Pain in Glendale
Lionel with Tiffany Austin, social worker at the hospital
By Lionel Rolfe
The morning I couldn’t get out of bed because my back went out, I had to be carried down a small elevator to Good Sam Hospital by four members of a Los Angeles Fire Department crew. They listened to my hysterical screaming where I yelled at them to keep me vertical. I was eventually dumped into a bed to save my back—and despite my doctor’s warning they gave me some strong morphine, which also helped. Read more
Dunga Brook Diary: Big Swinging Balls
The horse, of course
by Vicki Whicker
I bought my house sight unseen from a post on Facebook. I am probably going to say that more than once in this monthly column. Maybe once each month. I don’t think it can be stressed enough. Sight unseen!
I don’t need a lot of information. When something comes at me, I either say yes or no, there is no weighing of the options—I’m not calling my therapist, no friends are consulted, certainly not parents (long gone by this time, anyhow), my ex and his wife aren’t in on it, I might have mentioned it to my son and my best friends but I wasn’t looking for input. It’s just me, myself and I. Read more
Remembering Former Colleague Digby Diehl: Journalist, Author, Literary critic and “ghost whisperer” to Natalie Cole, Patti LuPone, Dan Rather and Esther Williams-for starters
Digby Diehl with Patti LuPone at NYC launch party for her memoir circa 2010 (Getty Images)
By Mary Reinholz
The late journalist Digby Diehl, a longtime Pasadena resident, was an author, co-author and a literary critic — a big, bearded guy who sometimes gave the impression that life for him was a day at the beach. I first got to know him nearly 50 years ago when he assigned me books to review for Coast, a fine arts guide, and later for the Los Angeles Times. Then I moved to New York. We had one lunch in Greenwich Village when I was working for Women’s Wear Daily. He was running a prestigious publishing firm. Read more
Ron Galperin’s Report on Homeless Camps
Leslie Evans
What is L.A. doing with the camps while waiting for housing and shelters to be built?
A read through the 46 dense pages on homeless camps released September 27 by City Controller Ron Galperin reveals a maze of overlapping jurisdictions that have difficulty communicating with each other, laws that are sometimes ambiguous, often not enforced, legal restrictions, and stalled plans to expand storage facilities for homeless belongings, still limited after years of discussion to a single building in Skid Row.
That doesn’t mean that nothing is being done. There is clearly an aggressive effort to clean up street camps. The devil, as usual, is in the details. Read more
A Glimpse Of Dust Unto Shadow
[Seven years ago first-time author Linda LaRoche gained entry into her genealogy by documents she found through The Church of Latter Day Saints. She had been told her family’s roots were in Mexico. But records indicated she descended from Criollos (Spaniards living in Mexico that kept their blood lines pure). Amazed by her findings she began to ask questions. Her mother, who had been an intensely private woman had not shared her family history other than their migration from a comfortable life in Northern California to Santa Clara, a village outside of Guadalajara, Jalisco. But approaching her twilight years, her voice grew steady and louder and her memories were vivid. LaRoche, documented as if she had become a trustee, a conduit to honor the past. She heard about violence, injustice, a lack of humanity and disrespect for life that brought tears to her eyes. The resulting portrait is illustrated in Dust Unto Shadow, a sensitive collection of short stories told in her mother’s voice and written with Hispanic folklore chronicling the quest in living for love.
Copies are available at: http://www.lindalaroche.com/resume_linda_laroche.htm ]
We fought a lot in Santa Clara. Not just to fend off enemies but to fit in. Maybe because there was little to do or maybe it was because that’s what we had learned by watching my father take out his rage on my mother, and as kids we took it out on each other, or maybe it was because life was hard and it made people hard or maybe it was because we were cramped, and it was dirty but whatever the reason it seemed that everyone had to fight. Read more
A Bank Violates Its Trust
Some months back I sent out a newsletter about one of my ongoing cases. My client was another personal injury lawyer, and his bank that helped itself to money in his attorney-client trust account to cover itself for money it (mistakenly) claimed that my client owed the bank in his personal capacity. It was an interesting case then, and it became a more interesting case once I had the opportunity to take the deposition of a couple of the bank’s employees who had been involved in the decision to invade my client’s attorney-client trust account to cover what even the bank knew was, at best, a personal debt. The case finally settled, but on terms that must remain confidential. I am, however, at liberty, to discuss the facts of the case, which are interesting even for the interesting times in which we live.
Honey at the Piper Tech
NOTES FROM ABOVE GROUND
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste)
Behind Union Station and across from the Denny’s stands the C. Erwin Piper Technical Center. C. Erwin Piper died at the age of 84 in 1992. He had been the head of the City’s Public Works Department. I have sat waiting for the bus at the back of Union Station and saw the large building many times and did not notice it, which either sets the bar higher for my obliviousness or says something about the building’s architecture.
The Los Angeles Police Technical Investigation Division is in Piper Tech. The Elections Bureau is in there. A room with boxes no one will let you into is there. There’s a helipad. City Archivist Michael Holland refers to Piper Tech as the city’s junk drawer. 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.
