Yesterday at Miramar when high tide prevented pre-Wine Bistro walk.

This is an historic day. Not because of the Chicago riots or the economic train wreck in Europe. I am speaking, of course, of my own cleaning of my apartment. Realize I don’t spend that much time here, though in the last two months more than the twelve months prior. I’m either at my parents’ house or J’s, or a friend’s house in another city. I usually get someone in every four months and had someone in when I showed the vacant second bedroom to roommate prospects. But there is no denying that when left to my own devices I do manifest the shiksa slob tendencies of my mother in her youth. It’s not horrible but not something which would pass muster either with my father or J, who as dissimilar as they are in many respects, are both Jew with OCD about various things including neatness and cleanliness.

Readers of Victorian Chick and Facebook will know that Dad heroically rescued me from the strange (to me) fate of a roommate. I have lived alone my entire adult life except for one semester at Yale.  Of course, it is much easier to keep a house or apartment clean when you never eat or sleep there. It only took about an hour and as I posted on Facebook, much to the amusement of my friends, I didn’t get hysterical and start sweeping or mopping floors: no sense in going overboard with this cleaning fetish. But I am happy I saved 60 bucks or so and I didn’t have much to do carless waiting for Saab to report back on the a/c. (Still no word, which can’t be good so I thought I would blog.)

Pico Iyer was extraordinary. He began with a funny joke about all the “disappointed souls” in the audience who must have planned to see John Cusack at UCSB before a last minute cancellation. (I was such a soul, but far from a disappointed one.) As I wrote this week, I heard him in 1993 at a Master’s Tea at Yale in Davenport College, which turns out to have been his only time at Yale though he lived in Manhattan during his Time magazine days.

I was in Berkeley College (BK) and had I been assigned to Davenport College (DC), my social life would have been very different. The singles in BK are not habitable even post-renovation which made everything much nicer of course but did not alter room size.  And I had taken off three semesters off after my first term, so I was out of the roommate lottery. I loved having that gorgeous 10th floor studio apartment in the Taft with a tiny view of Long Island Sound from my large kitchen (strangely large kitchen for a studio which of course was of no consequence to me as I didn’t cook much, but more then than at any time post-college), but it did isolate me somewhat.

Iyer is the only person I have ever heard who speaks more quickly than I do with more attenuated (but far more crafted and elegant) syntax. I absolutely adore him, though I have no desire ever to visit a Third World country, with the possible exception of beach resorts in Central America where you get the beauty of the Caribbean at a fraction of the cost. (I know, I know, you’re not supposed to say that; it’s “developing countries.” But does it really matter to a dirt poor country if you bullshit them into thinking they are ever going to be anything other than a dirt poor country in the Third World?)

J lived and volunteered in Costa Rica during a high school summer with a lovely family he still keeps in touch with via Facebook. My very good friend’s son is finishing up a 2 -year gig (post-law school) in Moldova for the Peace Corps. I am with J: if you are going to visit or live in a Third World country, it should at least be warm and have decent produce and a beach. That would definitely rule out Africa and with the exception of South Africa, I have no notion of why anyone would go there. My friend from 7th grade at Westlake to the middle of med school at Harvard and my Masters program at UCSB traveled a lot. Her parents, a wealthy gastroenterologist and late-in-life boutique immigration attorney in Beverly Hills, went on one of those 5 star safaris. Unless Robert Redford were part of the package (shampooing of hair optional), I’m not interested. (Klaus Maria Brandaer would do.) Similarly, the idea of going to an Islamic country intrigues me about as much as cleaning a toilet.

As for the First World, I’m very bourgeois and lacking in the spirit of adventure. I’m not really interested in traveling to Asia (maybe Japan if I could fly business but flying steerage, as my father calls coach or economy class, for 20 hours, no matter how much Ativan I popped, also does not appeal to me). I don’t want to go to Russia or Eastern Europe either.  I don’t have a burning desire to go anywhere in the Middle East, with the possible exception of Tel Aviv (and again, only business or first; I won’t do steerage to Israel).

I have never been to the European continent (just England twice and Ireland once) and of course this is something I intend to do sometime in my 40s or 50s, but it is not financially in the cards for me to travel to more than one place, perhaps, in 2013. I could go but it would mean not traveling to New York every two months and even with cheap Orbitz tickets and no rent, my New York sojourns rule out transatlantic travel.

In 2013, I want to go both to London and to the Lake District, ambling across the countryside where Wordsworth and Coleridge developed and articulated their vision of Romantic poetics. I’d love to see the Moors which gave rise to the Bronte sisters’ dark, imaginative masterpieces, along with the bleak, beautiful landscape which informed Hardy’s consciousness and resulted in his tragic vision, from Tess of the D’Urbervilles (my first Hardy novel) to the almost unreadable Jude.  Hardy is also a great poet though fewer know him for his poetry. I want to return to Ireland and visit Edinburgh for the first time.

Eliot often said that the best Brits were Scots, more so of course after she met her beloved friend and publisher, John Blackwood, along with Johnnie Cross, her dear friend and later husband of less than two years prior to her death in 1880.  My landlord is of course the exception which proves the rule, as he is quite ghastly and never tires of reminding me of his Scottish heritage and his poor coal miner father. I’m not convinced this gets him out of providing me with heat and a garage space as promised in the lease for years on end, however sorry I am that his father was so poor.

I’m an Anglophile, what can I say? But someday, I very much want to visit Spain, Italy, Greece, Germany, and France.  However, my utter lack of interest in “challenging” travel–Yemen or Oman, for instance–interferes not at all to my appreciation of Iyer’s profound vision of what travel does for the self and the soul alike. Iyer embodies kindness and joy in a way which even his elegant and sophisticated written language cannot fully convey.

Physically and emotionally, he seems relatively unchanged in twenty years. The core message of his new book–The Man Within My Mind–is that travel’s deepest meaning involves an inner journey sparked by the outer one. Iyer anchors these reflections in an exploration of Graham Greene’s fiction, which I’ve not read. I’m far less good on 20th-century fiction than the poetry and prose (both fiction and nonfiction) of the 18th and 19th centuries. (And you wonder why I’m not fabulously rich with this oh so useful store of knowledge cultivated over many years?)

His story of the kind elderly man in Yemen who risked his life to get him to the north from the south when his flight was delayed by four days (which could have been four months, apparently) was but one of his moving tales about the kindness of strangers. Sometimes the help came with a price or at least, an agenda, as with the Bolivian nurse who wanted help with a green card, or the man in another distant land who wanted his passport so he could see the world, reasoning that it would not be hard for Iyer, an American at the time, to procure another.

I was moved, however, by his comments about Yemen which of course we in America, post-9/11, understandably consider the incarnation of evil. Iyer claims that in a population of 24 million people, 700 Al Queda are hiding in Yemen, with an addition 10,000 assisting them. And I am sure you have to visit some of these places to realize emotionally what you know intellectually: not all Muslims are out to destroy the West. Of course, there are the Jihadists and they are evil.

But in so many of these countries, there are the powerless poor who worry about the same things Americans do: how to feed, clothe, shelter, educate, nurture their children. While I will take Iyer’s word for it, in part because I think the point of a vacation is to be happy, not depressed about the totally fucked up state of the world, I do see the value in his message about the humanizing influence of travel to “unpleasant places.” I just don’t do unpleasant here in America, much less abroad. I have neither the need nor the ability to drop a few grand on a vacation to be reminded that the world is full of pain and poverty about which I can do nothing.

I can’t wait to read Iyer’s book, along with some of the fiction he discusses therein. Iyer has a fabulous sense of humor, a kind and wry wit and understated but powerful presence and I could not have been more thrilled to speak with him afterwards for about five minutes, while he signed my book and I told him about seeing him twenty years ago with my mother in New Haven. Iyer was very funny in talking about English graduate school and before that the choice of English as a major, as a means of delaying entry into the real world. What I wouldn’t give to spend an evening hearing him talk about British poetry and fiction! He asked if I had majored in English at Yale or merely switched to English for grad school and I told him that I had. He sighed as if in recognition that the early 1990s were the tail end of one of Yale English’s golden ages. I was blessed.

Last night’s dinner at Wine Bistro, my first time there since the Montecito institution, Piatti, closed its doors early this year, was tremendous. It’s not cheap with entrees in the mid-20s and low-30s and appetizers in the mid-teens. But the flatbreads and some pastas and “favorites” are in the mid-to-high teens. You can fine a few wines for just 7 or 8, but more are in the 10 to 12 range by the glass, which is perfectly normal in Santa Barbara. The bread, both a sourdough and a multigrain in small slices, is outstanding with the sweet, fluffy butter. I adore the renovation of the internal patio and the food is vastly better than Piatti ever was, in my view the least good fine dining Italian in Santa Barbara or Montecito, though hands down the prettiest. J did not take pictures of the restaurant itself, so when I get back from the city, I will go in and take a bunch.

I had an excellent gazpacho and summer succotash side (all sides are 8 and that’s the way to go if you’re watching the bill). J had a wedge salad as good as any I have seen, with tomato, bacon and blue cheese dressing, along with a great minestrone with chive oil. I loved it. The chicken pot pie, which two men at the table next to us ordered, was beautiful and fragrant. All the fish and the meat looked and smelled beautiful and I am very much looking forward to returning to the bar and ordering the Santa Barbara Winery Sauvignon, munching on bread and soup and healthy sides. (I have pictures of all of this which WordPress will not, maddeningly, allow me to upload at the moment.)

My apartment is clean but my car is frightening, so I will cut this short and call Saab for the bad news about my a/c. I don’t have a good feeling about this! I still have to pay for my Luigi summer intensive jazz dance workshop and get to the pool before 4, though I still have one non-primetime pass left for the year. (They only give you two and I refuse to pay 20 dollars for a swim when I’m already overpaying, even with the discounted membership!)

I’ll blog tomorrow on the plane! Happy Friday!

This week on J's upper balcony.

Just about any beautiful woman could become a professional beauty–not through success at court, but in the emerging celebrity culture associated with illustrated  periodicals and mass-circulated photographs. The professional beauty needed not be rich, highly born, nor well educated–provided she had sense enough to escape from committing any glaring missteps–all that was required of her was that her face should be approved by society as a great beauty and her future was assured.

–Evangeline Holland, founder of                                              Edwardian Promenade blog (March 17, 2008)

Earlier today,  Greg Hilton posted a picture of Pippa Middleton committing an unpardonable fashion sin, unless she was attired for a 1980s-themed party. Donning what look like hot pink leg warmers, cheap plastic neon pink glasses and a tight black dress, I instantly thought back to my 6th grade graduation parties for St. Augustine-by-the-Sea school, the small, hippie, artsy liberal arts industry school I attended only because I went to pre-school at Kinderdance (owned by Buddy Ebsen and his sister) in Pacific Palisades with a girl named Ari.

Ari’s dad was on the Board of Directors at St. Augustine (now Crossroads Elementary) and simply told the board and/or Paul Cummings, the principal whom Mom informed me started over and founded another little liberal and liberal arts school in Santa Monica after leaving Crossroads, that “Maria” his little girl’s best friend and that she therefore must go to the same school as Ari (where her big sister also went).

The Venas lived on Rivas Canyon, just a minute away, and while I had nearly perfect grammar and spelling by second grade, I persisted well into first grade saying, “Me and Ari want to go to the park” or “Me and Ari are going to climb the tree in front.”  My mother never corrected me as she thought it just darling as well as uncharacteristic of my overall speech patterns.

Having watched from the wings as my dear Jersey friend, a sister to me really, went through the incomprehensible-cum-outlandish process of applying to private Jersey kindergartens, the story amuses me all the more. Paul didn’t even meet my father as I recall. I don’t know who took me for the interview–whose sole purpose was to determine I was neither moronic nor psychotic–and in a few short minutes I seemed to convince him or Mimi Baer (vice-principal and mother of very successful TV writer and producer of Law and Order, Neal Baer) that I was neither. No test, no writing sample, no practice day, no long dissertations about my parents’ hopes, dreams, interests, or fears! Just okay, she’s cute and smart and polite and comes well-recommended so as long as the check doesn’t bounce we’re cool!

St. Augustine (a secular private) formed me as much Westlake did (Harvard-Westlake now). Not because of the famous parents or the classmates famous in later life like Gwyneth Paltrow or Maya Rudolph, both class of 1984 with me, nor the very successful TV writers like Shana Goldberg-Meehan (my best friend for most of elementary school and classmate through 12th grade at Westlake though we were not close from about 10th grade on), who wrote for sitcoms like Mad About You, Friends and Joey, before executive-producing and creating her own CBS sitcom which I never saw. Chris(sy) Levinson went on to write Charmed and go on to Law and Order, where Nick(y) Wootton also ended up after years with Bochco (his mentor) on NYPD Blue and then their own one-season show on ABC in 2005, Blind Justice.

Shana, however, had a very deep influence on  my life because Gary (Lou Grant, Family Ties, Spin City) and his wife Diana (founder of the Archer School for Girls in Brentwood, the only secular private girls’ school left in LA other than Marlborough which is simply not an option for Westsiders due its distant and also cumbersome location in Hancock Park) invited me to England in 1984.

I have yet to visit Continental Europe, but Gary and Diana invited me to London in the summer of 1984, during the filming of Family Ties in London. We stayed, though it meant nothing to me then, beyond a beautiful place, in a suite in the Grosvenor House. The cast stayed at the Dorcester, but Gary, Diana, Shana, Betsy (au pair) and I were at the Grosvenor house for some two weeks. Shana had a baby sister (between one or two I would guess) and Betsy came along as much to look after the baby as to supervise these two sixth grade graduates headed for Westlake and feeling like very big girls indeed!

A list of the school’s roster at the time was like a Who’s Who in Hollywood, though it was more TV than film, though plenty of the parents acted and directed in film, such as Blythe Danner and Peter Hyams. In our class alone, we had writers of I Love Lucy, All in the Family, Maude, Columbo, Lou Grant, Family Ties, and Murder She Wrote. Steven Bochco, Hollywood television royalty like David Kelley (who wasn’t yet big), had a girl named Melissa a few years ahead of me and a son named Jesse, a few years behind me. Jesse went on, at an extraordinarily young age, to direct episodes of NYPD Blue, which I would have loved even if Hill Street Blues hadn’t been what George Eliot would have called “an epoch in my life.” No show of the 1990s moved me like NYPD Blue and I always thought Bochco was a flat out genius.

Of course being around all that talent was amazing. The kids were all so bright and artistic themselves and our teachers–music, drama, dance–were all accomplished in their own right, though not famous or financially successful. The emphasis was on reading and writing. Who cared about math and science? Other people could go to med school and God forbid business school, which would have been considered just oh so gauche, or at the very least, uncreative. Life was about art and beauty in every sense. Law was fine because at least it was verbal and if you had to do something like that, law was not so bad.

It is telling that not a single person that I know of in our class–many of whose students went to Ivies or Stanford or Berkeley–went on to med school. They weren’t breeding scientists or doctors at that school! Math? Eeeww. It says something that I was the best girl in the class in math and that they hired me a specialist as I was about two years ahead and by 5th or 6th grade had finished all the books. I’m not totally hopeless at math but I only got an A in dummy math in high school (non-honors, non-AP) and I’m terrible at math compared to anyone who takes BC Calculus senior year. I got a 78/C+ on my first 7 Honors math test at Westlake and was horrified, first because we had no grades at St. Augustine (just evaluations with check marks), and second because it was a C!

It was then I realized, being the smartest girl in the class in math at St. Augustine was a thoroughly meaningless distinction! (I was, honestly, considered the smartest girl in the class overall and generally did my own thing, writing current events reports three times the normal length with articles twice as long.) In college, most of us majored in history or English, though some majored in government (at Harvard, the name for political science) and people either went into the industry or law. One became a novelist of some note, Alexander Maksik.

But the school instilled a passion for beauty in me which has been the single guiding force of my life, both intellectually and personally. Before I even knew what philosophical aesthetics was in any substantive sense, my freshman year at Yale, questions of beauty–its origins as well as its implications–dominated my readings of literary texts. I didn’t care a bit about the political or economic forces embedded in the sonnet form. Intuitively, I was a Yale School of Criticism, New Critic kinda girl.

Of course, growing up in the heart of the entertainment industry (most Hollywood people don’t live in Hollywood of course; they live in Santa Monica, Pacific Palisades, Malibu, Brentwood, Westwood or Bel Air, perhaps), I developed a highly acute sense of physical beauty and its significance in life. Almost all mothers in the school were very thin and in good shape. There might be the stray heavy mom, but it was very rare. It was, even among the non-industry moms, the beautiful people and there is no denying that growing up in image-conscious LA attunes you to the power of physical appearance. Of course, we had character actresses as parents too, like Bochco’s wife, Barbara Bosson.

Bosson was never beautiful but she had gravitas and power as an actress and I adored her on Bochco’s 2-season drama Murder One in 2000. Daniel Benzali and Stanley Tucci , along with younger talents like Mary McCormack, rounded out the cast of that groundbreaking drama, whose entire season was organized around a single murder trial. No legal or cop drama had ever done this and apparently LA Times writer Mary Macnamara was right in saying that as much as the public claims to want novelty, they generally reject it.

The term “beautiful” on Hill Street would have been reserved for Veronica Hamel, the actress who played the girlfriend of Captain Frank Furillo (Daniel Travanti), the long-suffering, sober ex-husband of Bosson’s unglued and usually hysterical ex-wife. (I must say how shocking it was when Steven and Barbara–who lived in Brentwood near the Goldbergs and the Sikkings before Gary and Diana moved to Oakmont Drive, by OJ’s Rockingham estate but further up in a gated community in a gorgeous home bordered by Germaine Jackson and James Garner–split after some three decades of marriage. One never heard a bit of gossip and they seemed truly like the most stable couple in Hollywood.)

Of course, the homes and neighborhoods these industry people lived were dreamlike in their quiet, rustic and expansive feel. My parents, as I have written, bought a tract house in the Palisades in 1974 for 125K dollars. It was and remains a very basic house as they were civil servants, albeit at a very high level, U.S. Attorney and 9th Circuit Federal bankruptcy judge. Obviously government lawyers and TV royalty didn’t inhabit the same sort of dwellings! But all of these areas are so physically beautiful and if you want physical beauty–meaning greenery–in West Los Angeles, you will essentially pay large sums of money for expensive pieces of dirt. If you have a gorgeous house of four or five thousand square feet (a mansion by WLA standards), you are going to pay many millions for homes which would be no more than 500K in many parts of America, namely places not on the coasts.

There is, however, no question that my attachment to natural beauty and landscape derives from the good fortune of this “grandfathering” into the school I would not ever have been admitted had it not been for Ari’s father. St. Augustine had a sibling policy, whereby every sibling of a kid who got in was automatically admitted unless there was something severely wrong with him or her. Each grade had 25 kids so if you knocked out a third for siblings, another odd percentage for connections and industry kids, there weren’t a whole lot of spaces for the daughters of prosecutors and judges. It’s pretty much impossible to get in these days, though the school has expanded by I think double.

I will blog tomorrow about the “professional beauty” in Edwardian England as discussed by Evangeline Holland. But reflecting as I am wont to do on the miraculous good fortune of being born in the Palisades and attending this little pre-school called Kinderdance (at which we did pretty much nothing but finger-paint, read stories and do ballet) and of there meeting this little girl whose father would get me into a school so special I still marvel at the influence it had on my life, I am reminded of one of the best scenes in Mike Nichols’ Postcards from the Edge. Meryl Streep thinks she is late for “looping” and arrives flustered, only to find that she is early. Gene Hackman awaits her and they talk about how sobriety is going for her. He says her problem (among others) is that she want life to be like the movies. She concedes the point, “I don’t want life to imitate art: I want life to be art.”

Most of us at St. Augustine were raised to want life to be art as well. Technology, math, science, medicine: yuck. Even the doctor parents in our class or surrounding classes didn’t give birth to children who went on to follow in their footsteps, as if to say, we worked very hard in this difficult field so that you don’t have to. And technology was like the essence of anti-creativity. We didn’t have bankers, though of course there are people who worked in the stock market in LA. I just don’t think the people at the school wanted to have people working in such a worldly and mundane profession, no matter how wealthy. Businesspeople were boring: that’s what we were raised to believe.  This clearly is very different from the elite secular private elementary schools in Manhattan chock full of the kids of financiers.

All of us were instilled with the idea that the deepest meaning in life always derived from art.  Perhaps ultimately one learned to practice law to further one’s artistic passions, if only as an appreciator of art, later in life. Joe Morgenstern, the film critic for the Wall Street Journal was a St. Augustine dad, as was Gil Bellows, a big guy at the LA Times. Criticism was respected as well.

But at the end of the day, art is what mattered, whether it was dance, drama, literature, music , painting, fashion, or sculpture. I felt that way then and I still feel that way now. And I am fortunate to be able to live my life without the pursuit of rent and food, which of course encroaches upon the very spirit of art, which is “play,” and for Kant, the harmony of the faculties and imaginative freedom. Financial insecurity and terror are the enemies or art and the freedom which underlies it.

Newish Integrity pilates studio at SBAC: pretty impressive for little sleepy SB!

Sitting in apartment, waiting for gardening to pass before undertaking higher-minded activities. Well, one isn’t really a noble pursuit: moving the shit I moved into my room when I was going to “take on a boarder” as Dad put it before Asshole put an end to that. It ended up being for the best. First of all, who wants a roommate? Second of all, I am now spending more time in my own apartment writing and reading and now more than ever, I don’t want one, never having had a roommate in my life since 1990, fall term at Yale. The six boxes I moved out of the large closet for the first prospect–very attractive, thin, Asian OCD case–were all closed and thus not creating a visual disturbance.

But now, I have gone through some of them to find things and it’s messy in my beautiful little room. Also I have a 17-inch box TV, about a dozen years old and a little wooden stand I should throw out (hard to explain, nothing anyone would want and just the thing on which my ex-best friend who stored her stuff for years in that room placed various cabinets).

Also, I’ve been here more and it would be nice to do a little cleaning. Well, not nice of course. It would be nice to enjoy the fruits of having cleaned. My father is Jewish and secular and his secular Jewish mother regarded a clean garage floor as the closest a person got to God. Even at the industrial property she owned, she’d go up the ladders to clean the rain gutters because anyone she hired after her beloved Ashton and Evelyn either died or retired (they were black, which is very strange in LA but more common back then, because you rarely see cleaning people who are black, though he was a great handy man too), she never found a suitable replacement. Keep in mind, these are giant buildings on large plots of land. Grandma said every housekeeper or maintenance person was a schtunk.

This 5 foot tall terror would go through the toilets and clean them all herself. It was not even a matter of being cheap. Grandma was a great businesswoman with an 8th grade education and a childhood of poverty which truly mangled her for life and resulted in unspeakable suffering both for my father and subsequent generations of Ordins. Of course, the money she made and invested is a great blessing and the reason I don’t have to work, as long as I am extremely careful with money. It’s not enough to live on and my parents supplement it of course.

It would be nice to make enough just to lighten their load (that is, be able to live on the monthly take from inheritance plus my own labors), but Grandma’s hard work and acute business sense–plus my mother’s and father’s outrageously hard work all their lives combined with frugality minus the 54 foot ketch–is the reason I can live the life of Victorian Chick and I never ever forget that,  though it doesn’t mitigate the astonishing mental trauma that one little tiny woman inflicted on our family dynamic and my father’s psyche above all.

Grandma lived from 1970 to the mid-1980s in West Hollywood on Holloway Drive when my parents moved into her adorable (now worth a ton) house on Doheny Drive, north of Sunset up from Hamburger Hamlet.  Holloway is just off the Sunset Strip, down from what used to be Book Soup and Tower Records (RIP, Tower Records). They moved out of that house when I was two and ended up paying her back in a short period of time.  Her apartment building is unchanged and I passed it the day Mom retired, taking a slew of pictures of Hollywood and West Hollywood during a bout of extreme nostalgia. I will post those another day: 8558 Holloway Drive is the building arranged in classic California style around a pool in the middle of the ground floor. It was a one-bedroom but large and all the furniture she crammed into that place filled a 2 bedroom, 2 bath house with enormous living room on the corner of Carmelina and San Vicente in Brentwood.

Dad made her move because before West Hollywood became uber-trendy, expensive and gay, it wasn’t that safe. There’s another argument in favor of gays: they’re non-violent and they don’t create welfare problems, i.e. welfare queens as they don’t breed naturally and when they have kids, they tend to have money and go through all manner of shit to get a baby through in vitro and other expensive biomedical mishigas. Dad bought Grandma a .38 Smith and Wesson (I think) which my sister and her husband on occasion take to a shooting range. She never had to use it but the last time there was a robbery nearby, he finally said she had to move and she bought that charming little house (no bigger than 1700 square feet, if that) in Brentwood. It is amazing my father prevailed on her: Grandma gave orders, she didn’t take them.

Of course, anyone who knows WLA real estate knows that every time an old person or couple dies, someone moves in and builds a behemoth (hopefully not a gold palace of the sort you see in the Valley, particularly Tarzana which, sorry, is just an awful place) which is at least two times too big for the lot. Grandma’s Carmelina house was no exception, but happily this was not–I do not mean this to be racist but I just do not like the Middle Eastern sort of architecture that mars the beauty of WLA–a garish structure with lion statues in front. How anyone can find this attractive is completely beyond my powers of comprehension.

That’s what happened to my father’s first wife’s modest and decrepit house on Bowling Green north of Sunset between Kenter and Bundy upon her death in 1999, where she and my father moved the second they could afford to get the hell out of Pasadena which my father still resents for what he regards as the miserable years he spent there for all kinds of reasons.  Oy vey! I would be so beyond pissed if I owned a 2 million dollar house across the street and had to look at that gaudy, tasteless, oversized piece of shit on a daily basis. One advantage to being unable to afford a house and renting until late middle age: if someone builds an eyesore across the street and it matters to you enough, you just give 30 days notice and move to a place whose view does not induce migraines or nausea.

But the house on the Western corner of San Vicente and Carmelina is lovely. It’s brick and some variant of Tudor and I like it a lot. It just doesn’t fit on the lot and there are no setbacks to speak of. Grandma’s garage at that house had white curtains with blue flowers over the washer/dryer and the floor literally was scrubbed weekly, with toothbrushes to get out the intractable stains or grease spots. My grandmother loved to clean.

Needless to say, my mother is not like this (not that she cleans anyway as we have always had help as long as I was alive). But even in her youth, when my father met her for the first time at her apartment and she told him to get a beer or something from the fridge, he took one look at that thing and said, “This ain’t the broad for me!” After his initial shock and horror, his immediate thought was that his mother would disown him if she got one look at this fridge.  I only learned this story recently, in the last few years anyway, because he said I almost had a different father. Now, Mom’s position is that she was 25 then and working her way through UCLA Law (true of course) and that I am 40 and have nothing of major consequence or pressure to do in life and thus that the condition of my Saab is unjustifiable.

Mom is neat now but not as absolutely compulsive as my father. Oddly his office at home is very cluttered and it is shocking to me that he can stand all those file cabinets, binders, books and computer-related objects. He seems not to mind it and it is only a function of age, I think, that he doesn’t. On the other hand, he has only gotten worse as far as picking up every stray object in every room in the house and launching into the following speech: “What’s this? How long has it been there? Why is it here? How long is it going to stay here? Where did it come from?” We tease him about this but the teasing doesn’t make it any less true or real.

Thus, the prospect of spending an hour going through the kitchen (no dishwasher here) and straightening up the bedroom and moving the six boxes and TV does not pull me with the kind of magnetic and irresistible force such clutter would have activated in my grandmother. She died in 1993 when I was at Yale and there was no funeral as she had no friends. Partly this was because everyone had died and partly it was because my grandmother had much in common with Ellis Grey, Meredith’s extremely damaged mother on Grey’s Anatomy, played by the luminous and elegant Kate Burton. (She also played Chief Reilly’s neighbor and girlfriend at the end of Season 2 and beginning of Season 3 in Rescue Me.).

One of my all-time favorite scenes in GA is when Ellis has a moment of clarity during her Alzheimer’s and wants to refuse the heart surgery. Meredith has power of attorney and in a brief scene you can easily pull up on YouTube but I can’t link to at the moment, she rehearses the litany of hardships her mother has inflicted upon her throughout her life and most especially now: “But I do it [all] because there’s no one else, because you have alienated everyone in your life and I’m the only one left.”

When Ellis persists and asks to be allowed to die (which she will without question absent surgery), Meredith holds firm. With a quiet strength in her voice even as her eyes fill with tears, she says, “And killing my mother is not going to be another thing that happens to me.” Fans of the show know that Ellis ends up dying but she does get the surgery. Powerful stuff and one of the reasons I feel so strongly that people who dismiss this drama (at least the first five seasons) as a “soap opera” are not just wrong but truly lacking in perception, insight and taste as TV critics. (I wonder what John Podhoretz in his role as film critic for The Weekly Standard, not editor of Commentary, thinks of the show, because I have concluded in the short time I have been reading his movie reviews that I see eye to eye with him on practically nothing, though his recently articulated general criteria for good film I pretty much agree with. I also find his tone abrasive and unnecessarily unkind.)

My grandmother’s story of poverty –which goes a long way to explaining my attitudes toward money and my complete agreement with George Bernard Shaw (my father’s favorite playwright after Shakespeare) that poverty is indeed “a cancer”–ultimately hinges upon the education for which she longed and was denied.  No one in my family doubts that my grandmother had a genius IQ. That she was absolutely crazy is also beyond dispute, though I think she had to have been bipolar and my father won’t go there. But she was absolutely batshit and damaged and full of rage and terror. Her greatest sorrow was not going to high school and I don’t precisely remember why she couldn’t have gone to public school after 8th grade but she didn’t. The youngest of ten in a Jewish tenement (her nine siblings were born in Hell’s Kitchen but she was actually born in Philadelphia before the family came to Los Angeles), Grandma was dirt poor.

And Grandma’s poverty undoubtedly exacerbated whatever tendencies she had toward mental illness. She was brilliant and sensitive and powerful and her poverty for the first two or so decades of life haunted her, even when she became middle class, then upper middle class, and then well-to-do. Poverty scarred her for life and everything awful in my father’s life emotionally traces back to her. His father was no prize but he was a good guy on many levels. Certainly, my father’s father browbeat him about making a living but my father’s parents were enormously supportive of him after WWII. He lived in their gorgeous Silverlake home during USC Law, which he attended on the GI bill (tuition plus 100 dollars a month). When my father bought the 36 foot Angleman ketch in the mid-1960s, there was a financial glitch and she bought him top of the line sails which he could not afford.

Dad essentially gave his first wife the house on Bowling Green and started over with my mother at 41. Grandma was always generous with money if he needed it. That was rare but he knew he could always go to her. So Grandma could be loving, loyal and generous as well as very funny, but there were always strings attached. She was the master of using money as a weapon and instrument of control. Dad has to fight his innate urges to do the same.

Parents with  money are not the same as parents without money, because if you’re poor or don’t have any real money to speak of, why on earth would an adult child who is not getting any help during the parent’s lifetime and not going to inherit anything of significance, put up with his/her abuse or at least control and nosiness? I have met, through FB, people who are married to spouses who do care what their parents think and it is incomprehensible to me. Just tell them to fuck off would be my advice. I know one couple, in fact, from a hardcore Pentecostal background, now Lutheran. The husband who makes a boatload of money still (or did for years) defer to his parents on religious matters (going to church) because it would upset his middle class parents. Who gives a shit what your parents think if they have no money? This makes no logical sense to me.

Grandma was good to me through elementary school. I would sleep over in the years my father wasn’t speaking to her and we’d play Scrabble, make chocolate ice cream sundaes and tapioca pudding and she would curl my hair. Then I developed a will around 7th grade and perceived her as negative and later toxic.  While I dropped by the Brentwood house on the way home from high school to chit chat (she bought me my 1988 Tercel at 16, my first laser printer at Yale which lasted ten years and cost 1000 dollars in 1990), I didn’t really want to be close to her. I didn’t know until recently that she paid for Yale for a year and a half because she wanted to. I had thought she paid about a third, which would have been 10K. My parents paid for the last three semesters in full, while she took care of my first three semesters. (I graduated in three years not four.)

I had no idea she was pissed at me and cut me out of the will, dying before she could change it back and the percentage had been radically reduced when she reconciled with my father. But Dad went to my two half-siblings and asked them to allow him to cut me back in and they did. I called her from Yale but if she had told me she wanted 3 calls a week, I would have obliged. I wasn’t an idiot and knew the financial situation in broad outlines, though I really had zero sense about money, what things cost and all that, till I graduated from college. I was modest in spending but had a credit card and never saw the statement, which was sent directly to my parents who paid it in full every month.

But Grandma and I never fought. She was a huge bossy pants–a quaint way of putting her fiercely domineering and controlling temperament and behavior–with my half-siblings. She was constantly trying to tell them how to live their lives because of course she knew better and why wouldn’t they listen when she had all the answers and they were complete morons ruining their lives who, if they only listened to her, would be perfectly happy in every aspect of life?

The lesson of my grandmother (though my mother’s family was just as poor and never got past the middle class, her father dying of alcoholic dementia on Ward’s Island around 1966, six years before I was born and her mother marrying a financially stable but by no means well-off man in the early 1960s) was this: poverty destroys generations of lives. It is also true, however, some people do better with poverty than others. The (Mexican) Sheridan side of the family seemed to handle poverty and middle-class living a lot more successfully than the Ordin side.  There is no nobility in poverty. Poverty sucks. Living paycheck to paycheck and having financial struggle all one’s life is neither glorious nor wonderful.

Money doesn’t buy happiness in marriage or any other relationship in life, but money can absolutely ruin a marriage through the stress it imposes. Money is universally listed among the top three sources  of conflict in marriage, along with infidelity and disagreements about parenting. Infidelity can be overcome. Deep-seated resentments and all the other things poverty brings about, at least in the shitty marriages I’ve seen, is a much deeper issue. And the couple doesn’t even have to be poor or middle class: often there are such widely divergent priorities about the spending of money or use of resources, that even when there is technically enough money to live a decent life, this is not possible because of the level of discord about the allocation of household funds.

Even those dipshit motivational speakers talked about this last weekend at The Love Event (see Monday blog). When you are under financial stress, everything in life deteriorates. So I may seem hardcore on  money issues, refusing even to consider a child in my financial condition, but this is why. (I wouldn’t have a kid as I am currently situated even if I made the leap to accepting public school, which I get a lot of shit for feeling is not something I’d like to do if I ever had one child.) My mother’s issues have nothing directly to do with poverty or her childhood with money.

A vast majority of people select a spouse unconsciously as a result of their childhoods and relationships with their parents. They are either trying to get a do-over with the parent who troubled them the most or clinging to a false fantasy of what the better or worse parent was. I am a huge believer in the idea that when one parent is a nightmare, s/he is only 50% of the problem. An abuser or neglectful narcissist cannot function in a family without the enabling of the “good spouse.” It’s good cop /bad cop and I also believe that when a person hates one parents and likes or loves the other, s/he is in major denial about the role of the apparently “good parent.”

And because of the hatred for the bad parent, it is too frightening to admit to the anger at the good parent. After all, one might be abandoned or punished and lose the little love one gets , along with eradicating the ONLY good memories of a miserable childhood. And let’s face it, how many people think their parents did a great, emotionally healthy job of raising them? I know very few, regardless of date of birth.

I know many women and men who see one parent as the villain and while this is not untrue, the failure to hold the passive, enabling parent responsible is the single biggest determining force in a failed romantic life as an adult, whether it’s multiple divorces or just quiet misery with a spouse to whom the adult child remains married. It’s no news: children of drunks pick drunks for spouses. Or dry drunks. This can all be avoided but too few people do work on themselves prior to their first marriage. Very few people enter their first marriages intentionally or with a full intentionality. It is almost always a reaction rather than an action.

Even bright, mature men who have undergone significant analysis often pick a dipshit narcissist the second time around. Women who bounce from husband to husband have the self-awareness of a gnat or they would wait till a healthy choice materialized. I have seen this too many times to count. So while I see money issues at the very core of my father’s issues and his mother’s insanity, they are subtler in the case of my mother. But certainly, her childhood experiences (moving some ten times before high school graduation) shaped all kinds of decisions she made in life, not all of which were beneficial either to her or to me. So yeah, I think money matters. A lot. More than one can possibly articulate but I have here given it a shot.

As you can all see, I would rather write than clean (actually, I’d rather write than do pretty much anything in life) and now must motivate at least to move those boxes into the second bedroom closet before a doctor’s appointment at 4:30. Here are some pictures of the remodel at SBAC, plus one of me out of the pool in the new suit which literally feels like you’re wearing nothing and just swimming nude. Lovely sensation! I’m being very good and even in three weeks or so, when I fly back to the city, I’ll be leaner, thinner, and tighter. I don’t like excess flesh on my body, past that which is necessary to create an aura of femininity. No one wants to look like a 12-yr-old boy though the look works on some, like Ellen Pompeo. But she has tits. Sandra Oh is beautiful and she has no tits. Tits are good. I don’t have a use for anything beyond the most minimal curve in the hips and I prefer thinner to thicker legs. A slight roundness in the ass is nice but slight. Christina Hendricks of Mad Men does not at all appeal to me from the neck down as an aesthetic ideal. Her face is perfect.

New Peak/Small Group Training Boot Camp torture chamber. A converted court.

Notwithstanding a drop-dead gorgeous man named Jacob at the helm of this boot camp thing they’re so excited about at the club, I will never do it. Pilates is great (machine, not mat as I blogged last summer) but 80 a pop and I just don’t have the money for it. I mean I could spend that but then I couldn’t do other things. Also it’s an ugly room and I like to be surrounded by beauty as much as possible. The Integrity pilates studio is stunning!

Downstairs weight room at SBAC

They have changed the floor and now it’s like the spongy ground at the playground designed to prevent accidents when little kids jump off the jungle gym, but it’s not actually spongy. The machines are relatively new and fine but it’s not what I would call a beautiful weight room by Equinox or SCLA standards.

Here is the outdoor locker room. As I wrote on the album for Victorian Chick Facebook fan page, the original architect had this brilliant idea of building two locker rooms for both genders: outside and inside. The theory, I gather, was to have a swimmer’s locker room before tile became standard as a locker room floor covering. I remember the carpeting out there, actually a few incarnations of the carpeting, before they finally put the tile in around 1999. It was a shock and I dislike change even now. Then? It rocked my world for weeks.

The gym is not big enough to have four locker rooms so instead of two great ones, one male and one female, there are two cramped ones for each. Moreover, the steam room in the outdoor locker rooms is a box. It should not even be called a room as not even one average-height woman can lie down flat. You have to put your feet on the wall or just sit upright. Stupid. Santa Barbara has a ridiculously small number of steam rooms. In 1996, there was only the SBAC one and the one at the Four Seasons for the spa, which you can’t “join” like you can a gym. Maddeningly, the sauna in the inside locker room–which I now think is okay but before regarded as a claustrophobic horror which I only used during a closure of the outside for renovation–is four times the size of these team room. Four women can lie flat in that room.

But the granite is nice and finally it looks like a locker room in a gym whose monthly membership rivals Sports Club and Equinox. I don’t know what initiation is these days but mine was knocked way down because I came from an IHRSA gym in New Haven and they cut me a break on that because I was a UCSB student, though this is not a formal policy by any means.

I have posted the pool area before and I am happy to report that the really disgraceful part of the overpriced club (with however very nice, affluent, middle-aged members–not the crowd at 24 Hour Fitness or Spectrum which is roughly equivalent to the crowd on State Street trying to get laid on a Saturday night before migrating to EOS, the place of last resort both because it’s open late and because the music is so loud that if you’re a complete moron devoid of personality, your prospective one-night-stand will never notice) was the cardio room.

There were giant TVs hanging down as in a hospital. The ceiling was too low–again, some bang-up job this Santa Barbara architect did some 30 or 40 years ago in designing this structure–and it was just unpleasant. Now, every machine from the treadmills to the ellipticals to the stationary bikes and stairclimbers, has its own little TV with iPad hook-up. Also, the carpet is no longer offensive and they went through some two or three changes before getting it remotely right. Some of the new machines, however, have a cumbersome and bewildering decimal system by which you change channels. This is annoying but not the end of the world.

But the pool saved my life. It truly did. I was the most physically fit depressive in history. I swam five to six days a week, walked on weekends, did my personal practice of yoga in my apartment. I drank water in abundance (too much, actually but that’s why I had perfect skin from the neck down till I was 37 and smoking regularly). I drank God knows how many dollars a week of fresh veggie juice from Lazy Acres. I didn’t eat out, didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, didn’t go out in the sun. I also didn’t have sex though I am not clear this provides health benefits.

It’s a lovely pool area and I am looking forward to being in the pool daily when in SB until I go back to New York in mid-May.

Happy Wednesday!