Honey Speaks Her Piece On Mao & John Dewey
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
In, “Honey Begins Her Talk on John Dewey,” Boryanabooks, October 1, 2010, I began my essay on John Dewey’s influence in both American and Chinese utopian city design.
In “Honey Talks About Experiments in Urban Design at Llano del Rio,” Boryanabooks, November 1, 2010, I wrote about connections between Llano del Rio, the Jersey Homesteads created under the New Deal and the Maoist planning design of new towns that conserve energy. Urban Planning student Tammy Williams described the New Jersey utopia in “Honey Gives a Guest A Chance to Talk About a New Jersey Utopia,” Boryanabooks, December 30, 2010.)
A Conservative website lists Dewey’s Democracy and Education (1916) among the top ten most harmful books in the world – five points more harmful on their scale than Das Kapital. What’s the most odd thing about right-wing animosity towards John Dewey is that almost no one reads his books anymore. I was able to get Dewey material out of the CSUN library for two months without anyone asking me to return it. There was no long list of readers reserving those books. Read more
Honey on J. Edgar & Clint Eastwood
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
Anything by or involving Clint Eastwood with the exceptions of The Bridges of Madison County (1995) and Space Cowboys (2000) strikes me as odd and unpleasant. His acting in Bridges was odd and fine because he and Meryl Streep transcended a very bad book to make a good movie about love and duty. Space Cowboys was all right because Tommy Lee Jones is in it, and I’ve been in love with Tommy Lee Jones since the Eyes of Laura Mars (1978).
To this day, I loathe his roles in the Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns, which made him famous after Eastwood initially bombed in Hollywood. If I even hear the refrain from the musical score for any of the Man with No Name trilogy, I leave. Every Which Way But Loose (1978) is entirely horrible except for his pet orangutan Clyde.
I didn’t even like Eastwood’s Gran Torino (2008), in spite of the fact it was about an old racist’s spiritual redemption because I had the unsettling feeling that Clint Eastwood had been an old racist himself until he married Dina Ruiz and they got into ersatz environmentalism in Carmel. Read more
He Walked By Night
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
The Los Angeles Police Historical Society presented He Walked By Night at the theater in Barnsdall Park. About thirty people attended. No one who doesn’t browse the LPHS website – and not that many people do – knew about the film.
The detective novel rose in response to the fragmentation of human life after the Industrial Revolution. The detective connects the disparate parts of the city with the thread of his moral code. Raymond Chandler was this one of this city’s truest poets: his Philip Marlowe with his hard-boiled detective office on Hollywood Boulevard is a knight-errant drawn from the King Arthur myth. Film noir grows from the detective novel and plunges into the underside of urban life and its moral chaos, which reflects the disintegration of society during and in the years that closely followed World War II.
Charles Bukowski is this city’s urban poet without the ethical component. His writing is about what happens when everything gets screwed. This city provides a canvas of possibilities for getting fucked, and Bukowski explored as many of those he could. Read more
Honey Tells The True Story Of Parks
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
In 1930, the Citizens Committee of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce commissioned a regional plan for parks, beaches and playgrounds. The Olmsted-Bartholomew plan envisioned connected greenways that allowed easy access to recreation for all residents. (Eden by Design: the 1930 Olmsted-Bartholomew Plan, Greg Hise and William Deverell)
Landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted co-designed Central and Prospect Park in New York, the south portion of Chicago’s “Green Necklace” boulevard, Boston’s “Green Necklace,” the country’s first and oldest coordinated system of public parks and parkways in Buffalo, New York; the country’s oldest state park, the Niagara Reservation in Niagara Falls, New York, and many other lovely areas.
Frederick Olmsted, Jr. and his brother John C. Olmsted were the landscape architects who contributed to the Los Angeles plan. They were best known for their wildlife conservation plans, which included projects in Yosemite and the Everglades. Read more
Honey Travels Down Memory Lane
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
The terminus of the Glendale Freeway (now called the 2 Freeway), which is on one side the anus that disgorges automobiles and at the other the maw that engorges automobiles, blights Glendale Boulevard all the way to Angelus Temple. I’ll call that area “the Corridor” because I don’t know if there is an official or popular name for it.
In 1963, the State created the legal infrastructure for the 2 as a freeway that went from the Antelope Valley to Santa Monica via Avenue 36. The 2 Freeway presently crosses 36 and Fletcher Drive in Glassell Park. Read more
Honey Visits The First Jewish Cemetery In Los Angeles
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
I didn’t really visit the first Jewish cemetery in Los Angeles. Sue Borden (Sue and Ron Emler co-authored The Ghosts of Edendale) took me there today, and I looked at the State Historic Marker that memorializes what used to be there. The cemetery itself isn’t there anymore. It hasn’t been there since 1905. Read more
Honey Reveals The Sordid Tale Of A Rape In Elysian Park
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
In 1902, Walter Barlow built Barlow Respiratory Hospital on 25 acres of meadowland next to the city-owned Elysian Park on Chavez Ravine Road. He liked the location because the surrounding configuration of hills provided for clean air and the neighboring Elysian Park (created in 1886) seemed to insure against any future development.
In 1886, the City established its Department of Parks and Recreation with three parks: the Plaza downtown, La Plaza Abaja – now Pershing Square – and Elysian Park. Read more
Honey Reveals The Truth About Little Red Riding Hood
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.) Honey van Blossom
I will tell you the true story of Little Red Riding Hood.
The true story isn’t about our fear of wildness or our fear of sexuality — although it could have been that story and perhaps that’s the story behind the red cloak: red as in blood, the danger if nature, or blood as in menstrual blood. Little Red Riding Hood was not a child but menstruating.
The “Little” part comes from a mistranslation from the original in the Dutch Roodkapje. In Dutch, tje/pje/kje/je/etje..etc, are suffixes added to nouns/adjectives/adverbs, to make something sound small or to show intimacy. That suffix is called the diminutive. Roodkapje meant something like, “Dear” Red Hood. Read more
Honey Drives Up Baxter in Echo Park
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
When I was very small, my grandfather drove the Stalwart Studebaker downtown. My grandparents did not call each other by their names. Each called the other My Better Half.
My grandmother pulled up my dress and had me stand on the car’s running board – which was covered in rubber matting — and held my hands and I peed in the street whenever the need arose. Read more
Honey Talks About The Secret Of The Waterwheel
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
Today I walked with other elderly women in Elysian Park. There was snow on the San Gabriel Mountains. The scent of green weeds was evocative and for a moment I was a child again, because I grew up not far from where we walked, on the other side of the Los Angeles River.
At one place, we descended a steep dirt path through the brush into a small valley. I was happy. The action of descent made me happier. I remembered June 6, 1968, when I was 22 years old, and I said out loud “I descend.” 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.
