THE MAN WHO WOULD BE CHARLTON OGBURN III
Screenwriter Will Aldis
By Bob Vickrey
When Will Aldis enters a room with his remarkable energy, this tall commanding figure often causes heads to turn and conversations to momentarily subside.
His extraordinary life story has surely shaped his personality and has added a decided authority to his animated presence. The veteran screenwriter of numerous feature films combines intangible charismatic qualities that usually leave a lasting impression on those he meets.
Aldis’ latest film, Stealing Cars, a project he wrote more than a dozen years ago with his longtime writing partner Steve Mackall, had a successful debut at the recent Los Angeles Film Festival where it won the prestigious Zeitgeist Award. The film stars William H. Macy, Felicity Huffman, and John Leguizamo. Bradley Kaplan directs the picture and Rachel Winter (Dallas Buyers Club) is producer. Read more
A LONG GLORIOUS RELATIONSHIP THAT HAS LOST ITS MAGIC
By Bob Vickrey
It’s official. As of last week, In-N-Out Burger and I have called it quits. After more than 35 years, we have decided to go our separate ways.
The split did not just happen overnight. We have been seeing less and less of one another in recent years and connected only a couple of times in recent months. I cannot fully explain how we ultimately lost the magic in our long meaningful relationship.
But how do you go about breaking up with a veritable Southern California institution? Adults spend endless hours talking about their last meal at In-N-Out. It’s such a popular place that kids want its burgers to be served at their birthday parties. I can already tell that this is going to be a difficult separation. How do I explain to my friends that we’re through?
I’ll never forget the first time I laid eyes on the beauty that was—and is—an In-N-Out “Double-Double”—double meat, double cheese, accompanied by a fresh slice of garden tomato and crispy lettuce—all neatly wrapped in carefully folded wax-paper, alongside those crispy, dry, and salty French fries. How could I not have fallen in love? Throw in a perfectly blended strawberry shake and suddenly you found yourself a virtual slave to its magnetic appeal. Read more
Two Hills in Concord
TWO PAINTINGS BY BOB LAYPORT: THE HILL AND THE OAK
BOTH PAINTINGS; Copyright 2015 Bob Layport
BY PHYL VAN AMMERS
OUR SPECIAL NORTHERN CALIFORNIA CORRESPONDENT
A multi-use trail that runs behind schools, houses and shopping malls from a road near the Delta at Bay Point down to Walnut Creek is a lesson in history. That history is camouflaged by the transformation of the East Bay by freeways, water and sewage systems, and intense real estate development.
To many Californians, the geography of that area is unknown. I have to start off with, “Go east from Oakland.” Most people know where Oakland is. Even those who know where Oakland is don’t know anything about the California Delta. Read more
Los Angeles Homeless Numbers Continue to Grow as Weak Recovery Enters Its Seventh Year
Leslie Evans
There are 25,000 homeless people in the city of Los Angeles; 44,000 in the county. Those are the raw numbers found by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority from its late January three-day point-in-time nighttime count, in which 5,500 volunteers, this writer included, went out and covered every block of 89% of the census tracts in Los Angeles County. The bad news is that this is 12% more than were found two years ago.
The findings were presented by LAHSA’s Executive Director Peter Lynn at a well-attended May 11 meeting of its Commission at its Wilshire Blvd. headquarters in downtown Los Angeles. I was one of those in the audience.
As Lynn expanded his report, the subpopulations showed worse damage. Those found to be unsheltered in the city in this year’s count, that is, living in the streets, were 17,687, up 18.6% from two years ago. The rest on the nights of the count were in various public and charity homeless shelters. And of those on the streets, there was an incredible 85% increase in people living in tents, under plastic tarps, in RVs, and automobiles. Read more
Artist Yuri Elvin: Golden Under a Solar Deity: A Profile By Anna Broome
photo credit: ding ya lan
BY ANNA BROOME
A star in his own universe this California born kinetic, pornographic, cultivated painter explores, sets down in reds, yellows, black and white every aspect of savage warriors, mind-soiled thinkers, war-torn, machine-gun-carrying prostitutes, cloned parishioners and excess-driven dictators. Yes, the work has an apocalyptic style but one from the perception of an enthusiast there as much for the ride he creates for himself as the viewer.
The work is controlled as Elvin seems free working from within his mind as he expels characters and scenes.
Elvin begins painting as a young child with few memories only evidences of sleep-created art work. “I would wake up with drawings all around me. I wouldn’t remember any of it.”
Elvin’s artistic talent is a birthright of sorts as both his mother and father are accomplished artists. “My Mother didn’t start painting until she was 40, but my Father was always an artist, renegade of sorts.” Read more
AN ANNA BROOME PROFILE: Ghosts of the Low Country: New EP by Tawny Ellis
By ANNA BROOME
Tawny Ellis, Los Angeles based musician, singer, songwriter “unlocks and elevates the many mysteries of life” through her new Muscle Shoals inspired and recorded EP Ghosts of the Low Country. For Ellis this EP is a way she takes a glimpse of, senses a connection with people from the close to her heart South.
Mining influences as varied as Patsy Cline, David Bowie, Joni Mitchell, and Willie Nelson, the Los Angeles-based songstress channels that dynamic into an intricately textured blend of folk, rock, and alt-country that’s intense and masterful but irresistibly intimate.
Ghosts Of The Low Country is due for release in summer of 2015 and brings to life the real sounds of its indigenous title. The four tracks making the EP include collaborations with her long time partner, Gio Loria as well as members from Athens band Five Eight and bassist Peter Hamilton.
ANNA BROOME Talks About A Fundraising Gala
By Anna C. Broome
Art Share LA, a community art center located in Arts District Little Tokyo has been the home and gallery of emerging artists since 1997. Cheyanne Sauter, The Center’s Director of Operations, sees Art Share LA as a place for emerging artists to find their voices, styles, concepts without judgement or discrimination. Sauter’s tagline for the community center is “Creation not curation”, which describes perfectly Art Share’s devotion to the early stages of development for artists ranging from musicians to painters, sculptors to writers, dramatists to dancers.
As in the case of any quality non-profit centers, Art Share LA depends largely on donations and contributions to keep it thriving and evolving.
After almost two years of bringing Art Share LA above par financially, Cheyanne Sauter now looks to the future for Art Share LA.as a creative art center with global reach. The center houses artists and community residents with more than 90% of renters being artists. It is the lone wolf resident destination for an every growing and rent increasing district. This shows the importance of a place like Art Share LA that not only offers a gallery, theatre, work spaces, classrooms and classes accessible financially for almost anyone wanting to extend or learn art forms but also a residence in the very location where artists create and thrive off one another. Read more
Unlocking The Secrets Of That Incredible Flameneco Music
Conde, rehearsing with mezzo Soprano Kindra Scharich
By LIONEL ROLFE
When I was not yet quite a teenager, I spent a few years studying the classical guitar under Dorothy De Goede. She was a strikingly beautiful woman who had been a student of Andre Segovia. I was, of course, in love with her even though I was barely a decade old. I then wanted to study flamenco, so my parents sent me to Carlos Montoya. I loved flamenco but Montoya’s best and most patient coaxing did not teach me how to unfurl my right hand with that particular flamenco sweep. I should have had some genetic disposition. My dad was half German-Jewish and the other half Portuguese-Jewish. His mother grew up speaking Ladino in Seattle. The few remaining Ladino speakers lived in Seattle at that time–La dino is a combination of Hebrew and Spanish.
Yiddish is Hebrew and German. Appropriately my father, a scholarly judge by profession, loved the classical guitar, an instrument whose popularity really began with Segovia. The guitar, like a piano, can be a whole orchestra. My father also loved lutes, and we regularly went to the lute club. My dad loved to play the guitar in his heavily wooded paneled study where he also smoked his fine cigars. Maybe that was the Iberian in him, and I got a bit of it too, by osmosis if not genetics. In retirement, my dad spent a lot of time in Spain and Portugal, acquiring more guitars. Read more
INDRA DEVI WAS NOT JUST A NICE OLD LADY
By LIONEL ROLFE
The Goddess Pose: The Audacious Life of Indra Devi, the Woman Who Helped Bring Yoga to the West By Michelle Goldberg 352 pages hardcover Knopf $26.96 June 2015
I grew up around some of the biggest name in Yoga, yet never was much attracted to it. My uncle, violinist Yehudi Menuhin, one of the very greatest if not the greatest violinist of the last century, has been credited with bringing Yoga to the West. In 1953 the image of him in various esoteric positions occupied a number of pages in Life Magazine. In those days, millions of people read Life.
This led to my mother, Yaltah Menuhin (also a child prodigy musician, a pianist), getting a call from Marlon Brando. My mom reared me so I saw few movies or television in my earliest years. She thought both were pernicious. She always said that the day a television entered the house, she would walk.
But she made an exception for Marlon Brando. She had just taken me to see Brando’s “Teahouse of the August Moon.” She took me to a couple of other movies as well—“The Red Balloon,” and a series of the classic Greek dramas produced by the Canadian Broadcasting Company. My mother had known queens and kings and great musicians and writers of all kinds. She used to join the Queen at dinner in Buckingham Palace regularly. She never was overly impressed. But Marlon Brando was different. Read more
City Spends $100 Million a Year on Homeless, Mostly with Few Results
Leslie Evans
City Administrative Officer Miguel A. Santana released a 21-page report on L.A. homelessness April 16 to a chorus of criticism. The annual costs were much higher than people expected, conservatively at least $100 million, and precious little of that went to housing or other expenses that got anyone off the streets.
The amount looked like a lot, but in a city budget of $8.57 billion it came to just .017%, mainly showing that the city doesn’t take homelessness seriously and hasn’t made a significant investment in trying to end it.
Santana’s report concluded that the main achievement of the recent period has been the creation of the Coordinated Entry System (CES), which is working to replace the multiple first-come, first-served places where homeless people register for the extremely limited amount of housing, now with a citywide coordinated database that ranks applicants on the basis of need.
Beyond that, while 15 city agencies interact with the homeless, the study found “no consistent process across departments in interactions with homeless individuals, homeless encampments, or other issues related to homelessness, and no systematic efforts to connect the homeless with assessment and case management.” 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.
