“Literary L.A.”: The Movie! See the Facebook Page
Check out this Facebook page for the movie “Literary L.A.,” in production now. It’s based on Lionel Rolfe’s book “Literary L.A.”
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Literary-LA/115509071864686?sk=wall
Roots in the Garden of California’s Bohemia Will Be Celebrated Sunday
By LIONEL ROLFE
If walls really could talk, the hand-built stone castle just off the Avenue 43 exit in Highland Park of the Pasadena Freeway would be the mother lode of California bohemian history.
Charles Fletcher Lummis, L.A.’s “renaissance man” from the turn of the last century, began building El Alisal in 1897. Later, he liked to throw soirees on Saturday nights there among the sycamores on the Arroyo Seco. That is the memory people will try to recreate at El Alisal and along the arroyo when artists, poets, musicians and dancers celebrate “Charles Lummis Day” on Sunday, June 5. Read more
$4 Gas Is Only the Beginning
By Leslie Evans
Republicans and Democrats are scrambling in a blame game over the skyrocketing price of gasoline, which is rapidly approaching the historic highs of the 2008 oil shock. As of April 29 pump prices for regular had topped $4 in thirteen states and crested $3.90 in eleven more. The April 23 Christian Science Monitor carried the headline “Obama faces trouble with $4 gasoline.” The story led off: “Polls show Americans blame Democrats more than Republicans for $4 gasoline prices, and President Obama’s poll numbers show it.” Read more
My Hero, Ed Asner
By LIONEL ROLFE
Twenty five years ago, my mentor and hero was a city editor of television fame. The actor’s name was Ed Asner and he played a city editor named Lou Grant, which was also the name of the television series. Asner played the role so well I came to believe he made manifest the two real editors I had worked for who taught me every thing I knew about the journalism racket.
One was a wild Irishman, Dana McGaugh, at the Livermore Independent, a small town paper in Northern California. The other was Scott Newhall, editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, then the major newspaper in Northern California. Read more
Photographer Phil Stern Opens His Very Own Gallery In Downtown L.A.
Here’s Phil Stern’s famous picture of Marilyn Monroe, looking scared. Read more
The “Opposable Thumb” Will Be Celebrated In Downtown Los Angeles
By LIONEL ROLFE
When I was in my early teens in the 1950s in Long Beach I learned where human wealth really comes from.
There was this fellow named Dr. Fitzgibbon who was doing top secret research on dolphins for the U.S. Navy who used to come over to my parents’ house. He wasn’t supposed to talk about his work because it was regarded as top secret. But he was consumed with excitement over the knowledge that dolphins had bigger and he believed more powerful brains than humans and their language had much more complex syntax. Read more
As Landfills Decay Here, Elsewhere In The World They’re Coping Better
By ANDREW PERRY
The United States is no longer the leader in waste disposal technology. Like many other technological advancements, the country finds itself behind nations like China, Japan and Germany. Considering the country’s current recession, both local governments and private businesses struggle to move forward in relieving the threat of pollution caused by landfills. In Southern California, the state’s largest facility, Puente Hills Landfill is closing, and the available land to take on the excess garbage is limited. This trend is indicative of what many communities throughout the nation are facing. This paper will study the different methods used in waste disposal, examine some of the most innovative strategies in other countries, and finally, analyze the crisis that California may be facing in the near future. Read more
VLADIMIR RODZIANKO: I Meet The Ghost Of The Real Rasputin
By Lionel Rolfe
I first met Vladimir Rodzianko nearly 40 years ago. He lived in a house in Chiswick outside of London, where his father also lived, one of the most famous of Russian Orthodox priests. Father and son had the same name.
The elder Rodzianko had been born Vladimir Rodzianko in the Ukraine in 1915 and he had an amazing study where he did his work, so beloved by many in the Orthodox community. It was a small cubbyhole under the stairs and it was filled from floor to ceiling with icons. Rodzianko, who later went to San Francisco where he became His Grace the Right Reverend Bishop Basil Rodzianko in the Orthodox Church in America, at that time was the most prominent Russian Orthodox leader in England. This was in part because he broadcast religious commentary to his home country during the Cold War on the BBC, and it was probably no coincidence that the junior Vladimir became the Russian voice of the BBC in addition to being a composer of some notoriety. Read more
How the LA Times After a Hundred-Year Love Affair with the City of Vernon Decided It Really Hated the Place All Along
A more balanced look at the industrial town’s history and at some of the (often ill considered) proposals for solving the Vernon problem.
By Leslie Evans
Vernon, California, is an odd little town. Five square miles of meat packing plants, warehouses, and industrial enterprises where 50,000 people work during the day while only 91, belonging to just 23 families, live at night. There are only 26 homes within the city’s borders, virtually all occupied by city employees or relatives of the long-serving members of the city council or other city officials.
Vernon lies on the southeast side of Downtown Los Angeles, bounded roughly by Washington Blvd. on the north and Slauson on the south. Its main arteries are Santa Fe Avenue, Soto Street, and Bandini Blvd., the last best known for the fertilizer company of the same name. Read more
Huntington Exhibits Honors A Madman
By LIONEL ROLFE
For me, one of the great unanswered puzzles about Charles Bukowski, the bard of San Pedro, was his love of classical music. I assumed it was because he was born in Europe. And after a visit to the “Poet on the Edge” exhibit at the Huntington Library in San Marino, I can say most probably that was the case.
This was one of many riddles about the great poet and novelist the exhibit answered. 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.
