Soundings

In 1519, two civilizations with absolutely no knowledge of each other's existence collided in the Valley of Mexico. What followed was eighty days of siege, the fall of the greatest city in the Americas, and the event that historian Buddy Levy calls the birth of modern history.

Buddy Levy is the author of Conquistador: Hernán Cortés, King Montezuma, and the Last Stand of the Aztecs — narrative history that reads with the pace and tension of a thriller. In this episode, we trace the full arc of the story: from Cortés's unlikely origins as a Spanish nobody to the audacious engineering feat that decided the war, from Montezuma's fatal miscalculation to the extraordinary and still-debated role of Malinche.

CHAPTERS

00:00 — Introduction
01:21 — Who was Hernán Cortés?
03:46 — The making of a conquistador
04:57 — Why Europeans arrived in Mesoamerica — and not the other way around
05:53 — Who was Montezuma?
06:53 — Human sacrifice, cosmology, and the Aztec worldview
08:13 — Two empires, mirror images of each other
09:00 — Montezuma's mounting crises
10:08 — Malinche: interpreter, strategist, survivor
12:22 — Cortés finds his opening
13:22 — The march toward Tenochtitlán
15:13 — The city that stunned the Spanish
16:29 — Cortes and Montezuma: Roommates
18:42 — The Quetzalcoatl question
20:34 — Massacre, retreat, and La Noche Triste
22:31 — The brigantines: history's most audacious engineering feat
24:05 — The siege begins
25:05 — Guns, germs, and steel
26:15 — The morning after
27:17 — What became of Cortés — and what happened to his wife
28:50 — What you learn retracing Cortés's route
31:08 — Writing the conquest without editorializing
33:12 — The questions that still linger
34:46 — The scholarship behind Conquistador

About Soundings

Buddy Levy's website: buddylevy.com

Soundings is produced and hosted by Aaron McKenzie. More info at aaronmckenzie.net/soundings

Soundings is produced in partnership with San Pedro Today magazine: sanpedrotoday.com

In 1963, a 22-year-old art student was paid $150 to design a poster for a low-budget surf documentary nobody expected much from. That poster — for The Endless Summer — became one of the most reproduced images in American design history, and it launched a career that would put John Van Hamersveld behind a desk at Capitol Records within two years, doing album covers for the Beatles and dozens of the biggest artists of the era.

A few years after that, the Rolling Stones asked him to design the cover for Exile on Main St. The industry called it atrocious. It sold out in four months, and a decade later, Johnny Rotten told Van Hamersveld directly that seeing that cover helped define how the Sex Pistols and the whole punk movement decided to look.

Van Hamersveld is 85 now. He's still working, still drawing every wave by hand before it ever touches a screen. But underneath the career highlights — The Beatles, the Stones, Jimmy Z, a computer handed to him personally by Steve Jobs — is something closer to parenthood. An image starts as something private, made by hand, half-understood even by the person making it. Then it leaves, going out into a world built to package it, sell it, misread it, sometimes reject it outright. It grows up without him: becomes part of how millions of strangers picture a decade, a genre, a feeling they never asked his permission to attach to it. And every so often, decades later, it comes home, not as his anymore, but as something he gets to stand next to and watch live its own life. 

This conversation follows that cycle through six decades of his work: a poster, an album cover, a logo, a mural, and the six generations of strangers he's watched pass in front of one image, each of them meeting it as if for the first time.

Chapters

00:00 — Cold open

01:07 — From the Maryland woods to the California surf: Phil Becker, Art Center, and the Bauhaus collision

03:19 — Rick Griffin, a bedroom magazine, and an accidental rivalry

04:29 — Designing The Endless Summer poster

06:15 — The poster that opened the door to Capitol Records

07:29 — Inside the machine by day, running a psychedlic concert series by night

09:12 — Pinnacle, a 1968 Hendrix poster, and the road to the Rolling Stones

10:13 — Designing Exile on Main St. — and the Johnny Rotten connection

12:33 — When the album cover died: cassettes, MTV, and starting over

15:18 — Malibu, Jimmy Z, and finding a new visual language

17:10 — Steve Jobs, the Apple Lisa, and what stays analog

19:07 — Six generations at a table: what the work means now

____

"Soundings" is produced in partnership with San Pedro Today magazine. 

Find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

More info at aaronmckenzie.net/soundings

Visit John Van Hamersveld's website at post-future.com

More than a third of everything imported into the United States passes through two ports that sit side by side in Southern California. Most people who live nearby have never given the place a second thought. That invisibility, it turns out, is the point.

Bill Sharpsteen is a journalist and the author of The Docks, the definitive human portrait of America's busiest port complex. He spent years trying to get inside a world that didn't want him there: stonewalled by unions, turned away by terminal operators, and learning to find the side door every time. What he found was not a machine, but a collection of people, each one sovereign over a small, irreplaceable piece of something too large for any of them to fully see.

In this conversation, Sharpsteen walks us through what actually happens when a container ship arrives from Asia and works its way into berth. He talks about the longshoremen — the self-described "lords of the dock" — whose institutional memory stretches back to the bloodshed of the 1930s and who wield negotiating tactics they officially deny ever using. He talks about the port pilots who guide 1,200-foot vessels through a channel barely wider than the ship itself. And he reflects, fifteen years after publication, on which characters and jobs from his reporting have never really left him.

The Docks is available wherever you get your books.

Chapters

00:00 — Cold open

01:54 — How a discrimination lawsuit became a book about global trade

05:27 — A sensory portrait of the port: what it looks, sounds, and feels like inside

12:28 — Secretive and press-phobic: why the port didn't want to be written about

17:42 — How a ship gets into LA Harbor: a step-by-step breakdown

24:06 — The fragmentation of expertise: why no one person understands the whole port

25:13 — Port pilots: the stalled engine, the single tug, and why the pay is justified

28:49 — Fifteen years on: which characters still stand out

33:00 — The port as beating heart: why closing it for two weeks would be catastrophic

35:00 — Lords of the dock: longshoremen before and after the container

37:17 — The slowdown: the tactic that officially never happened

41:17 — How the book changed Sharpsteen's understanding of global trade

42:34 — What still remains messy — and whether there's cause for optimism

About Soundings

Soundings is hosted by Aaron McKenzie and produced in partnership with San Pedro Today magazine. More info at aaronmckenzie.net/soundings

Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.

This is not a story about a car.

It happens to involve a car – the Vector W8 Twin-Turbo, one of the most extraordinary machines ever built on American soil – but the car is almost beside the point.

Jerry Wiegert was a designer from the South Bay of Los Angeles who spent fifty years trying to will something impossible into existence through sheer force of personality. He landed the Vector on the cover of Motor Trend before it had an engine. He persuaded Saudi royals and tennis champions to write checks for cars that barely existed. He barricaded himself inside his own factory rather than hand it over to the people who'd taken it from him. And when it was all over — the company gone, the factory stripped — he announced a new car. Then another.

Preston Lerner is a veteran automotive journalist and longtime contributor to Hagerty magazine. In 2019, he drove out to a house in San Pedro and sat down with Wiegert two years before Wiegert died. What he found was a man still authoring his own legend in real time, still certain the story wasn't over.

Read Preston Lerner's original Hagerty profile here:
https://www.hagerty.com/media/magazine-features/hagerty-magazine/jerry-wiegert-and-the-vector-supercar/

More about Soundings: https://www.aaronmckenzie.net/soundings

Soundings is produced in partnership with San Pedro Today magazine: https://sanpedrotoday.com/

CHAPTERS

00:00 — Cold open
01:23 — The teal Vector on a San Pedro street
02:22 — Lerner reads the opening of his Hagerty profile
03:20 — Man or car: which came first?
04:12 — Arriving at Wiegert's house: the man in person
06:24 — What to listen for when a subject arrives preloaded with mythology
08:14 — The Malaise Era: why the Vector mattered
09:39 — The Motor Trend cover of 1972: a fiberglass shell and a big idea
12:00 — What it actually takes to build a car from scratch
13:00 — "It was going to be superior to Ferrari, Lamborghini, and Porsche. Fact."
14:56 — The buyers: Malcolm Forbes, Saudi royals, and Andre Agassi
18:30 — Wiegert in the tradition of Tucker, DeLorean, and Lamborghini
21:45 — The Indonesians: Lerner reads the most extraordinary passage
24:12 — How it all collapsed: the board, the armed guards, the barricade
26:37 — How do you verify a story this outlandish?
28:14 — Would we be asking these questions if the Vector had succeeded?
30:39 — The aftermath: the M12, the court victory, and thirty years of "not yet"
33:00 — Did Lerner ever drive a Vector?
35:00 — The car's legacy: what it's worth now, and what it meant then
39:00 — "Everybody deserves a second chance. I haven't had mine yet."
41:12 — How to profile someone without getting swept up in their myth
43:32 — Raging Bull, Roger Ebert, and what this story is really about
44:06 — If Jerry were listening to this conversation today

Joan Didion was the writer who made modern California matter to American literature. But over the last twenty years, she also became something else: an icon. The sunglasses, the Corvette, the memes. What if that iconography is exactly what's getting in the way of understanding how good she actually was?

Evelyn McDonnell is a journalism professor at Loyola Marymount University and the author of The World According to Joan Didion. Her book retraces Didion's footsteps: from Sacramento to New York to a gatehouse on Portuguese Bend, just up the coast from where McDonnell and host Aaron McKenzie both live in San Pedro.

Recording from that same stretch of Southern California coastline, McKenzie talks with McDonnell about Didion's method as a reporter — disappearing into the background, listening instead of interrogating — her complicated reckoning with the California pioneer mythology she was born into, and what it means to strip away "the Cult of St. Joan" to find the disciplined, unsentimental worker underneath.

Chapters:
00:00 — Intro
01:28 — Evelyn's Joan Didion origin story
03:20 — Who was Joan Didion?
05:00 — The Portuguese Bend gatehouse
06:16 — Retracing Didion's footsteps, place by place
09:27 — What you learn by standing where she stood
12:32 — How Didion made California literary territory
14:45 — Absorption and alienation
15:25 — Didion's reckoning with the pioneer myth
17:38 — Portuguese Bend, the imagined landslide, and The Year of Magical Thinking
18:44 — The edge of the continent
21:26 — Separating the writer from the icon
24:20 — Julian Wasser and the art of disappearing
27:57 — The girl in Haight-Ashbury, and the piece that made Didion's name
30:04 — The Central Park Jogger case, revisited
30:46 — How does Didion's writing outlast its moment?
33:12 — Where to start if you've never read Didion
35:53 — The moment Didion surprised her
36:44 — December 23rd, 2021
37:14 — What Evelyn learned about herself while writing this book

"The World According to Joan Didion" is available wherever books are sold.

Soundings is produced in partnership with San Pedro Today magazine. More info at aaronmckenzie.net/soundings

Rose George on Every Last Fish: A Deep Dive Into Everything They Do for Us and We Do to Them

For every ten tuna that once swam in the ocean, there is now one. One in five fish is caught illegally. And the fish on your plate may not even be what the label says it is.

Rose George is a British journalist who has spent her career making the invisible visible: first sewage, then the global shipping industry, and now fish. Her new book, Every Last Fish, is a deep-dive into the systems, economics, and human stories behind the global fishing industry – and what the collapse of fish populations means for the ocean, for the people who work it, and for everyone who eats from it.

Recording from San Pedro, California — once the largest commercial fishing port in the United States, now the busiest container port in the Western Hemisphere — host Aaron McKenzie talks with George about the moment the industry crossed a threshold it may not be able to walk back from, the strange economics of a supply chain that sends American fish abroad while importing 90% of what Americans eat, and why she thinks we should all be drinking bivalve cocktails.

Chapters:

00:00 — Intro
01:21 — Welcome & San Pedro context
01:58 — How Rose came to write about fishing
04:22 — The collapse of fish populations: when did we cross the threshold?
06:19 — The fishing industry is not a monolith
08:28 — Sushi, China, and the pressure of the "Big Five" species
11:15 — The illusion of plenty: why 90% of American seafood is imported
14:57 — Mislabeling and the opacity of the global supply chain
16:26 — If you can't trust the label, how do you act on your values?
18:04 — Subsidies, systemic change, and the WTO
21:04 — Tragedy of the commons: who owns the ocean?
24:39 — What World War II taught us about fish recovery
25:10 — Reporting from the boats: seasickness, Captain Tom, and a rough day at sea
28:23 — The best case for bottom trawling, and why Rose isn't buying it
30:32 — "I've never met a fisherman who doesn't love it"
32:05 — Aquaculture, salmon farming, and a three-meter statue of a sea louse
35:41 — What would a truly honest seafood system look like?
36:57 — Fisheries observers: the most dangerous job you've never heard of
38:45 — Causes for optimism
41:45 — What to see when you walk along a harbor

Every Last Fish is available wherever books are sold.

Soundings is produced in partnership with San Pedro Today magazine. Find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

More info at aaronmckenzie.net/soundings.

Early LA punk rock wasn't what you think it was. It wasn't just alienation, safety pins, and three-chord aggression. And it didn't take its cues from London or New York. It was something older — blues, country, rockabilly, Chicano folk music, rhythm and blues — filtered through a city that the rest of the country had written off as shallow.

Tom DeSavia spent years convincing his friend John Doe of X to help set the record straight. The result was two books — Under the Big Black Sun and More Fun in the New World — oral histories told by the people who were actually in the room: Jane Weidlin of the Go-Go's, Dave Alvin of the Blasters, Mike Watt, Allison Anders, Mike Ness, and dozens of others.

In this conversation we cover how a Tower Records in-store appearance accidentally reunited X for the first time in over a decade; why the Go-Go's were punk rock even after the scene decided they weren’t; what happened when hardcore arrived from Orange County and the South Bay; and why the Minutemen's Double Nickels on the Dime is still being discovered by teenagers half a century later.

The scene produced X, Los Lobos, the Blasters, Black Flag, Fishbone, the Go-Go's, the Minutemen, and Dwight Yoakam…and yet it remained a footnote for decades. This is the story of why, and why it matters.

Under the Big Black Sun and More Fun in the New World are available wherever books are sold.

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In 1956, a trucker named Malcolm McLean launched a ship with fifty-eight containers aboard. He was trying to solve a logistics problem. Instead, he accidentally changed the world

Economist Marc Levinson spent a decade researching containerization and discovered what McLean couldn't see: this simple metal box rewired labor, reshaped cities, enabled globalization, and helped pull billions of people out of poverty. Levinson's decade-long investigation reveals what happens when one innovation has consequences nobody can predict. This episode is about invisibility, unintended consequences, and why the most important forces in our world are often the ones we never notice.

ABOUT MARC LEVINSON:

Marc Levinson is an economist whose research into global trade and containerization transformed how we understand the modern economy. His book "The Box" is the definitive account of how this "tin can" became one of the 20th century's most important inventions.

Subscribe to "Soundings" for more conversations about global systems, commerce, and history through the lens of San Pedro and the Port of Los Angeles.

Howard Sounes: The Real Charles Bukowski vs. the Myth | "Soundings"

Episode Overview

What happens when a writer's greatest creation is himself? In the debut episode of Soundings, Aaron McKenzie sits down in San Pedro with British biographer Howard Sounes to separate the real Charles Bukowski from his famous literary alter ego, Henry Chinaski. Sounes discusses tracking down public records, walking L.A.'s streets, and interviewing the actual people Bukowski turned into characters to reveal the vulnerable, disciplined man behind the "outcast drunk" mythology.

A Few Topics We Discuss…

• The Myth vs. Reality: How Bukowski embellished his past (falsely claiming, for instance, that he was born a bastard) and how his post office years were far more calculated than his chaotic persona suggested.

• A Brutal Childhood: A look at Bukowski's early L.A. life, an abusive father, and a lonely childhood shaped his identity as an outsider.

• The Blue-Collar Writer: Why his focus on the drudgery of low-wage factory and postal work creates a unique literary voice for ordinary people.

• Late-Stage Fame in San Pedro: The turning point when publisher John Martin subsidized his exit from the post office, leading to global success, late-career poetry, and Hollywood deals like Barfly.

• The Perspective of the Exes: Why interviewing Bukowski's former girlfriends provided the most profound, emotionally honest, and funny insights into his character.
• Alcohol and "Don't Try": A candid look at his relationship with drinking, writing sober at the end of his life, and the meaning behind his boxing-inspired epitaph.
• A Life-Changing Biography: Sounes reflects on the intense personal stakes of quitting his stable newspaper job to finish this book.

About The Guest

Howard Sounes is a veteran British journalist and author of over a dozen books. His definitive biography, Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life, remains a deeply researched look into a polarizing literary icon.

About the Show

Produced in partnership with San Pedro Today magazine, Soundings uses this little corner of Los Angeles as a lens to explore global commerce, culture, art, and history. Each episode features long-form conversations with writers, thinkers, and artists who have something to teach us about how the world works.

San Pedro (home to the Port of Los Angeles and one of the world's busiest harbors) is a place where the local and the global collide. Every container ship that leaves tells a story of global supply chains. Every street corner holds a history of labor, immigration, and culture. Every person who lives here is connected to something larger.

Soundings takes this insight as its ethos: every place is a crossroads. Every person carries a piece of the larger world within them. By starting in San Pedro and looking outward, we discover truths about economics, art, identity, and human survival that resonate far beyond our city limits.

Soundings is hosted and produced by Aaron McKenzie.

Subscribe: Available on all major podcast platforms.