Liz Taylor's favorite chili (via Nora Ephron)

It's been one of those days. I've had the confidence beaten out of me with a big stick. So today, while the painters painted my wall pink, yes magenta pink, I moved furniture, hung pictures, cleaned closets and made flapjacks and chili. Not just any chili, Chasen's Chili -- the most fabulous chili in the world, the chili that Elizabeth Taylor had flown in to Rome in 1962 on dry ice so that she could taste it while she was filming Cleopatra -- using Nora Ephron's recipe. I'm rather a fan of Nora Ephron at the moment, and not just because I've been living through Heartburn. She also made the marvellous "Julie & Julia" and is a big fan of mashed potatoes. Hence this from "Heartburn":

Nothing like mashed potatoes when you're feeling blue. Nothing like getting into bed with a bowl of hot mashed potatoes already loaded with butter, and methodically adding a thin cold slice of butter to every forkful. The problem with mashed potatoes, though, is that they require almost as much hard work as crisp potatoes, and when you're feeling blue the last thing you feel like is hard work. Of course, you can always get someone to make the mashed potatoes for you, but let's face it: the reason you're blue is that there isn't anyone to make them for you. As a result, most people do not have nearly enough mashed potatoes in their lives, and when they do, it's almost always at the wrong time.

And here is her recipe for Chasen's chili:

Makes 10 to 12 servings

servings: 10-12 people

Ingredients

2 pounds ground chuck, ground big if possible
1 pound ground pork
red pepper chopped
1 green pepper chopped
3 cups chopped onion
2 cloves smashed garlic
3 TB oil
1 stick butter
1 35 oz.can crushed San Marzano tomatoes
4 15 oz. cans pinto beans
2/3 cup chili powder
2 TB cumin
2 tsp. cayenne pepper
salt and pepper

Preparation

Drain beans and rinse. Put into a large casserole with the can of tomatoes. (Remove basil if there's basil.) Heat for a few minutes.


Heat oil and gently cook peppers. When soft add onions and gently cook. Add garlic for a minute or so. Add all to tomatoes.


Melt half the butter and cook the beef and pork until no longer raw. Add spices and stir. Add to the tomato mixture and add the rest of the butter. Cook about thirty to forty five minutes, covered, over low heat.

Serve with sour cream, with grated cheddar, with some chopped cilantro, some finely chopped white onion, perhaps some thinly sliced jalapenos if you're feeling saucy.

I am.

Hermann Hesse on trees

"For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.
Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.
A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.
A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.
When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. . . . Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.
A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one’s suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.
So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness."

Hermann Hesse, from Bäume: Betrachtungen und Gedichte
via the inimitable Brain Pickings

Tree House

Start with a tree,
an old willow with its feet in the water,
and one low branch to let you in
and a higher branch to let you
upstairs,
and a lookout branch to show
how far you've come
(the lake before you,
the woods at your back),

and now you are close
to those who live in these rooms
without walls, without doors:
one nuthatch typing its way up the bark,
two mourning doves calling the sun out of darkness,
three blackbirds folding their wings tipped with sunset,
twelve crows threading the air and stitching
a cape that whirls them away
through the empty sky,

and don't forget the blue heron
stalking the shallows for bluegills,
and don't forget the otter backpaddling past you,
and the turtles perched on the log like shoes
lined up each night in a large family,

and don't forget the owl
who has watched over you
since you were born.

Be the housekeeper of trees,
who have nothing to keep
except silence.

"Tree House" by Nancy Willard, from The Sea at Truro. © Alfred A. Knopf, 2012. Via Writer's Almanac. 

 

Winnie the Pooh

“If ever there is tomorrow when we're not together... there is something you must always remember. You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think. But the most important thing is, even if we're apart... I'll always be with you.”

-- A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

Running on grass

The Del Mar Racetrack "where the turf meets the surf"

This weekend, I was in Del Mar where the younger child was horse-showing. I love Del Mar, have loved it for many years, since I was a hippy beach girl in cut-offs, listening to the Dead. It's a blissful place -- a tiny village full of little restaurants and shops, a lagoon, a dog beach, a race track, California-style bungalows, people walking down the street hand-in-hand with cups of coffee, dogs everywhere, and -- at this time of year -- crazy Tequila Sunrise-style sunsets.

While the east coast is in distress with Hurricane Sandy -- while Piers Morgan is interviewing the speaker of the New York City Council and Anderson Cooper is having heartfelt conversations with crane experts to discuss the one dangling precariously high over Manhattan, while my friends still don't have power, and Minky's trip to Bard for IDP has been cancelled due to the mess with the airlines, while people are trying to save their burned houses and washed away beaches and every reporter is standing thigh high in seawater, I feel slightly bad writing about lawn. But lawn is what I am going to write about.

The Del Mar racetrack was deserted this weekend. The show was at one end but the entire track, the one with the expensive European footing, and the grass one, was empty. And so, on Sunday afternoon, I crawled through a hedge and under a fence and ventured inside. While the dogs ran around happily, I rejoiced in feeling the grass under my feet and I was reminded quite clearly of my childhood, of big, springy lawns and cartwheels, and roly-poly races down hills and chasing dogs and dogs chasing you, and the smell of it, the heady, herby smell of the grass, and the way your legs felt walking on it. So walking on the racetrack in San Diego County in October, I was reminded of England in the summer, on those impossibly long sunny days which went on forever (and are the only ones you remember despite the fact that most days were grey and rainy). I remember bocce on the lawn. And my father with a glass of claret and the tricks he taught the dogs.  And for a moment, in all of it, I realized, how delicious it is to feel free.  The grass stretched for a mile. A whole mile of short, springy, green grass, no brown patches, no holes, no weeds, just turf.

Morning view from dog beach across the racetrack

Marky, Minky & Thistle, at the racetrack at night

In my next house -- in my next life -- there will be a lawn. Lots and lots of grass to roll on, and play on, to run on, and do cartwheels on. Try it.

Not Going to Him

 

Minute by minute, I do not get up and just
go to him –
by day, twenty blocks away;
by night, due across the city's
woods, where night-crowned heron sleep.
It is what I do now: not go, not
see or touch. And after eleven
million six hundred sixty-four thousand
minutes of not, I am a stunned knower
of not. Then I let myself picture him
a moment: the bone that seemed to surface in his
wrist after I had held my father's
hand in coma; then up, over
his arm, with its fold, from which for a friend
he gave his blood. Then a sense of his presence
returns, his flesh which seemed, to me,
made as if before the Christian
God existed, a north-island baby's
body become a man's, with that pent
spirit, its heels dug in, those time-worn
heels, those elegant flat feet;
and then, in a sweep, calf shin knee thigh pelvis
waist, and I run my irises
over his feathered chest, and on his neck,
the scar, dollhouse saucer of tarnish
set in time's throat, and up to the nape and then
dive again, as the swallows fly
at speed – cliff and barn and bank
and tree – at twilight, just over the surface
of a sloping terrain. He is alive, he breathes
and moves! My body may never learn
not to yearn for that one, or this could be
a first farewell to him, a life-do-us-part.

-- Sharon Olds (from "Stag's Leap"-- more here)

Teazles

Out in the vacant lot to gather weeds
I found these teazles – their ovoid heads
delicately armoured with crowns of thorns.
Arthur, from whom I haven't heard a word
in thirty years, who must be ninety if
he's a day, told me they were used to raise
the nap on the green felt of billiards tables
and, since Roman times, for combing woollen stuff.
He also said their seeds were caviar
to the goldfinch. And then I lost the knife
he'd lent me to cut some – the loss of which
was the cause of grief. In honour of gruff Arthur
I shake the seeds out in our small green patch
and stick the spiky seed heads in a jar.

• From Out There by Jamie McKendrick

Mr Ocean's advice

Spotteds/morning glory

The perfect match

So I took the plunge. I signed up on match.com. I figured that 15 months single was quite long enough and as no-one had come along -- not a walker, not a gigolo -- I should take the matter into my own hands. I picked the user name "emmapeel". I thought that was awfully funny until it was rejected. Match.com thoughtfully suggested "tenderemmapeel" or "adventurousbeetle". I kid you not.

After much editing and sending my profile back and forth to trusted male friends we came up with something that seemed honest yet plausible, witty yet warm and unfortunately I was vetoed in my desire to use my new favorite phrase "Argo fuck yourself" in my profile description. My friend Chris pointed out that saying "this is the strangest thing I have ever done" sounded as I were 80 because, darling, all the kids are online dating nowadays.

My first email came from Hector in Duarte. The subject line read "Let's go Shorty. Time to get back in the saddle." How does he know? I thought.

My misadventures will be shares with you, dear reader. I hope I can count on your discretion.

Mum's the word.

Onward and upward.

-- Emma Peel

My (other) neighbor

My neighbor just called.  The one down the hill, closer to Lookout Mountain. It's half past six in the morning. And yes the dogs were barking at six, at an errant coyote. Such is life in the hills. Dogs protect and the wildlife brings out their inner security guards. They were outside for all of an minute before I ushered them in, shut the door and grumbled at them. Usually we don't go out till seven, down the hill, along the swale, taking in the morning.

"It's George, your neighbor" he says. "What's up with the dogs?"
(George is a lawyer who gets large amounts of money for people hurt in accidents.)
"Oh sorry George, I heard them when you did and I just brought them in."
(Dogs bark, George, dogs bark, especially in the canyon.)
"Every day it's the same with the dogs barking early in the morning. What are you going to do about it."
"Sorry George, I'm usually really careful not to let them out too early. But you know, we live in the hills and there are coyotes..."
"What are you going to do about it?"
"Sorry George this is the first time I've spoken to you in ages, I didn't realize there was a problem."
"That's not true. I spoke to your daughter the other day.  That's just not true."
"What's not true, George? Are you calling me a liar?"
"It's not true" he says, firmly.
"George, I always respond whenever you call. I am always very aware that you don't want barking dogs to interrupt you in the early hours of the morning. I don't understand why you are being so aggressive."
"Well what's the solution?"
"I'll shoot them" I say, deadpan.
I am proud of the silence that ensues.
Finally, "Why are you being like that" says George.
"Well, because I had a shitty day yesterday, and you are calling me at six in the morning all aggressive when I have only ever been nice to you and frankly I think this is fucking bullshit."
And I hung up the phone.
Like that.
Or something like that.


These are the days that you wish you were married to a member of the NRA, with a big belly and a .45. Actually, any husband would do, as long as he were menacing.

Stuff that in your binder, Mr Romney.

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
       love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting-
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

-- Mary Oliver

October in Los Angeles

I ❤ Monica

This is what I cam home to. No words.

October 6, Tujunga creek

Sweet Thing

And I will stroll the merry way
And jump the hedges first
And I will drink the clear
Clean water for to quench my thirst
And I shall watch the ferry-boats
And they'll get high
On a bluer ocean
Against tomorrows sky
And I will never grow so old again
And I will walk and talk
In gardens all wet with rain

Oh sweet thing, sweet thing
My, my, my, my, my sweet thing
And I shall drive my chariot
Down your streets and cry
Hey, it's me, I'm dynamite
And I don't know why
And you shall take me strongly
In your arms again
And I will not remember
That I even felt the pain.
We shall walk and talk
In gardens all misty and wet with rain
And I will never, never, never
Grow so old again.

-- "Sweet Thing" from the perfect album Astral Weeks by Van Morrison

(no video, but song below)

Buddhist prayer

A buddhist prayer with letters cut out of the Book of Psalms by artist Meg Hitchcock.

"May every creature abound in well being and peace. May every living being weak or strong attain inner peace. Just as a mother with her own life protects her child from hurt so within yourself foster a limitless concern for every living creature. Display a heart of boundless love for all the world in all its height and depth. Love without restraint. Devote your mind entirely to divine love."

Manuka honey

Now that I am entirely hoarse I am drinking tea with manuka honey which has magical properties. It is awfully expensive so only use in times of desperate need. Thistle -- of course -- couldn't care less.

Impulsive

One thing I know: don't make any major life decisions with a 102F fever. And so it has been for the last few days: the sore throat, the headache, the body aches, and now the raspy man-voice. One typically Italian man with whom I work said to me today (as I croaked to him down the phone) "where are you?" "In bed, deathly ill," I rasped. "You sound amazing," he said, somewhat lustily. So much for ginger and lemon and cayenne and hot water and Ribena. But back to the point, never make any life decisions with a fever. Fevers make you paranoid and sad and small and utterly without a sense of humor. With health comes energy, expansion, bigness, happiness, wit (one hopes).

It's lousy in Los Angeles at the beginning of October. On the east coast there is rain and rainbows and colored leaves and apple picking and glorious bonfires and sausages on sticks. Here we have dried out hillsides and cut native grass lying about in black garbage bags like SoCal silage and winds that feel like hairdryers and the constant murmuration of earthquakes (no, not starlings, dear pedants). While others are making toffee apples and pumpkin soup and singing "Old Uncle Tom Cobbley and All" we are reading Joan Didion and tweeting the presidential debate and feeling sad that Obama was so boring tonight ("take that man to Starbucks" said someone) and wondering what will happen if the Republicans without a plan run the country. And it's too warm for "hearty autumn fare" so we're still nibbling on lettuce leaves and eating ice lollies to stave off the heat and mending the fence so that the dogs can't get out to carouse with their coyote friends. And after three days in bed I am giddy with boredom and sick of doing skyped conference calls in pyjamas and dying to be back in the office in relative cool and civility, eating bad food off the truck on the lot.

And then there's the giving up. You know, when you naively believe there's still a spark of hope left and you give a tiny little millimeter only to be slapped in the face and you wish you hadn't and you realize how much easier everyone's lives would be if the divorce were over and you were on your own completely and you didn't have to worry about the house and the hillside and the holes in the fence and the deck which is listing dangerously towards the environs of Sunset Plaza (and not in a good way, more like the Titanic), or the fact that the sprinklers don't work and you don't know how to fix sprinklers, despite learning how to use the sprinkler computer box which you think is awfully clever. There are school fees and medical bills and all the things that overwhelm you when you spend three days at home, on top of the 800 emails you receive every day. And you look in the mirror at your pale face with the hair scraped back and you think yikes, seriously, who'd have me anyway looking the way I do in frumpy pajamas and a strawberry pink hoodie that has seen better days.

Miss Bean

"The vet says that Bean is impulsive" say Monica. "Impulsive?" I say. "Hmmm."
"You know, the way she licks that hot spot. How she can't stop even though it makes it worse."
Ah. Compulsive. Yes, of course I understand. The irresistible urge to keep doing something even though it hurts. So much.

If Bean were a human she would pull out clumps of her hair. Unless she's running around on the hillside, under the trees or in the canyon. Last weekend I took them all to Little Tujunga Canyon and walked up into the National forest, under the oaks, in dappled light before the sun had come over the horizon, down to the old creek bed, which is barely a trickle at this time of the year, and she ran and she ran and she ran. Came back to me, smiled, and ran again.  And we stood there in the middle of the rocky bed of alluvium watching the Mexican cowboys and the hawks soaring overhead just above the ancient oaks. It's peaceful there in the morning. There is nothing and there is everything.

There's a great piece in EW today about the films of Paul Thomas Anderson by Owen Gleiberman (whether or not you agree with him, it's brilliantly written). More than anything it reminded me of this beautiful film, Magnolia. Watch Aimee Mann's Wise Up here. I mean, if you can, please watch it. You will know what I mean, I promise. Or have a look below:

Magnolia - Aimee Mann - Wise Up from Shoaib Akhtar on Vimeo.

Take Hands

via The Paris Review

Take hands.
There is no love now.
But there are hands.
There is no joining now,
But a joining has been
Of the fastening of fingers
And their opening.
More than the clasp even, the kiss
Speaks loneliness,
How we dwell apart
And how love triumphs in this.



-- Laura Riding

"Take Hands" from The Poems of Laura Riding: A New Edition from the 1938 Collection by Laura (Riding) Jackson. Copyright © 1938, 1980. Reprinted with the permission of Persea Books. In conformity with the late author's wish, her Board of Literary Management asks us to record that, in 1941, Laura (Riding) Jackson renounced, on grounds of linguistic principle, the writing of poetry: she had come to hold that "poetry obstructs general attainment to something better in our linguistic way-of-life than we have."