THE LOBSTER: NINETY-FOUR YEARS AND COUNTING
Bob and Arnie arrive at The Lobster with the Lunch Club Photos by Barry Stein.
By Bob Vickrey
It may not look like the “Seafood Shack” of old, but the latest version of the old landmark at the beach still offers that same breathtaking 180-degree view of the crystal-blue Pacific.
Our monthly lunch group decided it was time for some seafood, so The Lobster, located adjacent to the Santa Monica Pier since 1923, was an easy choice. The old seafood house has gone through several incarnations during its 94 years, and the latest upgrade completed in 1999, transformed it into an upscale restaurant that reflects the ever-changing economic climate in Santa Monica. Read more
Will Community Resistance Prevent Building the Homeless Housing Voters Have Funded?
Contested lot at Lorena and East 1st Street in Boyle Heights, proposed site of a 49 unit apartment house, half for mentally ill homeless people. El Mercado shopping center (at the right of the photo) has led the opposition to the project and been supported by Jose Huizar, chair of the Los Angeles City Council Planning and Land Use Management Committee.
Leslie Evans
Last November 76% of Los Angeles voters said yes to Proposition HHH, the $1.2 billion bond measure to build 10,000 units of homeless housing over the next ten years. While the vast majority of Angelinos are ready to spend money get the homeless off the streets, it is a very different story when it comes to where to put them. It seems that most people want them somewhere else than in their neighborhood. A disturbing test case has been a proposed 49-unit apartment house at east 1st and Lorena Streets in Boyle Heights, which has been stalled for three years by community opposition and reluctance by LA City officials to confront the critics and move forward. Read more
WHAT’S UP WITH ALL THESE EARLY BIRD DINNERS?
Is the Lime Jello “Surprise” looming in my near future?
By Bob Vickrey
I’m trying to remember exactly when my friends all began having dinner at 4:30 in the afternoon. It has occurred to me that this phenomenon could possibly have something to do with their age—and yes, possibly mine.
It seems that every time someone asks me to join them for dinner lately, the invitation begins: “Why don’t you meet us at Ferdinand the Bull’s at 4:30. The early-bird special there is fantastic and it’s only $9.95.” Read more
The Man From Pasadena Who Strode The Globes
By Lionel Rolfe
Guard Hall at his control console in the Deep Space Control Area, November 1980.
Thirty-five years ago in Pasadena I met a young man at JPL from where a device was rocketed to Jupiter. The Voyager was a VW-sized vehicle powered by nuclear fuel, with solar panels and broadcast antennas. Guard Hall was the “Ops Chief” for the Voyager spacecraft. Launched in 1977, the Voyager craft acquired images & scientific data from encounters with Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and their moons. He was involved in another related mission, the earlier one to Mars.
Guard Hall—his name apparently came from a military childhood—believed very much in the idea of life on Jupiter’s largest satellite Titan, and on Mars. He lived a wonderfully scientific life, more mystical than it should have been. He may have been the most mystical around JPL, he says. His job there was to command the Space Flights Operation Facility in the bottom rung of a five-story computer building. Hall, born in 1948, studied psychology, computers and space stations. Read more
The Late Lynne Stewart
Lynne Stewart on her website (one with her husband Ralph Poynter) not long before she died.
The Blind Shiek, Stewart’s most famous defendant, died Feb.18 –about 3 weeks before Stewart’s passing.
Photo of Lynne Stewart and husband Ralph Poynter at rally in lower Manhattan before she was imprisoned for helping “blind shiekh,” a convicted terrorist, communicate with his followers in Egypt.
By Mary Reinholz
Detractors of the late Lynne Stewart view her as a disbarred mouthpiece for evildoers who was imprisoned for helping a convicted terrorist communicate with his violent followers in Egypt. Her mostly leftist supporters revere the once prominent lawyer from Manhattan’s Lower East Side as a zealous defender of the poor and the grievously oppressed. Read more
THE WRITER WHO TURNED HIS LOVE OF LANGUAGE INTO OSCAR GOLD
Hollywood Writer and Director Robert Pirosh
By Bob Vickrey
Writer Robert Pirosh wrote what is likely the gold standard of resumes in 1934 when he penned a letter to Hollywood directors, producers and studio executives.
The well-paid 24 year-old copy editor who was living in New York City decided he wanted a career as a screenwriter and wrote this playful letter that would hopefully catch someone’s attention at the studios. Not surprisingly, this lively and exuberant romp immediately opened doors for him.
April 23, 1934
Dear Sirs,
I like words. I like fat buttery words such as ooze,
turpitude, glutinous, toady. I like solemn, angular,
creaky words such as straitlaced, cantankerous, pecunious,
valedictory. I like spurious, black-is-white words such
as mortician, liquidate, tonsorial, demi-monde. I like
suave V-words such as Svengali, svelte bravura, verve.
I like crunchy, brittle, crackly words such as splinter,
grapple, jostle, crusty. I like sullen, crabbed, scowling
words such as skulk, glower, scabby, churl. I like Good-
Heavens-my-gracious-land’s-sake words, such as tricksy,
tucker, genteel, horrid. I like elegant, glowery words
such as estivate, peregrinate, elysium, halcyon. I like
wormy, squirmy, mealy words such as crawl, blubber, squeal,
drip. I like sniggly, chuckling words such as cowlick,
gurgle, bubble and burp. I like the word screenwriter
better than copywriter, so I decided to quit my job in a
New York advertising agency and try my luck in Hollywood,
but before taking the plunge I went to Europe for a year of
study, contemplation and horsing around. I have just returned
and I still like words. May I have a few with you?
Robert Pirosh
The Effects on the Homeless Nationwide from President Trump’s Budget
[The following message on President Trump’s budget request was issued March 16 by Diane Yentel, President and CEO of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, based in Washington, D.C. It is reprinted with permission.]
* * *
President Trump’s budget slashes critical resources used to help keep housed some of the country’s lowest income and most vulnerable seniors, people with disabilities, families with children, veterans, and formerly homeless individuals. At a time when America’s housing crisis has reached historic heights and the lowest income people suffer the most severe impacts, proposals to further cut these vital resources are unconscionable and unacceptable.
President Trump proposes to cut overall HUD funding by 13% or $6.2 billion compared to 2016 levels. When compared to funding levels needed for FY 2017, the proposed cuts amount to a 15% or $7.5 billion reduction. Read more
UNCOVERING DU-PAR’S’ PANCAKE SECRETS
By Bob Vickrey
Du-par’s Restaurant and Bakery employees take their pancake preparation so seriously that they seem to consider pancakes as their own separate food group. Our monthly lunch club decided to get equally serious and investigate their findings firsthand.
When James Dunn and Edward Parsons founded Du-par’s in 1938, they opened a simple nine-stall booth adjacent to the Farmers Market that eventually became one of the most famous coffee shops in Los Angeles. (The partners combined a portion of their surnames to come up with the name of their new restaurant.) Read more
Threatened Section 8 Cutbacks Will Boost Los Angeles Homelessness
Leslie Evans
President Trump’s proposed $54 billion cutback in discretionary spending in order to fund a matching increase in the military budget hits hardest at programs for the poor and homeless. The most obvious is the $6.2 billion from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Cuts from other federal agencies that affect low-income people run the total to well over $10 billion, notably $4.2 billion from the Department of Health and Human Services, which operates the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program. The proposed budget also eliminates the federal Interagency Council on Homelessness, the coordinating body for 19 government agencies that work on homelessness. Read more
Stanley Bard, long time proprietor of the Bohemian Chelsea Hotel and a “Robin Hood” of innkeepers, dies at 82 in Florida
Arthur Miller at left, Arnold Weinstein center, and Stanley Bard at right
in photo by Rita Barros.
By Mary Reinholz
The old red brick building on the west side of downtown Manhattan was once home to luminaries like Dylan Thomas, Arthur Miller, Joni Mitchell and any number of wannabes and miscreants who needed an affordable place to crash. This one time crucible of creativity is nearly empty now, a ghostly construction site as renovations at the world famous Chelsea Hotel drag on.
All the paintings and sculpture that once hung on the lobby walls or dangled from the ceiling, many donated by grateful residents in lieu of back rent, were put in storage years ago or reportedly sold after Stanley Bard, the Chelsea’s late long time proprietor, was ousted in 2007 from his position as manager and majority owner by the hotel’s board of directors. I knew Bard back in the day and believe that coup broke his heart. 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.
