Poems By Julia Stein, From Her New Book “What Were They Like.”
Dear Joe
We miss you.
We’re glad you liked the cookies that mama mailed you.
Grandma loves the teapot you sent her from Kuwait.
Please come home soon
for my high school graduation.
My little brother likes your photos.
Please come home from Kuwait. Read more
Edendale: Chapter 15
Climbing Up Fat Hill--Los Angeles Public Library
WEST FAT HILL
By Phyl M. Noir
After the city tore down all the old mansions, the stores and the apartment buildings on Bunker Hill in 1960, Joy moved to a house in Cerro Gordo, which means Fat Hill in Spanish. From her hill she saw Bunker Hill, which was bare for many years, and – after about a decade — the skyscrapers that replaced the bare hill. Read more
KCET “Departures” Features Lionel Rolfe
KCET web columnist Mike Sonksen devotes his January 27, 2012, column to two longtime chroniclers of Los Angeles life: “Lionel Rolfe and Johnny Otis: Literary Icons of L.A.” Read more
A New Poem By Gerald Nicosia: The Role of the Poet
Obama a disappointment
Money for wars but not
For the poor, the sick, the kids in school
And corporations calling
All the shots
What chance has the human
Heart got?
The wise man said
“Poetry gives us a place to stand”
But I’d say rather
Poetry keeps
Your heart beating
And blood flowing
And without it
God forbid
The whole place
Called existence
Goes
Black
Rather than
Sit there listening
For the click of
The switch
Better to
Just
Keep
Writing!
The Greatest Music In The World
Angel Stankhov, left, Lionel Rolfe, right
Theodosii Spassov, left, Mayya Isaeva, center, Lionel Rolfe, right
By LIONEL ROLFE
While I’m mostly inclined to listen to what is called “classical music,” upon occasion other musical genres have proven enticing and powerful. I grew up with classical music, but along the way a few musicians not necessarily in that category have impinged their way onto my consciousness. I will humbly offer up a few of their names to make my point that what makes music great is not necessarily its genre.
Foremost among them was Giora Feidman, the greatest of the Klezmer musicians. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0GXlIEIy60). The first time I heard him was in a small synagogue as the result of an invitation by an old friend Marshall Levy, an amateur clarinetist and magician who said I just had to hear Giora. Read more
Christopher Hitchens and the Two Lefts
By Leslie Evans
I cannot help but feel deeply the loss of Christopher Hitchens. I never met him. I read a number of his books, many of his articles in Vanity Fair and in the online Slate magazine, and saw a few of his speeches on video. Contrarian though he was, he had become for me, with a few other similar thinkers, a political anchor in a time when the world was sorting itself into new and unexpected categories and many old convictions had become sterile and untenable. Read more
Edendale, Chapter 14
The view from Barnsdale, 1906--Los Angeles Public Library
Over the Grapevine
By Phyl M. Noir
Hiro smelled water and pines. Small boats gathered next to houses on the edge of Clearlake. Beyond them was the expanse of the lake — larger in his imagination than it really was because of the fog. He parked across the street from a wood house set on posts in the water.
Cyd Bissell wore a turquoise dress. She came out of the house through a screen door, turned on the porch light, looked down the road for a moment and went back inside the house. She hadn’t looked across the street: the fog had softened the sound of his van’s engine when he arrived.
Hiro had a limp from the polio he had when he was four years old. It took him a few minutes to swing his legs out of the van and slide his feet to the pavement. He pulled the package from the seat next to him and tucked it under his arm. He walked down the wooden ramp, stood on the porch in front of the door and waited. Read more
Tengo Kawana and Aomame’s Adventures in the World with Two Moons
1Q84. By Haruki Murakami. Translated from the Japanese by Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel. Audible audiobook edition: 10-25-2011. Narrated by Allison Hiroto, Marc Vietor, and Mark Boyett. 46 hours and 50 minutes. Paper edition: 944 pages. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, October 25, 2011.
By Leslie Evans
I first encountered Haruki Murakami’s work only last year when I “read,” as an audiobook, as I do most fiction, his 1985 novel “Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.” Literature began as oral storytelling and in our technological age it is to an important degree returning to those roots. It is common in works of fantasy for the conventions of the fantastic world, once established, to be presented with a strict faux realism to promote the suspension of disbelief. Murakami employs realism generously, but to a different end, long sequences of mundane detail are embedded in a world rich in surreal elements, whose rules and reasons are often never explained. Read more
The Trotsky Project
By LIONEL ROLFE
Back when I was in high school 50 years ago, I was called a Stalinist by my Trotskyite friend, Les Evans. Les had been a Republican because that’s what his salesman father had been up until I talked Les into a more leftist position. Les’ father was the man Arthur Miller must have had in mind when he wrote “Death of a Salesman.” Anyway, Les made the transition to being an acolyte of Leon Trotsky, Lenin’s main accomplice during the Russian Revolution. Les then went on to become an officer in the Socialist Workers Party, an editor in the party’s publishing arm and the author of a scholarly book about China in the 1970s, among others. Read more
Photographer Susan McRae Finds An Interesting Comment On The Beach
FIRST, click on the photo to make the details clearer. Then contemplate who was this commentator--a homeless person living on the beach in Ventura with a lot of time to ponder, or just a wandering genius?
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.
