Kinsee’s going away party

Thanks to Mr. Dave Rolland for the sweet farewell note in this week’s paper.

I’m thankful to Rolland and Kelly Davis for giving me a shot and letting me become a part of CityBeat.

I’ve learned a lot from Rolland and Davis (read: How to be a reporter and how to write) and I plan on continuing down the path of journalism, albeit in different, perhaps more digital forms.

Click here for my farewell to Tijuana and keep up with me here if you’re at all interested in life in rural Colorado.

This Sunday, Feb. 15, from 5 to midnight or so, my boy and I are throwing a going-way party with local bands The Dabbers, Street of Little Girls, Confesions of a Corn Silo and Bobby Fantasy. I’d love to see familiar faces before I go. And, before I go, I’d like to thank  Michael James Armstrong, Acamonchi, Saratoga Sake, Mike Maxwell, Pamela Jaeger, Joshua Krause, Lynn Schuette, Mario Torero, Amy Lorenzen, Don Hollis, Chris Coggan, James Ivey, Kelly Hutchison, Bill Pierce, Zack Neilsen, Sean and Stacy Kelley and all the other artists and cultural-makers who made my job so damn fun and interesting.  Keep on keepin’ on, folks!

Below are a few more thoughts on San Diego’s art scene.

"#59366" by Saratoga Sake. This is the last San Diego painting I bought. I plan on showing my collection of art by San Diego and Tijuana artists in this new gallery I'm starting in Colorado.

San Diego’s cultural scene sucks. That’s the easy way out, but I’ve never really bought that way of thinking and I never will.

San Diego is as filled with artists and creative types as it is with beach bums and SoCal bros. You just have to pay attention and look a little harder than you would in New York, Los Angeles or San Francisco.

But artists are here, seething beneath the surface, hidden outside the city’s boring suburbs and putting together performances and shows in warehouses, bars, restaurants and any other real estate they can afford in this expensive town.

Speaking of expensive, as a writer and creative-type myself, I had to move to Tijuana a few years ago just to be able to afford living on my own. It was there that I really found the most interesting thing this region has going for it—the border and all the politics, friction and texture swirling around it.

I love standing in Las Playas de Tijuana or Border Field California State Park and looking back at the border fence and the dramatic difference between the two sides—San Diego with its manicured lawns and imported greenery and Tijuana with its colorful and dense concrete housing and chaotic urban streets. If you look at the art coming from either side, you’ll see the striking difference, too. That’s what I heart most about this strange place.

I lived in San Francisco, a known artistic hub, but it wasn’t until I really dug my heels into the sand of San Diego and Tijuana that I started noticing how unique, creative and seriously awesome this region really can be. While The Bay and L.A. rarely have little more to offer than pop surrealism and other forms of urban pop-art and performances, Mexico is churning out conceptual political works that really couldn’t spring up in any other part of the world. And, in San Diego, you can go to an art show or a dance performance and see both Northern Mexico and Southern California at work. My hope is that those who snottily say “San Diego sucks” will eventually start seeing how lucky they are to live here.

So yeah, I’m leaving this place to do the marriage-and-family thing in rural Colorado where I was born and raised, but I know this little alt-weekly will truck on. CityBeat, in my admitted biased opinion, is one of the only print publications in San Diego that truly tries to capture all the cultural goings-on ’round here. Nothing and no one is above or beneath us. So while the San Diego Reader goes on doing whatever the fuck it is they’re doing and San Diego Union-Tribune goes on ignoring most of the local arts scene and the rest of the online ventures slowly creep in and start doing better jobs, I know that good-old CityBeat will continue to run local art on the cover, local-art features inside and cram in as many arts and culture events in the calendar section as they can. Thanks to all the local artists, galleries, authors and performance groups that made my job as arts editor at CityBeat so interesting and fun, and a big thanks to Dave Rolland and Kelly Davis for teaching me where to put my commas and how not to suck at this whole writing thing.