The year was 2015. On a dimly-lit street in the Berkeley Hills, a lanky young man was stepping into a rideshare. From the front steps of a three-story neoclassical apartment building, David Reid called out in his resonant voice: “Hey! Send me a dispatch!” His young friend was headed for Havana via Los Angeles and Mexico City. Over the course of four weeks in Cuba, Marius Sosnowski would organize his cultural, personal, and atmospheric appraisals into missives, dispatching them from the lobbies of various hotels—the only places to reliably access WiFi and ice-cold beverages. These bulletins were looser and more experimental than an essay, written with more purpose than a personal letter, and they weren’t very good. But in his willingness to take risks and be vulnerable, there was an eagerness, a hunger to be at the “center of all things.” Thus the dispatch, as in those published here, was born.
The magazine itself was conceived on walks David shared with Mateo Bonilla—a son of Quito and Brooklyn (Park Slope), formerly the youthful editor of Linea Sur, the journal of Ecuador’s foreign ministry—across the UC Berkeley campus, and in and out of cafés, a way of making things happen that now feels like ancient history. Recently arrived from Ecuador, and sharing Mateo’s foreign-policy background, Victoria Valladares contributed a design, distinguished by a haunting sketch of a craggy mound off Point Reyes that looked like the edge of the world. What had been a topic of discussion became a work-in-progress. (Mateo and Victoria are now married and living in Washington, D.C.)
At the time, Paris Cotz was spending her days working out of the UC Berkeley Arts & Design Vice-Chancellor’s office, keeping a close watch on West Coast visual arts. Paris, a native New Yorker, had fallen in love with the idea of California in 2004, on a trip to visit her aunt in West L.A. that culminated with the roaring Pacific Ocean beckoning to her. Since 2018 she has curated artworks and programs for the Gibson Arts Projects, whose storied Berkeley venue is the Pauline Kael-Jess Murals house. The exhibitions, performances, and film nights at the brown-shingle on Oregon Street recaptured the spirit, seemingly long-lost in the 21st century’s commercialist daze, of the Happenings of the 1960s. You could imagine Susan Sontag, who maintained an almost life-long connection to Berkeley, standing anonymously in the dark, making mental notes for a piece in Partisan Review.
It was at one of these evenings that Luna Izpisua Rodriguez and a nonce dance troupe performed “Asleep and Dancing in the Rainforest.” Luna had come to Berkeley from La Jolla, California, and afterward fallen in with artists, poets, and surfers in Bolinas. Her life and her art found definition along the California coastline. In admiring attendance on Oregon Street was David Reid. As he took in a melange of young and old, of artists and enthusiasts of the arts, of urban professionals and reclusive thinkers, people of every persuasion in the middle of so much color and sound and movement—David found the answer to a question inevitably, sometimes exasperatingly, posed to any new cultural venture: “THIS is our audience, here and now.”
Whether he knew it then or not, Johnny Pujol, our publisher, was looking for something too. After a stint in Boston for college and New York for work, he arrived in Berkeley where his life truly began. He learned something new every day: from skateboarding and surfing to the virtues of the desert and how to get properly stoned. He started hanging out at Strada, a café on the corner of College and Bancroft Avenues where he’d meet both Paris and David. He studied engineering, started a spy novel in verse, and launched two successful businesses. The rest of his family soon followed him to town. Eventually, his sister Katharine began dating a talented graphic designer from Brazil named Gabe Ferriera.
At 15, when his father first announced a move to California, Gabe had dreaded the thought of ever leaving São Paulo. He relented once he’d measured the distance from his family’s intended new home in Orange County to Hollywood. “Only 45 kilometers!” he exulted, only to discover when he got there that in Southern California 28 miles away might as well be another country. But in time Gabe would make his way to the sacred stations of California popular culture: an internship making movie posters in Mid-Wilshire, a job on the seventh floor of the famed Larry Flynt building in Beverly Hills, a move to San Francisco’s Chinatown, and finally to the interzone of the Lower Haight and Haight-Ashbury—designing, collaborating, and making art all along the way as a freelancer at five different agencies. Finally, Alphabet liked him enough to keep him around.
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Dispatches occupies the ground floor of a somber bungalow with a brick facade on a quiet stretch of Milvia Street south of University Avenue in Berkeley, California. Impending doom (a row of these former doctors’ offices are slated for demolition, nobody knows exactly when) and an indulgent master tenant (Johnny Pujol’s SimpleLab, Inc.) afford a manageable rent. Our small dark warren houses a working library of about 3000 books; assembled haphazardly over the years by our senior editors, the books are arranged on second-hand industrial metal bookcases according to a former bookseller-turned-roving correspondent’s arcane scheme.
Here at 2509 Milvia Street we are within easy walking distance from the “rose-covered cottage” where Allen Ginsberg welcomed Jack Kerouac in October 1955—a few blocks from the original broadcast studio of KPFA Pacifica, the first listener-sponsored radio station in the country, and not too far from where Augustus Stanley Owsley III confected his high-grade LSD for the ‘60s. We are 20 blocks from the brown-shingle Arts and Crafts house, mentioned above, where Pauline Kael, the most influential and imitated film critic of the mid-century, lived a bohemian life more than fifty years ago. From a dingbat on Benvenue less than three blocks away from there, Patricia Hearst was kidnapped by the sinister and ridiculous Symbionese Liberation Army on a brisk night in February 1974. At Bancroft Way and Browning Street—a long stone’s throw from us—stands a modest duplex where Kamala Harris spent most of her childhood, and jubilant crowds celebrated her election as vice president of the United States on November 3, 2020.
Dispatches was conceived in one world, and did its reporting and reviewing in another. In the strange days of 2020, we found our foreign correspondents communicating from increasingly colorful predicaments: Our dispatcher from Australia, Sky O’Brien, was forced to quarantine for weeks in hotel rooms in Sydney and Perth (the lodging gratis, the minibar not included); Francesco Milan was conducting video conferences with Marius and Paris from below decks of a sailboat caught in choppy Mediterranean waters; all while ex-pat dispatcher Philippe Aronson was venturing from an apartment in the Bastille in Paris to the South of France and back with his wife and collaborator, Emma, and their two young children, trying to stay a step ahead of shape-shifting lockdowns. Video interviews abounded between California and London, San Francisco and the East Bay, Angelenos and fellow Angelenos. However, we did manage one late-afternoon, plein-air editorial session on a wide picnic table under a large live oak in Loma Alta Park with our featured poet Kayla Ephros.
Wherever we convene, we know our prose will be crisper and cleaner thanks to Jayne L. Walker, our Senior Editor and literary conscience, a native Pennsylvanian who rode the wave of the Sixties from undergraduate study at Cornell to a Ph.D. at Berkeley and never looked back, amassing scores of aspiring writers indebted to her careful (and caring) eye.
For the lot of us, California is where our aesthetics developed, perspectives shifted, impressions were formed, and a sensibility evolved. All of us at Dispatches will be doing our best to bring you something bold, beautiful, and compelling. There are countless voices out there with stories to tell and images waiting to be discovered. By staying afoot and emphatic, we will seek them out and we will rove with them.
