Honey Moves To The Suburbs
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
Honey van Blossom
Juan Morales thinks those who were born in the United States are the white people except for those he grew up with. Those who took him to Virginia from Guatemala when he was eighteen are the Mennonite people. Whenever Mennonites come to California, he drops whatever he’s doing and goes to visit with them, and sometimes he already knows them.
When he removes his cap, black hair as thick as brush sticks up, and then he smashes his cap back on his head. Juan siempre esta allegre. Nothing perturbs him. Whatever is wrong or broken, Juan will fix it. He fixed our leaning chimney with fourteen men who made chimneys without scaffolding, when it was our house. He fixed the ancient washer and dryer. He fixed the ceiling when a rat chewed through a hot water pipe. He found my engagement ring in the large descending back yard he had planted for me – this was before my husband took back the ring and my wedding band. He cannot fix my broken heart but he can drive the U-Haul through the Central Valley and fix the car dolly along the road without tools. Read more
Honey Demands Justice
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
Honey van Blossom
Barlow Hospital proposed changes to zoning, height and density regulations on the land at an entrance to Elysian Park that it has owned since 1902.
Walter Jarvis Barlow purchased 25 acres of meadowland next to the city-owned Elysian Park on Chavez Ravine Road for $7,500 from J. B. Lankershim for a tuberculosis hospital. Barlow convinced Lankershim to donate $1,000 back to him, and he received a $1,300 donation from Alfred Solano. The location seemed ideal because the surrounding hills provided for clean air and the neighboring Elysian Park seemed to insure against any future development.
Los Angeles did not adopt land use regulations called zoning until 1909 to 1915. San Francisco had earlier restricted dance halls, livery stables, slaughterhouses, saloons and pool halls. In 1885, New York state limited the height of tenements. In 1909, the United States Supreme Court upheld height restrictions in Boston in Welch v. Swasey 214 U.S. 919. In 1915, Hadacheck v. Sebastian, 239 U.S. 394, the United States Supreme Court upheld a city ban on brickyards. Although lower courts found zoning unconstitutional, the United States Supreme Court decision in Village of Euclid v. Amber Realty, 272 U.S. 365 (1926), has been consistently interpreted to mean that local government’s “police power” allows it regulate land so long as it is in the public interest to do so, although there is the Fifth Amendment/14th amendment prohibition against government taking property without just compensation. Read more
What is to be done, Honey?
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
Honey van Blossom
Solar Living Institute in Hopland
In 1754, Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote, in his Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men that private property — which could not have been imagined before the neolithic revolution – was the beginning of the end of the human race.
“The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said ‘This is mine’ and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or by filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: ‘Beware of listening to this imposter; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.’”
Marx and Engles called the hunter-gatherer form of communism “primitive communism,” which had no hierarchical social class structures or capital accumulation. Looking at the political and economic changes that evolved in response to agriculture, the enclosure acts, the industrial revolution, Marx and Engles concluded that scientific socialism meant the inevitable withering of the state as a product of social revolution. Read more
Honey Explores Echo Park Addresses
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
Lionel Rolfe’s remembrance of meeting Jake Zeitlin touches on Zeitlin’s arrival in Los Angeles from Texas in 1925. http://echopark.patch.com/articles/lionel-rolfe-remembering-echo-park-s-jake-zietlin-part-one.
When Zeitlin first moved to Los Angeles, he sold books at Bullock’s downtown. After that, he sold books from a valise, working from his home. He “found a foothold” in a converted hallway on Hope near Sixth Street. Then he moved to 705-1/2 Sixth Street.
Zeitlin’s first home in Los Angeles was on 1623 Landa. That portion of Landa is at the top of Echo Park Avenue. http://echopark.patch.com/articles/photo-essay-you-cant-get-there-from-here-landa-street#photo-5673050 Read more
Honey Writes About Carey McWilliams
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
I debated with an acquaintance about where a very-well known writer, journalist, editor, activist, historian and lawyer lived in Echo Park, so I researched the question and found that he lived in several places in Echo Park and Silver Lake.
Carey McWilliams ‘ friends included Jake Zeitlin, John Fante, Robinson Jeffers and H.L. Mencken. His first published book was a biography of Ambrose Bierce (1929).
In the 1930s, he worked with the ACLU and the National Lawyers Guild and represented workers, helped organize unions and guilds and served as a trial examiner for the National Labor Relations Board.
His Southern California: An Island on the Land (revised edition 1973) is the seminal book on injustice in Los Angeles and inspired the screenplay for Chinatown. His Factories in the Field (1939) shattered myths about Central Valley agriculture. The book condemns the politics and consequences of large-scale agribusiness. Read more
Honey looks up at The Unsheltered Chicken
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
I walked with friends towards Mac Arthur Park, once called Westlake Park down Alvarado, which was a noisy and dismal experience in glaring and pitiless sunlight.Along the route, I went into what I thought was a Japanese restaurant to buy a bottle of water.
Maybe it is a Japanese restaurant but it is a fast food restaurant with the calorie counts listed above the service counter. Noodles and chicken: 2,100 calories. Add a large fountain soda – 250 calories and a slice of pie – 600 calories. Most of the people inside the restaurant shouted episodically at someone invisible, and they weren’t wearing ear pods. If they eat there twice a day, the calorie load is about 6,000 calories a day. Perhaps this is a Mac Arthur Park anomaly: these particular residents need a lot of calories because they are homeless people and it gets cold at night outdoors. learned that two bean burritos were 2,000 calories. Read more
Honey Travels Back in Time to Belly-Button Hill
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
We live is the era of the Digital Revolution – the age of information. Yet, local, state and federal governmental decision-making may be reaching the apogee of its non-fact-based decision making. Some politicians decry the possibility human beings contribute to global warming. One candidate for the job of President claimed homosexuality leads to bestiality. We have a War Against Drugs that has led to greater real crime, greater addiction, destruction of agricultural land, and a lot of bloodshed. At least a tenth of our people at any time believe Ronald Reagan served in WWII (because he said so). I had a sobering conversation once with a psychologist who conducted group sessions with people who had been abducted by space aliens. One of my freshman students at a state university believed the human race is 200 years old. No one disagreed with her.Because of scientific advances, we can figure out how long people like us — people who have art and music and tell stories and sing songs and know they will die — have been around. We don’t think we know what it was they thought.
We catch glimpses through the very long tunnel of time of what our more distant ancestors thought. Muslims slaughter sheep at Ramadan. You may knock on wood when someone utters something about good fortune. You may cross your fingers for luck. You may have a rabbit’s foot for luck, and your children may hunt for Easter eggs. Some people wear crosses. The rose is a symbol of the Virgin Mary. Read more
Honey Speaks Her Piece On Mao & John Dewey
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
In, “Honey Begins Her Talk on John Dewey,” Boryanabooks, October 1, 2010, I began my essay on John Dewey’s influence in both American and Chinese utopian city design.
In “Honey Talks About Experiments in Urban Design at Llano del Rio,” Boryanabooks, November 1, 2010, I wrote about connections between Llano del Rio, the Jersey Homesteads created under the New Deal and the Maoist planning design of new towns that conserve energy. Urban Planning student Tammy Williams described the New Jersey utopia in “Honey Gives a Guest A Chance to Talk About a New Jersey Utopia,” Boryanabooks, December 30, 2010.)
A Conservative website lists Dewey’s Democracy and Education (1916) among the top ten most harmful books in the world – five points more harmful on their scale than Das Kapital. What’s the most odd thing about right-wing animosity towards John Dewey is that almost no one reads his books anymore. I was able to get Dewey material out of the CSUN library for two months without anyone asking me to return it. There was no long list of readers reserving those books. Read more
Honey on J. Edgar & Clint Eastwood
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
Anything by or involving Clint Eastwood with the exceptions of The Bridges of Madison County (1995) and Space Cowboys (2000) strikes me as odd and unpleasant. His acting in Bridges was odd and fine because he and Meryl Streep transcended a very bad book to make a good movie about love and duty. Space Cowboys was all right because Tommy Lee Jones is in it, and I’ve been in love with Tommy Lee Jones since the Eyes of Laura Mars (1978).
To this day, I loathe his roles in the Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns, which made him famous after Eastwood initially bombed in Hollywood. If I even hear the refrain from the musical score for any of the Man with No Name trilogy, I leave. Every Which Way But Loose (1978) is entirely horrible except for his pet orangutan Clyde.
I didn’t even like Eastwood’s Gran Torino (2008), in spite of the fact it was about an old racist’s spiritual redemption because I had the unsettling feeling that Clint Eastwood had been an old racist himself until he married Dina Ruiz and they got into ersatz environmentalism in Carmel. Read more
He Walked By Night
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
The Los Angeles Police Historical Society presented He Walked By Night at the theater in Barnsdall Park. About thirty people attended. No one who doesn’t browse the LPHS website – and not that many people do – knew about the film.
The detective novel rose in response to the fragmentation of human life after the Industrial Revolution. The detective connects the disparate parts of the city with the thread of his moral code. Raymond Chandler was this one of this city’s truest poets: his Philip Marlowe with his hard-boiled detective office on Hollywood Boulevard is a knight-errant drawn from the King Arthur myth. Film noir grows from the detective novel and plunges into the underside of urban life and its moral chaos, which reflects the disintegration of society during and in the years that closely followed World War II.
Charles Bukowski is this city’s urban poet without the ethical component. His writing is about what happens when everything gets screwed. This city provides a canvas of possibilities for getting fucked, and Bukowski explored as many of those he could. 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.
