Day 400 - 402: Palm Springs, Part II & Joshua Tree

Day II.35 (400) - Friday, July 20 // Day II.36 (401) - Saturday, July 21 // Day II.37 (402) - Sunday, July 22

What a lovely weekend with my friends Shane, Amy & Nathan at Palm Springs & Joshua Tree. This was another thing on my LA Bucket List, and I am so profoundly grateful for an incredible trip with great friends.

 at Key's View: Nathan, Amy, me & Shane

 at Jumbo Rocks!

 Dinner at Lulu's

 Pool to myself, first thing in the am, under a mountain. Blessed.

View from the top!

Day 295 - 300: Palm Springs

for April 5-10, 2012


What a gorgeous town, state, part of the world.


Happy birthday to me: I got a pool to myself (and my closest friends!) for the weekend.







I'm so grateful that so many of the people I love best in the world came out this weekend: Berna and the boys, Alex & Stephen, Shane & Jesse, Leslie, Norah, Amy, Hong & Razz. Thank you for making me feel so loved and coming out to celebrate my 30th!

Day 118: West in Eden

I've been enjoying Steinbeck's East of Eden lately. I have to confess, I've never really read Steinbeck before. But when I moved to New York, Emile and I moved into this apartment in the East Village that a Dutch lesbian recently moved out of, leaving the country in a hurry (visa issues, we're told) and in her rushed departure, she left behind all her furniture - convenient for us - and a few books, including a copy of East of Eden as well as a book about the ghettos in America.



So now, three years later, I'm finally reading the book that was left for me. I also watched the James Dean movie version (hello, James Dean. I get why the ladies were all up on you now. Foxy). What a gorgeous inter-generational story of California, of humanity! The 1955 film version cuts it down to some of the basics, omitting a lot of salacious drama, but also some of the more fascinating characters (Lee, Samuel Hamilton, etc). But I have found something really beautiful in reading this classic story of California's founding and growing years, how people came here for new futures and built themselves out of nothing, struggled, survived, and ultimately thrived in this amazing place. There is something parallel about my own westward journey. Yes, I love New York - I have to, I always will, I miss it. But I love the west, and I love Steinbeck's vision of the historic West.

I also love words. I am incredibly grateful for the ravenously rich English language, and the delight of that language being well handled. So I will share some of my favorite pieces with you, as they've brought me joy.

I love Steinbeck's description of nostalgia (end of chapter 12), which ends with, "Oh, but the strawberries will never taste so good again and the thighs of women have lost their clutch!" (129). How great is that?!

Everything about this exchange is perfect, too, when Adam describes falling in love with Cathy:
"I'll want to hear," Samuel said. "I eat stories like grapes."
"A kind of light spread out from her. And everything changed color. And the world opened out. And a day was good to awaken to. And there were no limits to anything. And the people of the world were good and handsome. And I was not afraid of it anymore" (168).

In the end, though, it's Steinbeck's description of the story of the world that I find most captivating.

A child may ask, "What is the world's story about?" And a grown man or woman may wonder, "What way will the world go? How does it end and, while we're at it, what's the story about?"
I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one, that has frightened and inspired us, so that we live in Pearl White serial of continuing thought and wonder. Humans are caught - in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too - in a net of good and evil. I think that this is the only story we have and that it occurs on all levels of feeling and intelligence. Virtue and vice were warp and woof of our first consciousness, and they will be the fabric of our last, and this despite any changes we may impose on field and river and mountain, on economy and manners. There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well - or ill? (411).

Well, the hard, clean question is: was it good? Have I done well?

Day 34: Planning Trips

Oh the deliciousness of planning a road trip!


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Day 27 - Relief!

Today I'm grateful for the big relief that comes with making a huge decision or taking a giant leap towards something you need to do for yourself.

Today I made such a step. I am relieved, exhilarated, scared, sad, and excited all in one. I gave notice at my work for the end of August so that I can move back to Los Angeles. This is something I need to do for myself. And I'm going to make it happen. It might get a little dicey. But I'm a big girl, I can handle it. I brought myself to New York, I can bring myself back.



This picture is how I see LA from here, some bedroom in Brooklyn - a little blurry, and definitely in the distance - but absolutely gorgeous and glowing with possibility.

Day Four & Five (Traveling) Joint Post - but lots of gratitude!

photo from jrodmanjr on flikr

Because I have been traveling, I am posting double days - I actually wasn't on my computer at all yesterday. It was quite lovely.

Yesterday: I am thankful for Leslie, Alex, Berna, Maegan, Becky, Stephen, Vernon, Lucas & Nolan. I am thankful for Leslie who drove me to LA because it was what I needed to do and because we got to talk to each other the whole way.

I am thankful for Alex and Berna because they have been my best friends for so long, who show no signs of flagging, who love me for who I am, and who support me fully, wholly, completely.

I am thankful for Maegan, who is a lovely friend, and who continues to amaze me with her quiet laughter and generous spirit.

I am thankful for Becky and Stephen, because they love Berna and Alex respectively, are solid partners to them, and make my dear friends happy.

I am thankful for Lucas and Nolan, Berna and Becky's sons, because Berna and Becky are exactly the kind of people who should be having kids.

I am thankful for Vernon, who I have known forever, but who I have gotten to know more in recent years and I am enjoying our friendship so much. Some people are just really good souls, and Vernon is one of these.

I am thankful and grateful and completely love the family that I have chosen.

For today:
The picture above is where Leslie and I went running today. I am grateful for long runs in the sunshine with my dear friend. And most importantly I am grateful for mild California temperatures and no East Coast humidity.

I am also thankful for the family I was born into - namely my dad (Happy Father's Day). My dad is brilliant, funny, and the kindest man I know. I love you Dad.

LandFlow

"My usual question, unanswered by these - by most - travel books, is, How did you get there? We have become used to life being a series of arrivals or departures, of triumphs and failures, with nothing noteworthy in between. Summits matter, but what of the lower slopes of Parnassus?...Meanwhile, what of the journey itself? ... What interest me is the waking in the morning, the progress from the familiar to the slightly odd, to the rather strange, to the totally foreign, and finally to the outlandish. The journey, not the arrival, matters; the voyage, not the landing. Feeling cheated that way by other travel books, and wondering what exactly it is I have been denied, I decided to experiment by making my way to travel-book country, as far south as trains run."
-Paul Theroux, The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas

Inspired by Theroux, I recorded pieces of my train journey from Los Angeles to San Diego, to see how the land changes, how the terrain slowly evolves, in an attempt to capture and explore the feelings of movement through different spaces, of train travel, of crossing the earth and noticing the spaces that shift along the way. Our train passed from one urban configuration (flat, diffuse, with small clusters of small buildings and a certain reputation of openness, possibility) to another urban configuration (walkable, not as extensive, with a more conservative reputation) through urban sprawl, small rural towns, and natural settings. I am intrigued by the meanings and sensory experiences of these different spaces in passing through them, and how they are woven together on the fabric of the land in a seamless way.

Mythologizing the West

From San Diego/Los Angeles, CA


Paul Theroux notes in the beginning of The Patagonian Express that travel feels very different when it is undertaken overland, that there is something particularly important in understanding how the land progresses and changes and evolves as one goes across it, rather than just landing in a plane, experiencing the earth as disjointed territories and pieces rather than a slow evolution.

On the East Coast, it’s easy to get anywhere – the cities are fairly close together (100 miles or so) and the land is contiguous, interwoven with packed freeways. The East Coast itself (at least the Northeast, where I have now lived for over 2 years) has a sense of being together, being intimate, in that it’s difficult to ever get out and get lost somewhere without running into a housing development, civilization, freeways, stores. There are a few nature preserves, such as the Delaware Gap, but even that is a narrow strip of “wilderness” and when you kayak to the end of it, the end is signaled by crossing under a freeway overpass. East Coast cities are vertical – New York built upwards, creating a constellation of skyscrapers. They are beautiful, monuments to greatness in many cases, and illuminate the night sky. But the sky becomes so hard to see in New York, too many buildings obscure the broad arc of the sky.

The sky is so much bigger here, on the West Coast. You can see the sky, no matter where you are. It is blue and deep and light. It is not heavy, dense, dark. My experience of space in California is completely different than my experience in New York: in California, I want to be outside, to smell the orange and eucalyptus trees. To sit by the tiger lilies while looking at the mountains in the haze of the distance. The buildings here are closer to human scale, they are not imposing physically. As a result, the distance you travel horizontally on the West Coast roughly equal the distances you travel vertically on the East Coast. It’s just a very different way of being.

More people have cars here, because these distances are greater, and things are more spread out. There’s more space in the West, more room to expand. More freedom, more air. The spaces are more stark, there is more contrast. There are mountains, valleys; the East has rolling hills, no sharply contrasting landscapes in texture and size (excepting Maine).

The West has a long history of being mythologized as a space of freedom, for pioneers, for dreamers, for the sons and daughters of families that didn’t have important last names or dynasties…the place where the American dream stands, where anyone can make their future and fortune. The exhibition at LACMA, “The Modern West,” looked at the ways that artists mythologized the West and created a visual language to explain the sense of possibility and creative opening they felt here. The West is also rough: it is a ragged, demanding place to live that. Los Angeles, as a city, should not exist; there is no water to sustain it, so it had to be stolen from elsewhere (see Mike Davis' City of Quartz, Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert). Anyone who has visited Yosemite understands the awesome and awe-inspiring intensity of living in a landscape so beautiful but dangerous. The history of the West includes lawless vigilantes, cowboys, and rough “Wild West” towns, people who wanted to live outside strictures of society. Perhaps this epitomizes the inherent danger in freedom: if you are constrained, there is little risk; if you are free, you are also free to make the wrong choices and take yourself down a path of no return. The wide open spaces of the West open that opportunity.

I know that I play into this, that I fall under the lure of the “wide open West” idea. I know I idealize Los Angeles, because I was doing interesting work with the Getty <here's one of our projects, I did the video for this> and my two best friends from Seattle U were living there to attend USC (still reside there). So for me, LA was a place where I had fulfilling, stimulating work, I got to travel, and I had great friends. In my memory, it has become something so mythic it could never have been real. I have edited out the traffic, the eating disorders of the women I saw in Whole Foods, the odd surreal nature of living in a place you recognize, deja-vu-like, because you’ve seen it on tv somewhere. I’ve redacted the unreal relationship to the land and water, the beautiful topiary and manicured lawns that depend on siphoning water to render the city livable, beautiful, vibrant. In my mind, even though I know these things to be true, they have melted away.

I have to admit a predilection towards the desert, too. Perhaps this is vestigial from my childhood in Albuquerque, but the desert feels like home. My childhood weekends were filled with visits to Mesa Verde, Pueblo National Monument, Santa Fe. The mesas and brush of the desert, long brown and ochre expanses dotted with the occasional cacti or magnificent tree, with imposing stark peaked mountains in the distance, feels comfortable. My cousin, who has spent 20 years in Seattle, can’t imagine living in the desert; to her, it is beautiful in its way but not bearable past a few days. The lush verdant greens of the Pacific Northwest are home to her; the desert alien. In a way, I am biased towards the desert, it is inescapable the way I feel at home here. I cannot make it not feel this way. Tennyson was right, “I am a part of all that I have met.” And I met the West when I was so young, and fell in love with her, and have never managed to fall out of love with her again.

On Marriage

Perhaps because the universe knows I got engaged to be married, I have randomly read and come across so many things on the topic of marriage recently. In a mad plan to read all of Nancy Pearl's recommendations, I ordered a copy of The Nowhere City by Alison Lurie from the NYPL (I have one hour and fifteen minutes commute EACH WAY to work at the moment, so I find that between this length of time per day allotted to delicious reading plus my cultivated nerd speed-reading tendency, growing up in a house without tv, means I have trouble staying "in books" like some women have trouble staying "in shoes"). Pearl guaranteed me a novel about California, so I picked up Lurie with interest, encouraged further by the sticker on the cover notifying me that she won the Pulitzer Prize (for another book, of course, but still...it's a Pulitzer!).


The Nowhere City is in fact the story of a marriage that goes sideways when the East Coast couple, Harvard intellectuals, unable to find work in the small, closed circle of East Coast academia, turn to California and work at a research firm in order to get a paycheck. The Harvard man is immediately lured away from his shy, depressed brunette wife - who is, in the first half of the book, always described in bed suffering from headaches - by a beatnik blonde artist/waitress. He becomes obsessed with her laidback attitude, her California slang, her daring, sensual lifestyle and her voracious West Coast sexuality, so opposite of his wife's closed, muted life and personality. The Harvard man eventually returns to the East Coast (for him, and Lurie, clearly, California is after all so unnatural in its lack of seasons, desert colors, blunt sexuality, its blondeness). His wife, who first hated Los Angeles and suffered from psychosomatic headaches that prevented her from exploring the city for what it truly is, eventually turns into a California girl, abandoning her husband when he returns to the green summers and white winters of Boston. Unrecognizable to him now, she is blonde, she wears colorful clothing, she has an affair with a Hollywood starlet's husband. The book is a chronicle of a failed marriage, and an East Coaster's likewise failed attempt to make sense of California.



I'm sorry to relate I was disappointed with my first stab at conquering Nancy Pearl's recommendations (I will give her a few more chances!) but I think part of it is that its bleak portrait of marriage and failure to fully give the West Coast a chance influenced my negative opinion. After all, as a West Coast person, I feel Lurie did not weigh heavily enough the freedom and opportunity of the West Coast (see pictures of this very freedom above), of California - the freedom to redefine oneself, the freedom of the sky that goes for miles and miles uninterrupted, unconstrained...there is no pressure, no social constraint, there is space for exploration, which just does not exist on the East Coast. All one's effort on the East Coast is concentrated on trying to break into a circle of power long consolidated and designed to exclude others.

Reading a story about a failed marriage, too, is not the best thing for a newly engaged person. It is easy to recognize the small miscommunications inherent in any relationship, and see how they conflated and escalated to become unavoidable, unmistakable, capable of breaking the relationship. Then I read a delightful piece of infectious inventice on McSweeney's, here. Guest columnist Susan Schorn writes about women - the women who become mistresses of married men, and the women who are wives, left behind, forgotten, scorned. Schorn writes against these women who betray their fellow women, advocating the bitchslap despite various nuanced understandings of what it means to be a woman, a wife, a person in today's society. I found I agreed with her violent anger towards the women who so callously disregard their fellow women and don't stand beside them to end men's infidelity (we could, as women, after all, make it impossible if we chose.

Still a bit disillusioned and sad, divine intervention then sent me to Elizabeth Gilbert's website, where I found her Q & A discussing her new book, Committed. Here she discusses the negatives of marriage (it benefits men financially, socially and healthwise more than women; marriage actually makes women unhappier, increases their workload, and punishes them socially and financially, according to averaged statistics). She talks about how marriage is practical, and not romantic; it is, in her opinion, not a game for young people, either. These things I agree with, I can see. But then she went on to discuss how marriage was a revolution, instituted by families who wanted their connections to mean something, and found against the governments and powers that be to keep marriage around. I appreciate and support her call to honesty, to small "acts of household tolerance," to being individuals responsible for their own state of being at the end of every day. She writes about how gay marriage can rejuvenate the institution of marriage, and it reminded me of why I believe so fervently in the legalization of gay marriage. It's because I am, at the end of everything and despite experiences to the contrary, a hopeless romantic and believe fully in the restorative, beautiful, peace-giving power of love. I believe we should be free to bind ourselves to the person of our choosing. I believe that we can become better people in a monogamous domestic partnership - I know this because I have been shaped and honed by my relationship with E. I believe that with real love, it is the opposite of an anchor, the weight of this love pulls me up, pulls me toward my better self. And that journey is the only one worth making.




You can read Gilbert's extended Q & A here.

On the Road Again...

On my flight, I watched the tapestry below us turn from flat, angling fields, demarcated into neat diagrams from a geometry textbook in greens, parched straw, and brown. As we flew farther west, the land began to crinkle, with deep earthy fissures breaking the clean circles and triangles of the fields. Finally, then, the fissures rose into craggy peaks. It felt triumphant, somehow, to see nature disrupt the placid designs of man. Then, the minute I got off the plane in San Francisco I felt the cool Pacific mist of San Francisco on my face and I breathed a sigh of relief, thankful to be out of the East Coast humidity in what has been reportedly the hottest July on record. I was on the West Coast, in California; I was home.

Brooklyn had been 95 degrees and humid. San Francisco was 62 and breezy. Unprepared for the weather that was unimaginable in reeking putridity of the sewer of New York's summer, E scurried to Old Navy to buy pants. We hadn't packed any. Thankful for my cardigan, I shivered in delight, enjoying the breeze. I met Shane, my dear friend, for dinner at a pub near the airport. We picked up conversation like it had been days rather than months since we had enjoyed each other's company. It is a true and rare blessing in life to visit friends across the planet, and delight in their companionship.

The next morning dawned bleak and brisk. After a hefty breakfast in San Fran, we drove out to see the Golden Gate Bridge. Mist swallowed one end, the massive pylons disappearing on the other end. The wind whipped around us, and we marveled at the surfers braving the frothy waves breaking on the boulders at the base of the bridge.


Once we crested the hill, on the freeway heading east, the mist dissipated. The car slowly warmed so that within 10 minutes it was legitimately hot, and I squirmed out of my cardigan from my precarious position wedged in the backseat between two full-grown Aussie men. We sped through California's heartland, turning onto progressively smaller and smaller roads. Soon we were cruising along a backroad between latticed rows of plum trees, grapevines, green roses of lettuce neatly laid out in rows, and thick fences of corn plants. Lured by handpainted signs touting the luscious products, we stopped at a roadside stand and spent $10 on a bucket of strawberries, nectarines, apples, and pluots (a delightful hybrid of plum + apricot).

We continued east, and I noticed the railroads, humming east, bearing California's fruit to bodegas in New York and Philly. Ghosts of railroad towns and mining towns appeared on the horizon and vanished seamlessly, as if they had never been there. Wide golden fields gave way to evergreens and hills. By the time we got to Sonora, where our hotel was, we were in the mountains. I could smell juniper on the air, and it reminded me of being at my grandmother's house as a child - I wanted to bottle the air, keep it, infuse my being with it.
After checking in to our hotel, we continued east, snaking through the mountains to enter Yosemite. It was beautiful, but then we got into the park and rounded a bend to see Yosemite Valley and the Halfdome majestically in front of us. We all gasped, and immediately pulled over to snap pictures and revel in the dramatic valley gorge just off the road.

Entering the park at dusk was incredible because the crowds were gone for the day with their mewling infants and supersized cars and trailers. We almost had the place to ourselves, with its towering canyon walls with El Capitan and the Halfdome's smooth, incredible rockface and the rest of the canyon walls craggy, shadowy, mysterious. The valley floor was carpeted in the lush green of summer, and dragonflies and butterflies flitted and roamed the array of wildflowers. We passed a bear fishing for his supper in the glacial Merced River and watched the moon rise over the Half Dome.




It was balm to a soul aching for Western skies after too many seasons of manmade canyons.