Book Review: The Lure of a Land by the Sea

By Greta Cobar

Long-time Venice historian Delores Hanney did it again: published yet another wonderful Venice memoir, made up of over thirty “vignettes,” as she calls them. With grandiose vocabulary and in what could be called poetic prose, she tells funny and insightful stories from the times of Abbot Kinney’s arrival in Venice all the way to more recent events that long-timers might remember.

Venice is “the spot just before one falls off the edge,” according to Hanney, and her latest book, The Lure of a Land by the Sea, illustrates Venice characters and stories that most definitely have not just an edge, but an importance and a relevance that break through the geographical boundaries of what we call Venice.

The book starts, appropriately, with the beginning of our community, which established the way we do things by letting a coin toss decide where Venice of America was going to materialize. It could have been in Ocean Park, you know. “Abbot Kinney was a dreamer, and Venice-of-America was his most vivid dream,” writes Hanney. She goes on to give details of Kinneyland, such as the philosophy movement it was based upon,  which was meant to foster a sense of contentment, cohesiveness and belonging, “inviting surrender to a felicitous lifestyle.”

“To see Venice is to live!”, Kinney is quoted as exclaiming after he rearranged the marshland with a lagoon, canals, imported gondolas, singing gondoliers, even Italian pigeons.

Ever wondered who introduced Mardi Gras to the Venice scene? Read The Lure of a Land by the Sea to find out about Arthur Reese, “the first black businessman in Venice,” who was originally from Louisiana and for who “it would have been unnatural” not to come to Venice. The book beautifully describes his journey from shining shoes to cleaning houses, to winning the first prize in the Tournament of Roses, to assuming the operation of the Venice Boat and Canoe Company. And yes, he is credited with bringing Mardi Gras all the way from Louisiana to Venice. Read that vignette for inspiration!

It was August 1, 1905, in Venice, California, that octogenarians Susan B. Anthony and Caroline Severance were speaking about woman suffrage to the 3600 audience members that filled the local auditorium. “Nothing is impossible to organized womanhood,” Severance is quoted as saying. Indeed, on October 10, 1911 California became the sixth state in the nation in which women could vote, nine years before women’s voting rights would go national. Hanney proudly states in her book that “as the centennial anniversary of women’s suffrage in California is celebrated, these days more women than men are casting ballots.”

From inspirational stories of nation-wide relevance to funny anecdotes that might make you start laughing out loud as you are quietly reading, go on to the next chapter, “lions & tigers & bears, oh my!” to Al G. Barnes Circus and Wild Animal Zoo coming to Venice and “those times when elephants or camels escaped to thunder about on the pier and the streets.” From that story go on to the next, this time not about animals running wild among the humans, but about a well-known celebrity swimming with a certain dolphin every Sunday for nearly a year, “happily as a pair of sea otter sisters.”

Wanna know about the beginning of Harley motorcycle’s presence in Venice? In The Lure of a Land by the Sea, Hanney divulges how a 300-mile racing track was built in our 3-mile long community, and how Otto Walker claimed Harley’s first national win at that very race.

No, it’s not all happy stories, and December 18, 1929 was not a happy day for Venice. Oil was discovered offshore and within two years 450 wells were erected, “uglifying the once lovely shoreline, fouling sand and surf and the toes that might touch them with despicable tar-y blobs,” Hanney writes. To make matters worse, the money did not stay in Venice, but was redirected to fund a fishing pier somewhere else. Read the book to find out where.

After laughing out loud to being saddened, the reader of The Lure of a Land by the Sea might find himself shedding a tear while reading about President Franklin D. Roosevelt signing Executive Order 9066, which committed 110,000 men, women and children of Japanese descent to various internment camps. “The Japanese Venetians were ordered to gather, with only what they could carry, on April 25, 1942, at Venice and Lincoln Boulevards where they waited with quiet dignity in a long, long line before being hauled off by the busload to Manzanar, 230 miles northeast of L.A., high in the Sierra Mountains,” Hanney writes. Not coincidentally, just as we now have Suzy Williams as our beloved Songbird of Venice, so back then they had Mary Kageyama as Songbird of Manzanar.

“the beat of a bongo, the howl of a poet” is the title of the vignette about the Venice Beat Movement, which Hanney describes as “free of the inhibiting bondage of the conventional worldview … under the influence of this substance or that.” You might know about Larry Lipton and Stuart Perkoff, both of whom played a significant part in the Beat Movement, but did you know that there were not one, but two gathering spots called “Venice West”? Hanney gives details and locations for both.

The Lure of a Land by the Sea also tells the story of our Venice Poet Laureate Philomene Long, and how she jumped the covent wall of St. Joseph’s of Carondelet in Los Angeles to be “spirited off – in the dark of night – in a get-away car driven by sister Pegarty.” Hanney goes on to explain that leaving the covent did not represent an abandonment of spirituality, or even a rejection of Catholicism, and goes on to reveal Philomene’s new self-identification.

Nowadays one might think that surfing is inherent to Venice. However, as Hanney discloses in her book, the first surfer here was actually brought from Hawaii as a lure to potential buyers. He came here with his 200-pound, eight-foot-long wooden board of his own design.

Although many may have followed, the first Venice snake charmer was Carroll Shelby himself, who opened his Cobra manufacturing plant right here in Venice. His official mascot was a live cobra, which somehow escaped for a few days, and Shelby took drastic action upon its return. Read the book to find out what, and why Shelby moved out of Venice when his business went from a startup of nothing in 1962 to a $16 million company in ’65.

Hanney’s vignettes abound, entertain, inform and mesmerize. In “painting the town” she writes about Rip Cronk, who “came upon a mural-painter-seeking ad placed by SPARC” upon his arrival in Venice. The first mural he painted in Venice was Venice on the Halfshell and it was located in the old Venice Pavilion. According to The Lure of a Land by the Sea, Venice’s oldest mural is Edward Biberman’s 1941 “Story of Venice,” which all of us enjoyed looking at when visiting what used to be our historical post office. After the building’s recent sale into private ownership, the public’s access to its beloved mural was cut off. Hanney’s quote of Cronk as saying that “the community mural de-alienates and delineates the individual in society” is relevant to Venice residents’ current efforts to maintain the Biberman mural available for public view.

Hanney’s book tells so many more stories, divulges so many other secrets, and sheds light on so much history. To get the full details, get yourself a copy at Small World Books or Beyond Baroque.

Book Review: The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in The Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander

Reviewed by Mary Getlein

Once upon a time there was slavery in this country. Jim Crow laws were laws put in place during the reconstruction of the South, for the management and regulation of freed black slaves.

Ladies, when you’re walking down a street and it’s dark, and you see a Black man following you, does your heart accelerate and you start moving faster down the street? That reaction proves that racism is not dead.

The Jim Crow laws got Black men lynched. In 1954 Emmett Till went to Mississippi to visit a cousin. He was fourteen years old. He supposedly whistled at a white woman, which you did not do in Mississippi. A small crowd of white men forced their way into his cousin’s house, took him away, and beat him until he died. They wrapped him with barbed wire and chained him to a car motor and threw him into the river. When they found his body, his face was mutilated beyond description. His mother got his body back to Chicago and had an open casket funeral. White America got to see what happens to a young black man in their country. Most whites were horrified beyond belief. That happened in 1954.

Michelle Alexander and her book, The New Jim Crow – Mass Incarceration in The Age of Colorblindness, documents what is happening to millions of Black and Latino people today. Instead of lynching, we have the “War on Drugs,” which started with the Nixon White House. President Nixon said to Haldeman: “Face the facts! The whole problem is the Blacks. We have to devise a system to keep them in check.” Voila! the War on Drugs was born, designed specifically with the goal of locking up an incredible number of people with Draconian drug laws.

Black people are set up for a crime, are harasse and intimidated into accepting a “lesser charge,” but it’s still a felony conviction. Now they have a felony drug conviction in their records, and thus do not qualify for any federal aid such as food stamps, federal housing, any federal education grants, or anything else. You have no food and no place to live, yet you’re supposed to get a job and have a place to live in order to stay on parole. Most people will not hire anyone with a felony conviction.

Our country leads the world in locking up its citizens. For a drug offense in England, for example, you might get six months. In the United States, because of mandatory drug sentencing laws, a person might get five to ten years. The three strikes law gives you 25 years to life for your third strike. This year in the US there are over 50,000 in solitary confinement. This is “cruel and unusual” punishment. These people are locked in a cell twenty – four hours a day. Their food is shoved into the room. There is no contact with another human being. Humans are social animals. We need to be around other people. This is a prescription for mental illness, and it comes true.

This is a prison system that is cruel beyond belief. Who profits? The criminal “justice” system starts with juvenile hall and goes all the way up. They make money on the entire imprisoned population, which is often put in jail illegally. People do not know their rights and are easily persuaded to take a “lesser charge.” What they should have done was to stay in jail and fight it. If you fight it, they will usually drop it. Once you have a felony drug conviction, your life gets less and less your own. You are busy trying to get a job, trying to find a place to live, trying to reconnect with your kids, trying to live down the shame and stigma of a felony drug conviction.

Criminals are the one social group that we have permission to hate. They are entitled to no respect. They have our collective scorn and contempt. They are routinely treated as less than human.

What can we do? We can fight for new laws on drugs. In the Senate there is bill 1506, which would make posession a misdemeanor and not a felony. Marijuana is socially acceptable in most of the US, yet the drug laws do not reflect this. If they were reduced to misdemeanor charges, they would pay a fine and go home.

If you feel no compassion for the prisoners, you might care about this issue just on the cost to taxpayers. This is a 100 billion dollar issue. That’s how much California’s budget pays their criminal “justice” system. The jails and prisons are overcrowded as it is.

Michelle Alexander has written a brilliant book about this apartheid has come to be. While most white Americans think that racism is over: the fact is that we lock up mostly Blacks and Latinos. Why is that? She details the process extensively.

Alexander: “Rather than shaming and condemning an already deeply stigmatized group, we collectively can embrace them – not necessarily their behavior, but them – their humaness.”

People think that people in jail are in there because of their own fault. Mass incarceration is based on the belief that all these people have freely chosen a life of crime and that they deserve to be in prison. It’s exactly like when people believe that homeless people have freely chosen to be homeless. Losing a job, being evicted, having no money and no place to live – that has “nothing” to do with people being homeless. Those that are trapped at the bottom actually “chose” their fate.

Alexander ends the book by saying, “I was never a believer in conspiracy theories, now I am. Now I am a believer.”

Novel Explores Early Day Venice

Lions & Gondolas By Laura Shepard Townsend

Reviewed by Delores Hanney

Venetian Laura Shepard Townsend loves Venice and it shows. Opening the stunning mystical cover of her latest book, Lions and Gondolas, is something like stepping into a time machine to be whisked away – through a potent combination of painstaking research and elegant writing – to a viscerally felt presence in Venice, California, circa 1920, where a “perfumed gardens of the gods on the temporal plane of fantasy” aspect prevailed, according to an opinion in the Los Angeles Times.

Venice, indeed, radiated a heady blend of enchantment and excitement. With Townsend as guide, one revels in the splendid excesses: the chronic bathing beauty contests, endless parades of pretty starlets advertising new movies, and many reckless airplane wing walkers stealing our breath away. Thousands of twinkling lights lined the shores of the romantic canals. Everything and nothing were reason for a celebration, for which the whole town was swanned out in abundant embellishments by decorating maven Arthur Reese, to further heat up the happy quotient of the occasion.

Visionary cum founding father Abbot Kinney is all over the place: accessible, protective, cheerleading.  We roam U.S. Island at the confluence of three of Venice’s original canals, a compound of pretty, white-shuttered bungalows awash in lush plantings of colorful flowers. And also the pier with its concessionaires and rides and amusements, and the huge sea lion that served as the aquarium’s welcoming greeter.

Townsend also gives us the less jolly experience of Venice in the time of the swine flu pandemic, when folks scurried around behind the protection of gauze masks. Posted signs listed ways to avoid infection, including the rather mysterious injunction to “Drink plenty of water and keep your bowels open;” and roving helmeted patrols tacked bright green quarantine notices on the doors of those failing a health test.

Overlaid upon the compelling true-to-life Venice backdrop there’s a swell fictional factor to be avidly consumed.

Lions and Gondolas is sort of like Catcher in the Rye with a feminine persuasion. Its first person narrator, Angelica Grastende, is Holden Caulfield in a skirt, stomping about, all adolescent angst and alienation and narcissistic self-importance. But, whereas Holden had only coming-of-age madness to deal with, this poor babe’s teenage self-individuation process has the complicating issues of assimilation and skin tone to cope with, plus the whole contentious early-twentieth-century’s shifting paradigm regarding a woman’s place in the American social structure.

Favored by destiny’s consent – foretold in Grandmother Lena’s Tarot card reading – gypsies Angelica, her mother Ava, and grandmother, along with their pair of pilfered lions, arrive in Venice, three fugitives from a small traveling European circus (and Ava’s husband), panting with keenness to begin life afresh in the sun- soaked promised land on the Southern California coast.

The realization of the plan hinges on the transmutation of gentle Ava into “La Domadora,” the great tamer of lions. Expecting this radical a makeover seems overly optimistic, but it’s brought to fruition by the arrival of Mabel Stark, the honest-to-god, real life tiger trainer of global repute, who generously sets herself to the task of fairy god mothering Ava into a respectable trainer of large cats and a popular attraction on the Venice pier.

Meanwhile, Angelica flings herself furiously into reinvention as a typical American youth while constantly at odds with her Grandmother Lena, who is usually as cranky as a bear with a toothache and always haranguing about maintaining the traditional Romany ways. Rechristening herself Anne, in the way of most kids, she sometimes sells out on herself in order to promote a sense of belonging with her new, aggressively shallow teenage peers. But fortunately, she is blessed by the coming of a mentor, too, in the person of Abbot Kinney, assuming the role of wise, adoring uncle. Not that she always heeds his advice, to be sure.

Woven through it all are glowing bits of wisdom that make one stop short to reflect. “Now I know that love always possesses a fragility to it that lets it be forgotten in a breath,” for example. Descriptions of alluring grace call out for re-reading several times – for the pure joy of it – as well.

In this “memoir” of her early years in Venice, Angelica Grastende recalls,  “I first entered Venice, on foot, much like a pilgrim who enters a holy place, as a seeker, stirred with expectation.”

Immersion in Laura Shepard Townsend’s delicious second book in the Destiny’s Consent series, might cause readers to find themselves enjoying a similar sensation.

I did.

The Coverup continues – Book Review: Watergate – A Novel

By Jim Smith

We live in a world shaped by history. It is hard to escape our personal history – parents, aunts, uncles – and others who want to shape us in their molde. One means of escape that has likely been practiced by many readers is to run away to Venice. Here, at the end of the continent, we can create our own history, our own personality.

Even harder to escape is social and political history. Like it or not, we are all Americans and we carry considerable baggage, even here in Venice. We live in a country that has been shaped by world-historic events including the atom bomb, Nazism, the Holocaust, the demise of the socialist bloc, terrorism and seemingly endless wars, to name a few. And it is the political history of this country that has brought us to a more and more authoritarian society. These events include the Kennedy assassination(s), Watergate, Iran Contra, and 9/11. No matter when one was born, these events continue to play a role in our everyday lives.

Neither the mass media nor academia seem to have any interest in explaining why events happen and their significance to our lives. Thus we are left with the story that Kennedy was shot by a lone gunman (Oswald), who in turn was shot by a lone gunman (Ruby); Watergate was caused by a bunch of Keystone Kops or Plumbers; Iran-Contra was dreamed up by a crazy fellow named Ollie North, and was not the subversion of democratic government; and 9/11 was done by a bunch of religious fanatics and had nothing to do with U.S. foreign policy.

Thomas Mallon, author of Watergate: A Novel (Pantheon, 2012) seemingly has no interest in delving deeper into this pivotal event in American history. Mallon’s main interest is character development, which quickly turns into character distortion. Oilman Fred LaRue, who was a highly placed actor in the Nixon administration, was a man without a title or a clear job duty. This undoubtedly made it easier for him to work on Nixon’s reelection since he had no bothersome job duties. He was a protege of Mississippi’s Senator James Eastland, an unrepentant racist. He was also the architect of the Republican “southern strategy,” which gained that party a solid block of electoral votes in the South. In Mallon’s treatment, LaRue is a really nice guy with a liberal girlfriend.

Another Watergate conspirator to get a personality makeover by Mallon is the infamous E. Howard Hunt. He was the CIA’s point man on the Bay of Pigs fiasco, a failed invasion of Cuba in 1961. He later became a personal assistant to CIA Director Allen Dulles. Shortly before his death in 2007, Hunt made a taped death-bed confession of his involvement in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He named as co-conspirators David Phillips, Cord Meyer, Frank Sturgis, David Morales, William Harvey, as well as a French gunman, Lucien Sarti, who worked for the Mafia, and Lyndon B. Johnson. Sturgis was one of the “Plumbers” who was arrested in the Watergate burglary of the Democratic National Committee’s offices.

In Mallon’s novel, Hunt is portrayed as a family man who is very much in love with his wife Dorothy, who was also the “bag lady” who delivered hush money to those arrested in the break-in. Mallon says Hunt’s life was shattered when Dorothy was killed in a plane crash in 1972, while carrying $10,000 in cash. All of what Mallon says may be true, but Hunt and LaRue were by no means upstanding citizens. Both had no compulsion when it came to subverting democratic government to get what they wanted.

The real story behind Watergate surfaced with the publication of the best seller, Silent Coup (St. Martin’s Press, 1991). Perhaps Mallon doesn’t read non-fiction. In it, authors Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin show that Nixon was not only paranoid but that people – powerful people – were really out to get him.

As is often the case in real life, there was something even more evil and dangerous lurking in the shadows behind Nixon. For those of us in the anti-war movement, Nixon was the president we loved to hate, perhaps more than Bush. But to the military/covert action establishment there was growing alarm about Nixon’s liberal foreign policy, including his efforts to establish detente with the Soviet Union and his unprecedented trip to China and meeting with Mao Zedung. Now that China makes all our cool gadgets, it may be hard to understand just how much the far right hated China in 1972. The rabid anti-communists in the Pentagon and CIA were horrified that the President of the United States would sit in the same room with the devil incarnate. Chief of U.S. Naval Operations, Admiral Thomas Moorer, went so far as to establish a spy operation in the White House.

When the spying was uncovered by the soon to be infamous Plumbers, Nixon and his staff first considered filing treason charges against the ring. However, they later decided to hush up what was known as the Moorer-Radford Affair (Navy Yeoman Charles Radford was the spy in the White House). Even though the spying stopped, the Pentagon unease continued.

Moorer had another protege in addition to Radford. His name was Bob Woodward, who stated in 2005, “In 1970, when I was serving as a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy and assigned to Adm. Thomas H. Moorer, the chief of naval operations, I sometimes acted as a courier, taking documents to the White House.” However, Moorer said that Woodward’s role was to brief White House aide, General Alexander Haig. Woodward left the Navy, went to work as a reporter for a string of suburban Washington newspapers and quickly became one of the most famous journalists in history at the Washington Post, where he played a key role in bringing down Nixon.

None of this should excuse Nixon, who was guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors, including repression of domestic dissent and war crimes for his bombing of Hanoi and invasion of Cambodia. However, it should remind us that Presidents, including Barack Obama, are often manipulated and coerced by entrenched financial and government bureaucracies that are neither electable nor accountable. These bureaucracies, whether in the Pentagon, Wall Street or even in the Postal Service continue to lead us down a path of less freedom and more authoritarianism regardless of who is in the White House or Congress.

Watergate: A Novel will likely get a lot of publicity as the 40th anniversary of Watergate rolls around. Unfortunately, the book is a fantasy that uses real people’s names but alters them beyond recognition. Those who want to know the true story of Watergate should take a look at Silent Coup (silentcoup.com), which is available at Powell’s Books (powells.com) for as little as $3.50. Powell’s is a fully unionized alternative to Amazon.com. It might also be available at used book shops or thrift stores. Parts of the book are on-line at: nixonera.com/etexts/silentcoup/contents.asp. There have been new developments in recent years, as memoirs are written and files are declassified. Do a little sleuthing on the internet to uncover the facts. 

Snoopin’ Around – The Story of David Asper Johnson and The Argonaut

Reviewed by Jim Smith

Sometimes those who report the news have the biggest influence on shaping the news in the first place. Probably no one had a bigger influence on the the development of Marina del Rey than Argonaut founder and publisher Dave Johnson.

David  Asper Johnson and the newspaper he founded were inextricable linked with Marina del Rey. The small craft harbor began in the 1960s and the Argonaut was not founded until 1971, but from that day the newspaper reflected, for better or worse, our unusual neighboring community to the south.

Before dredging began, it was a swamp, a wetlands, as was Venice many years before. The natural environment was destroyed, as was 99 percent of the wetlands in Los Angeles County.

Snoopin’ Around, the title of the book – subtitled The Story of David Asper Johnson and The Argonaut - was also the title of Johnson’s long-running column. In it, and in the news stories carried by The Argonaut, is chronicled the 50-year journey that changed the Marina from a small-boat harbor into a mega-development that even attracts Saudi princes, and is L.A. County’s cash cow. In fact, the major topics of concern in The Argonaut, as reflected in Johnson’s columns are proposed new developments, not all of which were successful, and airport noise. The low rumble of giant jet aircraft that we sometimes hear in Venice could be a deafening roar in the neighborhoods of Playa del Rey and Westchester which were served by The Argonaut.

 

During the 1970s, many of us in Venice cast a wary eye on the Marina. The culture clash between bohemian Venice and swinging-singles Marina was extreme. There was even a popular tee shirt, “Venice Is Not Marina del Rey.” But even while we were condemning the high-rises sprouting in the Marina and the “straight” lifestyle of the thousands pouring into new waterside apartments and condos, many of us trooped off to work in the “swamp.” Venice women worked in the many expensive restaurants, and I still remember, not so fondly, waxing boats to make ends meet.

It’s always good to know your neighbors, and the Marina has been Venice’s neighbor, for better or worse, for nearly half of our town’s lifetime. The building of the Marina put more pressure by developers on Venice. The upwardly mobile have been trying to slice off Venice neighborhoods and call them part of the Marina for decades. Many newer residents of Venice’s Oxford Triangle and the Peninsula think of themselves as residents of the County’s boat harbor, instead of Venetians whose neighborhoods have a long history as part of Venice. Johnson noted this, and called Washington, “the Mason-Dixon Line.” Indeed, Marina signs can be found up and down Lincoln Blvd. and the large hotel a block south of Windward was until recently called the Marina-Pacific Hotel.

The Argonaut has never been as partisan as the Beachhead, yet by simply shining the light of publicity on outrageous development schemes, the Argonaut helped to quash them. There was a plan for a 13-story Holiday Inn at Lincoln and Mindanao, recurring Marina Bypass freeways, and a yacht harbor in the Venice canals. Johnson calculated how many more boats would be entering the Marina’s main channel from the canals, creating the specter of traffic jams. He reported on Dow Chemical’s former dump site that lies under some of the plushes homes in the Silver Strand. Even though a Republican, Johnson supported the drive for decriminalization of marijuana back in 1972. He also reported favorably on a petition drive for Venice cityhood in 1990.

At the same time, Johnson was an unabashed capitalist wannabe. He purchased a chain of newspapers in the South Bay, and moved his main office to Hermosa Beach. The papers folded a short time later. In 1980, Johnson invaded Venice in partnership with Tom Victory who wrote a chatty column in their short-lived paper called the Ocean Front Weekly. The Beachhead countered with a satirical column by “Dawn Defeat.” In his last couple of decades Johnson focused on the Argonaut, and made it a going concern.

At all times, the competition between the Argonaut and the Beachhead was friendly. So much so that when Johnson died in 2006 he was eulogized in this paper by none other than Carol Fondiller, usually our most caustic writer. But Fondiller, who had been with the Beachhead off and on since 1968 had nothing but high praise for the humor and integrity of the Argonaut’s publisher. If only corporate media had those qualities.

For those who are interested in the history of the Marina and Venice, this is a book to have. Helga Gendell, a Marina historian, has done a fine job researching and editing the book.

 

Snoopin’ Around can be purchased on-line at www.lulu.com. Carol Fondiller’s insightful article can be found at http://bit.ly/tuHUUG.    

New Book: Nun on Fire by Philomene Long

Reviewed by Jim Smith

Have you ever wondered what goes on behind the walls of a convent? The answer might surprise you.

Now we have a day-to-day look, thanks to Pegarty Long’s publication of her late twin sister’s Memoirs of a Nun On Fire. Before becoming Venice’s poet laureate, Philomene Long spent five years as a novice and a full-fledged nun in a convent located in the Santa Monica mountains. She went over the wall one night, in part due to the allure of Venice of the Beats, and never looked back. She did leave us with this inspired description of her time on the inside.

Up until now, Long has been known mainly for her haunting poetry. We now know that she was an accomplished writer of prose. Her factual, and hilarious, description of nunnery reads like a novel. The 18 chapters are broken up into nun-sized morsels with titles like: “Last Passionate Kiss on the Convent Steps,” “I was Elvis Presley’s First Hound Dog,” “I Set the Convent on Fire,” “God’s Worm,” “I Am a Beat Nun,” “Hermann Goering in a Nun’s Habit,” “The Zen Slap.”

For the first time in print (is that true?), it is disclosed that nuns routinely self-flagellate. What the Da Vinci Code novel and film implied was an aberration, was actually common practice in at least one convent. Apparently, the Roman Catholic Church denies that it is part of its practice.

In a response to the portrayal of self-flagellation in the Da Vinci Code, an official of the Opus Dei Catholic sect had this to say: “The Da Vinci Code makes it appear that Opus Dei members practice bloody mortifications. In fact, though history indicates that some Catholic saints have done so, Opus Dei members do not do this.” By implication, this influential group is denying widespread use or endorsement of self-flagellation in the Church.

Long’s disclosure of required self-flagellation within the last 50 years ago in a typical nunnery, “The Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet’s Convent,” may have uncovered a secret akin to the downgrading of Mary Magdalene by the Church or the sexual abuse of alter boys.

At the least, it raises some questions. Is self-flagellation an approved, or required, practice for nuns, monks and priests? If not, when did it stop?

Long says the instrument is called the “discipline.” She describes it as “a very narrow steel chain, about a foot and a half long…at the bottom there is a knob with many little chains, each with a small ball at the tip.” In her convent, it is the “Saturday night special,” to be used after prayers on that evening. This was no optional diversion for young nuns, but an integral and required part of convent life.

While Long devotes a good number of pages to this fearsome instrument, most of the book is much lighter. Philomene Long was not going to abandon her humorous way of dealing with the world simply because she had become a nun.

According to Pegarty Long, her sister began working on the book shortly after she left the convent. Parts of it have appeared in print through the years but this is the first unabridged and unexpurgated edition.

Philomene Long died in 2007 after a life spent as a Venice poet (except for this interlude as a nun). However, it remained for Pegarty Long to edit and publish much of her work. In August 2010, she published The Collected Poems of Philomene Long. This was followed last April by The Selected Poems and Prose of John Thomas. Thomas, a major poet in his own right, was Philomene Long’s husband until his death in 2002.

 

A book launching for Memoirs of a Nun on Fire was held Aug. 13 at Beyond Baroque. Members of the Beat Literati from throughout Southern California and beyond attended, and many of them read excerpts from the book. Readers included Hillary Kaye, Harry Northup, Jim Smith, Holly Prado, Virom Coppola, Pegarty Long, Mariana Dietl, S.A. Griffin and Michael C. Ford.

There is still a treasure trove of poetry and prose from Long and Thomas waiting to be mined and published. Pegarty Long can be encouraged in her editing and publishing work if everyone reading this review buys a copy of this throughly entertaining book, Memoirs of a Nun on Fire.

The book can be purchased at the Beyond Baroque bookstore or on-line from Raven Publications at: http://bit.ly/qs33Vk

Book Review: Charles Brittin – West and South

By Jim Smith

This book is an incredible photographic display of Venice in the 1950s and ‘60s, and of the Civil Rights Movement in Los Angeles and the South.

Brittin, who died last January 23 at age 83, left us with images of a Venice that no longer exists. His photos of the struggle for civil rights are both breathtaking and shocking.

Here’s what Brittin says about Venice: “It felt like the end of the world then–Venice was about as far away from Los Angeles as you could get. It had the mood of a deserted colony, and there was a quality of remoteness to Venice that drew people whose chances were running out, or were just about to begin…Our apartments may have been small but there was a tremendous sense of space when you stepped outside…There were no confines, it was private, and you seldom saw any police.”

One of Brittin’s most famous photos is of the Venice West Coffee House when it was shut down by the LAPD for allowing poetry to be recited without a license. The photo has been published previously in the Beachhead.

Brittin must have taken hundreds, if not thousands of photos of Venice, and although there are 215 prints in the book, many of the Venice photos are not necessarily included. We are now dependent on the good will of the Getty Museum, which owns the Brittin archives, if we are ever to view these.

In any case, almost any Venetian would love this book. Fortunately, it can be purchased at Firefly at 1409 Abbot Kinney Blvd and Small World Books at 1407 Ocean Front Walk.

Book Review by Kathy Leonardo: “The New Now” by Ava Bird

Poetry….some say it’s the highest of art forms….others consider it a bunch of nonsense. Whatever you believe, if it moves you, it has done its job.

Very much like an artist’s canvas, once the paint dries, the end result speaks to each person differently in a silent visual expression.

The book, The New Now is an exploration of the Feminine. This compelling, yet sensitive book of poetry and prose will not only shock you, but also tempt you to lament for the unspoken voice that rises up within you.

A true feminist, Ava Bird not only struts her feathers, but bears her red-feathered breast to all. While her prose consists of honesty flavored with cries of injustice, the language used is not for the weak-hearted. Ava Bird’s targeted rants are obsessed with blatant Feminism, while allowing shadows of vulnerability (mixed with rage) to flicker throughout.

As you follow the path, you are carried off to the absurd, twisted with humor. At the same time, you witness tinges of sadness. Ava Bird scoffs at the man-made system set before us to follow. However, we are left smirking from her amusing observations of sexism and the decay of society.

Like an abstract painting, Ava Bird takes you to the extreme, yet surprises you with her quirky sense of humor. A wonderful piece of work, Ava Bird revels in her own femininity and encourages all women to do the same. It’s a beautiful book and definitely worth the read. Stimulate your senses and awaken your goddess!

For more info, or to purchase The “New Now”, go to http://ompoem.com/ or www.ktrpromo.com.

The Diary of Dang Thuy Tram: Last Night I Dreamed of Peace

Book Reviewed by Jim Smith

The definitive book about the Viet Nam war has been written by a twenty-something Vietnamese woman. This may be hard to believe for those raised on a diet of male-oriented sagas of hard fighting, hard loving and hard living American soldiers that dominate the U.S. book market and big screens. Even veterans of Viet Nam don’t know the full story of the war until they read, Last Night I Dreamed of Peace, the best-selling (in Viet Nam) diary of Dang Thuy Tram.

What was the Viet Nam War really like? It was not just the experience of bomber pilots carrying out their missions miles above their intended victims. And certainly it was not the experience of policy makers 10,000 miles away in Washington. Perhaps the best book on the combat experience by an American solider is Ron Kovic’s Born on the Forth of July. A Rumor of War by Philip Caputo also has its fans. Histories of the conflict also abound, as do fantasy films like Apocalypse Now.

What all of these books have in common is that they tell the story from the invader’s point of view. In a relatively poor country like Viet Nam, there are few writers and few publishing houses. This is why Tram’s diaries written from 1968-70, “under the gun,” in Quảng Ngãi province are so illuminating.

Quảng Ngãi province, which lies about half-way from Hanoi and Saigon, was a hotbed of support for the National Liberation Front, called the Viet Cong. It was the sight of numerous bombings and sprayings of Agent Orange, as well as sorties by U.S. infantry, Marines and helicopter gunships. Dr. Tran’s field hospital hid under the forest canopy while enemy soldiers on patrol came within a few feet of it. Quảng Ngãi province was also the sight of the My Lai massacre where soldiers of the Americal Division under Lt. William Calley murdered between 350 and 500 mainly women, children and old men.

The diary became public only in 2005. Within 18 months, it had sold nearly half a million copies in Viet Nam. Most books there have press runs of 5,000 copies. The Diaries have caught the imagination of a generation that never knew the war. Two-thirds of Viet Nam’s 90 million people were born after 1975, when South Viet Nam was finally liberated.

After Dr. Tran’s death at the hands of an American soldier in 1970, the Diaries had come into the possession of an intelligence officer, Fred Whitehurst who took them back to the U.S. Whitehurst later joined the FBI and became a well-known whistle-blower over the FBI’s investigation of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. In 2005, he gave the Diaries to another veteran who was traveling to Hanoi. The Tran family was tracked down and the book was quickly published. The young doctor is now a national hero.

The Diaries reveal the innermost thoughts of a young woman’s insecurities, loves and crushes, and her desire to serve her people. Dr. Tran – known as Thuy (pronounced Twe) – often talks to herself and criticizes her failings and weaknesses: “Oh, Thuy! Are you pessimistic? Look around you, there are so many comrades, so many young men, who have sacrificed their youth for the revolution. They have fallen without ever finding happiness. Why do you think only of yourself?” (Dec. 21, 1968).

It struck me when I was reading the diary of this heroic young woman that she and I were nearly the same age. Born a world apart, our lives were so different, yet so similar in many ways. I, too, was in the army when her diary begins. Yet I was not there by choice, having been drafted in 1966. Thuy, on the other hand, had turned down a safe assignment in a Hanoi hospital when she graduated from physician training. She wanted to go when she would be most needed, in the war zone, where men and women her own age were suffering bullet wounds and dying. It was up to this young doctor to save them.

Thuy had to operate on wounded soldiers in nearly unimaginably primitive conditions. She often was without drugs that could save her patient’s life. Anesthetics were sometimes missing in critical operations. Through it all, Thuy seems to suffer as much as her patients.

In 1968, I was able to leave the Army when my term of servitude ended. But for Thuy, it was a life and death struggle with the invaders. Defeat meant death. Victory was the only road to a normal life. As Thuy prophetically said in 1968: “So many people have volunteered to sacrifice their whole lives for two words: Independence and Liberty. I, too, have sacrificed my life for that grandiose fulfillment.”

The Vietnamese people did reach “the promised land,” as Martin Luther King called it shortly before his death. But Thuy did not get there with them.

When I visited Viet Nam last December, I saw an independent country at peace. Everyone seemed healthy, well fed and well dressed. Women seem assertive and active in economic and social affairs. I’m not an expert on Viet Nam, but I think Thuy would be pleased with the progress made in spite of war, defoliation and lack of support from the outside world. The U.S. never made reparations for ravishing the country.

If Thuy had lived and could visit Venice today, I wonder what she would think. I’m sure she would disapprove of the selfishness of many young people who think only of themselves and their possessions.

What would she say to those of us who are trying to fend off the rich and powerful while helping the poor and homeless? What would she say to the many women around the world who are protesting against dictators and injustice? Perhaps she would say to us what she wrote to herself 43 years ago: “To live is to face the storms and not to cower before them. Stand up, then, oh, Thuy! Even when the rain and gale are rising, even when tears have flowed in torrents, keep your spirit high.”

Printed and ebook versions of Last Night I Dreamed of Peace: The Diary of Dang Thuy Tram are available from Powells Books<www.powells.com>. An audio book is available from www.audible.com.

A Vietnamese feature film, entitled Don’t Burn, based on the diaries has been released. A clip can be seen on YouTube at http://bit.ly/ihN49U.

 

New Book by Venice’s Poet Laureate – REVIEW: The Collected Poems of Philomene Long

By Jim Smith

Philomene Long is back. The works of Venice’s poet laureate, who died three years ago, are more accessible than ever thanks to the publication in August of The Collected Poems of Philomene Long. This epiphany-inducing book of hundreds of her poems is a must-have for poetry lovers, students of Beat culture and Venice history. Poetry lovers and Philomene lovers gathered for the third annual Philomenian at Beyond Baroque for the book launching on August 17 (the birthday of Philomene and Pegarty Long). The audio from the event can be found on www.freevenice.org.

Long’s book and Stuart Perkoff’s Voices of the Lady – Collected Poems, published in 1998, are like bookends for the Beat generation in Venice. Perkoff created the Beats in the 1950s (although he didn’t use the name), along with Larry Lipton, Tony Scibella, Frank E. Rios, John Thomas and James Ryan Morris.

Long arrived in Venice in 1968 and was a close companion to Perkoff until his death in 1974. Except for brief absences, Philomene Long personified the best of Venice poetry until her death. Between the two of them, Perkoff and Long kept Venice on the poetry map for more than 50 years.

Before the publication of The Collected Poems of Philomene Long, finding her poetry was like an Easter egg hunt (green eggs included). A small number of her poems were published in Queen of Bohemia, Cold Eye Burning, The Dream Awakening, Odd Phenomenon in An Abandoned City, The Ravens, The Book of Sleep and The Ghosts of Venice West (both with John Thomas), Bukowski in the Bathtub, and of course, in the pages of the Free Venice Beachhead.

Thanks to the diligent work of her twin sister, Pegarty Long, who hunted down and edited more than 300 pages of poems and 27 pages of photographs, a new feast of poetry is available in one place.

The book does not include all of Philomene Long’s creative work. There are also films, including The Beats, An Existential Comedy, and The California Missions, with Martin Sheen (Long’s Mission poems are included in the book). It does include much that will be new even to friends and fans of Philomene Long. Many of the chapters are in chronological order. Others are titled “The Cold Ellison Poems” (some of Long’s best work, about the castle-like apartment building at 15 Paloma Avenue where she and husband, John Thomas, lived for many years), “The Raven Poems,” “Mission Poems,” “A Book of Hours,” and many others.

Philomene Long, in the opinion of this writer, was one of the greatest poets since Sappho’s time. She was also one of the great Beat poets, although her work was much broader than any label. She was highly respected by the male-dominated Beat fraternity. Her friends included Allen Ginsberg, Jack Micheline, Charles Bukowski, Jack Hirschman, Jack Foley and counter-cultural heroes like Timothy Leary.

Long’s poetry also helped reinforce the importance of Venice in world Beatdom. New York and San Francisco have usually gotten the lion’s share of attention as the center of the Beat generation. However, Venice in the 1950s and 60s was just as vibrant, perhaps more so. Our small beach community sported two major coffee houses, the Gas House and Venice West, and many active poets and artists. Venice poets were more faithful to the Beat credo of eschewing fame and material rewards. Our poets often read their poems in a coffee house and then either threw them away or set fire to them, believing that the act of creation was more important than the act of preservation. Other poems and paintings existed only on the walls of their ‘pads,’ and were painted over by disgusted landlords. In contrast, many of the New York and San Francisco poets sought notoriety and book deals.

In 1984, Long married poet John Thomas (whose work is yet to be collected). John Thomas had been an early Beat poet and cook at the Gas House. He had stopped writing for several years before Long inspired him to begin again. For 18 years, the two had a fairy-tale romance that inspired both to ever-greater collective heights.

Thomas died in 2002, an event which shattered Philomene but led to many great poems of lost love. She survived, in part due to her Catholic fatalism and Zen tranquility. Long had entered a nunnery when she was 18 years old. She became a postulant at the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet in the Brentwood hills. But the pull of Venice poetry caused her to go over the wall one night. Later in her life, Long took up the study of Zen with Maezumi Roshi. A book came out of this spiritual education: American Zen Bones: Maezumi Roshi Stories.

Philomene Long was a stalwart supporter of Venice, a frequent topic of her poetry. Besides being Poet Laureate, she was an active supporter of Beyond Baroque, our poetry center, and worked closely with its director, Fred Dewey. She also taught creative writing at UCLA and cultivated young poets and writers including Mariana Dietl and Mariano Zaro. Now, with the publication of this book, we can all be inspired by this great soul and poet, Philomene Long.

The Collected Poems of Philomene Long can be obtained at Venice locations including Beyond Baroque Books, Small World Books and Mystic Journey Bookstore. It can also be ordered on the web at: www.Raven-productions.com.