Fallout From The Egyptian Crisis Affecting The People of Gaza
By Mohammad S. Arafat
July 3, 2013, anti-Morsi demonstration in Cairo's Tahrir Square
The Gaza strip, a besieged part of Palestine, is the most populous place in the world–it has some 1.79 million people, or about 2,600 people per kilometer.
There’s always something going wrong here. There’s constant crisis, and it’s probably more affected by its neighbors than most lands. Once this wasn’t true. Before the occupation in 2006, after the election which closed both the Israeli and Egyptian ports we had access to, the quality of our life plummeted.
There are more sick people, more poor people, and more suffering–with our neighbors hardly helping us. And we have Israel, which assaults us. Still, most Gazans remain religious, praying daily and nightly to Allah and being patient in our belief we have not lost Allah’s mercy. We say that Allah is with us and will not forget us. Read more
LA Times, LA Magazine, and LA Observed Feature Project for Film Based on Lionel Rolfe’s “Literary LA”
Tom Lutz, the founder and editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books and filmmaker Kurt Olerud have launched a Kickstarter fundraising project to produce a documentary feature film based on Lionel Rolfe’s Literary LA. , a feature documentary that “strives to capture the city’s literary soul in all of its complexity.” They are seeking $23,000 and plan to have the film feature such notables as Walter Mosely, Aimee Bender, Hector Tobar, Janet Fitch, Jerry Stahl, Rachel Kushner, Mike Davis, Steve Erickson.
The project has been written up in the LA Times, in LA Magazine, and in LA Observed. Check out the links to read more.
Lutz and Olerud in their announcement of the project write:
“Originally inspired by Lionel Rolfe’s pioneering and idiosyncratic survey of the city’s culture from its bohemian roots to the present day, Literary LA strives to capture the city’s literary soul in all of its complexity. . . .
“We have captured many of the various literary perspectives about this most diverse and in many ways still indefinable American city. Those who are native to the city, those who have come here from elsewhere in the country, and those who have immigrated from elsewhere in the world, who bring an even fresher perspective and who offer a window into this constantly shifting, ethnically diverse city. We cover a wide range of genres, including crime fiction (Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain), Hollywood fiction (Nathanael West), street realism (John Fante, Charles Bukowski) and, of course, the ever-present literature of the LA Apocalypse (too much to mention, unless you just say ‘all of it’).”
MY LITTLE TOWN: THE GREAT SUBURBAN EXPERIMENT
1947-48 High School Cheerleaders
By Bob Vickrey
In his classic 1970s ballad, My Little Town, Paul Simon methodically indicted small town America as an entrapment that placed limitations on the aspirations of its inhabitants and offered only a glimmer of hope in breaking free of those shackles to pursue their hopes and dreams.
Few of my peers in the 1950s and 60s gave much thought to having felt trapped within the lives into which they were born, and most of us considered ourselves lucky and grateful for the comforts of our working-class lifestyle. We knew little of the larger world that existed around us at that time. Hopes and expectations for the future generally evolve slowly over time, and there was little consideration of unhappiness about our living environment. Read more
The heartland
William Saroyan's house from 1921-1927. Courtesy Fresno County Historic Society
By Phyl Van Ammers
William Saroyan repeated a story in The Bicycle Rider in Beverly Hills (1952), originally told to him by an Armenian actor at a picnic on Kings River in the summer of 1918. The actor was almost eighty. Saroyan had been ten.
“A hunter snared a bird which was so beautiful that the hunter said to himself, ‘It would be a sin to end the life of this creature. I shall take it home, build it a wonderful cage, give it food and water, and I shall love it with all my heart, for I have never seen another bird like it.’”
The bird was unhappy and said every evening, “’Ahkh, Vahtahn’ (Oh, my country!’) “ So the hunter opened the cage, the bird flew out, and the hunter followed him until the bird “came to a place so desolate, hot, dry, rocky, and barren that it seemed to be the end of the world. “ Read more
Animals and the English Language
Leslie Evans
Our language is filled with metaphors and similes comparing people to animals, and the very names of many animals are often used as epithets to characterize people. Most of the metaphors and similes (someone is LIKE or AS something) are so long in use that they have become cliches. The terms mostly date from the days when most people lived on farms and many in wooded areas where most of the animals enlisted were actually familiar to the speakers. Today American city dwellers on a daily basis see mainly dogs, cats, pigeons, crows, and squirrels. Less often, rats, mice, and hawks. Still less often, live horses, goats, pigs, and sheep. Except on television and trips to the zoo, many of the others are known only by reputation.
Our predilection is for anthropocentric feelings of superiority to other animals. It allows us, as our numbers swell into the many billions, to construct an ever larger and more horrific and cruel industry that raises animals and birds for food. Pigs whose lives are spent in pens so small they cannot turn around, chickens with their beaks amputated and without room to take a step, slaughterhouses where the cows whose life’s goal is to become part of McDonald’s billions and billions of burgers end in terror and pain. Read more
More on the Middle East
In May we featured two articles about Israel and its history, one by Gaza author Mohammad Arafat about Palestinian sufferings during the December 2008-January 2009 war between Israel and Hamas, and a longer piece by Leslie Evans on the history of the Marxist Left’s negative view of Jewish identity, principally in nineteenth century Europe but affecting Western perceptions of Israel.
This month we reprise the subject with our same two authors. Mohammad Arafat returns in “A Tale of Determination” to the early days of the Israeli invasion of Gaza at the end of 2008, where he tells the story of his friend Musab, who was badly wounded by an Israeli rocket, as well as examples of civilian deaths inflicted by the Jewish forces. Leslie Evans in “Why the Middle East Is Always in Crisis” pulls the camera back to examine at length the breakup of the Ottoman Empire in World War I, and the legacy of seemingly insurmountable religious animosities built into the postwar map, particularly in Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and, of course, Israel-Palestine.
A Tale Of Determination
Israeli settlers taunt a Palestinian woman who has just been evicted from her home
By Mohammad Arafat
The Gaza strip is located in the eastern part of the Mediterranean Sea and is an important link between Asia and Africa. The traders of Asia and Africa used to cross Gaza in their comings and goings between the two continents. That importance no doubt made it attractive to the Israelis in their occupation of Gaza and all of Palestine in 1948. The Palestinian people have fought back against the occupation and massacres. They have forced it to withdraw from Gaza and we hope all of Palestine one day.
The Palestinian resistance made Israelis leave Gaza, but that occupation is still in control because Israel besieged Gaza by cutting power and water. It controls our food and the cooking gas. In December of 2008, F16 warplanes and lots of missiles fell on us. Read more
Why the Middle East Is Always in Crisis
Leslie Evans
A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East. David Fromkin. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1989. 643 pp.
Why write about a book that is almost twenty-five-years old? The best reason is that it uncovers, layer by layer, the consequences, intentional and unintentional, of the confrontations in and after World War I that dismembered the Ottoman Empire and drew the map that built into itself the incendiary ingredients that have made the Middle East perhaps the most explosive portion of today’s world. The results of the final partition of the former Ottoman lands in 1922 directly laid the groundwork for today’s civil war in Syria, now spreading into Lebanon, the emergent second civil war in post-invasion Iraq, the rise of jihadi Islam, and the perennial Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Only by looking at the region as a whole, pulling back from a narrow focus on the abuses of this or that Arab dictator or the Israeli occupation in the West Bank can the underlying dynamics and its actors’ motives be fully understood. David Fromkin’s classic work offers a convenient peg on which to hang a look back at how the Middle East mess took its modern form and what that tells us about where we are now. Read more
Dimitri Tiomkin as I remember him
by Jack Wallace
May 2013
Dimitri Tiomkin at work, mid-1940s.
He was without a doubt the greatest tunesmith who helped invent the music of Hollywood during the sound era. Just as Aaron Copland defined the sound of the American West of myth and legend for ballet and the concert hall, so did Dimitri Tiomkin do the same thing for the movies. It was a half a century ago and still is today a maxim in Hollywood that more is usually better. For Dimitri, more was usually OK, but the most was even better. For many of his scores, nothing less than the biggest, the loudest, and the most colorful (richly orchestrated) would do. Case in point: in Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller, I Confess, there’s a scene where Montgomery Clift, playing a priest, is crossing the street on his way to church. For most other film composers, a solo instrument such as a piano would have been sufficient, even in those days. But not for Dimitri, for whom the full orchestra blasting away as though reaching the finale of a Mahler symphony was what was the scene compelled. Excessive? Maybe. But he was a first rate composer who happened to be working in the movies; and the interplay of the music with the action on screen turned the routine into the memorable. Read more
SURVIVING THE WHIPLASH EFFECT OF L.A.’S CULTURE CLASH
 The Hollywood Sign
By Bob Vickrey
Several years ago I found myself doing a double-take as I noticed two familiar looking men mingling with a large group at an author speaking engagement in my local bookstore. The scene there was one that utterly embodied the ever-enduring clash of diverse Los Angeles cultures.
The sight of a well-known author who was in the company of a popular actor was so common in West Los Angeles that it normally would not trigger such a head-turning moment. But when I spotted writer Jonathan Kirsch and actor Charlton Heston in the same contingent, I quickly remembered that Kirsch was the author of a biography entitled Moses, A Life; and here he was rubbing shoulders with the actor who had portrayed the Old Testament prophet decades earlier in the movie, The Ten Commandments. That particular scene represented the very essence of the intersection of the worlds of literary and popular culture—a setting that plays out often in the city where I live. 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.
