This

Ever get that feeling

of a big dead fish hanging over your head?

Imagine This

You and your kids have been invited to a party where you don’t know anyone. The house has a large, wild yard, with trees to climb and an abandoned playhouse. A guy in a kilt is chopping freshly cut watermelons from the garden with an ax. Adults are lolling around, listening to jazz from a record player pulled into the garden (nice to see vinyl spinning again).
The kids are stand-offish at first, but after dinner you hear whooping in the dusk—the boys and girls have started a battle in the meadow, pine cones for grenades and stink bombs, sticks for swords and guns. The older ones are moving in slow motion, dying spectacular deaths. The little kids are leaping out from behind trees in ambushes. The choreography has the adults enthralled, although we pretend not to notice.
You think back to magical moments from your own childhood of long forgotten backyard parties, where loose and ungoverned games formed that could never have been planned.
Boat Sculpture by Nancy Rubins

Friends

Friends have always been an essential part of my life. Except those few years I had babies. During those years I just didn’t have time or energy for my friends. But most of my old friends hung in there.
And now I find myself with lots of new friends, and feel so blessed. We get together to drink coffee or beer, talk art or education or blogging, We walk and travel and eat sushi. My friends message me, send me photos of their new work, make me laugh with funny emails.
My friends are mostly women, but some men, younger and older than I am, artists and athletes and neighbors. I even have some teen friends who keep me laughing with their exploits.
Kisses to you.

The Longest Night

Who is to judge?
Maybe our last days in this life can be the best. Maybe the guacamole tastes perfectly balanced, the sky has never been bluer, the sheets on our bed so soft after being washed 1000 times.
Maybe we should linger in our dying, because we value these final sunsets and cups of coffee. Why are people waiting for us to die? Because they are so uncomfortable with the fact of dying, that’s why.
And it was easier, in the beginning, because life just faded away, instead of being cut off suddenly.
But grief also builds in reverse.
Bits of thread, wound on a spool, are a perfect symbol of my grandmother’s generation, who lived through the great depression and war after war. Her parents spoke German, poor like everyone else. She made herself.
Why can I not do it, with so much more?
This is my 399th post.

I Love Paris

I just watched this movie called “I Love Paris,” on dvd. It’s a collection of five minute stories about love, set in different neighborhoods of the City of Love/Light/Baguettes. Different directors, different actors. Most are ok, but a few are devastating. There’s a story by Nobuhiro Suwa starring Juliette Binoche, about a mother in fresh mourning for her son. And another by Frederik Auburtin and Gerard Depardieu, starring Gena Rolands, about a mature couple meeting in a café to discuss their divorce. Amazing. Natalie Portman and Maggie Gyllenhal also fair well. See it and drink some good wine.
And yes, I have been in Paris, and been in love there. I hope you get a chance to go there, too.

Fire News

Dawn this morning, the sun is rising through a huge smoke cloud. I went to work this morning, half my students showed up, and after a few hours of teaching I let them go. My evening class and all classes tomorrow are cancelled. Driving today the freeways were empty, so people are staying home.
TV and radio have been better than internet in this emergency. News and map sites get trafficked too heavily and bog down. The fires can’t be mapped accurately because the smoke is too thick to see what is happening from the air.
Winds are forecast to continue til tomorrow afternoon. There are evacuations in some areas to the ocean now, tonight. This is simply incredible.

Young Passion Can Solve World Problems

There was a young American student with me the second semester in Turkey. She was such an archetypal Californian: blond, sexy, always laughing, so friendly, even with very limited Turkish. I’ll call her Sunny. So Sunny was immediately surrounded by many young Turkish guys anxious to take her out, and she smiled on one, and he turned out to be a real sweety. An entrepreneur, working his way through university (not normal), from a liberal family who immediately adopted Sunny. It became serious. Now she’s back in SoCal and he just got a visa to visit her here. And she wants to return to Turkey somehow before she applies to grad school. Imagine if this kind of relationship can promote understanding between cultures, two beautiful talented people from opposite sides of the world who desire each other…

Imagine This

Is there anything nicer than sitting in a big armchair, one kid who smells like chlorine sitting on your lap, pinching your arm and softly mumbling to himself, while the other kid, fresh-faced from meeting his new teacher (schools starts in four days), reads Harry Potter to you? There are some other lovely things in this world, but this is definitely up there, it definitely ranks.

Home Again

So I’m sitting in Starbucks at the International Terminal at the Istanbul Airport. I got here at 5:30am from Germany. Don’t even ask, I’m too tired to tell you why.
As you may have been able to tell from this blog, I’m sort of an emotional girl. I need to feel things intuitively, that the time is right and I’m ready before I do something. And I haven’t been ready to leave Turkey and return to SoCal. But now I am ready. It’s finished. Don’t ask me what happened, it was lots of small things, and things I can’t talk about, but I just know it that I have to go now. I miss my kids. My gram is ill. My paintings will be finished within the week.
I have been so happy professionally, and lately socially, in Turkey that it has been hard to think of leaving. But when in Italy and Germany, I felt excited about other places, the friends I was with, and I realized that life is possible after Turkey. SoCal is afterall one of the most desirable places to be on earth, I just have to stop taking it for granted.
As soon as I can think clearly again, I’ll continue to post about the art I saw at Documenta. But let me leave you to imagine this:
Zooming through impossibly green rolling hills very fast on roads like Disneyland, a castle or two in the distance, eating a warm liverwurst sandwich, smell of hand-rolled tobacco and warm beer, little Bavarian villages with maypoles and cows with bells.

An Imagine This Kind of Day

Today I’m having the most wonderful day. After a lovely late night chat with a friend, I slept in (that in itself is amazing). Went to school to paint, and was picked by a colleague and his wife to visit their studio in the city. We are trading paintings, so I picked out one of his that I am so happy with! Then met another friend who showed me his cactus collection. He throws his own pots and puts Hittite designs on them that reflect the shapes of the cactuses. He gave me one (although I’m only babysitting it, E).
I also went to a birthday party in the faculty (Happy 29, M!), and got invited for coffee in the office of a secretary (can’t understand much of the conversation, but I’m trying). Even my janitor brought me tea.
And tonight I’m going to my first ever Kina Gecesi, the women’s party before a wedding; my good friend is getting married tomorrow.
The thing is, all these friends are dear to me; how am I going to be able to leave?

Imagine This

You are in your quiet studio with windows to the sky and it is getting darker and darker even though midmorning. You are painting a very large nude from a smaller study, with big fat brushstrokes of yellow-green and muddy pink. And you are thinking how beautiful the model was/is, how innocent and sexual at the same time, when the sky opens up and huge raindrops begin hurling down. (Last night you were caught in such a storm and even with an umbrella your jeans were soaked to mid-thigh in under a minute). You have anticipated this moment and it is perfect to be alone.

Captured by Pirates

I was carried away by pirates, sailing past Roman ruins and an armada of ships of gyrating bikini-clad women, fueled by vodka and sun. I was thrown from the ship into the clear cold sea, and pulled up again to dry in the heat of the top deck, surrounded by menacing sailors, and ambassadors from far away.

Imagine This

In another life, you lived a magical summer, in an old stone farmhouse surrounded by vineyards in Tuscany. Inside the house were Lichtensteins, outside down the highway was Florence: Massacio and Pontormo and Michaelangelo. You got fat on wine and nutella that summer, and you worked as a painter copying Vermeer, really learning to see.
Imagine in three days you will visit that place again! I am out-o-here!

P A I N

From my ear, jaw, temple, crown or base of my head.
Visualizing my new painting, much bigger than I’ve painted before. A huge nude, lying back on her arms, but she feels like she’s flying. I’m thinking about the next layer of paint, how juicy I want the whites to be, with drips and blobs.
Throbbing, ringing.
Listening to Correlli, Vaughn Williams, Glass, and Kid.02’s chatter-laughter. Doctors told me today my hearing might be affected. I hope they meant temporarily.
Still sometimes, moving sometimes.
Thinking about some big dragon trees I know in the park at home, 100 years old, with Dr. Suess trunks supported by cables, sculptural. And my little dragon tree in my garden, I hope the gophers don’t get the roots again, Jesus is taking care of it.
A spear pierced through my skull.
A huge piece of baklava is waiting for me in the fridge. It’s probably 1500 calories, and pistachio, not walnut. Getting yelled at from all sides to force myself to eat.
So many people live with constant pain. How do they do it?
Imagining a soft touch on my shoulders, sweet smells, lovely murmurings, a fairy godmother protecting me.

Imagine This

It’s the end of March and the weather feels summerish. Kid.01 and Best Friend.01 have no school today because the “abiler” (big kids) have exams, so you spend the morning at home overseeing homework and legos, making chicken soup and lemon bars. Lunch hour you go to Carrefour for t.p., fresh strawberries, etc., then deliver your bars 'n berries to your colleagues and friends. And the neighborhood kids get together at dusk, your kids jabbering away with them in Turkish. And you don’t have the heart to bring them in, because it reminds you of playing outside when you were young, which your kids can’t do much in the States, yelling and running in the street with sticks. Freedom!

Imagine This

You’re lying on your bed under an open window. It’s February in SoCal and the Santa Ana winds are blowing from the desert. The trees stand out against the sky, so clean, and the mountains that ring you as you drive to LAX are blue (when normally you can’t see them). Even if you grew up here, you’re impressed with this air and color and heat.
When/if/where will I see the people I already miss?
SoCal to Paris to Istanbul. Can't get more romantic than that.
See you back in Turkey.
With love.

Imagine This

You are swimming in an indoor thermal pool that smells vaguely of lavender. You dive through a tunnel into the open night. Steam is rising off the water. And falling on your head are snowflakes, so you are both warm and chilled. Your seal-son is bobbing next to you, looking up into the dark and describing how he is traveling in space among the stars. And because you are from SoCal, you keep thinking it’s not snow but ash falling from the sky. This is Anatolia—it both stings because it is harsh and melts you completely because it is beautiful.