I posted it at Scribd as a free (and long) excerpt:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/17273122/Bloo
That is all. Except for this picture of brunette me:
And now I'm off to read and eat chocolate covered peanuts.
But then I saw it again -- I believe I said something along the lines of "Holy shit" -- as fire jetted up behind the hills and disappeared. The smoke shifted to the right and I stood there, transfixed, glad the kids were at school (the older boys all the way over in Culver City), until I saw the flames again, this time chasing each other up the hillside in the direction opposite the house. Key word being opposite.
I went upstairs to the little balcony facing the same direction and took these photos:
What you can't see -- or hear -- are the helicopters. For the next couple of hours I listened to the chop-chop-chopping sounds as they traced the line of the horizon and moved in and out of the smoke. Once I made sure that the fire was continuing to not head in our direction, I of course thought the logical thing -- I should put this on twitter and facebook! -- and searched Twitter for news more up-to-the-moment than the stuff on the LA Times website. Which is how I learned that the Sepulveda Pass was on fire and a school in Brentwood had been evacuated as well as the Getty ("Oh no!" somebody tweeted. "Not the Getty!" While someone else -- clearly some jaded Los Angeleno who has been here many years -- tweeted a casual, "Looks bad. I hope they put this fire out soon, it's getting smoky up here").
I texted my friend who lives in west Bel Air** to ask her how close she was to the fire and if she and the dogs were okay. One of her dogs recently survived a coyote attack; all he needed was the additional trauma of smoke and fire smells and helicopters. She texted back to report that she was "leaving the house now". Meanwhile I couldn't see the flames anymore and the smoke had lightened and lessened, no longer the blooming mushroom cloud. "Looks like they're getting a handle on it," I was able, and thankful, to tell her.
They extinguished the fire not long after, but had to shut down part of Sepulveda and some I-405 off-ramps, which meant traffic in my area became a freaking nightmare. I'd expressed to a friend how glad I was that an appointment I had downtown -- my naturalization interview, last stage of the application process to become a US citizen -- happened to fall on the day before, instead of the day of, the Michael Jackson memorial service held at a nearby stadium which would make the area so not fun to navigate. Only to find myself in a gridlock of cars that took me close to an hour to travel what is usually a ten-minute distance home. I listened to music and tried to zen out and thought about fires: a fire last fall that happened not far from my friend's west Bel Air house late at night, helicopters waking me from where I slept in the guest bedroom, or the fire that happened years ago that destroyed my actress friend's childhood home and which she had vividly described to me, or the fire in a distant valley that rained ash in the Brentwood neighborhood where I was doing lunges with my trainer along the sidewalk.
Los Angeles: city on the edge of the continent, gang violence and earthquakes and mudslides and fire. Tilt the city one way, and you've got style and privilege and luxury, lifting your eyes from the traffic on Santa Monica to gaze at the hills and the palm trees; tilt it another, and you've got apocalypse.
* I have a desk now. And a filing cabinet. And three stacking paper trays. I barely recognize myself.
** The 'neighborhood' of Bel Air is composed of miles of rambling canyons and hillsides stretching east to west. You tell people you live by either East Gate or West Gate. The white colonial house used in Prince of Bel Air -- remember that show? -- is down near East Gate and has a gorgeous forested property complete with creek, which means in spring you sometimes have to stop your car to let a duck and her ducklings waddle across the road.
When a reader sends you a message asking, "Is your blog dead?" you know you've gone waaaaaay too long without a post. I slap myself.
I have an excuse. I've been writing. I sold a zombie story to an anthology called, appropriately enough, ZOMBIE, which comes out in October, and (I believe) includes writers like Joe Lansdale, Neil Gaiman, Poppy Z Brite. My story is called "Best Served Cold" and is about a dinner party in Bel Air that goes, shall we say, awry.
I've been thinking and working toward the new website, which will include a new blog, possibly called Pop Angel: The Creative Life in the Digital Age. There will also be a free ebook -- I mean c'mon, you gotta have a free ebook -- about how I got published and the advice I would give to other writers and wish someone had given me way back when, etc. This past year has been a time of reflection and transition for me, and the ebook is partly my way of clearing my own mental decks -- if hopefully in a way that will be of interest to others -- taking a look at where I am, how I got here, and where I want to go next.
One of the things I realized is this: I want to build something cool online. The Internet is an exciting place, and this is a great time to be a writer.
2
Sunday night I went to a screening at a screenwriter's house in Hancock Park. I get to Hancock Park so rarely that the place is a novelty for me: the old-ish mansions and sprawling manicured yards and no hills anywhere. I was pleased to meet the screenwriter: two of his movies are on my list of favorites. I was also pleased to meet his dogs -- three lab/malamute/pitbull type mixes who went, I thought, very well with the hardwood floors -- and to check out some of his book collection. Rows of books -- I saw Caitlin R Kiernan's among them -- in almost every room. There were donuts and pizza, much conversation, and red wine in plastic cups: maybe ten of us grouped round the table in the dining room, shelves of books to either side, the dogs padding around and looking hopeful. We trooped upstairs to the screening room and watched the movie SILK, a Japanese ghost story.
And there was also Harley, the teacup yorkie. She is fierce and cute and darts around like a hyperactive hamster. Harley came along with my friend Tina -- the three of us drove together -- although she belongs to a man named Frank. "That is so very Beverly Hills," I said, when Tina produced a Louis Vuitton dog carrier and plunked Harley inside. "Frank bought it," Tina said. Frank is a guy's guy. The fact that he went to such effort and expense to get the kind of creature you usually see cradled in the arms of skinny blonde socialites -- not to mention the Louis Vuitton carrier -- is something I'm still trying to reconcile with my understanding of the universe.
I was planning to post tonight but instead I have to give some thought and time to questions a journalist asked me about my ex-husband, who is about to be the subject of a profile in the New Yorker.
Here's a picture from the Heal the Bay benefit I went to last Thursday night:
I find this image kind of interesting because I'm talking to this guy named Joe. I remember that conversation: we were talking about the banks, the federal government and Wall Street: fun, cheerful stuff. You can see his enthusiasm for the subject in his animated hand gestures. I am listening intently -- if caught by surprise by the camera -- but my body is clearly angled toward the person on my other side. My arm is propped up between Joe and me, creating a kind of barrier, not because I want to block Joe but because I'm creating a private zone of space for myself and the person on my left. Said person, of course, being Dude.
Anyway, here's another excerpt from one of the things I am currently working on. It's called, tentatively, I AM MY OWN REBELLION: Notes from a Writer's Journey, and it's going to be a free ebook you can download from my new website which should be going up early this summer. This bit is from a larger bit about practice novels, in which I list and briefly describe my own failed, unpublished novels -- I prefer the term 'practice novels' -- before I finally sold my first novel BLOODANGEL to Roc/Penguin.
NIPPER.
The first 'book' -- and I use the term loosely -- I ever wrote. I was in fourth grade and I wrote it in longhand in a yellow spiralbound notebook. It wasn’t a novel but a series of anecdotes about my father, ‘Terry’, the beagle he had when he was a boy and their adventures together. The way it came about was this: I wanted a dog and my parents kept refusing me in what I considered a cruel and heartless manner, so to compensate my father would talk about the dog of his own childhood, named Nipper.
I showed the work-in-progress to my teacher, who had me read it to the class. The kids loved it and wanted more. It was my taste of commercial success. It was heady stuff indeed. From that point on, I had an identity within the classroom, and then the school, and then the community, as a writer and storyteller.
I’ll be honest. I continued to work on Nipper and I wrote many other things, but it wasn't for the love of the exercise. At that point, I didn't want to be a writer when I grew up; I wanted to be a vet or an actress on a soap opera (SANTA BARBARA was to have a big impact on me, and more importantly on my hair, which I grew long like Robin Wright's, the young actress who played Kelly Capwell before she went on to become the Princess Bride and the on-again off-again love of Sean Penn. I still love her. But I digress). I wrote because for whatever strange mishmash of genetic, psychological and environmental reasons, writing came easily to me.
I did it for attention and praise. I was your basic eight-year-old hack.
SECRETS OF THE CRYSTAL UNICORN
Sixth grade. Don’t remember much about this manuscript except that I typed it out on a little white electric Olympia typewriter, which would be my main writing instrument for many years and help me acquire a typing speed so impressive I would become the county typing champion for several years straight (while barely managing to pass the subject itself, since I would spend class typing poems instead of the deathly tedious and incredibly boring actual assignments).
I assume from the title that influences at the time included Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, Enid Blyton, Agatha Christie, etcetera. Unlike Nipper, this book had an actual plot. I just can’t remember what it was.
I should not be awake at this time and I should not be posting. I am not particularly good -- as of yet -- at sacrificing things, or being all that realistic: I tend to want everything all at once, I think I can do it all. This is one of my greater delusions. It tends to leave me tired.
Tonight my plans for a quiet productive evening were interrupted by a text from Tina, who wanted to know if I was coming out tonight. I had no idea what she was talking about. Turns out she'd sent me an email I somehow never received about her birthday celebration, and since I hadn't seen her in forever and value her friendship, there was no way I could not participate.
Rally. Throw on a black dress and black boots and go.
Tina is single, childless, and plugged into the LA club scene; she always knows the hot new spot and the person who can let us breeze in. Tonight it was the grand opening of a place called Guys and Dolls, which used to be a place called Guy's (seems every club in this part of LA used to be another club that used to be another club, in what amounts to a kind of nightlife recycling). I had not stepped onto the Scene in months, and it was oddly reassuring to see how it stays the same while my life is undergoing big changes. The same collection of unusually attractive, decked-out people, the same breed of stunning model-actor-bartenders, the same faces in the crowd that you remember from other crowds in other clubs. Long-haired heir of multi-billion-dollar fortune who hangs out at the prime real-estate VIP tables with Paris and co.? Check. Matthew Perry, standing in the circle of a protective group of friends, his gaze carefully averted from the people who forget themselves enough to point him out to others in the exact way an LA hipster is not supposed to do? Check. People who look familiar enough that you think you must have met them before, except you're experienced enough to know such 'recognition' only means you saw them on some television show you can't remember? Check. Tall olive-skinned guy in the skullcap, always on the fringes of Leo's posse at Club Villa when it was still the taste du jour, who kept hitting on your friend Stephanie? Check.
And so it goes.
Although the music was different -- as the night progressed took on a harder dance element that would not have been out of place at a rave. The music made me happy, and although I didn't exactly close the club down* -- getting too old for that -- I stayed longer than intended. Dude and I exchanged a few texts. Dancing like a wild thing , I informed him. Celebrating the superficial. I like the superficial. He informed me that he was working on a million-dollar proposal for his nonprofit organization. I greatly admire what he does, but there are times when a girl's gotta dance in her boots until her feet hurt.
* Clubs at LA close down at 2 am, when the Scene shifts to house parties in the hills. Yes, it's a school night, but that's the point. Only the peons save their partying for Fri and Sat nights, when anybody who is truly Anybody wouldn't bother to show their face in a place overrun by the workaday commoners.
Strike a pose.
"Only the people who really know you," said I, and quoted a friend of mine who said she admired this blog's ability to "be specific, yet vague".
He did not look reassured. It probably didn't help when a friend of mine and another friend of his started referring to him not by his real name but the pseudonym I use for him.
We decided that for the purposes of this trip I will refer to him as Dude and photograph him only as bits and pieces of body parts or Anonymous Walking Figure Glimpsed from Discreet Angles.
This is only the second time I've been out of Los Angeles in about a year, so I was ready. I had agreed to write a zombie story for "the ultimate zombie anthology" as edited by one John Skipp, and I like the idea of incorporating zombies and vineyards and Napa Valley in some way.
Dude and I started out in San Francisco, where I slept like I haven't slept in I can't remember how long. I am a night owl, and my older sons wake me like clockwork at 6:30 every morning, and so now even when they're at their father's I am unable to sleep past 7. As a general habit I don't mind this -- too much to do and too little time -- but there's at least one person in my life who, every time I see him, pointedly asks how many hours I got the night before and lectures on the importance of Enough Sleep. So I am pleased to report to him that I slept so hard for so long that I woke up groggy and almost killed myself stumbling across Market Street to get my morning Starbucks.
I forgot how much I like SF and made a mental note to get up to the city for a real visit, hopefully in June. Some of my favorite people are in SF, and the city holds amazing memories for me.
Dude and I drove up to Napa Valley and received a private tour and wine tasting at a mountainside vineyard. One of our guides was British and remarked on how Americans "like scores. In this country, wines that receive high scores sell a lot and wines with low scores sell little. In Europe, no one cares about scores, people trust their own tastes and like what they like." There was also some lamenting about what the movie Sideways did to the industry, laying waste to the poor merlot and elevating pinot noir to new heights. "You can see the effects in vineyards right around here, they took out the merlot and started growing pinot noir. But merlot is coming back. People are coming round."
For those of you who asked, and those of you who don't care yet find yourself reading this anyway, this is my new desk:
This is my new desk in mood lighting:
This is the view from my desk, complete with small wayward child:
And this is an excerpt from a thing that I am working on at my desk:
But I am not a well-rounded type. Not then, not now. I am ‘spiky’. I learned to read when I was 5 – I know this because I found mid-year kindergarten report cards that proclaimed "Justine is reading!" – and bought my first book for two dollars at the local Coles bookstore. It was Blubber, by Judy Blume, and one of the big kids had written a book report in the school newsletter about it. I was with a childhood friend named Andrea who also bought a copy of Blubber, and the next day I went to her house and asked her if she’d finished it. I was surprised when she said no. This would have been my first inkling – if I’d been old and mature enough to have such things as inklings – that I was not your typical reader. In grade one I would sit in reading group, bored out of my little-girl skull, while other kids sounded out Dick and Jane. I flipped through to the ‘teacher’s instructions’ at the back and read those. Then we’d return to our desks and I’d pull out my copy of Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians. Although I didn’t know this at the time – and wouldn’t until I ran into that same teacher over a decade later – the teacher never believed that I was truly reading Christie. She thought I was staring at the pages for show. Just another intellectually pretentious little first-grader.
Reading was my first and most powerful drug*. I didn’t want to go out on the playground during recess and lunch hour. I would hide somewhere in the school building and read. In junior high I found excellent nesting places among the stacks in the library, at least until my teacher realized where I was (and wasn’t). He would pound angrily on the windows to flush me out. The grown-ups in my life seemed determined that I learn how to socialize like a normal kid, which I was beginning to realize I wasn’t, not quite. I was lonely and craved popularity but could only be with other kids for a certain amount of time. I got bored. I wanted to get back to my book.
Fiction raised me. Although I remember getting the birds-and-the-bees conversation from my parents in a way that didn’t make a whole lot of sense at the time – something about a seed getting planted in the woman’s vagina, how gross, and what did gardening have to do with human babies? – my sexual education came to me, thoroughly and in-depth, from books. I read Judy Blume and learned about menstruation, wet dreams, erections, and first love; I read Richard Peck’s Are You In The House Alone and learned about date rape; I read my way through VC Andrews and learned about forbidden desire. I read so much about HIV – I came of age during the AIDS crisis – that I could lecture adults about how it was and was not transmitted. I knew about the different kinds of birth control years before I had any use for them. I knew that sex seemed simple enough but could get really complicated really quickly and made you emotionally vulnerable and had a seedy underside and a dark side and could ruin your life if you got pregnant, as several girls in my high school proceeded to do. None of the adults taught me this, at least not in a way that made any real impression. Fiction did. Fiction delivered not just a ‘message’ but rich emotional context and power that sent that message resonating through gut, heart and soul. Fiction was like stepping into a whole other life – a succession of lives – and the knowledge I gathered there I could bring back into my so-called real one. It was a strange kind of knowledge, it was the knowledge of life gleaned from books, of hard-won experience when I was an innocent, but it was knowledge nonetheless, and it fueled my hunger for more, more, more. I wanted the world. And no one, absolutely no one, could talk me out of it.
* Caffeine. I am a slave to the caffeine.
Not enough hours in the day and it gets intensely frustrating.
I've been working with the amazing David Franco of hexnet.com to redesign my main website (Hexnet designed the temporary web page that is up right now, I love these guys, if you need a site you should contact them). There will also be a 'Dreamlines' website on which I'll be posting free installments of a new Bloodangel/Summoners novel (more on that later, but it's something I've always wanted to do and promises to be a really exciting project, at least for me). I'm also back at work on another novel called SHADOW HILL, named after a street I pass when I drive up to Mulholland. The book is about narcissism and the New Hollywood, and it's either an urban fantasy or "a dark Los Angeles fable" and love story, I can't decide. Time (and marketing) will tell.
And I rearranged my bedroom. Got rid of some of the furniture the interior decorator had installed during that previous life known as Marriage, including the silk-and-wool rug that is a questionable purchase at best when you have small kids and small dogs running around. So now I have these clean, airy swaths of space, bare lightwood floor, unobstructed floor-to-ceiling windows (okay, still partially obstructed by stacks of books, but not for much longer). In my war on clutter, it occurred to me that I also need to get rid of anything involving drawers in which clutter finds shelter so this long, custom-designed dresser/table thing had to go. Somewhere an interior-decorator fairy just died.
But my new desk kicks ass.
2
In the lack of anything truly interesting to tell you, I give you pictures:
These are the vermeer calla lilies some mysterious person sent me just before Mother's Day. So thank you, Mysterious Person:
And these are photos from an art show held in a small gallery in Beverly Hills last night. My producer/screenwriter friend Nick -- readers might remember him from the entry about the Cut Copy concert in which I compared him to a Muppet serial killer for which he has forgiven me-- hosted it for his artist friend Alexander. The crowd was too big for the gallery and spilled out onto the sidewalk. The event seemed well-documented, involving a photographer from Women's Wear Daily who took pictures of us in various configurations and this other guy who said he was making a documentary about Alexander. He pointed the camera at my face and asked what I thought of the art. I rattled out something about how I liked the elements -- the found art and graffiti and hey, some hot-pink, so bonus -- and, when the camera continued to glare at me, ended with a little fist pump and a, "Go, Alexander!" "Thanks, that was brilliant," the guy lied, and wandered off.
I had missed Nick's previous two big nights -- the premiere of his movie TYSON, a documentary about the boxer, and his housewarming party -- and he sent me a text asking if I was going to "flake" on the art show. I told him I would be there. He texted back: Excellent!... If you get jammed and are about to miss it - just remember -- I WILL DESTROY YOU. Proving once again that there's nothing like a threat to keep a friendship alive.
And, just for fun, this is a picture of my mother currently visiting from the cold northern homeland (a.k.a. 'Canada'). The man beside her is a lovely friend named Brian. "Pretend to be her gigolo," I said. I was in a directing kind of mood.
The below was first posted at Storytellers Unplugged a few weeks ago. Am not sure what I think of it, to tell you the truth; the intersection of fiction, publishing, technology, culture is of fascination to me but I am not a digital native (I love that phrase, 'digital native'). Up until recently I was astonishingly, painfully clueless. I could barely handle my gmail. Now I am slightly less clueless, which is a big step for me and gives me optimism.
Regular posting will commence tomorrow. Or maybe the day after. But hopefully tomorrow.
And, if you care to, you can always find me at Twitter where I tweet as justinemusk. But Twitter is a whole other blog post.
Writing Fiction in a Digital Age
1
The novel is dead. Long live the novel.
2
So I got myself a Kindle2. I resisted the first version, declaiming to all and sundry that I preferred the experience of book-as-object: the feel of the pages, the gloss of the jacket. But the idea of reducing the weight of the reading load I carry around -- and to something as slender as a butter knife -- was too seductive to resist. Still, I remained skeptical. When the package arrived from Amazon, I let it sit around the house like a neglected hamster.
But then I got hooked. In minutes.
The convenience is amazing. Thinner and smaller than a notebook, it takes up so little space in my sack of a handbag I had to make sure it doesn’t get crushed. (Now I have a hot-pink leather case for it.) Within two days I’d packed the thing with newspapers, magazines, blogs and nonfiction: not only did I not mind reading them in this new form, I preferred it, happy to be without the clutter of all that print, articles so neatly at my fingertips.
The coolest thing of all is to read or hear about a book, then be able to order it on my Kindle2, download it, and start reading within minutes. Because, you know, that two-day wait from Amazon, that fifteen minute drive to the bookstore, is just waaaaay too long to endure. And reading on a Kindle turns out to be not so very different from reading a book-object: the page looks the same, your eyes move across it the same way. It just means that instead of getting a strained right wrist from propping up a hardcover, I get a strained thumb from pressing the ‘next page’ button.
And so I asked myself, Am I holding the death of traditional publishing in my hands?
And I answered myself: Duh.
3
Once upon a time, people sat around campfires in smoky caves and told each other stories and painted illustrations on the walls. Generations handed stories down to each other through poetry and song, using rhythm and rhyme as an excellent memory device.
Enter the book.
Once upon a time, a book was this kind of holy relic that monks labored over high in their monasteries, copying page after page while the rest of Europe sloshed through the mulch of the Dark Ages. Then, you see, this guy invented this thing called the printing press. Suddenly anything you could think up in your head could be printed and distributed to an audience of unimaginable size. People got more literate. Even women. Novels became the drug of choice, offering flight and fancy -- they also allowed the more intrepid (or financially desperate) women writers to create identity, independence and a name for themselves.
Novels – from Edith Wharton to Charles Dickens --were published in serial installments in monthly newspapers. Short fiction was the real moneymaker: Scott F Fitzgerald churned out lucrative short stories in order to subsidize the “real work” of his novels. As the decades rolled by, the bulky length of a Victorian novel became more streamlined, due to the natural evolution of the form itself, but perhaps also because of technology. The advent of word processing makes the cut-and-paste of revision a shockingly different experience than the literal cut-and-paste done under gaslight -- or even the liquid paper and carbons and constant retyping I remember doing on the white Olympia typewriter I swiped from my mother when I was a kid. Form and content have a living, shifting relationship to each other: content dictates form, and form dictates the possibilities of content.
But in the end, do the forms really change that much?
The more things change, after all, the more they stay the same. (Or, as Hollywood movie executives like to tell each other, “People want the same, yet different”). People fret about what the future of fiction will look like, but could be the future is already here. It looks like this: a Kindle2, popular because it mimics a familiar reading experience, not because it creates any real new one. Along with books, we have e-books. Digital fiction opens up a whole new world of interactive narrative, except we’ve already that for years: they’re called computer games, some of them with storylines more sophisticated and compelling than much of the stuff in the movie theatres on any given day.
We’ll have a kind of hybrid, multimedia storytelling that combines text, music, pictures, video, perhaps even social media but is that really so different from storyworlds like the Star Wars universe, explored through movies, novels, comic books, soundtracks, action figures? (Would Luke Skywalker have a Twitter account? Would Yoda be on Facebook?) As traditional magazines shut down and shut out short stories and poetry, literary journals multiply all over the Web . It’s possible that poetry and short-short fiction will find a whole new audience when distributed on iPhones and iPods. Narrative-blogs are today’s published journals, living memoirs. And what is Twitter but a grown-up version of notes passed in class or, for the more adventurous and poetic, a kind of haiku?
Fiction isn’t going anywhere, except digital. We’re seeing old wine in new bottles. The challenge is for the publishing industry to learn how to shape and build and package those new bottles.
And, of course, for the writers.
4
A novel remains a novel: a singular and well-crafted emotional experience that brings you into intimate contact with another person’s mind and vision. It is, for me, an experience very different from any kind of interactive storytelling – after all, we’ve already had that too, they’re called Choose Your Own Adventures – because part of the fulfillment of a good novel is not knowing what happens next and having no say or control over it. Just like life. And also how, in the end, everything comes together in a way you didn’t expect, and resonates back through the story to give it order and meaning. Which is what life should be like, but isn't. Which is why we need things like novels in the first place.
What has changed – the bottle that, in my mind, has been smashed to smithereens – is not the novel, but the position of the novelist.
In this Internet age of connection, collaboration and communication, it is harder and harder to view the writer as an isolated figure. Blogs, forums and social media have transformed the relationship between writer and reader, between writer and other writers, providing feedback and contact when before there would have been only silence -- until the trudging footsteps of the mailperson’s walk up the driveway. Googling a writer can bring on a flood of information that in turn brings a weird kind of intimacy – a sense of: I don’t know you, but I know you. The writer’s identity was once a shrouded, mysterious thing in the distance, sometimes revealed, in glimpses, through whatever interviews and public readings the writer decided to give.
Now, the writer doesn’t just have an identity, but a digital identity that anyone with an Internet connection can access at any time. I was thinking about this after a conversation with Brian, an Internet guy, who observed that “an author’s website no longer supports the books…the books support the website.” I could see how this might apply to nonfiction, especially if the writer was also a touring public speaker. I understood, sort of, about platforms. But fiction? Fiction isn’t about anything other than the fiction; either a book engages you and does what it’s supposed to, or it doesn’t.
Except…a long time can elapse between books. The books themselves can span different subjects, different genres. And if the author’s body of work represents that author’s vision, could be that the author’s website serves as the heart of that vision, a signature digital cord pulling everything together. This is also a time when to market your work means to speak with a unique and authentic voice that draws people in, makes them want to connect with you and read your stuff. Rather than just a promotional or ‘branding’ tool, the website – with its attendant blogs and links and takeaway reading material, its bio and news and reviews – becomes the author’s persona removed from a distant background to be placed front and center, literally, for the reader. It is the author’s way of putting herself out there and allowing herself to be found. This is why a static website is a failed website; it should have a life of its own, changing and growing as the author’s work -- and the author herself -- does the same. The work is the web, and the website – and the connection it enables with the reader -- is the warm, fuzzy spider at the center.
Because another thing that is changing – and not to the writer’s advantage – is the reading experience itself. When I am reading my Kindle, I have many options to choose from. One book loses my interest and – boom – I press a couple of buttons and go on to something else. Or if nothing on my Kindle appeals to me, and I’m in the mood for something new, I just need to switch over to the wireless store and see what catches my fancy enough to download. This, of course, is on top of everything else in today’s world competing for my time, my attention, and my money. It’s more difficult than ever for a writer to grab – and hold – the reader’s attention. But, thanks to the multiple dimensions of the Internet, the writer has more ways than ever of doing so.
Here is a picture, taken with my crappy-picture-taking Blackberry, of my friend Ruby's recent piece:
Ruby had it on display at a party in Bel Air, where friends and art-world types gathered for cocktails after going to see Kehinde Wiley speak at the Getty. Kehinde himself was there -- a thoughtful and elegantly mannered man in a striking floral-patterned suit that reminded me of something Matisse might have used as a backdrop for one of his reclining women -- surrounded by admirers out on the multi-leveled deck, accepting paper plates of food shoved at him out of nowhere by eager female acolytes, letting people pose next to him for pictures. Throughout the night I saw people looking over Ruby's project, commenting to each other. Later, an accomplished interior designer would tell her that he'd be interested in buying some of her work for some of his clients.
Ruby, who is the process of applying to MFA programs, asked me what I "saw" in her piece.
"The brutality of the business of female beauty," I said instantly. "You've got that clinical, impersonal black-and-white look to it, and these plastic women who all look the same -- the hair and vaguely S/M outfits and the boob jobs -- goose-stepping toward those black bars that suggest some kind of prison."
She grew silent.
I said, wondering if I was full of BS, "Is that sort of, kind of, what you'd intended?"
"Yes." Again the pause. Then: "People at the party said it was 'fun'."
2
I later learned, at that same party, people would say, "I wonder if Justine is here?" and walk right past me. Apparently this is what can happen when you take long blonde hair, dye it dark, and chop it to the shoulders.
It's like there's some kind of natural law that says, After your divorce, thou shalt want to drastically change your tresses, but the truth is I'd always intended to go dark as soon as the upkeep of the blonde got on my nerves.
I am fair-skinned, and blue-eyed, and people think I was born blonde -- "I will give you back the hair you had as a child!" one colorist proclaimed long ago, which is my favorite hair-person quote, except maybe for the gay Spanish stylist who frowned at the all-one-length locks I presented to him: "Zees schoolgirl hair, no no no, ees got to go!" (Which cracked me up, but maybe you had to be there.) Producing two tow-headed children did not help this perception. Strangers would ask if I was from Germany or, a couple of times, northern Italy. But I'm cast from my father's Irish heritage and my natural hair color is a medium brown --
-- which means that the ash-blonde was high freaking maintenance. Also freaking expensive. You can almost always get a last-minute appointment with Lea (when she's not on tour with Britney Spears* or working on a movie set somewhere) because her fiercely loyal clientele is limited to those who can afford her. I have not been the most spendthrift person in the world: if I was hurting, I'd go shopping, which did not always result in the wisest purchasing decisions. (The other day I came across a leopard-print Dolce & Gabbana trenchcoat in my closet that still had the pricetag, and I did a doubletake: I paid that much for it? I would never do that now! before realizing Okay I would, just not on that coat which I put in the stack to take to Decades, the vintage designer-clothing store on Melrose. But I digress.) Still, the expense of The Blonde always bothered me, and the time required to stay in the chair and let people touch and tug at my head drove me insane and seemed less and less like something I could justify.
But I love the salon, this little place tucked above the terracotta steps of the courtyard/pool area of the Beverly Hills Regent, known to tourists as "the hotel where they filmed Pretty Woman". The hotel is also where I took two teenage girls to lunch, and they were denied access to the restrooms because a woman snootily told them that said restrooms were for paying guests only. Also where I had lunch with a group that included Sharon Stone, and, when Endeavor head Ari Emmanuel approached us and asked my friend Ryan if he was my agent, Ryan immediately and smoothly lied, "Yes. Yes I am," and offered Ari his hand. The salon is an unpretentious, easy-going place staffed with people Lea imports from her hometown of Paris. Fashion TV plays on television screens set at strategic angles so you can watch them in the mirrors. At some point Lea and I would go outside and sit on the top step -- she calls it her "office" -- and she would smoke a Marlboro as we talked about men. It's one thing to get advice on your love life; it's another thing to get that same advice in throaty, broken English with a Parisian French accent.
When I decided I was done with the blonde thing -- I was walking around the Century City mall one day and thought, I'm done with the blonde thing -- I went to the salon. Lea was away making actors look fabulous. I was delivered into the capable hands of the newest colorist from Paris, a young man who happens to be six feet, muscled, heterosexual, and drop-dead gorgeous. He would not dye my hair as dark as I wanted. He talked instead about a "transition" color. Then I went to Xavier, who would not chop my hair above my shoulders like I wanted. He talked about a "transition" cut. And then I realized of course that they knew -- because these people know things, it's like they suck the information from your brain -- that I was recently separated and my ex was living with another woman. Clearly they were afraid I didn't know what I was saying. I felt sorry for them. I left with my transitional hair and then, when I decided I'd transitioned enough, went promptly to Lea, who gave me more or less what I'd wanted in the first place: "Voila! You have changed. You no longer look...how you say?...California blonde. Now you look European!" She nodded approvingly.
* Britney, she told me, is a "very sweet girl, very very sweet" who tends to surround herself with "people who are awful".
from a great post by Maggie Stiefvater on the fangs_fur_fey website
....that made me start thinking about how famous books and movies would be different if they shied away from hurting the characters in the way they feared the most. Imagine Little Women if Beth just got sinusitis. Star Wars if Luke didn’t have his little paternity crisis. I don't think readers like it when you are nice to the characters. They think they want characters to be happy, but they don't really. At least not until the characters have first been really miserable. I think a good writer finds their characters’ monsters and then resurrects them at the worst possible moment, and that we readers, like Jerry Springer audience members, love the angst and drama of it.
Reminds me of something a professor once said: "Personally, I think we should give people what they ought to want." What you want is not always what you need. Who (other than a psychopath) would ever say they want conflict and suffering? But when it comes to fiction, those are two of the basic food groups.
The band opened with 'Wrong', one of my favorite songs of the moment -- I have it on my Facebook profile, along with Keane's 'Spiraling' and Franz Ferdinand's 'Ulysses' and 'No You Girls' and the Plastician/Skream remix of Black Ghosts 'Some Way Through This' -- and then hit us with 'Personal Jesus', that well-loved synth-pop bassline charging up the crowd and then "Walking in My Shoes" which brought back memories of junior high so vivid I could practically taste the air in the gym, hear the clang and echo of the lockers. Their new songs -- 'Peace', 'Come Back' -- showed a matured, more meditative side to the band that the crowd didn't know what to do with. Gahan's vocals were amazing. His talent and sleek, ageless appearance can get you musing about deals with the devil and whether he might have made one. "All right," he told us, "you guys have been very patient," before rewarding us with 'Enjoy the Silence' and finishing off with 'Never Let Me Down Again'.
And I had one of those moments of -- I don't know what to call them, since 'transcendence' sounds pretentious and New Age and lame. But it made me think of something Brandon Flowers -- lead singer of The Killers -- said in a radio interview I was listening to in my car the other day. He was talking about how he liked music growing up, but "everybody listened to music" so it didn't occur to him until much later that maybe there was something different about the way he liked it and what it did for him. I've noticed of late that my own interest in music seems to be a bit more -- intense? involved? -- than average, especially as I reach an age where it seems many people stop exploring the new stuff and stick to what they grew up with. Music gets into my body and my head and I can literally feel how it alters my brain chemistry: it puts me into a thrilling tender dream-state that feels remarkably similar to what reading and writing can do for me, or intense exercise, or even the sense of being genuinely connected to someone I love. It's awesome, and when that feeling swept over me near the end of the Depeche Mode mini-concert I closed my eyes and stepped right into it.
* I think it was Rickles, if not someone please correct me now.
Got a text from Sam yesterday afternoon, saying he had VIP passes to the outdoor Depeche Mode concert to be held on Hollywood Blvd and would I be interested. You have to ask? He warned me that traffic would be madness. The concert -- part of which would double as the band's appearance on a late-night talk show to promote their new album -- was free, and about 15,000 people were expected to flood the neighborhood streets. The VIP pass, which was quickly messengered to me, ensured easy parking, a spot near the stage, and access to the pre- and post-parties.
Searching out the parking lot, naturally I turned left instead of right and spent a solid half hour fighting my way back around the block. Inching through the gridlock of traffic gave me plenty of opportunity to reflect on the disparity between the romanticized image of Hollywood and seedy, run-down reality. While you still catch glimpses of old-school grandeur in some of the elaborate, art-deco architecture, you also see the crumbling buildings, the dirt and smog, graffiti and garbage. You see the people who've been thrown out-- or have thrown themselves out -- to live on the fringes, the so-called freaks and homeless and drug dealers and rough trade. They become part of a different kind of mythos, to wonder at and spin stories about before climbing on your tour bus and heading back to your hotel. We say we live in LA, a friend remarked to me last week, but you and I live in a very small part of it. Hollywood is not that part. Still, it's always kind of a thrill to look up and find the Hollywood sign, massive letters marching off the hillside, suspended in sunlight or fog.
Since all I had was was the address of the parking lot, once I left my car I didn't know where to go. I found a crowd to follow -- rock'n'roll hipster types mingling with black-clad photographers carrying bulky equipment, one of them slamming down a skateboard and hopping neatly on it -- and by the time Sam had texted me enough info for me to figure out that I was not where I was supposed to be, I'd already reached various gates and booths manned by security guards and people holding clipboards. The hipsters and photographers would stop and I would stop along with them, until somebody noticed the red VIP pass that I'd forgotten was hanging around my neck: "Hey, you can go through." I didn't have to talk to anyone or see if my name was on a list or get scanned for weapons. I didn't even have to ask for directions; when a (very cute) guy in a uniform noticed me wandering past one of the fenced-off areas -- like huge holding pens -- in which people had already been gathering for hours, he checked my pass and escorted me to the (much smaller) pen off to the side of the stage. Which is when I remembered I was supposed to be at the preparty. That took a few more minutes to find -- it was in the lobby of the new W building down the street at the corner -- and as soon as I stepped through the doors I texted Sam to say I am here just as he was texting me to say I've gone out to look for you .
A bunch of people hanging out, drinking wine and mingling. The food was good, but there wasn't enough of it. I watched one server come out of the kitchen carrying a tray of shrimp appetizers. People swarmed like piranhas, and she had taken maybe five steps before the tray was picked clean and she rolled her eyes and turned back to the kitchen. It's impossible to talk to Sam at these things because he's constantly being approached, surrounded by people. So I talked to the people talking to him, and one of them gave me two wristbands -- strips of green paper printed with happy faces -- that, he said, would give us access to the central area in front of the stage. When I went to the bar to drop off empty wine glasses, people saw the strips of green in my hand and were suddenly descending on me: "Where did you get those wristbands?" To which I would shrug and give the less-than-illuminating answer, "Some guy."
Then another guy called us all to attention, explaining that the show would soon begin. "When you leave through those doors," he said, "you will see lots of people streaming down the sidewalks toward the concert area. Do not follow those people for they are..." He pretended to wring his hands. "...the unwashed masses, and where they are going is not where you are going."
As we moved to the doors, I exchanged a few words with another person who'd been talking to Sam, the model Josie Maran. She was with a young, dark-eyed man almost as good-looking as she is*. They were en route to another event -- something about the Chloe clothing line -- that was on the heels of this event, and trying to figure out the timeline involved in navigating their red-carpet responsibilities at both. "So many red carpets," I said, "so little time," and Josie at least pretended to find that amusing.
* I've had brief, passing encounters with other high-ranking models or supermodels and I always notice the same thing. It's not like they immediately bowl you over with paranormal beauty. Sure, they're really attractive, but so are lots of people in these rooms, this city. What they do have that sets them apart is an uncanny symmetry and harmony to their features, so that once you start looking at them it becomes difficult to stop. Your gaze continues to be drawn in. You can see why the eye of the camera doesn't get tired of them.
1
I was talking to R. today, a whipsmart older woman who is familiar with the family court system. When a woman is in the middle of a divorce involving some degree of wealth, I said to her, there seem to be certain personalities, usually male, who emphasize, But how much has she actually earned? As if everything that goes into building a life breaks down into pay by the hour. The law seems to look at it differently. The law asks: What are the responsibilities that the more powerful partner has toward the less powerful partner, and have those responsibilities been honored or not?
"The court looks at two things: the time and children involved," R said. "They look at the time you put into the marriage as a kind of investment. Years of your life that you gave to this person, this marriage, instead of starting a business, or traveling, or whatever. Years that, obviously, you can never get back." We talked about kids for a while. Then she tipped her head and said, "Maybe you should put this on your blog."
"Maybe I will," I said.
2
I am rearranging my bedroom furniture. This involved giving some of it to my sister Erin and her husband. In return they came over to help. Casey, my brother-in-law, is a mountain of a man my kids delight in climbing. As I watched him relocate a particularly heavy item from one side of the room to the other, I said to Erin, "Thank you for marrying a man of considerable strength and size."
"You're welcome," she responded.
Casey used to work as personal assistant to Burt Reynolds and has some great stories about him that, alas, I cannot repeat here. (I mean I could, and I would like to, but then Casey might just have to kill me). Casey also has Burt's old couches, these macho leather contraptions that dominate their apartment and give it an ominous 1970s kind of feel, as if a stranger in flared jeans is about to rise up from the cushions and whack you with a lava lamp. Now Casey works as a Hollywood stuntman whose latest claim to fame explored a question that philosophers have pondered through the ages: In a fight between a Viking and a samurai, who would be the one to kick ass?
Casey is not the samurai.
http://www.spike.com/video/samurai-kill
I've been thinking a bit about memoirs, in particular books like Rachel Resnick's Love Junkie, Kathryn Harrison's The Kiss, Jerry Stahl's Permanent Midnight and Alice Sebold's Lucky. I love, love, love all these books for various reasons, not least the courage and honesty it takes to confront such difficult topics (love/sex addiction, father-daughter incest, heroin addiction, and stranger rape). I also remember the controversy surrounding Kathryn Harrison's The Kiss when it first hit the bookshelves -- Harrison, by the way, is such an intelligent, elegant and compelling writer, one of my personal heroes -- that had some people asking, Why write about this? What is the point? and What about Harrison's children? Do they really need to know this stuff? Won't it turn them into serial killers?
Not that it was anywhere near comparable, but when someone asked me more or less the same things about my "speak divorce" post, my response went along the lines of:
I *do* think there is something -- a lot, actually -- to be said for sharing experience (in a way that isn't mean or bitter or pandering, etc.). Why do people write memoirs? Why do people *read* them? As far as kids go -- what truly harms kids is....getting bits and pieces of (perhaps erroneous) information WITHOUT A PROPER CONTEXT in which to frame, assimilate, process them. Kids should not be treated like little adults -- which they aren't, obviously -- but they should not be underestimated, either.
I mulled this stuff over in days following, especially when I realized that this blog is actually an ongoing memoir of sorts -- a living memoir, if you will. (You would have thought I'd clue in when the instructor of a "blogging as memoir" college course invited me to speak but no, took another year for me to arrive at such a conclusion. I can be like that.) Why is the memoir such a popular and briskly selling genre? Why, after reading one of the books listed above, was my immediate response to want to write the author a gushy fan letter saying I love you for writing this book ? Anybody want to throw out some theories on this?
At any rate, I give you this piece from the Boston Globe , which is a guy writing a review about a book by another guy writing about people who write memoirs. Highlights are mine.
The art of the memoir: more than an exercise in navel-gazing
by Robert Braile
The Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again
By Sven Birkerts
Graywolf, paperback, 192 pp., $12
It is hard to imagine a genre more misunderstood than memoir. Sometimes, these personal stories of our lives can illuminate the hearts and minds of writer and reader alike. Other times, they amount to little more than narcissism.
As a memoirist, critic, and teacher, Sven Birkerts is well positioned to explore this subject, and thankfully so. His "The Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again," is instructive, observant, and astute, a meditation on craft and culture by a relentlessly thoughtful writer. It is even at times a memoir itself, as honest and artful as any he examines.
Memoir, Birkerts writes, requires the juxtaposed perspectives of past and present, of what one recalls and how one recalls it. The recollection should be intuitive rather than chronological, a "felt past" allowing the themes of one's life to emerge. They should be as relevant to the reader as they are defining of the writer, "universalizing the specific" in ways that assume "there is a shared ground between the teller and the audience."
Lyrical memoirists, like Vladimir Nabokov, Virginia Woolf, and Annie Dillard, have pursued "restoration, searching out recurrences and patterns, but also then allowing for the idea that pattern hints at a larger order, possibly an intention to underlying experience." Coming-of-age memoirists, like Frank Conroy, Jo Ann Beard, and Maureen Howard, have sought to extract from this "most dramatically fraught period of our lives" a sense of "how I came to be who I now am," Birkerts writes.
Sons have sought reconciliation with their remote fathers through memoir, as in writings by Paul Auster, Geoffrey Wolff, and Blake Morrison. Daughters have sought distance from their domineering mothers, as in writings by Jamaica Kincaid and Vivian Gornick. Still others have struggled to confront and overcome trauma in their pasts, from incest to disfigurement, like Mary Karr, Richard Hoffman, Lucy Grealy, and Kathryn Harrison, Birkerts writes. Each memoirist has traversed the landscape between past and present in varying ways, using an array of literary techniques to craft their works.
Ultimately, however, memoirists share the human desire to know themselves, for their own sakes as well as their readers. They seek to recall and re-create their lives, and, in so doing, to compel readers to do the same. "Memoir is a narrative art," Birkerts writes, "but through its careful manipulation of vantage point it simulates the subjective sense of experience apprehended through memory and the corrective actions of hindsight. In other words it gives artistic form to what is the main business of our ongoing inner life."
Birkerts is as incisive a literary analyst as he is eloquent a literary essayist. His occasional forays into his own life further elucidate his points by way of example, while they offer glimpses into the mind of a memoirist writing about memoirists. His book, required reading for anyone interested in the genre, is an engaging study of how we come to understand ourselves through this most personal of literary expressions.
It's been two weeks since my last confession and I am annoyed at myself for letting so much time slip by without posting. Part of the reason was the short story I was writing for a vampire-romance anthology called Love Bites: the title is I Need More You and it's about a vampire and an angel playing an addictive love-game that spans decades and takes them to various places, this time Burning Man.
I've been wanting to set something at BM for years, and I realize (now) that I've been fascinated with issues of addiction since I made a major character in my first novel Bloodangel an ex-rock star struggling with heroin, which makes him extremely susceptible to my novel's Big Bad. Vampirism is often used as a metaphor for addiction, and although my books aren't vampire novels exactly (they are, as I like to call them, "vampire novels without any vampires in them") they are concerned to some extent with the nature of addiction, which is also the quest for the transcendent turned upside over and made corrupt. It's this quest that seems to be one of my obsessions as a writer, one of the things which will keep resurfacing in various forms throughout the future. I am an atheist who believes in the necessity of spiritual connection, which is not the contradiction it might seem. It raises some interesting questions.
I'm also -- pleased? bemused? -- to say that I finally met Talulah, my ex-husband's new girlfriend. She spends quite a bit of time with my children, given the 50/50 custody share. E and I had agreed that he and T would throw the twins' fifth birthday party on April 18. E wrote to me in an e-mail, "You're invited!" which, given the state of affairs of the last nine months, was no small thing. Talulah sent an email introducing herself and suggested we meet beforehand, rather than amid the chaos of a children's birthday party, which I appreciated.
We had breakfast. More than one friend pointed out that meeting her for a couple of stiff drinks might have been more appropriate, but carbs are good too. We had previously agreed to leave aside the uncomfortable topics. At one point I heard myself say, "I am so much happier now than I was this time last year" and realized this is true, there has been a reclaiming of time, friendships, interests, life in general. My sense of myself as person and mother is stronger now, and my writer-self, also going through some lessons, revelations and adjustments, is not far behind.
"It's kind of like a French movie," observed my friend Sam.
He had a point. His comment also reminded me of a comment of my father's, made ten years ago when I told him how I'd tossed red wine -- I am so not proud of this -- on a bedroom wall during a heated argument with E, after which we immediately made up (we made up pretty quickly in those days): "You have this tendency to live life like it's a French film".
So I said in an email to Talulah
I would rather live out the French-movie version of events (the ex-wife and new fiancee become friends and various philosophies are pondered) than the American version (one is 'good' and one is psycho, there's a big catfight sequence and someone gets thrown off a balcony) -- the latter of which seems vastly overrated.
She responded, Let's do as the French do.
To say that my presence at the birthday party wasn't awkward, however, would be a straight leap into Disney fantasy, where the birthday cakes (pirate theme for one twin, Buzz Lightyear for the other) do pirouettes and everyone breaks into song for no reason. But it wasn't a David Cronenberg either, so it could have been worse.
- Music:Hot Chip - Over and Over | Powered by Last.fm
I just finished Elaine Showalter's excellent and highly compelling A Jury of her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx.
Reading it, I was struck by just how many gifted, ambitious female writers who began their careers with a flourish and deep promise, ended up silenced in one way or another -- shamed, censured, marginalized, trivialized, or trapped and exhausted by domestic responsibilities. I was amazed at and grateful for the fact that things are so different for writers like me -- even as I was struck by certain things that haven't changed at all. I can relate -- uncomfortably so -- to what it's like to be accused of 'selfishness' because I had the audacity of prioritizing my creative work over housework (or, more accurately, supervising the housekeeper's housework). I can also attest to the necessity of finding a supportive partnership -- one that allows for genuine and mutual thriving -- if the roles of wife, mother (of multiples) and artist are to find harmonious balance.
So I was thinking these kinds of thoughts when I came across this profile of my ex-husband's actress girlfriend, the younger woman (23 to my 36) that he supposedly dumped me for, if you are to believe the cliched storyline a narrative like mine automatically gets reduced to in the eyes of whoever's watching. A couple of things leaped out at me:
they met in London when she was making an unplanned stop-off at a nightclub wearing a black ballgown (Versace or Armani or something, she couldn’t say for sure) after a formal event. Musk was sitting in a corner, head bowed over his BlackBerry, when they were introduced by a mutual friend.
[says Talulah] ‘It was all quite serendipitous, as Elon was about to leave and I was only there because someone I was with needed to drop in and collect his mobile phone from somebody. Neither of us are clubbers, so it was a happy accident that our paths crossed.’
E bowed over his Blackberry is his customary position, but the "neither of us are clubbers" line made me laugh out loud. (In fact, a friend brought this article to my attention just to comment on the 'clubbers' thing.)
There was also this:
He also has five children under the age of five – a set of triplets aged two and four-year-old twins, by his wife, the novelist Justine Musk. The couple are getting divorced, according to Justine’s blog, which states: ‘We had a good run. We married young, took it as far as we could and now it is over. That’s about all I can say for now, other than that it was a very sad and very necessary decision.’
This has happened several times now: quotes have been taken from my blog -- from me -- in order to support someone else's narrative about my marriage. This profile -- a puff piece on a beautiful young woman who, judging by the body language in that picture, seems genuinely in love* -- wants to make clear that Talulah is not a homewrecker, or Other Woman, or what have you. To that same end, in this Gawker article Elon stresses that the divorce was a "mutual decision" -- that although he was the one who filed for divorce, I "wasn't far behind" -- and this GQ piece also quotes me in order to support Elon's version of things.
(Meanwhile, this piece merely quotes me in regards to Talulah's hair color. That quote, you might have noticed, is no longer true.)
It's not like I was misquoted, or that I didn't mean what I said. I have nothing against Talulah. I wish her the best, and my kids seem to like her. But there's something going on here -- a certain tweaking -- that might be subtle, yet annoying.
This raises some interesting questions for me. When you are living part of your life in the public eye anyway -- when you blog, when your divorce has been kicked out there for public consumption -- when does this whole idea of "taking the high road" segue into this idea of being silent, silenced, even as someone appropriates your words to spin out a certain version of events?
So I want to say this:
Elon made the decision to divorce. We might have been mutually unhappy, and I might "not have been far behind", but the decision to divorce was not "mutual"; it was made unilaterally.
Yes, I was increasingly concerned about certain aspects* of the marriage and I made it clear to Elon that the situation was unacceptable to me. What I wanted, though, and what I was pushing for, was change. Divorce, for me, was like the bomb you set off when all other options have been exhausted. I had not yet given up on the diplomacy option, which was why I hadn't already filed. We were still in the early stages of marital counseling (three sessions total). Elon, however, took matters into his own hands -- he tends to like to do that -- when he gave me an ultimatum: "Either we fix [the marriage] today, or I will divorce you tomorrow."
That night, and again the next morning, he asked me what I wanted to do. I stated emphatically that I was not ready to unleash the dogs of divorce; I suggested that "we" hold off for at least another week. Elon nodded, touched the top of my head, and left. Later that same morning I tried to make a purchase* and discovered that he had cut off my credit card, which is when I also knew that he had gone ahead and filed (as it was, E did not tell me directly; he had another person do it). Five or six weeks later, he texted me to say that he and Talulah Riley were engaged. When he had taken her to the San Francisco Tesla store opening two or three weeks before, I did not even know she was in the country.
* which actually had nothing to do with the question of Elon's fidelity
** When a couple is truly in love and in sync, at least at that moment, their shoulders form a V. The closer the V, the closer the relationship. You can see from the way she has her hand on his neck and her body turned in towards him that she's totally into him; his torso, however, faces the camera and his thoughts seem somewhere else. With Elon, though, they generally are.
*** Cowboy boots at a store in Brentwood. Total retail therapy.
The other night I tagged along to a poetry reading at Arianna Huffington’s house. Arianna lives in Brentwood and is known, among other things, for hosting a modern-day political salon (I had never been before). If the Westside of LA is like a big high school – and in many ways it is, and in some ways not that big – then Arianna and her friends are like the smart, overachieving seniors who run the student council and star in the plays and put out the student newspaper and sit at the best, biggest table in the center of the cafeteria. If some people like to bitch about them, as some people are wont to do, it's not like they give a damn.
The poet in question was Elizabeth Alexander, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2005, and she was reading her poem 'Praise Song For The Day: A Poem For Barack Obama’s Presidential Inauguration'. Many of the people gathered in Arianna’s home – including several of my companions -- had been at the Inauguration and were hearing the poem for the second time. I – who followed part of the Inauguration on TV and other parts online – recognized lines that jumped out at me:
In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air,
Any thing can be made, any sentence begun,
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp.
As servers circulated with trays of wine and canapés, the crowd arrayed themselves around the sunken living room, stood on the stairs, or crowded the entrance hall and craned their necks to catch a glimpse of the poet through the archway. “A really good turn-out for a poetry reading,” a friend remarked rather dryly, just as I was thinking how, if this had been held at the nearest Barnes and Noble, the throng would have been smaller (and not so well-dressed).
Agapi, Arianna’s engaging and charming sister, who’s published a few books of her own, informed us that Obama is only the fourth President in the history of the US to request a poem for his big day. Obama, it would appear, regards poetry as relevant and significant. This might be one of the reasons why people like me are so happy he’s in office, while others fear that he’s the real-life equivalent of Keyser Soze.
We cross dirt roads and highways that mark
The will of some one and then others, who said
I need to see what’s on the other side.
2.
Be real. You’re not living in the real world. You’re out of touch with reality. These are accusations leveled at people in the so-called ivory towers of art and/or academia -- and also the gilded (metaphorically speaking, or at least some of the time) mansions in the hills north of Sunset Boulevard. Art, wealth and culture are linked, of course, because once upon a time the people with enough leisure to get and/or make themselves some culture did not have to work for a living. (This isn’t entirely true; many of America’s first women novelists became America's first women novelists precisely because they had to work for a living. Then again, novels weren't exactly regarded as highbrow, especially when written by women.)
You can’t make that same argument now, in a nation of people who have time to watch hours of television everyday, where anybody can go to a museum or listen to NPR or attend a concert or just watch one on TV. Art itself is democratic and egalitarian, yet its aura of elitism persists, and not without reason. You don’t have to stand in Arianna’s Spanish-style house listening to Elizabeth’s (and Obama’s) poem to know that, although it certainly helps drive the point home. Not all countries are like this: France comes to mind, where culture, style and philosophy are woven into everyday life, where how you dress becomes a direct reflection of how (or if) your mind works. America, though, as a still-young country that found its identity rebelling against its European masters (which, in itself, is not a bad thing) has reached a different conclusion. Not to mention that the French, as everybody knows, are snobs.
3
After the event at Arianna’s house, we headed down into Westwood Village: a neighborhood of cheap salons, boutiques and eateries catering to UCLA students, kind of like the scruffy younger half-sibling that the posh and family-oriented Brentwood has trouble relating to when forced to interact at family gatherings. A friend of ours – I’ll call her Ruby – had just concluded a series of art classes held through UCLA Extension, and the students were putting on a show. Unframed paintings leaned unceremoniously against their easels. Refreshments – soda in plastic cups, M&M cookies from Ralph’s – littered the table by the door.
I’ll admit to being biased, but I still think Ruby’s piece was best in show. Decapitated hammer heads lacquered in bright candy colors were welded in perfect rows on whiteboard. There was a clinical precision -- a kind of sterile coldness -- to the piece that reminded me a bit of Damian Hirst. The colors were playful and feminine, suggesting bottles of nail polish at a salon (a reference a woman was likely to get more quickly than a man, if he would even pick up on it at all).
Except there’s nothing playful or feminine about steel hammer heads, and the play between fun and bright, and cold and brutal, gave the piece a presence that made you want to look at it and keep looking at it. Frame the thing in a shadow box, hang it on a wall in a gallery, and it wouldn’t look like just another art student project. It would look like something someone might pay money for, while the gallery owner explained about the cold relentless business of the making of feminine beauty. Ruby, it seemed to me, was playing with materials and ideas in a way that cut the piece apart from the oils and pastels, portraits and self-portraits, surrounding it. Her piece had voice and perspective.
Or I just thought it was cool.
We concluded the night with an outdoor dining experience at Taco Bell. This was not by happenstance. A member of our party announced that she was craving Taco Bell, she needed Taco Bell, and we planned accordingly (a guy Google-mapped it on his Blackberry and we walked two blocks). It made me think of a saying I came across somewhere -- Desire rules the world. A grand pronouncement to apply to my nachos and spicy chicken burrito, I know, and yet it seemed a demonstration of the principle.
Cherie Priest, me, Caitlin Kittredge, Mark Henry, Christopher Andrews
Or not.
Of the people I consider my friends, Nick is the one who has ventured beyond the hallowed land of the Westside to set up camp in Hollywood or, as I like to call it, way the hell out there. Since I've known Nick, he's moved twice, and each time I've had to wind my way up through the haphazard maze known as bird's eye streets because of their high-pitched views of the city. Inevitably I get lost, backing the car out of some tightly curved cul-de-sac or doing a twenty-point-turn in a narrow stretch of road lined with parked cars and (sometimes) trash bins, hoping I don't back into a brick wall or ram a gate or trample somebody's cacti or birds-of-paradise. These are the times I find myself cursing Nick, as if his choice of residence was made just to vex me.
Nick remains oblivious. "Oh, it takes twenty minutes to get here," he'll say airily, reminding me of that scene in Clueless where the father tells Alicia Silverstone, "Everywhere in LA takes twenty minutes!"
This is not true.
"This is not true," I will inform Nick. For we have had this conversation more than once. "It took me almost an hour. First you have to get way the hell out here, and then you have to get up these hills."
"Yes, but isn't it an adventure?"
The house is worth the trip: a family-sized Spanish style from the 1940s with wood beam rafters, working fireplaces, a multi-leveled terrace with a sweeping view -- bird's eye view -- past the palm trees and tropical plants ("I like the foilage," I told Nick) to the densely knit lights of the city. You forget that it's a bachelor pad until you open the fridge and find goat cheese, a half-empty container of macaroni salad, packets of proscuitto, and lots of bare shelf. He offered me a baguette so stale I whacked it against the counter to enjoy the sound it made.
We grabbed a quick but charming dinner at Magnolia and headed to the concert. But nothing was happening at the Henry Fonda Theatre, where Cut Copy was supposed to be playing; a sign on the marquee instructed us to head to Club Nokia instead, a ten minute drive into downtown. Turned out that at the previous night's Cut Copy show, the Fonda couldn't handle the crowd. The fire marshal had had his way.
At the stadium-style Nokia -- which, as the lead singer dryly pointed out, was in no danger of getting shut down because of Cut Copy -- we couldn't help but note the youth of those around us. It took forever to get a drink because the bartenders were so busy checking IDs. "Is there a rule," I said to Nick, "that once you hit your thirties you have to stop doing this kind of stuff? Are we just supposed to go to Sting and U2 concerts now?"
"No," he said in that same, airy, it-only-takes-twenty-minutes tone, "because we're cool."
We separated ourselves from the kids, hung out in the balcony, and watched a great show.
Later, driving down through the shadowy hillside, I saw a coyote. He sashayed into somebody's yard, and I slowed the car to get a better look. He crossed the street, aware of my presence but not caring overmuch, lingering in the middle of the road. His eyes were gleams in the dark. Then he was gone.
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