As Landfills Decay Here, Elsewhere In The World They’re Coping Better
By ANDREW PERRY
The United States is no longer the leader in waste disposal technology. Like many other technological advancements, the country finds itself behind nations like China, Japan and Germany. Considering the country’s current recession, both local governments and private businesses struggle to move forward in relieving the threat of pollution caused by landfills. In Southern California, the state’s largest facility, Puente Hills Landfill is closing, and the available land to take on the excess garbage is limited. This trend is indicative of what many communities throughout the nation are facing. This paper will study the different methods used in waste disposal, examine some of the most innovative strategies in other countries, and finally, analyze the crisis that California may be facing in the near future. Read more
VLADIMIR RODZIANKO: I Meet The Ghost Of The Real Rasputin
By Lionel Rolfe
I first met Vladimir Rodzianko nearly 40 years ago. He lived in a house in Chiswick outside of London, where his father also lived, one of the most famous of Russian Orthodox priests. Father and son had the same name.
The elder Rodzianko had been born Vladimir Rodzianko in the Ukraine in 1915 and he had an amazing study where he did his work, so beloved by many in the Orthodox community. It was a small cubbyhole under the stairs and it was filled from floor to ceiling with icons. Rodzianko, who later went to San Francisco where he became His Grace the Right Reverend Bishop Basil Rodzianko in the Orthodox Church in America, at that time was the most prominent Russian Orthodox leader in England. This was in part because he broadcast religious commentary to his home country during the Cold War on the BBC, and it was probably no coincidence that the junior Vladimir became the Russian voice of the BBC in addition to being a composer of some notoriety. Read more
Edendale: Chapter 4
The Fourth Chapter Of “Edendale,” THE AVENUES By Phyl M. Noir
Ansel Adams photograph of the Santa Monica pier, courtesy of the Los Angeles Public Library
Phyl M. Noir
She was a big reader. Her stepfather Sam used to say “She’s always got her nose in a book.”
When she was older, Cyd would read in George Eliot’s Adam Bede that Arthur Donnithorne passed along a broad avenue of limes and beeches. “It was a still afternoon,” she would read. “The golden light was lingering languidly among the upper boughs.” She would imagine the limes in Adam Bede were citrus trees with green fruit because she had not yet been anywhere but Los Angeles and Santa Monica and didn’t know about the English trees. Read more
Edendale: Chapter 3
UNION STATION, 1947, Courtesy of Los Angeles Public Library
By Phyl M. Noir
UNION STATION
This is the third chapter of “Edendale.”
Justina Anna put on the mouse suit she had worn at her wedding. She tied a black band around one arm of it.
She looked at herself in the mirror and pinned a black felt hat to her black hair with bobby pins and pulled the little net veil over her face. She put on white cotton gloves and lifted her suitcases by their bone handles, and walked down the green check carpeted hotel stairs.
The air was balmy, and the sky looked like light shooting off metal. Butterfly palms with orange fruit grew on each side of the hotel’s front doors. Red azaleas grew in the hotel yard. Mature water oaks cooled the street with their deep shade. Read more
Edendale: Chapter 2
Vero Beach, 1945 –courtesy Los Angeles Public Library
By Phyl M. Noir
Vero Beach, Corralitas & Venice
After the wedding ceremony, Dr. Bissell snapped a photograph of Sid in his dress uniform. Justina wore a suit with cloth-covered buttons and held Sid’s arm. The suit was a light brown, which Mrs. Bissell called “mousse,” and Justina understood her to have said, “mouse.” Mrs. Bissell wore a Prussian blue suit with a straight skirt and fitted jacket, a hat that looked like a soup bowl with turkey feathers coming from its inverted bottom, and the hideous fur boa that ended in terrible little animal heads with glass eyes. The women wore white cotton socks and saddle shoes because the War Defense Board had commandeered first silk and then nylon, so they did not wear dress shoes and stockings. Read more
How the LA Times After a Hundred-Year Love Affair with the City of Vernon Decided It Really Hated the Place All Along
A more balanced look at the industrial town’s history and at some of the (often ill considered) proposals for solving the Vernon problem.
By Leslie Evans
Vernon, California, is an odd little town. Five square miles of meat packing plants, warehouses, and industrial enterprises where 50,000 people work during the day while only 91, belonging to just 23 families, live at night. There are only 26 homes within the city’s borders, virtually all occupied by city employees or relatives of the long-serving members of the city council or other city officials.
Vernon lies on the southeast side of Downtown Los Angeles, bounded roughly by Washington Blvd. on the north and Slauson on the south. Its main arteries are Santa Fe Avenue, Soto Street, and Bandini Blvd., the last best known for the fertilizer company of the same name. Read more
Huntington Exhibits Honors A Madman
By LIONEL ROLFE
For me, one of the great unanswered puzzles about Charles Bukowski, the bard of San Pedro, was his love of classical music. I assumed it was because he was born in Europe. And after a visit to the “Poet on the Edge” exhibit at the Huntington Library in San Marino, I can say most probably that was the case.
This was one of many riddles about the great poet and novelist the exhibit answered. Read more
Edendale: Chapter 1
Photograph of Tom Mix’s “Mixville” courtesy of Mark Wanamaker, Director, Bison Archives, 650 North Bronson, Los Angeles 90004
Boyle Heights, The First Chapter Of The Important New Serial “Edendale”
By Phyl M. Noir
For the remainder of his life, Sam was to remember everything that happened during the war years as having happened at night during winter: the bare limbs of trees alongside roads that left skeletal shadows on snow in the moonlight, and the moon that was always full; the soldiers that marched on brittle feet sometimes 25 miles a day with heavy knapsacks on their backs; the men who died in the bleak darkness. Read more
The Misadventures Of Ari Mendelsohn
By LIONEL ROLFE
This is the first chapter from the picaresque novel by author and journalist LIONEL ROLFE, which recounts the sexual and political travails of the irascible, blacklisted title character, a reporter still harboring his besieged idealistic belief in humanity’s innate goodness and America’s dubious potential for good amid a reality of avarice, pragmatism, cynicism, and materialism. Read more
Lionel Rolfe Interviewed on KPFK on Anniversary of L.A. Times Bombing
Lionel Rolfe spoke with KPFK’s Suzie Weisman on “Beneath the Surface” October 1, the hundredth anniversary of the famous bombing on the Los Angeles Times on that date in 1910. Rolfe is coauthor of Bread and Hyacinths , available in digital format through Boryanabooks, which deals with the bombing and the career of Los Angeles socialist Job Harriman. Rolfe’s interview was to promote the first project of LATimesbomb, a multimedia event the night of his interview held at the Wordspace studio in the Atwater district of Los Angele. The event drew a standing room only crowd.
Listen here to Lionel’s interview
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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.
