Honey walks in Black Diamond Regional Park
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
The East Bay’s relentless march of urban sprawl — the vast numbers of identical houses with similar lawns now decorated with fake orangey spider webs and fake tombstones, without stores or schools within walking distance, everything a drive somewhere, stoked by the freeway system, financed by taxpayers to enrich developers, climate destroying — is startlingly interrupted by its parks.
The suburban tracts gather at one end up against Mount Diablo State Park. Read more
The Death Of Honey’s Unusual Cousin, Peter
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
Honey van Blossom
I didn’t really meet my cousin Peter until I was 32. I had met him when I was a baby and he was nine. I know I was a baby because my grandfather drove car with running boards. When I had to pee, he slowed down and my grandmother pulled down my pants and made me stand on the running board. She held both my hands. “I hate diapers,” she said.
We camped in a forest and a squirrel sat on Peter’s shoulder.
I slightly met Peter when my aunt drove my mother, my evil little brother and me to Berkeley. The family used to live in Berkeley, at 66 Panorama Terrace, but they sold the house in 1938 when my father got his degree at the university and went to Mexico and camped in state parks. Around 1940, another uncle and his family and my grandparents shared a run-down duplex in Hollywood. That uncle taught at UCLA and was a member of the John Birch Society. My grandfather had a medical office on Kenmore. My father was a copywriter downtown. By the time I was born, they lived in two regular houses next to Forest Lawn. When my pregnant mother was taking a bath in the larger house, a truck came up the almost invisible path behind the house and crashed into the house. Read more
Adventures in the Hinterlands Continue
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
Honey van Blossom
Heat, crickets sawing love songs, hawks, turkey vultures, raccoons, poison oak, the side-blotched lizard, enormous oak trees sculpting a sky the Klein blue at the sun’s zenith and that becomes an improbable violet at nine o’clock in August makes up the first level.
The second level was comprised of the Chupcan (Concord) and the Volvan (Clayton). Both people spoke Bay Miwok.
Fr. Crespi, who created the narrative for the Spanish colonization of Los Angeles in 1769, passed through here in 1771. The Spanish soldiers called the area Monte de Diablo, which the Concord history website mistranslates as “devil’s thicket,” but which means of course the devil’s mountain. The Franciscans brought the Chupcan, and I suppose the Volvan, to the San Jose and San Francisco Missions by 1804.
The third level began in 1828. Don Salvio Pacheco petitioned the Mexican government for lands in the valley and received the “Monte del Diablo” land grant in 1834 to pasture 850 head of horned cattle, a flock of sheep and 30 head of horses. The 17,921-acre grant covered the valley from the Walnut Creek channel east to the hills and generally from the Mt. Diablo foothills north to the Bay. The Pacheco Adobe, center of his landholdings, is on Adobe Street in downtown Concord Read more
Honey Moves To The Suburbs
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
Honey van Blossom
Juan Morales thinks those who were born in the United States are the white people except for those he grew up with. Those who took him to Virginia from Guatemala when he was eighteen are the Mennonite people. Whenever Mennonites come to California, he drops whatever he’s doing and goes to visit with them, and sometimes he already knows them.
When he removes his cap, black hair as thick as brush sticks up, and then he smashes his cap back on his head. Juan siempre esta allegre. Nothing perturbs him. Whatever is wrong or broken, Juan will fix it. He fixed our leaning chimney with fourteen men who made chimneys without scaffolding, when it was our house. He fixed the ancient washer and dryer. He fixed the ceiling when a rat chewed through a hot water pipe. He found my engagement ring in the large descending back yard he had planted for me – this was before my husband took back the ring and my wedding band. He cannot fix my broken heart but he can drive the U-Haul through the Central Valley and fix the car dolly along the road without tools. Read more
Honey Demands Justice
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
Honey van Blossom
Barlow Hospital proposed changes to zoning, height and density regulations on the land at an entrance to Elysian Park that it has owned since 1902.
Walter Jarvis Barlow purchased 25 acres of meadowland next to the city-owned Elysian Park on Chavez Ravine Road for $7,500 from J. B. Lankershim for a tuberculosis hospital. Barlow convinced Lankershim to donate $1,000 back to him, and he received a $1,300 donation from Alfred Solano. The location seemed ideal because the surrounding hills provided for clean air and the neighboring Elysian Park seemed to insure against any future development.
Los Angeles did not adopt land use regulations called zoning until 1909 to 1915. San Francisco had earlier restricted dance halls, livery stables, slaughterhouses, saloons and pool halls. In 1885, New York state limited the height of tenements. In 1909, the United States Supreme Court upheld height restrictions in Boston in Welch v. Swasey 214 U.S. 919. In 1915, Hadacheck v. Sebastian, 239 U.S. 394, the United States Supreme Court upheld a city ban on brickyards. Although lower courts found zoning unconstitutional, the United States Supreme Court decision in Village of Euclid v. Amber Realty, 272 U.S. 365 (1926), has been consistently interpreted to mean that local government’s “police power” allows it regulate land so long as it is in the public interest to do so, although there is the Fifth Amendment/14th amendment prohibition against government taking property without just compensation. Read more
What is to be done, Honey?
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
Honey van Blossom
Solar Living Institute in Hopland
In 1754, Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote, in his Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men that private property — which could not have been imagined before the neolithic revolution – was the beginning of the end of the human race.
“The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said ‘This is mine’ and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or by filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: ‘Beware of listening to this imposter; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.’”
Marx and Engles called the hunter-gatherer form of communism “primitive communism,” which had no hierarchical social class structures or capital accumulation. Looking at the political and economic changes that evolved in response to agriculture, the enclosure acts, the industrial revolution, Marx and Engles concluded that scientific socialism meant the inevitable withering of the state as a product of social revolution. Read more
Honey Explores Echo Park Addresses
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
Lionel Rolfe’s remembrance of meeting Jake Zeitlin touches on Zeitlin’s arrival in Los Angeles from Texas in 1925. http://echopark.patch.com/articles/lionel-rolfe-remembering-echo-park-s-jake-zietlin-part-one.
When Zeitlin first moved to Los Angeles, he sold books at Bullock’s downtown. After that, he sold books from a valise, working from his home. He “found a foothold” in a converted hallway on Hope near Sixth Street. Then he moved to 705-1/2 Sixth Street.
Zeitlin’s first home in Los Angeles was on 1623 Landa. That portion of Landa is at the top of Echo Park Avenue. http://echopark.patch.com/articles/photo-essay-you-cant-get-there-from-here-landa-street#photo-5673050 Read more
Honey Writes About Carey McWilliams
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
I debated with an acquaintance about where a very-well known writer, journalist, editor, activist, historian and lawyer lived in Echo Park, so I researched the question and found that he lived in several places in Echo Park and Silver Lake.
Carey McWilliams ‘ friends included Jake Zeitlin, John Fante, Robinson Jeffers and H.L. Mencken. His first published book was a biography of Ambrose Bierce (1929).
In the 1930s, he worked with the ACLU and the National Lawyers Guild and represented workers, helped organize unions and guilds and served as a trial examiner for the National Labor Relations Board.
His Southern California: An Island on the Land (revised edition 1973) is the seminal book on injustice in Los Angeles and inspired the screenplay for Chinatown. His Factories in the Field (1939) shattered myths about Central Valley agriculture. The book condemns the politics and consequences of large-scale agribusiness. Read more
Honey looks up at The Unsheltered Chicken
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
I walked with friends towards Mac Arthur Park, once called Westlake Park down Alvarado, which was a noisy and dismal experience in glaring and pitiless sunlight.Along the route, I went into what I thought was a Japanese restaurant to buy a bottle of water.
Maybe it is a Japanese restaurant but it is a fast food restaurant with the calorie counts listed above the service counter. Noodles and chicken: 2,100 calories. Add a large fountain soda – 250 calories and a slice of pie – 600 calories. Most of the people inside the restaurant shouted episodically at someone invisible, and they weren’t wearing ear pods. If they eat there twice a day, the calorie load is about 6,000 calories a day. Perhaps this is a Mac Arthur Park anomaly: these particular residents need a lot of calories because they are homeless people and it gets cold at night outdoors. learned that two bean burritos were 2,000 calories. Read more
Honey Travels Back in Time to Belly-Button Hill
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
We live is the era of the Digital Revolution – the age of information. Yet, local, state and federal governmental decision-making may be reaching the apogee of its non-fact-based decision making. Some politicians decry the possibility human beings contribute to global warming. One candidate for the job of President claimed homosexuality leads to bestiality. We have a War Against Drugs that has led to greater real crime, greater addiction, destruction of agricultural land, and a lot of bloodshed. At least a tenth of our people at any time believe Ronald Reagan served in WWII (because he said so). I had a sobering conversation once with a psychologist who conducted group sessions with people who had been abducted by space aliens. One of my freshman students at a state university believed the human race is 200 years old. No one disagreed with her.Because of scientific advances, we can figure out how long people like us — people who have art and music and tell stories and sing songs and know they will die — have been around. We don’t think we know what it was they thought.
We catch glimpses through the very long tunnel of time of what our more distant ancestors thought. Muslims slaughter sheep at Ramadan. You may knock on wood when someone utters something about good fortune. You may cross your fingers for luck. You may have a rabbit’s foot for luck, and your children may hunt for Easter eggs. Some people wear crosses. The rose is a symbol of the Virgin Mary. 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.
