KCET Interviews Lionel Rolfe on His New Book, “Ari Mendelsohn”
KCET’s Mike Songsen both reviews Lionel Rolfe’s new book, The Misadventures of Ari Mendelsohn, and interviews the author, along with some musings about a fatal shooting just outside Songsen’s door, in a February 22 column in KCET’s online feature Departures.
Songsen concludes that “The book is chock full of self-deprecating jokes, while still possessing life-affirming passages like his early days as a journalist in the Central Coast or his quirky romance with a Bulgarian woman. A hybrid of Rolfe’s earlier books, this new collection reads quickly. The blend of humor and pathos within were clearly cathartic for the author and paint a fascinating account of the last half Century in Los Angeles. ” For the full story, see http://www.kcet.org/socal/departures/landofsunshine/la-letters/to-live-and-die-in-la-lionel-rolfe-literary-los-angeles.html
EAST AND WEST PUBLISHING CONVERGE ON THE SUNSET STRIP
The Aquarian Consiracy
By Bob Vickrey
After years of publishing books of a rather staid and provincial nature like the good New Englanders they were, the folks at Houghton Mifflin decided thirty years ago to add some spice to their yearly catalog when they enlisted a successful Los Angeles publisher of mind, body, and spiritualism titles to their annual mix.
Jeremy P. Tarcher and his idiosyncratic West Coast taste for alternative lifestyle books seemed at once to be quite an odd fit for a venerable old Boston publishing house, which had published the likes of Emerson, Longfellow, and Churchill. Read more
HANGING WITH BRUBECK ON THE QUEEN MARY
 Dave and Iola Brucbeck By Bob Vickrey I struck up a friendship with a book publicist in Los Angeles shortly after our two publishing companies joined forces in the 1980s. Lucinda worked for J.P. Tarcher Company, the most successful publishing enterprise on the West Coast. She had met many great musicians during her earlier years as a young publicist for the Dallas Symphony Orchestra and formed a long friendship with jazz legend Dave Brubeck. When he appeared at the Long Beach Jazz Festival in 1987, he invited her to join him and his wife, Iola, for dinner before his performance that evening. Read more |
The Controversy over America’s Oil Future
Leslie Evans
For the last decade there has been growing concern among petroleum geologists, energy specialists, the Defense Department, investors, and environmentalists over the radically rising price of oil. A 44 gallon barrel of oil that sold for $12 in 1998 is going today for $95, and that understates things, as that is the American, or West Texas Intermediate, standard. This is what many in the Midwest pay, but on both coasts and much of the South, oil is going at the European Brent price, which is now at $111 per barrel.
Unlike climate science, where the professionals have reached overwhelming consensus that global warming is caused by human use of fossil fuels, the constituencies concerned with America’s energy prospects remain divided. Those who think this finite, precisely “fossil,” material is running short of world demand are proponents of the peak oil thesis. They advocate strict conservation of fossil fuels and crash investment in energy efficient technologies and renewable energy sources. Their opponents call them doomsters, while the peak oilers refer to the deniers as cornicopians. The cornicopians maintain that there are large enough untapped resources still in the ground to delay indefinitely any need to change our high energy standard of living or our economy, which depends on perpetual growth. They got a huge boost last fall when the prestigious Paris-based International Energy Agency, the 28-nation consortium that reports to the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, on November 12 released its World Energy Outlook for 2012, predicting: Read more
California Road Scholar: Pastoral Era Writing
Carlotta--from Hitchcock's "Vertigo"
By Phyl van Ammers
If people today think at all about the pastoral era in California, which is just about never, they think of a movie character: Carlotta Valdes in Hitchcock’s “Vertigo.” Valdés is a surname of Asturian (Northern Spain) origin. Both in North and South America the spelling Valdez is very common. Juan Valdés is a fictional character that sells Columbian coffee on television. There is a city of Valdez in Yolo County. No Californio woman named Carlotta Valdes lived in San Benito County near the San Juan Bautista mission during the pastoral era.
Anyone who has seen the film thinks of Carlotta’s portrait. An unknown artist, possibly a movie studio artist, painted a fair- haired woman posed next to a marble column. The ambiguous background is comprised of ominous teal sky over what could be dry hills and dark olive trees and a reflective poo.. She wears a low cut violet satin dress and an elaborate ruby and gold pendant hangs from a thin gold chain. She carries a bouquet. Her expression is wary. Hitchcock placed the portrait in San Francisco’s Palace of the Legion of Honor.
The California pastoral era lasted from 1769 to 1854. (Hubert Howe Bancroft, Volume XXIV, published in 1888 by The History Company. Victorians wrote Bancroft’s history. (This chapter is available free on-line at http://archive.org/stream/californiapastor00inbanc#page/n9/mode/2up.)
Veteran Journalist Spills His Guts About California Journalism In New Book
Phyl Van Ammers recently talked to Lionel Rolfe, the Los Feliz-based author whose most recent book is, “The Misadventures of Ari Mendelsohn: A Mostly True Memoir of California Journalism.” It is available on Amazon, both in paper and on Kindle. He will be doing a signing at Skylight Bookstore in March.
Q: The Misadventures of Ari — does the title suggest a relationship to Saul Bellow’s Adventures of Augie March?
A: Oh God no. I never could read Saul Bellow. He was everything I don’t like. Academic, heavy handed, establishment in the worst kind of way. He might have even been a good writer, but I just couldn’t read him. What I could read just got on my nerves–badly. Also, I take my California identity seriously. I’ve made a career out pointing out that most of this country’s best writing came from California, from Mark Twain to Jack London to Steinbeck. Not from the James brothers from Boston, or wherever. That’s what my book “Literary L.A.” was all about. The real soul of California’s contribution to world literature was born in its Bohemian roots, and then it metamorphosed into something more apocalyptical after World War II. I don’t see Bellow as summing up anything big and stirring–just pompous and stale academia and equally pompous and stale New York publishing. Bellow is in the tradition of James’ parlor room writing. I’d point out that the best American writer in recent years certainly wasn’t Bellow, it was Bukowski. And no New York publisher ever touched him. I got to admit I do like Philip Roth on occasions. He had a certain bawdy appeal. Bellow sucks. If my book draws from anything–the picaresque novel sort of thing–think Henry Fielding and Mark Twain. I loved Henry Fielding. Read more
CHARLES BUKOWSKI: The Poet as Entertainer; An Excerpt From Joan Jobe Smith’s New Book,“Charles Bukowski: Epic GLOTTIS: His Art & His Women (& me)”
By Joan Jobe Smith
Unbelievable to think that here I am, in 2012, half of my lifetime
plus two years later, rewriting this piece I first drafted in August 1975,
when I was a law student. Seventeen long years later, after I dropped
out of law school, received a Master of Fine Arts in fiction writing
from the University of California Irvine and married the poet Fred
Voss, a portion appeared in Sure—The Charles Bukowski Newsletter #4,
1992. In the spring 1994 issue of Chiron Review, “The Poet As Entertainer”
was published in toto as a column I wrote called “Swimming in
the Word Stew.” Read more
My Uncle Yehudi, Ravi Shankar & The Mystic East
Menuhin (left) and Shankar (right)
Album cover
By Lionel Rolfe
The death of Ravi Shankar last week made much mention of his close friendship with the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, who happened to be my uncle, with whom he made three albums, “East Meets West” in the ‘50s before Shankar hooked up with the Beatles.
Yehudi says that George Enesco, who was one of Yehudi’s earliest teachers, could perform great feats with all kinds of music. He could play any opera, symphony or chamber piece “in the most inspired fashion on the piano using various auxiliary means such as whistles, grunts and singing to convey the full impact and breadth of the score.” He orchestrated the horns with his grunts, the violins with his singing and whistles. Read more
THE SECOND COMING OF A SILENT FILM STAR
Baby Peggy
By Bob Vickrey
When I received a phone call late last year, there was no mistaking the rich and resonant voice of my longtime friend Diana.
She was calling me from Northern California to tell me she had been invited to make a special appearance at the Turner Classic Movie Film Festival in Los Angeles. She wanted to make sure we arranged some time to spend together while she was in town. I informed her that I would try to work her into my very busy (retirement) schedule, which in turn, triggered that deeply intoxicating laugh I had remembered so well through the years.
My 94-year old friend, Diana Serra Cary, has seemingly lived three distinct lives. She was once a child movie star who earned millions of dollars in the 1920s. She later enjoyed a long career as a bookseller, and then while in her early sixties, launched a successful career as a writer and author. Read more
Reflections on Gnosticism
Han Solo : Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match
for a good blaster at your side, kid.
Luke Skywalker: You don’t believe in the Force, do you?
Leslie Evans
Ancient Gnosticism: Traditions and Literature. Birger A. Pearson. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007. 362 pp.
The Gnostic Bible: Gnostic Texts of Mystical Wisdom from the Ancient and Medieval Worlds. Willis Barnstone and Marvin Meyer, eds. Boston and London: Shambhala, 2009. 880 pp.
Voices of Gnosticism . Miguel Conner. Dublin: Bardic Press, 2011. 225 pp.
Forbidden Faith: The Gnostic Legacy, from the Gospels to the Da Vinci Code . Richard Smoley. Harper San Francisco, 2006, 244 pp.
William Blake's "Elohim Creating Adam." Blake, a kind of Gnostic, believed that lower angels created the Earth, while the true God was very far away.
Gnosticism, the Hellenistic mystery religion centered in Alexandria, Egypt, predated and then merged with Christianity, only to be rejected as heresy and violently suppressed. Gnosis is merely the Greek for knowledge, and Gnosticism – more or less, the Knowers – was a coinage that dated only from commentary literature in English in the seventeenth century. The Gnostics, to begin with a single one of their characteristics, rejected the Christian idea that salvation could be achieved by faith, as well as the Greek ideas that grew into materialism. They instead claimed that there was a special secret knowledge that, if sought and learned, could allow the spirit to escape the physical body and return after death to a remote realm of nonphysical existence. 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.
