ON THE FOURTH, JUST GET ME TO THE CHURCH ON TIME
Actor John Raitt with wife Rosemary in 1999
By Bob Vickrey
Nearly two decades ago, my simple volunteer job assignment on a sunny July 4th was to pick up former Palisades Honorary Mayor John Raitt at his home and accompany him to the annual parade VIP luncheon at the Methodist Church courtyard on Via de la Paz. The late actor and singer was set to uphold the long tradition of celebrity mayors who have ridden in the annual parade.
The only problem I encountered on that Fourth was that no one answered the door when I arrived to pick him up at his house on Napoli Drive in the Palisades Riviera. I glanced at my watch and realized I had allowed little time for a glitch in our plan. Read more
What’s the Story on Linkage Fees for Affordable Housing?
Mayor Garcetti at October 2015 Mayoral Summit where he announced his goal of getting linkage fees from developers to finance affordable housing.
Leslie Evans
Los Angeles has the least affordable housing in the United States. It is short some 500,000 units of housing for its population. Rising population, which pushes up land, materials, and labors costs, has made affordable housing in California a mostly unprofitable investment. Cities throughout the state have found themselves facing chronic and deepening housing shortages, with increasingly unaffordable rents. The response has been to look to government subsidies to try to fill the gap. Read more
Trump v. Watergate
Doug Weiskopf
(Two books, The Far Out Story of Vortex 1, by Matt Love, and Radicals in the Rose City, by Matt Nelson, plus a PhD thesis by historian, Dr. Dory Hylton, have chronicled many of the the events mentioned below).Watergate is the Great American Story that will never go away and currently it is again being examined for comparisons to the scandals of the Trump Administration. What many of us who were part of the antiwar protest movement back in the summer of 1970’s in Portland, Oregon have always believed is that the break-in by Nixon’s band of “dirty tricksters”, who were known as The Plumbers Unit and got caught by the police at the Democratic Party National HQ in Wash. DC, had its roots in Portland. Read more
LUNCH CLUB SPICES THINGS UP AT TALPA
All photos by Barry Stein:
By Bob Vickrey
Our monthly lunch club group may occasionally act like giddy teenagers during our get-togethers, but a couple of our companions’ recent medical woes have become a painful reminder that we are now far removed from those earlier carefree times.
Our longtime friend Mary Cole was visiting from Palm Springs and filled in admirably for Josh who is still on the mend and attempting to regain his strength after a long illness. Our small group has resembled a “MASH” unit in recent months with mounting casualties standing between us and a few first-class meals at famous restaurants in Southern California. Nevertheless, our fearless team has pushed ahead. Read more
LA County Supervisors Approve Plan for Measure H Funds
Chris Ko, Director of Homeless Initiatives for United Way and manager of Home For Good, addresses June 13 press conference in front of Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors’ building on West Temple Street, announcing the supervisors’ approval of a $1 billion budget for the first three years of the sales tax money for the homeless from Measure H.
Leslie Evans
The LA County Board of Supervisors approved the recommen-dations of the 50 member Measure H Revenue Planning Group for the first three years of income from the sales tax increase for the homeless, which passed in last March’s election. The quarter-cent sales tax increase is expected to generate $259 million in its first year and as much as $1 billion in the first three years. The money is to be divvied up between six basic strategies to contain homelessness, adopted by the county in February 2016. Read more
Susan Brownmiller, Kate Millett and Other Prominent Second Wave Feminists will speak out against Trumpism at June 10 Reunion in Greenwich Village
Women’s Strike for Peace-And Equality, Women’s Strike for Equality, Fifth Avenue, New York, New York, August 26, 1970. (Photo by Eugene Gordon/The New York Historical Society/Getty Images)
By Mary Reinholz
Radical feminist Susan Brownmiller has plenty of room at the top in her Greenwich Village penthouse near the meat packing district. Outside on the terrace is her urban oasis of carefully cultivated plants, trees and flowers, the subject of her latest book, “My City Highrise Garden” (Rutgers University Press). To a casual observer, she appears to lead an idyllic existence in lower Manhattan.
But Brownmiller, a self-described “82-year-old celibate heterosexual,” isn’t always at peace in her spacious 20th floor pad (now shared with a roommate). It’s a rent stabilized unit which she rented at triple the cost in her Jane Street building several years after the 1975 success of her groundbreaking treatise on rape: “Against Our Will,” a tome that established her as a prominent voice in the women’s liberation movement even while some leftwing feminists denounced her for becoming a star name in a collective effort to achieve gender equality. Read more
THE DAUNTING PERILS OF THE WRITING TRADE
Sports Editor of College Newspaper– circa 1967. The essay is in conjunction with the recent California Newspaper Publishers Association award he received for “Best Column Writing” in the weekly newspaper category.
By Bob Vickrey
Upon returning to the writing life as a newspaper columnist several years ago after a mere 40-year career detour in the book publishing business, I was reminded of the precarious journey a writer faces from their public exposure.
One of the first columns I wrote after my return was published in my hometown paper in Houston as I attempted to capture the essence of growing up in post-WWII suburbia. The piece received prominent positioning on the op/ed page of the Sunday edition of the Houston Chronicle, which immediately triggered numerous responses from old friends and classmates in the area who had noticed my byline. Read more
Los Angeles Housing Crisis Feeds Homelessness
Leslie Evans
Median rents in Los Angeles increased 32% between 2000 and 2017, according to a May 2017 report by the Public Policy Institute of California. Over the same period, household income decreased by 3% when adjusted for inflation. The real estate website Trulia reports that in Spring 2017 the median rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles was $2,600. A UC Berkeley study by the Urban Analytics Lab found a slightly lower figure, at $2,499. In large parts of Los Angeles this is more than the total annual median household income. In the Adams-Normandie section of South Los Angeles, median household income is $29,000 a year, or $2,417 a month; in Watts it is $25,000, or $2,083 a month. Read more
‘SOPRANOS’ WANNABES VISIT CARMINE’S RESTAURANT
Carmine’s Restaurant booth featuring picture of cast members of “Oceans Eleven” Photo by Barry Stein
By Bob Vickrey
The atmosphere at Carmine’s restaurant in West Los Angeles was so authentically old-world Italian that one would have thought our lunch club group had just taken an exit off the New Jersey Turnpike and slipped into Tony Soprano’s favorite hideaway.
So, like I was sayin’, my pals Pauley, Vito, and Johnny ‘Sack’—better known as Arnie, Barry, and Josh, were seated in our favorite corner booth and were a bit uneasy about who might be coming through the back door. Vito (a.k.a Barry) always seemed to have our backs so we could enjoy the best food in town without looking over our shoulders. Read more
The Fat Man Returns; The Elusive Hunt for California Bohemia and Other Matters
Review by Mary Reinholz
Peripatetic author and journalist Lionel Rolfe has slimmed down considerably judging from the cover of this slender 155-page collection of personal essays first written for the Pasadena Weekly and the Huffington Post and compiled nearly two decades after the publication of his 1998 volume, “Fat Man on the Left: Four Decades in the Underground.” In these short chapters, Rolfe, now in his 70s, makes it clear that he still maintains many of his hefty lefty beliefs. He’s all for unions to help working folks deal with the bosses despite his memories of unsavory mob figures in the background.
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.
