California Dreamin’
Located just 150 miles from Los Angeles, the Salton Sea provides local urbanites with an easy weekend excursion, either through Palm Springs or the exotic Anza Borrego mountains – yet a curious, even disturbing view of its skeletal remains as a metaphor of the 20th century and our feeble attempts to conquer the desert for recreational purposes. To their credit, the communities surrounding the inland sea remain in their own way vibrant, if not somewhat twisted by both the environment and life – but always hopeful, it seems… not unlike their distant neighbors in Hollywood.
Rastamaica
Look deep into the eyes of a “Rasta man” and you can see all the way into the past, to the dusty plateaus of Abyssinia – to the 1930s, and to the crowning of an emperor, Haile Selassie. It’s here, in Ethiopia, that the Rastafarian’s story begins. The coronation fulfilled a prophecy of Selassie as the chosen redeemer, launching a movement that would spawn an entire religion based on 21 tenets of truth – chief of which was a belief that God and man are one and the same.