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 (San Diego Reader November 21, 2018)
Last August, many of us were aghast at a news story, summed up in the Union-Tribune webby headline, “Three dead in wrong-way I-805 crash in Sorrento Valley that shut down freeway for 6 hours.” An 18-year-old man, going 100 miles per hour and against traffic in a McLaren sportscar, smashed into an SUV carrying a mother and daughter. On impact, the cars ignited in a firestorm and all three were killed. Deadly accidents are not rare occurrences at the nexus, “in Sorrento Valley.” Charred swaths and shattered glass on the highway speak of a Pickett’s Charge to get through the Merge, famed for its 22 northbound and southbound lanes that move thousands to destinations, ever elsewhere.
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 (San Diego Reader January 17, 2018)
Like you, the Little Italy I love has always been its sumptuous food and sensual people, both of which, despite the gentrifying nouveau riche takeover of late, remain as present and prosperous as ever. That Little Italy is alive in Mona Lisa Italian Foods, the tang of Parmesan, the toasty fume of fresh-baked sourdough, the nasal snap of balsamic vinaigrette dousing a saucer of EVOO. It's alive in the cannoli, the crispy-shelled, ricotta-filled, sugar-fairy pastry, just out of the freezer at RoVino (shoehorned next to The Waterfront) and served by two generations of homegrown cooks, the Tarantinos.
On the other side of the cannoli are Rosalie Tarantino and her nephew Tom, the fifty-two-year-old owner of RoVino. The pair love parsing their shared history, all things Italian except the family meatball recipe. Rosalie, her features still fine-boned at eighty-four, has the face of a beloved kept in an oval locket. She, like Tom's mother and Tom's daughter, and his brother's daughter, are all Rosalie Tarantino. Of course, their friends and neighbors know by sight and sound who is whom. But this naming tradition is like a bulwark against the risk that their ethnic claim may be vanishing.
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 (San Diego Reader June 28, 2017)
It’s decision day in the City Council chambers, Two Broke Girls vs. Billions. Call it a classic smackdown between local architectural preservationists who want to save any Spanish Colonial Revival building (and think someone should pay) vs. the downtown developers who can’t wait to erect residential towers (and have investors ready and willing to foot the bill). It’s early April, and the horseshoe room is packed, its 53-year-old semi-gloss teakwood a kind of paean to the past. Backrow perched, I think of Pete Wilson’s wily quip from 1975: “The future of San Diego should have as much of the past in it as possible.”
I think as well that each city-adjudicated, skyline alteration rehashes our city’s core ideological battle—the geraniums of George Marston (guard the green) and the smokestacks of Louis Wilde (grow the gray), nearly a century ago. The way the pro-housing, pro-job, pro-business “special interest” typically wins is to outspend, out-own, and out-promise opponents, one 40-story, 282-unit glass spire at a time.
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 (San Diego Reader April 19, 2017)
San Diego’s richest person is someone I’ve never heard of: Gwendolyn Sontheim Meyer. The Rancho Santa Fe resident owns a 7 percent stake in the family business, Cargill, a purveyor of grain and agricultural commodities with forays into financial services and a hedge fund. For a woman whose estimated worth is $4.3 billion, Meyer keeps the lowest of profiles. She lives and trains horses at her Coral Reef Ranch and is a champion jumper.
Forbes magazine, whose definitive billionaire lists are the oligarch’s equivalent of the Oscars’ red carpet, drops Meyer into their “Silver Spoon” bowl — those who did absolutely nothing to earn their fortune. All inheritance. Cargill, America’s largest private company, is independently managed but owned by two families. Forbes says, “They are richer than the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, and Carnegies combined.” Lord knows I’ve searched, but I can’t find any charity she supports. Maybe her giveaways are anonymous. Maybe Meyer is Scrooge McDuck. But many of the gifts of San Diego’s wealthiest donors are well known, in part, because the check-writing moment, if possible to stage, is a media event charities dream of and publicize.
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 (San Diego Reader August 31, 2016)
Cemetery
The thing about the dead that haunts us, in addition to having lost them, is that they are here, in the ground, buried or scattered, bones or ash. Their “remains” are marked, heralded, and sensed, and they are never out of our presence. “To be human,” Robert Pogue Harrison writes, “means above all to bury.” Elephants haunt the places where elephants die. Mammologists have found that the animals weep and nervously pace over their kind. As do we. In San Diego, we have a couple of huge tracts where mourners congregate—the city’s graveyard, Mount Hope Cemetery, with 76,000 internments, and Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery where more than 90,000, “who served the U.S. honorably in war and peace,” have been laid, beginning in 1846, and overlook the azure crescent of San Diego Bay.
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 (San Diego Reader June 8, 2016)
Every scene in a drama, according to the late director, Mike Nichols, is either a fight, a seduction, or a negotiation. He added, as a footnote, the same is true in life. The thrill, or the chaos, is that these three passages may occur in any order. Start, stop, go back, restart, leap forward, keep going, or not. Form follows helter-skelter. So it may also be true of the skittish interactivity experimental artists ask of audiences.
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 (San Diego Reader June 1, 2016)
Virtually no one ogles the industrial vistas of Southern California. Those unsightly realms where giant cranes stipple the skyline. Where ship containers are stacked unemptied of their new Curvy Barbie dolls for Wal-Mart. Where thickets of brightly painted gas pipes crowd the dead spaces beneath Interstate overpasses. Where electrical towers look like praying mantises and factories like Tinker Towns. Reasor, who is a young-looking 50 and who grew up in Denver under its “dramatic skies and high-altitude light,” has strikingly intense eyes; she has a numinous, intense gaze, seeming to record and compose whatever she beholds.
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