Anticapitalism, the Hyperstate, and the Current Crisis
By Leslie Evans
The Dragons of Expectation: Reality and Delusion in the Course of History, Robert Conquest. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2005, 256 pp.
“The Return of an Illusion,” John Gray. The New Republic, June 23, 2011.
The global economic crisis that began in 2008 has revived many salvationist dogmas that we should have thought were well past their shelf life. Most notably in the United States this has been Christian theocracy, but also, to some extent at least, the Marxist notion that the problems of inequality and declining living standards can best be solved by scrapping the whole existing system and abolishing private property tout court. Where the former has secured a commanding influence among Tea Party activists, the latter has been seeking, with a good deal less success, to persuade the Occupy movement campers. Read more
Edendale, Chapter 13
Malcolm Lowry, author of "Under The Volcano," was in Curaco about the time that Ronald and Marnix were there. Did the great author's close proximity to the young Ronald set him on his inevitable path under the volcano growing up in the Silverlake Hills?
THIRSTY PARADISE
By Phyl M. Noir
INT. COUNTRY HOUSE IN THE NETHERLANDS: DAY
A picture window in the living room reveals a descending garden, and the garden contains the bare branches of mature trees, bare rose bushes and perennial plants. There is snow on the ground. Only sky is seen above the trees. The sky is gray with clouds.
The interior’s design is Bauhaus but some of the furniture and the oil paintings were created in earlier centuries. There is a large painting in a carved gold frame of a blond woman wearing eighteenth century clothing, a large cupboard elaborately carved with vines, birds and mice, tables with feet shaped like lions’ claws, and a Balinese trunk made of dark wood. Read more
BEN & SARAH: A MURDER IN MISSISSIPPI
Writer Jeff Conine began researching and writing Ben & Sarah: A Murder in Mississippi after discovering that one of his students was the sister of once notorious murderer Ben Darras, who is doing life without parole at Parchman Farm, the Mississippi State Penitentiary, for his part in the sensational murderous rampage inspired by the movie “Natural Born Killers.” The case was famous in part because megawriter John Grisham was a friend of the first murder victim in the case who was shot and killed by Ben and his cohort Sarah. Grisham campaigned against Oliver Stone for making the movie that inspired Ben and Sarah to commit copycat murders. Eventually Stone and Time-Warner won the First Amendment case after it dragged on in the Louisana courts. Ben and Sarah’s story was the subject of a recent Discovery Channel investigation. But this is Conine’s story as his alter ego, Caine, journeys to the prison to interview Ben. In a parallel universe, he lives out his own descent into the heart of darkness, an adventure that takes him to The Blues Club Ground Zero that in reality is actor Morgan Freeman’s Club in Clarksdale, close to the prison. Boryanabooks is proud to present these excerpts from Conine’s story. Read more
Great Car Photos By Linda Scott, A Photographer Who Used Real Film To Get These Wonderful Shots
The Memorable Life of Edith Nesbit
A Woman of Passion: The Life of E. Nesbit, 1858-1924 by Julia Briggs (New York: New Amsterdam Books, 1987).
By Leslie Evans
Edith Nesbit
Preeminent Edwardian children’s author, prolific novelist and poet, co-founder of the Fabian socialists, friend of George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Annie Besant, Lord Dunsany, and Noel Coward, Edith Nesbit was to the world at large a figure of conventional if progressive sensibilities. In the relative privacy of her home she was the Bohemian duchess, chain-smoking mother to five children, two of them secretly by her ever-philandering husband’s live-in mistress, searcher for occult mysteries, lover of George Bernard Shaw – and afterward of an ever-younger string of adoring young men. A mesmerizing contrast of apparent acquiescence in the rigid conventionalities of late Victorian and Edwardian England, and quiet moral revolt against them. Read more
Edendale: Chapter 12
What the L.A. River Looks Like When It's On A Rampage
North Alvarado Street on Red Hill
By Phyl M. Noir
Wind rattled the windows of my house and pea sized hail hit the windows and struck the chimes hanging from one of the big eucalyptus trees. The marmalade-colored cat sat on the stairs to the backyard inhaling the scents in her venue: pepper, eucalyptus, ladybugs, succulents with a little water lying in their scooped bellies, skunk, and lemon. The wind blew the cat’s fur into an aureole.
I opened the windows and breathed salty air. Wind drew struggling gulls in a spiral towards rain clouds.
Below the clouds shone the gold-leaf dome of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Beyond the dome was Bohemian Hill — one of the Silver Lake hills — and beyond it white letters spelling Hollywood rose above chaparral growing on one of the smaller of the Santa Monica Mountains. Read more
Thoughts On Steve Jobs, Capitalism, Cybernetics & Old Reactionary Bankers
By LIONEL ROLFE
I’ve never been a fan of capitalism, but Steve Jobs made that a difficult position to uphold.
Jobs created one of this country’s biggest and most successful corporations by actually producing things good and real. More, the products were good because Jobs imbued those products with his own peculiar vision of things. That alone makes his corporation an exception to the general rule of America’s big business today.
Mind you, it might not seem so, but Jobs did not create this new age being wrought by computers. Norbert Wiener, whose best known book was “God and Golem” published in 1964, invented the term cybernetics in the early 1940s. Cybernetics has all to do with machines and man and then machines making machines. The upshot was that computers would give every person extraordinary new labor power and thus transform the world. Read more
AN INSIDIOUS PACK OF SCOUNDRELS
By LIONEL ROLFE
The insidious pack of scoundrels running for President on the Republican side make it difficult for me to figure out if I should shit or go blind in the event Obama were defeated by one of them.
On the one hand, it’s clear that the smartest among them is John Huntsman. He’s not an obvious scoundrel like a Perry or a Bachmann. He is intelligent, and for that reason I hope he is not the candidate. He’s the only one who would have a chance of successfully going head to head with Obama. Hopefully he won’t be the Republican candidate, I guess, but then I get the chills. I used to think that Ronald Reagan was a man who could never be elected president. I was wrong. Read more
A Sinister Priest Tries Concealing A Boarding School Massacre
Older Than America
By PHYL VAN AMMERS
Boryanabooks Film Critic
The Echo Park Film Center showed supernatural thriller Older than America, which should be seen for its portrayal of brutality purportedly suffered by Fond du Lac Indian children in Minnesota in the 1900s.
The plot rests on a plot by a sinister Catholic priest to conceal the deaths of children in a boarding school for Indians during in an earthquake in 1955. There is no record on Internet of an earthquake in the Cloquet area of any significant magnitude.
A rebellious child – Irene — sees a secret burial in the forest and insists on telling what she saw when she is a young mother. The evil priest wants to protect the Church from accusations of child abuse and rape, so he convinces the woman’s sister Apple to authorize electric shock therapy and heavy medication. Irene remains institutionalized for most of the rest of her life. Read more
Edendale: Chapter 11
View From The Observatory (Photo Courtesy LA Public Library)
THE APARTMENT HOUSE ON ROWENA
By Phyl M. Noir
On a Tuesday in January 1996, Jade Yee sat behind her desk in the John Steinbeck public library in Salinas.
It was cold outside. It was always cold outside in Salinas where it was often said you had your winter coat and you had your summer coat. The rooms inside of the library were too warm. The air was too dry.
A man walked up to her desk. Jade recognized saw him as he used to be – Ralph, a small slight boy with hair worn in an exaggerated pompadour like Jim Carrey’s in Ace Ventura Pet Detective standing on the varnished blond wood floor of the music room in the Yates house a violin tucked under his chin. She saw the music score to Chopin’s Polonaise left open on the piano stand. She saw herself at thirteen sitting on the piano bench although that image was an import into her memory from a photograph her mother had taken: straight Chinese hair on each side of a perfectly straight part, a white nylon blouse with a little black velvet tie, and her hands poised delicately over the keyboard. She remembered seeing the observatory on one of the Griffith Park peaks through the window behind the piano. The park was not always on fire but she remembered Ralph’s face tinted red and the flames in the windows and their teacher Frances’ powerful bronze hands on the orangeade ivory keys. 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.
