San Diego Reader
San Diego's Top 12 Donors Print E-mail

20170419(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's Oldest . . . Print E-mail

20160831(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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A New Art Aloud: On Margaret Noble Print E-mail

Margaret-Noble-Head-in-the-Sand t670(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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Consume, Discard, Repeat: The Industrial Landscapes of Kim Reasor Print E-mail

Winner Takes All 2015-1024x763(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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Between Words & Images Print E-mail

thumbnail 01(San Diego Reader February 3, 2016)

Now open at Cedar and Kettner downtown is yet another San Diego monument to the commute: a $24 million, trolley-side, ten-story (three levels below ground, seven above), 645-space parking structure, bestowing on County Administration Center employees slots by day and on Little Italy revelers slots by night.

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I Don't Know Why I'm a Musician Print E-mail

Joe-Garrison t670(San Diego Reader December 24, 2015)

Joe Garrison is a musical survivalist. The 64-year-old jazz and new music composer has shaped his artistic life to favor more beginnings than ends. Like his hero, Igor Stravinsky, he’s learned that to reinvent himself by adapting to new musical ideas elicits in him the highest pleasure. He does so despite having been lured by the sirens of L.A. and New York. Staying put—all local artists know—can be detrimental to the ego. “If someone hears you’re from San Diego,” he says, “what they’re really telling you is ‘Oh, you’re from San Diego.’” Ah, the embarrassment of being from here and stuck here forever.

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Child No More Print E-mail

20150722(San Diego Reader July 22, 2015)

Little for Sherry Sotelo growing up was how she wished it would be. She, her four siblings, and her mother lived wherever they could—in an accommodating relative’s house or a complex of two-bedroom apartments somewhere south of I-5. Her mother was single, with limited English, and hard-pressed to find work. When Sotelo was 12, her mother secured a job in Tijuana, so the family moved there. But then Sotelo wanted to go to school in the U.S., so she came back. She enrolled as a freshman at Hoover High, rooming “with whoever would let me stay.” After a while, she says, the loneliness got to her. “It was tough, not having my mom here, so I went back with her for another year.” At 15, she returned to San Diego. She began dreaming of a college education and a career in veterinarian medicine, yet still vulnerable to temporary quarters, no steady income, and a dearth of nutritious food.

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