Welcome To L.A. Arts District: An Insider’s View By The One & Only Anna Broome
Anna Broome Of The Broome Room At L.A. Art Share–With Princess Frank
The Anna Broome Room Tawny Ellis, Marissa Gomez, Terry Ellsworth, George Joquim, Richard McDowell, Jim Marquez, Lee Boek, Colette Von, Anna Broome, Cato Stevens.
It is 7 AM and the world is dark in the Art District. There is no one awake who may account for the happenings from the night previous. I lived here many moons ago, but still today, everyday is the day before and the night after. The local coffee house is alive with the hereafter represented inside a kind of world no one but the artist may explore: A simple continuing idea abounds from what is the mindset of love and art inside a love and art mind. I came here for the sake of art and kindness of home but like Dylan said, “A home I had never known.”
The ties Tatiana Von Der Schulenburg toes on the telephone post symbolizing gentrification
Bloomfest, an annual cultural festival honoring founder of the Arts District Joel Bloom
Meet the talent.
The morning I moved into the American Hotel was after the death of my boyfriend. I had no where to go. I had been given the cover of Citizen Magazine for a collection of paintings I created on drywall and thus introducing me to the Arts District by way of the art show to follow at The Continental Gallery at Fourth and Main. Long time Arts District member Rick Robinson, who later heads the Art Share board, came to the gallery while I was still working on paintings for my show to open there, Feminine Dissection. He brought me paints and stayed with me as I worked feverishly to finish the work for the show. I can still see him coming into the gallery at midday with a bag full of oil paints and a smile. I didn’t know where this guy came from or who or what sent him, only that he must belong to something wonderful, supportive, where an artists collect extends themselves to other artists, all just trying to survive and get the work done. Through Rick I met many fellow artists and just like I imagined there was a brilliant collective of artists not unsimilar to vampires who formed a kind of coven located in Little Tokyo. Read more
The Persistent Dreams Of The Tunnel Builders
It all began with the parkway to Pasadena in 1939. American Freeways were inspired by Hitler’s Autobahn
BY LIONEL ROLFE
Some of the people seated around the long table in the elegant dark wooded South Pasadena home have been fighting the idea of a five-mile long tunnel nearly 200 feet beneath their feet for decades. To them, that tunnel is the hydra-headed monster that they beat down, but only for a while, and then it pops up again. It’s like a cancerous tumor that can never be removed.
About the time Caltrans and Metro recently released a new Draft Environmental Impact Report/Statement which once again advanced the notion of building the tunnel, this group of veteran tunnel fighters were meeting to take stock. The report also suggested alternatives to the tunnel, ranging from realignment of existing streets, or putting in a lot of light rail or doing nothing.
As far back as the ‘70s and some say even back to 1939, Caltrans’ intention to complete the Long Beach (710) Freeway’s from Long Beach to Pasadena was always part of the plan. But for years, the plan has been foiled in court by the No 710 Action Committee, acting in alliance with cities like South Pasadena and the Sierra Club. In other words, the people here in the room. Read more
Memories Of Dean Channing Briggs
By DOUG WEISKOPF
I recently received an announcement of a new academic dean at my alma mater, Portland State University. It instantly brought back memories of one of my favorite people during my student days at the university during the late 1960’s, Dean of Students, Channing Briggs. As a member of a group of anti-Vietnam War protesters I was a part of constantly challenging his authority and railing against him for trying to keep a calming atmosphere on campus, when we felt that red hot rage was the only morally appropriate response possible to the war.
Once when Dean Briggs tried to put myself and four other students on disciplinary probation for disrupting on-campus military recruiting we were brought before a student/faculty hearing committee, which we not only attended but packed the room with several dozen sympathizers who booed when Dean Briggs sat down to make his case against us (it was like that comical scene in the movie, “Animal House, made a few years later). During the middle of his testimony as to why we should, in effect, have our hands slapped by the school, he began to fight back against his own impulse (unsuccessfully) to start giggling at the absurdity of the comic opera he found himself involved in. Read more
MEMORABLE SUMMER NIGHT RENDEZVOUS’ AT LA CARAFE
La Carafe Building (circa 1860)– Houston, Texas
By Bob Vickrey
I sometimes sit in a little French café across the street from my house in Southern California enjoying my breakfast while listening to the piped-in music of Edith Piaf, and become quickly transported back to my college years where I first heard the haunting La vie en rose.
The rundown musty old bar in Houston was called La Carafe, and for several summers in the heyday of the 1960s, it provided the perfect meeting place for many of my former high school pals.
I remember the first night I entered the dark, mysterious La Carafe and promptly spotted several friends who were being regaled with stories by the bartender. I was immediately struck by the number of beautiful women in the room who all seemed to be speaking French. The international flavor of the place was quite a novelty for those of us that had barely crossed state borders. Read more
MY KINDLE, MY BIRDS & ME
By LIONEL ROLFE
After several years of deliberation, I finally purchased a Kindle. I now own my very own digital reading device which has all the books I can read on it. There’s lot that’s unsettling about the device, but that’s not entirely bad—just caused a bit soul searching. Getting the Kindle turned out to be a really big deal for me, and a revelation. For one thing, I realized how much I was an old man living through revolutionary times.
I am preparing for exiting this vail of tears, not right away, I hope, but soon enough. I’m stumbling down the last league. As a result, I no longer feel a compulsion to be on the cutting edge. I’ve lived long enough to see too many cutting edges come and go. One of the things that my friends know about me is that I’m quaint in my appreciation of music. I grew up turning pages for my concert pianist mother, especially when she played the Kreutzer. I played classical guitar until I was 13 or so and haven’t touched an instrument since.
But music never lost its magic. I just felt that there were others who could give it that magic better than I. When I got into my late teens, Jazz proved intriguing. Folk, blues, and the very greatest voices like Paul Robeson and Edith Piaf turned me on. Rock never made the cut. I rarely heard that much genuine genius in it, and mostly I saw it as an essentially corporate product. When Bob Dylan electrified his guitar, I lost interest. Read more
DEMOLITION OF PALISADES BUILDING EVOKES FOND MEMORIES OF VILLAGE BOOKS
Photo by Bart Bartholomew
By Bob Vickrey
Shortly after the lunch hour on January 6th, I heard the first loud crash of a crane knocking down the walls of the buildings on North Swarthmore Avenue in Pacific Palisades, directly across the street from my house on Monument. When I walked outside to see which of the former businesses had taken the first hit, I saw the demolished back wall of Village Books.
As a booklover and former publisher’s representative, I began to wonder if there was some kind of international conspiracy against bookstores. First, Jeff Bezos turned the business on its head with Amazon.com; then billionaire investor and landlord Charley Munger decided Dutton’s Brentwood Books was an expendable commodity, and now, even the guy operating the crane for the demolition company employed by Caruso Affiliated decided he didn’t like bookstores either. Read more
Oil Is the Cheapest It’s Been in Years, What’s There to Worry About?
Leslie Evans
The price for a barrel of American-based oil (West Texas Intermediate) this morning was $55.91. The last time it was in this range was in 2009, while in the last three years it had vacillated around $100, a drop of 44%. Regular gas is under $3 a gallon in every state except Alaska and Hawaii. Is this unmitigated good news or is there a downside to the new low prices? And if oil is so plentiful that the price is plunging does this mean we don’t have to worry about peak oil any more?
Why Is the Price Dropping?
At its most basic, what is happening is simple supply and demand. As the chart below shows, except for brief periods in early 2009 and 2012, demand over the last five years, until 2014, was running ahead of supply, pushing the price into the $100 a barrel range. Now, as storage facilities fill up, oil needs to be priced to clear.
The gap is being caused as much by a fall in demand as by a growth in supply. This is a result of the persistent recession in Europe, a slowdown in the Chinese and German economies, the aftereffects of the 2008 crash in America, where unemployment has since declined but where good paying jobs were replaced by minimum wage and part time work. Improved efficiency is also a factor. Read more
C. M. Sunday Interviews Lionel Rolfe
C. M. Sunday, violinist, violin teacher, and representative of the string instrument sales company SunMusicStrings, conducted a wide ranging interview with Lionel Rolfe, published December 27 in Reflexions, a new online magazine for string players.
Here is the link
“The Menuhins: A Family Odyssey” Back in Print
We are pleased to bring back into print this account of the family of famous musicians.
By Lionel Menuhin Rolfe
Available from Amazon.com
$13.95 Amazon price: $12.54 245 pp.
The Menuhins is the story of a miraculous family of great musicians and religious leaders. It is told here by the nephew of Yehudi Menuhin, the violinist regarded as the greatest musical prodigy since Mozart. Elements of the story have been told before: how two Russian Jews living in San Francisco, Moshe and Marutha Menuhin, raised a brood of child prodigy musicians that astounded the world. It seemed the stuff of legend. Yehudi, with his violin and his younger pianist sisters, Hephzibah and Yaltah, displayed as children a musical gift rarely equaled by the finest musicians. But few outside the family have known the true dimensions of the Menuhin story, for the Menuhin children were not the first prodigies in the family’s unique history. For centuries, the Menuhin line had been producing geniuses, yet the the elder Menuhins withheld the details of Yehudi’s exotic lineage. There was the MaHaRal, a great rabbi and the creator of the legendary Golem; Schneur Zalman, the founder of Chabad Hassidism and the composer of powerful religious songs; and all the great Schneersohns, the hereditary first family of the Lubavitch Hassids. Although Rolfe, the son of Yaltah Menuhin, often focuses on his famous uncle, he has ventured beyond the Menuhin public image with an intimacy that only a Menuhin could bring to this family portrait. Long out of print, Boryanabooks is pleased to present this new edition of The Menuhins: A Family Odyssey.
Amazon.com paperback 245 pages List: $13.95, Amazon price: $12.54
Amazon.com Kindle edition $9.95
MEMORIES OF BELLA BARTOK BY ANOTHER COMPOSER AND COLLEAGUE
Bela Bartok in 1927 (left), Eugene Zador, late 1970s (right)
BY EUGENE ZADOR
I know practically all of Bartok’s orchestral works, including his ballet and his opera. But I still don’t feel like an authority on his music and am not able to give you a profound analysis of his works. I leave it to the musicologists. Instead of this, I rather give you a few glimpses on his life and a few personal impressions, which might be even more interesting, since you can’t find them in books.
Many people claim now that they were Bartok’s friends. Just like hundreds of people claimed to be classmates of Abraham Lincoln after he became president. No, unfortunately, I was not one of Bartok’s friends. He lived in Budapest and I in Vienna, so we saw each other only when he came to Vienna, which was always a short visit. But when he was there, I was practically is only personal guide. He always notified me when he came. I waited at the station and we took a cab to his hotel. Bartok was the simplicity itself. He didn’t like fancy hotels, on the contrary, where he stayed was an old, cheap hotel on the Wiedner Hauptstrasse, but he didn’t care; It was near to the Musikvereinsaal (the concert hall) and to the Radio, where he performed.
The conductor of the Vienna Radio, Mr. Kabaska, wanted to meet him. I suggested to see him either at the hotel or in my home, but Bartok refused, and preferred to meet him in a Kaffeehaus, which is a kind of cafeteria, where you can sit for hours. Bartok smoked and I will never forget when he pulled out his old and beaten up metal cigarette container, refusing Mr. Kabaska’s cigarettes, offered him in a golden tabatiere.
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.
