#MeToo is going too far for some veteran feminists
Shirley Jonas atop the Whitney Museum of American Art on Gansevoort St. Photo by Mary Reinholz
BY MARY REINHOLZ
Longtime West Village resident Shirley Jonas is a woman of a certain age, a former freelance television producer for outfits like Fox Broadcasting. She also spent 15 years working on staff at another national news division.
She now supports #MeToo, the new feminist movement which has spurred a tsunami-like wave of working women calling out bosses for sexual misconduct, many apparently after reading exposes in The New York Times and The New Yorker about alleged assaults by now-disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein.
“It’s about time,” Jonas said during a lunch Saturday at the Bus Stop Cafe on Hudson St.
Accusations of sexual harassment have swiftly ended the careers of famous men in media, government and entertainment, among them decades-long television hosts like Bill O’Reilly, Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose. The latter’s persona as a genial Southern gent interviewing people on CBS and PBS stands in sharp contrast to complaints last year that he greeted female staffers in his bathrobe, made unwanted advances and pranced around naked. Read more
Dunga Brook Diary: Mother’s Day, 2011
The barn
I arrived in Los Angeles in 1986, a small-town, young woman with nothing but the desire to see what I could do in the big, bad city. And I did plenty. Dead-end temp jobs to a career in fashion. Five-figure income to six. Fly-by-night boyfriends to single mother of a son who is now on his way to graduating high school and, very soon, off to college. Read more
STEPPING BACK IN TIME AT RAE’S DINER
Photos by Barry Stein
By Bob Vickrey
You’ve driven by it numerous times on Pico Boulevard, but like most Westsiders, you’ve probably never considered stopping for a meal at this old-fashioned diner.
Rae’s Restaurant has been around since the days when you could actually find a parking spot in Santa Monica. Rae’s turns 60 this year, and is still plugging along for those locals who don’t mind a little grit and authenticity with their meals.
As our monthly lunch group entered the restaurant, we were convinced Rae’s must have been where they shot the movie “Time Stood Still.” The modest menu prices also underscored the apparent time-warp that occurred here in 1958. Read more
Yippies vs. Zippies: New Rubin book reveals ’70s counterculture feud
BY MARY REINHOLZ
The late Yippie leader Jerry Rubin, a onetime West Villager who morphed into an investment banker and died in 1994 after getting struck by a car jaywalking in Westwood, California, comes back to flamboyant afterlife in Pat Thomas’s coffee-table book biography, “Did It!”
Published last year, Thomas’s book offers plenty of photographs of varied gurus and goblins of the counterculture, and sheds light on little-known internecine conflicts among the young politicized hippies who came under scrutiny by federal agents and undercover police for their opposition to the Vietnam War.
The cover of Pat Thomas’s new coffee-table book on Jerry Rubin.
The hefty tome, subtitled, “From Yippie to Yuppie: Jerry Rubin, an American Revolutionary,” recounts how a younger radical group known as the Zippies surfaced before the 1972 Democratic and Republican National Conventions in Miami. The Zippies engaged in fierce feuding with Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, Rubin’s more-famous fellow Yippie prankster and rival. Rubin reportedly regarded the Zippies’ founder, the late Tom Forcade — who ran the Underground Press Syndicate and started High Times magazine — as a provocateur and cop. 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.
