doug, i've always said you're such a tease.
since i'll bet most of the list's readers have no idea who ella taylor is -- and i didn't either -- i thought i'd take a look see who coop and doug are so thrilled about. all i could find out is that ella taylor does mediocre movie reviews for LA Weekly.
then i stumbled across a LA Weekly cover story written by ella t. about her friend Anna Mendelson, called "Wild Thing Lost -- Another rebel, another disappearing act ...."
for listees who have no idea of who ella is and why her writing appeals to coop and his good friend, doug, "Wild Thing Lost" is semi autobiographical. ella tends to be very wordy, so i have included an excerpt of "Wild Thing Lost" herewith, and a link, just like doug did with ella's last article.
so list members will have an even better idea of ella's writings, later on i'll post a couple of her wordy movie reviews, like "Twisted Roots -- Little Otik's comedy of terrors" or "Let's Roll! -- Collateral Damage steps out of the shadows" -- the two latest ones.
thanks, doug; tell coop to keep 'em coming. please thank him for taking himself off the air at KPFK, from all of us regular listeners!
R
Wild Thing Lost Another rebel, another disappearing act . . . but this time only the curious are looking for Anna Mendelson by Ella Taylor
TALL AND LEGGY, WITH ENORMOUS green eyes and a generous, mobile mouth, my friend Anne Mendelson had presence to burn. At 17 years old, she carried herself like a queen and cultivated a thatch of black curls long before big hair became hip. Even in the shapeless men's sweaters we affected in the mid-'60s, she projected an unselfconscious glamour while the rest of us were attending to our zits. Yet she was never one to suck up all the air in a room. A loyal and devoted friend, she'd also absorbed a powerful social conscience from her actively Labourite family. Still, there was something anarchic and unilateral about Anne that I sensed would never be contained by the socialist youth movement in which we became fast friends.
After high school we both started college at hubs of the campus revolt: I at the London School of Economics, a center of the orthodox Left; she at Essex University, which in 1967 already had a reputation for the politics of the spectacle. By the time she came to visit, Anne had become Anna, was heavily involved in fringe drama and, she confided, had fallen in love with a handsome Latin American radical. We lost touch as the student revolt swung into full gear -- but while I was at campus sit-ins dutifully yelling, "Free, free the LSE/Take it from the bourgeoisie," Anna's name kept cropping up in stories of wild partying and urban-guerrilla happenings when various agents of the repressive state apparatus came to Essex to speak.
Asked to leave the university, Anna disappeared. I graduated, got married and went to live abroad. I'd heard vague rumors about the Angry Brigade, a Situationist group committed to the violent overthrow of the ruling class, and a wing of the Left that I saw -- and still do -- as marooned somewhere between irrelevance and pathos in the context of the relatively open society in which we lived. Still, it came as a shock on the day, in late August 1971, when I opened the newspaper to find that my gentle friend had been arrested with three others in a North London flat containing a cache of arms and gelignite. The group was charged -- along with four others -- with conspiracy to commit 25 bomb attacks, mostly on commercial and industrial targets throughout the country over a period of four years, including the home of the new Tory minister of employment, Robert Carr. After one of the longest conspiracy trials in British legal history -- it lasted 109 days, during part of which Anna insisted on conducting her own defense, and in which the judge allowed her to receive a birthday cake in court -- she and her three friends were found guilty and sentenced to 10 years for conspiracy and possession.
for those dying to read more: http://www.laweekly.com/ink/02/09/cover-taylor.shtml
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