PEACOCK, a photo by Susan McRae
“Literary L.A.”: The Movie! See the Facebook Page
Check out this Facebook page for the movie “Literary L.A.,” in production now. It’s based on Lionel Rolfe’s book “Literary L.A.”
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Literary-LA/115509071864686?sk=wall
Roots in the Garden of California’s Bohemia Will Be Celebrated Sunday
By LIONEL ROLFE
If walls really could talk, the hand-built stone castle just off the Avenue 43 exit in Highland Park of the Pasadena Freeway would be the mother lode of California bohemian history.
Charles Fletcher Lummis, L.A.’s “renaissance man” from the turn of the last century, began building El Alisal in 1897. Later, he liked to throw soirees on Saturday nights there among the sycamores on the Arroyo Seco. That is the memory people will try to recreate at El Alisal and along the arroyo when artists, poets, musicians and dancers celebrate “Charles Lummis Day” on Sunday, June 5. Read more
Honey Reveals The Sordid Tale Of A Rape In Elysian Park
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
In 1902, Walter Barlow built Barlow Respiratory Hospital on 25 acres of meadowland next to the city-owned Elysian Park on Chavez Ravine Road. He liked the location because the surrounding configuration of hills provided for clean air and the neighboring Elysian Park (created in 1886) seemed to insure against any future development.
In 1886, the City established its Department of Parks and Recreation with three parks: the Plaza downtown, La Plaza Abaja – now Pershing Square – and Elysian Park. Read more
Edendale: Chapter 8
The Eighth Chapter of “Edendale,” Chicken Corner, by Phyl M. Noir
Photograph is by Gary Leonard, courtesy of the Los Angeles Public Library
By Phyl M. Noir
The members of the dissertation committee at Columbia in New York City sat at a long table. Behind them was a tall window. Opaque light came through the window, and Celia imagined there was no outside but only a larger room encapsulating the smaller.
“I have some concerns,” the white woman professor complained. “One of my concerns is that you failed utterly to show the Marxist perspective in public housing activism during the 1930s.” 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.
