Honey Sees Gatsby in 3-D
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
“It’s like an amusement park!” Cries a visitor to Gatsby’s estate in the fictional town of Little Egg opposite Big Egg where the object of his passion lived on Long Island. In the recent film, the house is magnificent – in the book it’s based on a Hôtel de Ville in Normandy — but the visitor’s exclamation describes Great Gatsby in 3-D itself: the current movie is quite like an amusement park ride, the high point of which is when Myrtle Wilson’s body hurtles against the car windshield.
There are also two on-line video games of the novel.
Fitzgerald based the locations on Cow Neck and Great Neck, two peninsulas of Nassau County that border Manhasset Bay, where he and his wife Zelda lived in 1922. He wrote by day and partied with Hollywood heroes, Broadway stars, and the “staid nobility” by night. He only got through three chapters in a year and a half. Read more
Honey thinks about dragons
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
I bought a bronze turtle good luck totem in Chinatown in San Francisco. The totem is comprised of a large turtle, and on her back is a little turtle. The big turtle has a dragon’s head and delightfully awful dragon feet stepping on coins. The totem will bring me prosperity and prestige.
A placard elsewhere in the store for a dragon said that in China, a dragon symbolizes good fortune. Dragons come from the sky. They make the rules.
Animal signs in Chinese astrology include the dragon along with the rabbit, rat, ox, tiger, snake, horse, goat, monkey, rooster, dog and pig.
If the Chinese animal signs were an IQ test, which one does not belong?
The English word “dragon” derives from Greek δράκων (drákōn), “dragon, serpent of huge size, water-snake.” Dragons feature in European, Australian and Asian myths. The word “dragon” (Hebrew: tannin) is used throughout the Old Testament, and most directly translates as “sea or land monsters.” In the Book of Job, the author describes great creatures likes the mega fauna that used to roam the earth. Read more
Honey Searches The Eyes Of Writers
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
Yesterday I reread the last of the Henning Mankell mystery series about a Swedish police detective Kurt Wallender. Wallender is the same age as his creator: sixty-five now, sixty when he wrote the last book. Wallender is often too fat and doesn’t exercise enough. Mankell is often fat.
This is the third time I read the last Wallender. I picked open the seams of Mankell’s book this time instead of reading for pleasure. Threaded through the novel are Wallender’s attempts to disguise Mankell. Underlying the extensive research into Russian/Swedish and Russian/American espionage is Mankell’s fear of death. The character anticipates living to the age of 75 before he descends into the blackness of Alzheimer’s. He looks forward to taking half a sleeping pill to get through consciousness of death. Read more
Honey walks in Mt. Diablo
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
The soundtrack to Conquered is the sound of individual car engines not the roar of multitudes like the LA soundtrack. All of the engines run well. The owners maintain their cars. Everyone knows how to check her oil including for the first time me. Entire enclaves of mechanics work on side streets off Main in Walnut Creek and someone will always give you a lift home to wait until he returns. In the shopping malls – not real malls but 1950s stores on parking lots – auto supply stores sell fan belts, wipers, polish, transmission fluid and oil.
Just before dusk, an owl hoots. At dusk two dogs at opposite ends of blocks bark, probably at each other because they have nothing else to do in Conquered. If there are intruders, I haven’t seen them but I once saw a homeless man with a shopping cart, and the man who runs an antique store only a mile from me said there are schizophrenics only they don’t come out much. No one sleeps on the sidewalk. No one lives on the canal. It’s fenced and there’s a sign saying the water is public drinking water, which is a horrible thought because the water looks black. At dusk, the sky turns orange now, pierced by the bare branches and twigs of large trees. Read more
Honey goes to Lakeport
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
Let us begin this story with Astarte, who is a dog living in San Felipe, Mexico on the coast of the Sea of Cortez. To get to the story, however, I have to tell you the backstory.
The congregation of the Rainbow Church of Living Light had prayed together the night before I responded to their ad for a lawyer. One of them said to me later that, when you need something, you open yourself to the universe. You receive what you need.
What I need is an income. I am open to the universe.
Two members of the church cut down and helped me haul away most of an old expansive yucca on the northeast corner of my property line. The yucca is a species of evergreen with tough, sword-shaped leaves known colloquially in the Midwest United States as ghosts in the graveyard. Its sharp leaves also drive off money. Read more
Honey visits Los Angeles
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
Honey visits Los Angeles
The cabbie asked me which way I wanted him to go. I asked him to go down Willow Pass Road to the 650 and take the last exit before the bridge because otherwise we’d get trapped in Pacheco and then in Martinez side streets. I didn’t say I once thought I could easily walk to the Best Western from the train station in the rain at Thanksgiving and it took two hours. I was glad to have seen so much of the city but didn’t want to do it again.
We passed full parking lots at the strip malls. I asked why no one was working. He said that’s a good question.
Concord is more conservative than Berkeley and Oakland. The political spectrum moves from Tea Party and Evangelicals all the way to mainstream Republican. The driver said after hesitating that he was glad Obama was getting more time to fix things.
We approached the bridge, and he turned down the road that leads to the train station. Read more
Honey examines old maps and arrives at a mildly surprising conclusion
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
The inquiry began when I wrote Lionel to ask where California photographer Edward Weston (1886-1958) lived.
One of Weston’s pupils, Ansel Adams wrote: “Weston is, in the real sense, one of the few creative artists of today. He has recreated the matter-forms and forces of nature; he has recreated the matter-forms and forces of nature; he has recreated the matter-forms and forces of nature; he has made these forms eloquent of the fundamental unity of the world. His work illuminates man’s inner journey toward perfection of the spirit.”
Honey believes this photo is of the Weston cottage in Atwater. She is convinced or convinced herself he lived on pretty much farm land in 1909 in this cottage, which, for all she knows, may still be there on Perlita, which she believes they called Weston Avenue and that everything about his living in "Tropico" is mistaken and that he lived in Atwater, near Los Feliz Boulevard and the Los Angeles River.
Honey walks in Black Diamond Regional Park
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
The East Bay’s relentless march of urban sprawl — the vast numbers of identical houses with similar lawns now decorated with fake orangey spider webs and fake tombstones, without stores or schools within walking distance, everything a drive somewhere, stoked by the freeway system, financed by taxpayers to enrich developers, climate destroying — is startlingly interrupted by its parks.
The suburban tracts gather at one end up against Mount Diablo State Park. Read more
The Death Of Honey’s Unusual Cousin, Peter
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
Honey van Blossom
I didn’t really meet my cousin Peter until I was 32. I had met him when I was a baby and he was nine. I know I was a baby because my grandfather drove car with running boards. When I had to pee, he slowed down and my grandmother pulled down my pants and made me stand on the running board. She held both my hands. “I hate diapers,” she said.
We camped in a forest and a squirrel sat on Peter’s shoulder.
I slightly met Peter when my aunt drove my mother, my evil little brother and me to Berkeley. The family used to live in Berkeley, at 66 Panorama Terrace, but they sold the house in 1938 when my father got his degree at the university and went to Mexico and camped in state parks. Around 1940, another uncle and his family and my grandparents shared a run-down duplex in Hollywood. That uncle taught at UCLA and was a member of the John Birch Society. My grandfather had a medical office on Kenmore. My father was a copywriter downtown. By the time I was born, they lived in two regular houses next to Forest Lawn. When my pregnant mother was taking a bath in the larger house, a truck came up the almost invisible path behind the house and crashed into the house. Read more
Adventures in the Hinterlands Continue
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
Honey van Blossom
Heat, crickets sawing love songs, hawks, turkey vultures, raccoons, poison oak, the side-blotched lizard, enormous oak trees sculpting a sky the Klein blue at the sun’s zenith and that becomes an improbable violet at nine o’clock in August makes up the first level.
The second level was comprised of the Chupcan (Concord) and the Volvan (Clayton). Both people spoke Bay Miwok.
Fr. Crespi, who created the narrative for the Spanish colonization of Los Angeles in 1769, passed through here in 1771. The Spanish soldiers called the area Monte de Diablo, which the Concord history website mistranslates as “devil’s thicket,” but which means of course the devil’s mountain. The Franciscans brought the Chupcan, and I suppose the Volvan, to the San Jose and San Francisco Missions by 1804.
The third level began in 1828. Don Salvio Pacheco petitioned the Mexican government for lands in the valley and received the “Monte del Diablo” land grant in 1834 to pasture 850 head of horned cattle, a flock of sheep and 30 head of horses. The 17,921-acre grant covered the valley from the Walnut Creek channel east to the hills and generally from the Mt. Diablo foothills north to the Bay. The Pacheco Adobe, center of his landholdings, is on Adobe Street in downtown Concord Read more
Honey Sees Gatsby in 3-D
NOTES FROM ABOVE GROUND
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
“It’s like an amusement park!” Cries a visitor to Gatsby’s estate in the fictional town of Little Egg opposite Big Egg where the object of his passion lived on Long Island. In the recent film, the house is magnificent -- in the book it’s based on a Hôtel de Ville in Normandy -- but the visitor’s exclamation describes Great Gatsby in 3-D itself: the current movie is quite like an amusement park ride, the high point of which is when Myrtle Wilson’s body hurtles against the car windshield.
There are also two on-line video games of the novel.
Fitzgerald based the locations on Cow Neck and Great Neck, two peninsulas of Nassau County that border Manhasset Bay, where he and his wife Zelda lived in 1922. He wrote by day and partied with Hollywood heroes, Broadway stars, and the “staid nobility” by night. He only got through three chapters in a year and a half.
