Trying to Fix L.A.’s Animal Death Row
How is our new head of Animal Services doing in her effort to stop the killing?
By Leslie Evans
Brenda Barnette
Brenda Barnette was sworn in as head of the Los Angeles Animal Services Department in August 2010. She had a long history of efforts to halt, or at least slow down, the mass government killing of lost and abandoned pets. Most recently she had been CEO of the Seattle Humane Society, where in 2009 they found homes for 6,091 animals and raised the save rate from 77 to 92 percent. Barnette at her swearing in said she would try to match the Seattle numbers in Los Angeles within five years. Before Seattle she had run the Tony La Russa Animal Rescue Foundation and been Development Director of the San Francisco SPCA.
Ominously, Barnette was the sixth General Manager in ten years to try to reform the dysfunctional Animal Services Department. By the end of her first year it was already apparent that the various and sundry partisan interests didn’t mean to give her much of a honeymoon before starting to look for candidate number seven. Read more
People’s Capitalism Is Dead!
By LIONEL ROLFE
With two of the three leading Republican candidates for president threatening to set up a new Christian theocracy, this next election may be our last. We know that it will be brutal, the Republicans will use every cheap bullying lie and tactic that they can, and we’ll end up with America’s first fascist state if they prevail.
It’s obvious that the Republicans were so anxious to get rid of the nation’s first black president, they decided to go for tanking the economy before the next election. In another day and age, when Republicans took seriously their own claims of patriotism, they would not have committed such treason. For treason it is. They decided to throw away the term “loyal” from “loyal opposition.” Read more
Readers: Our Site Was Hacked
Boryanabooks readers: Our site was badly hacked a few weeks back: 49,000 spams and corruption of part of our operating system. We have wiped the old site and made a clean install. We are in the process of restoring our backlist of commentary. Our catalog of Ebooks and other publications is back up now, along with the whole of Honey’s column, “Notes from Above Ground,” from the beginning, and all the chapters of Phyl M. Noir’s serial novel Edendale. We are working on restoring earlier articles, and are ready to stay with you into the future. Because of the extreme hack, which came in through hackers’ attempts to plant spam in the site disguised as comments, we regretfully have had to turn off all comments from readers.
The Sierra God Machine
Photographer Susan McRae captured Ari as an old man standing in reverie in front of the Mansion House where the Sierra God Machine Was Born.
By Lionel Rolfe
Ari began his journalism career in the early sixties by writing for the communist
People’s World. By the end of that decade, he had done a lot of knocking around small town weeklies and dailies. It was in the late in that decade when he was called into the office of the publisher of the Inglewood Daily News and fired because his connection with the People’s World had resulted in his name appearing in an Un-American Activities Committee report.
In a dreary suburban L.A. area town of dirty white and faded pink stucco apartments and
fifties tract homes and a downtown long before gone to seed, the Daily News did not have enough of an economic base to survive much longer. But it continued to exist in Ari’s
mind, because he never forgot when the publisher fired him because the California
Newspaper Publishers Association had found the reference listing him as a subversive. Read more
Edendale: Chapter 10
Glassell Park
Ansel Adams, Courtesy Los Angeles Public Library
By Phyl M. Noir
Bruno got a job as an engineer’s assistant for the city and rented a house in Glassell Park. Malcolm came to live with him and Minda. Bruno thought implausibly: with time Malcolm was going to be all right.
Bruno had a job before this one. He had taken care of schizophrenics and worked with them at a car repair shop because Malcolm went to the same doctor as they did. That hadn’t worked. Dr. Hilarius came by the repair shop and punched the schizophrenics in the face to make them better. Most of the schizophrenics ran squealing out of the back of the shop into the alley and didn’t finish their work. Malcolm, however, waited behind the door until the others had gone and leapt on Hilarius’s back and punched him in the head. The doctor ran out the door covering his head with his arms. Read more
Edendale: Chapter 9
Toonerville At The End Of The Civilized World
The photo is by L.A. Times photographer Herman Schultheis taken around 1940.
Courtesy Los Angeles Times
By Phyl M. Noir
Jade Yee was exhilarated and powerful. She flew over the house roofs in Toonerville. The red Tooner Ville electric train traveled beneath her through pine forests towards the San Gabriel Mountains. It went over Fletcher Drive and onto Bliss.
She flew over the Forest Lawn wall and watched a military funeral. She heard the guns salute and understood at last how it was that people died: you shot them. She saw oleanders bright with raspberry flowers bending in sunlight. Read more
A Reunion At Mt. Lowe
I’m the stout fellow with the hat and beard on the left.
By LIONEL ROLFE
Some time ago I wrote an article in which I mentioned that my parents sent me away to a military school in Altadena when I was perhaps 13 years old and it was probably 1955. This fellow wrote me and asked me if I was talking about Mt. Lowe Military Academy. He introduced himself as Chris Andrada, president of the school’s alumni association. Would I like to come a reunion? Read more
A Romanian Novelist
By Leslie Evans
Eugen Uricaru (left) with Leslie Evans
We sit quietly under the arbor in my backyard. “You are familiar with the Cathars, of course,” he says. “Yes,” I reply, “French offshoots of the Bulgarian Bogomils, who renounced the material world and its god.” This esoteric discussion had been prompted by my giving him a copy of my memoir, Outsider’s Reverie , in which he had reached the chapter recounting my youthful fascination with the ancient Gnostics, otherworldly progenitors of the medieval sects of which we were speaking. He seems interested and intrigued, to have found an unexpected commonality. Read more
Who Was The Real Columbo?
By LIONEL ROLFE
The death of Peter Falk at 83, the actor whose most famous role was a rumpled, eccentric Los Angeles police detective named “Lt. Columbo,” brought to mind the real story of who Columbo was.
For many who hung out in newspaper circles back in the early’60s and’70s in Los Angeles, London and Paris, they knew a profoundly eccentric and brilliant rimrat named Gene Vier. Vier worked as a copy editor at the Los Angeles Times for years, the Los Angeles Daily News, as well as the New York Times Paris edition and the Guardian in Great Britain. Read more
Waiting At Union Station, A Photo By Susan McRae
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.
