At the absolute height of my collectional zeal, bloated by too many years on the promo-album dole, my LP stash numbered in the THOUSANDS. Three? Four? Five? I now own, well, hundreds—many, most, almost all …

29 Reader writers on their fathersBy Abe Opincar, Anne Albright, August Kleinzahler, Bill Manson, Deirdre Lickona, Duncan Shepherd, Eleanor Widmer, Ernie Grimm, Jangchup Phelgyal, Jeanne Schinto, Jeannette DeWyze, Jeff Smith, Jennifer Ball, Jim Eichel, John …

Every dive around San Diego yields discovery One of the oddest of these noises, an irregular bumping sound heard frequently in the rocks and ridges off the beaches from the La Jolla Caves south to …

The girls of summer Right after the Fourth of July, a series of perfect days unrolled across San Diego County beaches. Sun sizzled away the coastal low clouds by no later than eleven, and girls …

You want the night staff Do all these people pass through in the night, millions of little desperate atoms on their way to conventions, underground bingo palaces, or whores' bedrooms? The only person who sees …

Why the mother of Balboa Park is the mother of us all Sure, there’s a school and park named after her, and careless admirers credit her, rightly or not, with planting any large tree growing …

Among the creatures I put the dog on the table. I felt inexplicably ill at ease with just the dog, myself, and Dr. Smith there; it was a rare moment shared by just the two …

Roommates from Hell Later that morning I called Carolee and described how I made love to her husband on her jungle-print sheets and gave her vivid details of our evening and our conversations. Rick and …

A Living Cloud The next morning, I am greeted by my media escort, Penny. This is a fascinating new feature of my life — escorts. They pick you up, drive you around, provide snacks, meals, …

The Unbearable Rightness of Being Roger Hedgecock “I was at Santa Barbara, a junior in college, and I got appointed as the head of all social programs. And we did Ray Charles, the Doors, we …

A Little Bit East of Eden There are also sharp disputes about Noah's Ark within the Creationist movement. Some years ago, in the ICR museum, I helped John Morris, their principal ark investigator, look for …

Eating people is the ultimate control You won’t find Dahmer’s Diner on the bill at the Cannibal Bar in Mission Beach. In fact, DD has been banned from all but two venues in town, SOMA …

Meltzer Family Christmas Beer Bust Carta Blanca's the best. I would stand behind Carta Blanca. It's the first one that's given me any sense of, you know, where I have conviction about it. Its taste …

Chinaberry Farm: Finding Home Half our belongings still packed in the barn, paths form a quotidian maze between stacked boxes. The house livable, anyway. A rat takes up residence in Cindy’s paintings stored in the …

Thought for Food Bob Peterson (husband to Mayor Maureen O’Connor) opened his first Jack-in-the-Box restaurant at 63rd Street and El Cajon Boulevard in 1951. Peterson had expanded his chain to include 350 units by the …

Cardiff man builds DC-3 to drive on freeway After six months his scavenger hunt came to an end in Tucson, Arizona. There, he paid $1500 for the GMC bus chassis and another $9000 for the …

Wing Men On June 15, 1988, they headed north to the Aleutians, where the F-14s played their usual games with Russian MiGs and bombers: VF-51 pilots shot excellent video of the Soviet planes on patrol …

Lester Bangs, El Cajon Kid These “great man” theorists see Lester as self-made and El Cajon actually was a hindrance. Those of us from El Cajon, especially those who knew him well, have a much …

Third Spud from the Sun: Cameron Crowe Then and Now “A couple things about Cameron set him down a peg from even the rank and file of ’zine greenhorn dust-suckers. He for all intents & …

Birth of the Beat Farmers Jerry Raney: “This guy from El Cajon High named Jack Chan knew how to play, we’d go out and get the Beatles songbooks and go through 'em and he’d teach …

Rancho Peñasquitos boys, charged with hate crime The teenagers shot at Roman from the Subaru with the BB gun during three or four passes. They took turns shooting at him as they drove by, but …

Ku Klux Klan 's John Metzger talks of hate and tears "My father was in the Crusaders, a national organization that was pretty powerful in San Diego, which was part Christian Identity. It’s a church …

Was James Gibson tortured by Mexican police? When two Mexican police officers and two FBI agents showed up at his beachfront Playas de Tijuana apartment on October 17, James Gibson had reason to suspect that …

Haiku #1 where the fuck’s my car? don’t even gotta be drunk no more t’ lose it! Gig Let it be known, to begin with, that I didn’t ask for this, but was asked — …

By the time Cameron showed up, Rolling Stone was little more than a highwater marker for self-effacing, slave-drudge careerism: the most conspicuous place, nationally, to have your copy butchered, your ideas reshaped to fit the moment’s market-driven party line.

There’s nothing wrong with this — it’s great. Oh, okay — so what izzit? Two guys playing, well, one of ’em’s on saxophone, two saxes actually — soprano and baritone — and the other on …

CD review: The Magnificent Meatsticks, MP3.com You can download all of this from www.mp3.com/magmeat, including a little ditty called “Richard Meltzer Is My Fucking Hero” — I kid you not. But it couldn’t be me …

To commemorate Father's Day, this issue contains a collection of reflections from Reader writers about their fathers: The Last Tag Sale — Jeanne Schinto An Air of Exoticism — Duncan Shepherd Kinder Than I Would …

Perhaps it’s a question of semantics, who knows, but I feel incredibly relieved to be done with “family,” “home” — these are things you grow up to leave and be done with, at least as …

MY CENTURY, YOUR CENTURY BOBO OLSON'S CENTURY Century’s short but centuries long should be limited. — "Microwave," William Carlos Williams [It ended abruptly around 1970, or slightly earlier. ’69 would be a good likely date. …

Things we’ve saved and saved and SAVED. For all the stupid reasons you or I or anybody saves things. You can’t take them “with you,” not all, not any, but chances are what’s left is …

I have no context, no history (other than remote; remoter than remote; wholly, utterly adventitious) to plug into when I listen to classical music, no environment in which to meet and greet it even halfway.

Ten minutes later my guest arrives, John Cale, never my favorite member of the Velvet Underground, always struck me as a method actor, ugh, though some people thought of him as a progenitor of punk.

I got up, went in, pulled down my pants, sat down, thought, fucking often has nothing to do with being “lovers” and fucking seldom has much to do with literature and literature has nothing to …

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.

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.

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 …

Getting rid of records, right, because of the goddamn quake. Like bricks, dead albums fall heavy. They fell and they fell — hard — and in five months of aftershocks have fallen some more. Less …

You know the biggest lobby currently in Washington is the one whose job it is to keep ingredients off the beer labels. They’ve done a pretty good job, wouldn’t you say?

"See the marketplace in old Algiers,” sang Jo Stafford quite clearly in the summer of 1951 or ’52, “Send me photographs and souvenirs,” but I heard it funny. (Kids’ ears are like that.) I heard …

He’d seen Ornette play Philly in ’59. Was delighted. Liked his way of improvising, creating melodically, chord changes be damned. Minor reservations later but not then. (Three years before I’d even heard of him.)

The bookstore “pop-up” for Niek Tosches’s Ditto: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams reads: “The Great American Show Biz Story — Straight Up with a Hark Twist” — and dark it is. Darker …

The bookstore “pop-up” for Nick Tosches’s Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams reads: “The Great American Show Biz Story — Straight Up with a Dark Twist” — and dark it is. Darker …

While some may harbor Welk values in general, they can't hack the music nohow — so to avoid taking any chances, to be demographically safest, there is simply no Welk music at the resort.

JOY AS I KILL IT Hi, returning your... Oh hi, I’m having another rock trivia game tomorrow night and I... Where'd, who gave you my number? George. Is that okay? Well, there's not much I …

All right, let's see if I can do this in one sitting, no leaving the typer, a thousand words on Faulkner, should be a snap. Faulkner, wait, Hemingway. Why does (or did) anybody, even as …

Hi, howya, come in, lemme show ya something. From a tan glueless envelope, ½ square, the kind used for storing stamps, coins, and various other miniature collectibles, he removes a speck of hard white paint …

I don’t listen to the cops, I wish they all were dead. — The Dils, “Sound of the Rain," by longtime Carlsbad residents Chip and Tony Kinman Do as I do, do exactly as I …

Dogs: are too worthless even to kick. Kicking a dog is like beating a rug; killing a dog is like washing one. Dogs are stupid and breathy, rugsmelly, dogloyal: who needs ’em?

Some kids burst when they came within a couple-three yards of me. A female 2-year-old sees me, whimpers, her ma’s embarrassed, pushes her closer: WAAAAAA! (Ma takes a candy cane for later.)