What does a soccer team have to do with San Diego's arts scene? Quite a lot, as it turns out. When San Diego FC launched, the club could have spent its marketing budget on billboards, bus wraps, and digital ads. Instead, it went into neighborhoods, found local artists and creatives, and started building the club's identity with them. Through its Playmakers initiative, artists have designed limited-edition merchandise, had their work featured on the stadium's jumbotron, and found themselves in front of thousands of fans—and, in some cases, a national TV audience.

For this special edition of the podcast, created alongside San Diego Magazine's September arts and culture issue, host Troy Johnson talks with Sebastián Morúa, SDFC's Senior Vice President of Brand & Innovation, and longtime San Diego native and creative Tony Martinez of Barrio Junto. The conversation gets into why a professional soccer club would make local art part of its business, how Martinez's decades in San Diego's creative community helped shape Playmakers, and the club's early efforts to connect with artists across the county through its Chrome Ball Tour and neighborhood events. The goal, they explain, isn't simply to put a local artist on a T-shirt. It's to let the people who already understand San Diego help define what the new club looks and feels like.

The conversation also gets into the less glamorous—but important—side of supporting artists: money. They talk about how Playmakers pays local creatives, the value of the platform SDFC provides, and what it means to build an ongoing relationship between a professional sports club and the artists who help shape its identity. They also discuss the club's growing music initiative, which will bring local musicians into the fold, and the many ways artists have already contributed to SDFC through merchandise, murals, Parks & Pitches projects, and more. Ultimately, it's a conversation about soccer, art, community, and what can happen when a major sports franchise gives the people already making culture in San Diego a bigger platform.

This summary was provided to you by AI. To hear from the humans, listen to the podcast wherever you get your podcasts.

San Diego has beaches, sunshine, biotech, and enough stucco to wallpaper a small country. But what actually gives a city its personality? The artists, musicians, designers, dancers, galleries, theaters, museums, and all the other creative people making things that give a place its identity. That's the question at the center of this special edition of the podcast, recorded as part of San Diego Magazine's September arts and culture issue, created in collaboration with the Art + Design District and San Diego FC Playmakers.

Host Troy Johnson sits down with Jonathon Glus, former director of the City of San Diego's Department of Cultural Affairs; and Grant Oliphant, president and CEO of the Prebys Foundation. Glus now serves as the Prebys Foundation's senior art & design fellow in residence at the Downtown San Diego Partnership, where he's helping develop the emerging Art + Design District around the Civic Center. Together, Glus and Oliphant bring two sides of the conversation to the table: what it takes to build the physical and cultural infrastructure for a creative city, and what role philanthropy, government, businesses, and artists themselves play in making that happen.

The conversation gets into San Diego's recent fight over arts funding, the city's cultural ecosystem, and why supporting artists means more than simply writing checks. They talk about the Art + Design District's roots in city planning work dating back to 2016, the cultural institutions already clustered around the Civic Center, and examples from cities like Miami and Austin that used major cultural initiatives to help shape their identities.

And, naturally, Troy gets nostalgic about San Diego's old jazz scene, including his best friend's dad's club, The Crossroads, and the unfortunate fate of a very valuable vinyl collection.

This summary was provided to you by AI. To hear from the humans, listen to this episode wherever you get your podcasts.

Fifteen years ago, Oceanside's food scene looked pretty different. Then Flying Pig Pub & Kitchen opened in a not-exactly-prime location in South Oceanside and started serving Southern-influenced food with pork chops, red beans and rice, pork belly, and the kind of cooking that made people wonder why they'd driven past the place so many times.

On this week's Happy Half Hour, host Troy Johnson talks with Flying Pig owners Aaron and Roddy Browning about the restaurant's unlikely beginnings and the evolution of Oceanside's food scene around it. The couple opened the restaurant in 2011 with limited resources and, as they tell it, maxed-out credit cards and a space that happened to have the restaurant essentials they needed: a hood system, grease interceptor, and room for some seats. They also built the restaurant's distinctive look from the kinds of Craigslist, flea-market, and salvage-yard finds that eventually gave the Pig its eclectic, lived-in personality.

The conversation gets into what has kept the Flying Pig going all these years: Southern cooking rooted in memory and tradition, but filtered through California's produce and coastal sensibility. They talk about the restaurant's signature pork chop—which is still made from the same recipe—as well as pork belly, house-made pastas, fried chicken, red beans and rice, and banana pudding. Troy also makes the case that the Pig helped kick off a new generation of food in Oceanside, a city whose restaurant scene has changed dramatically since the Brownings first opened their doors. And after revisiting the restaurant himself, he says it's still as good as he remembered.

This summary was provided to you by AI. To hear from the humans, listen to Happy Half Hour wherever you get your podcasts.