An Elusive Utopia By The Sea
Lionel meets up with a young lady near the Venice Boardwalk who tells him she's a writer.
By LIONEL ROLFE
Venice, CA: A City State Of Mind by John O’Kane. Hard cover edition is $26.95.
The traditional happening places for the arts in Los Angeles are two–and it’s been this way since the ’20s and earlier. One is Echo Park near downtown and the other is Venice by the sea. But Venice has captured more of the romance, perhaps because its history has been rich and porous enough there’s this terrible tendency to want to sum it all up, to say what exactly it means. Read more
A NEWSROOM SERIOUSLY RUN AMOK
The Newsroom's Network Anchor Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels)
By Bob Vickrey
After watching a recent episode of the entertaining, but often maddening HBO series, “The Newsroom,” I decided that someone on that staff needs to empty the office fridge of its 5-Hour Energy drinks and brew up a big pot of decaf. No, make that several pots of decaf!
The friends I hang out with simply do not converse in the rapid-fire staccato cadence that the characters on this show engage in. Either start that decaf brewing soon, or have the producers of the show provide me with some helpful subtitles at the bottom of the screen.
Creator Aaron Sorkin’s smart, but smugly self-congratulatory series is presently airing in its second season. As with his previous work, he’s captured a big audience and considerable acclaim. The series chronicles the behind-the-scenes events of the fictional Atlantis Cable News (ACN) channel. Sorkin’s characters seem to be constantly reminding us of how smart, witty, and acerbic news people are. When the show slows to a comprehensible pace, it becomes one of the most compelling and thoughtful series on television. But the tiring dialogue, infused by its forced frenzy, gives it a staged and choreographed appearance.
Read more
California Roads Scholar on Central Coast Writing
By PHYL VAN AMMERS
“It wasn’t Indians that were important nor adventures, nor even getting out here. It was a whole bunch of people made into one big crawling beast. And I was the head. It was westering and westering. Every man wanted something for himself, but the big beast that was all of them wanted only westering. I was the leader, but if I hadn’t been there, someone else would have been the head. The thing had to have a head.” Grandfather’s speech to Jody in The Red Pony.
The Central Coast roughly spans the area between the Monterey Bay and Point Conception in Santa Barbara County. Robert Louis Stevenson’s background for Treasure Island may be the Monterey Bay Coast; at any rate, Pt. Lobos was the location for the 1934 film of the book. Steinbeck’s “The Red Pony,” is set on his grandfather Hamilton’s farm near King City, and the other The Long Valley (1938) stories are set in the Salinas Valley, as is Of Mice and Men (1937) and East of Eden (1952 – in his letters, Steinbeck referred to East of Eden as the “autobiography of the valley.”) is set in the Salinas Valley. Jolon — 17 miles south of King City –is the primary setting of To A God Unknown (1933). Artists and writers from San Francisco moved to Carmel after the 1906 earthquake and – further down the coast—an Ur Beat movement thrived in Big Sur for a time. Robinson Jeffers’ poetry is about the Central Coast. James D. Houston’s Continental Drift explores the dark changes in the lives of paradisiac Santa Cruz at the end of the hippie era. Read more
New Boryanabooks title: Leslie Evans’ “More from the Shaggy Man”
Boryanabooks is pleased to announce the publication of a new essay collection by its regular contributor Leslie Evans. Titled More from the Shaggy Man, it is now available in paperback from Amazon.com.
More from the Shaggy Man: Essays by Leslie Evans. Los Angeles: Boryanabooks, 2013. 386 pp. $13.25.
Order Here from Amazon.com.
On sale now from Amazon for $12.19
Below is the Preface from More from the Shaggy Man.
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Here in this second Shaggy Man collection are fifteen essays written between May 2012 and August 2013. They appeared first on The Shaggy Man’s Place (www.shaggman.com) and on my publisher’s website, www.boryanabooks.com, as well as one from the socialist journal Against the Current. They range from the rightward evolution of the Republican Party to recent discoveries about the ancient Jewish religion known as Gnosticism.
“On the Track of the Elusive Baron Long” offers the only extensive biographical sketch of one of Southern California’s most fascinating characters. I became interested in Baron Long from having written previously on the history of the little industrial city of Vernon just southeast of downtown Los Angeles. Surprisingly for a tiny town with virtually no residential district, composed of slaughterhouses, factories, and warehouses, Vernon before Prohibition hit in 1920 was the nightlife capital of Los Angeles. Two institutions were the cornerstones of its appeal: Jack Doyle’s Saloon and its adjacent boxing arena, and Baron Long’s Vernon Country Club. The Country Club is reputed to have been the first real night club in America, combining a restaurant with an orchestra and floor show. The Baron, as he was always called, was for years the bête noir of the Los Angeles Times, before he struck it rich with a string of night clubs, became part owner of the U.S. Grant Hotel in San Diego, then of the world class Agua Caliente hotel and racetrack in Tijuana, finally ending as the owner of the Biltmore Hotel. Read more
A CELEBRATION OF GEORGE DUKE, A GREAT MUSICIAN AND GOOD GUY
By LIONEL ROLFE
The death of keyboardist George Duke at 67 last week brought back memories of the ‘70s when I smoked dope with him nearly every day.
I had hooked up with Nigey Lennon, to whom I would be married for about a quarter of a century, and I used to go with her to Frank Zappa’s rehearsal space on Sunset Boulevard near Bronson Avenue where Zappa’s Mothers of Invention worked on such albums as “Roxy and Elsewhere” and “Over-Nite Sensation.”
It was a cavernous airplane hangar-like building, a former movie sound stage which oddly enough I had worked in some years before when I was a teenage gofer on a movie about Rosa Parks. Now the space had the feeling of a night club, with an obnoxiously loud sound system and lots of blaring spotlights. Dead center on the stage, haloed by the main spot, was Frank’s chair, where he chain smoked Winstons and guzzled endless cups of 40-weight coffee from a Shop Vac-sized thermos pot. When he wasn’t playing, he was tyrannizing the musicians, which bothered me because I was used to the much more genteel and civilized way great classical musicians work together. Read more
A Deep Melancholy That’s Not Just Personal
By LIONEL ROLFE
A couple of days ago I was in a deeply melancholic state because of various personal struggles, including health and financial issues and an ex-wife I still love, but it all is leavened with the sense that as one approaches the end of life, the world becomes a much more apocalyptical place.
Sitting here in Los Angeles, I gazed at recent photographs of Nelson Mandela in South Africa wearing a kind of a beatific smile. It left me wondering if he really felt that sanguine about the planet he is leaving soon. I pondered these matters in part because it evoked some powerful links in my own life.
Mandela, as we all know, was a compatriot of another great Apartheid leader–Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who I saw in 1999 at Westminster Abbey in London at a memorial for the violinist Yehudi Menuhin–who also is my uncle. Read more
Tom Paine, A Professional Revolutionary
By LIONEL ROLFE
Alaine Lowell lived through the revolutionary ’60s — a young woman born of the counterculture and intent on experiencing the time-honored odyssey of finding one’s self.
Lowell was a product of those more free-thinking and open-minded times and still firmly held onto those values by the late 1970s, which made her budding friendship at that time with George Holtz, a Republican real estate entrepreneur more than 35 years her senior, somewhat uncommon.
The two met while Lowell was living in Castle Green and Holtz was a member of the historic structure’s board of directors. Their relationship was “never romantic,” Lowell explains. They were friends and business associates through the Old Pasadena landmark she lived in and he helped oversee. Read more
BRIAN BANKS: THE SUCCESSFUL RECLAMATION OF A LIFE
Brian Banks, as an Atlanta Falcons signee
By Bob Vickrey
The Atlanta Falcons’ recent signing of an unproven linebacker would normally not command much media attention, but the circuitous route Brian Banks has been forced to travel in order to have the opportunity to play professional football is truly a remarkable one.
The well-documented story of the talented Southern California high school football player who was on the verge of college stardom, but wrongly convicted of rape, is one that has riveted the nation—not just the sports world. Perhaps it offers us a cautionary tale about the inherent biases of our legal system against defendants who are unable to provide witnesses in their own defense and the ensuing imminent rush to judgment that often prevails. Read more
Thinking about Oz
Leslie Evans
Oz Reimagined: New Tales from the Emerald City and Beyond. Edited by John Joseph Adams & Douglas Cohen. Las Vegas, NV: 47North, 2013. 365 pp.
The Living House of Oz. Edward Einhorn. Illustrated by Eric Shanower. San Diego: Hungry Tiger Press, 2005. 238 pp.
John R. Neil's end papers for L. Frank Baum's 1907 Ozma of Oz
The land of Oz is a beloved American legend. It is known to most people from the 1939 musical film starring Judy Garland, Ray Bolger, Bert Lahr, and Jack Haley, still revived regularly on television and available on DVD. The film captured the look of the place much as it had been envisaged by its creator, L. Frank Baum, back in 1899: a vividly colored fairyland filled with odd but simple people and many magical creatures, from witches to live trees, winged monkeys, and Oz’s famous automatons, the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman. These images are engrained on the American psyche. Read more
Bukowski Found On Sunset Boulevard
Our loyal reader, Ronald Van Ammers, spotted this pickup truck on Sunset Boulevard. It wasn't clear if the owner like Bukowski, or was related to him.
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.
