OMYWORD! Did I Say That?

I Am Calling You

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Wines) — Tue, 07 Jan 2014 16:53:00 +0000

Well, hey there. It's 2014. I've written very little in the last two years. But there will be no blogpology. Life has some interesting twists and turns. And I've twisted and turned along with it.

What got me back here? Creating and editing my about.me page, that's what. Sooooo many decisions to make. You'd think they wouldn't be difficult. But every decision sends me into deep thought and looking for more coffee. Background picture? Birds? OK, I like that bird picture. I took it on the Wonkette road trip. At an outdoor restaurant in Chicago. I was the third wheel while a very, very tall Wonkette fan declared his love for Rebecca. I had to keep busy. Watching the birds.

But does the photo represent me? I don't know. Momma bird feeding baby bird. Motherly love. Ah. That one goes a bit too deep. I'll use the photo for now. But I may rethink that one.

Adding apps and links. Do I really want everything about me to be assembled in one spot? For a very long time, I've kept my LinkedIn profile free of my Facebook, Twitter and Blog links. Because... what HR person would hire me after they read my posts? I say fuck. A lot. I have a rather, er, interesting past. I'm a raging liberal. I am a hater of all organized religions. I have a congenital (my Dad was an entrepreneur) lack of respect for corporate hierarchy and suits and ties and titles. So... why do I even have a LinkedIn profile at all? Good fucking question. And have you seen that corporate headshot of me on LinkedIn? Jesus. So very much hairspray I used in 2005. A few months ago, I wrote a comedy resumé centered around my greatest assets: I Figure Shit Out and Get Shit Done. Every "accomplishment" bullet point had the word shit in it. Perhaps I should go update my LinkedIn profile. (Smile begins to form on my recalcitrant face).

I started this blog way back in 2006 to encourage myself to write. While I toiled in yet another completely absurd corporate job and licked my wounds after the end of a relationship that I thought was THE ONE, I dreamed of being a writer. A comedian. A traveler. I created an online pseudonym called OMYWORD! Did I say that? Because, it seemed, I was always getting in trouble for what I said. (Still am.) I took standup comedy classes and actually did two shows! (Terrifying!) I hooked up with a brilliant, if troubled, writer. (Aren't we all? Well, perhaps not as troubled as all that.) I quit my corporate job with zero prospects in hand. That very night, I got a contract with my friend Jan Miller for a hilarious one-year stint creating a Curves franchise training program. Talk about comedy! Waco, Texas-style Born-Again-Christian comedy! Then, after taking money from Christians (why do I always end up working for the krazy kind? Whyyyy?), I sold everything and moved to Paris. I met a girl in a grocery store who got me a university teaching job. I discovered how much I loved teaching. And I wrote and I wrote and I wrote. I did all of this as my relationship turned to tragedy and sucked the essence and spirit and soul out of me.

Do you see that picture up there of me doing the OMyWord! thing? (Oops. It disappeared when I changed my blog template. I am putting it below.)

That's me. In 2005. Hairspray. Skinny as a rail. Starting to reinvent myself. I succeeded, too. I made money as a writer. I made people laugh as an amateur comedian. I lived in a foreign country, in the city of lights. I sustained my expat lifestyle by teaching. I know I made a positive impact on many students' lives.

But I was bruised along the way. I turned myself off. Became a robot. Faking my way through life. Hoping nobody would notice me. Because getting noticed gets you hurt. I stumbled into a relationship with a beautiful, sexy, younger-than-me woman and then hurt her lovely heart when I told her I wasn't capable of being in any relationship, male or female. I took up smoking to shut my mouth and stop the pain. I gained weight. I hid in my apartment. I wished for an end. I was too chicken to bring it on myself. I stopped writing. I stopped living. I was just surviving. I did a summer teaching stint at a university in Puebla, Mexico, falling in love with teaching all over again. And then I found a bit of redemption in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Many kind souls put my Humpty Dumpty heart back together again. In record time. I lost my fear of living. It's not exactly the total healing I wish for. But it was a step.

And now, for reasons of love and loyalty to my brother, I agreed to return to Arizona to care for my aging parents. The prodigal commie returns home. Wow. What a shock. Culture shock. Family shock. I'm the only liberal for miles. I am a Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A Heinlein. Everyone walks on egg shells. They try to keep their mouths shut. I try to keep my mouth shut. It is almost impossible. I manage, until I don't. And then it alllll comes out. More than a year I've been here and have been close to losing my mind several times. An angry, crazy father, resenting my intrusion into his life-long love affair with my mother, suspicious of me at all times, screaming at me all the way up until he died last January. And a mother who feigns love, but never really loved any of her six kids or most of her grand kids. They don't give a shit about her, either. So she's mostly alone now, except for me, hiding in my room upstairs. She smokes, watches Matlock. Not really caring that nobody cares about her. Happy to have me here to butter her bagels and drive her to the hairdresser every Friday morning, since she can't do those things anymore.

Ah yes. The picture of a mother bird feeding her baby. It all makes sense now.

I'm here for now. Probably will be here until mom dies. Might not. We'll see. But I know it's time to reinvent myself again. Only I can do it. I've done it before. I know, even while surrounded by negativity, that there are truckloads full of grace and softness and love in the world. I can ask for a delivery. I can beckon my lost spirit to return. I can be alive and vital again.

Lisa Wines, I am calling you. Can't you hear me? I am calling you.

A desert road from Vegas to nowhere.
Some place better than where I've been.
A coffee machine that needs some fixing.
In a little cafe just around the bend.
I am calling you.
Can't you hear me?
I am calling you.
A hot dry wind blows right through me.
The baby's crying and I can't sleep.
But we both know a change is coming.
Coming closer, sweet release.

How Benny Hinn Got Pwnd

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Wines) — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 12:27:00 +0000

This funny article on Wonkette, Televangelists Jan and Paul Crouch Live Like Jesus With $100,000 Motorhome For Their Dogs, reminded me of a story of my own indirect brush with televangelism...

I once rented an old run-down, swamp-cooled shack in Cave Creek, Arizona that my brother fittingly called "the hovel." Actually, my street, Scopa Trail, was the dividing line between the poor, bar-hoppin' cowboys of Cave Creek and the rich, latte-drinkin' summer home owners of Carefree. I was on the wrong side of Scopa, so to speak.

My shack is the largest building on the right side of the picture. There were two other shacks on the property, one was an old adobe (bottom left) where a middle-aged massage therapist named Gloria lived with her much younger Mexican boyfriend (and any number of his Mexican buddies, all of whom made and invited me to eat kickass barbacoa on a regular basis) and another adobe where two guys lived (top left) who once saved me from a rattlesnake in my kitchen, but that's a whole 'nuther story. All the shacks were owned by a crotchety old lady named Mrs. Peters. The dirt-road entrance to the property sported an old faded wooden sign marked "Petersville," which Mrs. Peters later pointed out to me with great pride.

It was actually a very historic compound, since it was used in the early days as an overnight resting place for sheep herders bringing their flocks from northern Arizona down to Phoenix for slaughter. It was also where I perfected my oft-requested coyote imitations - both the lone howler as well as a pack going after an unlucky bunny in one of the dry washes on either side of my shack.

When I met Mrs. Peters and a younger (well, he was probably 45ish but anything was younger than Mrs. Peters) real estate guy to see if I could rent the place, she said (in her screechy granny voice), "Honey, are you a kreeshtian?" I was a bit taken aback but replied, "Well, I'm, uh... Catholic." That's a big uh since me saying I'm Catholic is a big nuh-uh. But whatever. She said, "Ha! Catholics aren't kreeshtians!" Then she wandered off to another room, muttering to herself. The real estate guy sized me up in my little corporate suit and said, "You don't really look like someone who would live in a place like this." I wish I had said, "I don't look like a Catholic either." But I didn't. I just smiled. He didn't know that, as in most aspects of my life, I prefer (or somehow always fall into) the bizarre vs. the conventional.

Anyway, somehow Lisa The Heretic was approved as a tenant, as long as I could promise Mrs. Peters that it was ok for her to periodically bring people over to my place to view the only lilac tree in Cave Creek, which was just outside my living room window. I agreed without a single thought as to the very real possibility that one morning, while I was buck-ass naked in my country-life living room, I'd look up to see five old people staring at me through the lilac flowers.

Mrs. Peters regularly showed up at weird times, always chaufferred by some conscript, since she was too old to drive. Her most loyal chauffeur was a one-armed, bee-keeping, trench-digging, tractor-renting Cave Creek Cowboy who also served as our handy man and groundskeeper and only put up with Mrs. Peters because he was hoping she'd leave the property to him in her will. (He told me this. And I think, in the end, he got what he wanted.)

Every time she visited me, she lectured me on kreeshtianity and told me that the best way to be a kreeshtian was to watch Benny Hinn on the TEEvee (a pronunciation I have found only in the wilds of Arizona). Benny is the guy who wears white suits, sports a hairdo that somebody once called Niagra Falls and is famous for healing people by hitting them and making them fall down and go boom. Each time Mrs. Peters brought up Benny, I'd point out the fact that I sadly didn't have a TEEvee, which shut her up until the next visit.

One day I had to go to her house for some reason and she kept me there for hours in the dark (all the windows were covered in aluminum foil and then draped in thick dark cloth), peering at her dusty photo albums while she told me long stories about EVERY photo. Next I was compelled to admire her Baltic amber jewelry collection, apparently passed down by her Latvian ancestors. She loved her ancestors but hated her good-for-nothing' kids. But they would get their comeuppance when she died, thank ye Jesus, since she had purposely excluded them from her will. This conversation about her will led directly to Benny Hinn. I started to zone out until she said, "As a matter of fact, I have hundreds of acres of desert land I want to will to Benny Hinn so I called his people and told them that if Benny wanted the land, he'd have to come to Arizona personally to see it."

Well, that got my attention.

Me: So... did he come here?
Her: Yes! Last week!
Me: Wow. Personally?
Her: Yep! He flew his very own plane over here and he and a couple of his people arrived in a big limo so I could take them out to my land and show it to them. I had all the papers with me for him to sign and everything.
Me: A limo? Out in the desert?
Her: Yes, that was stupid. You would think if they are as close to Jesus as they say they are, they would know these things.
Me: Uh...huh. So, how did it go?
Her: It didn't go very well. No.
Me: No?
Her: Well (she averted her eyes and fumbled a bit with her plastic daisy broach - the amber was only for looking, not wearing)... the problem was... I couldn't find my land. We drove around and around and around for hours out in the desert and I just couldn't find it.
Me: Ha! Hahahaha! (I couldn't help myself.)
Her: IT WAS NOT FUNNY!
Me: (forced serious face)
Her: Benny got so mad at me that he wouldn't speak to me and they just drove me back here and dropped me off and left for the airport without even saying goodbye or thank you or ANYTHING.

I'm surprised Benny didn't hit her and make her fall down and go boom, right after he signed the papers for the mystery land. Heck, even if it didn't exist, he's very skilled at selling things that aren't real. He'd find some sucker watching him on TEEvee to take it off his hands. But personally, I hope the one-armed bee-keeper got those hundreds of acres of land. I'm sure he needed a place to keep his coyotes, just like Jan and Paul Crouch.

Update: My friend Daniel, who still lives in Cave Creek, told me after reading this that he had run into Mrs. Peters a time or two and did some handyman work at one of her properties and avoided her after that. He reminded me that she always wore a sun hat and was always saying, "Praise the Lord!". This made me remember that when I called her she always answered the phone like that.

Moments In The Life of a Dog

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Wines) — Sat, 24 Mar 2012 15:38:00 +0000

Above, on the table, red wine stains the faded Provençal cloth
1957 is hand-written on a small label at the neck of a deep-green bottle
Nothing else but dust, a few cobwebs, keep company with the label
Its wine had been offered respectfully by our host, the winemaker
In honor of his grandfather's vintage
On this last day of the wine harvest

The remains of a farmer's lunch litter the table
The hand-made bread is gone, but crumbs stick like evidence
In the last gob of butter on a tarnished vintage knife
Sardine skeletons are piled high upon pushed-aside plates
Not a morsel of garden-fresh salad is left in a wooden bowl
Wine glasses hold nothing but lees from long ago

The bearded winemaker regales us with stories in French
Gesturing & smiling, a wicked sparkle in his eye
And everyone laughs; even me, who doesn't understand
His wife's foot, in a cast, rests on a chair
Her eyes are weary from a week of cooking for thirty people
A Mona Lisa smile on her face, she watches him, amused but wise
She knows he isn't always this adorable
Her crutches fall with a clatter to the red-tiled floor
Her son, the one who wants nothing to do with winemaking
Dutifully retrieves them for her
We laugh at another of his father's jokes

Logs pop and glow in the stone fireplace
The smell of autumn floats through the open kitchen door
Mixing with smoke and sweat and grilled fish
The last of the harvesters drift in and out, saying their goodbyes
Mostly young people, with dreadlocks and gypsy clothes
Hands stained after a week of grape picking
Feet stained after a naked plunge into the giant crushing vat
Heads aching after last night's end-of-harvest celebration
New lovers, former lovers, some jilted right in the vines
And a British man, his Moroccan wife, their two young sons
Their busy black dog

For some reason, the dog picks me to be his playmate
He must know that I need something to do (or that I'm a sucker)
We're both foreigners; but he's not at all concerned about that
While everyone above the table speaks a language neither of us understands
Under the table, he nudges me for attention
His golden eyes are not so much pleading; but enticing
He gingerly places a golden tennis ball into my crotch
Pushes it towards me with his nose, to make his point
And sits down, patiently awaiting my toss

I pretend to ignore him; he pretends to ignore me
I move my hand towards the ball; his ears go into full alert
I move my hand back; he yawns; can't fool me
Lightening swift, I grab the ball and girl-throw it
Just missing a dreadlocked head, a sun hat, the crutches
Out the door like a shot, the dog scrambles
And returns moments later, thrilled from the chase and capture
He drops the ball into my crotch again
Saliva bubbles and mud tarnish the once-golden orb
A piece of hay hangs from the dog's mouth as he pants
Everyone laughs at something, but not me, not the dog
We're in our own under-table world
Playing our own below-board game
One that ends when the British man and his Moroccan wife and their two young sons
Kiss the last cheeks goodbye and call for their dog
Without a dog-thought, he leaves the ball; a messy forgotten toy
With no dog-regrets, he abandons me; a temporary co-conspirator

I remember him still.
But by now, he has a new toy; a new toy-tossing friend

It was all so important, for a few moments
The harvesting
The fecundity of love in the vines
The stories of harvests past
The hangovers
The taste of 1957 wine
The life of the man who made it
The life of the grandson who maintains the family trade
The dreams of the great grandson who wants to be an architect
The golden ball flying out the door

This poem was also featured on Third Sunday Blog Carnival.

Longing For Me

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Wines) — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 18:04:00 +0000

In the last few weeks I've been longing for the sea. For the smell of salt, seaweed and Bain de Soleil. For the cool breeze and warm sun against my skin. I wanted to hear the seagulls' cry. I wanted to sit in a beach side cafe, for hours, and somehow be cleansed. I wanted to leave there, replenished, renewed.

But I'm not necessarily the Queen of The Beach. Sand pisses me off, for one thing. Swimming in the ocean scares me. Putting on a bathing suit scares me much more.

So it's all about escape, from Paris and from myself. Paris has been very cold and mostly grey. A pre-Christmas flea infestation in my apartment was worthy of a horror flick. And the noise in my apartment building just keeps getting worse. It sounded like somebody was breaking down the door of the apartment downstairs at the wee hours of this morning. I stood at my peephole trying to decide if I should rush downstairs and confront the burglars, but climbed back into bed instead. The young college student on the other side of my wall has a new boyfriend. I think he's the same guy that waltzed into the Hot Tan Girl's life downstairs a few months ago and roused her into multiple orgasms 5 times a day. She finally left, so I felt relieved. But now, instead of hovering above Hot Tan Girl's bed, I'm directly in bed with the Young College Student. She's just on the other side of the wall where I lay down my head, wailing Oui! Oui! 5 times a day. God. Bless. Her.

I just lie here with my headphones jammed into my ears, with Joni Mitchell playing, and long for the sea.

I think I have a fantasy that if I'm standing and looking at the sea, the world slows down to the languid rate of the waves' ebb and flow. There are no deadlines. No threatening letters piling up from the French tax office because I miscalculated and should have paid them 145 Euros instead of 128. There's no looming expiration date for my work visa. No days of standing in multiple lines just to talk to a grumpy French fonctionnaire, not to mention the nice chunky payment to my lawyer in order to get that visa. There's nothing at all pressing, except a wander down the boardwalk to find a place to have lunch.

I think there's no noise there, at the sea. No midnight robberies or door-lock changes or people banging refrigerators down the circular apartment stairs as they escape immigration in the middle of the night. No King Kong crashing the trash cans out of the courtyard, down the hall and out of the building at 6am. And certainly, no orgasms.

Only the seagulls are crying out. But somehow, that doesn't embarrass me as much.

A million years ago, the whole time I lived just a couple of blocks from the beach in California, I avoided the sea. Because if I stood there long enough, I would cry. A deep sadness would well up into my chest and spill down my cheeks. I didn't know why it was there and only wanted it to go back from whence it came. After a while, I realized that the sadness was my lonely, unexpressed self. I ran around a lot then, chasing after nothing, working way too much, spending money I didn't have, doing all I could to avoid noticing me. I had few friends. No hobbies. So when I stopped at all, I realized I was just an empty shell. Standing on the sand, looking out at the horizon, the sea just stared back at me, placid and deep, daring me to dive inside and connect with the teeming, unseen self that wanted so desperately to be expressed.

Instead, I just got into a new relationship. Or I moved to Arizona. Or to Paris. Though I've given up relationships for lent (and my lent is longer than your lent), I'm pondering my next country move as I type. Certainly there's a place where I can go where I can find peace? Where I miraculously step out of fear, grab my lithesome, ebullient, funny self and rush outside, right into life? Where I initiate, instead of follow. Where I create instead of stifle. Where I'm animated from my own inner light instead of closed up and hiding.

This week I took a 5-hour train ride from Paris to Cannes. To the sea. I anticipated the train ride for days. Five hours to watch the world go by. Yet it sped by too quickly. Leaf-less trees waiting for spring, rolling hills dressed in a thin spray of frost and fog swirling just a few feet above, beach cities with medieval castles just barely standing upon their cliffs and then, finally, the sea. Stretching to the horizon, deep, placid. But I was on the fast train. There was but a glimpse and then it was gone. On to the next town, the next hill, the next cove.

When I arrived at Cannes I was busy. Finding my hotel. Finding my friends. Setting up the trade show booth. Finding a place to eat lunch, then dinner. Catching up on my friend's life, his sister's, his mother's. Learning his business so I could bullshit in the booth. The sea lay just outside of my reach, visible only on a busy walk-by. I never paused to look, to feel.

On the last night in town, my friends slept past our dinner rendezvous time so I went out by myself for dinner. I walked along the empty boardwalk and took pictures. Of empty benches and chairs. Of trees lit by colored lights. Of magazine covers displayed outside closed news stands. Of window displays at closed shops. Of the twinkling lights from unreachable shorelines, far away.

I took the train back to Paris early the next morning. I read my book instead of watching the world whiz by. Everything annoyed me. The man in the seat next to me, blowing his nose. The man who was sitting in my seat when I got on the train and I was too shy to ask him to move. The woman who boarded at the next stop and pointed out that I was in her seat. I actually got the nerve to ask the first guy to leave, which he did, but he still pissed me off. The crowds of people walking down the quay in Paris, talking, laughing, not caring that I was behind them and wanted to pass. The smell of urine in the Metro. The dog shit on the streets. The greyness of Paris.

I've been longing for the sea and so, I went to it. But the reality didn't measure up to the fantasy. I returned, unsated. My tamped-down sadness and tied-up joy still struggle inside me.

It isn't the place. It isn't the work. It isn't the relationship. It's me.

Study In Contrasts

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Wines) — Sat, 07 May 2011 14:58:00 +0000

It was a pretty comfortable Eurostar chunnel trip back home to Paris from my Guardian Masterclass in London. Unfortunately, I sat in a 4-seat configuration with three other travelers - two women and a guy - and the guy who sat next to me had ants in his pants. He couldn't sit still and his elbows were constantly jabbing me. He kept dropping his phone on the floor and had to crawl under the table to get it. He jumped up several times to walk the train or go to the bar car. The whiff of his beer breath afterwards was nauseating.

It was raining. I'd had a beautiful couple of days in London, with rare sunshine. But as I made my way to St. Pancras station to catch my train, the rain started coming down. Drops of water spotted the train window and the greenery speeding past me was muffled in fog. All at once, there was a rainbow, but the people sitting with me were oblivious - wrapped up in their French hilarity that I didn't understand and didn't want to.

The women were a study in contrast. One had a smart haircut, was slim, tall and fashionably dressed - black mini-skirt suit, low-scooped neckline and spiked heels. The other was puffy-cheeked and dowdy, with an old-fashioned headband and a pale blue cotton shirt, buttoned almost all the way up. But they laughed as if they were best friends. The rapport seemed contrived, like they had to be friendly because they worked together. But once they got home, I imagined they wouldn't be caught dead together. Dowdy would feed her cat in a 6th-floor walkup in the boredom of the 7th arrondissement. She'd put on flannels and go to bed alone. Sultry would call her boyfriend as soon as she got away from her coworkers and soon fall back into his Egyptian cotton sheets while he pulled down her scoop-neck top to reveal her black and red lace bustier. "Leave your shoes on." he'd whisper.

I snapped a few pictures of the rainbow through the window, not realizing that I also captured the reflection of the two women during a lull in their tiresome conversation. Two hours on a train pretending you like someone can be exhausting, I know. The rainbow arcs boldly behind them - an unpredictable natural phenomenon - unnoticed.

From Paris' Gare du Nord I thought I'd take the bus home. It was a direct shot on the 31 bus. I filed through the tourists at the station, feeling a bit cocky because, unlike them, I know where I'm going. I stood at the bus stop and was somewhat taken aback by a handsome older guy who walked up and waited nearby. He did a double take of me, a rare occurrence. Just two days before, I listened to another woman writer in the Masterclass, reading her story of a middle-aged woman who suddenly realized how invisible she had become to handsome men. I found myself shaking my head in recognition, realizing I had also faded into the woodwork. But this surprising glance from a handsome stranger was life's way of teasing me. Or, maybe I hadn't lost "it" completely.

I glanced up at an approaching bus and saw the 3 in what I assumed was the 31 bus. I boarded, following my handsome man. We sat opposite one another. I no longer had the nerve to continue eye contact. Going past his second glance was a bit too risky for me. I watched as we passed through Pigalle. Tourists, sex workers and peep show barkers competed with each other for my attention. Then, the neighborhoods stopped looking familiar. That's when I looked up and noticed I'd taken the wrong bus. I got off at the next stop, trying to seem like I still knew where I was going. The handsome man and the bus faded into the night.

There was a Metro stop right beside me. I boarded the train with a sigh. I could have been home by now, feeding my neighbor's cat then going to bed, alone, in my flannels. Instead, I sat in the glaring fluorescent light, bothered a bit by the loud hissing of the train and the siren that sounds before the train's doors close. In front of me was another odd couple. Two men. They were also talking, so I imagined they were together. One was a dark, long-haired guy, reminding me of George Harrison on the cover of his album, Beware of Darkness. The other man was extraordinary. Asian. Ancient. Glasses. He had a white Fu Man Chu beard that curled up impossibly at the ends. His Paris-style tourist beret sat on his head like a school girl's beanie. His bags were carefully packed and stationed in front of him. His striped umbrella stood upright inside a hidden slot of his suitcase. It matched the fabric of the Metro seats, but not the man who owned it.

At the next stop, George Harrison got off the train, his blue backpack slung over his shoulder, his white bag full of something - God knows what - no longer in view. So, they weren't together after all. Maybe George was just fascinated with Mr. Fu Man Chu and struck up a momentary conversation. I preferred their conversation. It was more authetic than the two women on the Eurostar.

My stop was next. I so wanted to see Mr. Fu Man Chu stand up and leave the train. I wanted to see if he wore a long black dress or matching black pants with a button-up coat, like in the gold rush days of San Francisco's China Town. Somehow, it would have made him more real to me. It was like he was a vision, from another place and time. But he remained where he was, an ancient wizard in this modern contrivance called The Metro.

I stepped off the train, this time knowing where I was going. He stayed behind, not even worried about becoming invisible in his middle age. I envied him. I have a feeling he knows where he's going even when he's in an unfamiliar place. But I think, more importantly, he knows who he is.

Reading List From My Guardian Masters Novel Writing Class

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Wines) — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 08:54:00 +0000

Somewhere in the vicinity of 290 of my blog fans (actually, only one), asked me for the reading list from my Guardian Masters Novel Writing Class.

So... here are some that we studied; others were mentioned by teachers or students:

The Body Artist - Don DeLillo
Middlemarch - George Eliot
Tom Jones - Fielding
Decline and Fall - Evelyn Waugh
Measure for Measure - Shakespeare
The Wings Of The Dove - Henry James
Tender Buttons - Gertrude Stein
A Clean, Well-Lighted Place - Hemingway
The Haystack In The Floods - William Morris
Sons and Lovers - D. H. Lawrence
David Copperfield - Dickens
A Misremembered Lyric (poem) - Denise Riley
Ulysses 'Calypso' - James Joyce
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Fitte 3
Cold Calls - Christopher Logue
The Capital Of The World - Hemingway
The Crossing - Cormac McCarthy
Winter's Bone - Daniel Woodrell
Richard Gary Brautigan
Oxygen - Andrew Miller
God's Own Country - Ross Raisin
How Late It Was, How Late - James Kelman
Secret Country - John Pilger
Flowers In The Attic - Virginia Andrews
Beyond Black - Hilary Mantel
Sum: 40 Tales From The Afterlife - David Eagleman
Light Years - James Salter
The Turning - Tim Winton
The Art Of Fiction (essay) - Henry James
"Dog" (poem) - Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Translations (play) - Brian Friel

Analysis Paralysis: The Guardian Master Class on Novel Writing

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Wines) — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 12:34:00 +0000

In my last post, I gave you the back story of how I wound up taking a Guardian Master Class on novel writing. If you haven't read it yet, you should, or you won't get any of my jokes in this post. (You still might not get the jokes, but it won't be your fault.)

Now that you know about my nonexistent sex life...

...we can continue on with more cerebral subjects. Speaking of cerebral, on one of our breaks during the class, I sat there, not saying a word (shocking, I know), waiting for the other students to say how much they hated the class. They were mostly British, so hatred was not forthcoming. (I imagine the same thing might happen in Canada.) But one of the students, comparing the first famous writer who spoke to us (Sarah Hall) to the second (Adam Foulds) said, "Adam is a little more cerebral than Sarah." This is an excellent example of a literary rhetorical effect called, understatement.

Now, don't get me wrong. Sarah and Adam are both brilliant and were super nice to us fledgling writers. But basically, what we did for a day and a half was read samples of famous writers' work and analyze them. We didn't write anything. We didn't talk about how to write a novel. It was, therefore, not a novel writing class. It was a literary analysis class.

Here's what we analyzed with Sarah: Writing dialogue without committing the heinous writer's crime of "He said, adoringly." Check. Making the torture and murder of chickens interesting. Check. Artistic character development: At night, accompanied by a storm lantern and a cat, in preparation for a family party, a man strings lights into the trees of a 300-year-old orchard. He sits at the base of a tree and weeps at the thought of losing his mother, but not before carefully removing, folding and placing his glasses in his pocket. Check. Writing things that make no fucking sense, so as to confuse and dazzle readers with your deep and mysterious obscurity. Check. Showing (rather than telling) poverty through images of hanging meat and a flowered dress/combat boots ensemble. Check.

Here's what we analyzed with Adam: Studium vs. punctum. (Don't ask.) Chyeck. Making the torture and killing of bulls (and the goring and subsequent PTSD of the bullfighter) interesting. Check. Poignancy: A courageous wimp loses in a street fight against a bully butcher and his publican and chimney sweep pals. And colorful imagery: "...the butcher lights ten thousand candles out of my left eyebrow." Check. Experimental writing: Retelling a Greek myth using characters who wear flip-flops and outrageous dialogue such as, "Greek, cut that bitch." Check. Showing a husband's devotion through the procurement and grilling of a slippery kidney. Check. More dialogue: Dignifying the t in shit. Self-flagellating would-be poet who sees the writing of poetry as a condition requiring fits. The strength of a parson's rhetoric (stronger, it seems, than his arms) in calming the wrath of an unforgiving squire. How many pupils can say, one at a time, "Good morning, sir." before a teacher named Paul says "Oh, shut up." (Three.) How, if you put the character's name in bold caps above their dialogue, you don't have to use quotation marks or "He said, adoringly." Check, check checkity check. Sentences: Long ones. Short ones. And meaningless ones like this: "A shining breakfast, a breakfast shining, no dispute, no practice, nothing, nothing at all." (Note to my formerly famous former writer boyfriend: the use of commas does fuck-all for this sentence.) Chee-yeck! Then a very long poem that we had to read five times but still couldn't figure out why there was a fucking haystack in there at all. (I've run completely out of checks.)

Thank the lourd we didn't have time to dissect this...

gedered þe grattest of gres þat þer were
and didden hem derely vndo as þe dede askez

...or I surely would have blown my brains out. (Hyperbole. Check.)

I defy you to name the books and authors whence the previous examples came. (Don't mind me. I'm practicing my Oulde English.) The good news about all this is that I now have quite a reading list. Despite my irreverent thrashing above, I liked almost everything we read and wanted to read more than the bits and pieces we sampled.

Needless to say, I've never been big on analysis. I'm action oriented. I learn by doing, rather than reading about what other people are or were doing. All the above just seemed like mental masturbation. (For clarification, see Jazz: musical masturbation.) I have to put a straight jacket on to do analysis (and listen to jazz). The Guardian served us cookies and tea, but there were no straight jackets. So, I fidgeted in my chair, tried desperately to participate and at the end of day one I seriously considered not coming back for day two. But there was one small problem. They were saving Hanif Kureishi (My Beautiful Laundrette, Buddha of Suburbia etc.) for last.

I read Kureishi's bio before I went to London. He started out writing porn. This was promising. He wrote a novel that was suspiciously close to his own story of leaving his partner and two young sons for a younger woman (Intimacy). He created fictional characters and stories resembling his family and upbringing, that were a bit too close to the bone. His sister is supremely pissed off at him because of it. He's controversial. My kind of guy!

Then he walked into the room. He looked and behaved almost exactly like my formerly famous writer former boyfriend. Smallish in stature, biggish in ego. Messy gray hair. Controversial sneakers. He made us all get up and move the chairs into a circle, while bitching about having to be there on a Sunday. I immediately hated him.

And I took more notes from him than I had all weekend. He also made us write and read what we wrote. I liked him, then. I was also delighted and awed by the writing of my fellow students. So was Kureishi. He was mostly gentle with his critique and always generous with his praise.

One of the students wrote about a woman of about my age, who suddenly understood that she had become invisible to men. It was like she knew me. My own desire to fade into the woodwork was exposed. Alas, I'm not the hot little smart girl I used to be. No longer sexual fodder for intellectual, existential, anarchist, skateboarding writers. I'm just smart. Finally smart enough to know that I don't have to sleep with writers to be one. I can just write. I spent about $150K for the privilege of sleeping with my formerly famously writerly former ex. I only had to pay £400 to listen to Kureishi and didn't have to fight off his ex wife, win over his children or argue with him about commas. ... Check!

Sex With Writers, Comma

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Wines) — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 09:33:00 +0000

Back in the late 80's, my friend Dana and I used to dream about being writers. We were roommates and co-workers, stuck in corporate hell together. But living in Laguna Beach, California was a kind of salve to our wounds. She'd jog or play volleyball on Main beach. I'd sit on the terrace of some beach-side restaurant and smell the ocean and become deeply sad, taking in the vastness of it all. This was my überintellectual way of avoiding any form of exercise. I also hate sand.

Dana and I share a character flaw: living vicariously through other writers. Living vicariously is a nice way of putting it. Sleeping with writers is more accurate, but we weren't only sleeping with them. We were willing vessels of all their writerly emanations.

Dana slept with a famous writer first, while renting a room in another famous writer's home. She was more focused than me. I was busy sleeping with various corporate suits or fiddle players or artists. I was unclear about my career objectives, evidently. But when my last artist boyfriend (and I mean LAST - I was nevereverever going to sleep with an artist again, ever!) ditched me in 2005 on Valentines Day (timing is, of course, everything), I became reallyreallyreally clear about being a writer. Really. Well, I also wanted to be a stand-up comedian. So I took a class from a hot comedy coach. Unfortunately, even though he was a most excellent teacher, he wouldn't sleep with me because I was too old (his age). Fine. I never liked his powder blue cowboy boots, anyway. OK? OK. (Love ya Tony!)

While still trying to sleep with my comedy coach, I finally met my very own artist-in-residence. What I mean to say is that he was homeless, so I let him live in my residence. He was a formerly-famous music critic, or as he would angrily correct me, a cultural critic. He was adorable! He quickly insulted and alienated all of my friends and let me pay the legal fees for his divorce from a formerly-famous rock star. I was so honored. He also couldn't stand living with me in an Arizona backwater, ironically called Carefree. He said, "Nobody's going to hire me as Their Man In Carefree." So I quit my cushy-but-insane corporate job, sold everything I owned and moved us to France, in hopes that somebody would hire him as Their Man In Paris. Then, I could be the girlfriend of somebody's Man In Paris!

At least I was writing. About the time I adopted him, I discovered blogging. So, during the first couple years in Paris, I blogged like a banshee while he ran around in circles, pulling at his hair. He was incredibly supportive of my writing, though. His compliments were valued, since he hated just about everybody and made sure that if he hated you, you knew about it. If he said my writing was good, then it was. But we had huge fights about my use of commas. Verbal brawls about commas. To this day, I have comma anxiety. I either leave them out completely or throw in a few extras to cover my ass.

Once a month or so, he'd write a sentence. I would listen, transfixed, as he read me that sentence. It was always a good sentence. An excellent sentence. And I hoped that very soon, this sentence, or maybe the other three sentences he'd written that year, would become a book, or maybe just an article, or perhaps a pamphlet. And that this book, article, pamphlet would pay our overhead, or at least buy cat food. Just in case, I thought I'd better go out and get a job so that he could write even more sentences.

I bet you can imagine how all that turned out. It used to be his ex-wife's fault that he's the way he is (whatever that is). Then it became all my fault. Somehow, I had the presence of mind to leave him. He is now free to write sentences to his heart's content, without my soul-destroying ~~support~~ interference. I hear he's doing undercover journalism by living on a park bench and reporting on the underbelly of Paris life. Or, something like that.

I still have my university job. In between classes, I run around in circles, pull at my hair, and write 4,378 sentences. Someday, I hope they become a book, or maybe an article, or perhaps a pamphlet.

Meanwhile, Dana's famous writer landlord recently departed this world, with a rigor mortis grip on a bottle of scotch. And while she's still friends with her famous former writer lover, she wonders what in hell she saw in him since he's just a neurotic pain in the ass. Live and learn! I'm pretty sure that neither one of us will have sex again for at least 50 years. This whole wanting-to-be-a-writer thing has taken its toll.

Dana stayed in corporate America, and graciously followed my life in Paris through my blog. She sees me as her hero - somebody who escaped corporate hell to become a writer. I have to say that ~~I don't regret~~ ~~I am happy~~ the jury is still out on this whole sell-everything-move-to-Paris-with-boyfriend-to-become-a-writer thing. But I was very touched when Dana emailed me a month or so ago and told me that she'd gotten a bonus at work and wanted to share some of it with me, to encourage me to write. I decided to not apply this gift to my rent or other expenses, but instead, I registered for a Guardian Master Class workshop on novel writing.

I can see my former boyfriend's not-so-silent disapproval now. "You always think you have to take a class to learn something. Just write." He's right. It's one of the things I hated the most about him. How often he was right, about many things. But, he was just such a dick about it. You can be right. Just don't be a dick, OK? If we were still together, I'd probably say, "Nobody knows, better than you, that I seriously need, to learn about commas."

I just wrote hundreds of sentences and still haven't told you about the writing class. But, (comma? no comma? OK, comma.) I felt like I needed to give you a little (haha!) back story. Stay tuned; soon I'll write hundreds of sentences to report on my class and trip to London. Comments about my comma use will be immediately deleted.

The Lies of Connards and Courtiers

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Wines) — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 08:15:00 +0000

I went with two friends Monday night to La Java to see an improv troop perform: LA TAVERNE MÜNCHAUSEN Joutes verbieuses et improvisades. It was amazing, even though I couldn't understand a word they were saying, since it was all in French. Well, maybe I got ten words. I laughed a couple of times, so I must have understood some of it. Of course, nobody else was laughing at that exact moment, so... Hmm.

The building is a bit run down but it was built in 1923 and beneath the peeling paint it still has that great 20's style. If Edith Piaf and Maurice Chevalier (Tank heben fahr leetle girlz...) were willing to sing there, it's good enough for me. Here's an English-language review of the place where there's a great shot of the outside of the building.

ANYhoo - I loved it. There are four main actors dressed in hilariously exaggerated period clothing (Louis XIV era) with white-painted faces and cherry-red lips (on the men it's quite dashing), who sit around a tavern table.

A young waitress, dressed in non-courtly clothes and unvarnished, quietly waits on them, pouring their drinks and helping the ladies arrange their elaborate dresses on the peeling Naugahyde bar stools. She was the same girl who sold me my 12 Euro cheese and meat plate at the bar before the performance.

Standing next to me at the bar, was one of the main actresses (I didn't know it until I saw her appear in costume on the stage) and the three of us had one hell of a time trying to figure out how much change I should get from my 50 Euro bill. Seriously. (50 minus 12 is? Go ahead, see how fast you can do it. Go ahe.. Oh. 38. Well, aren't you the smarty pants.) We gave away and took back and gave away so much paper and coin, all the time counting out loud ensemble, that I think I ended up with 350 Euros in the end. Or perhaps I paid 50 Euros for my cheese and meat.

Luckily, I scraped up some change from the bottom of my purse to stand in the drinks line and get my 5 Euro Planter's Punch. It was the size of a thimble, unfortunately, but was made up of mostly alcohol, fortunately.

But, I digress, as always. The fifth actor was the Emcee, of sorts (Check out his hilarious picture here.). The waitress took a basket with little rolled up scrolls and presented it to an audience member who chose one scroll and read it out loud. They consisted of questions like, "Why did you bring New York butter to Louis XIV?" and "Why did you spend four years inside a whale?" and "Tell us about your magical tooth." and "How did you mistake the queen's necklace for some sausage links?" Then the scroll was given to the Emcee, who sat at the table with the other four actors and read it again. One of the four main actors then had to stand up and, off the cuff, create a fantastical story to answer the question. The Emcee and other three actors would help their friend embellish the story, much to the enjoyment of the audience.

The four main actors carried little silk bags and if they told a successful story, they were awarded coins. If any of the actors insulted the others, coins were taken away. (This happened frequently.) After the break, the audience was allowed to write their own questions and the basket was passed again. The first round was timed, giving the actors three minutes to develop their stories and the second round lasted only one minute. In the end, the one with the greatest number of coins was the winner and the one with the least had his or her head chopped off. (Back stage, so there wouldn't be a big mess, I imagine.)

A couple of times, in between rounds, two actors left their table and mounted the stage with plastic swords and daggers and the Emcee picked a word from the dictionary. The two actors, parrying their weapons, then had to come up with a sentence that ended in a word that rhymed with the chosen word. The actor who couldn't come up with a sentence was the loser.

Even though I've been in intense French-language training since early February, reading the writings of Un Gros Connard (inside joke, so sorry), I had a hard time following this show. I have become proud of my new French vocabulary - Ou est la doudou? Elle n'as pas la doudou! C'est VOLUNTAIRE??? (inside joke #2 - just so that two other people can laugh with me right now, sorry again) - but the lies of a single Gros Connard (who, interesting enough, suffers from "Münchausen syndrome by proxy") and the criminal modern-day intrigue in which I've become embroiled are a pale (and, hopefully soon, distant) charade compared to the comedic prevaricating courtiers of The Sun King.

Arizona Rain

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Wines) — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 09:58:00 +0000

I've been combing through all my writing in preparation for a writing workshop April 9th and 10th. I found this piece I'd written in 2002, when I was in a relationship with an artist. It was a relationship that was wonderful for five years and then imploded when a deeper commitment was required. It's a shame, because it was the most peaceful time of my life.

Arizona Rain

September 11, 2002

As I sit in my home office starting the workday, I have the pleasure of looking out my rain-speckled window. Drops softly thud upon my roof and when two or more drops gather together on my windowpane, they merge into a tiny rivulet that meanders down the glass to puddle on the sill. I imagine long-thirsty desert plants reaching up to catch every drop. My black driveway shines like a mirror. I watch my neighbor walk by with her umbrella, on the way to the post office. Her old white dog is padding slowly behind her, head hung low, oblivious to the drizzle. I can’t see the cars driving by but I can hear their tires spinning like the water wheels at the old Pennsylvania mills where I grew up. Here and there, a tire hits a puddle and I hear the water splash and then slowly slide back into place.

It’s been raining all weekend. We’ve been waiting for it for months. Both of our monsoon seasons were a complete disappointment. No rain in February, none in August. Now hurricane Fay is dumping the last of her fury on us and we are grateful. In the desert, most of the cactus is lying on the ground, a sickly yellow, dead or dying. The tall saguaros are still standing but their trunks are sucked in like the cheeks of old men.

My boyfriend and I walked into the desert from his home last Saturday after the rain slowed down. We wanted to see the wash, usually bone dry, running for the first time in three years. We saw bugs that we had never seen before – out in hoards. As the first drops of rain hit the dusty ground, thousands upon thousands of termites wriggled out of tiny holes in the ground and flew upwards in a cloud. They looked like golden ants with long wings. We heard that these strange insect clouds were sighted in cities and towns near Phoenix and people didn’t know what they were.

I was drawn out of my reverie by a tiny colorful movement on the ground. I stooped to see a bug I had never seen before. Only a quarter of an inch long, maybe less, it’s back was fuchsia velvet, like a coat my sister wore to her prom in the 70’s. A beetle about an inch long flew smack into my boyfriend’s ear. It wore a somber, black and gray pinstripe suit.

The wash was definitely running, we could hear it as we approached from the house, 100 yards away. When we got to our favorite spot, there were tiny waterfalls, probably 5 or 6 of them, cascading down the caliche and rock, into the running torrent that was only six inches deep. My boyfriend stood on a large rock in the middle of the wash, so that he could see if his stone stacks still stood upstream. People have made stone stacks in forests for centuries. It’s like a meditation, choosing the right size, the right surface, the right color. Stacking them as if they form a prayer, marking your spot and beckoning other travelers to meet your stone totem along their way.

I stood on the edge of the flow, remembering news stories of people drowning from a surprise wall of water thundering down a wash. Soon we heard it, as if in answer to my overcautious thoughts, the surge intensified and the water rose another few inches at the edge. My feet were quickly submerged. No wall came, but my boyfriend made his way back to shore – just in case. His stone stacks had tumbled. But he would make new prayers, later.

I hope it rains for a week. I want to smell the astringent exotic creosote and rinse my body and senses of all the accumulated dust and heat. I am reminded that I live on earth and my feet are planted on moist, verdant soil. The needless worry in my mind clears too. No fear that I can conjure up is as real, or as important, or as timeless as an Arizona rain.

Jurassic Jeeves and the Mâcon Delta

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Wines) — Fri, 24 Dec 2010 17:30:00 +0000

I set the alarm on my laptop to gently awaken me, at 5am on December 23rd, with Ry Cooder's African Dream. I vowed to close the laptop by 9pm on December 22nd, in order to get enough sleep so that 5am wouldn't arrive like an unwanted telegram. I had a train to catch by 6:40 and didn't want to miss it.

I lay there in the dark, staring into the void. My body wanted to sleep but my mind wouldn't agree. It was time to re-open my laptop and turn to Bertie Wooster for solace and sleep.

Between him and his manservant Jeeves, solving yet another crisis of the idle rich, I knew that they would eventually arrive at the proverbial happy ending. Not the happy ending offered with a Thai oil massage (very popular with American middle-aged men in Chiang Mai), mind you, but the wholesome kind, where young aristocratic British men escape marriage to overly-pushy women and great aunt Agatha decides to put said young man back in her will. It's Jeeves, the valet, who is the learned one in these stories, while the public-schooled Sons-of-a-Viscount are foppish, well-dressed dandies with less than one brain cell shared between them.

Stories like these wouldn't be successful if there wasn't some truth beneath the comedy. I dare say that if Jeeves were running the world, we'd all be in a better place. I used to, and still do, think the same for the secretaries of the world. While their bosses hobnob with clients and abuse the company credit card, it's the secretary who gets all the work done. That's why I support an Ernestine/Jeeves 2012 American presidential ticket. Ernestine can be the public face for the duo and dismiss her critics with "We're the American government. We don't care, we don't have to." (Hey, American exceptionalism, completely misunderstood by Republicans, nervertheless works brilliantly as a battle call for their incredibly less informed base). Meanwhile, Jeeves can ingeniously bring peace to the Middle East and bring North Korea to its knees just like he blithely downed the dictator Lord Sidcup (leader of the fascist group The Black Shorts - named thusly because at the time, other fascist groups had taken all the shirts) by simply saying the one word "Eulalie". I'll leave it to you to look that one up. It's Christmas, by gum. What the fuck else do you have to do?

So, by midnight or perhaps 1am, I not only had watched three Jeeves & Wooster episodes, but also magically developed this new British writing style. Thusly, foppish and all that rot. What what? Right oh! And 5am came upon me like a wild elephant, no matter how gently Cooder's African Queen tiptoed upon my brain. If I only had a manservant like Jeeves to draw my bath and pack my bags and then carry them to the train station for me. But, I don't know where I'd put the poor chap. And I don't have a bathtub.

Unmanservanted, I dragged myself out of bed. I wedged myself into my shower and managed to wash my hair without bruising my elbows on the faucet handles and I even shaved my legs, which is quite a feat, since bending over in my shower is impossible (why, you might ask, would I shave when I will not be getting naked in front of anyone? I don't know, I might answer, perhaps because it's Christmas and I might get lucky with Santa?).

I had packed my bag the night before and laid out my traveling clothes in a big crunchy pile on the floor in front of the bathroom. I dressed, blew my hair to a smoking pulp, put on my Jon Stewart Rally For Sanity hat and two layers of coat and gloves, picked up my bag o' gifts and my backpack and set out in the crispy 5:45-in-the-morning air for the train station.

The train station was surprisingly alive with people, but I found my train easily and felt lucky to find a place for my bags in the luggage rack. I could sit in my seat and feel superior as the Bad Late People had to shove their bags into every available crevice... thus permanently burying my bags and crushing those delicate chocolate eggs, whose price included a donation to disadvantaged children. If those Bad Late People, a.k.a. luggage thugs, knew about the origin of those eggs, I bet they would not have been such insensitive beasts. Or, I think I would be better off if I become a Bad Late Person. At least my luggage would have been on top when I had to get off the train in Dijon. The Bad Late People all stared at me with blank faces as I threw their ten-ton valises into the aisle, desperately digging for my underprivileged eggs.

At Dijon, I waited for my connecting train that would take me to Mâcon, where my friend Helen (formerly of Troy) would pick me up and whisk me off to her Bergundian manor where I would be spending Christmas and New Years with her and her husband, Faustus.

OK, those aren't their real names. And their relationship isn't that tragic. At least, as far as I know.

The train trip was peaceful. I watched the sun break over the hills and the mist rise from the wet, green fields.

Snow clouds hung low and threatening...

...and leafless trees stood as sentries, reminding the earth and all its inhabitants that they will bloom again in the spring.

After arriving in Mâcon, Helen showed me around Faustus' family home. It had been in the family for hundreds of years and still contained many beautiful pieces of furniture, including Faustus' great grandmother's sleigh bed, now used as a couch in the living room. Standing in front of a crackling fire, I admired a giant armoire in the corner of the room.

Helen said, "Yes, that's our Jurassic armoire."
I said (channeling Bertie Wooster), "It's pretty damn big, all right."

If Jeeves had been the room, he would have discretely mumbled, "I believe what Madame Troy means, Madame, is that this family heirloom originates from the nearby mountain range of Jura, which essentially covers the region of Franche-Comté, stretching south to the region of Rhône-Alpes east of the department of Ain, where the range reaches its peak at Le Crêt de la Neige. The southern end of the French Jura is in the northwest of the department of Savoie. The north end is in the very south of Alsace. It is because of this provenance of the armoire that it would be considered Jurassic and is not at all related, Madame, to the 1993 American movie Jurassic Park, wherein, as I imagine Madame must be referencing, many large terrestrial vertebrates, commonly referred to as dinosaurs, cavorted."

I said, "That will be all Jeeves."
He said, "Thank you, Madame."

I Admit I'm Powerless Over Neighbor Noise and Ask My Higher Power To Help Me Find A New Apartment

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Wines) — Sun, 05 Dec 2010 10:48:00 +0000

Lately, I've been living my life with earplugs inserted. I wear them so much that I have forgotten they were in and wondered, of a groggy morning, why I couldn't hear myself peeing. Yesterday, I almost stepped into the shower with them. On the days when I don't go to school and stay home to work on my book, I never take the earplugs out.

If you've been reading my blog for a while, you already know that I live in an 'interesting' building in Paris. Ugly on the outside. Ugly on the inside. Could possibly be condemned some day (like Monday). But I just don't pay attention to all of that because the rent's cheap and the residents will keep me busy with writing fodder for many years to come. But lately, they have forced me into Earplug Overuse.

In the courtyard below my window, there's my partner in crime, 'G' and her miniature daughter, the Divine Miss M. I can hear everything going on down there, including the cat meowing to get back in, Miss M riding her bicycle in circles and crashing into the patio furniture and G arguing with The French Bureaucracy (du jour). When G has a party (in her words, a "cocktail"), I'm usually there, drinking all of the cocktails, so I get to hear everything directly, if a bit slurrily. I haven't minded these sounds very much. It's only once in a while that I fantasize about locking Miss M in the closet.

Across the courtyard from G is Toilet Guy, who we renamed Socket Man, since he is (still) obsessed with G's empty (poor girl) socket. In contrast to the rest of the building's inhabitants, he is so silent that we often wonder if he's dead. But he becomes incredibly, redundantly talkative when you run into him in the hallway and have to have a conversation about electricity with him. This is the only thing he can talk about, along with The Coming Storm and how it could electrocute us all, if we're not careful. We avoid him, and The Coming Storm, like the plague.

Then there are The Moroccan Girls, whom I used to refer to as The Muslim Girls until G told me that was rude. "Would you be happy if they called you The Catholic Girl?" Well, yes, because I'm a Recovering Catholic Girl and accuracy, in the area of religion, is important to me. Anyway, they consist of one Mama and three lovely daughters renting the closet of an apartment that I had rented when I first got here. We've become friends and food borrowers. By renting my old apartment, they also inherited The Masticating Toilet. I can still hear that damn toilet up here on the third floor every time it masticates.

Across the hall from The Moroccan Girls is The Ululating Slapper. He sings and chants and slaps himself at 6:00 every morning. Luckily, I don't hear that anymore.

That's because King Kong drowns him out. This is the building's maintenance woman and all I can say is that she enters the scene at 6ish every morning and throws open the courtyard door, throws open the trash room door, roars when she views our collective filthiness, angrily drags all four trash cans out, then bangs them, one at a time, through the courtyard door, along the corridor and then out the front door. Then she returns to the building and takes a mop and slams it into everybody's door as she pretends to clean the stairs. After 7ish, she retrieves the now-empty bins and bangs them through the front door, bumps and scrapes them against the hallway walls, throws open the courtyard door, upends the trash cans and sprays them down with the hose, throws open the trash room door, smashes the trash bins inside, slams the door closed, then raises her fists to the sky and curses at us all before she thankfully leaves. I don't know how she manages to do all this with Fay Ray struggling, like a tiny Barbie doll, in her hands.

On the first floor is a petite tonsured man whom G calls My Future Husband. He's a private chef, evidently. And very nice. But not my future husband. No. Not at all. Just erase that thought from your mind. I never used to hear a thing from him, but lately he's decided to learn Italian. Perhaps he's decided to join the priesthood, with his monk-like hairdo and all. So, I get to learn Italian with him (Uno, due...), depending on how loud the masticating toilet is.

Next door to him and just below me is The Hot Tan Girl. She really is beautiful. One of G's guy friends, who was visiting from Los Angeles, would do pushups in the courtyard in the morning, hoping that Hot Tan Girl would notice him. His wife, sipping coffee inside G's apartment, would roll her eyes and yell, "Good luck with that, Chunky." In the past year or so, Hot Tan Girl has had a few parties, with music and loud fun-having. But it's been pretty rare. She does have the habit, before she goes to sleep at night and right when she wakes up, of slamming her metal window covers open and closed. This sounds like an explosion, until you get used to it. Which I have not. But, then, a few weeks ago, she got a boyfriend. I am delighted for her. She's really nice and sweet and deserves to be loved. But does she really deserve to have four orgasms, four times a day? Does she deserve a boyfriend who doesn't have his orgasm until she has been reduced to a wet noodle? Yes, she does. We all do. I just wish I wasn't reminded of it every single day. Perhaps this is The Coming Storm which Socket Man has been warning us about for so long. Anyway, I pay attention to the frequency (and not the content) of their emanations, knowing from experience that the ohhing and ahhing will eventually slow down and "Why the fuck did you forget to buy toilet paper?" will eventually take their place.

Across the hall from The Coming Storm is an apartment that is provided as a temporary haven for women escaping domestic violence. A few times, that violence followed them here, in the form of two robberies. Unluckily, I didn't hear anything, though I was here both times. The robbers even rummaged around in G's outdoor toolbox and then took the maintenance ladder off the wall of the courtyard and plopped it against the building and climbed up to the apartment's window and broke the window lock with G's screw driver and climbed in and then climbed out, leaving a trail of the current resident's underwear as they descended. How in the hell did I miss that? I didn't even know how to use earplugs then, let alone own a pair.

Next is my floor. I used to have a guy on the other side of my wall (our beds are separated by a 4-inch-thick, uninsulated sheet-rock wall. Isn't that cozy?) who came home from work every night and turned on The Simpsons (Les Simpson!). I enjoyed hearing the song. Then his iPhone would ring and I would jump up, looking for my iPhone. Then I remembered that I only have three friends in Paris and they never call me. So I'd sit back down and listen to his conversation (I had no choice). I could have learned all sorts of things about him, if I spoke better French. But alas, he remained a mystery. I never heard anything else from him, though. No moaning or anything. (Thank God.) Then, a few weeks ago, he moved out. And a nice young girl moved in who keeps her TV on all night, listens to Hip Hop all day and when she goes away for the weekend, she forgets to turn her alarm off and it starts BEEP BEEP BEEPing at 6AM and doesn't stop for, well, hours. On the weekends when she stays home, I think she invites her friends from out of town to stay with her. They are party animals. The music is on full blast, so they have to shout at each other to be heard. They have a lot to say, so they keep on shouting until 5 or 6AM. Ear plugs are insufficient, so I now open iTunes on my laptop, set it to permanent calm-but-boring music shuffle, at full blast to drown out the Hip Hop, insert my ear plugs and somehow go to sleep. I have been tempted, when I get up the next morning and they're all snoring, to play 80's Madonna music at full blast. But that's passive aggressive behavior and... downloading her music was too expensive.

Last month, the Hot German Guy across the hall from me moved out and the Hot Tall Dark-Haired Guy moved in. I only know this because he came over with his landlord to ask if I had any moisture. At least that's what I thought they said. I answered, "Well, not as much as I used to. I'm over 50, you know." But then, through sign language, I figured out that they wanted to see the brown water stains on my ceiling because they have the same stains and need to know if it's coming from the apartment above us. I showed them my stains but they didn't show me theirs. I didn't hear much from him after that, until his tall pretty girlfriend knocked on my door and asked for a tire-bouchon, which I thought might mean toilet plunger but when she demonstrated its use, I figured out she wanted a corkscrew. After I gave her the wine plunger, they had a wild party. I could hear it through my ear plugs. I thought someone was being murdered. I jumped out of bed, ready to run out there and save the day in my Super Girl socks, but when I pressed my good eye against the peep hole, I saw many happy people laughing and drinking in the hallway, all wearing fashionable leather jackets. I'm glad I looked before I ran out there. I would have been sorely under dressed wearing only my Super Girl socks.

Up above me? Other than the water seepage, there is a nice husband and wife with a little two-year-old boy. He runs back and forth, back and forth, like an elephant on the wooden floor until precisely 9PM, at which point, I imagine, he is drugged and laid to rest. I am happy that my upstairs neighbors' parenting skills include sticking to the bed time rule. Now, if they would just fix their leaking shower.

So, between cat meows, child bikes, bureaucratic argueings, crashing mops and trash cans, masticating toilets, Oh OH! OHHHHHHHHing, Ah AH! AHHHHHHHHing, Italian lessons, Hip Hop, TV, child elephants, alarm clocks, robberies, dripping ceiling sounds and leather parties, I now know that everybody has a life, except me.

Earplugs have saved me from the onslaught of other people's lives. But as an added benefit, I now know what my body sounds like from the inside out. Earplugs block the outside noise but reveal the gurgling, hissing sounds of my corpus. There's a constant hum to it. Maybe it's the blood running through my veins. Sometimes I forget I have a body, so it's good to know that it's still there, miraculously functioning on its own.

Moral of the story? There really is no such thing as silence. Even in a people-less forest, you can hear squirrels cracking nuts, mooses mating, streams gurgling and from time to time, that annoying one hand clapping. If I moved to the forest, the night owls would be pissing me off to no end. I should probably just get out of my apartment more often. Or, start learning how to play the drums.

The Normandy Chronicles: Day Five: Seamen, Baggywinkles and Le Havre's Sensual Inlet

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Wines) — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 12:38:00 +0000

Based on my photos, Galadriel and I were good girls on the fifth day of our Normandy chateau inspection trip. On this day, I have no food or wine porn pics, which means we must have been very serious. Of course, that's probably because it was the last day, so we had to "catch up" on all the places we didn't get around to seeing because we took so much time taking food and wine porn pics at all the restaurants along the way.

Speaking of serious, do you see what I see in this picture? If so, you have a filthy mind, just like me. And Galadriel too, it seems. As she was chatting with the manager in the lobby of the first hotel we visited, Les Voiles, I was busy behind her, snapping pictures of the sexual bits of the Normandy coastline that were just hanging there, right on the wall, for all the world to see. Or maybe some people might just see it as an old map of Le Havre harbor. But they have no imagination (or, they've never done the mirror thing).

Galadriel, with a look on her face that said, "What are you doing NOW?" (this was day five, after all - she knows me now), nudged me as the hotel manager passed me by to lead us on the inspection tour. I silently pointed to Le Havre's Secret Garden of Delight and only had to lift one eyebrow and she got it, right away. Perhaps I even whispered, "What does that look like to you?" I don't remember. But I just have to say that the entire day, as we made our way around the Vajayjay of Le Havre (We even crossed it! I extended a respectful salute to the clitoris on the left side of the bridge.), I couldn't cast off the feeling that I was going where too many sailors had gone before.

Hotel Les Voiles is on the northern thigh of Le Havre's, er, inlet, in a beach-side town called Sainte-Adresse. Other than the map, I didn't take any pictures of the hotel. It didn't float my little-man-in-the-boat. (Oh my. I just realized that I've now set the tone for this post and must come up with an endless amount of metaphors for female genitalia.) The hotel had a sort of contrived nautical decor, with portraits of old seamen, some baggywrinkles and of course, a whipstaff. (I'm making this part up.) Based on where it was situated (at the top of the hill, beginning of the town, overlooking the beach) and how it smelled (not terrible, but they may need to clean the bilge more often), it reminded me of the old Laguna Shores hotel (Laguna Beach, CA - here's an old post card), long before it was renovated.

The hotel manager was anxious that we also inspect his other hotel (Hotel des Phares), just a few blocks away, because it was in a more authentic historical building. He must have sensed our lack of enthusiasm with the faux seafarer's life. We were... thrilled to go see it. (Not.) But what the heck, it was pretty. Well, the historic building part of it was. The other buildings? Les Annexes? Not so much. Plus, the people the hotel manager called to ask if they could greet us and give us a tour, were just as thrilled to give us the tour as we were to be there. (Not.)

So, other than the fact that I had discovered an ancient, little-known sea passage into the Garden of Eden, I was underimpressed. But I have to say that neither hotel was terrible. Hotel Voiles had a restaurant and bar overlooking the ocean. I'm sure I could at least get drunk while watching the sun set. And if I wanted to have a room overlooking the sea to sleep off the grog, I could book the "Non-Commissioned Officer's Cabin" (if I'm lucky, he might not have deck watch that night) for only 150 Euros a night. (What? I should be able to sleep with the Captain for that price.) Or, I could stay here (our next stop on our trip) instead, for the same price. Hmmm. Decisions, decisions.

The Normandy Chronicles: Day Four: Domaine Saint Clair Le Donjon - Étretat

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Wines) — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 13:46:00 +0000

As you've been reading in the last few Normandy Chronicles, day 4 on our B&B inspection trip had been long and action-packed, with stormy skies, fabulous lunch and wine, some foxes (Mr., Mrs. & Little Mister) and one American.

Well, I didn't write about the one American we met, because he was totally disinterested in the fact that I was American and instead spoke to Galadriel in French... with a New York accent. He has a B&B in the area and to be fair, he only talked to Galadriel because he wanted to be in her B&B guide (or not get kicked out of it...I'm not sure which). He was all business. But still, it was disconcerting to just follow them around the place (me and the cats) without him at least once saying, "So, where are you from in the states?" I could have fallen off a cliff and he wouldn't have noticed.

French B&B owners at least realize that I'm a friend of The Inspector General and so they smile at me (if they don't speak English) or try out a little English with me, just to be polite. So, Mr. American and his brand spanking new Hammam and strange retro 70's decor (of both he was quite proud) will be punished by the lack of mention of his B&B in this highly influential blog of mine. I didn't even take any pictures. So, there.

Meanwhile, darkness was descending and my belly was full with Mr. & Mrs. Renard's cake and tea. My head began to loll as Galadriel drove with her feet so she could simultaneously thumb through three or four guidebooks and make telephone calls.

Moi: (not-so-innocently) So, where are we staying tonight?
Galadriel: (ever-so-guiltily) Um. That's what I'm trying to figure out.

It was, like, 9pm. I admit that this is lunch time for French people but I'm usually asleep by 9pm. Even though I might be sitting in a smokey bar somewhere, late at night or in the wee hours of a polluted morning, discussing Nietzsche's philology and how the aphorism 'Mediocrity is forgiven more easily than talent' proves that we the gifted (i.e. everybody at our table but NOT everybody in the bar) suffer so, I am actually asleep. Because I can discuss Nietzsche in my sleep. As a matter of fact, I'm sleeping now.

So, just like Mary, Joseph and the Baby Jesus (I'm Mary and Jesus. Galadriel can be Joseph), there was no room at any inn.

Moi: How about we go stay at one of the places we inspected today? Except the American guy. I hated him.
Galadriel: We could... But I'm afraid they'll all be in bed by now.
Moi: But, French people never go to bed before dawn.
Galadriel: How would you know?
Moi: Because I wake up at dawn and I see them all stumbling home, smelling of Poire William and cigarettes.

Galadriel began to list our choices. One of them she described as an old chateau that was kind of expensive. My eyes lit up. I like kind of expensive, especially when I'm not paying. Let's go there! Well, since she visited it last time, it had been purchased by somebody new and she didn't know if it was any good anymore. Well, of course it's good! Her head agreed but her eyes didn't. This is when I know that there's something about this thing I want to do or see that's against Galadriel's religion. Like my usage of wet wipes. But, I ignored this subtlety and commenced to ooh and ahh all the way up the hill to Domaine Saint Clair - Le Donjon.

Until I got to the reception area. Oh my. I had been trying to explain the term 'clusterfuck' to Galadriel for a few days. As the very friendly woman at reception found us a room, I pulled on Galadriel's little linen shirt and said, sotto voce, "This is a clusterfuck." and swept my hand from one corner of the lobby to the other, like Vanna White showing a gasping winner their new kitchen, vintage Camaro, fully equipped gym and lion cub. The winner might have her hands clasped in front of her ecstatic face, jumping up and down and screaming with excitement, but in the dark crevasses of her mind, she's thinking, "Holy shit! Where am I going to put all this shit?"

Well, I think she put it all in the lobby of Domaine Saint Clair and Saint Clair is turning in her grave right now.

Let me walk you through the experience...

This is what you see through the doors at the main entrance and lobby. Yes. This is the main entrance. I really like the coat hanger thing. It speaks of the old chateau world, of luxury... and winter coats... in the middle of June. And what's behind the coat rack and carved oriental screen?

This.

I like the pastel faux velvet armchairs kind of shoved together every which way, surrounding a plastic pool-side table. I'll call this little nook The Asian Poolside British Grandma Knitting Nook.

Let's move on through this gigantic lobby, where we now approach the two-story-high stone wall of the chateau, graced by a thousand-foot-long leather couch, more plastic pool-side tables and ultra-modern-retro chairs from Mars.

I think they were going for a theme here, but I'm at a loss as to what that theme might be.

And finally, just before we reach the door leading out to the pool and meeting/wedding tent, we have this little reading alcove, with newsprint-covered chairs, a giant vase filled with empty Badoit bottles (French mineral waters known for their hangover-healing properties) and a bronze sculpture of god-knows-what on a wooden platform with peeling paint. Behind me, not seen in the picture, is a pastel-colored impressionist painting on an ornate gilded easel. I call this The News Room.

As far as the rest of our lucky Wheel Of Fortune contestant's winnings, the Camaro is probably hanging from the ceiling and the kitchen was across from the News Room and the gym is in the meeting/wedding tent when they aren't holding any meetings or weddings. But the lion cub was nowhere to be found.

Oh wait. Here he is, looking rather nonplussed. I found him curled up in the center of the room on a cracked black lacquer and yellow faux velvet couch.

So, as a friend once wisely told me - "They never treat you better than on the first date." - this probably was an indication that things were going to go downhill from here.

We were given a choice of two rooms. They were both hilariously full of mismatched furniture that is made to look expensive but is really thrown together in sweat shops in some distant banana republic. Galadriel's nose was so bent out of shape that the ever-so-nice receptionist's smile began to crack like all of the furniture in the joint as Galadriel asked me in English, "They're both terrible. You choose." I refused to decide. There was no way I could win. At the moment she handed the receptionist her credit card, Galadriel had broken every standard of her highly evolved religious fervor for natural surroundings, simple comfort and real people. If I chose one room over the other, she would be horrified that I could have chosen any of them at all. So, I made her do it.

We ended up with this place (the telescope was extremely useful), probably because the bath tub was giant and when Galadriel the Mermaid can't jump into the ocean daily to wet her little fins, she must immerse herself in water somehow. So, while she washed away the now-vivid meaning of clusterfuck, I headed for the back porch to smoke 42 cigarettes in anticipation of how bad our dinner in this hotel's 'Restaurant gastronomique' would be. Galadriel has a way of asking questions about the wine list and menu that send waiters into rehab for months.

That's when I found the home of the Pod People. This giant contraption took up 1/3 of our patio. It was either a covered wagon or a barbecue. I couldn't be sure. I waited for Galadriel to emerge from her water treatment so she could help me take off the cover.

It looked like this inside. A giant love seat. Or a portable harem. Or it's where I Dream Of Jeannie was filmed. That little towel was there because the bottom cushion was stained and soaking wet. Very appealing. There was something strange about this thing. It had a presence of its own. You could not be on that porch and ignore it. It's like the gaping mouth of a whale or Pacman just before they swallow you whole. Once we opened up the mouth of death (and couldn't put the cover back on), we could not go out on that porch again.

In the lobby of our room's building, we encountered more decorating aberrations with the combination of large black and white-tiled marble floor, a stained-white silk whore house couch, a Chinese kneeling soldier statue, a Japanese Buddhist meditating monk picture and a merry-go-round rocking horse. OK, I have to upload those pictures too. I just want you to all be horrified with me.

Soooooo. Off to dinner we went. It was actually quite nice. The food was delicious and they had one bottle of natural wine on the list. We watched the sun set on the water and relaxed. (This picture of me watching the sun set was taken at 10:01pm. I love how long the days last in the summer here.) The female maître d' was unceasingly pleasant, as was our waiter. This is the one thing that still stands out about this place. All the people who worked there had an impeccable service attitude and friendly demeanor.

Even the poor young guy that worked the breakfast room the next morning. There were so many disasters that I can't remember them all. Somebody dropped a plate and it broke all over the food table and floor and I think there were little bits of china in the food. Galadriel brought a hard-boiled egg to the table and when she broke it open it had never seen a pan of boiling water in its life. The waiter apologized and took her messy plate and brought her a new plate and egg and she proceeded to open that one and it hadn't been cooked yet either. The only indication of his exasperation was an under-the-breath Mon Dieu! as he ran back to the kitchen to try and get the real hard-boiled eggs.

Oh, and one last thing. I took a little walk the next morning down a pretty path that had a great view of the ocean below but also was the secret stash for the hotel's discarded furniture. This lamp base is simply awesome.

Stay tuned for Day 5, where we visit three hotels - a beautiful chateau in Eure, currently owned by an Englishman, but also has a rich and juicy history dating back to 1606 and involving an unscrupulous step-father who discarded his new wife's children to try and steal her money and estate. The children came back to retake their fortune with the aid of Catherine, Empress of Russian, but lost it again by spending too extravagantly in expectation of the Empress's visit. We also toured a very nice hotel in Deauville with a garden where we had tea and then a very artsy and colorful hotel in Calvados. Adieu!

Ain't No Cracks In MY Cheesecake

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Wines) — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 19:02:00 +0000

I interrupt this program of The Normandy Chronicles to talk about cheesecake. Not the kind where girls show their ankles. But the kind where girls eat so much that their ankles swell.

Besides, I am very far behind on The Normandy Chronicles, which will soon be enhanced with my Brittany chronicles and then my Languedoc chronicles. I am still deciding if I want to turn all my chronicles into a self-published book called 89 Vacations In One, since that's what it's turned out to be. If I go this route, I'll probably offer the book as a download for a small price and also serialize the book for those who don't have a few dollars to spend on a book and don't mind waiting for the next installment. I'll keep you posted.

Meanwhile, I'm still hanging out in Brittany with Galadriel at her home near the beach, since I don't really have to go back to Paris until I start teaching again in the Fall. There's another friend staying here with us. She's a French-Russian (mother is French, father is Russian) and she asks me many questions about America (some for which I know the answer and most for which I make up answers). Par example:

Frussian: Which states in America are sexy?
Framerican: Definitely not Ohio.

My apologies to Ohioans. But really, do you think your state is sexy?

Oh, and about those Russians. I forgot that Galadriel is Frussian too - her mother is Russian and her father is French. So, now that that's cleared up...

The night before last, the dinner conversation turned to typical American food. I mentioned hot dogs (many French sounds of disgust, something akin to phlugh!). Then hamburgers (No reaction. It could be they like these things but they are afraid to admit it).

Talking about food in France is dangerous territory, of course. French people are, rightfully so, very proud of their gastronomy. It's the main topic of conversation in everyday life, with the second most popular topic being the wine which will accompany the food. They can talk (and argue minute details) for hours on these subjects. Why, just the other day, we went to visit some friends who own an art gallery in the resort town of La Baule and I stood for what seemed like hours, waiting for some gallery visitors to leave. After all, they said they were leaving. We all did the double-cheek kiss and everything. Now, why weren't they leaving?

Well, it's because somebody brought up the subject of lobster. Off they went to the races. Canadian lobsters have no taste. The Norwegian lobsters are too pink. But the Bretagne (Brittany, i.e. local) lobsters - oh lah lah. (I just made all that up. The only thing I know is that they were talking about lobsters. For months.) Finally, they solved the Great Lobster Question and we all had to do the double-cheek mwa mwa kiss thing again. (It's a peculiarity of the French that they have to kiss everyone when they enter a party or somebody's home or run into each other in the street. I find myself reluctantly kissing many cheeks. Of people I don't know and sometimes, of people I don't particularly like. This can be disconcerting for a girl like me who likes to hide from people. When I'm around a bunch of Americans, it's always such a relief to not have to kiss anybody.)

So, as you can imagine, it's difficult for French people to think that any food can be good and of course, never can any food be superior. So, I moved the conversation deftly to dessert. This is safe territory, since French people love sweets and don't mind tasting sweets made by infidels. So, I mentioned pineapple upside down cake - a 1950's American favorite. Then baked Alaska. They were (somewhat) fascinated. Until they both decided that they were just like their own desserts called je-ne-sais-quoi and je-ne-sais-rien. Then:

Frussian: Ohhh! I know! J'adore Cheesecake! Can you make cheesecake?
Framerican: Yes. (Liar. Well, not necessarily. CAN I make it? Well, of course I CAN. HAVE I made it before? Wellll, yes. IF you consider buying a pre-made graham cracker crust and pouring in a quickly thrown together cheesy batter - from a boxed mix - and freezing the poor thing until it hardens into a cheesy rock. Yes.)
Frussian: Oh, can you make it for us? Please, please?
Framerican: But, of course!

So, the next morning, I scrounged around the internets, looking for the recipe for Junior's New York Cheesecake. I remember going to Junior's many years ago and walking back to my sister's Brooklyn apartment, carefully holding that five-ton precious cake. There's nothing quite like it, to be sure. I wanted my Frussian friend to experience that very same thing. Then I saw the recipe (linked above) and gulped with fear. Ever since I gave away the keys to the kitchen to my last boyfriend, I've lost my Cooking Confidence. It didn't help much when I was staying with Galadriel's friends at their bee and donkey farm (a story yet to be told) when I offered to make soup and while digging in their cabinets I found some Cayenne pepper and just TAPPED the bottle over the soup and inflicted merely a sprinkle upon the huge cauldron. Well. It was hot as a mother trucker. Mr. and Mrs. Bee-Donkey-Farm were polite, but Mrs. Bee did choke a little. Kind of like a Barbie choke. But choke, she did.

So, I gave up on Junior's. It just seemed too...complicated. I also began to realize that all the recipes I was finding were not in metric amounts and they called for things like a spring-form pan. "Do you have a spring-form pan?" I asked Galadriel. "A what?" she countered. "Oh, never mind." In addition, heating temperatures were given in Fahrenheit versus Centigrade and Galadriel's gas stove is calbrated in "gas marks" - 1-10, with 11 thrown in there for good measure. (If you're a musician, you know what 11 means. Try not to lust.)

Finally, I found a cheesecake recipe that handily provided Centigrade and metric measurement equivalents. Galadriel told me that 10-11 was equal to 300 degrees Centigrade and 3 was about 90. Close enough for government work.

So, Galadriel went shopping and brought home goat cheese to substitute for Philadelphia cream cheese and crème fraiche to substitute for whipping cream. You can't find graham crackers here, so I used spéculoos cookies. All set? Well, kinda. The girls left me alone in the kitchen. Thank God. Because I had noooo idea what I was doing. Was Galadriel's round baking pan 9 inches? I dunno. (I could make a joke here, but I won't.) I just looked at the pan and decided to cut the recipe in half. (Maybe because I have years of experience telling the difference between 6 inches and well, four. Sorry, couldn't resist.)

So I decided to crush the cookies. Any zip-lock bags? Nope. OK, a plastic grocery bag? Yep. Rolling pin? Nope. Galadriel brought me a rubber mallet from her tool shed. Perfect. Cookies duly crushed. I melted the butter, added it to the cookies and flattened them into the bottom of the pan. So far, so good. I shoved the pan in the oven to cook the crust.

Now, for the goat cheese. The recipe calls for freaking 2.5 pounds or 1.1 kilograms. Hmmm. Does Galadriel have any measuring cups or a scale? Nope. Okkkk. So I dug around in the cabinets and found an empty sauce jar whose label claimed it contained 300 grams of something. So...how many grams are in a kilogram? It's been YEARS since I bought illicit drugs, so I've completely forgotten. Frussian tells me that there are 1000 grams in a kilo. (Do you KNOW what the street value of 1000 grams of coke are these days? Neither do I.) So that meant that I needed about three of those jars stuffed with goat cheese to make almost one kilo so half of that would be a jar and a half. Et voilà.

I didn't tell you this would be easy. So, carry on.

Galadriel had a hand mixer but it was taken from a space alien ship or is also used by Roto Rooter to clean out the toilets. Whatever. I rinsed it, ok? And I clomped all the goat cheese in a bowl and tried desperately to make it creamy and it wasn't budging. So, I threw in the crème fraiche to liquefy things. I know, I know. It's out of order from the recipe, but too freaking bad, ok?

OK?

Then I threw in the sugar, salt and eggs and a little squeeze of lemon and then realized I didn't have any vanilla. Galadriel handed me some vanilla sticks. Oh. Hmmm. OK. They were hard as rocks. I snapped about an inch off of one. I threw it into a little pan of boiling water to "soften it up." I forgot about it. It burned to the bottom of the pan. I got the vanilla seeds out of it anyway. They tasted like plegh. So I didn't use them.

I also forgot about the graham cracker crust that was supposed to be cooking for only 10 minutes in the oven. Oops. It was, uh, golden brown. That's ok, it was going to be covered with my cheese mix. That mix whose consistency was worrying me. It was a bit, well, wet. I thought it should be kind of thick. So I added three tablespoons of flour. What the hell. I did the little drop-bowl-o-mix-on-counter (to get the bubbles out - why I have no clue, but mine is not to reason why) and then poured the mix on top of the crust. It filled the pan. I was right to cut the recipe in half.

I want this recorded. I was right.

As a last-minute fling, I sprinkled little bits of lemon zest all over the top of the cake. (Sacrilege! I'm sure.) Then I put it into the oven at 11 (rock star heat level) and this time, I set the timer for 10 minutes. I actually was near the timer and heard it... and knew what it meant... even though I was drunk. This is a miracle. I then turned the oven down to 3 and set the timer for 100 minutes. 100 minutes? 100 minutes.

Then I read all the comments under the recipe about all these people wringing their hair out about cracks in their finished cake. If that cake tasted remotely like cheese cake, fuck the cracks. OK? My biggest fear is that it would burn on the outside and when cut, would dribble egg yolks and wet cheese all over the place. I sat, in fear, for minutes. 100s of them.

I also read that after pulling the cake out, it had to first cool on a wire rack for an hour or two and then cool in the refrigerator for 4 more hours. It was 7pm. Frussian was hovering, asking, "Eez eet cayk-uh yet?" Everyone wanted cheesecake after dinner. Uh-oh.

The cake puffed up beautifully and then as it was cooling, it kinda sagged. (But I have years of experience with that too, so it didn't bother me.) But, there were no cracks! I shoved it in the fridge after an hour. We made and then ate dinner and we disobeyed the recipe and breathlessly cut into the cake after only two hours of cooling. It was fabuloso. Really. It was fab. I was thrilled. It wasn't as high as Junior's cheesecake, but it tasted great!

So, there's a lesson here, somewhere. Something about saying no to cracks? But, it's really about taking a risk and clusterfucking yourself to cheesecake glory. Anybody can do it. Even moi. Here are some pictures to prove it:

The Normandy Chronicles: Day Four: White Cliffs of Étretat and an Architect Named Renard

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Wines) — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 19:59:00 +0000

We were late, as usual. I don't remember why, but I can almost guarantee it was because we got lost in the pleasure of something. Lunch. Wine. Sitting by the sea. (Lisa checks her pictures to remind herself of where she's been.) Oh yes, we had just finished eating a fabulous lunch at Le Garde Manger while Men In Boots tested out the floodatiousness of the fire hydrant five feet from our lunch table.

Then we wandered back to the enormous white seaside cliffs of Étretat, to see why Monet felt the need to paint them 125 years ago. Here's a picture I took of the cliffs and then enhanced in iPhoto so that I could be just like Monet. Ahem.

It was raining and the storm clouds over the sea were beautiful. That kind of somber light always makes the colors pop. I couldn't leave without taking some pictures of the boats upended on the beach.

We drove up a winding road that gave us an amazing view of the cliffs below and green rolling hills above. Our destination was Les Charmettes, a classic 19th century villa that has been the home of four generations of a family named Renard (In English - Fox). Of course, I didn't know any of this before I got there. (Galadriel doesn't tell me anything. Of course, she'd be right if she said, "Lisa never asks me anything.") I also didn't know that we had to visit another bed and breakfast in Étretat and that we had not yet reserved a place to rest our weary little heads for the evening. Ignorance is bliss.

Monsieur and Madame Renard met us at the end of the lane leading up to their villa. They were taking advantage of the fresh, rain-soaked air to walk with their child in his stroller. That baby had great big fat cheeks and an addicting smile. In contrast, Monsieur Renard seemed as serious as the cloudy day. Uh-oh. When I meet men who don't smile, I immediately think I'm in trouble. But I was soon to learn that this was not the case.

We parked at the base of the villa and walked up a hill and through the beautiful gardens to the front entrance. As we walked in, I encountered a smell from my childhood - graphite. My father was a mechanical designer and taught me to be a draftswoman. I worked for him in his office before computers took over the design field and his office always smelled like graphite, vellum and oak.

To the right, off the main entrance hallway at Les Charmettes (still paved in original tiles), was a typical architect's room, with an old-fashioned oak drafting table. The sliding straight edge was positioned towards the bottom of the drawing table and vellum was scattered on the desk and stored in flat files. Monsieur Renard is an architect, as was his father, grandfather and great grandfather.

Madame Renard and her sweet child left us with her husband so we could tour the home. The guest rooms were comfortably furnished, but what captured my attention was the incredible art and sculpture that we encountered at every turn.

Monsieur Renard has a passion for art and in addition to his large collection, he's hosted several artists, such as Gail Hood, recently retired visual arts professor at Southeast Louisiana University. She gave the Renards this painting of the Etretat cliffs that she had made from their villa's porch. When I looked her up online, I found this interesting article and photo about a beautiful painting she just created, using some of the crude oil from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

Hidden at the top of the stairs was a powerful pastel drawing done by one of Monsieur Renard's relatives - I think it was his uncle - of a naked African man. He kept it upstairs in case he had guests who might take offense. But to me, it was beautiful. You can see that it's signed RENARD at the bottom left.

It was in the main dining room, with Monsieur Renard and his lovely wife and child, that we all relaxed while drinking sweet, hot tea and eating a special Moroccan cake that Madame Renard had made just for us. We were still full from our lunch, but we welcomed the tea and loved the cake. It was not only beautiful to look at, but it had a distinctive, delicious flavor - some combination of semolina (I think) and honey.

Monsieur Renard wasn't serious in a brooding way. Not like my father, who my mother used to call Chief Rain-In-The-Face when he would go silent and all of us would watch and wait to see when his storm would break and upon whose head the rain of anger would fall. No. Monsieur Renard was serious because he is passionate - about his family's history, about art, about sharing his home with others. If you ever travel to Étretat and are lucky enough to stay at Les Charmettes, be prepared to feast your eyes on truly wonderful contemporary art, sleep in comfortable rooms appointed with period furniture and share with Monsieur Renard, over a cup of tea, the history of the "Fox" family.

The Normandy Chronicles: Day Four: La Cour Sainte Catherine & Gushing Fire Hydrants

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Wines) — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 16:11:00 +0000

You know, I really don't want all of you to have a bad impression of the little town of Honfleur. A town with that name just can't be all that bad. So yes, we ate a mediocre dinner while watching a drunk man perform with his pet suitcase. But while we watched this show, we had the pleasure of anonymous camaraderie with the two German ladies at the table next to us.

And yes, we stayed in a B&B where the bed sheets frightened us but not as much as the painting of a car junk yard above our heads. And yes, I had to crawl along the floor and under furniture and finally stick my hand into a black hole in search of an electrical outlet for my Mac. (I felt many strange things while prodding that hole, but nothing at all felt like an electrical outlet.)

But the view of Honfleur from our bathtub in this strange B&B was amazing. I sat there for a while, putting off my descent into the terrors of my impending B&B breakfast-with-strangers. I used all the natural flower-based shampoos and soaps and conditioners and stole them, also too. And breakfast wasn't bad at all. I joined a decrepit little couple at the table and dove for the tea pot each time the sweet little old lady tried to pour her husband more tea, with her gnarled hands shaking from the weight of it all. A black cat cuddled on the couch nearby and the proprietor, in his strange Sherlock Holmes garb (coupled with his dominatrix wife, I had many unwanted images creep into my perverted brain), only looked in on us when we absolutely needed him. (Thank the Holy Unicorn. I just couldn't look him in the eye.)

I'd stay there again, if I didn't know better and if I didn't have Galadriel leading me around by the nose the next morning, to see much better B&Bs in the same town.

As I've said before, I rarely know what Galadriel's agenda is. After all, she's the Elven Queen and only fools would question her intentions. Instead, when she said she was looking for a coffee shop, I figured it was time for a coffee (hopefully served by somebody in a milk maiden's costume because Sherlock and his leather-n-chains wife had scared me), and followed her down a romantic passage, shaded by trees and draped in vines and roses.

La Cour Sainte Catherine is a beautiful B&B, formerly a 17th century convent, then turned into a cider house and now owned by the Giaglis, a friendly couple who spoke English and who showed us their clean and serene rooms. They eventually served us coffee in their cozy breakfast room with stone walls and comfortable leather chairs in front of a giant fireplace. They also own the coffee shop that fronts the street outside their hidden B&B. Check out their website to see more pictures of the building and the rooms.

And as you've probably already gathered, life on the French B&B inspection tour is more about where we will eat lunch and dinner than anything else. And Galadriel had been trying to get to a certain restaurant since we began this tour. She'd heard about it, but had never eaten there. We'd tried to go the first night we arrived in Normandy, calling the friendly hostess and putting off our dinner reservation a few times while trying to find a place to stay. By the time we found a place, it was too late. Now, we'd be eating lunch there and I was dribbling a bit on my chin in anticipation.

We arrived at Le Garde Manger (15 Place Charles de Gaulle 76400 Fécamp, France 02 35 29 36 39) in the town of Fécamp at the very last second, just before they were about to stop serving lunch. Pas grave! The hostess, Julia, greeted us warmly (it was like she was one of the girls since Galadriel had been talking to her on the phone so many times to make, and then break, reservations) and we sat outside on their nice wooden deck, looking out on the town square.

The food was delicious. The wine superb. All organic. I took some food porn pics of our appetizers, but got a bit distracted after that because of the arrival of Men In Boots. With crowbars.

They looked at us, knowingly. We looked back, unknowingly. One guy and his boots sauntered over to a fire hydrant right in front of us and with a big metal ring (crowring?) he cranked the hydrant open. Water gushed out onto the sidewalk and started a small river down the street. The noise was deafening. It was like sitting at a nice little table with crystal glasses and fresh-grilled trout on porcelain plates, candelabras, the whole works - right at the base of Niagara Falls. Good thing that wooden deck was on stilts or our bootless feet would have been six inches under water.

I don't think this was all. I think the trash truck came and parked right in front and ground up the entire town's stinky bits. And somebody with an SUV parked in front and left their engine running so we could have the pleasure of inhaling exhaust with our smoked salmon. Then I think some little kid in combat fatigues wasn't content with using the sidewalk and climbed the railing onto one side of our deck and then climbed the railing on the other side to get back to the sidewalk. His parents looked on, glowingly, as if to say, "Aww. Isn't that just adorable?"

Note to self: Eat inside next time. Since inside looks like this:

Inside or out, the food and wine were great. Julia was hilarious, yet appropriately respectful, as you can see here, when she finally discovers that Galadriel is the true Queen of the Elves.

The Normandy Chronicles: Day Two: Me n' Jesus

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Wines) — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 18:44:00 +0000

Back when we were at Chateau D'Aument, I told you that there was a trampoline in the garden. After we met the owners of the chateau and settled in our room, we made our way outside before the sun set. I couldn't resist this trampoline. Well, Galadriel just sent me this picture that she took of me, reaffirming my jumping prowess.

Then, I just noticed this other picture she took when we were staying at Jean-Luc Barral's home, a natural winemaker friend of Galadriel's, in Lenthéric, France. (I'll tell that story lay-ter. It's a goodun.)

This is when I realized that I must have a Jesus complex. I don't know. What do you think?

The Normandy Chronicles: Day Three: Honfleur and Run-On Sentences

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Wines) — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 14:33:00 +0000

I had great expectations for Honfleur, our next stop on the B&B inspection trail. My friend Lisa had rented a car last year and driven from Paris to Normandy and stumbled upon Honfleur. When she came back to Paris she gushed about the pretty port and the little town.

And it's true. Honfleur is a beautiful little Medieval town with its 11th century port, surrounded by picturesque buildings and waterside outdoor restaurants.

But Galadriel and I are different kinds of tourists. We have this pesky little habit of wanting natural wine and organic food, served in quiet little restaurants owned by locals who will spend millions of minutes discussing the pros and cons of different wines for each course.

"Oh, this wine is best with the bread made from ancient wheat and the butter that's churned by the gnarled hands of a bewhiskered farm wife, seated on a three-legged stool (hand carved by her cow-herding husband) with the wooden churn (passed down from her great-great-great grandmother) wedged between her shriveled thighs and her rubber-booted feet planted firmly in fragrant hay in between sun-warmed recently-milked benign cows fed only with wild flowers. Now... what shall we drink with the snails - picked by hand at dawn, just after a full moon, from dew-moistened lettuce by vestal virgins and placed carefully in a mouth-blown glass container full of stone-ground corn meal for two weeks until they excrete only fragrant corn poop, then sent to their deaths, bathed in garden-fresh parsley and garlic and the butter that's hand churned by the gnarled...?"

You can see why it can take some time to select wine in France.

Anyhoo! Galadriel had just that kind of restaurant in mind, as we parked the car and walked with our noses high in the air, feeling like vestal virgins ourselves (well, that's a stretch), past the tourist-infested port-side restaurants, saying "Non, non!" to the waiters as they tried to lure us in with promises of the freshest oysters and crabs. It was getting late. Too late, even for French dinner. In my mind, I'm always thinking, "But, if we keep walking and trying to find this place, won't they be closed and we'll be left, bereft, on the cobblestone streets, as hungry as little beggars?" But I rarely voice these concerns, as they tend to reveal the fact that I'm a big worrier of the never-occurring evil.

"Oh, non!" Galadriel gasped as we turned down a side street and discovered that Alexandre Bourdas' restaurant Sa.Qua.Na was closed. Like corporate travelers, shocked by the fact that first class is full and their gold-card status lacks the power to eject undeserving cretins from the depths of their Corinthian leather seats and the effervescence of pre-takeoff champagne, we were indignant. This restaurant had the audacity to only be opened on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays and every other leap year? "The Fooding guide said it was open on Tuesdays, Sundays and every other fêtes de Saint-Eustache!" Galadriel said, exasperated. Reluctantly, we turned our backs on Alexandre Bourdas' quirky opening hours to face the dreaded tourist restaurants across the street and resigned ourselves (well, I resigned myself; Galadriel wasn't going down without a fight) to prefabricated food and waitresses.

It was not pretty. We walked, staring at menus, then walked back, staring at them all again. A dark cloud gathered above Galadriel's elven head.

Me: (feigned cheerfulness) "What are you in the mood for?"
Galadriel: "I don't know." (pouty mouth)
Me: "Pasta? They can't fuck up pasta." (always the delicate speaker)
Galadriel: "Phlegh" (I took that for a no)
Me: "They all have seafood. I'm sure it's local and fresh."
Galadriel: (searing stare that said, "You have GOT to be kidding.")
Me: (my fake smile beginning to crack) "Okaaay. Erm. We could sit outside here and it won't be as noisy as inside and it would be cool and breezy and I'm sure there's something on the menu that's borderline fresh and ...?"

Sit, we did. There were two women sitting next to the only table left empty on the tiny sidewalk, a mother and daughter, with the daughter's baby sleeping soundly in a stroller. The daughter rose, seeing our distress, and moved the stroller carefully so that we could sit down next to them. They were smiley and nice.

The waitress...not so much. Perhaps she could smell our discontent. Or maybe it was the rather pointed questions Galadriel was asking, as she held the menu like it was recently fished out of the dumpster. Of course they had no natural wine. And the sardines had not just been fished out of pristine waters, placed in a hand-twisted twine basket, carried carefully by a fleet runner, barefoot and hair flying behind him in the salt-sprayed wind, directly to the back door of the kitchen and tossed, still alive, into a frying pan. (I'm making most of this up, since it was all in French and you can't trust my translations since I've been known to say to the waiter when he bends down to take my empty plate, "Oui, Je suis fini" which kind of means, "I'm dead, done-for.") The waitress became a bit, well, defensive.

So, the wine was terrible and the food was mediocre. But fortunately, the street entertainment provided a much-needed distraction. Galadriel's longing eyes were torn away from the shuttered Sa.Qua.Na across the street, by the appearance of a drunk man with a blue, rolling suitcase. Clickety-clack, clickety-clack, the cheap suitcase rolled along the cobblestones but would suddenly stop, as it's owner staggered a bit and tried desperately to make his head stop moving long enough to focus his eyes on the narrow street ahead. He was heading somewhere important, but I'm not sure he knew exactly where that might be.

We exchanged glances and smiles with the two ladies next to us. Four sets of wise women's eyes followed the one drunken man. I would give anything to see tiny thought and picture bubbles above all of our heads at that very moment.

"Poor thing."
"What's in that suitcase? Cockles? His clown outfit?"
"Who's the lucky girl?"
"He is going to try and kill us."

Guess who was thinking about impending death? Well, actually, those are all my thoughts. I have no idea what the rest of the girls were thinking.

He managed to make it halfway down the street, where a certain amount of foggy determination and a leftward tilt initiated with his shoulder as the rudder, impelled him into a bar. He left his suitcase, its telescoping handle still extended, looking forlorn outside the door in the middle of the tiny sidewalk. A moment later, as a drunken afterthought, he peered out the door, nodded his head at the suitcase as if to say, "Good dog. Stay." and fell back inside.

Content to know that the clown murderer was temporarily busy in the bar, we paid the bill, wished the nice ladies next to us a good evening and walked back up the hill to our B&B. I wish I could write more about this place, but I can't get Galadriel in trouble. And somebody, definitely not my mother, once said, "If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all."

So, I'll just say that the bed was comfortable (but I couldn't help thinking that the red and black and purple flowered sheets covered up a multitude of sin stains), the decorations artistic (but the painting of a junk yard above the bed inspired several nightmares), the conversation with the little old couple at breakfast was sweet (even as I kept wanting to dive in and help her trembling hands as she tried to pass the tea pot to her husband), the bathtub had a magnificent view down the hill to the village and beyond to the green hills, the terrace outside our room was magnificent and the B&B owners were kind of well, kinky. I don't know why I would think that, other than the fact that there were many erotic photos, circa 1972, of the wife along the corridor to our room and the husband had a strange look in his eye and always, day and night, sported a fedora.

Instead, I'll tell you in the next post about the gorgeous B&B we visited the following day in Honfleur, where we hung out and chatted with the super-nice owners, drinking coffee, petting their cat and taking lots of pretty pictures. À Bientôt!

The Normandy Chronicles: Day Three: The Smell of Horses and The Noise of Water

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Wines) — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 15:07:00 +0000

Contrast is an amazing thing. During this trip through France, our experiences have ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous. But without the ridiculous, the sublime would not be as deeply appreciated. We left our lunch at l'Abbaye de Valloires with the taste of good food in our mouths, but tainted by an atmosphere of commercialism. But a drive through the French countryside restored our equilibrium, as Galadriel pointed out the beautiful caramel-colored horses - Henson ponies - that are raised in the Baie de Somme (Wiki).

Even though I lived in Arizona for many years, I didn't know anything about horses until I had the pleasure of meeting Todd Masden of Cave Creek Outfitters. After losing my job and being ejected from my family, I was pretty much a lost soul. But my friend Sharon gave me a job in her art gallery and Todd gave me a job driving his van to Scottsdale resorts to pick up tourists for trail rides out in the desert. I may have been scraping together chicken feed for a living, but I had two of the calmest jobs on the planet. Sitting in Sharon's art gallery in Biltmore Fashion Park (Phoenix shopping center), I was surrounded by peace and quiet and could gaze at the eclectic collection of artists that said so much about who Sharon is and who her friends are: Zarco Guerrero, Robert Miley, Dennis Numkena (RIP), John Boomer, John Soderberg and many others.

Meanwhile, when not working at the gallery, I would show up at Todd's ranch early in the morning and "help" him while he readied his horses for the day and loaded them in the trailer to take them out to the desert drop-off point. Then I'd drive his big van to the first resort, pick up a load of 8-10 tourists and drive them out to meet Todd. They'd take off for their one-hour ride and I'd drive to the second resort and pick up a new load of tourists. By the time I got back, the first group was returning from their ride, so I dropped off the new people and took the first group back to their hotel. This went on all day.

At dusk, after I dropped off the last load of tourists to their shiny resorts, I would "help" Todd return the horses to his ranch and he'd let me brush them. It was awesome to be so close to those sweaty, heaving beasts. I had great respect, a little fear, but much pleasure stroking and talking to them. And Todd was and is the coolest guy on the planet (and not a bad guitar picker, either). He had a lot of patience with me. I'd be yapping about all my ideas for expanding his business, and he'd just smile and tighten some saddle straps. He knew exactly how to run his business - with integrity and great care. That's why he's still in business today.

These were some of the thoughts that ran through my mind as I looked at the French Henson ponies, so far away from the Arizona desert. But in my mind's eye, I could feel their bristly fur, the silkiness of their cheeks, the warmth of their haunches. We lowered our windows and I could smell them, too. It was lovely. Just driving by them, seeing them grazing, remembering my times with Todd and his horses, reconnected me to life's beautiful energy...and erased the sound of tourists in a museum-gift-shop-buying frenzy, trying to reconnect to life by buying more stuff. It's OK. I've done it and still do it (yes, I do lust for an iPad). I just don't want to be around it any more. I'd rather be with the horses.

Or, at le Bruit de l'Eau. I know I got a little sidetracked here, but oh well. Reconnecting to the earth and to my own senses is really important to me now. This trip has given me so many blissful moments where I climbed out of my head and out of my fears and experienced the many pleasures of food, drink, people and nature. Writing about it and sharing it with you gives it the power it deserves and puts all of the worries of supposed "real" life into perspective. The horses were just a visual preparation for the surprise of senses that I experienced in the authentic Japanese garden of Le Bruit de l'Eau, surrounding an ecological B&B which might not be for everybody, but which swept me away into another world, right in the middle of French horse country.

Le bruit de l'eau means "the noise of water" in English. When we entered the grounds and parked, we walked along pathways and heard just that, the noise of water. It's an interesting contrast - associating water with noise - usually a negative connotation. But if you go to the Le Bruit de l'Eau website and scroll down to the bottom of the home page, there's a little audio gadget that you can click on to listen to the sound of this place. You might expect to hear water, but what you'll hear are the animals that live near the water - birds, frogs, lizards I guess... You might never turn it off.

There wasn't a soul anywhere in the place. We peeked into the exhibition kitchen where the owner prepares organic meals while his guests sit at the bar and watch.

We peeked into the main office. It was empty, except for some simple furniture and a tea pot. It was as if the whole place was taking an afternoon siesta or had softly ascended into deep meditation.

We whispered. And tip-toe'd. Galadriel told me that the last time she visited, they were building a Dôjô d'Été (summer dojo) along the water. A dojo is traditionally a place for training, but this room can be rented as a place to sleep. Galadriel wanted to see it, so we wandered the wild paths, into the potager (kitchen garden) and along the spring on a wooden walkway. Beautiful grass, moss and flowering plants filled the wandering streams.

When we found the Dôjô, we became even more silent, in order to hear the cacophony of silence along the water in front of the Dôjô: water sounds, birds flying and tweeting and frog mating sounds.

Here is the inside of the Dôjô, where you can see the sleeping mats rolled up and hints of the mosquito netting that I imagine is a necessity if you want to get any sleep at night (as I said, this isn't for everyone).

If you're sitting on the mats in the Dôjô and the Japanese sliding screens are open, this is what you can see past the deck.

Here is the front "deck." The outside toilet and shower area is on the left, behind the bamboo curtains. You probably have the idea now that this feels like an isolated place, even though it's just a few pathways from the main buildings.

Toilet en plein air, anyone?

Don't worry. They have very comfortable rooms in the main building like the room called Kio-ko, with its private terrace and direct access to the spa. Wifi is available too.

So...this was turning out to be a wonderful day. We almost left this quiet place without seeing anyone. But on our way out, we met the owner's girlfriend and she greeted us warmly, remembered Galadriel from the last time she came, and then told us to enjoy ourselves as she had some work to do. I expected her to be wearing Japanese wooden flip flops and those little white one-toe socks and a kimono. But actually, she was kind of glamorous. Snazzy jeans, hipster haircut, designer sunglasses.

Ahh...the contrasts.

Stick around. Day three isn't over yet. On our way to the sea and our final resting place for the evening, Galadriel and I will visit another Gaycoco B&B which we loved and end up sleeping in an Ohsoso B&B, which we didn't love. Sayonara!

The Normandy Chronicles: Day Three: L'Abbaye de Valloires

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Wines) — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 11:15:00 +0000

After reluctantly leaving Chateau d'Aumont, we really, really tried to be good girls and visit more than one or two B&Bs in one day, but Galadriel is now addicted to hearing me say "Wow!" (pronounced in French as wauwuh) every ten minutes as we pass adorable little villages and gorgeous old churches and seas of wheat and coffee-with-cream-colored cows and and and.

So, she stopped at the l'Abbaye de Valloires, (Wiki page) where they have beautiful gardens. There is a rumor that they also have a restaurant where all the food is made from flowers and vegetables from the garden and they have...drum roll...natural wine. (I took this picture at the main entrance of l'Abbaye, but we had to get into the car and drive a little bit down the road to get to the restaurant.)

Besides, it was lunch time. This is our classic MO for the trip. Sleep until 9ish. Have breakfast while we look at the map and decide which natural food and wine restaurants we can hit for lunch and dinner, while still visiting the obligatory B&Bs on the map. We climb into the car at lunch time and go have lunch. Sometimes, we have a 4-hour lunch. After all, we have to talk to the chef about each course and discuss which wine is best for each course and then take food porn pictures of everything and then the chef and his wife have to sit down with us at the table to have a glass or two with us and then they have to tell us about the best local places for wine and food and advise us on where to go for dinner. This is very, very important. And then, we have to cram in the B&B inspection visits in time to hit our natural food and wine restaurant for dinner. It's a tough job, but somebody has to do it.

We didn't take the time to visit the gardens at l'Abbaye, because we had our priorities and, um, work to do. We made a beeline to The Gardener's Table for our lunch. Oh boy. It was kind of a disaster. In order to get to the restaurant, you're forced to go through the gift shop, which was full of busloads of tourists, clamoring to buy flower-scented soaps, gardening books, post cards and whatever. It was terrible. Me and Galadriel hated this. Worse yet, the restaurant is in the back of this Altar of Needless Consumption, with just a little portable screen for separation. The noise was deafening.

Galadriel spied an outside terrace, where we ran for cover. There was a table available and a waitress brought us the plastic-coated menus. Galadriel asked her about natural wine and about the menu and the waitress had no idea if they had natural wine and had only a basic knowledge of the menu. Ugh. This did not bode well. You would think that she would be full of information and proud of what the restaurant had to offer, but non. So, we reluctantly ordered.

This is when we had a nice surprise. When the food and wine came, it was all an incredible work of art. And the food was amazing. It was such a shame that it was presented in this environment and we couldn't quite get past our original experience to really love the food. But you can see from the pictures how beautiful it was.

Here is the bread basket, with flowers embedded in the bread.

Here is the appetizer, with a shot for each of us of a nice sweet wine. There were spicy chapatis to dip in hummus and three types of herb or vegetable-stuffed breads to dip in a cool herbed cream sauce.

Here is the vegetable soup.

Here is the main course - roasted tomato, beet salad, fresh asparagus, hummus, grapes. I can't remember what was in the little red pot.

Here is the cheese.

You can see how beautifully presented it was and it was really delicious. We just couldn't stand the atmosphere.

Just across the street was a chateau which was on Galadriel's list to visit, but there was a sign at the main gate telling us that the owner had died and they were having his funeral that day. So, walking in there and asking to inspect the beds and bathrooms didn't seem like the right thing to do.

Stay tuned for my next post, where I'll show you an incredible Japanese wilderness garden and B&B, right in the French countryside. When you enter the grounds, you completely forget where you are. À tout à l'heure!

The Normandy Chronicles: Day Two: First Place Tramp

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Wines) — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 17:44:00 +0000

After our strange day in The Twilight Zone and cider redemption at Rapunzel's castle, we headed, with a few apple burps, towards Chateau D'Aumont, where we would spend the night. Here is a view of the back of the chateau from the garden.

I don't remember whether it is in Galadriel's guide and needed inspection or if it is new and she needed to decide if it would go into next year's guide. But if I have anything to say about it (and as you know, I will always have something to say about everything), it should be in the guide with a 4-girl rating. (I have no idea if Galadriel's guide has a rating system, so I'll just invent my own: If 4 of my girlfriends would like the place, then it's the bomb.)

We got lost getting there, which isn't unusual on this trip. Out in the country, mobile networks disappear and Mister GPS has a hard time finding his way. (Perhaps we need to find him a Missus GPS...or a guide dog.) But we finally got there and were greeted by the owner - a tall, elegant blond woman, and her two young sons.

First, we toured the guest rooms, which were located in a renovated building off the side of the main chateau. Every room was beautiful. It was modern, calm, quiet and comfortable. Here's a picture of our messy room, which I took the next morning. That bathtub was fab-u-luss. You can see pictures of all the rooms on their website. (The English translation is pretty terrible, but oh well.)

Here's the very cool thing about our stay. We hadn't eaten since breakfast and this Chateau is kind of out in the middle of nowhere. Galadriel asked Stephanie Danzel d’Aumont, as we sat in her chateau kitchen sipping tea, if it was possible that they had any food that they could throw together for us for dinner. We didn't care - cheese, bread, snausages. Whatever. Oh, and they wouldn't happen to have any natural wine, would they? I thought Galadriel was pushing our luck with this request. Madame d'Aumont looked a bit stressed. But she said she would see what she could do.

So, me and Galadriel unloaded our suitcases and then ran out to the back "yard" so we could jump up and down on the trampoline. Now, if you've been reading this blog for a while, you know that I won the prestigious award of Third Place Tramp when I was in Junior High (read it and weep). But I haven't been on a trampoline for 30 years, so this was going to be interesting. I remembered how to "mount" by rolling onto it and within seconds I was jumping as high as a mushroom and then maybe a carrot and soon I graduated to the height of a small dog. et voila. It was damn good fun. Galadriel joined me and we almost jettisoned each other off into the stratosphere, but finally "dismounted" without breaking our teeth.

Then, Galadriel wandered off to speak to the trees and I decided to speak to the big white bathtub in the sky. While I was lounging in a thick white robe, smelling like a daffodil, Galadriel took her bath. I could hear some rustling going on downstairs in the breakfast room and figured the d'Aumonts were setting up our cocktail weenies, Cheez Whiz and Tab. To hell with all of this "natural" stuff. I had ordered real food. I'm an American, damnit.

So, we descended to the breakfast room (which looked like this the next morning) and there, all set up as if by elves, was a really nice dinner. Fresh, cold vegetable soup, a baked dish of ham and cheese-filled crepes rolled up and covered with Béchamel sauce and shredded cheese and baked in the oven - a local specialty. There was bread and cheese and a chilled bottle of local rosé. I don't know if it was natural, but I liked it. Much better for my teeth than Tab, I must admit.

While we were eating, naked under our fluffy robes, the owner's husband came in. Er. Hi! He was very cool, though. He works for Disney, marketing children's food. I'm afraid to ask what that means, but I can imagine that it's awful.

We slept like babies and the next morning the elves delivered a beautiful breakfast. We couldn't leave the place. We sat down in the breakfast room and geeked out on our Macs until Galadriel reluctantly said we had to leave. Onward and downward! Next stop - the 12th century Abbeye de Valloires, an amazing Japanese-style B&B, another gaycoco B&B and restaurant that we really liked and a not-so-amazing B&B where we stayed the night, hoping that the owner's wife wouldn't wander the house late at night, dressed in high boots and a dog collar and carrying a whip.

The Normandy Chronicles: Day Two: Wet Wipes n' Cider

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Wines) — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 17:51:00 +0000

As we drove away from the twin psycho towns of Le Tréport and Mers-les-Bains, we took one last look from the cliffs that really are the most magnificent part of the area. And from this vantage point, far above, the towns and their dog crap statistics became insignificant.

The sun was starting its descent as we drove along little country roads on our way to the B&B where we would rest our weary heads for the night. We were still feeling a bit like we were leaving The Twilight Zone until we stumbled upon Yet Another Castle.

"Castle! Towers! Rapunzel!" I screamed. "Screeeeech!" Galadriel, ever so pleased to accommodate my fairytale fantasies, slammed on the brakes and did a back-up to the entrance to the fourteenth century Chateau Fort de Rambures. The gates were closed, but we got out and walked up to the ticket kiosk, where we encountered a handsome young man as he was closing up shop for the evening. I left Galadriel to flirt with him while I checked out the scenery. She told him about The Twilight Zone because we needed to know that we weren't crazy. He affirmed that the people in Le Tréport and Mers-les-Bains are very strange, and have had a rivalry going on between them for many years. I'm glad we left them to fling dog droppings at each other into the next century.

I don't know why I loved this little castle so much. Maybe because of those fat round towers in the front or the moat around it. But it really appealed to me. It's been in the same family for 600 years. I wish I could have seen the rose gardens, but I did get to see all the beautiful shades of green - bright green grass, silver-green and blue-green leaves. Lovely.

The only thing that marred the scenery was a goofy setup of mannequins in dishevelled medieval clothing, standing around ancient farm implements. I was taking a picture of a post card in the kiosk window so I could remember the name of the Chateau later, and I didn't realize until now that one of the mannequins is reflected in the window on the left. You can see my face and hair and blue scarf reflected on the right.

It reminded me of Frontier Town in Arizona, with mannequin cowboys sittin' around the campfire, their wagons circled around them, while pioneer wenches served them pork n' beans in tin pie plates. I expected a reenactment of the shoot-out at the OK corral at any moment. Except with armor and chain maille and lances, and stuff.

I also noticed (because my last name isn't Wines for nuthin') the bottle of special cider from the castle which was for sale in the kiosk. I don't know if it's made at the castle or if it's of any quality worth writing home about, but it looked awfully good after our unsuccessful attempt at getting fed and watered with the dogs of Le Treport. So, when I pointed it out to Galadriel, she asked the friendly ticket man if there was any cider available...cold? (Recipe for success: Soften voice. Blink eyelashes, twice). He said sure, and left the kiosk for the castle.

While we waited, I was busy taking pictures and didn't notice that Galadriel had dissappeared. This always bothers me because every time she dissappears, I'm certain that something bad will happen to me. Like the ticket guy on the train will come and demand to punch my ticket. Which is in Galadriel's purse. Which she took with her. Or that the castle man will come back with our cider and I'll have to TALK to him in FRENCH. Or, the scariest thing of all, she will find a great photo opportunity before I do. We (I should say "I") have a small competition in this area.

So, I went looking for her in the parking lot across from the castle. I saw her, flitting in and out of the bushes. Like a bird.

"What are you doing?" I asked, suspiciously, wondering if she'd found a rare Phainopepla and had gotten the million-Euro shot.
"Trying to find a place to pee." She glanced at me sideways, guilty.
"Oh. Uh. Sorry! Do you need my wet wipes?"
"Um. No. Thanks."

Nobody let us pee in The Twilight Zone, either. I probably had to go too, but forgot about my "special" needs when confronted with the awesomeness of a new castle.

Mister Castle Keeper returned with a dripping, cold bottle of cider and two plastic cups. What a guy. Luckily, Galadriel had finished her ablutions and could talk to him, pay him and say goodbye to him while I stood there mute, but eager. It's my new MO in France, when surrounded by French people. Mute, but eager. I do have a brain, and I'm sure everything you are saying is brilliant, and I'm so very eager to know everything you know, I just can't speak. Really. Bonjour. Au revoir.

We paid him and thanked him and went and stood by the car and Galadriel opened the bottle. It exploded all over her dress. Of course, NOW she was glad to have my wet wipes. Even though she secretly wonders about this strange American wet wipe affliction of mine. Just one more reason for us to laugh hysterically while she changed her clothes in the car.

After all, she had to look respectable (and drunk from cider) because we were soon to arrive at this impeccable, elegant place. Ooh lah laaah.

The Normandy Chronicles: Day Two: Octopussy

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Wines) — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 09:53:00 +0000

Well, that blog post title ought to bring me some traffic.

After our lovely visit to Chateau Miromesnil, I got excited by the prospect of seeing the sea again and maybe eating some fresh fish at a beachside restaurant.

OK, who am I kidding? I had no idea where we were going because I never ask Galadriel. I just wait for her to deliver me unto the next amazing and delicious place, sitting slack-jawed in the passenger seat of our miniature rental car while she drives with eight guide books in her lap and tries to strike a balance balance between doing her job and showing me something that will make me go, "Jumpin' Jehovah's witness! Ah never done seen nothin' lahk that in mah whole doggone lahf." Or something like that.

And that's almost what I said when she took me to Le Tréport and Mers-les-Bains, two seaside villages that are very pretty but the most unfriendly place in France, je pense. Even if they do have very pretty, gingerbready, San Franciscoish, Mexican-colored houses.

We walked along the boardwalk, looking for a nice place to sit and look at the sea and eat some fresh seafood. Good luck with that. Especially when it's after 2pm and all of France refuses to serve you food. Even though Octopussy lured us in with its suggestive sign, all they would serve us were the local gallettes, or savory crepes filled with ham or cheese or both.

I hate to compare America to France, because America generally loses, but in this case, I thought about any coastal town in America, right coast or left coast, and if there are humanoids walking along the beach, restaurants will be serving their full menu. It seemed incredible to me that at 3pm we couldn't sit somewhere, stare out at the sea and have a drink and eat some fish. At least in this case, the score must be Dirty Capitalists 1, Dirty Socialists 0.

At one point, we saw an outdoor seating area, with people having drinks, and walked across the street to the entrance of the restaurant attached to it. Blocking the door, in cop stance (meaty arms folded across ample chest, bulky legs seemingly rooted into the carpet, head tilted up and back, eyes glaring), was the restaurant owner. "Can we get some seafood and drinks and sit outside and eat?" "No." That was it. No. We could have drinks, but no food. We said thanks (God knows why) and that we'd look for another place and continued down to the other end of the boardwalk.

At the very last restaurant, which was directly on the beach, we walked in and asked if we could have drinks and food. The girls behind the counter looked at us in disgust. How ignorant could we be? They didn't say, "Oh we're so sorry, but the chef is gone." They just said no and looked at us like we were very wrong in the head.

Hungry and sad (kind of like these doggies in the posters that were ALL along the boardwalk - rough translation: "Dog Poop: It's not up to them to collect it." - those little signs they're carrying are the total of poops they're guilty of dropping), we started back towards the car. As we passed Monsieur Méchant (translation: Mister Evil - from the title of a French horror movie), he was standing in his beach-side cafe, gloating. "I told you that you wouldn't find any food." I don't know what Galadriel said to him, but I know it was good. Most likely mean, but ever so polite.

As we drove away, we felt like we had been in a horror movie ourselves. Like we had accidentally stepped into The Twilight Zone.

In retrospect, it's apparent that the people of Le Tréport and Mers-les-Bains are much more concerned about the poop scooping, feeding and watering of their dogs (as seen in the photo to the left, where they even have a name for their dog-watering bar), than they are about any outsiders who enter....The Twilight Zone. In your mind's ear, hear the voice of Rod Serling as he says: There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call the Twilight Zone.

Don't worry, though. We escaped back to the real world where we stumbled upon a medieval castle that was closing, so we couldn't visit (and I was disappointed because I was so sure Rapunzel draped her flaxen braids from this very same castle's windows), but whose gatekeeper restored our faith in mankind (with the help of a certain local alcoholic beverage) and Galadriel got her dress all wet. And then, we found what became, at least for this first B&B inspection trip (we're currently on our third), was the best place we stayed. So, stay tuned for the next segment in our continuing series of The Normandy Chronicles.

SOS Help: English Language Crisis Line in France

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Wines) — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 06:58:00 +0000

I received a request this morning from a great organization in France, SOS Help Line. They asked me to post about them on my blog and spread the word that they are available to help English speakers who may be having an emotional crisis while in France and need a friendly voice:

Feel like talking? SOS Help, an English speaking crisis line in France, is open from 3 pm to 11 pm daily. Call us up to talk about anything on your mind – from loneliness to stress to concerns about integrating into a new culture. We are here to listen! Call us at 01 46 21 46 46 or visit us online at www.soshelpline.org for more information.