Photog Susan McRae Begins To Love Birds Perhaps Too Much
Photog Susan McRae just got back from a photo workshop in Bosque del Apache, a nature and wildlife preserve in southern part of New Mexico, where she has moved after years of living in Los Angeles. Knowing that Lionel Rolfe, the editor of Boryanabooks, has an unreasonable love of dinosaurs and their descendants, she sent in these photos. This one of McRae and her newfound friend was taken by Jerry Goffe, one of the instructors at the workshop. Her friend is a Harris hawk, raised by a raptor breeder. All the others are her photos. And these are all wild birds. Below, the Harris hawk in flight. Read more
PENELOPE SUDROW: a wandering waif with a hint of noblesse oblige
PENELOPE MEETS LIONEL AT A PARTY IN SILVER LAKE
BY LIONEL ROLFE
I met Penelope Sudrow at a backyard party in the Silver Lake home of my actor friend Lee Boek, who runs Public Works Improvisational Theater. It wasn’t just because she was an attractive woman that made me curious about her. I sensed that she was somebody more than just a pretty lady.
What was intriguing was that sense that she was a woman-child. Although she looked like a woman, she had something of the vulnerability of a child about her as well a sense of fun and wonder you rarely see in a normal grownup. I was not surprised when I found out she had been a well known child star. Read more
Once Again, Gaza Is A Big Cage & Our Gaza Correspondent Has Witnessed A Lot Of It
[This month we have another contribution by our Gaza correspondent, Mohammad Arafat. He expresses with deep feeling the suffering of the ordinary people of Gaza. We should say also that he has a certain innocence in his view of the world. He sees plainly the pain inflicted by the border restrictions by Israel and Egypt, but never mentions Hamas, which governs Gaza, or Islamic Jihad, or the recent terrorist attacks in the Sinai that precipitated Egypt’s closing of the Gaza tunnels. These things explain much of why conditions in Gaza are far worse than those in the occupied West Bank, which has its own burdens but not of such extremity.]
* * *
By Mohammad Arafat
I wish I could sum it up quickly,what does it all mean. Maybe I should contemplate why it’s so hard to say what’s most on my mind. I’m not even sure who I’m talking to–perhaps to my critics, my supporters. But Gazans have been told for too long they had no right to write. Maybe this is why I don’t know why I’m writing and to whom.
But I know that I have a right to express what’s going through my mind. At first, my pen refused to write and then I began to cry and moan. But then I wiped away my tears and realized nothing could stop me from writing. I had come to believe that people won’t read anything written about Gaza these days. I told myself that it’s true, a great many people in this world can support us, and read what we say, but victory won’t come from those people, even if they stand with us. Still, I must try simply because I I must serve truth.
Leninism and Nazism: Opposites, Twins, or Siblings?
Leslie Evans
The Devil in History: Communism, Fascism, and Some Lessons of the Twentieth Century. Vladimir Tismaneanu. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. 320 pp.
Vladimir Tismaneanu is a Romanian who grew up under the Stalinist dictatorship that ruled his country from 1947 to 1989. Born in 1951, he was almost forty when Ceausescu was overthrown. His father was an important propagandist for the Communist government. Vladimir headed the 2006 Presidential Commission for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania, which condemned the Communist period as a criminal regime. The report was highly controversial, denounced by high ranking former communists who were condemned by name, by liberals who pointed to Tismaneanu’s past as a convinced Marxist-Leninist, and by the far right because Tismaneanu is a Jew. He teaches currently in the United States at the University of Maryland.
In The Devil in History Tismaneanu spends almost no time on the fascist devil. Where he does reference them it is in sociological generalities about Hitler Germany, where the crimes of the Nazis are so well known they require no elaboration. He deals with them mostly by occasional paragraphs in which he establishes specific similarities and differences from their leftist enemy.
DAVID SIMON’S “TREME”: A FITTING ODE TO THE CRESCENT CITY
Trombonist Antoine Batiste (Wendel Pierce) embodies the spirit of the New Orleans’ music scene
By Bob Vickrey
Almost nine years later, the CNN images are still fresh in our memories—the rising flood waters from Hurricane Katrina forcing stranded residents of New Orleans onto their rooftops, as a stunned nation watched in utter disbelief. Days turned into weeks in the recovery effort as futile governmental rescue attempts mounted and we asked ourselves how this could have possibly happened in America. Read more
Attorney Les Zador: When Have You Been (Legally) Poisoned By That Dinner Out
Today, I want to talk to you about the liability of food suppliers, particularly restaurants, for food poisoning. Food poisoning?
It happens to most of us at least once or twice in our lifetimes. We go to a restaurant or a fast food outlet. We order the fish or whatever; and we may or may not notice that the taste is a little off as we unsuspectingly consume the adulterated food. After finishing, we don’t give it a second thought until it hits us; and then we spend the better part of the next 24 hours hunched over the toilet praying to God for it to be over and, in many cases, heading over or getting someone to drive us to the emergency room.
Whoever has been through the process will know in his or her gut (pun intended) that it was the lousy food consumed at the local fast food eatery that did him or her in; but how do you prove this? In the typical case, someone will check in at the hospital, have a battery of tests run resulting in a formidable hospital bill, all the while missing several days of work. It only stands to reason that the person who has suffered and been inconvenienced thus should want to be compensated. But then the fun starts when the eatery claims that it wasn’t its product that made the victim ill, that nobody else got sick from eating the food on the day in question, and that the illness was obviously caused by something else. I’ve been through this with restaurants, etc., a few times. Read more
Radicals in the Rose City: Portland’s Revolutionaries 1960-1975 by Matt Nelson and Bill Nygren (2013)
By WURDY MCGUFFREY
“Radicals In The Rose City: Portland’s Revolutionaries 1960-1970“, is available on EBay and NWHistoryPress.com (price $15).
The Rose City is the nickname the town of Portland, Oregon goes by and it has a long history of activism and radical politics, going back to Coxey’s Army in 1893, which began a cross country trek of protesters on Wash. DC against the bad economic conditions of the day. A similar march was again begun in Portland in 1932 by out of work WW1 veterans who became known as The Bonus Army and camped out, an estimated 43,000 strong, in and around DC until they were violently removed by Federal troops led by Gen. Douglas McArthur. Portland had a history of labor strife involving dock workers, known as Wobblies. Noted radical journalist, John Reed, grew up and graduated from high school in Portland and credited his inspiration as coming from his father, a top law enforcement official who refused to be controlled by the large timber barons of Oregon. Read more
The World’s Greatest Vegan Bartender, Mai Tai Mati, Meets Up With Talia Caldwell
Here’s a couple of Lionel Rolfe’s favorites–Mai Tai Mati, the world’s greatest Vegan bartender, and her friend Talia Caldwell, the famous basketball center from the UC Berkeley.
BLACK FRIDAYS GONE WILD!
By Bob Vickrey
The Black Friday spectacle of the huddled and frantic masses lining the sidewalks outside front doors of big- box retailers sent an uncomfortable shiver down my spine as I observed this annual ritual on television news reports from the comfort of my easy chair at home.
Thanksgiving night has long represented the unofficial commencement of Christmas shopping for frenzied customers impatiently awaiting the midnight rush for what they perceive to be the best deals for items on their gift list. In recent years, the ante has been upped and the clock moved forward by retailers—all hoping to cash in on consumers who will push and shove their way toward that coveted 60-inch big-screen television. Read more
The Secret Behind L.A.’s Literature
Lionel Rolfe (left) with Gerry Nicosia, author of “Memory Babe,” the major biography of Jack Kerouac and the beats. The photo was taken at Beyond Baroque in Venice.
By LIONEL ROLFE
It all began in the coffeehouses a couple of centuries or more ago in London where such institutions as media and insurance took on their modern forms, for better or for worse.
The coffeehouses had names like The Fifth Estate and Lloyd’s of London. They all shared something in common. They imbibed a highly seditious drink, a coffee brew from Turkey called Kaufy. Most folks regarded the potent new drink the same way police viewed pot in the coffeehouses of Los Angeles and San Francisco in the ’50s and ’60s.
After the Gold Rush, Bohemia and coffeehouses developed in San Francisco with such characters as Herman Melville and Mark Twain. The bohemian was the foundation of good writing in California, first in San Francisco and then in Los Angeles. 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.
