los angeles farewell

There are so many interesting characters in Los Angeles, you could spend a lifetime sitting down meeting each of them, and it's my bad luck that I met some of the most compelling people right before I left.

My going away ceremonies were huge affairs, and I realize now that I was very lucky to know so many of the right kind of people, the kind who help you hold your center and make you become a better person. I encountered so many lonely transplants in L.A. who had only sketchy acquaintances after many years, and it was only through the good will of many cool friends that I was able to see the nooks and crannies and secrets that I saw in my time there.

I'll miss K's dark humor and wit and encyclopedic knowledge about every nook and cranny of the neighborhoods and history of the city. There was the shiny, brilliant choreographer with her troupe of dancing boys, this center of so much creativity and passion. I was introduced and spoke to her for only moments, but there are certain women who glow so charismatically, the center of so many great things. There was L, who I rarely saw, because it's impossible to run into people randomly in that place, organizing her shows and propelling things forward. The young men working forward with his projects and creating grand parties and girls with sharp minds who know it's better to D.J. than be a model any day.

I wish I had time to sit down alone with each of them, share a few weekends working on something interesting, because I truly do find people fascinating, and there are so many great minds at work in a metropolis like L.A. It's just that in that world, so much is hidden, and the cream doesn't often rise to the top, although once in a while it does.

It really does. I know this because I saw Julie Delphy from a short distance, one in which I could have called out her name and she would have heard me and looked at my face. But I was content to simply watch her laugh and talk with the make-up artists, oozing class even though she was sloppily dressed in jeans and horn-rimmed glasses for a television interview. It makes me happy that someone like that would be famous, yet stay so true and bright.

first rainbow

I picked up my friend from the fancy hotel where she was staying downtown. She had been flown in to speak, and I always feel proud when these things happen. I had known her quite a long time, and when you count through the years, and it's so encouraging to see that she's never lost steam.

It never rains in Los Angeles so it was a complete shock when there were thunderstorm clouds on the horizon. The sound of raindrops was completely foreign to me after six months in this desert.

When we first met we sat in a cafe in New York, and weren't we children? This time meeting we went to a cafe in Los Angeles picking at huge pastries and coffee. Even with everyone so thin, the croissants stay huge, larger than my head. When we had first met, I hadn't travelled around at all, and I wouldn't notice this, but somehow the essence of both of us remained the same.

Later on I found her in a maze of the strange Disneyland streets of Chinatown. It's all about pagodas and Chinese lanterns there , but it has an undeniable prettiness even when surrendering to kitsch. She's so dazzling, my friend is, one of the most brilliant people I've ever met. If you look back in life and at all of the choices and turns, there are so many instances when things could have turned out differently; but in this instance she was shining.

I like speeches and bare white stages. There was a video projection; I had a hard time following what most of the speakers were talking about that night, but she made the most sense. It had been a while since I had been to something to just sit and think for the sake of thinking.

But the whole crowd spilling onto the wet streets was there not only to think but to have fun. And to parade like peacocks--it was the best fashion I'd ever seen in all my time in Southern California, where it's normal to see beautiful young women dressed unironically like Joan Collins. Is that why people age so quickly here? My friend looks so young still, and so do I, and it's such a strange thing because we eschew facial peels and mud masks. Something about the air in L.A. artificially ages people, or is it all that sunlight? Men and women under thirty are supertanned and trim, their faces lined, moving forward more quickly, speeding up to the pace of light.

Everyone on this particular street was absolutely striking on this night, fluttering about with gossamer wings, although we laughed that the slight dip in temperatures had people in too-hot peacoats and black tights. In Germany men would be walking around in t-shirts and shorts, that's how brave they are about the weather. I felt like I was in the middle of a Vogue magazine spread.

One of her friends came with her baby to hear her speak. She was one of those women who had chosen life: she was a bright and happy mommy full of life. Sometimes you can see through the pretenses and know instantly when people are happy, and this was one of them. She had to leave early because the baby was acting up, but that's how a mother should be--upright and happy, someone to lean on, eating up food voraciously just like she'd eat up life.

I felt a swell of pride again as my friend answered the questions, her mind so sharp. There are so many points where things could have turned out differently: maybe she wouldn't have written a book, maybe she wouldn't be a speaker here today and I wouldn't get this delicious slice of time to hang out with her. You can choose life or you can choose something else, but I prefer to keep company with women who choose life. She bought me a dinner and we ate huge mounds of noodles, our cheeks filling out.

I stood on the street at one point and looked up and saw something wonderful. There it was, hanging in the sky, my first L.A. rainbow. Without rain, you don't get rainbows.

peace love and happiness to all

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.

- einstein

dreams from the void: cowgirl & ghost woman

age of consent

from Rainer Maria Rilke's notebooks:

I think I ought to begin to do some works now that I am learning to see. I am 28 years old, and almost nothing has been done. To recapitulate, I have written a study on Carpaccio, which is bad, a drama entitled "Marriage" which sets out to demonstrate something false by equivocal means, and some verses. Ah! But verses amount to so little when one writes them young. One ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness a whole life long, and a long life if possible, and then, quite at the end, one night be able to write ten verses that are good. For verses are not, as people imagine, simply feelings (those one has early enough), -they are experiences. For the sake of a single verse, one must see many cities, men and things, one must know animals, the little flowers open in the morning. One must be able to think back to roads in unknown regions, to unexpected meetings and to partings one had long seen coming, to days of childhood that are still unexplained, to parents whom one had hurt when they brought one some joy and one did not grasp it (it was a joy for someone else), to childhood illnesses that begin with such a number of profound and grave transformations, to days in rooms withdrawn and quiet and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along on high and flew with all the stars--and it is not yet enough if one may thing of all this. One must have memories of many nights of love, none of which was like the others, of the screams of women in labor, and of light, white sleeping women in childbeds, closing again. But one must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the fitful noises. And still it is not enough to have memories. One must have been able to fget them when they are many and one must have great patience to wait until the come again. For it is not yet the memories themselves. Not till they have turned to blood within us, to glance and gesture, nameless and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves not til then can it happent hat in a most rare hour the first word of a verse arises in their midst and goes forth from them.

kluster magazine (thanks miss mel!)

Miss Mel interviewed me in the art issue of kluster magazine
Check it out!

I'm missing those crazy australian girls, and all the Berlin crowd in general...