Dunga Brook Diary: April Fools
Vicki Whicker
Central New York, Mother’s Day, 2011.
We’re walking across the field from Jim’s farmhouse to my farmhouse. I’ve got butterflies. I’m about to ditch LA for this.
I’m about to pull a geographic— Palisades cottage to 1820s farmhouse. From the trendy West to the forgotten Northeast. From bone-dry to lush. Hip to hillbilly. Known to unknown. Read more
Mrs. Brown and the Walk Uptown
Ralls County Courthouse, New London, Missouri
Baylis Glascock
Mrs. Brown was my seventh-grade teacher, a single mother of two, who dressed in the straight skirts of the day with matching jackets. It was 1953. She occasionally spoke of her late husband. He had died unexpectedly of a heart attack. She drove a ’49 Ford, lived in Hannibal, and drove the ten miles to New London and back each day, bringing the two children with her. While having little occasion to discuss politics in the classroom, she did make known, more than once during the year, her profound dislike of Harry S. Truman for having fired General MacArthur, whom she regarded as a true American hero and patriot. I had no opinion about MacArthur, but my father, having taken the train to Washington, D.C., for Truman’s inauguration, and having had seating within about 75 feet of the ceremony, quite a bit closer than county assessor Jack Briscoe, who perceived himself to be well connected in Democratic political circles, made Dad speak of Truman with great respect. Also, Truman, like George Washington, was a Mason: Dad was a 32nd degree Mason and Grand Master of the local Masonic Lodge. So, I did have a generally positive feeling about the 33rd president, but I never made a point of making my preferences in the matter known. Read more
Overcoming Adversity: A Conversation with Painter Ricardo Garcia
Anna C. Broome
The self as creator and man as painter is vigorously defined in the art of Ricardo Garcia. He is well developed as an artist in many forms and always extends the best of his creative self to the world. The evolution of the paintings rests on the process Garcia exposes through sequences of line and shape: mutually feminine and masculine; bold and tenacious; tender and fierce. “My art is a fusion of my life, environment, experience. When they ask me what kind of style I paint I tell them it’s a style that I cannot label.”
Chia 44×60 in.
The ideas he explores come from within as he initiates dialog with himself and the work. “Silence inspires me. I often have conversations with myself as a means of study of who I am as a man and a painter. I want to inspire the world to come to a place of harmony, and I think my art is a way of encouraging people to extend the best of who they are through the exposure of complex image and theme.” Read more
STALKED AGAIN BY SINATRA’S LEGACY AT MATTEO’S
Photos by Barry Stein
By Bob Vickrey
During our ongoing three-year tour of famous Los Angeles restaurants, our monthly lunch club has often encountered difficulty escaping Frank Sinatra and his Rat Pack’s shadow wherever we decide to dine.
It seems these guys had the same taste in restaurants as our roving foursome. This time it was Matteo’s on Westwood Boulevard, where we were once again forced to deal with their legacy.
Owner and founder Matty “Matteo” Jordan opened his restaurant in 1963, with the help of his childhood friend Sinatra, and fellow Hoboken, New Jersey native. That collaboration made Matteo’s an instant LA hot spot, which featured a great mix of fine Italian food, tuxedoed waiters and a friendly, upscale supper club atmosphere. 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.
