Ritual on a Saturday afternoon (best thing I ever wrote!) When Jesus, tied to a tree in Old Town Plaza, was being mercilessly scourged by a centurion, the announcer cautioned us not to believe in …

Roommates from Hell I walked outside to the storage door. I pushed on the door and opened it. I saw the rope around John’s neck and John’s face looking at me. I screamed and ran …

I Need Time to Recuperate A snowstorm trapped the porter on the other side of a pass, and he couldn’t get back for three days. Quentin had matches and lit a fire. He had a …

Angel of the Apocalypse During that long, violent spring of 1968, leftist student leaders around the world began to quote Marcuse and claim his ideas as inspiration to their movements. By June worldwide media had …

Neglected, rejected, and misunderstood When — I don’t speak only of San Diego — do we ever get a chance to hear live performances of Ernst Toch, Vittorio Rieti, Vaclav Nelhybel, Peter Mennin, Roger Sessions, …

What Windansea surfers said about Tom Wolfe Eight summers have drifted by since Tom Wolfe (author of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test) traveled to California to write a series on “The New Life Out There” …

Caught between a hug and a hard place If you move to somewhere on the East Coast, such as Boston, NYC, or Philadelphia, fewer people will try to hug you, mostly because they’re all too …

How Saville came to work at the Reader: In 1972, I was an associate professor in the Literature Department at UCSD. I had an office on the Muir Campus, with my door usually left open …

I see Asian gang cars some nights, in a long caravan down the Mira Mesa Boulevard. They meet at In-N-Out Burger before heading off for illegal street races on Kearny Villa Road or in Sorrento Valley.

Which La Jolla? Old La Jolla or New La Jolla? The distinction is chronological, but also a matter of attitude. You can see the contrast along a few yards of Girard Avenue, in what used …

Esmo’s phone manner was so hugger-mugger that I could be sitting four feet away and could not make out a single word. For all I could tell, he might have been laying fifty on a pony.

It must have been hundreds of years ago, that time of simplicity and innocence. It was before the electronic revolution had shackled us all in front of our screens. In those days, the Reader’s writers …

Her loyalty to old friends - n that, she is single and firm. Hence her return to San Diego Rep this weekend in two benefit performances for the theater that first recognized her as something special.

Night? I know about Night. It was before I started to compare things, to measure things, to judge the world by reason. There the universe spoke a different language, the language of Night. I was …

Sandy and a girlfriend had gone into a liquor store, robbed the clerk, They locked the clerk in a walk-in cooler. Sandy started feeling bad about the guy. She went back and let him out.

Paul Hindemith is generally thought of as one of the important twentieth-century composer, along with Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Berg, Webern. Bartok. Shostakovich, and Prokofiev. He began his career as an iconoclast, shocking audiences with his dissonances; …

You're wide awake, and suddenly your mind's a blank. You can't even for the words to ask for help. What do you do?

The following awards are drawn from musical and theatrical events I have attended throughout 1980. There may possibly be a better play or concert which I have missed; there are bound to be far many …

A friend of mine (whom I will refer to — so as not to embarrass him — as Jeff Smith) is a nicotine addict and cannot go for long without a cigarette. At a recent …

"The View from Glacier Point" is not the title of a painting by Bierstadt or a novel by John O’Hara. I am referring to the real thing, that grand prospect over Yosemite Valley and the …

On the afternoon preceding Easter Sunday, a group of young men from Baja California performed the Passion Play in San Diego's Old Town. The production — amateur and popular in style, intense and affecting in …

Only in America, the land of opportunity, could a coddled, Ivy-League-trained, rich girl for suburban New Jersey achieve success by turning herself into an uneducated lower-class Zulu.

Dear Jonathan Savile: I know you will never allow this to be printed, but I am writing anyway, because if I didn’t I would go mad with rage. I have read all your reviews since …

Of collecting many records, as the Preacher might have said, there is no end. But it is really the beginning of the addiction that presents the greatest hurdle. Let us suppose you want to have …

The Jingler She is an elegant lady who has decorated all available parts of her body with pendant metallic jewelry. From her wrists there hand flurries of fine metal strips; around her neck, more of …

The music of the 20th Century constitutes one of the richest periods in musical history. For variety of expressive means, for inventiveness, for ingenuity in the handling of old forms and the discovery of new …

The art of serious music involves three distinct groups of people (one might almost say three social classes) — those who compose music, those who perform it, and those who listen to it. (A case …

There has been a universal orgy of congratulation and self congratulation over Joan Sutherland’s Lucia di Lammermoor at the San Diego Opera. These feelings are understandable. When one has waited all year to hear a …

Godspell, a musical based on the life and teachings of Jesus, is playing to sold-out houses at the Old Globe. The production is terrific; the play itself is abominable. Christianity has been having a hard …

Sometimes you can see them only from a distance (bring your binoculars); or sometimes a gnu or an eland will be standing just by the track as your little train goes by.

Reading George Bernard Shaw's play Getting Married is not a very stimulating experience. The usual Shavian traits are there in oppressive abundance: endless talkiness, poor imitations of Oscar Wilde's drawing room wit, shallow philosophizing, and …