Two years. A thank you.

I'm getting out of town not a day too early. Even my weather app has a red banner across the top of it warning of Excessive Heat in Los Angeles.  The ground feels like straw, brown and crunchy. No sign of our skunk today and I'm concerned that the neighbor's overzealous de-nuding of the hillside (a fire precaution in the canyon) may have led to its demise. I hope not. It was a hardy little thing (three dog skunkings in 10 days, after all). The birds are lazy this morning too, tweeting laconically in the close to ninety degree early morning heat. There is nothing interesting about this kind of heat. It causes anxiety of a particular kind, for the possibility of fire, for the wilting plants, for the canyon wildlife, and especially for the homeless. Not that living on the street isn't miserable enough on a relatively clement day.

 The Heat: Laurel Canyon edition

The dogs saunter across the deck and climb up on the table to reach the low-hanging fruit. They fight half-heartedly over the plums, carrying them round in their mouths. Thistle looks like Winston Churchill -- somehow her plum looks like a cigar.

les prunes

I encountered something like bliss yesterday. Always these things sounds odd when shared and described. It sounds smug. But I found myself in the middle of my kundalini yoga class, sitting next to my divine friend R who sings with the most beautiful and sweet tone, and exudes this able calm, and feeling the most immense amount of gratitude for coming through this alive. I wept through the meditation, the kind of weeping where the tears just stream out of the sides of your eyes but no sounds are made and struggling to sing the Wahe Gurus without sobbing and I realized it was relief. Pure, profound, childlike relief. The feeling that everything just got immensely better.  And interestingly, now that I think of it, yesterday was precisely the two year mark - June 29 - when all the horrible stuff started. "Everything takes two years" says my mother. And everything takes exactly two years. There is no rushing it. There are no short cuts. There are no quick ways to make things better.

Advice for those going through the end of a relationship or a death: find yoga, preferably kundalini. It's nothing short of miraculous.

Massive outpouring of love and support this week on the announcement of the new company. Unbelievably wonderful. Enormously grateful. Overwhelmed and surprised by it. To the universe, to the love, to the energy, to God, whatever it is, to the higher spirits, to the goodness, to the magnificent and beautiful physics of wonder: thank you. To the sweetness of people: thank you. To my friends and family: thank you. To my children: you are extraordinary -- I cannot imagine two people I'd rather be related to!

This afternoon we fly to Norway. I will be posting from the island.

Stay cool. Love always.

HIVE COLLECTIVE: My new venture

I have started a new company, Hive Collective, which brings together all the things I love under one roof: traditional pr combined with strategic storytelling, social media and digital. Clients will come from art (entertainment) and philanthropy. For more information: www.hivecomm.com/press.pdf

My partner Tracy and I have known each other for years -- since we both worked for the firm that handled Arnold Schwarzenegger (it was the Total Recall years and I remember going to see the film eight months pregnant with my son -- no wonder he has an aversion to loud noises). She comes out of philanthropy and I come out of entertainment, so together we hope to create something wonderful.

I promise not to abandon Miss Whistle. She is, as you all know, very important to me.

Thank you, everyone, always, for all the support. It means so much.

Much love,

Bumble aka MsW

PS: To celebrate, here's the HiveCollectiveSummer playlist
 

WATCH THIS SPACE

So, dear readers, in real life I'm a little giddy because I'm announcing my new venture tomorrow morning. Actually, I'm completely over-excited. What an exciting time to be an entrepreneur. Especially in the digital world. Watch this space. Can't say a lot, but here's a teaser:

And thank you, you have been so supportive. I am enormously grateful.

Tis the Season

'Tis the season of the solstice, the super moon, the soft fruit, the long days, and -- sadly -- the skunk. A blissful walk this morning was interrupted by this:

Which karmicly ended in this:

May you live long happy lives, and may your dogs never be skunked. Happy Monday.

Carry On!

I'm posting this for Lisa, who I met at a party on the solstice, and who told me this was her favorite song. This is for everyone in a miserable situation; to let you know that you will get through it. I promise you will get it through it. And Lisa, you're lovely :)

This Life by Edward Sharpe

This Life by Edward Sharpe Mag Zeros

Sublime new Edward Sharpe.

Summer (songs)

"Summer's always over before we want it to be, so what we're left with is this dreamlike memory of what summer was or we want summer to be. In our minds we create an ideal sense of it, and the best songs evoke this dreamlike quality of what we want summer to be regardless of what summer ends up being like." -- Oliver Wang reviewing J-Cole's Cole Summer on KPCC

Now isn't that the truth?

Tej: Use breath to mend a broken heart

This is Tej, my Kundalini yoga teacher. For more information, go to Nine Treasures Yoga

You can't Beet our Beets or a Homage to Andrea

My sexy friend & inveterate style guru, Andrea

There are always one or two people in your life that have a profound influence, and my style guru, if I were to choose one, is probably my friend Andrea (An-DRAY-ya), who has one of those pleasantly messy big Spanish houses in Santa Monica filled with interesting pictures and knick-knackery and books you always want to read. Her tables are orange and pink and green and filled with flowers in odd-shaped vases and eccentric lights. Even her dog-beds are covered in wild, Life of Pi-inspired fabrics which she just happened to find while browsing one day. (She's also a very talented interior designer in Real Life.)

Every single time I go to her house for dinner I find myself emulating a recipe of hers. Saturday night was no exception. Her husband, a dead ringer for Kiefer Sutherland, is a most excellent cook and his paella with home-smoked chicken will go down as one of the Great Paellas of All Time, but it is this dish that caught my attention, glinting shiney fuchsia in its green and white and gold ikat bowl: Roasted Beet Dip (possibly adopted from Ottolenghi) served with spears of endive and little toasted bits of pita bread. This stuff is seriously addictive.

I've moderated the recipe as I didn't ask for it, but I made this one last night and it worked splendidly.

Roasted Beet Dip for Good Karma
2 bunches of little beets from the farmers' market (10 small beets)
olive oil
lemon juice
salt
pepper
1 clove of garlic, smushed
some yogurt or sour cream

• Wash the beets, cut off their rat tails and leaves and wrap each one in a square of aluminum foil. Pop into a 350 degree oven and bake for about half an hour.
• Unwrap, and peel beets with your fingers (the skin comes right off).
• Cool and then whizz up with the smushed clove of garlic, a good blob (1/2 cup) yogurt, a glug of olive oil and the juice of half a lemon, salt and pepper.
• Ta da!

Nantucket, summer, ties that bind & being the lighthouse

In Maggie Shipstead's novel "Seating Arrangements" the family summers on the fictional island of Waskeke, a place not unlike Nantucket or Fisher Island where, I was told yesterday by a Boston friend that "wealthy young New Yorkers come for the weekend with their family and black nannies whom 'they insist dress up in French maids' costumes'." He says this wryly, half rolling his eyes. We're sitting under my plum tree which is nearly touching the deck from the weight of its fruit, adorned in pink ribbons to keep the squirrels away (you may call me eccentric but, touch wood, thus far it has worked). And we're discussing the similarities between Maine and Norway (rocky coastline, blueberries, wildflowers, fish, a solid seafaring populace, unafraid of wearing fleece). These are people I don't know and yet I know them. In the fall, our children will be at the same college. The man and my ex-husband were at the same college together, and the woman is someone I feel I've met before, although I haven't. She is elegant and small and smiles easily and we are drinking tea as if it's the most natural thing in the world, this pretty woman, her husband, me and my ex-husband, whose life I cannot extricate from my own however hard I try, as there are ribbons and ropes and memories and ties that bind us. Even a peripheral tour of the house reveals stories of our life together -- a painting bought here, an ornament from Tokyo, the view from our house in Norway shot in a panorama by him one night after dinner when it was still light (as it is till 11 or 12). The new memories are being formed and I'm aware of an objectivity creeping in that wasn't there before.

I explained this on the phone to Marta, my friend who lives in Concord. "You are not free until you are entirely unbound from the other person" she says and I know that she is right, but I can't imagine where I will put these 29 years, in which particular room in my head they will be stored. But this newfound objectivity is a good sign; no doubt of that. I am fond of him but I do not ache for him as I did, for our life together. "Are you happier now than when you were married to him" Marta asks. And I realize I am. Profoundly so.

On Nantucket it is customary to name houses, amidst the ghost walks and clam bakes and bicycling. I'm tempted to fly there now and start an Instagram feed of house names. It's quite wonderful. And apparently there isn't an archive of them. Yet.

One thinks of families living in houses for generations on places like Nantucket and Waskeke, and even Tjome, the island we go to in Norway. Houses with names are houses loved by generations and generations of children, retaining the memories of each one. In Maine, my friends visit a cove where they went as children, where their parents and grandparents went as children, and where their children will go with their grandchildren. There is a sweetness to that -- coming back each year to a familiar place filled with familiar people and a collective memory. In two weeks time we will be in Norway, on the island we love, with the jellyfish and the crabs on the jetty and my Norwegian family, and the houses that aren't named and are hardly numbered. We revert back to the life my grandparents had -- lazy days on boats or sunbathing, the collecting of the newspaper from the mailbox, vaguest memories of bikes and the shortcut through the woods to the grocery store, of stopping on the side of the road to buy Norwegian strawberries, red and sweet and just beginning to mascerate. And there is the old badminton set that's been year for forty years, and the grass that has to cut in order to play, and the roof we stand on to pick the sour black morello cherries, and the rock we throw the fishbones on for the seagulls, next to the flag which has to come down before sunset.  There are herrings and hardboiled eggs, dried smoked ham and tomatoes, sweet brown goats cheese and knekkebrod, and picnics on the hard gray granite rocks of the skerry island that guard the coast.

Isn't this the best time of the year? I drove through LA on Friday to a dinner in Culver City. It was eight o'clock and the sky was pink and the air was just slightly warm and I thought, this is it, just before the summer solstice, the time to be here in the City of Angels. The air is thick with optimism, and what could be. To be honest, it's the time of year when it would be splendid to have a boyfriend, to hike with early in the morning and read books under trees in the afternoon and giggle insanely over supper under lightened skies.

You know, just putting it out there. Trying to make new memories and all that.

Happy Father's Day.

Oh, and this book, by the way, is great: Seating Arrangements by Maggie Shipstead.

And one more thing:
Be the Lighthouse.

"You are a lighthouse, so nobody else can wreck near you. That is the one thing in life you have to do. Spread the light. Be the lighthouse. So every journey, every destiny, every distance will be safe."

-- Yogi Bhajan 11/87

Swedish House Mafia: Don't You Worry Child

Some lovely untsa untsa music with memories of Scandinavian summers:


Swedish House Mafia - Don't You Worry Child... by SwedishHouseMafia-Official

Vanessa's Amazing Chicken Curry (by way of Singapore)

la belle vanessa (un peu blurry)

My cousin Vanessa (by marriage) is impossibly beautiful, with wide, almond-shaped eyes and curly brown hair and a permanent lazy half-smile on her face. Everything she does seems effortless. Until two days ago, I had no idea that she had serious culinary talents. The little light she'd been hiding under a bushel was this curry (only one element of her hidden repertoire) -- inspired by her fiance who grew up in Singapore -- a fantastic, if not a little complicated, chicken and potato curry, which she served with plain Jasmine rice, stir-fried beansprouts and tiny, warm papadams. This is quite literally one of the best curries I've ever tasted.

But the coolest thing is her garden: a whole rooftop of raised beds filled with tomatoes, cilantro, kefir lime leaves, curry leaves, parsley, onions, scallions, peas, thyme. (You have to climb through a window from a little ladder to get onto the roof, not the easiest thing to do in high heels, to be honest). It's heaven.

the island of singapore

curry leaves

authentic small papadams

Indian Chicken Curry
Serves 8-10

Ingredients

6 boneless/skinless chicken thighs, washed and dried and cut into 1-2” pieces
3 boneless/skinless chicken breasts, washed and dried and cut into 1-2” pieces
5 potatoes (of your choice, if they are smaller sized, up the quantity), peeled and cut into LARGE pieces (if you’re using small potatoes, leave them whole. if you cut too small they will breakdown and overtake the curry, and turn it into curry mashed potatoes)
2.5 cups coconut milk
Vegetable oil

A-
25 shallots (small Asian shallots, if you are using US gigantic shallots, 1 is usually equal to about 3-4 Asian, so you’ll only need about 8)- sliced thin
8 cloves of garlic -- sliced thin
1 tbspn mixed curry seeds (available at Asian or Indian markets)
10 stems of curry leaves (these aren’t easy to find… call around Asian markets to see if they have them… or stop by my house to pick them from my tree!) -- washed, leaves removed from stems (**note: curry leaves aren't the same as kefir lime leaves, they're smaller and thinner and the flavor is different)
15 med size red chilies (in Asian markets they are usually called ‘red jalapenos’, in American markets they are usually called ‘fresno peppers’) --  seeds removed, ground into paste in blender

B-
2 tspn tumeric powder
6 tbspn meat curry powder (available in Asian or Indian markets)
2 tbspn paprika
… mix all together with enough water to make a sauce-consistency

C-
2 tbspn cumin powder
1 tbspn mixed curry seeds
… mix together


Directions
Heat oil in a large pot and fry the A ingredients… beginning with the shallots, garlic, and seeds, then adding the leaves, and when the shallots start to soften, add the chili paste.  Continue frying for about 5 minutes, then add mixture B, and fry for another 5 minutes.  Add chicken, stir for a few minutes, then add the coconut milk and C mixture.
Lower the heat and cover the pot.  Leave for about 10 minutes, then add in the potatoes and re-cover the pot.  Cook for about 40 minutes, or until the potatoes are fully cooked.

Serve with plain jasmine rice, papadams, spicy citrus soy (recipe below) and an Asian vegetable of your choice!

Spicy Citrus Soy
Limes
Soy Sauce
Thai Chillies

In a small bowl, fill 1/2 way with soy sauce, 1/2 way with fresh squeezed lime juice, and add diced chilies (the tiny red and green ones are best for this).

the beautiful moshay girls at minky's graduation party

Silver: Love

It's been a while. My apologies. Between moving into a new office and graduations and the siren call of the summer soft fruit, I have not been attentive to MissWhistle.

But today, on the occasion of my 25th wedding anniversary, time should be marked. Not just the passing of time, but the realization that today, June 11, 2013, I woke up feeling for the first time in a long while, completely okay with not being married and not fearful of being alone. The sun was pouring in after a week of low-cloud mornings, and the birds were singing, and the plum tree is fat with fruit, so heavy that it's almost hitting the deck. Girls will be wearing white dresses and flower garlands soon in celebration of the solstice. It's summer!

Here is my teacher, the lovely Tej from Nine Treasures Yoga, speaking about transforming fear:



Get into a place where God's miracles can come to you. Pretty good, huh?

I wish you a day filled with love.

This is my favorite song on the Daft Punk album (audio only).

"Hold on. If love is the answer, you're home."

(Crazy funk guitar by Nile Rodgers...)

In Spite of Everything, the Stars

Like a stunned piano, like a bucket
of fresh milk flung into the air
or a dozen fists of confetti
thrown hard at a bride
stepping down from the altar,
the stars surprise the sky.
Think of dazed stones
floating overhead, or an ocean
of starfish hung up to dry. Yes,
like a conductor's expectant arm
about to lift toward the chorus,
or a juggler's plates defying gravity,
or a hundred fastballs fired at once
and freezing in midair, the stars
startle the sky over the city.

And that's why drunks leaning up
against abandoned buildings, women
hurrying home on deserted side streets,
policemen turning blind corners, and
even thieves stepping from alleys
all stare up at once. Why else do
sleepwalkers move toward the windows,
or old men drag flimsy lawn chairs
onto fire escapes, or hardened criminals
press sad foreheads to steel bars?
Because the night is alive with lamps!
That's why in dark houses all over the city
dreams stir in the pillows, a million
plumes of breath rise into the sky.

-- Edward Hirsch (via Writer's Almanac)