Publications
Does the City of San Diego Care How Much Water You Use? Print E-mail
San Diego Reader

20021003(San Diego Reader October 3, 2002)

In recent years, the 855 employees of the San Diego Water Department have faced scandals, alleged mismanagement, media scrutiny, and the rebuke of the City Council. All this began in 1999 when news stories appeared locally about water thieves and industrial hogs who didn’t pay their bills—accusations that proved true and forced changes in how the 100-year-old agency operates. Consequently, the department has new policies to deal with the press. Senior public information officer Kurt Kidman said that "10 years ago we might [have been] a whole lot more accommodating than we are right now." But today, he said, the department is "in a real difficult position. We’re definitely under the gun with Channel 10. When we breathe, they want to know how much it cost us." In 1999 KGTV/Channel 10 reported on how "big water customers are allowed to run up huge bills that go unpaid." In the "hidden meter" scandal, reporter Mark Matthews discovered one million dollars’ worth of unpaid bills, with "dozens of industrial water meters . . . recording only 10 percent of the water going through them."

Read more...
 
Busy Being Born: On the Molecular Origins of Life Print E-mail
San Diego Reader

18kand_1-650(San Diego Reader September 12, 2002)

Ask evolutionary biologist Christopher Wills and organic chemist Jeffrey Bada, who are studying the origin of life on earth at the University of California, San Diego, to define life and both will answer, "an autonomous self-replicating system that replicates imperfectly via natural selection." Key for this pair is understanding how the abiotic or non-living world developed into the biotic one. Co-authors of The Spark of Life: Darwin and the Primeval Soup (2001), Wills and Bada believe life could arise only in optimal conditions and over a significant period of time.

Bada echoes Wills. "When I talk to the lay public about the origin of life, I’m talking about something that can’t be seen even with the best microscope."

Read more...
 
My Father, Bounding Down the Stairs Print E-mail
Essays and Memoirs

avery_selfportrait.1941(Written Summer 2002)

In Des Peres, a comfy St. Louis suburb where my family lived when I was a teenager, Saturday afternoons about two my father would, following his nap, suddenly bound down the stairs. From second story to first hung a stairway (for his stair-assault) in the middle of the house, leading up to three bedrooms and two baths. Above a plant garden Mother tended with high-intensity light, the staircase seemed to float like a cataract, its thick maple steps, wrapped with plush carpet, bolted onto ruler-thin, wrought-iron black railings. The effect of his flurry was noisily musical, a run on the xylophone, fingers danced across a counter. You heard then felt before seeing the rumble of my Swede/Czech heavy-set father barreling down those nine steps. Brúm-brum-brum-brum-brúm-brum-brum-brum-brúm, and he’d be down, bicycling cartoon feet, all-hands-on-deck hurry-up, each step taken with no-hands fearlessness in two seconds flat. Like an iron-wired marionette, the hanging stairway quivered in his wake.

Read more...
 
Writer, Interrupted Print E-mail
San Diego Reader

LARSON Writer Interupted t670(San Diego Reader May 30, 2002)

A new, sparkling gray limestone church in Middletown, Ohio, and its knotty-pine basement, where this nervous, determined eight-year-old auditioned for the pastor and the pastor’s choir. I had wanted the tryout, told my parents it was important, bugged my mother until she got it scheduled. The pastor said,“Oh, so you’re the one who wants to join us. You’re ready then,” and I nodded. His hands moved me by my shoulders: “Stand here and hold on to the piano top; I’ll play a scale to warm us up. Up once, down once, sing!” he exclaimed, and “Again!” Halfway through he stopped, I kept going — so, fa, mi, re — while he inclined a hairy ear my way. “Ah, a baritone,” he said, as though it were secret knowledge only we and the other singers would share.

Read more...
 
I Have More Money Than We Could Possibly Spend In Our Lifetimes Print E-mail
San Diego Reader

20020418(San Diego Reader April 18, 2002)

Perched atop a flagpole at One Times Square sat the New Year’s Eve ball, ready for its traditional drop. For this drop, marking the end of the millennium, the famous orb had been sold to Waterford, legendary Irish glassmakers, and re-spangled. It was now the Waterford crystal ball. Such advertising was emblematic of the 1990s: From Tiger Wood’s hat to movie titles on NASA rockets, panoptic exposure seemed valuable at any price. Awaiting the Waterford’s fall, bodies had back-filled midtown Manhattan all day until, at 11:59, nearly one million gleeful voices began counting down the ball’s light-pulsing descent, synchronized to the (now-forgotten) "Anthem for the Millennium." In that moment, most revelers believed the Y2K scare was bogus and the new year would arrive intact, granting not so much a new age but, what was truly hoped, continuity with the one passing, its incontinent dot.com profits a testament to the prodigal investor. Everywhere people were betting that the American good life had another good act to go.

Read more...
 
Almost Beautiful: A Life of Nathanael West Print E-mail
Essays and Memoirs

14_4cover(The Gettysburg Review Winter 2001)

Impossible, he would have said, but he is flying. Air above, air below, sudden yet with a strange everlastingness. A splay of arms and legs, and still he is shooting higher, as in a scene from a novel or a movie script he has written, a back-lot stunt off a trampoline: the soldier’s life, from small-town romance to war in the trenches, has been told in flashbacks, then BOOM! a bomb blows his body skyward. Any moment now the director will bullhorn, “Cut.”

And yet this flight also feels larger, a world and time apart, novelistic. He is making mental notes already, everything expanding, not contracting—in the air.

**

The writer making notes is Nathanael West. He is a screenwriter for the motion-picture industry and the author, most recently, of a terrifying novel about Hollywood, The Day of the Locust. The story is about a group of misfits in Tinsel Town, drawn powerfully together until their amalgam of ambitions turns ugly. West has written four novels, but only this one concerns the people who “had come to California to die.” Each novel was published to small acclaim—and very few sales—during the 1930s, his decade of emergence.

Read more...
 
How Steam and Sun Can Light Your Life Print E-mail
San Diego Reader

20011206(San Diego Reader December 6, 2001)

Who among us has not twitched a little during this, the year of California’s power crisis, upon hearing Tales of the End Time of the Fossil Fuel. For more than a billion years, the planet’s organic matter has laid down its life to form combustible sumps of oil, gas, and coal. And now, petroleum engineers predict, the cache is dwindling—lo, accelerating its dwindling—as we dig and siphon more of that cache every day. Here is the prognosis again, in case you missed it. At present rates of consumption, recoverable world coal reserves will last no more than 1000 years. U.S. coal reserves will last us 275 years. Recoverable world oil and natural gas reserves will last between 100 and 200 years. U.S. oil and gas reserves between 50 and 75; that is, without Alaska and without West Coast offshore drilling.

Read more...
 
<< Start < Prev 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 Next > End >>

Page 37 of 51