Tosi’s Novel “Our Own Kind” Continues With “The Prophet Of Spring Street”
By Umberto Tosi
(Copyright © 2014 by Umberto Tosi, all rights reserved.)
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Umberto Tosi‘s latest novel is Ophelia Rising, a literary historical novel about Shakespeare’s fair maiden before and after Hamlet.
7. THE PROPHET OF SPRING STREET
Here he comes, the prophet of doom. His bombast echoes off the bland glass and concrete of civic center. Shambling forward, hollering Gospel, as he hears it in his head, he parts lunch-hour pedestrians like the Red Sea. Every damn day. His booming could crack tree trunks:
“HELL! You’re all gonna go to H-E-L-L-! Hell! Hell! You’re goin’ to H-E-L-L-!”
Over and over, louder and louder until he arrives like a bad squall, spiral-eyed, tall and gaunt, with long blondish hair and beard bristling. He always wears a plus-size, cream brassiere like a helmet, D-cups akimbo like Viking horns, with the straps dangling, as he strides forward as if into a stiff wind, to the syncopated cadence of his remorseless chant:
“Ha-hell, ha-hell. You’re all goin’ to ha-hell, damn-a-nation and-a h-hell. You’re all-a-gonna-go-ta h-e-l-l-l-l!”
He’s a standing joke at the first-floor magazine office, where they can hear him bunkered from his midday, holy barrage inside the massive gray walls the old Times building. On this particular day, however, the hellfire rant stops suddenly. Down on the first floor, Benny sees Preacher Man’s face flush to the pane nearest his and Makeda’s desks. Preacher Man cups his hands against the glass and peers at them with Apocalypse eyes. His face floats disembodied against the dark glass like Jesus on the Shroud of Turin. His lips move soundlessly. Read more
Chapter 19/ Exit from Eden by Mary Reinholz
Author Mary Reinholz in New York during the 1970s at The Blue Angel, a renowned nightclub
Storm clouds had gathered in a slate gray sky at noon as the yellow cab barreled out of the meatpacking district, spitting up gravel on the rutted streets. Ted Katz sat beside me in the back seat. I could smell his shaving cologne and the acrid scent of tobacco. He told the driver to take us to the Daily Bugle.
“I forget where that rag is— so many newspapers in this town, all of them tell lies,” the driver said. He was a hard bitten Chinese guy about 35, wearing a black sock cap pulled down past his forehead. He radiated fury at his circumstances.
Katz rattled off the midtown address of The Bugle. He winked at me, confiding in a stage whisper that we’d be sharing a byline on the crime story I had witnessed. It would be a hot and heavy write up, he predicted, all about two wise guys getting whacked in the mob warehouse filled with pornographic books and magazines that we had just left. Police were still questioning Harvey Jewell, publisher of the notorious sex tabloid F.U. who was present during the mob rob-out. This would be a cover story with screaming headlines. There would be plenty of red blood and black ink.
Amazing how Katz, the Bugle’s chief investigative reporter, had taken over my story in the same self-assured way that he had gotten me out of trouble with an FBI agent who had nearly blown my cover at the mafia run warehouse that served as Jewell’s distribution center. Katz said nothing else as the driver headed up the West Side Highway. In the silence, he seemed like a different man than the brash dude who had come on to me at The Bugle, acting like a star reporter asserting male privilege. There was something almost comforting about his firm jawline in profile and his domed forehead with the receding hairline. I felt a brief moment of peace listening to the whooshing sounds of the cab’s windshield wipers and Katz breathing next to me as a light rain began to fall.. Read more
Tom Lutz interviews Lionel Rolfe at December 11 tribute
Tom Lutz, chair of the Creative Writing Department at UC Riverside and editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books here interviews author Lionel Rolfe at the December 11 tribute to Rolfe sponsored by the Public Works Improvisational Theatre at the Warszawa Loft in Santa Monica.
Hyla Douglas sings at December 11, 2014, Tribute to Lionel Rolfe
Hyla Douglas, Lionel Rolfe’s daughter, sings at the December 11 Tribute to Lionel Rolfe staged by the Public Works Improvisational Theatre at the Warszawa Loft in Santa Monica.
Mike the Poet presents at Lionel Rolfe Tribute
Mike Sonksen, better known as Mike the Poet, is a 3rd-generation LA native acclaimed for poetry performances and published articles. Poet, journalist, historian, tour guide, and teacher, he graduated from the University of California Los Angeles and is currently pursuing an advanced degree at California State University Los Angeles. Here he performs one of his poems at the December 11 tribute to Lionel Rolfe staged by the Public Works Improvisational Theatre at the Warszawa Loft in Santa Monica.
Lionel’s Been Relaxing For Years, Awaiting His Big Dec. 11 Event; His Daughter Hyla Douglas To Join In
Are We Really The Smartest Creatures On Earth? If So, So What?
More than 40 years ago, my then wife Nigey Lennon and I were on our way home to Echo Park when suddenly she said to stop. I thought it was because she saw a garage sale. Instead it was a woman who had set up a bunch of cages with cocatiels for sale. Some were in the cages and some stood on top of the edge of the cages.
“Oh hell,” I said. “I don’t want birds. They’re messy and they’re…well…bird brained. Stupid.”
Nigey, of course prevailed, and as we approached the birds, I was amazed that as we were looking them over, they were giving us the once over. That unnerved me. And it began the process where I began to realize we share this earth with a lot of creatures who are every bit as sentient as us.
Over the next few years, other birds impinged on my life and took me into their soap opera lives. The bird we bought that day was named Mo. Gurly came next because we walked into a bird store on Melrose Avenue near my old alma mater Fairfax High School in Los Angeles. As we walked around the cage, one rather drab gray bird was intently following us with her eyes and body. She peeped and squawked, obviously saying, “I’m here. Look at me. I want to be with you guys.” Read more
Mary Reinholz Plunges Onward Into Chapter 18 Of Her Novel, “Exit From Eden”
Ever since she arrived in the Big Apple, the author of “Exit From Eden” has hung out and interviewed some tough customers. Here, she’s interviewing the leader of the New York City’s Hell’s Angels.
By Mary Reinholz
It generally breaks my heart when tough guys cry.
So I felt a twinge of sympathy as corpulent New York porn king Harvey Jewell shed copious tears over the murder of his wise guy distributor in a double homicide. I didn’t know what to say or do as he sat bawling on a wooden work bench a few yards from VdeQ’s office where the capo de cino also known as Vinnie DeQuattro still sat at his desk, shot dead by a single bullet to the jugular.
But when Jewell’s nose started running, I handed him some Kleenex from my shoulder strap bag, patting him on the head as if he was a small boy stricken with grief over the sudden loss of his favorite choo choo train.
“VdeQ helped me launch F.U. nationally,” Jewell blubbered. “Nobody else would distribute it except him. Together we put an honest sex tabloid on the map. . He was a sensitive guy. I brought him a gift today. A cigarette lighter with his initials on it. It’s sterling silver and it cost me. But VdeQ was worth it.”
Jewell heaved dry sobs as he showed me the lighter. Yes, I mused, here was a smut merchant with a deeply sentimental side. There was something endearing about his feelings for a thin well dressed mafia killer who was probably getting ready to slit his throat for bringing me unannounced to his mob warehouse. Meanwhile, the shooter of VdeQ and another man in his office was at large and the cops were on their way. Jewell needed to get himself together for a grilling. Read more
Nightcrawler film review
Phyl van Ammers
Only two other people sat in the theater in downtown Concord to see Nightcrawler with Jake Gyllenhall and Rene Russo. Perhaps because tonight is Thursday – the day the theater adds a new movie. Perhaps because people thought it was another Halloween movie, and Halloween is over. Or perhaps prospective film viewers thought that this Nightcrawler was the comic book superhero Nightcrawler in the Marvel Universe, who is able to teleport across both short and long distances and has adhesive hands.
After the movie ended, I listened the two other people that had been in the audience. One said she wasn’t going to be able to sleep after seeing this film. The other said she didn’t like Jake Gyllenhall anymore.
I thought the film was predictable from almost the beginning: the protagonist is a psychopath in a corrupt world; his flawed but human partner “Rick” (apparently Latino but the actor Riz Ahmed is a British actor, writer and rapper of Pakistani heritage who graduated from Oxford– Middle Eastern) is going to die, and Lou Bloom (Gyllenhall) will be the cause. Bloom is going to sacrifice Rick, and Rick is going to deserve it because he allowed himself to get sucked in. That Rick dies and Lou thrives is a twist on noir. Noir, which grew out of Greek tragedy and French realist writing, means the psychopathic protagonist will die, sometimes from falling, say from a train, as Joseph Cotten died in Hitchcock’s 1943 Shadow of a Doubt, or sometimes his partner in crime kills him, like in Double Indemnity (1944).
Noir protagonists are sympathetic, and they look normal. Read more
PUT THIS ON YOUR CALENDAR….
A PDF ebook edition of Lionel Rolfe’s
“The Uncommon Friendship of Yaltah Menuhin and Willa Cather”
is currently available for $1 in the bookstore at americanlegends.
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.
