Feature Stories
“San Diego? This isn’t a county, it’s a country!” This how it starts. Dave, sounding off after a couple of beers. Dave’s latest rave is San Diego County. You might call him a county nationalist. …
A decisive factor in Schoenberg’s terminal discomfort with America had to be the unsettling presence of ruling modernist pickle-herring Igor Stravinsky. Both lived in L.A., hung out in emigre circles, they had friends in common.
He was stuck in the apartment doorway. One of his neighbors walked by; Ken asked for help. The neighbor kept walking. Ken didn’t let anger overtake him. “It was a great opportunity to pray."
I would have thought that if rhubarb had any family, it would have been cousin to celery; rhubarb blades look like celery dyed red. But rhubarb is a member of the buckwheat family.
Gardens, however modest, are visions of paradise. As such they are the setting for activities that take me out of time. Gardens reconcile me to time on the grandest scale. In gardens I engage in …
Let’s face it: as football commentator, film actor, star of high-visibility commercials, O.J. was my-t-bland. He was exactly the sort of bland BLACK ex-jock TV is always hiring to be unoutspoken, undangerous.
“The people we sell them to are by and large people from Southeast San Diego, black people. They are connoisseurs of sweet potatoes. Most of them grew up in the South, and it was part of their diet.”
There have been many big mouths. William Randolph Hearst. Mick Jagger. Desi Arnaz. Wallace Beery. Nat “King” Cole. MacDonald Carey. Fifties singer Guy Mitchell. Probably no one has a bigger mouth than Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler.
He was, if not my first love, my first conscious attempt at love. I am tempted to say we were meant for each other. I am tempted to say: destiny scented the air of Mrs. …
I’m the substitute, so I sit at a stranger’s desk beneath a poster that displays a Ferrari in the driveway of a mansion. “The rewards of higher education,” it reads. A boy named Eric, who was called to the office during the first hour, is working on his test and talking to two girls, so after three warnings, I give him detention. “You bitch!” he shouts across the room.
Ten, 12 years ago I was talking to some small-press jerk, a publisher of pamphlets and broadsides and occasional 40-page books and such, who didn't much care for the Beats. His idea of a Real …
My birth certificate reads "Patrick Daugherty." When I was a child everyone called me Pat. My first love, a big-busted, traveling woman, dubbed me Patrick, gave my full name back to me, but that happened …
Five-thirty on a workday evening, the traffic is backed up stoplight to stoplight on Miramar Road, and 805 is choked from Chula Vista to Del Mar. At a shaded business park on Commerce Avenue, the …
Guy Castiglione, 42, a Lakeside resident, was president of the San Diego chapter of the Hell’s Angels. He was arrested May 13, 1989, with two pounds of crystal at the Border Patrol checkpoint near Temecula on Interstate 15.
“Oh, my gosh, look at all this food!” And, “I always look forward to Mrs. Cummer’s lovely pea-and-baby-onion salad!” and “I can’t help but want more than my share of Mrs. Gibbons’ cheddar biscuits!”
Norman Mailer would eat lunch there and Germaine Greer, Zero Mostel, and Lauren Bacall. We began to feel like stars ourselves, as if we were actors in some romantic, intellectual art film.