After The Holidays In The City Of The Angels: A Photo By Susan McRae
Click for more details. Christmas and New Year's had just ended, so camerwoman Susan McRae ventured forth on a cold and windy night to find some reality just up the street.
The Truth About On The Road
Gerald Nicosia with actors at Beat Boot camp, Montreal, July 2010. From left, Garrett Hedlund, Nicosia, Sam Riley, Kristen Stewart
Lionel Rolfe
In his latest book, Gerald Nicosia has unlocked the dynamic of Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady, and not a moment too soon. Nicosia, the author of “Memory Babe,” the definitive Jack Kerouac book, was an advisor to the “On The Road” movie due to be premiered in May at the Cannes Film Festival. “On The Road,” published in 1957, was of course, the book that made Kerouac famous. It was inspired by Jack London’s famed book, “The Road,” published in 1907.
Nicosia’s new book is “One And Only: The Untold Story of On The Road.” Read more
Soaring into space
By Phyl van Ammers
The author interviews the artist Ashton Richard Brick and the artist’s mother Olga Justine Brick.
PVA: Tell me, what is the name of this picture?
Abstract 467
ARB: This is No. 467.
PVA: What does it mean? Read more
George Bernard Shaw: Can His Reputation Survive His Dark Side?
By Leslie Evans
It is with a certain sadness that I come to write this. George Bernard Shaw, through his plays, was one of my early heroes. I knew only the good of him then. More recently I have come to learn things, about his political views, that I could have known then but did not, and knowing, would have seen him differently. Learning them prompts me to want to know more about his contradictory character, to decide anew what we should think of him. Read more
Poems By Julia Stein, From Her New Book “What Were They Like.”
Dear Joe
We miss you.
We’re glad you liked the cookies that mama mailed you.
Grandma loves the teapot you sent her from Kuwait.
Please come home soon
for my high school graduation.
My little brother likes your photos.
Please come home from Kuwait. Read more
Edendale: Chapter 15
Climbing Up Fat Hill--Los Angeles Public Library
WEST FAT HILL
By Phyl M. Noir
After the city tore down all the old mansions, the stores and the apartment buildings on Bunker Hill in 1960, Joy moved to a house in Cerro Gordo, which means Fat Hill in Spanish. From her hill she saw Bunker Hill, which was bare for many years, and – after about a decade — the skyscrapers that replaced the bare hill. Read more
KCET “Departures” Features Lionel Rolfe
KCET web columnist Mike Sonksen devotes his January 27, 2012, column to two longtime chroniclers of Los Angeles life: “Lionel Rolfe and Johnny Otis: Literary Icons of L.A.” 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.
