Honey Talks About Ina Coolbrith
By Honey van Blossom
My older grandson Ethan always wants to go to Chinatown in San Francisco. I insist we take a long time to get to Chinatown because, once there, my interest in our adventure wanes.
In Chinatown stores, he examines cellophane wrapped packages of exploding cigars, Mao’s Little Red Book, mechanical masturbating orangutans, caps that blow up in the street, porcelain ash trays formed in the shape of copulating couples, and playing cards with images of naked women. None of the store clerks will sell him any of these things although I can’t imagine who would want these items except for eleven-year-old boys. Once, he came away with a midnight blue silk smoking jacket. I gave in and got him a battery-operated cigar to go with the jacket “but that was in exchange for his not asking me how many times in my life I had had sex” and he walked insouciantly down Grant Avenue in his smoking jacket smoking his pretend cigar. Read more
The Mystic Pull Of Israel Is Very, Very Real – Honest
By LIONEL ROLFE
At a point in the mid-seventies, when some nefarious anti-Semitism was rearing its ugly head in the military – I forgot exactly what it was – I took my first trip to Israel. No doubt it had something to do with the oil companies. The trip raised the age old questions: What exactly is a Jew, anyway, and do his first loyalties lie with Israel?
Do all Jews share the same view of themselves and of the larger world? The anti-Semites, of course, see us as a monolithic group, and so do some Jews. But I think they are wrong – a judgment buttressed during my first visit to Israel some 40 years ago. Read more
Honey on the road to San Francisco with some of the Spanish explorers
NOTES FROM ABOVE GROUND
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste)
"Cities of the Golden Gate," Raymond Dabb Yelland, 1893. Most illustrations can be enlarged by clicking on them.
Prologue to the story of the Spanish exploration and settlement of California
Seasonal migrations of animals now extinct in California probably created the roads the native people used before the Spanish land exploration of California. “The heyday of giant mammals in North America was the middle and late Pleistocene, an epoch that started 2.6 million years ago and ended 11,700 years ago, around the time the Earth was thawing out from the Ice Age. The gigantic beasts, which migrated from Asia across a now-vanished land bridge called Beringia, are known as Rancholabrean megafauna, after the famous La Brea tar pits in downtown Los Angeles — the graveyard of thousands of saber-toothed tigers, giant bison and other extinct animals.”[1]
The seasonal migrations of the large mammals may have created the substantial roads used by the indigenous people after their arrival.[2]
Paul S. Martin and Richard G. Klein argue that Paleoindian over-hunting led to the extinction of the megafauna.[3] Others argue that climate change was responsible for mammoth and mastodon extinctions. As the last major glaciation ended around 12,000 years ago, climate warmed too quickly for the megafauna to adapt.
