Three One G label owner, promoter, bassist, and vocalist Justin Pearson has been wrapping up a Dead Cross LP on Ipecac Recordings with the addition of Mike Patton (Mr. Bungle, Faith No More, Fantômas) on …

Sam Lopez is a promoter, label owner, and noise musician. Local artist? “I’m very partial to the artists who have had releases on [my label] Stay Strange — Monochromacy, Xavier Ramirez, and Michael Zimmerman.” Live …

Projection artist (RETOX, Die Mißbildungen Des Menschen), videographer, musician, and Space Time curator Xavier Vasquez... Local band? “RETOX, Hexa, Gloomsday, Schizophonics, Monochromacy.” All-time local band? “Black Heart Procession.” Venue to perform/host? “The Casbah, the Hideout, …

“We weren’t connected to the electronic scene in San Diego when we started in January 2015, but we really dug the vibe of the ‘singer/songwriter’ events like Grampadrew’s Flim-Flam Revue,” says Jeffrey Trageser, host of …

Long before Tecate roja and caguamas of Indio dominated Mexican bartops, Aztec priests, warriors, and sacrificial victims sipped a milky agave wine called pulque. Fabled among its acolytes as a wellspring of fertility and divine …

“I was always under age when I lived in San Diego, so venues were mainly Ché Café, Soma, WorldBeat Center, and the occasional DIY thing,” says Miguel Trost de Pedro, aka Kid606, a 37-year-old electronic …

Experimental music rarely goes as planned. Often, that’s the point. Sometimes, nothing happens at all. Just ask John Cage. One thing’s for sure: it’s a gamble. It’s downright audacious first-date material. Most people find it …

When 22-year-old college student Brett Miller and partner Dean Marchant bought the bar at 4479 Everts Street in 1989, it was hemorrhaging money due to poor and often absent management. While pursuing his degree to …

If You’re Making Art and Getting Paid for It... “People used to say, ‘Oh, I love your music; I put it on when I go to sleep.’ At first, I was insulted: ‘Thanks a lot. …

Attending a midnight screening of 2003 cult film The Room is kind of a train wreck, if train wrecks were accompanied by group chants, spontaneous games of football, and multiple plastic spoonados. It’s widely regarded …

The story of Coyote begins with a horse. A Trojan horse. The year is 1997. A ten-year-old Daniel Espinosa weaves through traffic at the San Ysidro Port of Entry to get a closer look at …

If ever there were a compelling reason for San Diegans to hang out in Old Town, it’s Home & Away at the former location of Kelly’s Pub. For about two years now, locals and tourists …

“God invented whiskey to keep the Irish from ruling the world,” as Ed McMahon once said, but that hasn’t stopped them from exerting a considerable influence over Normal Heights nightlife. A Guinness-branded butcher board along …

if you paid any attention to the reductive echo chamber of social media last year, you’d know that 2016 was without a doubt the most merciless hope-strangler in all recorded history. For one thing, just …

At the unruly age of 16, the former Bar Dynamite bleached its mop and jutted its chin as Blonde Bar. Open since August, Blonde channels a ’70s CBGB into modern day through the punk-rock patchwork …

I read somewhere that the reason you’re sad around Christmastime is because it’s a reminder of what you’ve lost since childhood: the belief that the world is a magical place that is interested in your …

Like most of the county, Fallbrook has been plagued by fire throughout its history. Most recently, over 200 structures were destroyed in the 2007 “Rice Fire,” which found the region’s resources spread thin for a …

Jacumba is at the epicenter of an ongoing struggle for economic revival tempered by a grassroots commitment to natural preservation.

Over at Here’s the Deal we often revel in the local nightlife, but what about you day-drinkers out there? Krakatoa is the kind of place that allows one to feel validated — nay, vindicated! — …

The hamburger’s toothsome alchemy has enchanted appetites everywhere since first materializing during the late 1800s in Connecticut, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Texas, New York, San Francisco, or Germany, depending on whose historical account one is to believe. …

“This is an homage to Tijuana’s golden era, which was Prohibition time in the States,” says Nórtico owner and chef Ruffo Ibarra, who unveiled the West Coast–style speakeasy hidden within his restaurant Oryx Capital last …

Tribute Pizza has been in soft opening mode for the past month or so, but this review begins about two years earlier. The setting is BLVD Market, San Diego’s premier prepared-foods monthly on El Cajon …

Quantum Brewing is going thorough a phase of uncertainty. The owners have changed, the beers are changing, and even the name is liable to change. Martin Beaulieu became officially entangled with the two-year-old brewery last …

One does not simply accompany their mother to an arts festival in Orange County without reverting to a cynical state of adolescence, while at the same time joining in the postmodern chuckle of it all. …

A few months teaching English in Colombia did little to prepare me for the elaborate linguistic pozole that stews in the streets of Tijuana. When I moved south of the fence three years ago, I …

It’s 11:06 on a Saturday night and the superheroes are plotting outside the Hall of Justice on Broadway. “We’ll drive up Golf and meet the foot-patrol at Sixth and Lima,” says a large figure in …

A crowd has gathered around Per Huttner. He stands upright in a dark room, not moving, eyes fixed on a white sheet of paper in his hand, wires snaking from his skull. Doctor Stephen Whitmarsh …

“It’s pretty humbling when big names agree to come play our event here at the Kava Lounge,” says Tyler Detweiler, whose live, hardware-based electronic music monthly, Acid Varsity, curates members of veteran acts, such as …

Asada days and adobada nights — A little taste of Loreto in San Diego. by Mary Beth Abate Tacos where you least expect them — Looking beyond standard tacolandia. By Ed Bedford Taco mecca — …

Tijuana is an undeniable pescaterian paradise. Seafood influences from coastal states such as Sonora, Sinaloa, and Nayarit are well suited for the warmer climate of the North, making for adventurous reinterpretations of Sea of Cortez …

San Diego is home to a number of Mexican bars that follow more or less the same format. You’re probably already familiar with it. You can hear the corridos blasting from blocks away. Buckets of …

Coachella 2004 was kind of a big deal for me. Having no idea what we were getting into, a carload of friends and I drove 13 hours from the Humboldt State dorms to the desert …

This year signaled a new era for local small-batch distillers. Assembly Bill 1295, also known as the Craft Distillers Act of 2015, went into effect on January 1, reversing archaic liquor laws that date to …

Themes of racist, classist, and sexist oppression have been central to hip-hop since its conception, but MC Kalyn Heffernan of Denver-based outfit Wheelchair Sports Camp rolls it out even further. “I grew up in kind …

A couple of years ago I stopped by the soft opening of La Justina to check out San Diego–based Bajaphile chef Chad White’s south-of-the-border debut. I was not disappointed. A creamy sea snail and almond …

I first met her three years ago at a Chinese-Mexican pop-up dinner that her brother was hosting in Tijuana. At the time, Haydeé was living in Berlin working for global collaboration platform Rockajoint. She moved …

“Paradise ULTD. is essentially about escapism,” Corey James Hurley remarks of his burgeoning label and blog. Hurley, listed on showbills as Colour Vision, knows a thing or two about getting away. The North County native …

when I glanced over the Facebook event page advertising a Star Wars cosplay convention in the dunes outside of Yuma, I automatically assumed it would be a party. I pictured spacetini-sipping Slave Leias and inebriated …

It’s the end of the road for the Wild West, except the crooked sheriff now carries an automatic rifle, the saloon women dress like school girls (and might not be girls), the horse bandits use …

Whether you’re a pending Picasso or an underactualized E.E. Cummings, or only a dabbling fan of surreal cinema, song, and dance, the greater Cali-Baja region has something for you. Come with me on a tour …

If you’d have asked me about brunch a few years ago, I would have laughed in your face. Brunch is just breakfast with booze (hardly a novel concept). Brunch is where saps take new girlfriends …

Dorkbot: “people doing strange things with electricity.” It was founded by Douglas Repetto 15 years ago as a music and technology conclave in New York and has since spawned meet-ups in about 140 cities worldwide. …

“Remember one thing: la city is not a utopia or a dystopia, it’s the afterparty where you hear the last call.” The words of the late Rafa Saavedra, a culture writer and champion of Tijuana …

Maybe the multiple breakfast beers deserve some credit, but when I arrive at the third annual San Diego Zine Fest at Bread & Salt community center on an early October afternoon, the place feels brimming …

When Luis Montijo came upon downtown Tijuana’s Pasaje Rodriguez, the arts and culture alleyway was losing steam. “It wasn’t really going anywhere,” the 32-year-old Tijuana native recalls of his 2013 visit from Mexico City, where …

San Diego Museum of Art’s Art of Music exhibit welcomes visitors with a giant ceramic auricle and protruding ear trumpet that, upon detecting the voices of passersby, proceeds to emit Beethoven’s “Grosse Fuge.” It’s a …

“I guess it was just a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time,” says Tijuana Rumble Fest organizer David Villegas. “This random crook popped out of nowhere and tried to pick …

A couple of years ago, Mexicali’s craft beer culture consisted of loosely associated biannual affairs drawing on the region’s growing collective of home brewers. Today, you can’t toss a handful of hops without hitting a …

You could have a worse judge than a dog.

Supporters of long-standing punk haven Scolari’s Office had a knee-jerk reaction of disdain when, in 2008, the place traded hands, remodeled, and reclaimed its title from the ’50s, “The Office.” It felt off. Its manicured …