Katie Hafner’s The Boys

What the hell are we doing here, and what does it mean to lead a fulfilling life?

Perhaps it’s due to living through Covid-19 and its aftermath that I’m significantly horrified at humanity’s social, political, environmental, and economic challenges. Whatever the reason, I find myself asking the big existential questions more than ever.

These are not questions I’m alone in wondering—the existence of university philosophy departments confirms this. Just pop into any late-night, booze-and-weed-soaked bonfire and eavesdrop on the chatter.

But these are questions that, at least in the United States, have been largely cast aside during the 20th century in formal philosophy—until recently, University of San Diego aesthetics professor and author Nick Riggle tells me. We’re discussing his book, This Beauty: A Philosophy of Being Alive (published December 2022), which provides a working manual for thinking through “The Question.”

To wit: How are we, as sentient beings, supposed to value a life we did not choose to live? We’re here, sure as we can pinch our skins, but why should we “want it, love it, care for it, make it mine?” Riggle asks.

Befitting an academic, Riggle tackles this quandary as a lecturer might, by speaking directly to readers in his text, walking them through each chapter conversationally and lyrically. The chapters appear as individually themed essays on life in general, time, the body, family, the concept of a single day, and, of course, beauty. This sprawling format is intentional.

“I don’t think, philosophically, that ‘The Question’ has a direct answer,” he says. “We don’t have enough information to have one. We don’t know enough… [W]ho we are, what we’re doing here, what the universe is. It’s all one great mystery.”

To help untangle this mystery, Riggle offers real-life examples of how to think about these concepts through relatable anecdotes about parenthood and his middle-class upbringing. He also interrogates the futility and vagueness of common inspirational phrases like “live like there’s no tomorrow,” “seize the day,” and “you only live once.”

He argues they all imply that life is precious and therefore inspire either recklessness or over-careful preservation. Both of these are overkill for the nuances of everyday life and recognizing the beauty and, consequently, the value therein.

Beauty as a subject, and the search for it, is what anchors Riggle’s entire philosophy (and book). To him, it’s very much in the eye of the beholder, something subjective and highly individual, with meaning beyond just pleasure and visual satisfaction. There’s also an inherently communal aspect. The personal and public aspects engage in a feedback loop that creates aesthetic value.

Riggle, who lives in El Cerrito, is a good candidate to explore the value of life: He’s lived many already. He dropped out of high school to pursue a professional inline skating career that took him to the X-Games and other international competitions and found him hanging out with Eminem, Dave Matthews Band, and Randy Savage by age 20.

Dissatisfied with living life rooted more in the corporeal, surrounded by material pleasures in a body-punishing discipline, he moved on to other pursuits. He got his bachelor’s degree at Berkeley after starting at community college, earned his PhD in philosophy at New York University, became a professor, married, and, more recently, became a father. There was also a stint as the head of a hip-hop-slash-folk music group in-between.

So why ask The Question now?

The book touches on other disciplines, but it’s fair to say that it is broadly an existentialist work. Academically speaking, this worldview fell out of favor after the writings of Søren Kirkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, John Paul Sartre, and others preoccupied with teasing out the meaning of human existence initially became popular.

For many, existentialism is too nebulous and tedious to consider. In San Diego, where championing good vibes sometimes trumps everything else, it’s easy to see how it rarely elevates beyond that aforementioned bonfire conversation. For Riggle, fatherhood provided a good opportunity to dig in.

Zooming out more widely, after decades of the decline of organized religion and the rise of buffet-style spiritualism linked to astrology, crystals, yoga, and other hodgepodge practices and philosophies, people are perhaps more primed than they have been in a while to consider what he’s offering.

Frankly, this line of thinking—and to know it’s again becoming en vogue—is refreshing, particularly in a city with crushing economic and social inequality. Even Foreign Policy argued in favor of it in a 2019 article, declaring, “French philosophy came to define the postwar era. As U.S. politics get ever more absurd, it’s time for a comeback.”

We may have a harder time addressing the material comforts of every human on earth, but at least we can try to provide a roadmap for mentally riding the waves. Or, as Riggle puts it, “engaging in aesthetic life [is] a way of keeping in touch with the value of being alive.”

“You should call this piece ‘The Not So Lonely Hedonist,’” says journalist, author, and independent book publisher Mike Sager as we look at the ocean from his home in Bird Rock. He’s referring to the title of one of his essay compilations, The Lonely Hedonist.

It’s filled with stories about other people, but the title is an apt description of Mike. If anyone else in the world tried to tell me how to title my piece, I’d have bristled. But one of the quirks of writers writing about writers (also why we typically avoid it) is that it becomes a collaborative process.

Collaboration is something the now-publisher knows well. Though if someone asked him, he’d say he’s been going it alone for years. He moved to La Jolla in 1997 from Washington D.C., where he began his storied journalism career in 1978 at The Washington Post.

“I was a rogue hire,” he says, downplaying his success, per usual. Sager was just the copy boy who freelanced on the side, but after 11 months, he broke a story on abuses in the Department of Agriculture and, instantly, famed editor Bob Woodward promoted him.

What followed is a long, still-active career writing for titles like Rolling Stone, Esquire, where he’s been a contributing editor for 20 years, and many others, including this magazine. At Rolling Stone, Sager was the rag’s contributing editor who wrote about drugs and getting paid actual American dollars to smoke crack with Rick James, among other anecdotes. But he also ghost-wrote for Hunter S. Thompson when the gonzo wordsmith was too inebriated to file copy on his own.

Sager’s since become one of history’s best chroniclers of people—often the world’s most interesting people. He has an uncanny ability to pick up on the quirky things they do, identifying the fascinating contradictions they inhabit that make them both relatable and also utterly foreign. To that point, it’s no wonder he’s especially drawn to writing about celebrities, sports, and various drug cultures.

Sager’s pieces are so vivid, the characters so alive that it’s no surprise more than a dozen of his articles have been turned into films. Ever heard of Boogie Nights? That was thanks to Sager’s Rolling Stone piece “The Devil and John Holmes.”

So was Wonderland, starring Val Kilmer, as well as 2012’s The Marinovich Project, an ESPN documentary based on Sager’s 2010 Esquire piece on the former No. 1 NFL draft pick and the disastrous effects of the all-consuming, lifelong training regimen from a young age. There are also stories about “The Pope of Pot,” who ran New York’s first marijuana delivery service, and another dispatch from the underground world of Southern California’s hash scene.

These days, he also runs his own publishing house, The Sager Group, which is HQ’ed at his oceanfront home. Sager started the eponymous press in 2012 as a “multimedia content brand” geared towards “empowering those who create.” Sager knows better than anyone that a media career these days doesn’t exactly guarantee riches, even more so with print journalism.

And though he’s made out okay—he calls his La Jolla perch the “house that Hollywood built”—he also knows he’s been lucky, and he wants to pay it forward. Plus, he likes staying in the mix.

To do so, Sager finds who he considers the best, brightest, and most underexposed writers kicking out the most interesting stories. He works with them to develop and bring to completion books and e-books. He lends a hand with heavy edits and helps with product design, and thanks to Sager’s Hollywood connections, the press also helps authors turn their books into documentaries and feature films.

Since 2012, The Sager Group has published more than 80 books, including a Women in Journalism series, which Sager claims is the “world’s only three-volume textbook or anthology of great women writers.” A cursory Google search confirms that. Many of these books are being turned into movies.

Shaman and Labyrinth of the Wind have been optioned by TIME Studios, plus Bang Bang Productions in India. They’re working with fiction and long-form journalism publisher NeoText, whose parent company recently became part of Jake Gyllenhaal’s Nine Stories Productions.

Currently, the dual production teams are creating a film, podcast, and documentary to accompany Deadliest Man Alive by Benji Feldheim, published earlier this year. It’s about Chicagoan John Keenan, a martial arts expert with a “Most Interesting Man in the World” sort of pedigree. He also ran occult and pornography shops, harbored a lively cocaine habit, and was rumored to be linked to the mob.

I joke to Sager that he could qualify as “the Most Interesting Man in the World.” A tour through his office and studio is a look into where he’s been, what he’s seen. Pictures of Sager with various celebrities line the walls next to his many books—some he wrote, the rest classic and obscure works, many penned by famous friends.

One photo shows Sager cautiously, with some distance, putting his arm around Paris Hilton. In another, he’s got fists up in a defensive boxing pose with “Freeway” Rick Ross, the crack kingpin of 1980s L.A. In yet another, he’s chatting with the second-to-last king of Nepal, King Birendra, who was later assassinated by his own son.

Life is much quieter and more consistent for Sager these days: he’s in a new relationship, he lives next door to his mom, and he spends most of his time at home, promoting the writers of The Sager Group. He’s got a few recent releases of his own. Hunting Marlon Brando, which is also available in audiobook, details Sager’s experiences across the globe trying to interview the iconic late actor (spoiler: he eventually succeeds—sort of).

A Boy and His Dog in Hell is an anthology of what Sager calls his “greatest hits.” Upcoming releases include My Father’s Con by octogenarian Pat Jordan, the great sportswriter for Sports Illustrated and The New York Times, as well as The Devil Took Her by New Zealand “off-kilter short story writer” Michael Botur.

While finishing this story, I asked Sager if there’s anything I missed, a fascinating anecdote we somehow overlooked. Over the next few minutes, I watch the text bubbles on my phone appear, then disappear, when a photo of him and a white-haired man appears. It’s Sager with Jonathan Goldsmith, of Dos Equis commercial fame.

Another text bubble, then: “One of these guys is the Most Interesting Man in the World.”

Sebastián Morúa is the Senior Vice President of Brand & Innovation for San Diego FC. He oversees Playmakers, the program through which the club has, over the past three years, engaged with over 80 working artists—not as marketing partners, but as co-creative directors.

Morúa didn’t build Playmakers as a community-outreach program bolted onto a Major League Soccer franchise. He built it as the identity of the franchise. When we sat down, he talked about the World Cup, San Diego’s creative workforce, his challenge to other sports franchises in the city, and the mural of heroes he hopes people will see one day when they close their eyes and picture San Diego FC.

Claire Johnson: Why does an MLS team invest in arts and culture?

Sebastián Morúa: I want to answer that in two parts. Philosophically first—because I think what you’re really asking is why should any sports team do this when most don’t.

Sport is a platform for transformation. It has proven that over and over. We saw it this summer with countries participating in the World Cup for the first time and what that did in their home countries—the sense of self-identification, pride, possibility. That is the power of sport.

When you take a sports team that’s fueled by that principle and understands what it could mean for other stakeholders in a community, you start to think about what you can accomplish in collaboration with them. One of those stakeholders, very early on, was the creative community. If we were going to build a team that represents this place and its people, we needed to go to the source. Artists are uniquely positioned to translate the essence and the soul of a community. When you zoom out and look at the multitude of artists in a place, you start to see the fabric of that local culture. That’s where the sense of pride and possibility gets unlocked.

But you’re also San Diego FC specifically. That matters.

Our mission is to create opportunities for talent to flourish and make San Diego shine. That means the club is a platform. When we started doing the early research for the brand, we brought artists into our focus groups. The response was immediate. There was a clear need. In 2024, we ran the first full year of what became Playmakers, working with more than 20 artists to help us tell the story of how San Diego FC could weave 18 distinct communities together.

We’re in the business of developing communities through sport. We’re not in the business of fútbol to entertain communities. That is an outcome—but not the purpose.

When you started, were you thinking about the profitability of this type of program?

No. I wasn’t thinking about where this was going or how much it would cost. It instinctively felt aligned with our organizational purpose, and we made a decision to go for it. Now it’s become what it’s become.

What does Playmakers look like in 10 or 20 years?

If a fan closed their eyes 20 years from now and tried to paint a mural of the heroes that make up the club, they would see a big percentage of Playmakers artists on that mural. Ask any fan about the team they’ve supported for decades, and they’ll tell you about players, maybe a coach, maybe an owner. We’re expanding that. In our mural, there’ll be artists, entrepreneurs, community leaders, youth coaches. The community will be present.

Three to five years from now, Playmakers is an established community of creatives who have co-directed the identity of the club and the evolving identity of San Diego. If we keep the pace we’ve kept, we should have collaborated with 150 to 200 artists whose stories we’ve told and whose next steps we’ve helped support.

What would you tell another organization considering this kind of investment?

There’s a huge benefit for us as a club and as a brand. This is symbiotic. The artists have a need, we can support that need, and in return the community cares more about our club because of the investment we’re doing in the community. That’s what I would tell another organization.

What excites you most about how San Diego is changing?

San Diego is waking up to how much it has to offer the global conversation around culture. There’s a purity to life here—partly because of the weather, which allows us to spend so much time outside, in nature—and that exists alongside this incredible richness in food, music, art, and now sports.

I have a sense that San Diego is ready to unlock its full potential. You see it in the artists and creatives here. They’re ready. There’s very little hesitation. It’s more like: “Hell yeah, of course I want to do this. I know I’m talented. I’ve been waiting for something like this.”

That energy, combined with the unique lifestyle and character of this place, creates a really exciting sense of what San Diego can become in the years ahead.

Is there a question I should have asked you that I haven’t?

I would ask: What would you say to the other big players in San Diego who are—or could be—shaping the cultural fabric of our community? Do they understand the symbiotic benefit? Are they supporting it?

Because Playmakers, in the end, is a cultural compass. It’s making sure that San Diego still feels—and will always feel—represented in the creative process of building San Diego FC and what that means for San Diego.

The pitch is a canvas. Athletes are painting collectively during every game. There is a story in every game. That’s the link between sport and art. At the core, it’s the same creative process.

This is part of a three-part series. This is Act III. See Act I and Act II here.

The Future

We’ve been here before.

In 2012, city funding for the arts and culture in San Diego had eroded. As a corrective, the city council unanimously approved “Penny for the Arts”—a promise to dedicate roughly one penny of every dollar spent on hotel rooms (the Transient Occupancy Tax, or TOT).

The logic was fair and sound: Cultural institutions and events help attract visitors. Those visitors pay hotel taxes. So, the people agreed, some of that hotel-tax revenue should go back into maintaining the cultural ecosystem that helps bring those visitors and that money.

Projected as a five-year plan, the measure was supposed to increase funding to $17.9 million by 2017.

It never did. The penny was never guaranteed, so each year the city used part of it for other priorities. By 2023, the money going to arts and culture was up to about a half a penny. Even as TOT revenue has gone up significantly.

In 2019, TOT revenue was $245 million.

In 2025: $325 million.

One fix would be to guarantee the penny. Not simple, given San Diego’s financial woes. But the alternative—eroding the culture that makes San Diego San Diego, give it its identity—also doesn’t feel wise. Plus, even a locked percentage still rises and falls with tourism, which is why culture advocates want a guaranteed floor on top of it.

Another solution would be to give the arts commission actual authority.

“It’s an advisory body,” says arts commissioner Kamaal Martin. “You’d be hard-pressed to find anybody who takes our advice.”

He described the commissioners debating real, consequential questions this year, like whether and how to divide the cuts between funding pools. But those conversations “don’t connect to whoever’s actually deciding,” Martin says. “We haven’t been entrusted with decision-making about relevant things nearly enough.”

Christine Martinez is building political infrastructure through her organization Arts+Culture:San Diego—which is starting a 501(c)(4) lobbying structure not unlike police and fire unions. Martinez is also keeping her community actively engaged. “We won’t be caught off guard next year like we were this year,” she tells me.

Then there’s the evergreen issue of affordability and accessibility. Kiplinger’s most recent report ranks San Diego as the 11th most expensive city in the US, based on cost of living. The average home value is $980,700 (the US median is $540,000), but San Diego’s median household income is only one-third greater than the national level. Rent is also 66 percent higher than the national average ($2,716 vs. $1,636).

This is why San Diego has long suffered from the creative brain drain—creatives leaving for more affordable cities. “Artists are free to live wherever they want, and they will go where the rent is affordable,” says Jennifer de Poyen of Space 4 Art. “When they leave, they take their gifts with them, and their contributions, and their economic impact.”

One saving grace is the presence of Tijuana, where the cost of living is about 60 percent lower than San Diego, per Numbeo. Tijuana has long functioned as an affordable neighborhood for many in San Diego’s creative culture. It’s part of the reason why the binational identity is such a constant in our galleries, music, theater, murals, and culture. While that cross-border blood flow is one of San Diego’s most compelling attributes, few artists living that life would call it convenient or easy. A city is at a disadvantage when its culture creators have to cross a border to go home at night, and cross again the next morning to work.

In May, San Diego County Board of Supervisors approved a $2.75 million arts initiative of its own. It includes an Artist Space Grant Program aimed directly at the affordability crisis, as well as an artist-in-residence program, a dedicated Binational Creative Economy Investment, and a one-time investment in the Black Arts and Culture District in Encanto.

Bob Lehman of San Diego Art Matters has been doing county-level, binational organizing for years; in 2023, he helped get the county’s arts commission reestablished after 30 years of defunctness. That’s important because it gives arts and culture an official seat in county government, advising the County Board of Supervisors on arts and culture policy. He also brought in consultant Laura Zucker, who ran LA County’s arts program for three decades, to build a real regional plan.

“I really believe we’ll have something set up here that other communities come and look at,” he told me. “A national template other cities come to learn from.”

When asked who decides which artists will get the new grant money, county arts commissioner and executive director of the Chicano Park Museum and Cultural Center Monica Delgadillo Hernandez doesn’t hedge.

“That’s part of the infrastructure we’re going to be building,” she says. “What should a panel of reviewers look like? Should it be the commissioners? Should it be other folks? A supervisor?” She was just as candid that the commission itself doesn’t reflect San Diego’s population—Chicano communities are roughly a third of the city, she tells me, “and that’s not represented at the table yet.”

What Other Cities Prove Is Possible

The great news is that none of these solutions have to be invented from scratch. Numerous cities serve as examples of what’s possible—if we have the will.

Jonathon Glus—Prebys Foundation Senior Fellow for Art & Design, the Executive Director of the Art + Design District, and board president for California for the Arts—worked in Houston before coming to San Diego. The Texas city dedicates 74.5 percent of its hotel tax to arts grants by formula, and that support is guaranteed. Washington, DC locked in dedicated arts funding in 2019. Salt Lake City, my hometown, has run a voter-approved arts tax for almost 30 years, most recently reauthorized through 2034. And just this summer, New York City pushed cultural funding to a record $323.8 million, even incorporating an emergency fund.

Denver’s model is interesting because instead of a city-dependent funding model, theirs is a 0.1 percent regional sales tax. In place since 1988 and renewed by voters three times, their Scientific & Cultural Facilities District has distributed between $54 million and $85 million to arts, culture, and scientific orgs—each of the last 12 years.

This is part of a three-part series. This is Act III. See Act I and Act II here.

None of these cities got there by accident. They decided, on purpose, that arts and culture were worth protecting from politics—and, in some cases, worth building an entire identity around.

“That’s how Miami has flipped the switch,” says Glus. “People go to Miami for culture as much as they do the beach.”

San Diego has spent decades selling itself backward: Beach and weather first, culture as an afterthought you might stumble into. Glus would love to see the strategy flipped: Visitors should come for the art, “and then, by the way, you’re on the beach.”

So What Happens From Here?

“I do think it was a wake-up call for the community,” de Poyen says of the budget fight. “People understand that our funding is vulnerable. It was a lesson in how much power people have when they coalesce. But wow, is it painful.”

Glus says he’s genuinely optimistic. “The players have all changed seats, but the work is moving forward.”

“I believe optimism is a moral duty,” says Martin, who’s both power-fist and polite.

In eight months, there will be another budget fight. Everyone I talked to expects it will be worse. But something happened this spring that can’t be undone.

“I hope this rupture has brought us together in a moment of self-realization,” says Leticia Gomez Franco of the Balboa Art Conservation Center. “I hope we stop being so transactional; we begin to see ourselves and each other as partners in this work.”

That’s the whole ask, really. And it’s on all of us.

This is part of a three-part series. This is Act III. See Act I and Act II here.

This is part of a three-part series. This is Act II. See Act I and Act III here.

Without concrete, wildflowers are just weeds. Any honest history of San Diego art and culture is tension and its reckonings. It begins before the name existed, with the Kumeyaay. It must pass through the Panama-California Exposition, one hell of a county fair that conjured Balboa Park as our grand cultural stage. It pays tribute to the lights of La Jolla, where the donor pool helped realize unrealizable things. It should mention names like Marston, Scripps, Ochoa, DeWitt, Lopez, Klauber, Baldessari, Torres… so many.

In short spaces like this, long histories like that become roll calls. So this is more of a walk through pressure points, notes on recurring forces and regional oddities.

Border life is key to understanding the here of here. Art without dialogue is just decoration. At its best, that dialogue should be a tad muddy, emotionally gassed. In other words, it should be in need of art—to widen perspective, parse meaning, see the unseen.

San Diego’s central dialogue—the magic and the stressor—is being flatmates with Mexico’s second-largest city by population. That makes San Diego a swing-gate of shared and vastly different perspectives, both its own place and something larger. And in no other major city in the US do the fresh flow of ideas from two countries—different governments, laws, mores, expressions, arts, cultures, traditions, economies, loves, and resentments—mingle at such a constant daily rate (due respect to El Paso).

That binational steam created Chicano Park, one of the most uniquely San Diegan contributions to national and international culture. When construction of the I-5 and Coronado Bridge divided Logan Heights, neighbors protested by transmuting prejudicial concrete into redwoods of Chicano art. Turning a civic wound into a beautiful and enduring landmark that expressed and preserved a core identity—like East Side Gallery in Berlin or Constitution Hill in Johannesburg—is damn near the core of what art is supposed to do.

Like any city, the underground-overground friction is crucial in San Diego. Our culture is headlined by institutions that lift creative work onto national and international stages: MCASD, The Nat, SDMA, Centro Cultural de la Raza, the Symphony, WorldBeat Center, The Old Globe, La Jolla Playhouse, Mingei, Museum of Us, Stuart Collection, Timken, ICA, Comic-Con, etc. The next mutations grow in the seams: street murals, music dives, tattoo shops, wheatpasted walls, graffiti, lowriders, surf and skate art (though in San Diego, this is mainstream), pop-up shows, backyard shows, beach raves, any place with room for people and a loose relationship with regulations.

Both art and culture get their power from power. They’re fundamentally a conversation with and retort against dominant structures. San Diego’s most pervasive structure is arguably the most rigid form: the military. Its presence is heavy in the southern tip (Border Patrol), the middle (Navy and MCAS Miramar), and northern edge (Camp Pendleton). The military is San Diego’s largest employer, by a long shot.

Within this plus-sized environment of order and hierarchy, it’s understandable that Shepard Fairey’s “OBEY” posters in the late ’90s struck such a potent chord. The most compelling punk rock is often outside a strong governor’s window. (The “OBEY” series featured an ominous, propaganda-style André the Giant wheatpasted on random ugly surfaces across San Diego—launching Fairey’s style that he eventually used for Obama’s “HOPE” poster.)

Armed forces are often viewed as the absence of creative culture—understandably so, since rogue individual expression feels like a pretty sure way to sink a war effort.

But in San Diego, the Navy’s unsuspecting role as art creator—directly or indirectly—is hard to ignore. Tattoos are a dawn-of-time practice of many early cultures, including the Kumeyaay. But Polynesia was a core realm. Sailors were exposed to it on deployment in the Pacific Rim, inking their arms with the names of loved ones and unit insignia. Back in San Diego, they’d flaunt those tats in the beaches and bars of Mission Beach or PB (Marines did the same in Oceanside.) Enlistees were the muscular flesh galleries that helped turn skin art into one of the city’s most widespread modern art forms.

During WWII, the military also trained huge legions of San Diego laborers how to build war machines. Those mechanics, engineers, machinists, welders, painters, and metal fabricators used those skills for creative good in their neighborhoods—especially in custom car culture, which took off in the post-war ’50s and ’60s. Mexican-American vets helped develop the lowrider scene, a deeply rooted part of San Diego creative expression. Galleries on slow-moving wheels.

Tourism is the other mainstream force ripe for creating against. It is both critical to San Diego’s economy, and one of the greatest barriers to deeper, more nuanced expressions of what and who San Diego is. The industry of selling our city to passers-through creates a gigantic tarp of cultural tropes. It reinforces the most obvious charms—cute zoo animal takes in an epic sunset with a giant margarita—and doesn’t yield much airspace to the thrilling micro-cultures that live and breathe where locals live and breathe. Nothing against watercolors of dolphins, but much against the hegemony of watercolors of dolphins.

Maybe because of these dominant forces, San Diegans especially tend to force underground and institutional art into a needless cage match. It’s human instinct to champion the underdog as more worthy, but that has always felt like a form of articide.

It’s like saying the only good food is made by gritty upstarts who crafted their own whisks from discarded shopping carts. Most of those plucky whisk-makers would love to eventually be paid properly, would love a stage, a grant, a building, a donor, a lighting rig, health insurance, maybe even one chair that doesn’t threaten the spine.

That’s what the major institutions do. Both stages—the duct-taped and the donored—serve vital roles and deserve commensurate support if we care about the entire lifespan of creative expression and not just its first exciting steps. Championing the starving artist exclusively just secures an enduring poverty for the creative class at large.

I’ve often theorized it’s harder to create great art and culture in cities like San Diego, where the climate is supernaturally pleasant. In colder/hotter/rainier/less beautiful cities, people are forced indoors to fabricate their own beauty (the grunge music of Seattle, the obscene creative output of Reykjavík). San Diego’s eternally mild sunshine tends to make the human body our art medium of choice. But scratch the surface of that surf poster (and I’ve only scratched a miniscule percent here), and this city’s far from the cultural shallows it gets accused of being.

Addendum: A Personal Agenda. In scouting the route of art and culture across San Diego county through history, two areas come up again and again: La Jolla and Barrio Logan. So I propose a collaboration between two icons of artful concrete—Chicano Park and Salk Institute (one of the world’s great examples of brutalism architecture). Let Barrio Logan’s muralists go nuts on that coastal science fortress, unite the realms for a moment in time.

This is part of a three-part series. This is Act II. See Act I and Act III here.