The Misadventures Of Ari Mendelsohn
By LIONEL ROLFE
This is the first chapter from the picaresque novel by author and journalist LIONEL ROLFE, which recounts the sexual and political travails of the irascible, blacklisted title character, a reporter still harboring his besieged idealistic belief in humanity’s innate goodness and America’s dubious potential for good amid a reality of avarice, pragmatism, cynicism, and materialism. Read more
A Blast On Broadway
By Lionel Rolfe, Nigey Lennon & Paul Greenstein
This is a chapter from “Bread And Hyacinths: The Rise and Fall of Utopian Los Angeles,” specifically about the bombing of the Los Angeles Times in 1910. The book is available on Amazon’s Kindle Store for iPhones, iPads, Kindles, personal computers and the like. The Times was demolished Oct. 1, 1910. This event of a century ago had a profound impact on Los Angeles and the entire country. So over the next year, Public Works Improvisational Theater is creating a series of collaborative arts projects with input from many artists. Through the singing of ballads, dramas, speeches, words, music and the visual arts, we want to bring that time back to people so they will understand the times we live in now. Thus, this Oct. 1, 2010, we will kick off our year long celebration with drama, literature and music at Wordspace in the Atwater District of Los Angeles at 3191 Casitas Avenue, unit 156, at 7:30 p.m. An exact date has not been established for an even larger event at the historic Alexandria Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, 501 S. Spring St. You can follow and communicate with us on Facebook at “TIMES BOMB” or at http://www.publicworksimprov.com/. Read more
Freddy’s Feed and Read
By Leslie Evans
Mark Watkins, the last owner of Freddy's Feed and Read, 1998
This is about a place I never saw, and which has been gone for twelve years. Even longer ago, back in my Marxist days, in New York in the early seventies I was editor of a monthly magazine called the International Socialist Review. In 1973 we claimed a circulation of 6,851, a bit less than half from subscriptions and the rest listed as dealers and counter sales. The truth about this last is that almost all of the bundles went to branches of the Socialist Workers Party around the country and very few to bookstores. Now and then I would go downstairs in the party’s Manhattan headquarters, where Flax Hermes, the blond athletic business manager, would show me the order lists. Among the handful of nonparty orders one stood out. It was called Freddy’s Feed and Read. The name was odd enough but it was located in the unlikely town of Missoula, Montana. Read more
ABBEY ROAD: Some Good Memories
By LIONEL ROLFE
The Abbey Road EMI Studio in London, no doubt the most famous recording studio in the world, has been in the news a lot recently, so I thought I would wait for a few weeks to pass so I could tell my memories of the place without the contamination of trendiness.
I spent some time at London’s legendary Abbey Road Studios in the early ’70s because my uncle, violinist Yehudi Menuhin, also known in England as Lord Yehudi Menuhin, was recording there. I’m sure he had been making recordings there probably since the ’30s. I think Yehudi by far had the biggest catalog in the EMI catalog, and many of them had been recorded there. Read more
Who Was The Real Hero Of The 1910 Bombing Of The Los Angeles Times?
By LIONEL ROLFE
Beginning in October, I will join with Lee Boek and Eric Vollmer of Public Works Improvisational Theater in presenting a series of salons and theatrical productions relating to the bombing of the Los Angeles Times and the almost successful candidacy of Job Harriman in becoming the socialist mayor of Los Angeles. He had already beaten the incumbent in a primary. Along with Nigey Lennon and Paul Greenstein, I penned the book “Bread And Hyacinths: The Rise and Fall of Utopian Los Angeles” which documents the story. That book is now available for your iPhone, iPad, iPod, Kindle or computer from Amazon’s Kindle bookstore. The book was optioned by Oscar-winning director and screenwriter Paul Haggis. Read more
The Mystic Pull Of Israel Is Very, Very Real – Honest
By LIONEL ROLFE
At a point in the mid-seventies, when some nefarious anti-Semitism was rearing its ugly head in the military – I forgot exactly what it was – I took my first trip to Israel. No doubt it had something to do with the oil companies. The trip raised the age old questions: What exactly is a Jew, anyway, and do his first loyalties lie with Israel?
Do all Jews share the same view of themselves and of the larger world? The anti-Semites, of course, see us as a monolithic group, and so do some Jews. But I think they are wrong – a judgment buttressed during my first visit to Israel some 40 years ago. Read more
Tales Of That Extraordinary Madman, Charles Bukowski
BY LIONEL ROLFE
IN 1972, when I saw fellow Los Angeles Free Press writer Charles Bukowski’s book in the window of a bookstore in West Hampstead in London, my first reaction was one of jealousy The book was called Notes of a Dirty Old Man, the same title as his column in the paper. It was a City Lights book, with Bukowski’s amazing pocked alcoholic face adorning its cover. I viewed Bukowski as only doing a limited shtick – he rarely came into the office himself, but I knew all about him because my friend Judy Lewellen, the city editor, used to go pick up the column. I guess I hadn’t understood how popular Bukowski was getting until I was confronted by a book display in London. Years later, I came to realize that this guy had paid far more dues in his life than I had. Read more
The Deep Dark Past Of An Elephant Oasis
By LIONEL ROLFE
A hundred million years or so ago, or perhaps far less by some estimates, the sea beds then under the ancient ocean were thrust up into the heavens, and thus was the Sierra born. The cataclysmic rise left the eastern side of the mountain range rocky and steep and sheer. The western side is the older side, and the land is more gentle and sloping beneath the dwindling glacier at the top of Kiersarge Pass.
Actually, the mountain range is still young, compared to the Rockies in the center of the country and the Adirondacks in the east. The Sierra are still being formed, thrusting upward at a rapid rate – geologically speaking. Read more
EXCLUSIVE: The Bizarre Relationship Of Frank Zappa & Lionel Rolfe Is Revealed
by Nigey Lennon
If you’re reading this, it’s likely you’re familiar with Lionel Rolfe, co-publisher of Boryanabooks (with his lovely wife, the eponymous Boryana Rolfe). You’ve probably read his various musings on literature, politics, and classical music — with a decided emphasis on “classical”. Coming as he does from a family of world-class classical musicians, Lionel has never been one to suffer rock ‘n roll fools gladly, nor find it in his heart to excuse the wretched excesses of popular culture. On the contrary: over the years, he has practically made a career out of thumbing his nose at pop icons of various stripes, from the Grateful Dead at their inception in ’60s San Francisco to the advent of punk music in the ’70s to whatever passing trend happened to be floating down the gutter in his artsy Silver Lake neighborhood a few minutes ago. He’s truly an egalitarian hater of anything with distorted guitars. Thus, being married to me, a purveyor of music that involves abusing guitars on occasion, must have been a sore trial to him, especially when I insisted on introducing him to Frank Zappa. Read more
Despite How It Looks Now, Obama Will Be Our Next Lincoln
By LIONEL ROLFE
Ultimately I think that Barak Obama will be considered one of the great presidents. He has the intellectual ability to see what the problems are and what might be done about them. That’s a big start, compared to the last president. There’s a problem, however. The nation is awash in religious fervor and a growing worship of ignorance, not unlike the Middle East and too many other parts of the world. This is not the way to deal with the future. 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.
