A NATIVE SON’S LONG VIGIL FOR HIS HOMETOWN
By Bob Vickrey
In recent years, we’ve watched natural disasters unfold in cities across the country that created unparalleled misery and hardships for its citizens that forever altered lives. Hurricane Katrina and super-storm Sandy remain indelible in our memories.
However, in watching the hurricane-spawned disaster play out in Houston, the circumstances were quite different. This was my hometown, my city, and my people. This time it was personal.
I left Houston more than 40 years ago, but this past week I found out that my heart still belonged to my beloved hometown and its people there. From my living room in Southern California, I watched television images of the inconceivable, never-ending rainfall that inundated my city. Read more
“Hollywood in Havana” at Pasadena Museum of California Art exhibits Spanish-language posters promoting US films as Cuban art
Posted by Mary Reinholz | Aug 17, 2017, from the Pasadena Weekly
Starting Sunday, Aug. 20, the Pasadena Museum of California Art presents the exhibition “Hollywood in Havana: Five Decades of Cuban Posters Promoting U.S. Films,” showcasing approximately 40 posters advertising iconic movies — most from the capitalist heart of La La Land that were produced from 1960 through 2012. The posters were created by Cuban artists trained at a free, government-sponsored studio in the communist paradise. How the American films got past the US trade embargo against Cuba remains unclear.
Among the posters are bold silkscreen prints publicizing such Hollywood blockbusters as “The Silence of the Lambs” with Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster, which won five Academy Awards; and “Schindler’s List” directed by Steven Spielberg, which garnered seven Oscars. A few of the posters boost Cuban films, such as a documentary on Marilyn Monroe. Read more
Important Setback for Homeless Housing
Architect’s rendering of proposed Lorena Plaza, 3407 E. 1st Street, Boyle Heights
Leslie Evans
The Los Angeles City Council’s Planning and Land Use Committee (PLUM) on August 16 rejected a plan from the highly regarded A Community of Friends (ACOF) to build a 49-unit affordable income apartment house in Boyle Heights, half of whose tenants would be mentally ill homeless.
The contested property, a one-acre empty lot at 3407 E. First Street at the corner of Lorena Street in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of East Los Angeles, is a one-acre empty lot owned by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. To the west is the Evergreen Cemetery. To the east is El Mercado, a combined market, restaurant, nightclub, and craft store. Read more
ESCAPING THE RAT PACK AT EL COYOTE
By Bob Vickrey
It seems that just about every legendary Los Angles restaurant our monthly lunch club has visited in the last couple of years, staff members invariably claim Frank Sinatra and his “Rat Pack” once hung out there.
So, fearing an uprising from our readership about overworking the “Rat Pack” theme, I decided to call ahead to our next destination and make sure Sinatra and his entourage had never held target practice in the back room with their plate of chicken enchiladas. When the host of El Coyote failed to understand my “Rat Pack” reference, I realized he had perhaps confused me with the city health inspector. Nevertheless, I knew we had found our spot for August. Read more
The Affordable Housing Crisis Won’t Be Over Soon
Mija Town Homes, 4501 S. Figueroa, Los Angeles 90037. One of the all-too-few affordable housing complexes in Los Angeles.
Leslie Evans
A daunting complex of causes stands behind Los Angeles’ crisis-level lack of affordable housing. Too few houses and too expensive ones, along with very low wages, are the single biggest causes of the city’s huge homeless population. According to Professor Dennis P. Culhane, an authority on homelessness at the University of Pennsylvania, “It’s not personal vulnerabilities of drug use or illness driving homelessness. It’s a lack of access to housing. If there were lots of available housing, all of these vulnerabilities would be hidden.” (8-2-2017 LA Times) 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.
