Nancy Rommelmann

The Come-Back Kid

"Who made that noise?"

"It was Nancy."

The above conversation between two baristas at Ristretto, after I'd given a gleeful little yip, seeing that the entire top half of yesterday's Arts page in the Times was taken up with a photo of James Frey, which let me know that nice things were about to be written about his new novel, Bright Shiny Morning.

I have not, in the past, been kind to Frey; I once wrote a blog post about his A Million Little Pieces debacle that, I believe, contained the word "pussy." In the title. I watched Oprah for the second and last time the day he was grilled, and considered it some of the most riveting television I'd seen. Did this man take his lumps? Boy, did he.

As it turns out, and as was always known, Frey had a whole lot of help passing AMLP off as a memoir rather than the novel he'd written; even more help than we knew. Though what got in my craw about the whole affair was that I thought the book was bad, it was just bad writing. It pissed me off that yet another not-very-good-book was being ululated over by the mid-lit crowd.

Bright Shiny Morning is, according to Times reviewer Janet Maslin (whom I trust, because her sense of smell is a whole lot better than Kakutani's), a sprawling, tender, bloody, real book about Los Angeles, one in which the author is more concerned with the redemption of his characters than himself, as it must be. Here's the kicker:

So the Bright Shiny Morning guy did it differently. He let the little vignette play out against a big, gaudy, dangerous Southern California backdrop, full of drug-dealing gang-bangers, full of schemers, phonies, rich with a history of robber barons, all of it listed here, all of it stacking the deck against any generosity of spirit. The son steals the maid’s virtue? Been there, read that. They plot against the old lady? Been there too. This novelist wanted something else for Esperanza: he wanted to honor her, fall in love with her, do it with startling sincerity. He wanted to save her.

And it worked.

That’s how James Frey saved himself.

I really commend this guy. He stood up, got back in the ring, and apparently, has knocked us out.

Though apparently not all of us: David Ulin at the LA Times writes that  BSM is "a terrible book. One of the worst I've ever read and HarperCollins' ponying up 1.5 million for it, "yet another symbol of a book industry in crisis, with publishers grasping at whatever straws they can to manufacture buzz."

Fascinating. And on that note I'll mention, if a bit prematurely, my novel about Los Angeles, for which HarperCollins did not pay me $1.5 million, and which will be available soon.

Dial M for Mother

Happy Mother's Day to all you moms out there, and to your moms. We don't make a big deal out of this stuff in our house, but am I touched to see the spider orchids and card from my darling daughter awaiting me on my desk? I am. Was I happy to chat with my own mom just now? Of course. And was it sweet to today receive five mother's day emails from friends new and old, one addressed to "Nancy Mommelmann"? Yes, it was.

Mostly, I was moved today by what I read from a stranger, or rather, a colleague whom I find myself admiring more and more as the years go by. Caitlin Flanagan's Dial M for Mother, an Op-Ed in today's Times, had me both tearing up and laughing out loud at the same time. Here's a snip:

You spend your entire adolescence and much of your adulthood trying to shake her, trying to be a grown-up, a smooth operator, but you keep blowing it, and the person you call out for — like a toddler shrieking in a playpen, or a soldier dying in a ditch — is Mom. She co-signs your car notes and wires you cash, she takes in the dog you should never have adopted, pays for your wedding and then keeps up your spirits during the divorce.

Your vision of your adult life with your mother is one of spoiling her, of being so successful in your endeavors that you are able to cradle her in comfort and luxury, and that your visits will be demonstrations of largess and tenderness, the car trunk opening to reveal some expensive new kitchen appliance or extravagant winter coat. Instead, you get some frightening news from a doctor, and the first person you call — because making her weep with fear and grief seems like the one thing that might cheer you up — is Mom.

True, true; all true. Flanagan also bangs it home with one of the most succinct and crushing last lines ever. I thank her for it.

Images: Mary Cassatt, "Breakfast in Bed."

Martine Franck / Magnum Photos - for more mom photos, click here.

How to Cover an Election

I ran into the NY Times' Frank Rich at an event about a month ago, and while I only exchanged pleasantries with him, I did spend a nice amount of time chatting with his wife, columnist Alex Witchel. It was a charged conversation, with the usual journo complaints, a bit of name-gaming; the startling realization that one of her and Rich's dearest friends, a former NY Timesman who'd moved some years earlier to the LA Times, was near-universally loathed in the West Coast newsroom, a position from which he'd just been fired. We seemed also to have opposing opinions about Laura Albert, someone I'd recently written a long feature about, and with whom a year earlier Rich's son had conducted an in-depth if decidedly softer Q & A. I left the conversation thinking, I'm glad to be in the same arena with these people, even when our opinions radically differ.

In this week's New York Review of Books, Rich has a spectacular piece, one in deep alignment with what I believe is the job of a journalist, or rather, the sort of journalism I trust and hope I write, "by injecting strong subjective voices, self-reflection, opinion, and most of all, good writing that animate[s] current events and the characters who populate them."

The article, How to Cover an Election, is about Norman Mailer's covering of the 1968 Democratic and Republication conventions for Harper's magazine. Here's a long clip from Rich's piece:

As a narrative of the summer's actual political events it is both compactly comprehensive and dead-on, often hilariously so. And not just when serving up Richard Nixon. Mailer's Dickensian portraiture revivifies even the half-remembered. Eugene McCarthy seemed less a presidential prospect than "the dean of the finest English department in the land." John Connally boasted "a thin-lipped Texas grin, a confident grin—it spoke of teeth which knew how far they could bite into every bone, pie, nipple or tit." Hubert Humphrey employed "a formal slovenliness of syntax which enabled him to shunt phrases back and forth like a switchman who locates a freight car by moving everything in the yard." Mayor Richard Daley looked at his worst "like a vastly robust peasant woman with a dirty gray silk wig" and at his best "respectable enough to be coach of the Chicago Bears."

By taking the time to look, and think, Rich notes that Mailer also had the ability to see, including where the parties were going:

"We will be fighting for forty years," [Mailer] suggests. Perhaps he thought that was hyperbole at the time, but we now know it was portent.

Mailer also knew where journalism was headed. The politicians, he noticed, "rushed forward to TV men, and shouldered note-pads aside." When he misses an exciting night on the convention floor, he consoles himself "with the sad knowledge that he could cover it better on television than if he had been there." He predicts that "soon they would hold conventions in TV studios."

Rich concludes that this sort of coverage has shrunk to the size of a peanut; that "occasionally a fresh voice breaks through—Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone in 2008—but much of what passes for political reportage now in print, whether on paper or on a Web site, succumbs to the same kind of small-bore pack mentality that Mailer set out to vanquish."

I agree with everything Rich writes here. The liberty to get paid to publish not merely this kind of writing but this kind of thinking, shrinks by the day, at least in the dead-tree publications. At a magazine for which I recently wrote, the editors sang a choral ode to my wonderful "voice," then -- through edit and top-edit and copy-edit -- denuded the piece of anything five degrees east or west of center, and then, just to make sure no one in the known or unknown universe could take offense or become confused, rolled the whole in the editorial equivalent of confectioner's sugar. I have a choice, and won't write for them again. But what about the choice in what we read?

In the comments, please tell me where you read trenchant, well-written, topical work. I'll start it off: Reason magazine and the Atlantic.

Get Out of My Mouth

Here's my version of what's become the anthem of Portland chefs: "Sustainable, Sustainable, Local, Organic, Sustainable." Now, taking it to operatic levels, is alpha-chef Gordon Ramsay, who's proposed fining chefs who use out-of-season produce. This, despite his restaurants serving whatever the damn well they want in any season. It's really disgusting, and proves to me, for the 800 billionth time, what a fetish people really have, how they really just love the taste of the jackboot.

You want to grow locally and use it? I think that's fantastic. I love a beautiful red ripe strawberry in July, full of sweetness and juice. But you know what? If I want to eat one in January, grown somewhere in the Southern hemisphere, and some chef wants to serve it to me, then you better just get the hell out of my way.

Jay Rayner in the Observer makes a good point about the laziness of chefs that don't even bother to consider the seasons' bounties, a point I for the most part agree with: nature gives you a certain palette, and a chef worth his or her salt is going to explore the ways it can be used. But legislating which ingredients he or she uses? This is called fascism, and Rayner points out that the last time this was actually put into effect was in the Soviet Union, which "introduced a state cook book and anybody who, like me, has had the misfortune to eat in Moscow recently will know exactly what lasting damage that did to the progress of gastronomy. You can have whatever you like there as long as it's a dumpling or a pickled cucumber."

To Ramsay and his ilk I say, get the hell out of my mouth. As for his contentions that legislating what we eat is good for our souls and the Earth, as well as a righteous and uplifting step toward helping the world's farmers -- we might cue up some Bono here -- I'll give Rayner the last word:

The sudden rise of a food Taliban insisting that the door should now be slammed shut serves no one. I would also be curious to know who will be volunteering to pop over to see the farmers of Kenya, hard-working people who have been able to make a good living supplying us with out-of-season mangetout, green beans and, yes, strawberries and tell them the party is over because the British middle classes have concluded it's so awfully not the done thing?

h/t Jackie Danicki

Battle At Kruger

I realize about 30 million people have already viewed this video, but in case you're not amongst them. In addition to the nearly jaw-dropping action of water buffalo v. lion v. crocodile v. more water buffaloes, you get the Pythonesque commentary in the bg. Really cool.

Barack Obama North Carolina Victory Speech

I'm pretty cynical, in general, about all politics. I find them interesting, certainly, but I believe nearly none of what I hear, tending instead to see how what the party or person is saying fits into the picture we don't see. I am surely not alone in this.

Last night, my 18-year-old daughter -- a huge Obama fan who will be voting in her first presidential primary this month -- and I visited my 72-year-old father, in his new condo here in Portland. I was hooking up his internet for him, she was showing him how to retrieve his cell phone messages, while on the flat-screen TV my husband had set up, came Obama, giving his victory speech on North Carolina. One by one -- my daughter first, then my father, then me -- stopped what we were doing to watch the speech, and damn if at one point I did not have tears in my eyes, which shocks me but does not shame me. I think what it was, besides his real gift as an orator, was his grace, and his talk about how politics plays on fear, plays on division, and sure, this seems expedient to those who perpetrate it, but it's bullshit. I've heard a lot of speeches, but I have never heard one quite like this.

Dave Brubeck

When I was growing up in Brooklyn, the music in my house was jazz. Yes, my mother dutifully bought Black Sabbath and Simon & Garfunkle and Carole King and Jesus Christ Superstar on 8-track, but she listened to Sarah Vaughn and Ella Fitzgerald and John Coltrane. Also in the house, and I think the provenance of my dad, was lots of Jackie Gleason and his Orchestra and Frank Sinatra, but the track I recall playing, what seemed like at all times, was Dave Brubeck's Take Five. Aside from my parents arguing, it was the soundtrack to my childhood, and when I got older, I bought it for myself, on cassette.

The cassette is long gone but Brubeck is still around, 88 years old and still touring, including a performance last night to which I bought tickets two months ago, because I wanted to take Din but also as a carrot on a stick to get my dad out here by the time of the concert; at 72, he's divorcing for the second time and has just driven himself across the country to live in a nice little apartment we found him in Portland's Pearl District. Din and I did the dutiful Ikea run and put together all his furniture. That was last week. Last night, it was time for Brubeck.

"They look like they just came out of the nursing home," said my dad, albeit with affection and not small wonder, when Brubeck and his band came out: Randy Jones on drums; Michael Moore on bass, and Robert Militello on saxophone. My dad, who saw Brubeck with my mom several times in the Village in the 60s, remarked Militello could not have been more different in build than Brubeck's former sax man Paul Desmond. "Desmond was small and lean," said my dad.

Brubeck, white-haired, sardonic, generous, told the audience a few stories about pianos; about the wondrous behemoth instrument he played in 1958 in Bombay, and when he remarked he wished he could play that same piano the following evening at a nearby stadium, someone said, "You can," whereupon 20 Indians got under the piano, hoisted it up, and walked, "in formation" to the stadium. He also talked about three fantastic pianos that one night went up in flames at someplace called The Crystal Palace.

And then he played, with the virtuosity and playfulness and beauty that comes, one sees, with doing something well for 60 years. Moore did a solo on his bass to deep and emotive and sensual, I thought, I want to be that bass just before my dad said, "He looks like he's making love to it." The song was called Margy, which my dad recognized; I'd never heard of it but it's a beauty. There was a short intermission, during which I learned that Brubeck almost became a cattle rancher like his dad and during WWII served under Patton, and then, the band played on. Someone called for "Take Five!" and Brubeck said, "Behave now, or we'll play it in a way you'll never recognize it." But recognize it we did, if not beat for beat Jones' 10-minute -- 10-minute -- drum solo that would have left a 20-year-old winded; the audience was practically not breathing, except for a few spontaneous, "Yeah!"s, including from my dad, who, when the solo ended, I thought would clap the skin right off his hands.

The band took their bows and said good-night but we were all on out feet so, of course, they returned... and played, "Lullabye." And then they left the stage, but for Brubeck who snuck out of the flies for one wave, nighty-night. Once in a lifetime for me, for sure.

When we were walking back to the car, my dad remarked, "You know, he kind of reminds me of David," meaning my stepdad, David Levine. "Not the looks, but the virtuosity, there's just no one better at what they do." For sure.

Proving That Nothing is Impossible

With Some People, You Just Know

You just know, they are going to succeed wildly. How do I know? The brilliance, the striving, the intolerance and curiosity and psychic pain; the games they play and know they're playing, the charisma; the way you know, you want to know them anywhere, even if they don't feel the same about you. Here are three with whom I knew the moment we made contact:

Matt Davis, Mercury provocateur who's just started his own blog, Matt Davis Opens His Mouth. Since last week, he's been linked by AP, Boing Boing and called by NPR. And he's something like 26.

Joe Donnelly, my editor at LA Weekly for this story, and this one, and fellow Hollywood habitue. You know how people say they're writing a novel and you think, yeah, who isn't, please pass the salt. Joe's apparently now going to write his, and I tell you, it's going to hit.

Jackie Danicki, with whom I will be visiting this weekend in San Francisco. Frankly, I'd need a Bible-size book to enclose all the wonders of Miss Jaq. Just keep your eyes on her, she's about to take over the world.

Fashion for Geniuses

I love fashion, and if I had some genius at it to lay out my clothes every morning, I'd probably wear it. As it is, I am more like Buckminster Fuller; I want my clothes to be functional and efficient and to work in nearly all situations and to also have beauty. My dream: two pairs of shoes and two pairs only. One, a pair of black slides with two-inch platform, and two, sneakers I can run in and also walk around in. I can augment these with a pair of flip-flops, if need be.

As far as every day clothes: I need shirts that go with everything, are snug and sexy and can be worn from morning until night. Thank you, American Apparel Summer Shirt Deep V-Neck. I am wearing white, in XS, and, at $18 a pop, I am going to buy six more. I paired it this morning with a acid-pink-and-green scarf I got yesterday at a vintage story, which I have wrapped and knotted around my neck.

"You're wearing an ascot," Din said upon seeing it, and when I told him that on women, I do not think they are called ascots, he suggested, "askette."

Thanks a Lot, Nike

Two weeks ago, I walked into my local running store, needing new shoes. They didn't have what I usually run in -- Adidas Supernova -- but I also needed a pair of simply walking-around sneakers, and thought I'd hit on two-in-one with a pair of Nike Free. For running shoes, they were rather odd -- no cushion, able to be bent in half -- but the glossy, full-color, eight-page insert they came with (note to self: why?) explained, in six languages, that the structureless nature of the shoe was a "natural technology," which allowed the foot to strengthen itself in ways well-cushioned running shoes did not.

I asked the guy working there about this. "They're meant to help your foot to become stronger, like, if you did a lot of active stuff without shoes." Meaning, they'd essentially help me build my own super-foot?

"Something like that," he said." I said, that was interesting, but didn't we have running shoe technology for a reason? He nodded.

"And I can't caution you strongly enough about not running right away in these shoes," he said. "Work up to it."

As instructed, I wore them just around the first day, and the second. The third morning, I decided to do a little run, maybe three miles. Let me here insert that I have been running for 15 years; that in all that time the only running injury I've suffered (besides the marathon-related bleeding nipples and lost toenails) was a heel spur. The shoes felt fine, I got about a half-mile when... oh, crap; what was that? There was a twinge in my right knee. Not an ache, or a creak -- a twinge. I cannot count the number of runners I know who run no more because of knee injuries. I walked home.

I put the Nike Free in the closet. I bought some new Adidas. I did not run for eight days. I've run since then, twice, slowly and not far. The knee is... fine. Sometimes, it lets me know it's not yet better by giving a sharp little pain.

I saw a trainer I know recently, and told her about the shoes. She said, she's heard nothing but nightmare stories about them. So what's up, Nike? Are you deliberately culling clients from your roster? I'm pissed.

A New Elevator Terror

I grew up riding elevators many times a day. Sometimes I'd think, what if it goes into freefall? And then there's this. As Jackie (from whom I lifted this) notes, "remember that there's an alarm going on the entire time."

For the narrative, read the story in this week's New Yorker.

Super Vixens' Dymaxion Lounge

I get to be really proud all over again, with Hillary Johnson putting online Super Vixens' Dymaxion Lounge, her incisive, wise, beautiful book of essays about 1990s Los Angeles. It's as though some splendid, long at sea ship has generously beached itself in order for us to explore, wreckage, glamour and all.

I could write a lot more here. How Super Vixens was Hillary's and my company, complete with corporate American Express cards embossed with the company name. How when she finished this book she lay the essays out on my dining table and we stood there smiling at them. How she influenced and continues to impact for the incalculably better the course of my writing and indeed my life, as she introduced me to her brother Din, who I married. But don't listen to me, listen to her, upon arriving in Los Angeles:

I had a vague idea I'd write screenplays, or magazine articles, or whatever, just to make a buck. Meanwhile, I moved into a studio apartment in Silver Lake and started working as a temp at the Southern California Gas Company, which was downtown, in the tallest building in Los Angeles. The other secretaries were quick to tell me that the building was on «rollers» or «ball bearings» so that we'd be safe in case of a quake. They always added, reassuringly, that the whole building moved all the time. These girls weren't like the secretaries from Queens, Catholic girls who got lunch from Blimpie's and went on package vacations to singles resorts in Jamaica and spent hours in the ladies' room dishing and putting on eyeliner. If you were a temp, you got to be their little sister, and they expected you to tell them all about the wild parties you went to and the guys you fucked, and they would never let the boss stick you with «busywork.» The downtown L.A. secretaries had two-hour commutes to tract houses in the Valley, and an unparalleled reverence for employment. They ate skinless chicken and wore pantyhose and took aerobics classes on their lunch hour and always wanted to know if you minded before they asked you a personal question, like «Do you know how to do a mail merge on Windows?» Not to mention the jobs in L.A. paid a lot less.

Every morning I exited the elevator on the forty-second floor of the gas company and walked past the receptionist and the enormous Ed Ruscha paintings behind her.

I sat in a beige cubicle all day every day. There was a phone on the desk, and my job was to answer it. I was there for two weeks, and the phone rang twice. I sat at my desk and cried all day every day. After two weeks, I was sent to Warner Bros. in Burbank. At Warner Bros. I was a secretary in the Airline Rights Acquisitions department. The secretaries here wore jeans and had self-esteem. But then, this was the Entertainment Industry. I sat at my desk laughing and puking until I knew I was pregnant.

She will be posting a new chapter each Monday, in what will be the maiden run for other projects. From her web preface:

This web edition will appear a chapter at a time, with a new installment appearing every Monday. Somewhere along the way, a print edition will be available for purchase through this site as well. This effort is a shakedown cruise, a dry run for what I hope will turn out to be a good way to publish new books.

Including, in a few weeks, one of mine.

When Not to Listen to a Woman*

*expansion of previous post, and cross-posted at LA Observed

A few months back, the Atlantic Monthly ran an essay by Lori Gottlieb entitled, “Marry Him! The case for settling for Mr. Good Enough,” a title a former editor of mine would have termed “nothing but readers.” And read I did. Gottlieb's writing had pith and verve, but the essay's essential argument -- that a woman's dream of wanting a smart, cultured, successful husband who recognizes her for the brilliant, accomplished, potential baby-maker she is -- is just that, a dream, and one that will rarely if ever come true because men are not sufficiently complicit. The solution? Settle. Marry the okay-guy, get a child or two out of it, and complain to your friends about the husband you hate to have sex with. Hey, at least you're married, which, by the way, Gottlieb is not.

I have rarely been as incensed by an article as I was by this one. As I wrote at the time, rather than blaming men for their disillusions…

How about women of Gottlieb's ilk stepping up to the plate? Try not setting traps for guys. They know, by the way, you're doing this; they put up with it. But they don't like it. And while they might think it's sweet, for a time, that you're building this imaginary castle into which, should you be able to amplify what you like about him and amputate the rest, he will nicely fit, they really are not keen in the long-run to be thought of projects. So knock it off.

I also at the time wondered why the Atlantic, publisher (if we must split down gender lines) of the brilliant and always illuminating Sandra Tsing Loh and Virginia Postrel, would give this take on a “woman’s topic” so much space. After reading Rebecca Solnit's Opinion piece in yesterday's LA Times, Men Who Explain Things, I wonder if it's institutional.

Solnit's position is, she feels bullied by men, and it's their fault. Speaking directly to said men about this has not apparently occurred to Solnit, though it did to Amy Alkon, who wrote today over at Pajamas Media:

Solnit mewls on for 1,863 words about how women are patronized and silenced by men.

But, wait. Let me check. (Peering down into pants and then panties.) Yup, there’s a vagina in my pants, which suggests I’m either a woman or there’s a matched, escaped set of labia taken up hiding in my underwear. Most mysteriously, I don’t seem to suffer the myriad conversational injustices from men that Solnit and so many other women apparently do.

In Gavin De Becker's excellent The Gift of Fear, he explains what most of us intuitively know even when we don’t know we know it: that people who explain too much are often trying to justify what they know to be their poor behavior. This is what Solnit does, though I assume unintentionally, as it’s in opposition to her stated objective of being heard.

Telling us about her mistakes might have been constructive; she might have said, “Here was this time when I really clammed up, geez, how embarrassing. Won’t do that again!” Instead, she presents experiences in which she flopped around like a fish in a boat as the manifest insecurity of every woman in any situation that calls for her to interact with a less than attentive man. Example: when the host of a party does not acknowledge Solnit’s authorship of a book he’s discussing, Solnit does not laugh ("Being women, we were politely out of earshot before we started laughing," she writes of her friend and herself); she does not consider that maybe the guy is dim; she does not say, "Darling, why not do something useful and get me a drink?" No, she freezes, she fumbles; she's overrun with self-doubt. And whose fault is this? According to Solnit, the man’s.

Let us acknowledge there are bullies in the world, and some of them are men. My sister-in-law once mentioned that, as a sailor, she’s often crewed on boats where the guys take for granted that they know more than she and order her around accordingly. She also said that, when she sails her own boat, she often has male sailors rush out on their dinghies, wanting to know if she needs any help. Both instances can be seen as patronizing, or the natural order of things, or the product of testosterone, or idiotic, or helpful, or any number things. In all cases, we have a choice in how we act and react, and on and on bumps the world.

Solnit does not see she has a choice, which is of course her choice – but why publish it? If Solnit wants to play the victim, let her. If she wants to spend years researching and writing books and then get watery and weak-kneed when someone is dismissive, or loud, or boorish, that's her business. But what is the use in her relaying the following: when confronted by a man who knows less about a subject than she, Solnit does not argue her point; does engage in and thus further the cultural conversation. Instead, she double-checks herself, and later, alone in a hotel room, goes on Google, where she finds… she's right! The lesson she takes from this? To call out the guy years later, in print, to wit:

Dude, if you're reading this, you're a carbuncle on the face of humanity and an obstacle to civilization. Feel the shame.

Why did she not stand up for herself in the moment? I don't know. What does she want? As far as I can tell, a sea change in order to accommodate for her weakness, though why we should embrace her passivity while rejecting men's aggression is never made clear.

The battle with Men Who Explain Things has trampled many women -- of my generation, of the up-and-coming generation we need so badly, here and in Pakistan and Bolivia and Java, not to mention the countless women who came before me and were not allowed into the laboratory, or the library, or the conversation, or the revolution, or even the category called human.

One might say many things of Solnit's assumption that hers is the battle cry women should hark: that it is ludicrous, laughable, sad, counterproductive. But I won't say any of these things, only, to those tempted to follow: you're running the wrong way.

Nancy Nall

Smart, funny and (to my mind) always on the right side of the fight, Nancy Nall is a journalist and blogger I read fairly religiously a few years ago and then for no reason other than pudding headedness, stopped reading. I've been on her this week, and yesterday read every piece of long-form journalism she linked to. I now have a huge intellectual crush Gene Weingarten. And do check out the looks of alarm and reproach on the reporters faces' when they report this. Thanks, Nancy Nall.

Authority

Can't buy it, can't fake it, something I thought for the eighty-eighth time reading this fragrance post by Hillary Johnson:

Oh wow. I have finally grown into Bandit. It's like being slapped in the face with a leather riding glove. A glove being held by a blonde, smokey-eyed German vixen who has spent the day crushing flowers and grass under her heels, and who just may mean you harm.  This is an old-fashioned classic scent; there is nothing modern about it, whatsoever. This perfume smokes and drinks and has been married several times. It is eccentric and not the least bit sweet, but it still smells like perfume the way Chanel No. 5 smells like perfume--it's the first chypre, according to Luscious Cargo. Did I mention that this fragrance was launched in1944? That Garbo wore it? Who would wear it among today's stars? I think that would have to be Daniel Day Lewis.

Yes, I am in the "Nancy" in the rest of the post, and yes, I still wear Antonia's Flowers, though not as often as Dalissimo (which Din and I first bought ten years ago for Hillary, a scent that smelled so good on her I could not keep my nose out of her neck) and Dior Addict, which was a Hillary cast-off. I do await the MV2, though maybe more the Bandit, as I have been looking for about a year now for something with musk and leather and smoke.

Where the Work Goes

Interesting work week, started out by writing fiction, which I haven't done in a while, which, as I told Hillary, was like performing dental surgery on myself. Did edit a story and send it on its way into the world, and within a few days will finish a wee small polish on the novel, which I am considering podcasting, maybe with video, maybe in my nightgown.

Where I think all this writing will go depends on which day you ask. Some mornings I walk into the sunshine and think, everything is new. Some days, I want to figure out a way to leave my head that does not involve drinking, sleep or death. Today, I see what's below. I knew it was coming but still, those boxes are full of my stories! Luckily, a lot of them are online.

The Tyranny of Flawlessness

Interesting article today on Slate ("Tuck Off,"€ by William Saletan), about how the sagging economy will yield more sagging skin, as people put off elective cosmetic surgery. A self-proclaimed "big fan of capitalism," Saletan nevertheless hails the downturn as a worthy corrective, not least of all because it might get more doctors to choose health-related medicine (risky and messy and futile as it often is) over the $12  to 20 billion a year "luxury healthcare sector."

My beef with cosmetic surgery is that people often choose it out of fear, laziness, entitlement or some combination thereof. You can stand there all day and tell me the 329,000 American women who in 2006 chose breast augmentation did it because it made them feel empowered, and sure I defend their freedom to choose well or badly, but I'€™d rather give them all library cards and make them use them for a year, then see if new titties is as far as their purview goes. Also, the aesthetic verisimilitude much of this surgery yields is pretty awful, and I'€™m not just talking on Hef'™s gals: a recent article in the Times about rich women in Northern California included a photo, a photo in which they all had the same noses, the same taut foreheads, the same flat-ironed, professionally streaked hair. As ExPat Jane blogged today, "œif everyone has the same features that's not very good looking at all."

This reminded me of an interview I recently did with Micki McGee, author of Self-Help, Inc: Makeover Culture in American Life. We were talking about life coaching, whose popularity I suggested has run in tandem with cosmetic surgery's. She agreed, while painting the dual rise into the larger picture.

Is the stratospheric rise in life coaching due to the fact that anyone can be one? And what are the contributing economic factors?

My sense is the emergence of personal coaching coincides with the downsizing of middle management, around 1992 and 1993. This is when you see the very beginning of personal coaching. Of course, you'd always had analysts trying to change neurotic unhappiness into garden-variety unhappiness. But this is when you had people that had retool themselves to stay in the workforce, and they started hanging out their own shingles [as life coaches].

It also coincides with the rise of the HMO and the decline in coverage for mental health. Previously, the population had coverage that provided for therapy; with the rise of managed care, people didn't want to have to choose from a small list of providers, people often working for very little money.

Coaching also coincides with the rise in psychopharmacology, which also started to displace traditional therapy. Analysis is long and time-consuming and expensive; it tries to get to the roots of behavior. Coaching, like behavioral drugs, promises a speedy recovery. It's very proactive.

Besides middle management, I also noticed a lot of people coming to coaching from the financial industry. Coaching emerges at a time of the highest wealth inequality since the Gilded Age, when a tiny fraction of the American population owns such a great portion of the wealth;€“ this was the full impact of Reaganomics. You see Americans really struggling with what we expect to obtain and what we can obtain. There was a huge gap, which was filled with consumer credit, and we see where that's led us. There was the expectation that we should all be able to afford the flat-screen TV and the fabulous vacation and the college tuition for the kids. My family didn't have these things when I was a kid, and we didn't feel as though we were supposed to. Since 1972, real wages have not really increased, not when you adjust for inflation. The gap was closed by consumer credit, and also, this bootstrapping self-improvement, that says, if I only work harder, or lose more weight, or get some Botox, I'll be able to be employed, and get what I want.

The promise of better just over that horizon, so long as we keep perfecting ourselves into the zenith, preferably with pockets full of cash. In this way, coaching strikes me as running parallel with the cosmetic surgery industry: we should all appear flawless, as quickly as possible. But who is this really making things more comfortable for?

I think you'€™re on to something with the cosmetic surgery analogy. There was an article in the New York Times a few years ago called something like, "Fearing the Ax? Then Men Choose the Knife," about how men were choosing cosmetic surgery to avoid appearing old, because they were being dismissed from middle management. Age is equated with fatigue, and so we'€™re expected to spend more time appearing vibrant or energetic or what I call hypo-manic. In coaching, from what I've seen, there's a great concern with presentation of self; your whole life is a job interview, no crabbing at the other employees, no bad days, you're supposed to be a perfect little automaton of productivity and creativity, which is not possible but is what coaching suggests. It's disturbing, and it's sort of, the culture of the visual, or what's called compulsory happiness... It'€™s been found that this regiment of happiness is antithetical to political organizing. People who organize are basically complaining; you organize out of shared miseries. Having a big smile plastered on your face is an impediment to organizing. Which is one reason why business loves coaching. It's one of its biggest clients.

The difference between cosmetic surgery and coaching is, your boss can pay for coaching. Cosmetic surgery remains a medical if putatively individual decision --€“ though if everyone around you is having it, you have to explain why you're not.

I can explain why not: compulsory prettiness doesn't interest me. Nor does compulsory happiness. Why would we want to look like everyone else, or pave under that which is dark, terrifying, shameful? Imagine Dostoyevsky saying to a life coach, "I am tortured by memories of my despotic father, of the firing squad in Siberia," and the coach saying, "Fyodor, you're making everyone uncomfortable, let's bring out the positive--you like borscht, right?" Both the cosmetic and coaching industries bank on the idea that you want to be flawless, as if this were something to strive for.

The Perfect Wave Approaches...

My good friend David Rensin's book, All For a Few Perfect Waves: The Audacious Life and Legend of Rebel Surfer Miki Dora was chosen as one of the Significant Seven for April by Amazon.com.

The book comes out next Tuesday, though I (ahem) already read it, granted, in pre-edited, considerably longer form. That's my good fortune: when David, in the interview below, characterizes Dora as "an enigma," he's not kidding. I would add, un-classifiable; there is simply so much going on with this guy -- and not the half of it noble. I find myself tempted to stick a whole bunch of labels on Dora -- con artist, visionary, recluse, movie star -- though I know, this is what everyone did; it's how he became a legend, so many people believed so many things about him, things that are often in operatic conflict, which makes him such an incredible subject to write about. Congratulations, my friend; I can't wait to read it in its final form.

The Groupies Return

Another text came through this morning at 11:30:

"We've just landed."

Girls report two-day road trip with Justice was a blast; that the tour bus was boy-land, "all socks and electronics"; that the boys were (according to Robin) "extremely polite, the French gentlemen thing you can't really describe; they're really goofy and prank each other but at the same time, way more formal and polite." Tafv reports she learned to speak "more French in two days than I learned in two years at school."

Girls were treated, they say, with great care and respect ("They're really more like our brothers, mom"); they had a little time on their own yesterday to explore the city, while the band sound checked. And, as is de rigueur for such a trip, they came home with souveniers: upon getting off the bus yesterday morning and into the bright SF sunshine, the boys gave them their sunglasses, which they are sporting below, just off the plane.

What's the First Thing You Saw This Morning?

This is what I saw, a text message sent to my phone at 2:05 am:

I know this is so last minute but Robin and I are driving to San Francisco. I will be back tomorrow. Love you.

Let's see if you can guess who the message was from. I'll give you a hint: it wasn't Batman.

Yes, it was my daughter, who went last night to a concert with her friend, a concert she's been looking forward to for three months, with a friend who knew the two boys that make up Justice from when she lived in France, and with whom, I found out several hours after reading the above text, she had climbed onto the tour bus and driven south.

"So, are you groupies now?" I asked her, when she called at 11:30.

"Mom!" she said. "No. They're so incredibly polite."

Robin's mom and I, who spoke by phone, are fairly relaxed about this impromptu trip. Though I worry when Tafv walks a mile down to the MAX line here, I trust her judgment and know, she would not have blithely walked into danger. Our husbands, on the other hand, are a wreck: Robin's dad didn't sleep all night (Robin apparently called home to announce her departure), and Din says, he's going to kick some French ass. That, or order Tafv to do lots and lots of chores upon her return.

Just interrupted from this post by Tafv, calling from SF, where she is exploring the city for a few hours before the Justice show tonight. She and Robin will, she said, fly home tomorrow.

I'll do my best to post a photo of the girls just off the plane.

When Good Things Happen to Bad Writers

Having a coffee this morning at the shop, I started reading today's book review in the Times, Janet Maslin writing on the new novel by Jodi Picoult. I've seen Picoult's name but knew nothing about her or what she writes, though could tell by the review's opening, in which Maslin's limns the research Picoault did for her new novel, it was going to be brutal:

Some of it took her to a prison in Arizona, where she found herself right next to the lethal-injection gurney while discussing the death penalty with the warden. She also visited a gas chamber. She spoke with a condemned man.

I might have been interested in this, seeing I have visited with condemned killers (well, one), and yet I could tell, what was coming was going to be really icky. Wow, I had no idea:

"Despite her grim diligence and earnestly religion-based story line, she seems to have written her latest tear-jerker on authorial autopilot," writes Maslin, of Picoult's Change of Heart. "Its premise is built on miserably unhappy coincidence. What if a bad man murdered a nice woman’s husband? What if he killed her daughter too? What if she had another daughter? What if 11 years later, as the date for the bad man’s execution approached, the second daughter needed a new heart? What if the bad man wanted to make amends with an organ transplant?"...

“Change of Heart” is complicated by the miraculous powers of the condemned man. He is a 33-year-old carpenter who sounds stunningly familiar. He cures the sick, turns water into wine, feeds the hungry (albeit with bubble gum)..."

“Change of Heart” is narrated by several characters, each with a different way of elbowing the reader’s ribs. The book’s sort-of-hip clergyman is Father Michael: “Sure, I rode a Triumph Trophy, volunteered to work with gang youth, and broke the stereotype of a priest any chance I got.”

Had enough? Me, too. Except, of course, there's this: Picoult’s books currently top both The New York Times’s hardcover and paperback best-seller lists. While Maslin notes, "When writers become this popular... they can coast in ways not possible for the up-and-coming. The opportunity to be long-winded yet perfunctory, paradoxically daring yet formulaic, is available to only proven hit makers at the top of the heap," why is this crap rewarded? Why not just issue all of us ice picks and shout, "Start the trepanation... now!"

Please discuss.

Remembering Cathy

Today is the one-year anniversary of the death of our friend Cathy Seipp. I say "our" because she so impacted her core group of friends, of which Matt Welch wrote on this date last year, "[Cathy] deserves all the credit in the world for creating this community of unlike-minded weirdoes around her." Indeed, Cathy had put me in touch with Matt and his wife Emmanuelle Richard three years earlier, when I had some questions about health insurance. Cathy radically disagreed with Matt and Emmanuelle's semi-positive position on socialized medicine (Emmanuelle is from France), a view I shared, and I think she threw us together with the idea that we might talk some sense into each other; that, or give her the opportunity to sit us down as a group and scold us, something we all would have throughly enjoyed. Cathy also was my initial liaison to Jackie Danicki; they'd met through blogging; had some face-time in London, face-time I admired and wanted to emulate, and did.

I'd actually met Cathy many years earlier, when I was still reading scripts for a living. I desperately wanted to be a journalist, and so, would type out articles at home, and fax them cold to publications around LA. No one ever answered me, but one.

"This is Catherine Seipp," the woman on the phone said. "I got your article, and it's good. Now, what do you want me to do with it?"

Cathy was at Buzz at the time, and I told her, I wanted her to publish it, whereupon she gently but pointedly told me, that's not the way it worked; you sell the idea, and then write it. "This way, you get paid -- or at least get a kill fee."

I didn't know what a kill fee was, but she'd given me a strategy.

Within the year, I was a columnist at Buzz, where Cathy was both a columnist and a contributing writer. She also scared the hell out of me. She had an opinion about everything: the LA Times (which she notoriously skewered each month, under the byline Margo McGee); writing for Hustler (yay); same-sex marriage (nay); the texture of the chicken at our monthly contributers' lunches at Maple Drive. I remember mentioning at one such lunch in 1995 that the magazine was sending Hillary Johnson and me and our two small children to Las Vegas, to write about how the city was becoming kid-friendly.

"That's a sin," Cathy said from across the table. I thought she was kidding. When she repeated it, I knew she was not.

During the next five years, Cathy and I became friends, then good friends. We met for monthly breakfasts at Kokomo at the Farmers Market, a group that included Hillary, Cathy, Amy Alkon, Jill Stewart, Sandra Tsing Loh, Denise Hamilton, Monica Corcoran, Kerry Madden, Emmanuelle, other writers in town for a reading or a story. We called it the Writer Girls breakfast, though I don't think there was any edict about men coming or not coming; I do recall seeing Ross Johnson there once; also, David Rensin and Luke Ford. Though perhaps there was an edict, as I can't imagine Cathy not having one.

To say Cathy was the center of this group is to state the obvious; she was the one that sent the emails, and expected an RSVP. I remember more than once someone showing up who had not, and Cathy disapprovingly raising her eyebrows, and then gently if pointedly remarking that it really is better if you RSVP, so that we know how many tables we need. Really, it's out of courtesy for the servers.

Cathy and I knew each other as colleagues, as friends; as mothers. We both had daughters born in 1989, and before I met my husband in 1997, had for the most part raised them ourselves, on what we earned as freelancers. We didn't need to beat this point, but a point it was. I don't know if it contributed to my being one of the handful of writer girls whom Amy called, in June of 2002, to say Cathy had lung cancer.

"She only wants a few people to know," Amy told me, and that the surgery would be at Cedars. I called Cathy. She told me, she'd found out really as a fluke: she had asthma, and had not been able to shake a cough, and the doctor had decided to do a chest x-ray, which he looked at and then, promptly walked her down the hall to oncology. I do recall Cathy telling me, "The doctor said, if the surgery takes 30 minutes, it means he couldn't get it. If it takes an hour, he could."

Cathy said that when she came out of the anesthesia, she'd asked the nurse, "How long did it take?"

"Forty-five minutes," the nurse told her.

"Which you can imagine, was very frustrating." This was Cathy, the day after surgery, in her hospital bed, surrounded by her family. I'd walked into the room holding a poundcake, whereupon Cathy said, "That's so kind of you, and Nancy, do you remember my mother?"

Picture this scene: a room full of shellshocked people who know the surgeon could not get the cancer; that the prognosis is bad. And Cathy, making introductions, making sure the older folks have seats, sending someone down the hall for ice. Her composure was surreal. I think of it often, especially when I am being a weakling. I think of Hillary walking in with the gift of a peignoir, so that Cathy might look beautiful as she convelesced, and Cathy -- still covered in mecurichrome or whatever that yellow stuff is they paint on you during surgery -- holding it up to her chest, commenting on how pretty it was, and how thoughtful. I think of how Jill Stewart, with Cathy when she was wheeled to her room post-surgery, telling the nurse, "You need to get her some painkillers," and when the nurses dillydallied, Jill charging after them down the hall, saying, 'YOU NEED TO GET HER PAINKILLERS, NOW!"

And how do I know this story? Because Cathy told it to me; she told all the cancer stories; the funny ones, the terrible ones. Cancer was now part of the narrative, and we were not going to be namby-pamby about it; we were not going to wear pink ribbons and tiptoe around. As she famously announced at a party, “I just want to let everyone know having cancer hasn’t made me a better person.”

I have written previously about this woman's courage.

I think of her rather as a dance mistress in this. Her friends who knew about the cancer reacted with varying degrees of emotional spasticity: to ask or not to ask about the new chemo? Is bringing over more food annoying or nice? Oh my god, Maia? How much crying is not okay? But whether in person or psychically, one sensed Cathy clapping her hands, and saying, "None of this. We are not going to freak out; we are not going to lie on the floor and throw a tantrum. We are going to do this dance this way."

And we did. We nearly always did what Cathy wanted us to do.

This became a difficult toward the end of her life. She was very sick; some of us questioned the rationality of continuing treatment -- she was on her third round of chemo, plus radiation to shrink the tumors simply so she would not be in such unbearable pain. Maybe we should look into a visiting nurse? Hospice? But Cathy did not want that, and as Sandra so wisely said, who were we to question Cathy on decisions concerning Cathy? And so Amy took her to chemo, as did Emmanuelle, who also created a Google schedule called Team Cathy, so that people could drive, bring food, pick up Maia from the train. If you die in your 40s, and if you were, as Cathy was, the centerpiece of your group, you are surrounded by robust, capable people who are going to do everything they can to save your life, though we all knew, there would be no saving. There would only be attempts at comfort. I flew in from Portland for a week last Feburary to be with Cathy, to basically drink milkshakes with her and dish the dirt and take naps.  Jackie came from London the following week and did the same.

In the weeks leading to Cathy's death, it was as though we -- the weirdoes, the writer girls, Cathy's myriad other friends, and the masses teeming Cathy's World, a veritable clusterfuck posting 200, 300, 400 comments to whatever Mistress Cathy wrote -- became a buzzing hive. Thouands of phone calls and emails and blog posts passed in the days leading up to her death. Maybe this is the way it always is, but I -- and many of Cathy's friends, most of us in our 30s and 40s -- had not experienced the protracted death of a friend; we did not know how to sit on our hands; we had to keep trying, just as Cathy was.

On March 21 2007, just after 2 pm, I was at the public library when my cell phone rang. It was Emmanuelle, the third time we'd spoken that day, this time to tell me, Cathy had died. I sank down in a nook between the wall and a bookcase; asked Emmanuelle if she were okay; she said yes, but there were still things that needed to be done. Of course.

These things included to continue talking about Cathy, a conversation that reached such a din by the next day, Technorati listed "Cathy Seipp" as its #1 search, a fact we cheered and which certainly Cathy would have loved, though I also imagine her saying, "Well, yes."

Sandra was recently in Portland, and we spent time together, including a few hours at Ristretto talking about work, kids, and of course, Cathy. Sandra was at the hospital during the days preceding Cathy's death, a time that was -- no suprise -- attended, with various degrees of decorum, by the unlike-minded weirdoes and others. There are few people in the world who can tell a story like Sandra; the grand accents; the sweeping mannerisms; the spot-on caricatures were all there, and as I sat there listening, I realized, I had cried, but I was also laughing. And you might think, what a terrible thing, laughing at the narrative of your friend's death. And maybe it is a terrible thing, but it didn't feel terrible; it felt like a continuation of Cathy, and in truth I think she would only want; would most certainly demand that we continue the narration of her life, which includes her death.

I spoke yesterday to Amy, who said, "I find myself mentioning her as often as I can. I just want her here, and for people to know about her." Me, too.

Another gift: Months after Cathy passed away, Jackie emailed me a photo I did not know existed, of Cathy and me at her roast in the fall of 2006.

 

Lovely Hula Hands: Restaurant of the Year

Ow! Um... I just hurt my shoulder, patting myself on the back, for having urged Food Dude to get his ass into Lovely Hula Hands, which he subsequently named - yah! - Restaurant of the Year 2007. And what a beautiful review it is. Yes, chef Troy MacLarty is one my and Din's close friends (though he wasn't before this). And yeah, the Dude thought I might have been shilling for the guy. But seriously, it's a spectacular place, beginning to end. As I wrote the Dude earlier this evening, "I nearly have tears in my eyes, reading about our good friend writing about our good friend." As Din says, "And they don't even know each other!"

But that's all the lauding Troy's going to get from me. Now, onto the evidence! From our cocktail party of two weeks ago, of which Tafv was the documentarian:

Troy, talking about the Olsen Twins:

Checking out my vast cleavage:

Trying to make me feel guilty about said same. [Why does my head look as big as a beachball?]

A toast! To world domination! (Well deserved, my friend.)