Calle Articulo Unos Dos Tres, more commonly known as First Street — one of the oldest streets in TJ — is being ripped up and revamped as part of a program designed to create a …

Florida four-piece Surfer Blood might have spent too much time lying in the sun, listening to '90s indie-rock. On their debut album, Astro Coast, the similarities to Weezer, the Shins, Sebadoh, and Pavement keep crashing …

I recently drove home to Lakeside on the 67 so I could stop at Sarita’s taco shop for a burrito. While stopped at the 67/Mapleview intersection, a truck caught my eye. A repo truck. You …

Ten days before the Soft Pack take the stage on the David Letterman Show, the San Diego band formerly known as the Muslims returned to the Tower Bar in City Heights to release their s/t …

The Green Season. Border Patrol agents in Laredo, Texas, confiscated 745 pounds of marijuana; the bundles were wrapped in Christmas paper. During a routine immigration inspection, a drug-sniffing dog alerted agents to a passenger van …

It’s not hard to make decisions when you know what your values are. — Roy Disney A tight shot on George Clooney’s face opened and drew back, across the bare hotel room in which he …

In the early 1970s, my late grandfather, an artist and retired San Diego State art professor, took me camping to a beautiful and remote setting along Baja’s northwest coast. While exploring the peninsula’s back roads, …

“2010: A New Beginning” reads the label on the binder in the ministry booth set up in the church hall. The table surrounding the decorated cardboard triptych is strewn with candy. Other, similar booths advertise …

An NFL placekicker has his own world. For him, the word “placekicker” is another way of saying “no contact.” Contact, for a placekicker, is referred to as “roughing the kicker.” A normal day at the …

At first it looks as if Neil Simon’s Lost in Yonkers (1991) will repeat the coming-of-age theme in his Brighton Beach trilogy. It’s 1942. When their father hits the road to pay off a loan …

Maybe it’s the pale, washed-green cupboards or the mustard walls or the blue-and-yellow tablecloths and olive bowls for sale. This place just feels like a little piece of France. Right here in Little Italy. Cheeky. …

Can you judge a chef’s palate by a single dish if that dish represents how he cooks when he’s showing off for his peers? Before moving to San Diego, ten years ago I came down …

Let’s Hear It For Science Would you fly on a plane designed by opinion (“Global Warming Is Crap,” Cover Story, January 28)? Does no one remember what science is for? Science provides a path to …

San Diego is on the map as one of the dog friendliest of cities. Beaches, hiking trails, and even some stores and cafés accommodate four-legged visitors. It’s all here, from dog sports to doggy daycare. …

Before moving to North County, singer-songwriter Spud Davenport drummed for various L.A. and San Francisco bands, the most successful of which was Toymuzic. After learning how to play both guitar and keyboard, he penned the …

A few months ago I came across a wonderful new band with a familiar sound. There were jangly and distorted guitars, raggedy drums, aloof female vocals, and singsong melodies and everything cloaked in a haze …

We know the year Mississippi Delta blues legend Booker T. Washington White died, but we can only guess at when he was born. Sometime around 1909? By the age of 16, Bukka, as he was …

Water roared down our street, pooled up around the clogged street drain, and began to overflow into our neighbor’s front yard. By the time Patrick unclogged the drain — two plastic "No Parking" signs were …

Thirty Years AgoGeorge Marston thought the Nolen plan presented sound concepts for developing the city, but not everyone in San Diego agreed with him, as he found out when he ran for mayor in 1913. …

Every morning at seven o’clock, Rodger Hartnett starts his day. The 62-year-old law school graduate and county employee breakfasts inside his Tierrasanta home as he watches the news. Afterwards, he opens up his book of …

Matt: Why can’t I tickle myself? Anybody else can tickle me, but when I try it, nothing happens. — Anonymous, via email Somehow this was also a burning question in Swedish academic circles. Maybe something …

Recipe by Ricardo Heredia, executive chef, Alchemy What I make depends on how I feel that day. I love Latin food. Anything South American. My grandmother was Mexican, so I grew up with Mexican food …

They are kissing, on a park bench, on the edge of an old bed, in a doorway or on the floor of a church. Kissing as the streets fill with balloons or soldiers, locusts or …

It seems impossible to speak of Mel Gibson’s “comeback” in Edge of Darkness without speaking of what it is he is coming back from. But speaking strictly, the aftermath of his arrest for drunk driving …

San Diego city councilman Ben Hueso, running in the Democratic primaries for an assembly seat this year, has been busy handing out free tickets from the City’s big stash. The latest: two passes to the …

The Obama administration’s nominee to run the Transportation Security Administration dropped out of consideration two weeks ago, shortly after Senate Republicans began asking questions about his San Diego divorce. Erroll Southers, a former FBI agent, …

Virtually unknown to the public here, Bill Cavala, a onetime UC Berkeley professor and top aide to Speaker Willie Brown Jr., was for most of two decades the Democratic operative most indispensable to the party’s …

In his State of the City speech on January 13, Mayor Jerry Sanders devoted 434 words to the possibility of taxpayers shelling out hundreds of millions of dollars for a subsidized Chargers stadium and 174 …

Each year Pollstar magazine lists the 200 top-grossing concert headliners. No San Diego–based artists showed up on the 2008 list, but three local bands with multimillion-dollar tours appear on the 2009 list. The reformed blink-182 …

“We haven’t played locally for over six months,” says Kristofer Towne, singer-guitarist for a Scribe Amidst the Lions. “We’ve been busy working on the first in a concept trilogy of releases.” The Last Sting Trilogy …

On a January evening, Phil Bensimon stood on the porch of his home on Highfield Avenue in La Mesa. The front room of the house had been converted into a recording studio. Bensimon listened through …

Ritual Torture says playing death metal doesn’t mean they want people to die. “We’re not about violence,” says guitarist Jesse Jensen. But Ritual Torture’s lyrics can get gory and morbid. “Humanity has always been obsessed …

Thursday 4The Brooklyn-band hype machine needed something different, a new sound and language to distract from the steady stream of ornate art-pop acts — the TV on the Radios and Dirty Projectors, the Animal Collectives …

Stark and barren, yet glorious in their nakedness, Anza-Borrego’s skeletal mountain ranges conceal more than they reveal to casual passersby. If you want to know them better, you must leave the security of the automotive …

Our one-week journey takes us to an archipelago in the Puget Sound, just off the United States’ northwest corner: the San Juan Islands. It’s a perfect trip if you don’t mind taking on a cooler …

With the immediate intimacy of her sweet, classically trained voice, Foster sounds nearly as depressed as A. Camp on the Cardigans’ “Step On Me” or “Nasty Sunny Beam.” Lacking A. Camp's sense of humor and …

Medellin, enchanted city, home of the silicon buttcheek, where no one remembers the natural light of stars and the sun has barely been named, where the Paisas wear their souls on their skin and old …

First off, how normal is blueberry pie? Serious question. As far as Zen koans go, I'm sticking it right up there with “Why has Bhodi-Dharma left for the East?” or “Why are those car wheels …

Touring behind the critically acclaimed A Friend of a Friend, Dave Rawlings Machine made their second appearance in the past year at the Belly Up. A full house was treated to two covers-heavy sets, with …