Month: August 2017

A small business feels the heat in OB’s changing landscape

By Brett Warnke

Maryanne Hsu does not stop moving.

Her restaurant, The Little Chef on Newport Avenue, is a busy reef of patrons. There are a few tables occupied as I entered and a teenager wearing an Ohio shirt who flung a fortune cookie to his friend. Both quit their tables with stray grains of fried rice lying on dirty plates, as empty as he left the tip jar. Maryanne quickly tidied up.

Her Little Chef is little bigger than a Point Loma heiress’s closet, but it is a delicious local spot where she has spent roughly 65 hours of each of the 7 days a week she works since she immigrated to San Diego in 1990.

Originally posted in 2017.
Ocean Beach does have its own history of a KKK – or Klan – presence, and the presence of other white supremacists over the years.
And within OB’s well known laid-back character and tolerance for alternative lifestyles – which has allowed artists, musicians, bohemians, gays and lesbians, along with bikers and skin heads, to reside within the dense neighborhoods of the community – there’s also been a fiercely, anti-racist attitude among the more liberal and radical residents, at least since the late 1960s.

All summer the OB Rag has been collecting memories of those who lived through the 1967 “Summer of Love” in Ocean Beach and San Diego – asking our readers to send us their experiences so we can share them.

So, this is the LAST CALL for Summer of Love memories wherever our readers gathered them.

You’ve probably seen Ray Blavatt’s cartoon drawings around town at the local coffee houses, but didn’t know he has been the animator for a special program for adult literacy.

Now, in fact, Ray is part of a team that is a semifinalist in a national adult literacy project called X Prize. He is the team’s animator and has created their titles that have taught over 1 million students.

Ray is part of another team – the team of locals who keep the Ocean Beach Historical Society going. Often working quietly in the background, he provides tech support to the OBHS during their monthly presentations.

By Anna Daniels

The response to Trump’s total moral failure to reckon with what happened in Charlottesville last Saturday prompted an immediate response from citizens all over the country. Over 700 rallies and marches were held in the aftermath, including here in San Diego.

Also in San Diego, the Horton Plaza pavement plaque commemorating the Confederacy was removed–quickly. According to the petition that was circulated yesterday

Community Activists Respond to a Very Real Hypothetical

By Brent E. Beltrán / San Diego Free Press

Barrio Logan’s national landmark, Chicano Park, is sacred space to the multitude of people that visit every year. It is the epicenter of Chicanx art and culture in San Diego and “el ombligo de Aztlán” as poetic wordmaestro alurista once wrote.

After the white supremacist terror in Charlottesville, Virginia I thought about what I would do if nazis and white supremacists decided to hold a rally in Chicano Park, steps away from my home.

Attacks by white supremacists and right wing groups are not something new to Chicano Park.

Two dozen people crowded into the OB Green Center on Voltaire last night, August 15th, to discuss organizing a group opposed to Target Express coming into Ocean Beach.

Their discussion began with the reasons they’re opposed to the mega-corporation opening up on Newport Avenue, familiar themes expressed by OB residents and businesses ever since the community heard the owners of the Antique Mall were leasing their huge building to Target.

By David Helvarg / Blue Notes / Aug. 15, 2017

Both 2016 and 2017 will be remembered as years of contrast in the way the United States approached its public seas, an ocean frontier that like our 19th century western frontier has been ruthlessly exploited but remains an essential element of who we are as a people and what we might yet achieve.

By Friend of Orcas

39 years in captivity. Finally free of pain. Kasatka Orca.

SeaWorld Entertainment Inc. made billions off your captivity and children born into it. But they never did right by you, in funding the design, construction and maintenance of a seapen retirement sanctuary where you could once more feel the ocean, and share it with your children.

This is the same Kasatka featured in the OB Rag’s 2014 series of the ten orcas held in captivity by SeaWorld, COME INSIDE FOR MORE.

Activists at the Ocean Beach Green Center are hosting a meeting to formalize an opposition group to Target Express moving into OB – which will be held tonight, Tuesday, August 15th at 7:00 p.m. The Green Center is located at 4843B Voltaire Street.

There’s a fundraiser concert this Thursday night – August 17th – for the Ocean Beach Woman’s Club and it’s all happening at OB’s newest music and bar venue – The Holding Company – 5046 Newport Avenue.

The San Diego reggae band Big Mountain will be playing, with proceeds benefiting the Woman’s Club. Doors to the event swing open at 7 p.m. with the concert beginning at 8pm.