Lionel Rolfe Meets & Greets James Ellroy, The Best Living L.A. Writer
Lionel Rolfe was introduced by mutual friends to James Ellroy, author of “American Tabloid” and “L.A. Confidential” and other such books at Vroman’s bookstore in Pasadena. Rolfe apologized for not including Ellroy in his book “Literary L.A.,” but promised if he ever does another edition, Ellroy will make the cut.
No One
No one marched in the streets
When they killed the electric car
We did not want one
We wanted gasoline
We shoved that nozzle
In the tank
OH, it felt so good
Like a spike in the arm
That rush you could taste in your gums
That full tank feeling
Knowing
Now, I can go wherever I want Read more
Lorraine Belcher Chamberlain, Frank Zappa’s First Girlfriend, Reviews “Being Frank”
Here is a review of Nigey Lennon’s book“Being Frank: My Time with Frank Zappa” by Lorraine Belcher Chamberlain, who was famously close to Frank Zappa. It appears on Punk Globe:
—————
I am the girl who was living with Frank Zappa when we were arrested for pornography and suspected sex perversion. I was 19. This is hardly anything a person would willingly list on their resume, but since I continued to have a relationship with Frank until the year before his death it gives me a unique perspective from which to write a few words about Nigey Lennon’s book, “Being Frank-My Time With Frank Zappa” which is now an e-book available on Amazon.com and Scribd. Since I had read it over two months ago, I took it along with me to re-read this week on a trip downtown. Sitting quietly on the subway I noticed the woman across from me glaring and rolling her eyes. Frank provoked outrage most of his life, but it seems the author’s photo of herself sitting on a toilet on the back of the book (an obvious homage to Frank’s own Potty Poster) follows in that tradition. Read more
On The Black Sea Or By The Pacific, People Sing & Dance Their Way Into Delerium
In Varna on the Black Sea, a dance troupe puts on a show of Bulgarian folkdancing. Read more
THE BIG EVENT AT THE GEFFEN PLAYHOUSE: GET ALL THE GRUBBY DETAILS & REAL LOWDOWN HERE
AUTHORS AT THE GEFFEN — The three authors who hopefully provoked and even entertained an audience at Red Hen Press’ night at the Geffen Playhouse on Nov. 16 included, from left, Marc Acito, Annie La Ganga and Lionel Rolfe. Acito is the author of “The Gospel According to Marc” and “The Attack of the Theater People.” Acito, a regular NPR commentator, was funny and thought provoking with descriptions of his experiences as a house painter and the deaths of the people whose homes he worked on. Annie La Ganga, a performance artist and prose poet whose “Stoners and Self Appointed Saints,” is a discovery of Red Hen Press, did a kind of surreal and literary strip tease, describing her feelings of making love while she imagined herself to be a mermaid. Rolfe did his usual, talking about Thomas Mann and Arnold Schoenberg, among other such ponderous things.
Boryanabooks.com Makes People Sing & Dance
ALTHOUGH IN THIS CASE, IT WAS A LITTLE MORE COMPLICATED THAN THAT. IT WASN’T JUST BORYANABOOKS. THE SKY, THE MOUNTAINS, AN UNMOURNED FIRE & ONE IMPORTANT BIRTHDAY WERE ALSO INVOLVED.
Sallie Cruise, the beautiful spouse of the august Theo ten Brummelaar, associate director of the Center for High Angular Resolution Astronomy at Mt. Wilson, wasn’t just celebrating to the Boryanabooks.com beat. It was also her birthday. Still, as she sang and danced and opened gifts from those she loved, she was not unaffected by the presence of some of the website’s most ardent proponents and supporters. 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.
