Cove Theater, Diane Arbus

Thirty Years Ago I met Diane Arbus in 1967 shortly after her first major show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. My roommate at Yale, David Lippman, saw that I admired her work and said casually, "Would you like to meet Diane Arbus? I used to go out with her daughter, Doon." Pause. "In the third grade!" Jon Hankin, our other roommate, accompanied us to her apartment in Greenwich Village at 131 1/2 Charles Street. I was elated and apprehensive. What could I say to a talented and famous photographer? As it turned out, she did most of the talking. -- "ARBUS/AVEDON: OUT OF FASHION INTO TRUTH,"Alberto Lau, November 23, 1977

Twenty-Five Years Ago A seven-foot-tall stucco wall is part of an intended $110,000 spruce-up to the La Jolla Shores home of Dick Carlson, former TV newsman and now a San Diego Federal Savings executive. But Carlson's next-door neighbor didn't like the prospect of such a wall separating her property from his, so she got her son-in-law, William C. Kellogg, and his son, Bob, to lobby against it. The senior Kellogg, a well-known La Jolla burgher who runs the La Jolla Beach and Tennis Club, is also a former member of the La Jolla Shores Planned District Advisory Board, before which the Carlson wall was debated. -- CITY LIGHTS: "THE GREAT WALL OF LA JOLLA," Paul Krueger, November 24, 1982

Twenty Years Ago I went in search of Southeast San Diego. I don't know if I found it. Everybody I talked to there had a different notion of Southeast, its boundaries, its living conditions, its prospects for the future. Southeast is in ferment, and whether it will ripen into wine or vinegar is an open question. What it is now depends upon the angle you view it from. -- "SOUTHEAST: IT'S MUCH MORE THAN MEAN STREETS," Neal Matthews, November 26, 1987

Fifteen Years Ago But if anything, the La Jolla temple is stranger than any of these. Most Mormon temples, in fact, have been exuberant and fantastical exteriors, which are in most cases offset by more subdued, even severe interiors. Their effect of strangeness has to do with their populist monumentality. And by their so obvious desire to impose themselves upon time. The architects at Deems Lewis McKinley responsible for the La Jolla site were told quite bluntly to make the thing last for at least a millennium ($20 million seems a small price to pay for such terrestrial permanence). -- "THE MOTHER SHIP HAS LANDED," Lawrence Osborne, November 26, 1992

Ten Years Ago I've always wanted to host a Thanksgiving dinner at which I got clear to the violet and melancholy sunset and still felt wildly thankful. Too often, I approach the day mean and cranky. I dread list-making, dread shopping. I dread washing and ironing linens. I dread chopping celery and onions. I dread the damned cranberries, when they come to a boil, popping on my bare arm and leaving a blister. I dread hauling the big-ass 25-pound dead turkey up onto the chopping block. -- "HOW FAR WE CAME TO BE HERE AND HOW MUCH ALONG THE WAY WE LOST," Judith Moore, November 26, 1997

Five Years Ago Since the announcement late last month that the Cove Theater would cease operations after the holidays, I have made it a point when out in my car to detour past the movie houses I used to attend all the time but now attend no more, because they are movie houses no more. I have not sought to fatten the catalog with ones I personally never went to, or ones I could not find my way back to without the aid of a Thomas Bros., so there will be no gnashing of teeth over the likes of the Village, the Helix, the Linda, the Jerry Lewis Twin, the Pussycat. -- "SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY," Duncan Shepherd, November 21, 2002