Celebrity Overload
Maybe it is because I live in LA now, and feel a little too close for comfort, but for some reason I have started to get more and more exasperated by the world’s obsession with celebrities. I have to admit that for a long time one of my airplane rituals was buying the most mindless magazines I could get my hands on – People, Us Weekly, Entertainment Weekly, etc. I considered it my guilty pleasure that didn’t really count because I was up in the air. But the more I see headlines about Tom Cruise’s love life, Michael Jackson’s oddities, and whether or not Brad & Angelina have DONE IT, the more I am turned off by the whole game, for many different reasons. For something like this Tom Cruise fiasco, I don’t understand why he feels it is necessary to shove his personal life in our faces (not to mention in the face of his ex-wife and his kids.) For Brad & Angelina, I actually feel sorry for them. No privacy, nowhere they can go on the entire planet that the paparazzi won’t find them. If I were them, I’d start asking Dennis Tito for advice on how to take a space flight for a few days of real R & R.
I used to be a movie-aholic, but lately I find myself rebelling against all of the hype, overload and intrusions into private lives. I haven’t seen the latest Star Wars film because I got so sick of seeing it EVERYWHERE – even in M & Ms ads. I now don’t even want to see War of the Worlds because of Mr. Cruise’s bizarre behavior. And here’s the crazy catch – I don’t even have cable TV. I can’t imagine how much more information would be blasted into my brain beyond what I get from the LA Times, NPR radio and my Premiere magazine.
There was an article in the LA Times today about this very topic, and Patrick Goldstein wrote, "Somewhere between aberrant star behavior and insatiable audience voyeurism, we’ve created a new entertainment form: celebrity reality TV." Whatever happened to just making great films, creating a unique television series or producing a groundbreaking album? Whatever happened to just creating something meaningful and original and letting the work speak for itself? So many films – with great talent involved – are crap and so much music over-produced and pre-packaged. Through this we churn out Britney Spears, Paris Hilton (triple gag), the Tom & Katie love-fest and the entirely new genre of reality TV celebrities.
I know I am on my soapbox here, but I just marvel at society’s obsession with fame and celebrity. Are our lives really that shallow? Don’t people have anything better or more meaningful to focus on in their own lives? Imagine if all the time people spent reading celebrity gossip was spent doing volunteer work. What could be done with all the money people spend on celebrity gossip magazines in one month? Could it build a school in a far-away country?
I shall end my rant here, but with the hope that perhaps all of this mania is at its peak, and will soon begin to subside. I’ll be doing my part tomorrow, when I get on a plane to DC, with an entirely different stack of magazines than my usual.
June 20, 2005 Follow-up: I did fly to and from DC and the magazines in my bag were: Oprah Home, Ladies Home Journal (the interview with Madonna caught my eye) and In Style. When I landed I called my girlfriend Melissa and one of her first questions was, "So, what magazines did you buy?", having read this entry.
Kooky
We all have these stories – strange "coincidences", premonitions, dreams, omens and experiences – that are sometimes too outlandish to be believable, yet they are, in fact, true. I have always tried to pay attention to mine, and I find that the more you notice, appreciate and try to perhaps interpret or understand, the more insights you can learn about your own self and life in general. Some of my most notable stories are rather mundane, but some are fairly mind-blowing. What are some of yours? I’d love to hear them.
* A couple of months ago a woman named Alexandra emailed me and asked me to write the forward to her book, which I happily did. The woman who illustrated her book is an amazing collage artist named Laini Taylor, and she has a line of wonderful hanging adornments. Alexandra sent me one as a thank you gift recently and it is hanging in my kitchen. Last fall I had an intense falling out with a dear friend and we have not had much communication since. I received a package from her today, with a gift and a note. The note said she saw the gift and it made her think of me. The gift was one of Laini’s adornments.
* This is a weird one – last night I was at a friend’s birthday party. I was talking to my friend Lucy and in the background Tom Jones’ song "What’s new Pussycat?" was playing. Suddenly Lucy looks up at sees the host’s golden lab humping a giant pillow in the next room. The sight of the dog humping to that particular song cracked us up.
This morning I checked my email and there was an email from a friend I haven’t heard from in ages. In the subject line: "What’s new pussycat?"
* One of my current clients was in a dream I had a few weeks ago. In the dream she gave me one of those one cheek – two cheek European air kisses, which is totally out of character for her. I found out soon after that when I had the dream she was in France.
* A few years ago I was in downtown Santa Barbara, and for some reason decided to go to Butterfly Beach, a beach I had never been to. At that moment I wasn’t sure why I suddenly wanted to go there, but I just knew that was where I wanted to be. When I got there I found my dear friend Heidi hanging out with a blanket & a thermos of hot chocolate. She walked up to me and said, "I guess you got my message!" I said, "What message?" and she explained to me that she had just left a message for me at home to come meet her at Butterfly Beach to watch the sunset. We watched the sunset, and it was beautiful.
* I saw the film Baraka in the theater years ago, and kind of forgot about it. Then sometime around late 2003, I started thinking about that film and trying to remember what the name of it was, eager to see it again. That Christmas, my fiancee received a gift from our friend Ashley Collins, and it was a book of photography from the film. I didn’t pay attention to the title of the book, I just started looking through the pictures, which was when I realized what the book was about. Then I closed the book to see the title and I found my answer. Thank you Ashley.
* I had a dream a few years ago where someone I was very close to looked extremely thin, fragile and very unhealthy. Two days later he was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma.
The happy ending – he beat the odds and is still alive & well.
* Last summer I was in Oklahoma to be with my grandma, who was not doing well. I sent an email out to my friends asking them for support and for emails, as I felt kind of disconnected from everyone and was feeling sad about my grandma. A few days later a friend of mine forwarded another email to me. It was an email from a woman named Christine, who sent it to all of her friends asking for their love and support because she was feeling sad about her grandma, who was not doing well. Two Christines, two grandmas, two emails asking for support from their friends, all within a few days of each other.
This other Christine and I recently had tea and scones in Venice, and we each just got engaged within a month of each other.
There are so many others – like when I was in a rinky-dink train station on the border of France and Spain many years ago at about 5:00am and I ran into a woman I had rented an apartment from in Berkeley, CA the previous summer. Or the time my ex-husband and I were in Australia, out on the Great Barrier Reef, on one tiny dock, in a small tube under the water – a tunnel you could walk through to see the reef. There were maybe ten people in there at a time, and he ran into a woman he went to high school with in Northern Virginia. Check out the May 17, 2005 journal entry for Andrea Scher for another great one.
These are stories we all have. Dreams. Coincidences. Omens. Insights. Clues. Messages. Gifts.
Friday Morning
I am not making this up: this morning as I was riding my bike along the Venice Boardwalk to breakfast, I saw a bulldog riding a skateboard. And I don’t mean the bulldog was placed on the skateboard and given a push by its owner, this dog was getting on the board, using his paw to push him forward, and taking it for a spin.
“Behave your way to success”
Tunnels beach on Kaua’i. Taken May 31, 2005.
This was a quote by Dr. Phil on Oprah. I found it on the website of another artist pursuing her dreams, Africa James. I immediately wrote it down and tacked it on my bulletin board, as I love the simplicity yet fierce directness of it. My definition of success has most definitely changed over the past few years, but this statement still very much applies. I try my best to live with integrity and accountability, and I believe this has given me a direct route to success, personally and professionally. I am still in the midst of a somewhat scary transition with my work – letting go of something that worked very well for a long time, and moving towards a place where I have no experience and no reputation. But I did that before, blindly leaping into the world of greeting cards, and it turned out OK. I dug such deep roots into one type of creative career, and now I am beginning to sink in another one. Or perhaps I should say I’m growing a new branch – sinking seems so ominous, and it is really just growing in a new way as an artist. I am not planting an entirely new tree, just trying to coax a few new blossoms out from their pods to see what they hold for me.
Painting
Today was a day of painting. It is so gratifying to have so many canvases around with all kinds of different images, ideas and experiments. I currently have:
* 4 completed paintings that are receiving their final varnish tomorrow.
* 7 paintings that are oh-so close to being finished.
* Another 8 in the works.
* 3 new ones just started today.
With each new painting I discover a new technique, subject or method, usually by accident. Most of my "mistakes" actually turn out to be something I would have never otherwise discovered and enjoyed. There are also those moments when I try something and hate it, having to either paint over everything or try to get it back to what it was originally. I am trying not to be too hesitant to go farther with different pieces and try new things, even if it means I screw it all up and don’t like the outcome.
It is a fascinating process, as each painting is an exploration of a different idea, emotion, feeling and vision. Because I am still experimenting with various techniques for execution, I dive into the deep end of each piece, so to speak, not quite sure how I am going to go about expressing what I want to express. Sometimes even unsure of what exactly a new piece will end up being about. It is like each painting is a gift, waiting for me to open it up to see what it is. My only job is to follow where it takes me, unafraid and willing to go farther than I think I can.
"Art is like beginning a sentence before you know its ending." – Art & Fear
Happy Sandals
We all need a pair of happy sandals for our journey.
Friendship
Orchids in a garden near Poipu Beach on the South Shore. Taken in Kaua’i June 4, 2005.
I continued to feel pretty zoned out for most of yesterday, and took my time cleaning the house top to bottom with a couple of breaks for phone calls with girlfriends here and there. Friendship is a topic I ponder quite a bit, as I have always taken friendships very seriously throughout my life since I grew up an only child and have such a tiny family. No cousins, aunts, or uncles. I have a sister who is half my age and lives in Oklahoma with my dad – we never grew up in the same house together so we don’t have that sibling experience. What we have is special in its own way, but not in the way sisters who share rooms, clothes and teenage traumas have.
I had a long discussion with my girlfriend Pixie about the sometimes elusive nature of friendships, and how they can become more complicated and fragile as we manuever our way through adulthood. Any significant shift – a move, a divorce, a marriage, a new baby – can alter the course of what had once been a solid connection. I have experienced this from both sides. I have initiated "break-ups" with friends, and I have felt ignored and brushed aside. Neither situation is pleasant, but what I have come to realize is that friendships are cyclical by nature, and the best thing I can do in any situation is let go of wanting any specific outcome and just see where the relationship goes. And it is always interesting to see how different circumstances affect friendships.
I have been feeling worried about what will happen between myself and my dear friends in Solvang when I move to LA permanently (which will most likely happen by the end of the summer.) For a while I have been putting pressure on myself to do whatever I can to keep the friendships strong, and feeling like I was the sole bearer of responsibility for visits, staying in touch, etc. Then I exhaled, and realized that the friendships are, in fact, going to change. This is inevitable. But it will be up to all of us to keep the connections strong, and I cannot enter into this new situation feeling anxious about it, or – I know myself – resentment will start to build quickly. I also don’t feel like I will necessarily serve anyone by being too honest about my feelings, because in another recent situation with a different friend, I tried to be up front about the changes I was going through in my life and I was basically ignored. I was talking about this situation with Pixie and she made the observation that not everyone likes such honesty – even if it is expressed with an open and loving intention, and intention to deepen the friendship – because perhaps they fear being held too accountable. I think this one friend in particular liked things the way they were before my circumstances changed. Perhaps she was not particularly interested in moving our friendship to a more meaningful place. Of course this hurt my feelings, but it is what it is, and I am thankful that we had what we had a year ago. But after the way things went between us over the past nine months or so, I no longer feel safe with her. I know rationally this makes little sense, because she would never have any intention to hurt me, but I really exposed myself to her, and tried to open a door to a new space for us, and all I got in return was a lot of excuses.
In The Four Agreements, one of the agreements is "Don’t take anything personally." Pixie and I agreed that this was true most of the time. But, as with this friend, if I find myself having to repeat it twenty times a day, then maybe it is time I do take it personally, and remove myself from that situation rather than continue to try to morph myself into being the kind of friend I don’t want to be for the sake of another individual’s agenda. Pixie emailed me and said, "Trust can squeeze a bit more tolerance out so you can really make up your mind whether friend is good." I know I gave all the effort I could to give this friend the benefit of the doubt and not take things personally, but in the end I just wound up feeling very hurt and taken for granted. It is therefore time to just let go and move on, and trust that perhaps some time is needed before we are able to go to a new place as friends. Letting go – with love - while sometimes difficult, can be a wonderful gift. Not only because we release whatever tension we have been carrying, but also because we can focus on all the goodness we shared with this person, and all the reasons why we loved them in the first place.
I do not know what path the rest of my friendships will go down as we all continue living our lives and making our way, but I am very thankful I have what I have with them at this moment. For every friendship, argument, falling out, phone call, girl’s night out, shared heartbreak and creative companionship, I feel tremendously blessed. Every experience has its own unique beauty and light.
Back on the Mainland
The very last photo I took in Hawaii – a lotus flower at night. It opened up after the sunset. Taken in Kaua’i June 4, 2005.
I am still in a bit of jet lag haze this evening after my return to LA on a redeye last night. We arrived back in LA about 6:00am and the entire day has been a little foggy. But in a good way.
My activities on the beautiful island of Kaua’i were few and simple: relax on the beach, read, paint, write, read, snorkel, walk, wander, meander and swim in the ocean. On our last day we snorkeled at Ke’e Beach with about a dozen giant turtles. The are quite large, extremely graceful and almost mystical. I am normally not quite at ease in the water, but with so many of them all around me, I actually felt safer.
We stayed on the North Shore of the island all week, but our very last day we were on the South Shore for the day since our flight home didn’t depart until after 9:30pm. The North Shore in the summer is quite calm and the South Shore is where all the surfers go. The environment at the beach on the South Shore was so different than what we had been experiencing all week, and it was great fun. There were surfers, boogie boarders, body surfers – all ages but mostly teenagers – and everyone was just out enjoying the water. It was an entirely different energy from the surf spots of Southern California, where I sometimes feel like I’m just in everyone’s way and anyone in the water is in competition with each other to catch the best waves. At Poipu Beach there were plenty of waves for everyone, and I did not see one shred of evidence of anyone getting annoyed, impatient or feeling like they were "too cool for school". It was nothing but pure fun. I loved that we had the relaxing calm of the North Shore for the majority of our vacation, and then got to experience the wilder side of the island on our final day.
My house has become a complete mess in the 15 or so hours since we got back home, in no small part because I got inspired to start re-organizing my studio/office to better reflect my creative priorities. Why I felt the need to begin this today I have no idea, but I suppose now was as good a time as any. It always feels good to shed, toss, clear out and make room for what really matters. Tomorrow I will continue this project, clean the rest of my house, go grocery shopping, take out the trash & recycling, do laundry (which I love) and perhaps even go to a nursery for some geraniums for the patio outside my studio.
"All the pathos and irony of leaving one’s youth behind is thus implicit in every joyous moment of travel: one knows that the first joy can never be recovered, and the wise traveller learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time." -Paul Fussell
