As I look out the window at a chilly and foggy San Francisco afternoon, I can still feel the warm Mar Vista sunshine on my face. I look forward to our next stay, to harvesting a meal from the organic garden, and to another walk along “one of the most beautiful beaches in all of North America.”

From the website: Mar Vista Cottages at Anchor Bay is “a project to ensure that a bit of our coastal past is not lost to modern development.”

Mar Vista Cottages at Anchor Bay from Chad Reese on Vimeo.

June 2010 vacation to Mar Vista Cottages at Anchor Bay. Production, post and voiceover by Chad Reese.

In May of this year, I was living in San Diego and helping a group called San Diego Growers determine best-practices for a regional food hub and distribution center. The formal USDA definition of a regional food hub:

A centrally located facility with a business management structure facilitating the aggregation, storage, processing, distribution, and/or marketing of locally/regionally produced food products.

During my time working with San Diego Growers, I was able to conduct surveys and compile economic data on various food hubs around the country.  I turned my economic analysis into a Triple Pundit piece on the developing movement. The story, titled “San Diego Regional Food Hub Cultivates Local Markets,” was picked up by others within the good food movement, the food hub movement and USDA.

For this month’s Triple Pundit contribution, I focused on growing food in urban areas. The 3p article, titled “From Skies to Soil: A Brief Review of Urban Farms,” weaved together many agricultural trends, juxtaposing growing food in multistory buildings with aquaponics, hydroponics and other greenhouse technologies with “the myriad countless dirt lovers and permaculture do-it-yourselfers that thrive on personal relationships with the detritovores that comprise the web of life.”

The premise of the article: Waste = Food. I traced the vertical farming movement from Nancy Jack and John Todd’s groundbreaking 1993 book “From Eco-Cities to Living Machines: Principles of Ecological Design,” to The Plant, a 93,000 square foot salvaged meatpacking facility that is vertical farming’s current embodiment.

By the way, here is the link to all of my Triple Pundit contributions. Let me know what you think. Leave a comment or contact me for more info.

Below is my homage to an era, set to Brokeback’s “Another Routine Day Breaks.” Released on Field Recordings From The Cook County Water Table (1999, Thrill Jockey) and used with permission.

Adding “fowl” to the list, on January 23, 2007, Rafter released “Music for Total Chickens” on the AK label. In honor of the occasion, Rafter and AK sourced the crowd to create a video to one of four of four songs released on the new album. Below is my official offering of the song “Encouragement” for the Rafter Music for Total Chickens Video Contest.

Cathedral is the debut release by a unique new voice of avant-country, San Diego’s Castanets. Backed by the haunting, angelic voice of newcomer Bridgit DeCook, and recorded mostly in a secluded cabin in the northern California woodlands, Cathedral illuminates the dark architecture where faith and doubt clash in an often-ambiguous search for the divine.

The song “You are the Blood” was released by Castanets on the Cathedral album. The song was subsequently covered by Sufjan Stevens, who is also on the AK label. Below is my unofficial video of Castanets’ original version, with a few live show noises left in for texture.