The Deep Dark Past Of An Elephant Oasis
By LIONEL ROLFE
A hundred million years or so ago, or perhaps far less by some estimates, the sea beds then under the ancient ocean were thrust up into the heavens, and thus was the Sierra born. The cataclysmic rise left the eastern side of the mountain range rocky and steep and sheer. The western side is the older side, and the land is more gentle and sloping beneath the dwindling glacier at the top of Kiersarge Pass.
Actually, the mountain range is still young, compared to the Rockies in the center of the country and the Adirondacks in the east. The Sierra are still being formed, thrusting upward at a rapid rate – geologically speaking. Read more
EXCLUSIVE: The Bizarre Relationship Of Frank Zappa & Lionel Rolfe Is Revealed
by Nigey Lennon
If you’re reading this, it’s likely you’re familiar with Lionel Rolfe, co-publisher of Boryanabooks (with his lovely wife, the eponymous Boryana Rolfe). You’ve probably read his various musings on literature, politics, and classical music — with a decided emphasis on “classical”. Coming as he does from a family of world-class classical musicians, Lionel has never been one to suffer rock ‘n roll fools gladly, nor find it in his heart to excuse the wretched excesses of popular culture. On the contrary: over the years, he has practically made a career out of thumbing his nose at pop icons of various stripes, from the Grateful Dead at their inception in ’60s San Francisco to the advent of punk music in the ’70s to whatever passing trend happened to be floating down the gutter in his artsy Silver Lake neighborhood a few minutes ago. He’s truly an egalitarian hater of anything with distorted guitars. Thus, being married to me, a purveyor of music that involves abusing guitars on occasion, must have been a sore trial to him, especially when I insisted on introducing him to Frank Zappa. Read more
Despite How It Looks Now, Obama Will Be Our Next Lincoln
By LIONEL ROLFE
Ultimately I think that Barak Obama will be considered one of the great presidents. He has the intellectual ability to see what the problems are and what might be done about them. That’s a big start, compared to the last president. There’s a problem, however. The nation is awash in religious fervor and a growing worship of ignorance, not unlike the Middle East and too many other parts of the world. This is not the way to deal with the future. Read more
On The Black Sea Or By The Pacific, People Sing & Dance Their Way Into Delerium
In Varna on the Black Sea, a dance troupe puts on a show of Bulgarian folkdancing. Read more
Is Obama Going To Force Leftists To The Center?
By LIONEL ROLFE
A few weeks back, word got out that Obama’s been feeling tired. After a win by a rather peculiar former male model named Scott Brown of the Massachusetts senate seat of the late Ted Kennedy, a lot of the rest of us got tired. Especially when it was immediately followed by the Supreme Court giving away the store to the corporations. So the fact that Kennedy’s going to be replaced by a bank and insurance company megaphone shouldn’t be surprising. Read more
You Can’t Always Sing & Dance: Memories Of A Particularly Special Person And Friend
By LIONEL ROLFE
December 23, 2009
My friend Karen Kaye, executive director of Connections for Children in Santa Monica, a non-profit provider of babysitting and other services for single working mothers, is dying. She’ll probably be gone by the time you read this. Read more
THE BIG EVENT AT THE GEFFEN PLAYHOUSE: GET ALL THE GRUBBY DETAILS & REAL LOWDOWN HERE
AUTHORS AT THE GEFFEN — The three authors who hopefully provoked and even entertained an audience at Red Hen Press’ night at the Geffen Playhouse on Nov. 16 included, from left, Marc Acito, Annie La Ganga and Lionel Rolfe. Acito is the author of “The Gospel According to Marc” and “The Attack of the Theater People.” Acito, a regular NPR commentator, was funny and thought provoking with descriptions of his experiences as a house painter and the deaths of the people whose homes he worked on. Annie La Ganga, a performance artist and prose poet whose “Stoners and Self Appointed Saints,” is a discovery of Red Hen Press, did a kind of surreal and literary strip tease, describing her feelings of making love while she imagined herself to be a mermaid. Rolfe did his usual, talking about Thomas Mann and Arnold Schoenberg, among other such ponderous things.
Wallowing in Pessimism
By Lionel Rolfe
It’s been nearly 20 years since my fateful meeting with Yehudi Menuhin in the Pasadena Hilton Hotel. In case you don’t remember the name, Yehudi was one of the two greatest violinists of the 20th century, the other being Jascha Heifetz. Yehudi was also regarded as the greatest musical prodigy since Mozart. He began his career in San Francisco in the ’20s, in brilliant performances as a youngster of six, immediately drawing international acclaim. He was also my uncle. Read more
Interview with Nigey Lennon
A Surreal Nigey With Someone Else
IN JULY, WE INTERVIEWED NIGEY LENNON, AUTHOR OF THE BEST BOOK ON FRANK ZAPPA Nigey Lennon’s Being Frank: My Time with Frank Zappa occupies a fascinating and lively spot in the world of musical autobiography. When it was originally published it was extravagantly praised by many readers and critics, on the one hand, and at the same time snarkishly derided by some who questioned its legitimacy. All quibbling aside, the book remains the only firsthand, up close-and-personal memoir of the late Frank Zappa, iconoclastic composer, guitarist, and social commentator. In light of the fact that www.boryanabooks.com will soon be offering a completely revised and updated e-book edition of Being Frank, we decided to shoot a few questions at Ms. Lennon, who has lived in New York since 2000. Read more
Forget Trying to Make Nice with the Priests and Kings
By LIONEL ROLFE
Dear Mr. Obama,
Please let me remind you that there are times you just can’t be bipartisan. Not with the priests and kings who you can always count on standing against progress. In the midst of battle against these same foes, a couple of our nation’s founding fathers took strong note of that. “These are the times that try men’s soul,” Tom Paine wrote in “Common Sense.” Thomas Jefferson said that, “the tree of liberty must be replenished every ten to 20 years with the blood of patriots and the blood of tyrants.” 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.
