A Great & Special Concert
By LIONEL ROLFE
& PHOTOS BY SUSAN MCRAE
Photog Susan McRae captured Sonji well
Sonji Kimmons came–one of the greatest of the unheralded blues pianists and singers around town–looked out over her audience at MJs, the bar in Silver Lake next door to the Trader Joe’s last Saturday, and played her heart out. Read more
More Poems By Michael Cornier
FOUR QUESTIONS
Victory, defeat,
Sans hands, sans feet,
Win, lose,
The truth buried in the news,
Overcast or sunny weather,
Who forged these chains to which we’re tethered?
Euphemisms, rhetoric,
The saint reviled as heretic,
Ambition, coalitions,
Beware the man with a mission,
Find the child bloodied beneath the rubble,
What does it take to prick your bubble? Read more
Two Poems By Michael Cormier
IT’S A WONDERFUL COUNTRY
Immersed in it, rehearsed in it,
Everyone’s well versed in it,
Railing and hailing their flag waving, hand shaking, back slapping, good old party plan.
Bigger than you, better than you,
Glad to undo your fetters for you,
By railing and hailing their flag waving, hand shaking, back slapping, good old party plan. Read more
Bygone Days in West Adams
Leslie Evans
My wife Jennifer and I have lived in the old West Adams section of Los Angeles, not far from the University of Southern California, for almost twenty-five years. Once, from the 1880s through World War I, this was a prized neighborhood for the affluent. It faded when Beverly Hills was opened in 1917. Despite the hundreds of architect-designed mansions, the area decayed in the Depression, when many of the grand old homes were cut up into boarding houses, with heavy-duty locks cut into the bedroom doors. When, in Shelley v. Kramer in 1948, the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed racial housing covenants, the area turned mostly black. The Santa Monica 10 Freeway was the white bureaucracy’s revenge. Its route was chosen to slash its way through the center of the most concentrated stretch of historic two-story mansions, the pride of the black middle class. Thereafter the freeway marked the dividing line between L.A. proper and the feared South Central. In the 1990s Latino immigration again transformed West Adams, as Spanish-speakers became the plurality ethnicity.
Interspecies Friendships
Humans are rapidly exterminating most of the larger animal species on our planet. Here are some photos to remind us what it can be like to share affection with other animals.
Forwarded to us by Kathleen Rosenblatt. NOTE: You can click within each photo to see the next one, or use the arrows at the bottom, but the full screen icon on the right doesn’t work and it doesn’t run as an automatic slide show.
If you have Microsoft PowerPoint or the PowerPoint Viewer and want to see this show full screen (much better!), Click Here
Poems For Labor Day
Every Day Is An Act of Resistance: Selected Poems by Carol Tarlen (Mongrel Empire Press) edited by Julia Stein and David Joseph is the first poetry book by Carol Tarlen, a San Francisco radical poet who died in June 2004. Jack Hirschman in his introduction says that in North Beach in the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s, Tarlen was writing some of the best poetry around.
Detroit poet Jim Daniels says about Tarlen’s work, “This book is simply a treasure. Carol Tarlen’s poems bring the human and political together in rich, heart-felt ways….”
Janet Zandy says this about Tarlen: “Tough girl, quiet Quaker, brilliant poet, worker for the working-class…. Her luminous poetic voice is large, direct, high-steppin, and justice-driven. Go ahead … read her poetry, teach it to your children.
Julia Stein wrote an obituary/biography, “Death of a Poet,” which was first published in Pemmican and then on the blog caroltarlenlives. If you want more background information about Tarlen’s life, work, and death
The book can be ordered from the Mongrel Empire Press website:
http://www.mongrelempire.org/Mongrel_Empire_Press/Poetry.html
THE LIBERAL BOSS
It was, finally, all she wanted
to be alone
in the back conference room
her empty desk mocking
her silent telephone
her supervisor’s anxious face
desperate to delegate
a rush job xeroxing
twenty-three travel vouchers
and their supporting documentation
A Telling Sign, Photo by Susan McRae
A photo from Monterey. It speaks for itself.
Photog Susan McRae captures images of “counterculture” icon Art Kunkin, who is now an alchemist and plans to live forever.
Photog Susan McRae Captures An Illusion From The Past
Photog Susan McRae captures an image from the past.
A faded image amidst the gritty urban truth
Photog Susan McRae: She’s Always On The Scene When Folks Are Mad
One recent Monday, a man climbed up to the top of a police radio tower. Cops were on the scene in minutes, but it took hours to figure out how to get him down. Click for larger version.
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.
