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California Cotswolds

Gone to California in my Mind

Posted on February 5, 2010

It may just be down to the fact that we are having the worst winter the UK has seen for thirty years, but I think it could be time to start making a plan to move back to Los Angeles. It’s an idea husband has been dropping into conversation on and off for at least six months now. I’ve been resistant, not least because I’m liking my job at the moment. But a few weeks ago, something shifted. I’ve noticed that I’ve started making mental lists of things I want to do before I leave. There’s the Trouble House and the Kilkenny, pubs I drive by most days but have never made the time to stop in to. And I need to eat at the Plough at Kingham so I can taste Alex James’ goat cheese. In London there’s the Soanes museum and that Eritrean restaurant on the Harrow Road I’ve been meaning to try. Will I make it to the longest running show in the world, The Mousetrap, before it closes? What about the Louisana museum in Copenhagen and the new Magritte one in Brussels, not to mention Stockholm and a return cycling trip to Alsace? All of a sudden it seems like there is so much to do, and that doesn’t even include finding a job in California or any of the two thousand other practicalities associated with hopping the Atlantic.

Worst of all I feel like some kind of fraud. I’ve spent close to two years blogging about the charms of rural Britain and yet, faced with a little snow, I’m ready to turncoat on the market square wine bar and settle into a booth at Gilbert’s on Pico with a carafe of margaritas. Despite the fact that there’s a red passport snuggled up to the blue one in my sock drawer, I guess at heart I’m still an American in the Cotswolds.

California

Stalking David Hockney

Posted on July 27, 2009

I’m just back from Los Angeles and, despite having lived there for ten years, felt like I was seeing it for the first time. My eye, accustomed to the wobbly stone and green and brown landscape that is the Cotswolds, was startled by this paean to mid-century design, all stucco cubes in mustard yellows, olive greens and shell pinks set against an aching blue sky. Now I understand that only an Englishman could and did paint A Bigger Splash.

As a teenager my sister had a poster of Hockney’s iconic California image hanging in her bedroom. We lived in Florida but every summer we visited my grandparents in SoCal for two weeks, and we loved that poster because Hockney could have painted it from their back patio. The only difference was that the diving board was rotated 45 degrees in Hockney’s version and instead of a director’s chair, my grandparents had a non-adjustable teal green chaise lounge. It was constructed of hundreds of rubber chords strung taut on a metal frame, and it left ripples of angry red welts across your skin after just a few minutes of lying on it. Still it looked good in its own mid-century, minimalist way. I’d even go as far as to say it would have been a better choice than Hockney’s deck chair, it’s low horizontal line echoing the planes of the sliding glass doors and flat roof.

In 2005, right before I left Los Angeles to move to London, I spent a lunch hour at an exhibit of Hockney’s Yorkshire paintings in watercolours. I was alone except for the gallery assistant in this quiet mecca, a block from the riot of Los Angeles that is Venice Beach, and the fact that Hockney had turned his artistic attention to the rural landscape of England felt somehow like a private pre-welcome party for me. The following year I spent more lunch hours at a second exhibit of Hockney’s Yorkshire paintings, these in oil, at a gallery on Derring Street in London around the corner from my then office on Hanover Square. The Cotswolds weren’t even in my consciousness back then, but Hockney’s images of wheat and rolling hills and country roads covered in a canopy of trees were burning themselves into my psyche for later recall. It was like Hockney knew about my move to the country before I did.

One of the joys of reading is that thrill of recognition when an author conveys something you have felt or thought or done and does so with flair and sometimes wit and above all authenticity. These moments offer the paradox of human connection via the largely individual pursuits of reading and, for the author, writing. David Hockney’s California and Yorkshire paintings make me feel the same way. I know he has painted other places and people and things, but these paintings are the ones that make me feel understood, perhaps like only and Englishman could.

P.S. Artsy’s David Hockney page is a cool resource on all things Hockney. 

California Random

Vacation in the Past

Posted on July 26, 2009

My family has been coming to Canters Deli on Fairfax Avenue in Los Angeles as long as I can remember, which is at least part of the reason why I am so irritated that my mother has just asked the waiter for a cup of matzo. How can she not know after thirty-plus years that matzo ball soup (at Canters at least) only comes by the bowl and not by the cup? And why is she asking the waiter for a cup of matzo, leaving out the “ball soup” part? Does she want a cup of unleavened crackers? My ninety-year old grandmother sits oblivious at the other end of our horseshoe-shaped, baby shit brown vinyl booth. Her head is suspended above the table at a forty-five degree angle, like a wrecking ball swinging from a crane, as she clutches half a corned beef on rye in both hands. A frosted coral mouth swoops in to take a bite, the red ragged edges of the meat protruding lasciviously from between the crusts while a small fly nests in her silvery helmet of hair. I am too transfixed by the scene of savagery—of old age, our food chain, of all of human history—even to swat it away.

But I cannot hold my mother’s obliviousness to matzo ball soup ordering etiquette accountable for my crotchety and pondering mood. I blame it on the cumulative contents of the vacation thus far, a pseudo vacation really, which started a week ago when we arrived in Florida to attend my twentieth high school reunion. On our first morning we brunched with my old childhood friend, A., at News Cafe on South Beach. Over eggs we talked of disease—my MS scare and her mother’s lymphoma. In matter of fact terms she explained that her mother is managing her disease but at the same time it is likely this is what she will die from. After breakfast we headed west for the reunion in Fort Myers. From within the air conditioned confines of her husband’s Mercedes (used, as she pointed out for what seemed like no particular reason), she updated us on the financial meltdown that is dominating her immediate family’s life. The story lasted the length of Alligator Alley and was littered with the usual suspects: commercial real estate market collapse, foreclosures, lawsuits, soured friendships, pondering when to pull a child out of private school. She talked about leaving Miami and starting over in Greenville, S.C. (where they’re “all just sitting around drinking a beer on the front porch”), dropping the word bankruptcy into the conversation as if she were breaking in a new pair of shoes by wearing them around the house. Throughout she was detached and impressively philosophical. It might be “the best thing that ever happened to our family” she mused before adding the admirable dose of self-flagellation: “We were very materialistic.”

A. and I have always had a kind of low-level, background competitiveness lingering in our relationship. We attended the the same high school and university. At both she outshone me in popularity (cheerleader, homecoming court) which I liked to think I made up for by marginally edging her out academically. But years ago A. had won hands down in the traditional success stakes: a stay at home mom with three kids and a wildly successful businessman of a husband. Last year she posted a picture of her ridiculously attractive and stylish family on Facebook and I joked with her to take down the ad from the Ralph Lauren catalog and stop pretending it was her family. I am relieved that my sub-conscious had the dignity not to feel a shred of victory over her current plight. My psyche somehow needed this better, richer version of me and without her I felt a little bit lost.

The reunion wasn’t all glum news. I reminisced with one of my oldest pals, J., about how in third grade we used to fight over who got Scott Baio and who got Jimmy McNichol in our imaginary boyfriend playdates in our imaginary hot tub. I had a snatched catchup with S., one of the few black girls in our high school class, just before we sat down for our Hawaiian-themed buffet dinner. She had been tall and athletic looking back in high school and still was. I had enough time to find out she was living in Atlanta, a teacher of some sort, in graduate school, and dating a long haul truck driver. I wish I would’ve talked to her more. I reconnected with P., whose older sister used to regale us on sleepovers by demonstrating her ability to open a beer bottle between her ample breasts. Back then P., like me, favoured an Aqua Net encrusted set of bouffant bangs, and we spent many Friday nights perfecting them with the curling iron before heading out in her red Honda CRX.After the reunion we flew to Los Angeles, where in addition to the matzo ball soup incident, I was subjected to twice daily nervous breakdowns by husband on the topic of why we ever left this sunny paradise. In between he checked his BlackBerry and muttered conspiracy theories about what was happening in his absence from work. I tried to ignore him and focus on the intense joy I experienced in our daily Mexican pilgrimages to Gilberts El Indio or Holy Guacamole, but the truth is I was starting to wonder why we ever left L.A. too. And herein lies the lesson: vacationing in your past is a dangerous game at which I had excelled. In ten days I managed to wedge in the entire psychological landscape of my childhood plus a good dose of mortality, which explains how I came to observe the whole sordid spectre of human history in that fly sitting on my grandmother’s head in a booth of a Jewish deli. I resolve to spend next year’s summer vacation firmly in the present, preferably someplace without BlackBerry connectivity.

California Random

The Thing About Lenny

Posted on December 30, 2008

Today was my grandmother’s ninetieth birthday party. It was held in an anteroom of the Arrowhead Country Club whose decor, prime rib menu, and bartender, Manny, had not changed since I was last there roughly thirty years ago for my grandmother’s retirement party. There were thirty-three family members and friends in attendance, most of whom were elderly women who had outlived their husbands. The handful of men included a neighbor who is rich from selling Italian tractor parts, my father, and my great uncle and his two sons, one of whom is the notorious Lenny.

Lenny came half an hour late, which would have offended most grandmothers on the occasion of their ninetieth birthday but he had already done that when he displayed the same margin of tardiness at my grandfather’s funeral five years ago. When he did arrive today he was at least bearing belated Christmas gifts. As with last year it was a CD, this time of Laura Nyro. And as with last year’s Neil Young which came with a burned copy on which he had re-edited the track order to “improve” it, this one also came with very specific instructions to ignore the bonus tracks.

“It was called the Thirteenth Confession for a reason,” he informed me.

Like Neil Young and T.C. Boyle, Laura Nyro is in Lenny’s canon of artists on whom he is forever pontificating. I tuned out somewhere between Lenny missing Laura Nyro’s Woodstock performance because he had to work in a steel mill to pay his way through college and the declaration by an “authentic rasta man” that his son was the chosen one in the family and had recently reeled off an epic poem comparable to Blake in twenty minutes. To be fair to this son, he has forever been in the shadow of his Ivy League student body president/McKinsey Consulting/Gates Foundation/Harvard Business School sister, so it was strangely sweet if slightly deluded to hear his father championing him. (Come to think of it, our entire family is in his sister’s shadow.)

As we said our goodbyes, Lenny separately directed both my sister and me not to “look for homogeneity” and to “expect variegation” in our new Laura Nyro CDs. In the country club parking lot my sister, an FBI agent in another state, told me how Lenny had left several frantic messages for her earlier this year. When she called him back he reported that his girlfriend had lost her wallet. My sister informed him there was nothing much she could do, omitting to clarify for him that most FBI agents are busy with other stuff like, umm, trying to prevent another 9/11. Instead she calmly directed him to a website which walks you through the steps you need to take, esoteric things like call the police and cancel your credit cards. I’d like to expect variegation in next year’s annual visit with Lenny, but somehow I am expecting homogeneity. Maybe Neil Young or Laura Nyro with their voices edited out and Lenny’s in their place, droning on.

California England

The First Hop: Los Angeles to London – May 2005

Posted on January 19, 2008

Before I can explain how I ended up in the Cotswolds, I guess I have to explain how I ended up in England at all. Los Angeles was my home for a decade before moving to England. I spent the six years previous to L.A. living variously in North Carolina, Italy, Singapore, and Malaysia. In L.A., for the first time in a long time, I was exactly where I wanted to be.

The year before we got married, husband and I bought a tiny 1930’s bungalow with a big backyard in Santa Monica. We affectionately referred to the house as “Little Yellow”, a nickname borne from a sickly sweet letter our realtor (grandly known as estate agents over here) encouraged us to write to the sellers telling them “how much we loved the house and knew it was for us from the moment we saw it” to accompany our well below asking price offer. It’s hard for me to imagine this going over so well after experiencing the brutality of the London property market, but being Southern California, it worked.

Life found a stride in the years at Little Yellow. I spent Saturday mornings shopping at the farmers’ market, then cooking a big lunch and eating it with husband out on the back deck in the sunshine. I had hit a professional stride as a project manager after a false start in finance, we had a moody cat and a loving dog, and all was well with the world. When my British husband first started floating the idea of moving back to England sometime after 9/11 and just over a year into our life in this new house, I staunchly resisted. I felt like he was pulling the rug out from under me and this cosy life, to the point where it became a regular topic in my weekly therapy sessions (everyone in L.A. has a therapist, really). My therapist’s advice was to call husband’s bluff.

So I did.

I told husband I’d move to London, but I wasn’t going to spend any money to get there. If he could find a job that paid to get us and our stuff across the Atlantic, I’d go. To the amazement of both of us, within a couple of months he did. Not only did he find a job, he seemed to have found the perfect job in the perfect industry paying the perfect money. Some bluff, I thought, and silently cursed the thousands spent on that therapist.

But as the time for the move approached it was, as my shrink predicted, husband who got cold feet. What the therapist failed to predict was that it was me who would become the cheerleader for the move abroad. My change of heart was facilitated by my irritation with my job at the time, more accurately my irritation with my idiotic boss, known in my household as “The Chadster”. He was from Texas and wore hair gel. Moving to London struck me as a convenient way to escape from this job I hadn’t been in for long without damaging my resumé (admitting defeat and finding a better job in L.A. somehow seemed less obvious).

Even stranger, I started to say things to husband like, “I’m 33, I have a lovely house in a lovely place, the best burrito in the world within walking distance, I own a Kitchenaid mixer, and I feel retired. Is this all there is?”

“Is this all there is?” That little question was quite popular with the thirty-somethings at the Santa Monica Zen Center where husband and I had spent the last few years as practitioners. (Shrinks and alternative religions are de riguer in L.A., I swear) And the sensai was consistent and clear, even a bit smug, in answering this question: “Yes, this is all there is.”

Which added even more fuel to my fire. If this is all there is then we might as well take the opportunity to do “this” in a country where flights to Europe are cheap and you get 23 vacation days standard per year. Whatever I said convinced us both. Six weeks later I walked into 334 square London feet that was now my home.