Ritual on a Saturday afternoon (best thing I ever wrote!) When Jesus, tied to a tree in Old Town Plaza, was being mercilessly scourged by a centurion, the announcer cautioned us not to believe in …
October 16, 2022
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Stories by Jonathan Saville
Baja men re-enact Christ's passion at Old Town
San Diego – city of shame, University Avenue, roommates from hell, writers write about moms
Roommates from Hell I walked outside to the storage door. I pushed on the door and opened it. I saw the rope around John’s neck and John’s face looking at me. I screamed and ran …
December 5, 2021
Mira Mesa man captured first giant panda in 1936
I Need Time to Recuperate A snowstorm trapped the porter on the other side of a pass, and he couldn’t get back for three days. Quentin had matches and lit a fire. He had a …
August 2, 2021
Herbert Marcuse ends up in lotus land, Ishmael Reed visits Quincy Troupe at UCSD
Angel of the Apocalypse During that long, violent spring of 1968, leftist student leaders around the world began to quote Marcuse and claim his ideas as inspiration to their movements. By June worldwide media had …
July 26, 2021
20th Century music in San Diego, annoying audience members, passion play in Old Town
Neglected, rejected, and misunderstood When — I don’t speak only of San Diego — do we ever get a chance to hear live performances of Ernst Toch, Vittorio Rieti, Vaclav Nelhybel, Peter Mennin, Roger Sessions, …
January 16, 2021
La Jolla – a shoreline and a mountain
What Windansea surfers said about Tom Wolfe Eight summers have drifted by since Tom Wolfe (author of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test) traveled to California to write a series on “The New Life Out There” …
July 20, 2020
Mayor O'Connor goes slumming in Balboa Park, Mayor Faulconer reads Dr. Seuss racist book
Caught between a hug and a hard place If you move to somewhere on the East Coast, such as Boston, NYC, or Philadelphia, fewer people will try to hug you, mostly because they’re all too …
April 25, 2020
Jonathan Saville and the Reader
How Saville came to work at the Reader: In 1972, I was an associate professor in the Literature Department at UCSD. I had an office on the Muir Campus, with my door usually left open …
February 23, 2019
Neighborhood: small towns of San Diego
I see Asian gang cars some nights, in a long caravan down the Mira Mesa Boulevard. They meet at In-N-Out Burger before heading off for illegal street races on Kearny Villa Road or in Sorrento Valley.
December 24, 2003
La Jolla
Which La Jolla? Old La Jolla or New La Jolla? The distinction is chronological, but also a matter of attitude. You can see the contrast along a few yards of Girard Avenue, in what used …
December 24, 2003
Reader writers tell funny stories about dead colleague, Steve Esmedina
Esmo’s phone manner was so hugger-mugger that I could be sitting four feet away and could not make out a single word. For all I could tell, he might have been laying fifty on a pony.
September 20, 2001
A Critic Looks at a Critic
It must have been hundreds of years ago, that time of simplicity and innocence. It was before the electronic revolution had shackled us all in front of our screens. In those days, the Reader’s writers …
September 20, 2001
Whoopi Goldberg is back.
Her loyalty to old friends - n that, she is single and firm. Hence her return to San Diego Rep this weekend in two benefit performances for the theater that first recognized her as something special.
May 13, 1993
Jonathan Saville knows about night
Night? I know about Night. It was before I started to compare things, to measure things, to judge the world by reason. There the universe spoke a different language, the language of Night. I was …
July 5, 1990
Reader writers: the story I wanted to write... but didn't
Sandy and a girlfriend had gone into a liquor store, robbed the clerk, They locked the clerk in a walk-in cooler. Sandy started feeling bad about the guy. She went back and let him out.
October 5, 1989
San Francisco Opera Center
Paul Hindemith is generally thought of as one of the important twentieth-century composer, along with Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Berg, Webern. Bartok. Shostakovich, and Prokofiev. He began his career as an iconoclast, shocking audiences with his dissonances; …
April 10, 1986
Exhibit A for “Peter Pan syndrome”
You're wide awake, and suddenly your mind's a blank. You can't even for the words to ask for help. What do you do?
April 10, 1986
San Diego theater and classical music, 1980
The following awards are drawn from musical and theatrical events I have attended throughout 1980. There may possibly be a better play or concert which I have missed; there are bound to be far many …
December 18, 1980
San Diego's most memorable theater and classical music in 1979
A friend of mine (whom I will refer to — so as not to embarrass him — as Jeff Smith) is a nicotine addict and cannot go for long without a cigarette. At a recent …
December 20, 1979
Yosemite's Glacier Point and the people who come there
"The View from Glacier Point" is not the title of a painting by Bierstadt or a novel by John O’Hara. I am referring to the real thing, that grand prospect over Yosemite Valley and the …
August 30, 1979
Baja men perform Passion play outside in San Diego's Old Town
On the afternoon preceding Easter Sunday, a group of young men from Baja California performed the Passion Play in San Diego's Old Town. The production — amateur and popular in style, intense and affecting in …
April 19, 1979
For Colored Girls is a weapon in the fight to destroy men
Only in America, the land of opportunity, could a coddled, Ivy-League-trained, rich girl for suburban New Jersey achieve success by turning herself into an uneducated lower-class Zulu.
September 21, 1978
Your review of Chekhov’s The Seagull is the worst ever
Dear Jonathan Savile: I know you will never allow this to be printed, but I am writing anyway, because if I didn’t I would go mad with rage. I have read all your reviews since …
January 26, 1978
Those who feel passionately about La Boheme will have to have the Angel recording with Callas and Di Stefano
Of collecting many records, as the Preacher might have said, there is no end. But it is really the beginning of the addiction that presents the greatest hurdle. Let us suppose you want to have …
September 4, 1977
Abominable members of the classical music crowd
The Jingler She is an elegant lady who has decorated all available parts of her body with pendant metallic jewelry. From her wrists there hand flurries of fine metal strips; around her neck, more of …
August 4, 1977
The state of 20th Century music in San Diego
The music of the 20th Century constitutes one of the richest periods in musical history. For variety of expressive means, for inventiveness, for ingenuity in the handling of old forms and the discovery of new …
June 30, 1977
San Diego schools treat music as an expendable addendum
The art of serious music involves three distinct groups of people (one might almost say three social classes) — those who compose music, those who perform it, and those who listen to it. (A case …
December 23, 1976
Joan Sutherland – not a shred of drama in her soul
There has been a universal orgy of congratulation and self congratulation over Joan Sutherland’s Lucia di Lammermoor at the San Diego Opera. These feelings are understandable. When one has waited all year to hear a …
December 19, 1974
Can Christianity survive Godspell?
Godspell, a musical based on the life and teachings of Jesus, is playing to sold-out houses at the Old Globe. The production is terrific; the play itself is abominable. Christianity has been having a hard …
October 24, 1974
San Diego Wild Animal Park, one year after opening
Sometimes you can see them only from a distance (bring your binoculars); or sometimes a gnu or an eland will be standing just by the track as your little train goes by.
August 23, 1973
G.B. Shaw on Fem Lib — ever-old yet ever-new
Reading George Bernard Shaw's play Getting Married is not a very stimulating experience. The usual Shavian traits are there in oppressive abundance: endless talkiness, poor imitations of Oscar Wilde's drawing room wit, shallow philosophizing, and …
March 22, 1973