THE MYSTIFYING NINE LIVES OF WRITER JERZY KOSINSKI
By Bob Vickrey
A restless publishing conference crowd appeared slightly impatient as it awaited the arrival of acclaimed novelist Jerzy Kosinski for his scheduled luncheon speech at the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston. Kosinski was running noticeably late for an appearance that would officially launch his forthcoming book later that year.
When he finally arrived at the semi-annual Houghton Mifflin sales conference, he emerged visibly shaken, and was steadied by a company publicist. As he wiped his forehead with a handkerchief, he described an incident that had just happened on the sidewalk outside the hotel entrance. Kosinski said a plate glass window which was being installed in a nearby office tower had fallen and barely missed hitting him as it shattered on the concrete sidewalk directly in his path to the hotel.
When he composed himself and began his prepared remarks, he told the story of another potentially fatal event which happened to him in 1969. He was on the way to Los Angeles from Paris to visit his friend and fellow Polish countryman Roman Polanski, but during his New York stop-over, he discovered his baggage had been lost in route. The overnight delay in New York ultimately prevented Kosinski from accompanying Polanski to actress Sharon Tate’s house the night she was murdered by the Charles Manson followers. Read more
Was That A Glacier I Froze Next To At The Top Of Kearsarge Pass?
By LIONEL ROLFE
A half century or so ago, I took a trip to the top of the Sierra, where I made the acquaintance of the fragile land of delicate meadows and lakes and dramatic ice fields and glaciers just below the jagged peaks that form the spine of the Sierra. As I recollected my adventure, it became more and more like a dream, hyperrealistic, a place I know I could never really return to.
There is no Trans Sierra Highway that crosses the John Muir trail along the spine of peaks anchored in the south by Mt. Whitney and in the north by Yosemite. Much of that pristine land would be destroyed if there were such a road. Some years back, the freeway bureaucracy wanted to build such a road, but luckily, wiser heads prevailed.
The only way to get there is to hike in, carrying your sleeping bag and provisions. Physically I am no longer up to such a task, and that means I will never see God’s country again, which makes me sad.
But in my mind, there is one moment I can not lose. It was the moment I stood next to a glacier at the top of the Sierra.
We had parked our cars at Florence Lake, the source of which is the Stanislaus River, along whose banks we’d climb to where the river begins. We slept bone tired that evening beside the Stanislaus, which at that point was racing down a narrow heavily wooded canyon with the speed and noise of a thousand steam engines. We slept among the aspen groves along the dank forest trail under the luminous stars and brightly burning falling stars. Read more
ONCE BEFORE I’VE SEEN THIS
The Author As A Young Man
By Stanton Kaye
© Stanton Kaye, 2014
Communication may be more of an art than a science:—Some people take no account of what’s being said, so we can say they lack the appreciation of the art.
My father was just such a person;—indirectly through a business associate, a Mr. I. Lugosi, who was selling him sweaters from Mexico or China—wholesale—at the time. The associate, Mr. I. Lugosi, operated (usually retail) from a small double storefront located just across the street from the Dupar’s side of the Farmers’ Market on Fairfax Avenue.
I was only sixteen. It was the fifties in Los Angeles and the early and late migration of Jewish businessmen liked to live in the proximity of a lot of Kosher amenities. At the time, this part of town—including the C.B.S. TV crowd—was like a pickle barrel of amenities from butchers to bakers; from Deli owners to deal makers; from Rabbis to ruminations on Zionism; yet my father still had room to swim between the pickles, so to speak:—That was maybe the most important thing about his business, perhaps more than profit margins.[1] Read more
Gaza From The Perspective Of A Proud Diaspora Jew
Jewish settlers taunting a Palestinian woman who has just been evicted
By LIONEL ROLFE
I have been doing my best not to think too much about Gaza, not only publicly but for myself. I can no longer avoid pondering all the uncomfortable thoughts Israel’s bombing of Gaza is bringing home to me. Of one thing I’m sure of—I want to tell Netanyahu, “I told you so.” Netanyahu’s purpose was always designed to prevent any chance of rapprochement. What’s unfolding was foretold by him.
Netanyahu has forced me to question my relationship to Israel in a fundamental way. I have some strong credentials as a Jew. I come from the centuries-old Schneersohn dynasty of the Chabad movement of Hasidic Judaism. When the last rebbe, who was the closest thing to a pope Judaism ever had, died, his followers expected he would be the messiah. It turned out he just died, and was not the messiah. During that period, when they were looking for his replacement, some powerful Lubavitchers approached me. I was more of the bloodline than the last rebbe, so my bloodline made me attractive to them. Even when I pointed out I was not a good candidate—that I was an atheist and a socialist, they wanted to keep talking. Of course being an atheist and a socialist would not have saved me from the death camps, quite the contrary. So we talked. In the end it was not to be. But as a Jew, I was deeply affected by my knowledge of the Holocaust. My study of the Holocaust became an obsession. Read more
Hamas, Islamic State, and Dreams of a World Caliphate
Leslie Evans
Lionel Rolfe and I have been friends since we met at Los Angeles High School around 1958. I enjoy his company and his journalism. I have no Jewish credentials to match his, either in his family or his wide life experience with Jewish periodicals or in Israel. My mother was Jewish but my father was not and I had little exposure growing up to Jewish religion or culture. Still I felt the need to round out Lionel’s present piece on Israel and Gaza, which focuses on the long drift to the right of Israeli politics, with a piece on the Arab-Muslim side of that endless conflict. To paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, Lionel has been so eloquent on the negative side of the Israeli establishment that it calls for an equal treatment on the drawbacks of the alternative establishment.
* * *
Western liberalism, despite its many admirable qualities and causes, its antiracism, defense of women’s and gay rights, advocacy of the welfare state, and opposition to national or colonial oppression, frequently fails to understand Islamic radicalism in general and its Palestinian expression in Hamas in particular. This is the lingering influence of the Enlightenment, which infused Western society with the idea that religion is passing away, that people are essentially reasonable, and if they engage in violent struggles it must be because they have been wronged over some tangible material benefit they have been denied. All that is needed to fix things is to supply the missing material needs. Marxism is an extreme example of this viewpoint. This amounts to historical ignorance or collective amnesia of Europe’s own past with its centuries of bloody religious wars.
Where this involves the conflict between Hamas and Israel there is also an element of the deep cultural antipathy toward Jews that is the inheritance of Western Christendom. This reappeared with renewed virulence during the seven-week Israel-Gaza war that ended August 26, with physical assaults on Jews, firebombing synagogues, trashing markets that sell Jewish food products, and crowds shouting “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the Gas!” These outbursts took place primarily in Europe, in France, Britain, the Netherlands, Italy, and Germany, but individual Jews were assaulted in several cities in the United States. Read more
ALL FOR THE LOVE OF THE GAME OF COLLEGE FOOTBALL
By Bob Vickrey
I can’t remember the precise date of our anniversary, but I must have taken traditional vows like everyone else did: “I take you to be my faithful partner and my love from this day forward and to cherish you for as long as we both shall live.”
Looking back at our long relationship, I can truthfully say I’ve honored these vows and still have the same love for college football that I did when I made that commitment many years ago.
If your sports background began with Texas high school football like mine did, the love affair with the game was naturally acquired. The “Friday Night Lights” syndrome was—and is—very much alive and well in my home state. High school football madness has dominated community discussions every fall for many decades in big cities as well as in small towns across the state. Read more
My Friend Boyd Lewis Took My Picture At A Birthday Party in 2001
LIONEL ROLFE IN HIS WHITE SUIT AT HIS BIRTHDAY PARTY
How Meeting Susan Anspach Completed The Circle
Goodnight moon.
Goodnight room.
Goodnight Lionel in the room.
—-Susan Anspach
By LIONEL ROLFE
I met her at a Thanksgiving party in 2012. Karen Kaye, the sister of avant garde film maker Stanton Kaye, had been throwing the parties for years at her Echo Park home. Back in 1971, Stan made a film called “Brandy in the Wilderness,” which created a large buzz among local bohemians. The bohemian scene was particularly vibrant around Los Angeles City College and a lot of us who gathered at Karen’s were the core of Hollywood bohemianism. Sometimes new faces would appear. I liked going to Karen’s parties because many of the people who went there were some of the greatest eccentrics of the era.
That’s how I met Susan Anspach.
She was as eccentric as any of us. Karen died in 2009 but her niece
Samantha kept the tradition going. Normally I’m a bit jaded when I
meet new folks, but Susan was of a different sort. When my eyes
lighted on this woman, I knew she was some kind of special lady. No
wonder I couldn’t describe her easily. I had spotted her sitting
demurely behind a dining room table and couldn’t take my eyes off
her. I couldn’t decide if she was an older biker chick or a slightly
faded apparition of a formerly grand lady. Was she in her early 40s
or early 60s? I finally determined she was an older woman who wore
her years well. I felt like I should know her name, but I didn’t. I knew
I had known her in some past life, but when? I just kept staring,
before I asked her some sort of awkward question. Read more
A LONG HISTORY OF DODGING THE DANCE FLOOR SHUFFLE
By Bob Vickrey
Just ask any woman in America, and she will assure you that she has a better chance of talking her man into joining her knitting club than trying to coax him onto any dance floor.
The subject of dancing came up recently while attending a local wedding. It was a casual backyard affair, and of course, there was the dreaded dance floor in the corner of the yard that offered one more chance for public humiliation. I could already envision being dragged onto the floor against my will by some woman at my table who wished to unleash her inhibitions for one evening at the expense of those of us who preferred to remain happily inhibited.
The occasion took me back to high school days at the Friday night dances at the local community center. For shy boys like me, the notion of hanging out with cute girls with whom I shared classes was both exhilarating and terrifying at the same time. I usually found a convenient hiding spot behind two friends where I could observe the dance floor, but also stay out of the direct line of fire.
The Myths We Live By
John Gray
The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths. John Gray. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013, 225 pp.
Leslie Evans
John Gray, 66, emeritus professor of philosophy at Oxford, is the great pessimist of Western intellectuals, the self-conscious inheritor of Schopenhauer. He has been all over the political map, from youthful leftism to Thatcherism in middle age, to New Labour and a current commitment to environmentalism. He is also a principal interpreter of British Jewish social theorist Isaiah Berlin, who was a staunch defender of liberal values against authoritarian currents, and, in consequence, a critic of the negative side of the Enlightenment, its spawning of schemes of generic social engineering to improve humanity by imposing Reason on the world, usually at terrible human cost.
This little book is unusual in Gray’s oeuvre. It is not a linear exposition but a series of comments on brief excerpts from novels and poems; works of nonfiction such as The Peregrine, an account of a year in the life of a Peregrine falcon; interspersed with an essay on Freud containing a sidebar on Jung. If there is a common theme it is that despite our technological prowess we humans are animals like all the others, not some special creation, with our animal nature unchanged since it evolved 50,000 years ago, all attempts to improve it to the contrary notwithstanding.
The myth that we are perfecting ourselves, central to the liberal ethos since the French Revolution, and which was in turn inherited from the Christianity of St. Paul, is Gray’s target:
“History may be a succession of absurdities, tragedies and crimes; but – everyone insists -the future can still be better than anything in the past. To give up this hope would induce a state of despair.” 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.
