Honey Goes to Pittsburg
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
Here I lay me down to sleep
To wait the coming morrow,
Perhaps success, perhaps defeat,
And everlasting sorrow.
Let come what will, I’ll try it on,
My condition can’t be worse;
And if there’s money in that box
‘Tis munny in my purse.”
(1878 poem by Black Bart, a Concord elementary school teacher, at the site of one of his stage coach robberies, that one on the road to Oroville)
Honey explains why we have the Silver Lake neighborhood in Los Angeles
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
Today’s Libertarians would have found utopia in early American-occupied Los Angeles. Americans – including among them new American citizens from Europe — stepped into the Mexican system of public and common lands and transformed the land through private entrepreneurship. Speculators created “Ivanhoe Town,” the boundaries of which roughly correspond to the Silver Lake district, towards the end of that free market idyll. The Kenilworth tract adjoined, and that is now partly Los Feliz and partly Griffith Park. Also, there were other tracts that adjoined the Ivanhoe area: Golden Gates, Childs, Edendale. Today’s Silver Lake neighborhood was to remain, however, mostly grazing land until the 1920s.
The early speculators acquired the former rancho land that comprised much of “Ivanhoe Town” because of the 1851 California Land Claims Act, which led to the former Mexican citizens’ loss of the ranchos that had thrived through peonage labor; that is, Indian labor that was close to slavery. The Americans also used “free” Indian labor to build their capitalist city.
Rancho property often became the property of the rancheros’ lawyers, who sold the land to real estate speculators. American property owners voluntarily taxed themselves to build roads, and speculators financed a complex system of privately owned interurban railways so that prospective buyers could reach home sites. The Feliz family daughters sold off some of the land on the Feliz Rancho for $1 an acre to the family attorney and the son transferred most of the rest to him when he died, perhaps for legal fees incurred in claiming the rancho in American courts. Read more
Honey on the long narrow road
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
Once upon a time, or as the Turks sometimes begin their stories,
“There was once and there was not (once upon a time), many were faithful to God. Inside past time when straw was a cradle, when the camel was the town crier, when the flea was a barber, when I was pushing my mother’s cradle, and the cradle said ‘tinger minger.’”
In that straw cradle time when the flea was a barber, I lived in the village of Degirmindere on the Gulf of Iznit.
Iznit is the Turkish name for what had been Nicea, which is where the Nicean Creed was developed. In 1331, Orhan captured Nicea from the Byzantines. I had memorized the Nicean Creed in Bible studies when I was a child at the Silver Lake Presbyterian Church.
There were cherry trees and hazlenut trees surrounding Degirmendire. When the gypsy women harvested the fruit, I sent my children – then about four and six years old, down to the orchards. The gypsy women filled their aprons with cherries and hung cherries from their ears. In the early spring, the gypsies sold cucumbers, parsely, later artichokes and eggplants, in the marketplace. Thirty years later, Degirmendire was the epicenter of the Marmara earthquake and almost completely destroyed. Read more
Honey Sees Gatsby in 3-D
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
“It’s like an amusement park!” Cries a visitor to Gatsby’s estate in the fictional town of Little Egg opposite Big Egg where the object of his passion lived on Long Island. In the recent film, the house is magnificent — in the book it’s based on a Hôtel de Ville in Normandy — but the visitor’s exclamation describes Great Gatsby in 3-D itself: the current movie is quite like an amusement park ride, the high point of which is when Myrtle Wilson’s body hurtles against the car windshield.
There are also two on-line video games of the novel.
Fitzgerald based the locations on Cow Neck and Great Neck, two peninsulas of Nassau County that border Manhasset Bay, where he and his wife Zelda lived in 1922. He wrote by day and partied with Hollywood heroes, Broadway stars, and the “staid nobility” by night. He only got through three chapters in a year and a half. Read more
Honey thinks about dragons
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
I bought a bronze turtle good luck totem in Chinatown in San Francisco. The totem is comprised of a large turtle, and on her back is a little turtle. The big turtle has a dragon’s head and delightfully awful dragon feet stepping on coins. The totem will bring me prosperity and prestige.
A placard elsewhere in the store for a dragon said that in China, a dragon symbolizes good fortune. Dragons come from the sky. They make the rules.
Animal signs in Chinese astrology include the dragon along with the rabbit, rat, ox, tiger, snake, horse, goat, monkey, rooster, dog and pig.
If the Chinese animal signs were an IQ test, which one does not belong?
The English word “dragon” derives from Greek δράκων (drákōn), “dragon, serpent of huge size, water-snake.” Dragons feature in European, Australian and Asian myths. The word “dragon” (Hebrew: tannin) is used throughout the Old Testament, and most directly translates as “sea or land monsters.” In the Book of Job, the author describes great creatures likes the mega fauna that used to roam the earth. Read more
Honey Searches The Eyes Of Writers
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
Yesterday I reread the last of the Henning Mankell mystery series about a Swedish police detective Kurt Wallender. Wallender is the same age as his creator: sixty-five now, sixty when he wrote the last book. Wallender is often too fat and doesn’t exercise enough. Mankell is often fat.
This is the third time I read the last Wallender. I picked open the seams of Mankell’s book this time instead of reading for pleasure. Threaded through the novel are Wallender’s attempts to disguise Mankell. Underlying the extensive research into Russian/Swedish and Russian/American espionage is Mankell’s fear of death. The character anticipates living to the age of 75 before he descends into the blackness of Alzheimer’s. He looks forward to taking half a sleeping pill to get through consciousness of death. Read more
Honey walks in Mt. Diablo
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
The soundtrack to Conquered is the sound of individual car engines not the roar of multitudes like the LA soundtrack. All of the engines run well. The owners maintain their cars. Everyone knows how to check her oil including for the first time me. Entire enclaves of mechanics work on side streets off Main in Walnut Creek and someone will always give you a lift home to wait until he returns. In the shopping malls – not real malls but 1950s stores on parking lots – auto supply stores sell fan belts, wipers, polish, transmission fluid and oil.
Just before dusk, an owl hoots. At dusk two dogs at opposite ends of blocks bark, probably at each other because they have nothing else to do in Conquered. If there are intruders, I haven’t seen them but I once saw a homeless man with a shopping cart, and the man who runs an antique store only a mile from me said there are schizophrenics only they don’t come out much. No one sleeps on the sidewalk. No one lives on the canal. It’s fenced and there’s a sign saying the water is public drinking water, which is a horrible thought because the water looks black. At dusk, the sky turns orange now, pierced by the bare branches and twigs of large trees. Read more
Honey goes to Lakeport
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
Let us begin this story with Astarte, who is a dog living in San Felipe, Mexico on the coast of the Sea of Cortez. To get to the story, however, I have to tell you the backstory.
The congregation of the Rainbow Church of Living Light had prayed together the night before I responded to their ad for a lawyer. One of them said to me later that, when you need something, you open yourself to the universe. You receive what you need.
What I need is an income. I am open to the universe.
Two members of the church cut down and helped me haul away most of an old expansive yucca on the northeast corner of my property line. The yucca is a species of evergreen with tough, sword-shaped leaves known colloquially in the Midwest United States as ghosts in the graveyard. Its sharp leaves also drive off money. Read more
Honey visits Los Angeles
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
Honey visits Los Angeles
The cabbie asked me which way I wanted him to go. I asked him to go down Willow Pass Road to the 650 and take the last exit before the bridge because otherwise we’d get trapped in Pacheco and then in Martinez side streets. I didn’t say I once thought I could easily walk to the Best Western from the train station in the rain at Thanksgiving and it took two hours. I was glad to have seen so much of the city but didn’t want to do it again.
We passed full parking lots at the strip malls. I asked why no one was working. He said that’s a good question.
Concord is more conservative than Berkeley and Oakland. The political spectrum moves from Tea Party and Evangelicals all the way to mainstream Republican. The driver said after hesitating that he was glad Obama was getting more time to fix things.
We approached the bridge, and he turned down the road that leads to the train station. Read more
Honey examines old maps and arrives at a mildly surprising conclusion
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
The inquiry began when I wrote Lionel to ask where California photographer Edward Weston (1886-1958) lived.
One of Weston’s pupils, Ansel Adams wrote: “Weston is, in the real sense, one of the few creative artists of today. He has recreated the matter-forms and forces of nature; he has recreated the matter-forms and forces of nature; he has recreated the matter-forms and forces of nature; he has made these forms eloquent of the fundamental unity of the world. His work illuminates man’s inner journey toward perfection of the spirit.”
Honey believes this photo is of the Weston cottage in Atwater. She is convinced or convinced herself he lived on pretty much farm land in 1909 in this cottage, which, for all she knows, may still be there on Perlita, which she believes they called Weston Avenue and that everything about his living in "Tropico" is mistaken and that he lived in Atwater, near Los Feliz Boulevard and the Los Angeles River.
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.
