Finding Bambi
By Kathering Hisako Glascock
[Katherine Hisako Fukami Glascock (August 31, 1940-October 15, 2017) was a musician, artist, and was best known as a landscape designer. She was married to Baylis Glascock, who we have featured previously on this website, for more than 50 years. In a May 22, 2003, article on her work in the Los Angeles Times, the paper’s garden specialist Emily Green wrote:
[“Katherine Glascock creates gardens that express the true nature of the land and the people who live there. No two are alike, but all bring together strength and elegance.”
[Baylis Glascock has offered us two of her writings, dating from the late 1990s. We have added notes in square brackets on a few of the people she mentions.]
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At the garden on the Malibu coast I saw him in the distance with his friend. As I recognized him they both looked my way. She was tall and graceful; they were a handsome couple. The light from the ocean and the overhead blue outlined them standing in a green wave of gently lilting fine grasses. Seeing them at that distance across the garden, so beautiful, having stopped in the midst of some conversation, both their heads turned toward me like a pair of deer, alert: a sense of formality, a kind of separateness came over me. And I hesitated to go toward them. And to this day I regret having missed the opportunity. How often I have imagined myself stepping through the long sweeps of grasses, greeting them with confidence and a smile, and all of it turning out differently. Read more
MY FRONT YARD CARUSO VILLAGE GALA PARTY
By Bob Vickrey
Last Thursday evening I discovered that Palisades Village developer Rick Caruso is a very accommodating guy. He must have known that I’ve become somewhat of a hermit in recent years and rarely travel east of Bundy Drive, so he decided to have his Grand Opening Gala in my front yard—which is only a slight exaggeration.
My house on Monument Street sits near the intersection of Swarthmore Avenue, which has become the new retail nexus of our town—and judging by the recent Wall Street Journal profile of Caruso, the retail shopping and entertainment model of the future.
Last Thursday’s special occasion honored members of the project team who planned and built the new shopping complex. The Wolfgang Puck-catered dinner was also held to introduce the new tenants who are opening shops and restaurants in the village center. Several city dignitaries attended, but more to the point; what would a grand opening in L.A. be without a bevy of celebrity guests for such an august occasion?
When members of my party arrived on the red carpet walkway—sans entourage and the obligatory black Escalade—I immediately spotted actresses Charlize Theron and Kate Beckinsale, as well as Palisades Honorary Mayors Janice and Billy Crystal. This auspicious scene naturally begged the obvious question: What the heck was I doing here? 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.
