Rooms with a View

Thirty-Five Years Ago
[T]he dominating mood among the middle-class graduates is one of passive acceptance of a decayed world, handed to them on a platter beyond meaningful repair.

While the middle-class kids tend to view themselves as day nurses in a terminal ward, the Third Worlders in foreign lands like Logan Heights and points southeast are beginning to view the world as theirs. Their time is just beginning. Let the middle-class kids have their ennui. They don’t know what street wisdom is.

Juan Perino...first entered the Golden Hills area to steal a car battery and stayed to become a counselor at the Neighborhood Outreach Program.
— “BRAVING THE NEW WORLD,” Richard Louv, June 24, 1976

Thirty Years Ago
I imagine that a perfect production of King Lear would inspire an awesome, mass catharsis in the minds of its observers. As if they had been assaulted by a metaphysical hurricane, audiences would leave the theater shaken, stumbling over what they had seen. They would also regard the slightest act of human kindness as cause for extreme jubilation. The current production by the Old Globe Theatre, as part of the Thirty-Second National Shakespeare Festival, falls short of this lofty — many scholars have said impossible — ideal.
— “THE KING IS MAD,” Jeff Smith, June 25, 1981

Twenty-Five Years Ago
For the last eight years, some of the condo dwellers at Coronado Shores have been able to stand on their balconies and see the San Diego skyline, the Tijuana haze, and men taking off their bathing suits at the municipal pool across the street.

When the Coronado municipal pool was built in 1958, the ten condo towers at Coronado Shores had not yet risen from the ground. In 1977, while Encanto (one of two 15-story-highrises that overlook the pool) was being built, female swimmers, toweling off after a shower, noticed male construction workers with binoculars. A slatted roof was soon erected over the women’s outdoor changing room. But no one fretted about the nude men.

[Joanne] Larson, the recreation director, says her department had evaluated the problem but concluded that the expense of a roof outweighed the visual discomfort.
— CITY LIGHTS: “ROOMS WITH A VIEW,” Brae Canlen, June 26, 1986

Twenty Years Ago
Chee-Chee’s at 3:00 p.m. Self-hatred, failure, perversion line the old queers’ faces. They’re all here. Sailors who never left port. Scraggly hustlers trading butt for drugs. A couple middle-aged fatties sporting that perversely youthful corrupt, no-chin visage that is normally seen on actors playing Nero or on extras in Fellini’s Roman epics.
— “SAN DIEGO, MY LOVELY,” Adam Parfrey, June 27, 1991

Fifteen Years Ago
Right beside me stands a chair. I look up into its pathetic underbelly and think, What a strange simulacrum of a beast. Its body is grotesquely inverted to mirror ours. Children may sit in laps, but adults, except when amorous, do not. We don’t sit on a chair’s lap but on its seat; nor do we lean against its chest but against its back. If chairs had faces, those, too, would be turned away, eyes to the wall.
— “THE CHAIR,” John Thorne, June 27, 1996

Ten Years Ago
My husband is the least sexist man I know.... Unfortunately, he has a best friend who’s one of the most sexist men I’ve ever met. Frankly, I can’t fathom what my husband sees in this guy. Whenever my husband goes out to dinner with this man, they spend the whole evening looking at women’s breasts and exchanging comments about them. What kind of a way is this for grown, supposedly sophisticated men to act?
— ASK AUNT TRUDY, June 21, 2001

Five Years Ago
In his rambling book, Killing Yourself to Live, rock critic Chuck Klosterman devotes much of a chapter to dissecting the ways in which Kid A predicted the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks a year before they happened. No doubt he’s working on a follow-up about how 2003’s Hail to the Thief predicted voting irregularities in Ohio in 2004 and the government’s poor response to Hurricane Katrina.
— OF NOTE: “RADIOHEAD,” William Crain, June 22, 2006