John Anderson's Amtrak odyssey started with a dream of seeing America "from the rolling level of a train car, solidly planted on earth," he writes in Miami New Times. The Sunset Limited Orlando to Los Angeles dream unravels in packed train stations, derailments, mysterious delays, moving backward, prefab muffins, broken air conditioning and finally a two-day forced layover in San Antonio with Julie the computer.
Portland's "club-crawl" music festival rebounded this year from 2001, when terrorism dampened national spirits, The Oregonian reports. Richard Meeker, publisher of Willamette Week, MusicfestNW's main sponsor, estimates that attendance and revenue rose 20 percent to 25 percent. "I think it's a great thing that we've been able to grow this event this much, even in this economy," Meeker tells the daily. The bulk of the proceeds go to First Octave, a non-profit music education program.
"George Bush and John Ashcroft used the Sept. 11 tragedy to shred the Bill of Rights and begin the greatest period of political repression since the McCarthy era," Executive Editor Tim Redmond writes in the San Francisco Bay Guardian. "The greatest enemy to the American way of life may not be al-Qaeda or its foreign sponsors. The greatest threat may be our own government.," he writes.
"Because I am most decidedly not a politician, I am best qualified for political office," says John Sugg, senior editor, Creative Loafing Atlanta, in announcing his candidacy for the 7th Congressional District. Sugg, who is running a write-in campaign as a Whig, says fellow journalists shouldn't question his political activism. "Your bosses have neutered real journalism by creating the cult of objectivity -- passionless journalism that is beholden to the status quo." Sugg is challenging "ho-hum" Democrat Mike Berlon and John Linder, "a water-carrier for the most corrupt elements of corporate America," he writes in his "Fishwrapper" column.
The San Francisco Bay Guardian wrote its first article about PG&E's monopoly on power in the Bay area in 1969, not long after the paper was founded. The San Francisco Chronicle looks back on this "lone, frequently bombastic crusade to make the city establish the municipal power utility Congress intended" and how the daily papers in San Francisco have opposed public power. The article quotes Stephen Buel, editor of the East Bay Express, as saying, "The sad fact is that a lot of the Bay Guardian's criticisms of PG&E are very apt, but the way in which the paper hammers home its message makes it get lost because it is so mind-numbingly repetitive."
While Mickey Mouse entertains diners at a Disneyland hotel restaurant, rats may be wreaking havoc in the kitchen. OC Weekly's Nick Schou talks to employees, some of whom have filed claims against the hotel for a variety of illnesses they say are connected to filthy kitchens -- live rats, rat droppings, toxic molds and backed up drains. "When they started all this expansion at Disneyland, it brought us all the rats," one former employee tells Schou. "There were also roaches and worms."
LA Weekly's Brendan Bernhard interviews a naked Benedikt Taschen, the king of the coffee table art book, as he lies flat on his back at an LA spa."Taschen is a postmodern tycoon for the 21st century, a brash and stylish entrepreneur who has turned the world of illustrated-book publishing upside down. ... The jet-setting 41-year-old German publisher produces exquisite coffee-table books that range in subject matter from the complete etchings of 18th-century Italian engraver Giovanni Battista Piranesi to the pornographic digital diaries of 21st-century Internet exhibitionist Natacha Merritt."
