Tom Lutz interviews Lionel Rolfe at December 11 tribute
Tom Lutz, chair of the Creative Writing Department at UC Riverside and editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books here interviews author Lionel Rolfe at the December 11 tribute to Rolfe sponsored by the Public Works Improvisational Theatre at the Warszawa Loft in Santa Monica.
Hyla Douglas sings at December 11, 2014, Tribute to Lionel Rolfe
Hyla Douglas, Lionel Rolfe’s daughter, sings at the December 11 Tribute to Lionel Rolfe staged by the Public Works Improvisational Theatre at the Warszawa Loft in Santa Monica.
Mike the Poet presents at Lionel Rolfe Tribute
Mike Sonksen, better known as Mike the Poet, is a 3rd-generation LA native acclaimed for poetry performances and published articles. Poet, journalist, historian, tour guide, and teacher, he graduated from the University of California Los Angeles and is currently pursuing an advanced degree at California State University Los Angeles. Here he performs one of his poems at the December 11 tribute to Lionel Rolfe staged by the Public Works Improvisational Theatre at the Warszawa Loft in Santa Monica.
Lionel’s Been Relaxing For Years, Awaiting His Big Dec. 11 Event; His Daughter Hyla Douglas To Join In
Are We Really The Smartest Creatures On Earth? If So, So What?
More than 40 years ago, my then wife Nigey Lennon and I were on our way home to Echo Park when suddenly she said to stop. I thought it was because she saw a garage sale. Instead it was a woman who had set up a bunch of cages with cocatiels for sale. Some were in the cages and some stood on top of the edge of the cages.
“Oh hell,” I said. “I don’t want birds. They’re messy and they’re…well…bird brained. Stupid.”
Nigey, of course prevailed, and as we approached the birds, I was amazed that as we were looking them over, they were giving us the once over. That unnerved me. And it began the process where I began to realize we share this earth with a lot of creatures who are every bit as sentient as us.
Over the next few years, other birds impinged on my life and took me into their soap opera lives. The bird we bought that day was named Mo. Gurly came next because we walked into a bird store on Melrose Avenue near my old alma mater Fairfax High School in Los Angeles. As we walked around the cage, one rather drab gray bird was intently following us with her eyes and body. She peeped and squawked, obviously saying, “I’m here. Look at me. I want to be with you guys.” Read more
Nightcrawler film review
Phyl van Ammers
Only two other people sat in the theater in downtown Concord to see Nightcrawler with Jake Gyllenhall and Rene Russo. Perhaps because tonight is Thursday – the day the theater adds a new movie. Perhaps because people thought it was another Halloween movie, and Halloween is over. Or perhaps prospective film viewers thought that this Nightcrawler was the comic book superhero Nightcrawler in the Marvel Universe, who is able to teleport across both short and long distances and has adhesive hands.
After the movie ended, I listened the two other people that had been in the audience. One said she wasn’t going to be able to sleep after seeing this film. The other said she didn’t like Jake Gyllenhall anymore.
I thought the film was predictable from almost the beginning: the protagonist is a psychopath in a corrupt world; his flawed but human partner “Rick” (apparently Latino but the actor Riz Ahmed is a British actor, writer and rapper of Pakistani heritage who graduated from Oxford– Middle Eastern) is going to die, and Lou Bloom (Gyllenhall) will be the cause. Bloom is going to sacrifice Rick, and Rick is going to deserve it because he allowed himself to get sucked in. That Rick dies and Lou thrives is a twist on noir. Noir, which grew out of Greek tragedy and French realist writing, means the psychopathic protagonist will die, sometimes from falling, say from a train, as Joseph Cotten died in Hitchcock’s 1943 Shadow of a Doubt, or sometimes his partner in crime kills him, like in Double Indemnity (1944).
Noir protagonists are sympathetic, and they look normal. Read more
PUT THIS ON YOUR CALENDAR….
A PDF ebook edition of Lionel Rolfe’s
“The Uncommon Friendship of Yaltah Menuhin and Willa Cather”
is currently available for $1 in the bookstore at americanlegends.
DARK ALLIANCE
Lionel Rolfe
I surprised myself by how much the movie “Kill the Messenger” affected me. I hadn’t gone to it expecting that it would upset me. I wasn’t a close friend of Gary Webb, the journalist (pictured above) whose story the movie was based on. But I had made a couple of calls at his request, trying to get him a job. He was desperate after the San Jose Mercury News dropped him when he published his powerful series, “Dark Alliance.”
At the end of the ’60s, I did a stint as a police reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle–and then in 1981 Chronicle Books published my book Literary L.A. and in the mid-’90s I wrote a few op-ed columns for the paper.
I had knocked around with some of the best of the ’60s journalists in San Francisco. Most were deeply influenced by the counter culture. I hung out a bit with Warren Hinckle, editor of Rampart Magazine, he of the infamous eye patch. I dealt a few times with Bob Scheer, one of the bright spots of the Los Angeles Times during its days of glory under publisher Otis Chandler, and was much awed by his talents. I was proud to count Dave McQueen, who along with Scoop Nisker made KSAN radio the first of the “underground FM stations,” one of my good friends. KSAN never really was “underground”– it was owned by Metromedia, now long swallowed up in some other corporate behemoth. But I had partied with the likes of Janis Joplin because of my friendship with McQueen. Read more
A Real Story About A Navy Seal
BY DOUG WEISKOPF
I read an interesting review recently in The LA Times on the new movie, “Kill The Messenger”, with great interest, as it reminded me of a young man I met back in the late 1990’s who was a neighbor of mine (I used to take care of his dog while he was out of town, which always creates strong bonds with their owners). I knew he had been a Navy Seal who had abruptly chosen to leave the service and one evening over beers I asked him why he left.
The story I was told in answer to my casual question could have been the subject of a movie like “Messenger”. He said that he had been assigned as a machine gunner on a navy helicopter which flew a mission in Columbia to pick up a large load of cocaine from a local drug cartel. When the crew landed to unload the coke the officer in charge at the scene was none other than the infamous Oliver North, whom he described as an overly officious and unpleasant fellow. Read more
Umberto Tosi’s New Book, Just Out
OPHELIA Rising by Umberto Tosi is a NEW NOVEL BY THE Author of Our Own Kind, which is running in this issue of Boryanabooks.
What if Ophelia had survived and lived to tell her story. That’s what this novel is about. This picaresque, historical novel is a lively re-imagining of the fair Ophelia’s life before and after Hamlet. In the novel’s alternative world, she hasn’t drowned after all. She was fished out downstream from where she fell by that those traveling players who – at Hamlet’s urging – had caught the conscience of the King Claudius, and now were fleeing his royal wrath fast as their carnival wagons could carry them out of Denmark.
Thus begins young Ophelia’s great adventure – a new life thrust upon her, while her mind and broken heart are on the mend – as player and fugitive, lover and warrior, mother and poet, seeker and survivor. Moving from town to town, across war torn, 16th century Europe with her performing troupe, she plays many roles and encounters a cast of vividly drawn characters, including some of the most powerful, audacious, Machiavellian, prophetic and creative figures of the late Renaissance – real and fictional. Inevitably, Ophelia crosses paths with Horatio – now the author of a book chronicling his late Prince Hamlet’s tragedy – and a diplomat and spy for the ruthless, newly crowned Norwegian-Danish King Fortinbras.
With a nod to the Bard, the Melancholy Dane’s ghost shows up as well, along with Barnardo, Marcellus and other characters from the play. Ophelia comes into herself in the liberating company of the players – particularly their two bickering principals, Isabella and Carlo. No nunnery for her. She struggles through adversity to find new loves, new passions and she fashions herself into someone to be reckoned with. Now she must decide which path her new life will take. Perils abound – bloody religious conflicts, assassinations, persecution, disease, palace plots, pirates. There are those who want her dead.
The novel is steeped in meticulously researched, authentic details conveying the events, look and feel of its period. One experiences the vistas, texture, smells, colors, customs, attitudes, fashions, foods, arts, politics, weaponry, rituals, beliefs and diversions of Ophelia’s times, particularly in the worlds of theater, the church, the emergent merchant class, printing, art and ruthless, all-powerful royal houses. The swiftly moving narrative remains consistent with Shakespeare’s tragedy throughout, flashing back to Ophelia’s motherless childhood, as well as weaving a credible story of the play’s aftermath. The ebook edition of “Ophelia Rising” will be published in November, 2014, followed by a print edition in the spring of 2015, by Light Fantastic Books.
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.
