Justin’s Newsletter: September 2023
Vol. 3, Issue 9
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What’s Up With Me
It was a fun birthday month… but I still don’t want to be 38. I was fine with 37, sort of. Seems like it’s mostly downhill from here on out. Correct me if I’m wrong.
Watch the latest episode of my TV show on Pasadena Media, “Pasadena Monthly with Justin Chapman,” featuring Karen Hofmann, the first woman, alumna, and provost president and CEO of ArtCenter College of Design.
Blink-182 ain’t the only band having an emotional and long-awaited reunion… Announcing the triumphant return of Whatnot, my two-piece punk band from high school with Zakk Eginton. It was a band reunion 20 years in the making, highly anticipated by fewer than 100 million fans. Stay tuned for new music! You can hear some of our old stuff from 2000-2003 here. (On a related note, it’s finally cool to like blink again. If you haven’t heard their new single “One More Time” or seen the video, I highly recommend it; it’s a tear-jerker: “Next time ain’t always gonna happen, I gotta say ‘I love you’ while we’re here.” My childhood friend engineered their new album of the same name, coming out October 20.)
Around Town
Stories to Keep an Eye On
International: The UFO story has become an international story (though the recent “alien bodies” in the Mexico hearing was highly dubious and probably did damage to the cause). I highly recommend you watch the full U.S. congressional hearing on the topic that was held recently; read the work of Leslie Kean and other serious people who are researching and reporting on this; and read about the Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Disclosure Act of 2023, recently proposed bipartisan legislation to declassify government records related to UFOs, modeled on the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act. Even NASA has created an independent study team “to better understand how the agency can contribute to ongoing government efforts to further the study observations of events in the sky that cannot be identified as balloons, aircraft, or as known natural phenomena from a scientific perspective.” Read their report here. It’s high time the government came clean about the situation and let everyone know exactly what’s gone on and where we go from here. Everyone knows there’s more to it than the government is saying. The gig is up. Luckily the tide of public opinion is turning and there’s less of a stigma for those speaking out about it.
National: So we’ve somehow avoided a government shutdown—but at the high cost of no Ukraine aid… for now. Now let’s see if McCarthy’s total capitulation results in a vote to remove him as Speaker, as the hard right has promised. Hard to see how they don’t do that; they’ve backed themselves into a corner. But who can lead this razor-thin Republican majority? This is what happens, of course, when voters set up such a narrowly divided government—this is what the phrase “elections have consequences” is referring to, right here. Holding my breath that we’ve learned our lesson, this time. 😬
California: The writer’s strike is over, and we’re left with the thought: did it really need to take that long? Was that much suffering really necessary? Guess their demands weren’t so “unrealistic” after all, Iger. The silver lining of all this is that their deal has laid a foundation for how to handle artificial intelligence concerns in creative industries going forward. Now let’s do the same for the actors and move on.
Local: Pasadena will establish a citizen charter reform task force to study and recommend amendments to the City’s charter, the City’s governing document. The task force will study Council vacancies, compensation, family care benefits, term limits, vice mayoral appointments, and the timing of the Mayoral election in relation to Council District elections, among other major changes that residents would do well to pay attention to. Any amendments to the charter must be approved by Pasadena voters. The City is aiming to put any recommended amendments on the 2024 ballot.
Great Reads
Here are some recommendations for interesting books I’ve read recently:
Berlin Underground: 1938-1945—Ruth Andreas-Friedrich
This is a chronicle of anti-Nazi resistance fighters in Berlin before and during World War II. Journalist Andreas-Friedrich recounts in real time some harrowing stories of her Jewish friends disappearing and the lengths she and many other Germans went to undermine the murderous Nazi regime and save innocent people. Plenty of lessons in here for our time, and goes to show that not all people living under such a regime are bad and culpable—life is more complicated than that. She also wrote a follow-up diary book called Battleground Berlin: 1945-1948 that describes the aftermath of the war and the foundations of the Cold War, including the Berlin Blockade and Airlift (which, if you don’t know much about, you should definitely learn more—another highly recommended book on the subject is Giles Milton’s Checkmate in Berlin).
Savage Journey: Hunter S. Thompson and the Weird Road to Gonzo—Peter Richardson
Hunter S. Thompson built up a certain reputation as a hard-partying, wild, cartoonish character, which often eclipsed his influential literary contributions and his dead-serious perspective on national politics. This book expertly explores his journey as a writer and his actual writing, which deserves to be taken very seriously indeed. He was ahead of his time and foresaw many of the issues and people in national politics that we’re dealing with today.
Spotlight on My Past Stories
Revisiting my original story about when the One Arroyo Foundation was created in 2017 to establish a comprehensive vision and improvement projects for the Arroyo Seco in Pasadena, because Congressmember Adam Schiff this month spoke at a meeting of the organization’s board and talked about adding the Arroyo to his Rim of the Valley Corridor Preservation Act legislation, which would add more than 191,000 acres to the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area.
And read all of my journalism here.