LA Times, LA Magazine, and LA Observed Feature Project for Film Based on Lionel Rolfe’s “Literary LA”
Tom Lutz, the founder and editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books and filmmaker Kurt Olerud have launched a Kickstarter fundraising project to produce a documentary feature film based on Lionel Rolfe’s Literary LA. , a feature documentary that “strives to capture the city’s literary soul in all of its complexity.” They are seeking $23,000 and plan to have the film feature such notables as Walter Mosely, Aimee Bender, Hector Tobar, Janet Fitch, Jerry Stahl, Rachel Kushner, Mike Davis, Steve Erickson.
The project has been written up in the LA Times, in LA Magazine, and in LA Observed. Check out the links to read more.
Lutz and Olerud in their announcement of the project write:
“Originally inspired by Lionel Rolfe’s pioneering and idiosyncratic survey of the city’s culture from its bohemian roots to the present day, Literary LA strives to capture the city’s literary soul in all of its complexity. . . .
“We have captured many of the various literary perspectives about this most diverse and in many ways still indefinable American city. Those who are native to the city, those who have come here from elsewhere in the country, and those who have immigrated from elsewhere in the world, who bring an even fresher perspective and who offer a window into this constantly shifting, ethnically diverse city. We cover a wide range of genres, including crime fiction (Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain), Hollywood fiction (Nathanael West), street realism (John Fante, Charles Bukowski) and, of course, the ever-present literature of the LA Apocalypse (too much to mention, unless you just say ‘all of it’).”
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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.
