THE BIG EVENT AT THE GEFFEN PLAYHOUSE: GET ALL THE GRUBBY DETAILS & REAL LOWDOWN HERE
AUTHORS AT THE GEFFEN — The three authors who hopefully provoked and even entertained an audience at Red Hen Press’ night at the Geffen Playhouse on Nov. 16 included, from left, Marc Acito, Annie La Ganga and Lionel Rolfe. Acito is the author of “The Gospel According to Marc” and “The Attack of the Theater People.” Acito, a regular NPR commentator, was funny and thought provoking with descriptions of his experiences as a house painter and the deaths of the people whose homes he worked on. Annie La Ganga, a performance artist and prose poet whose “Stoners and Self Appointed Saints,” is a discovery of Red Hen Press, did a kind of surreal and literary strip tease, describing her feelings of making love while she imagined herself to be a mermaid. Rolfe did his usual, talking about Thomas Mann and Arnold Schoenberg, among other such ponderous things.
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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.
