Is Obama Going To Force Leftists To The Center?
By LIONEL ROLFE
A few weeks back, word got out that Obama’s been feeling tired. After a win by a rather peculiar former male model named Scott Brown of the Massachusetts senate seat of the late Ted Kennedy, a lot of the rest of us got tired. Especially when it was immediately followed by the Supreme Court giving away the store to the corporations. So the fact that Kennedy’s going to be replaced by a bank and insurance company megaphone shouldn’t be surprising. Read more
You Can’t Always Sing & Dance: Memories Of A Particularly Special Person And Friend
By LIONEL ROLFE
December 23, 2009
My friend Karen Kaye, executive director of Connections for Children in Santa Monica, a non-profit provider of babysitting and other services for single working mothers, is dying. She’ll probably be gone by the time you read this. Read more
Wallowing in Pessimism
By Lionel Rolfe
It’s been nearly 20 years since my fateful meeting with Yehudi Menuhin in the Pasadena Hilton Hotel. In case you don’t remember the name, Yehudi was one of the two greatest violinists of the 20th century, the other being Jascha Heifetz. Yehudi was also regarded as the greatest musical prodigy since Mozart. He began his career in San Francisco in the ’20s, in brilliant performances as a youngster of six, immediately drawing international acclaim. He was also my uncle. Read more
Interview with Nigey Lennon
A Surreal Nigey With Someone Else
IN JULY, WE INTERVIEWED NIGEY LENNON, AUTHOR OF THE BEST BOOK ON FRANK ZAPPA Nigey Lennon’s Being Frank: My Time with Frank Zappa occupies a fascinating and lively spot in the world of musical autobiography. When it was originally published it was extravagantly praised by many readers and critics, on the one hand, and at the same time snarkishly derided by some who questioned its legitimacy. All quibbling aside, the book remains the only firsthand, up close-and-personal memoir of the late Frank Zappa, iconoclastic composer, guitarist, and social commentator. In light of the fact that www.boryanabooks.com will soon be offering a completely revised and updated e-book edition of Being Frank, we decided to shoot a few questions at Ms. Lennon, who has lived in New York since 2000. Read more
Forget Trying to Make Nice with the Priests and Kings
By LIONEL ROLFE
Dear Mr. Obama,
Please let me remind you that there are times you just can’t be bipartisan. Not with the priests and kings who you can always count on standing against progress. In the midst of battle against these same foes, a couple of our nation’s founding fathers took strong note of that. “These are the times that try men’s soul,” Tom Paine wrote in “Common Sense.” Thomas Jefferson said that, “the tree of liberty must be replenished every ten to 20 years with the blood of patriots and the blood of tyrants.” Read more
War, Wealth, Empire & The Obama Presidency
By LIONEL ROLFE
I am not a warmonger by nature. I never was in the military, except for a couple of military schools I was sent to as a kid. One of the schools, Urban Military Academy (now Brentwood Academy on Sunset Boulevard in a ritzy part of West Los Angeles), was for spoiled rich kids. The other, Mt. Lowe in Altadena, was tough and mean, run by a real Army sergeant, who was big into discipline. Most of the students were at best middle class – there because their parents were getting divorced, or they just wanted to get them housed somewhere else. 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.
