Honey Circles the Hathaway Gated Community
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
Garbutt House looms impressively on its summit over Silver Lake.
It is listed in the National Register of Historic Places (1987) at 1809 Apex Ave. in Silver Lake.
Only 100 families and their visitors are allowed to get into the Hathaway Estate, so not that many people can see Garbutt House. Although the streets in it are owned by the City of Los Angeles, and the streets that lead into it are owned by the City of Los Angeles, the people of the City of Los Angeles aren’t allowed in. Read more
Honey Climbs The Stairs Of Darkness
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
The term “the Commoners” derived from the ancient rights English peasants had in large areas of land called Commons to graze their animals, gather fire wood, and gather hay, and these rights are related to the common law right of all people to walk across privately owned land.
Between 1760 and 1820, village after village lost its common law rights. Marxists called these losses a case of class robbery. Henry VIII obtained laws that required any landless peasant to be put to work, and the consequent acts were the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and Capitalism. Read more
Honey Gives A Guest A Chance To Write About A New Jersey Utopia
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
Editor’s note: Honey is offering Tammy Williams-Anderson her column this month in order to learn that some tried to build a utopia in an unlikely place – New Jersey.
WAS THE HOMESTEADS OF ROOSEVELT A UTOPIA, AND WHAT HAPPENED TO IT?
From personal collection (no date): The home of the Fuchs family in Jersey Homesteads, Roosevelt, New Jersey. Photograph taken about 1941.
Urban Planning attracts idealists. Idealists are always looking for utopia – the opportunity to make improvements in the lives and environments of humans. As an adjective the word utopian is defined as,”Excellent, but existing only in fancy or theory; ideal.” Read more
Honey Talks About Experiments in urban design at Llano del Rio, the New Deal and Mao’s China
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
After the Southern Pacific Railroad reached Los Angeles, this city dispersed into formerly agricultural lands, subsidized by taxpayer dollars paid into street and highway development that enabled automobile users to live in the suburbs and to abandon downtown, by city government’s decision not to municipalize the once ubiquitous electric trolley, and by its decision to transport water from the Owens Valley into the San Fernando Valley. Read more
Honey Begins Her Talk On John Dewey
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
Every culture has a way of looking at the world. The people who live in a culture don’t know that there are other ways to look at the world but their own. People are like fish in the sea. We don’t know there are alternatives to the way we see things.
The American world-view – ideology — grew out of English history, and our legal system developed as a result of that history. The English people began with tribalism and primitive communism. Read more
Honey Talks About Robert Louis Stevenson
NOTES FROM ABOVE GROUND
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
Last week, my grandson Ethan, aged eleven, and I went to Santa Cruz on the north end of the Monterey Bay for a few days. From the beach, where I stood watching him as he swam into the waves, I saw the pale blue uneven line on the southern end, which is Monterey.
I rode the Hurricane and Logger’s Revenge on the Santa Cruz Boardwalk with him. I also rented a little car from the hotel that went forty miles an hour and we drove through cold thick fog up to the University past startled deer and two or three complaisantly beautiful students. The car was open, it was too small for drivers in other cars to see even though it was canary yellow, it didn’t have a steering wheel but a thing like a motorcycle steering mechanism, and Ethan frequently put his long strong young fingers over my hands and tried to take control of the steering and screamed in my ear, “Faster Grandma! Faster!” I think Ethan may not be a contemplative child but he may be contemplative at a rate of speed so I am incapable of seeing it, as people are incapable of hearing sounds that dogs hear. Read more
Honey Visits the Gold Country
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
My older daughter Feride and granddaughter Emma and I arrived at the Sierra Club’s Clair Tappaan Lodge, which is on the old Lincoln Highway — the first coast-to-coast automobile route in the country (1912-1913) — a little west of Donner Lake, at about midnight on July 3rd, after an incident that revealed to me that Feride had indeed inherited my parallel parking gene. (The parking event occurred when a total stranger opened my daughter’s car door and yelled, “I can’t stand it!” and made her get out so he could park the car for her. The first time someone did this to her, she thought she was being carjacked. Now she just tips them, which can be unnerving when the intervener turns out to be a surgeon.) Read more
Honey Talks About Ina Coolbrith
By Honey van Blossom
My older grandson Ethan always wants to go to Chinatown in San Francisco. I insist we take a long time to get to Chinatown because, once there, my interest in our adventure wanes.
In Chinatown stores, he examines cellophane wrapped packages of exploding cigars, Mao’s Little Red Book, mechanical masturbating orangutans, caps that blow up in the street, porcelain ash trays formed in the shape of copulating couples, and playing cards with images of naked women. None of the store clerks will sell him any of these things although I can’t imagine who would want these items except for eleven-year-old boys. Once, he came away with a midnight blue silk smoking jacket. I gave in and got him a battery-operated cigar to go with the jacket “but that was in exchange for his not asking me how many times in my life I had had sex” and he walked insouciantly down Grant Avenue in his smoking jacket smoking his pretend cigar. Read more
Jack London’s Magic Trail
By Honey van Blossom
The Baron and I saw The Last Station, a film with Helen Mirren acting as Tolstoy’s wife, the day before the Baron filed for divorce. At the end of the film, when actors playing ordinary people followed Tolstoy’s casket weeping, I cried with them. The Baron, who had been silent, and who had not wept, said that he hadn’t thought such a plain story could be so moving, but that I was exactly like Tolstoy’s wife.
A difference between us may be that I was not married to the best writer in the world, I said. The Countess had not only had thirteen children with her husband, she had also copied and re-copied and re-copied his manuscripts. She had added the dimension of another voice to his work, a woman’s voice, so that Tolstoy’s writing soared above anything he could have written without her. Read more
Some Years Back, Honey Encountered Some Bulgarian Communists
NOTES FROM ABOVE GROUND
By Honey van Blossom
One evening, I walked on the pedestrian path on the west side of Silver Lake. Several tall eucalyptus and conifers grew inside the fence. The reflections of streetlights on the other side of the lake looked like white and yellow poles in the almost black water.
A slender young man had his feet in the fence links and reached toward its top. A young woman stood on the path near him.
“There’s barbed wire on top,” I said to the man. “You can’t get over the fence.”
“I don’t want to get over the fence,” he said. “I want to be able to see the moon on the water without interference.” 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.
