L.A. Woman
BY LIONEL ROLFE
Okay, it’s not all a tragedy. It’s the river of life. The only way to keep from dropping to the bottom like a stone is the pursuit of pure, unadulterated, unrestrained libido. Throw orgasms up in the face of the Grim Reaper, I say.
Fornicate until you and her swim in a river of Jism. During wartime, they say, people breed like cats. It’s biology. Perhaps in the face of death, or of divorce, the impulse is the same.
So, okay, one day I was so damned horny I went out prowling, with the full intent of finding someone. I did.
Her name was Eve. I found her sitting in a mall parking lot in Silver Lake. It was just natural for me to sit down beside her and strike up a conversation.
Eve was half-Irish, half-Mexican. And a kind of a street person. She had a most memorable face, one that I thought combined the most handsome aspects of the two peoples. Read more
MAKING UNLIKELY NEW FRIENDS ON THE BOOK TOUR CIRCUIT
Joseph Cotton and wife Patricia Medina
By Bob Vickrey
The day my old friend Frank Winans entered the front door of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel with actress Shirley MacLaine clutching his arm, he turned toward me with a wry grin and coyly nodded, as if to say, “Ho, hum, just another day at the office.”
Frank was a publisher’s representative who was escorting Ms. MacLaine to her book signing engagement at Brentano’s Bookstore in Beverly Hills, which was located adjacent to the hotel lobby.
We publisher’s reps often found ourselves in unexpected and sometimes fashionable company when our authors were on their promotional book tours, as we served as media escorts in guiding them from venue to venue throughout the city. My company, Houghton Mifflin, was not a firm known for publishing celebrity biographies, but there were occasional exceptions that paired me with unlikely traveling partners for several days. Read more
CALIFORNIA ROADS SCHOLAR: Space opera, cowboys with ray guns, swordfish regalia, monsters, dystopias, utopias and urban planning in California
Chumash rock art, which looks like it was done by an astronomer. Santa Barbara Museum
BY PHYL VAN AMMERS
“I’ve… seen things you people wouldn’t believe… (laughs)] Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those… moments… will be lost in time, like (cough)] tears… in… rain. Time… to die…”
…
(Tears-in-rain death soliloquy of the main antagonist replicant-engineer Ray Batty in the movie Blade Runner (1982), based on Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968).) Read more
Norman Geras, 1943-2013
Leslie Evans
Norman Geras died in Cambridge, England, on October 18 of prostate cancer; he had turned seventy in August. He was little known in the United States, but was a seminal figure in a decades-long battle to rescue the humanitarian and democratic traditions of the socialist Left from a drift toward support to right-wing totalitarian governments and movements in the Third World, particularly Islamic radicalism, in the aftermath of the collapse of Communism. He was also a voice of reason in opposing the wave of demonization of Israel that has grown up into a distinctive form of left-wing antisemitism. Read more
Obama Will Go Down In History As One Of Our Greatest Presidents
In my mind, there’s little doubt that Barak Obama will go down in history as one of our greatest presidents. He is presiding over a country almost as torn by divisions as it was in the Civil War. Our greatest presidents come out of troubled times.
You would have to be totally blind if you ignored the fact that the source of the strident words is one thing–pure unadulterated racism. It’s there on the faces of the tea party goers. It’s there on the faces of even the suavest of Republican politicians. They can’t hide the otherwise inexplicable hatred writ large on their pasty visages.
Years ago I was much more tolerant of Republicans than I am now. As a journalist, I covered a lot of Republican politics. I became a drinking buddy with Ed Reinecke, the former California lieutenant governor and congressman who went to prison for 18 months in the Watergate scandal. I always felt he was a patsy, taking the fall for other higher ups who should have been not just been sent to jail, but given a fair trial and then hung. We both liked women and booze and had a belief that the Warren report lied about who killed John Kennedy.
As part of my duties in covering politics, I used to go to Republican parties in the late ’60s where I regularly flirted with Maureen Reagan, daughter of the then California governor. She loved her father, but also knew that he was not the sharpest knife on the shelf. She hated Nancy, her stepmother, who had turned her father from Democratic to Republican politics. Her mother was Jane Wyman, who divorced her husband in part because of their political differences. Read more
A Letter From A Mother To Her Son
Our Gaza correspondent, Mohammad S. Arafat
By MOHAMMAD S. ARAFAT
I don’t think that the story of mothers told in this article is unique to Gaza where I live. I think it’s a story that can be found not only in Arabic nations, but in many other countries in the world, in London and perhaps New York. The names of the mother and the son are being withheld, for reasons I think you will find obvious. A friend of mine got this letter from his mother and it affected him a lot. You’ll see when you read it. His mother called her son harsh.
To my dear son who I loved and still love and will love forever.
I don’t know where to begin. I’m not even sure how to say it. But I know there are things that must be said. I’m talking about things that have been on my mind for a quarter of a century. You should listen to what I say. My neighbours tried to persuade me to tell you my story, your mother’s stories, in the way they thought best, but I realised I had to chose my way so you can understand what I have learned in this lifetime. Read more
TONY VERNA’S INNOVATIVE ‘INSTANT REPLAY’ TURNS FIFTY
Tony Verna in the Control RoomBy Bob Vickrey
As I thumbed through my copy of Tony Verna’s entertaining memoir, “Instant Replay,” I became mesmerized by the pictures in the book’s photo section of the celebrated figures he had worked with during his long television career. There were pictures of him with Jonathan Winters, Joe DiMaggio, Kirk Douglas, President Ronald Reagan, Mother Teresa, and Pope John Paul II.
I sent my old friend an email alerting him of one significant omission—a picture of him and God. He immediately shot back, “I’ll be seeing ‘Him’ soon enough.” Read more
Humanity: Caught in a Progress Trap, Again
A Short History of Progress. Ronald Wright. Philadelphia: Da Capo Press, 2004. 211 pp.
Leslie Evans
Generally I don’t pay attention to very short books that try to trace the entire history of the human race, and worse, present the author’s pet theory of why we are now on the verge of collapse. Ronald Wright tackles this daunting task in an undersized binding, 8 X 5.5 inches, and a text before notes and index that runs to only 132 pages in a generous sized type. Still, he has an ear for the mot juste, a sure sense for the revealing anecdote, and a theory that, even in this highly abbreviated presentation, rings true.
The theory is the progress trap. The first great progress trap was the invention of spears and bows and arrows for hunting. The earliest stone tools date back three million years, at the dawn of the Old Stone Age, which lasted until the most recent retreat of the Ice Age glaciers 12,000 years ago. The revolution in hunting weaponry, which Wright suggests may also have been used to exterminate our closest hominid relatives, solidified around 15,000 years ago. By that time humans were established on all the continents exceptAntarctica. Read more
THE STORY OF AN AMERICAN JAZZ MUSICIAN
Sonji Kimmons (photo by Susan McRae)
By LIONEL ROLFE
I see my friend Sonji Kimmons as kind of a metaphor for this country’s relationship to its collective soul. Sonji grew up in South Los Angeles–her mother was a nurse at the County-USC Medical Center. She sang gospel in church and when she was 13 cut some of her own 45s with Dot Records, one of the archetypical Blues music labels. It wasn’t until she got to Europe that she forged a really good concert career as a jazz pianist and singer. She’s been back in Los Angeles since just before the turn of the Millennium. She returned because her mother was sick. But of late she’s developing an obsession–it’s time to return to Europe where she was treated as the real artist that she is.
America has a history of allowing Europe to recognize its greatest talents first. The greatest American writer of all times, Mark Twain, was dismissed as little more than a humorous newspaper columnist and raconteur of the California Gold Rush. It was the English who first realized his importance. Read more
Lionel Rolfe in AOL Video on the Llano Del Rio Socialist Colony
Lionel Rolfe is interviewed on AOL’s online local history video series What Remains. Rolfe is coauthor with Nigey Lennon of Bread and Hyacinths: The Rise and Fall of Utopian Los Angeles, which offers a history of the utopian colony that flourished in the Southern California desert during World War I. His interview, interspersed with historic photos, shows us Job Harriman’s Llano Del Rio utopian socialist community, set in the Antelope Valley between 1915 and 1918. Harriman had run for U.S. Vice President on the Socialist ticket with Eugene V. Debs, and was narrowly defeated for Mayor of Los Angeles in 1911. His Llano Del Rio community at its height had some 1,000 residents who lived a communal life and had homes and jobs provided by the community. It was located in the desert east of Palmdale.
Watch the video here.
Residents of Llano Del Rio in its heyday.
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.
