Los Angeles what a week.....

Here's the view from my terrace window. I live in LA. I love it. Ok, Ok, I know the traffic is bad, but the upside is the neighborhoods have improved, by a long shot, better eating, better shopping, more movies. This week was packed. Saw an evening with Joel Grey at the Paley Center for Media and watched fabulous old film of his early days on TV. I hit the Los Angeles Art Show in downtown and was gobsmacked by John Baldessari's A to Z collection, sold as a set in mixgrafia, as well as Michele Mattei's glorious flowers in photography. Did the girl thing & bought new capri pants at J.Crew. Jumped into the writing life again with Jack Grapes and his merry band of pranksters, poets and tempest tossed writers. Spent a lovely Saturday evening at the Colburn School of Music downtown for a Brahms concert, and did the flea market in Santa Monica yesterday with Lisa. Finished off the week with dinner at Angelini Osteria, my favorite restaurant in town. I mean really, the weather is 75, the rest of the country is in the deep freeze and even though my car needs some repair from the major pot holes in Wilshire Blvd., I can't complain about this city. LA? I love it. 

Books: Binocular Vision by Edith Pearlman

If you read Ann Patchett's introduction to
                          BINOCULAR VISION,
you will surely turn the page,
and the next page,
and the next.



I am awestruck and filled with wonder.

My breath has been taken away.
These very short stories are touching,
mind bending,
they make me want to read them aloud and
              savour
each
                                                 and every word.
Oh God, the glory of living in a world with art.


"The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again."
                                                                         - William Faulkner

ART/ Photo LA

UCLA Bamboo - Kathleen Blurock photo

Went to PHOTO LA 

Nan Goldin, check.
Elliott Erwitt, check.
Julius Schulman, Imogene Cunningham, check check check.

Also saw some interesting things at PHOTO EYE,
a 2001 space oddyssey looking ilfachrome that was fab,
Robert Tat's usual great selection
and some tough looking street stuff at Rivera & Rivera.
The Australians had "sculpted" photography.

German, Netherlands, London all covered.
Interesting stuff.

"It is through living that we discover ourselves - at the same time as we discover the world around us." 

                                        - Henri Cartier-Bresson 1952

Food as ART, the genius of Gino Angelini

 When I die I want to go to Gino heaven where I can eat all day and never get fat, never be overloaded or sick. I can go from warm octopus salad with arugula & cherry tomatoes to tagliatelle with lamb ragu and wash it down with the lovely La Massa without a care that it will be too much for me. I can even eat the warm Nonna cake with pine nuts and vanilla ice cream, so divine. God won't care, neither will Gino. He'll just laugh and take another swallow of whatever he is drinking. It's easy for him to cook in heaven, no heat. A few tables with comfortable chairs and a wall of wine whose bottles are magically replaced as one is removed. The tables are in the middle of an olive grove with little bamboo lights hung from the branches. It is heaven, Gino heaven. But it's MY Gino heaven,
here on earth, in Los Angeles, on Beverly Blvd, and all you have to do is call.

Poetry Workshop: Richard Jones & Jack Grapes

SHARE with a friend.


Richard Jones:
"I don't paint what I see
             I paint what I want you to see."

Jack Grapes:
"Write poems that are so light
they                               God."
        fly        up    to    








The workshop was sublime, a meal, delicious, funny, embracing and hit that spot in the solar plexus, sexus, nexus. It's not so important, it's only poetry. Make a list and write from that. Write like you talk. The poem represents you, and your rodeo, it's everlasting.

"There is a desk in my office,
but I want a larger desk,
a much larger desk,
in a bigger room
with all my bookshelves,
yes
with ALL of my books around me.
This is a serviceable desk,
but I need a bigger desk,
a wider desk,
an enormous desk for my enormous appetite
because that is where I live,
that's where I imagine
that's where I dream
and tell the           truth
that's where I am a girl
that's where I am a writer.
My paradise is my desk.
That is where
I want to
stay
where I arrest
the rush
yes
the rush
of course
the rush
and the speed of the world."
               - Kathleen

Poetry: Richard Jones & Jack Grapes

Richard Jones, Professor of English at DePaul University and editor of the literary journal POETRY EAST is in town this weekend presenting a poetry workshop with Jack Grapes, award-winning poet, actor, playwright (Circle of Will), teacher and editor and publisher of ON THE BUS literary journal. I will be there, grateful to be present with these two literary giants. 

The Bell 

Richard Jones 

In the tower the bell 

is alone, like a man 

in his room, 

thinking and thinking. 

The bell is made of iron. 

It takes the weight 

of a man 

to make the bell move. 

Far below, the bell feels 

hands on a rope. 

It considers this. 

It turns its head. 

Miles away, 

a man in his room 

hears the clear sound, 

and lifts his head to listen. 

Nothing Left To Chance

Jack Grapes 

Begin with fish, 

smack their heads off with a mallet 

or tear through the entire phone book 

sheet by sheet 

and digest the lives listed 

five hundred to a page. 

You don't remember one old phone number 

but all the addresses 

for each home you've lived in 

bob like little boats 

on the ocean of your daydreams. 

You can't understand why poets 

write lines like that, 

or what makes a car go, 

and when you see those steel girders 

going up on the vacant lot 

the exposed elevator shafts, 

glass and concrete not far behind 

you wonder how so much can be built

one piece at a time 

and nothing left to chance. 

http://jackgrapes.com/grapes_classes.php

Interiors

Temporary great room in THE HERMOYNE. Top floor.

A treehouse, a perch, a zen space with a lookout over the canvas of LA from downtown through Hancock Park and the Miracle Mile to Century City. 1929, originally a hotel, the building has the sensuous Old Hollywood vibe.

JANUARY 2011

Three cats jumped off the morning papers today. Cats in clothing, cats in literature, and cats in portraiture. First Sunday of the year, a blossom, a holdover, a mass of dirty dishes and glasses and roasting pans in the kitchen waiting....

waiting....

waiting for someone,

who? Not me, to clear them. I'm too interested in the New New York, the arts, Debo's latest book and what to give my bestest girl friend in New York for her birthday...gold bracelets? Leather bags? Flowers? Apples for a year. So much in life to choose from. I am quite grateful for the 5 senses, the 4 seasons, the 3 spirits, the 2 options and the one true self. Welcome to 2011.

Interiors: Bulthaup kitchen party in Santa Monica

Chris Tosdevin threw a tasteful party for the opening of his Bulthaup studio in Santa Monica last night. Lots of architects, musicians, commercial real estate developers and the old lion of architecture, Ray Kappe and his wife Shelly. Lovely people. I could tell just from looking at Ray he "was" someone. The man was vibrating, radiating. This was the LA design crowd at it's best; uncrowded. Still, among the black clothing there were some stand out jewels, some Bottega bags, some Manolo shoes. The kitchens made me want to create a brand new kitchen. Bulthaup is the best. Once you work in one, you are hooked, and it is so visually pleasing, and so incredibly functional. Someone thought of a place for the dishwashing liquid so you don't have to look at that bottle, wasn't that thoughtful? Someone thought of a pullout drawer for the saran wrap and the aluminum foil, wasn't that thoughtful? And someone knew the refrigerator could just "go away" and look like another cabinet and not stand out like a thud in the middle of the room. That was brilliant. The LA drive there took an hour in rush traffic, the drive home 40 minutes through Beverly Hills, through Santa and his sleigh arched over Wilshire Blvd, through the twinkling blue lights up Canon Drive and it's row of packed restaurants, through the design section of Beverly Blvd, the sofas and beds and kitchens speeding by. It's fun to drive through LA. It's fun to live in this city.

Writing: "I had a farm in Africa...." one of the most glorious first lines in literature.

Karen Blixen, aka Isak Dinesen, is my guide & constant inspiration.

From the 1956 Paris Review, after she was asked: most of your tales are laid in the last century, aren't they? You never write about modern times.

"I do, if you consider that the time of our grandparents, that just-out-of-reach time, is so much a part of us. We absorb so much without being aware. Also, I write about characters, and they take over. They make the design, I simply permit them their liberty. Now, in modern life and in modern fiction there is a kind of atmosphere and above all an interior movement inside the characters - which is something else again. I feel that in life and in art people have drawn a little apart in this century. Solitude is now the universal theme. But I write about characters within a design, how they act upon one another. Relation with others is important to me, you see, friendship is precious to me, and I have been blessed with heroic friendships. But time in my tales is flexible. I may begin in the eighteenth century and come right up to World War I. Those times have been sorted out, they are clearly visible. Besides, so many novels that we think are contemporary in subject with their date of publication - think of Dickens or Faulkner or Tolstoy or Turgenev, are really set in an earlier period, a generation or so back. The present is always unsettled, no one has had time to contemplate it in tranquility...I was a painter before I was a writer....and a painter never wants the subject right under his nose; he wants to stand back and study a landscape with half-closed eyes."

photo by Peter Beard.