PEACOCK, a photo by Susan McRae
“Literary L.A.”: The Movie! See the Facebook Page
Check out this Facebook page for the movie “Literary L.A.,” in production now. It’s based on Lionel Rolfe’s book “Literary L.A.”
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Literary-LA/115509071864686?sk=wall
Roots in the Garden of California’s Bohemia Will Be Celebrated Sunday
By LIONEL ROLFE
If walls really could talk, the hand-built stone castle just off the Avenue 43 exit in Highland Park of the Pasadena Freeway would be the mother lode of California bohemian history.
Charles Fletcher Lummis, L.A.’s “renaissance man” from the turn of the last century, began building El Alisal in 1897. Later, he liked to throw soirees on Saturday nights there among the sycamores on the Arroyo Seco. That is the memory people will try to recreate at El Alisal and along the arroyo when artists, poets, musicians and dancers celebrate “Charles Lummis Day” on Sunday, June 5. Read more
Edendale: Chapter 8
The Eighth Chapter of “Edendale,” Chicken Corner, by Phyl M. Noir
Photograph is by Gary Leonard, courtesy of the Los Angeles Public Library
By Phyl M. Noir
The members of the dissertation committee at Columbia in New York City sat at a long table. Behind them was a tall window. Opaque light came through the window, and Celia imagined there was no outside but only a larger room encapsulating the smaller.
“I have some concerns,” the white woman professor complained. “One of my concerns is that you failed utterly to show the Marxist perspective in public housing activism during the 1930s.” Read more
$4 Gas Is Only the Beginning
By Leslie Evans
Republicans and Democrats are scrambling in a blame game over the skyrocketing price of gasoline, which is rapidly approaching the historic highs of the 2008 oil shock. As of April 29 pump prices for regular had topped $4 in thirteen states and crested $3.90 in eleven more. The April 23 Christian Science Monitor carried the headline “Obama faces trouble with $4 gasoline.” The story led off: “Polls show Americans blame Democrats more than Republicans for $4 gasoline prices, and President Obama’s poll numbers show it.” Read more
Edendale: Chapter 7
The Seventh Chapter of “Edendale,” Bunker Hill, by Phyl M. Noir
Photograph of house on Bunker Hill – before the City tore down all of the old houses – is courtesy of the Los Angeles Public Library.
By Phyl M. Noir
Dupont first built a dynamite factory in Hopewell then switched to the manufacture of guncotton during World War I. In 1923 Tubize Corporation established a plant at the old Dupont site but everyone kept calling the plant Dupont. The same year, the city of Hopewell annexed the neighboring town of City Point. The Honeywell Corporation and Hercules Chemical sited their plants on the James River. Smurfit-Stone Container Corporation built a paper mill. Read more
My Hero, Ed Asner
By LIONEL ROLFE
Twenty five years ago, my mentor and hero was a city editor of television fame. The actor’s name was Ed Asner and he played a city editor named Lou Grant, which was also the name of the television series. Asner played the role so well I came to believe he made manifest the two real editors I had worked for who taught me every thing I knew about the journalism racket.
One was a wild Irishman, Dana McGaugh, at the Livermore Independent, a small town paper in Northern California. The other was Scott Newhall, editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, then the major newspaper in Northern California. Read more
Edendale: Chapter 6
Sixth Chapter of “Edendale,” Frog Town by Phyl M. Noir
Architectural rendering of proposed Hyperion Bridge. Courtesy of Los Angeles Public Library. The Electric railway runs alongside it.
By Phyl M. Noir
Bruno Shultz followed Celia at a distance and when she turned to look at him he looked at the ground. She walked by the Frog Town houses, which were surrounded by dirt yards planted with corn and tomatoes except for the house with the carved wood Virgin bulto, and that house had a lawn.
Celia’s father Juan Lowry had returned from the war in Europe with money he won playing poker and bought Won’s on the corner of Riverside Drive and Knox before CalTrans built the Golden State in 1956, which eradicated, obliterated, razed, moved, ripped asunder, and demolished the mostly Latino Eastside near the River. The stretch of little commercial buildings except for Won’s sunk into desuetude. In 1964, CalTrans brought California Route 2 over Riverside Drive, which almost completely isolated Frogtown and surrounded it with incessant noise. Read more
Photographer Phil Stern Opens His Very Own Gallery In Downtown L.A.
Here’s Phil Stern’s famous picture of Marilyn Monroe, looking scared. Read more
The “Opposable Thumb” Will Be Celebrated In Downtown Los Angeles
By LIONEL ROLFE
When I was in my early teens in the 1950s in Long Beach I learned where human wealth really comes from.
There was this fellow named Dr. Fitzgibbon who was doing top secret research on dolphins for the U.S. Navy who used to come over to my parents’ house. He wasn’t supposed to talk about his work because it was regarded as top secret. But he was consumed with excitement over the knowledge that dolphins had bigger and he believed more powerful brains than humans and their language had much more complex syntax. 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.
