Jill Rants and Raves

owning a home - no castle guaranteed

I've just spent the afternoon pulling weeds from part of my yard - just one part. The next pack of weeds will have to wait for another day. And then I can start on the patch I just spent three hours on. What did I used to do before this? Before the 'homeowner' label got slapped on me like a neon sign at Home Depot. If I get one more badly designed flier from some fly by night construction firm, garden debris clearer, tree trimmer, paint consultant or trash hauler stuffed on my front porch, I will...what will I do? If I could afford somebody to do this stuff for me you stupid dolts, dontcha think I'd have already paid for it? Huh??

What was I thinking? It was 1997, I know exactly what I was thinking. Prices were at a record low after a nutty overheated real estate market skidded to a freezing stop and I was being horribly sentimental and feeling vulnerable. My dad had died recently, my dad who was evicted from his rental home in Berlin after 20 years there - 6 months before his death. Who does that kind of shit to a 91 year old man? My father, the Jewish intellectual who barely knew what a hammer was for (I mention this only because my preference has always been for girls who know how to wield a power tool and can fix their own plumbing and then want to be taken to bed) had never bought a home after the loss of all our family property under the Nazis.

Susie and I lived in a great flat in Bernal Heights (where else?), walked our dogs up to the Hill every day and generally felt pretty happy where we were (and as an aside, if any of you shop at Bernal Beast, the pet store on Cortland Avenue - I came up with the name). But after my dad died and left me his book collection, I sold it for a princely $8,000 and was thrilled when my girlfriend's mom said she would match that amount - so Susie and I went hunting for a cheap end home in San Francisco, where I had lived since arriving here in 1987. I sorta didn't want to live in a 70's shack with no floor, next to McLaren Park so we expanded our search...

The first time I saw this house I knew it was perfect for us. And even with all my complaining, don't get me wrong, this is one freakin' sweet house and particularly because I have my office here in the back, in the converted garage with light flooding in and a skylight. The previous owners had a small printing press and they had made some great renovations that meant we didn't have to rip up and rip out dreadful 'renter special' fittings. Errr, but what was going on with the new pinky tile they put in the bathroom....maybe they thought it looked terracotta in the showroom....I keep hoping it'll crack apart so I can have a good excuse to go further into debt, but unfortunately it seems to be holding up really well....

Being a houseowner was a pretty big shock. And I haven't recovered from it yet. My relationship didn't do too well with us stressing out over money, repairs, endless commitments, gardening, roof leaking, hot water tank hissing, and -gulp- property taxes with more special assessments in Berkeley than I even knew existed. It isn't a surprise that Suse left me (and the house) - and moved into a small studio and bought a red sports car and fell in lust with someone. Meanwhile, dating for me meant introducing the potential girlfriend to a house full of animals, a pile of bills and a 1993 Toyota Wagon. For those of you who are single parents you'll understand how it felt when one of my cats welcomed a sexy woman to my house by getting onto her lap in a seeming act of adoration, and turned and sprayed all over her white cashmere sweater.

And my career? It's really hard to think about photo shoots when the kitchen cabinets need painting, or I have to go get 10 bags of bark from the garden store. And don't even talk to me about roots in the freakin' sewer pipes. Honestly, there are more days than not that I wish I was back in a rental, and I could smile as I watched the landlord breakin' his back hauling off some rotted out tree. "Yeah, I'm going to the studio dude, to photograph some unbelievably handsome persons of indeterminate gender and I won't be back till after dark."

I'm too tired from the yardwork, and the cleaning, and the laundry to take pictures of anything other than dogs...mind you, I'm getting pretty damn good at that....

state bark

I got a call yesterday evening from someone who couldn't stop laughing - they were looking, they told me, at a redecorated sign at my beloved Albany Waterfront Park. Just as the sun was easing out of the sky (where does it go when it goes down???) I arrived with my trusty little point and shoot....
I won't bore you with all the details about why State Parks need to be softening their regulations on dogs in certain parks. For now, just laugh along with the wit who came up with this....

of alternators, farmers markets and macaroons

My car broke down on Clement Street in San Francisco which was damn annoying. Even more annoying was that I had taken Susie's advice and gone to Green Apple Books to sell a bunch of CD's and books which have been cluttering up my house and after all it is spring time - I want clutter gone, I am in a cleaning up and cleaning out kinda mood. I would have just donated this stuff but Susie had told tall tales of getting a reasonable chunk of change for her stuff, so I thought 'hey, that's enough for another good meal at my fave restaurant' so I loaded the boxes into the car and we headed off to the City, and as the battery warning light flashed on the dashboard I was through the toll plaza and called my mechanic and he said 'bring it in on your way home'. Yeah. Ok. That woulda been good. What made this really annoying was that while they went through my CD's and books including the copy of Andrea Dworkin's 'Intercourse' which Susie Bright gave me 20 years ago and inscribed with the words 'the best fuck book anytime, anywhere' (as a joke), Susie (Fought not Bright) and I went and got coffee which cost as much as the piddling amount they offered me for the few items the bookstore kept. That is some embarrassment, walking out of a used bookstore with almost everything you'd tried to sell and having spent most of the income on a weak milky cup of joe.

We got in the car and tick tick tick tick. Shit fuck goddamm. 4pm on a weekday and stuck in the nether regions of San Francisco. I thought of calling my old buddy Tim who used to run a Volkswagen repair shop on Irving Street called Folk Wisdom and where I learned how to replace a starter or water pump and where I discovered that, even in California, hands could get really really cold. And then, suddenly, things sort of looked up. The tow truck came in a miraculous half an hour, my insurance company agreed to pay for the tow all the way back to Berkeley instead of the 5 miles the tow company said they would pay for - which woulda put me bang in the middle of the lower deck of the Bay Bridge. And my mechanic, one of those surly Yugoslavs with a heart of gold, was waiting for us when we arrived and Susie and I walked the mile back to my house.

Of course, when your car needs a freakin' new alternator, one tries to find the bright side. But it could have been a lot worse, right?

So, this morning I loaded up some of the dogs in Susie's Miata which has some pretty weird sounds of its' own and headed to the Albany Bulb where I almost ran into a reversing Lexus SUV. Only to notice that it was the same Lexus SUV being driven by the same person who tried to run me into oncoming traffic less than a year ago. This is an ugly story from my recent past. I better call my therapist before I'm tempted to blog about it. If I could just get back to my novel I could switch the identities, change the car colors ( I'll have to leave it as a pretentious Lexus SUV) and pretend that this crazy situation all just happened in my fertile imagination.

But I enjoyed my walk, there are almost as many wildflowers at the Albany Bulb as I saw in the desert last week, Dan my mechanic broke the bad news to me about my car (and the cost) and I saw my stimulus check float away in a sea of auto repairs. But somehow I wasn't that perturbed. I came home, chopped some wood (actually I chain sawed it), plucked weeds from the front yard, did some photo work and then sauntered to the Tuesday Farmers Market just a block from my house. Local honey and Vital Vittles bread (from right here in Berkeley), cheeses from Marin, Blue Bottle coffee, vegetables and fruits erupting from baskets, organic meats and ice cream, and my little addiction - an almond macaroon which is so buttery melt in the mouth and crispy on the outside that I savor every mouthful like a first kiss.

I had been feeling and am feeling - so at odds inside, so wanting to leave the country, leave the state, leave Berkeley, sell my house, rent out my house, change my identity, not be me, be somewhere, someone, anyone else, be with someone, anyone, elsewhere, be a boy, not a boy, a teenage boy, not a girl that's for sure, buy a prefab house and persuade Aida to let me put it on an acre or two of her land, move to Tennessee, go to Cuba, go to Palermo, finish my novel, start taking photographs again goddammit, make organic dog biscuits and sell them at the organic farmer's market where you can't take your dog. It is unbelievably tough being me. The macaroon sure helped though!

from merle haggard to mecca and back via mozart and the coalinga stockyards

I went on a roadtrip with my dog. We went looking for wildflowers, but it's always the things you aren't looking for that make the journey worthwhile. We were gone for 1400 miles and came back the better for it. The road less traveled took us along freeways and highways, and then into canyons where there was nothing but real silence, the only sound from the tinkling of Calvin's dog tags. I took his collar off and my dog and I lay down in the late afternoon shade of 75 degrees and waited for sound that didn't come and slept. When I awoke, we hiked between the rock face and I photographed a flower that doesn't grow anywhere else. We stayed in motels and with friends along the way. Anderson, Joy, Diviana and I went to the opening of a Gender photo exhibit in LA and I reminded Phranc of our younger days in London, we ate vegan Thai food in West Hollywood (of course) and I drank a Peroni with my pasta in Indio. We walked through the palm groves in Mecca and ignored the '4 wheel drive only' notices so that we could drive the dirt road into Painted Canyon, we were surrounded by pelicans at the Salton Sea and saw the abandoned buildings, the long shuttered cafes with their fading painted signs, met Godzilla the cat in Bombay Beach and the dogs on the roof and the burnt out remains of a town on the edge of official neglect. I re-met old friends and met new ones, hung with a border collie and a shepherd mix in Palm Springs, and pee'd in the desert at Coachella, ate at Shermans Jewish Deli in Palm Springs and remembered that I am more Merle Haggard Drive in Bakersfield than Bob Hope Drive in Rancho Mirage. I learned what a date shake is and a celery soda and on the way back made a pilgrimage of sorts, back to the beginnings of my American journey and took the turn to Tehachapi where I had eaten at a diner on my first visit in 1986. I walked through the door and ordered the same meal - eggs over medium, bacon, with hash browns, and they don't charge for the coffee. I smiled as I drove past Buttonwillow on my way home and fondly remembered the tamales from Tita's Salvadorean cafe which I'd shared with Calvin on our first night away from home. And then in Merle's hometown I grabbed my latte while the Starbucks played Mozart on the sound system, and then headed out into the noonday sun for the drive home, and as we headed up Highway 5 alongside the pistachio and apricot farms, we headed past the stench and the misery of the Coalinga stockyards and I hit the button on the ipod and Bronski Beat and 'Tell me why'...

Look at the pictures: Roadtrip

like riding a bike

Figured Spring was here, the rain has slowed, the blossoms are out on the plum tree, time to get the bike out. Yesterday I was heading off to therapy - I don't go on a regular basis anymore as I am so freakin' healed - but I had called Jody the other day and told her that I had a sudden epiphany and could I come and chat. So, it was sunny, I was sunny, and Toots and the Maytals were thumping in my headset and I was on my bike and off down the driveway, around the corner and along the road. And promptly rode into a huge blue recycling container that someone had rolled off the sidewalk. Thump, crash, bang, wallop. I was so fucking embarrassed. My bike lying helpless beside me, and a burning sensation on my knee and elbow. Decided to change strategies. So biked back home feeling less like a homecoming hero and more like an accident prone wally and changed into 4 wheel transport and listened to talk radio instead of my i pod, and limped into therapy 2 minutes ahead of schedule and talked for an hour about secrecy.

I think a lot about the difference between privacy and secrecy. Not so much at the moment as I am distinctly single and therefore singularly unconcerned with what someone might be doing and not telling me about. But I definitely have a thing about the sin of omission. D'ya know what I mean? Privacy is a damn important thing. But I think some people mix privacy up with keeping secrets. Like a secret is the only way to have privacy. Privacy is something we can ask for, something we have a right to have and which others have an obligation to respect. But secrets are altogether different. Like when someone happily tells you their whole schedule for the next day, they tell you they are having lunch with their mum at 1pm and taking their best friend to dinner at 6pm. And then the day after that they tell you, that at 3pm they went to a shooting range with someone who has expressed interest in dating them. Just slipped their mind I guess.

Secret keepers are cowards and gamblers all at once. It's kinda strange, when you think about it. Most people who keep secrets do so because they want to avoid a possible reaction from another person. They might even do it to 'protect' the other. Yeah, right. But it's a gamble, for those who like playing the high risk stakes. You either get away with it completely, you get to do the illicit secret deed and the 'other' has no soddin' idea - the equivalent of five cherries in a row at Caesar's Palace, but if the secret is out, the consequences can be an all or nothing flat out knockdown bareknuckler. The equivalent of slipping all your winnings back into the slots.

So, there I was - thinking about secrecy because, like in most families, secrets were bursting out at every seam in the fabric of our lives. And I have been realising that I feel absolute terror, real physical fear, when I feel secrecy creeping into my relationships. Which could be why, and I'm only half joking here, I have pretty extensive conversations with myself about what I am planning to do for the next 24 hours....trippy. Just so my right side knows what my left is doing. 

So, sore from my bicycle stumble, and filled with the urgency one feels when the clock is creeping towards the moment the therapist says 'the buzzer will probably go in about 5 minutes' and you get ushered out the back door, like a nasty little secret, I rushed through my epiphany. That it is not that I do not understand, appreciate or even encourage privacy, but that the very thought of secrets fills me with such dread that I probably do everything I can do to avoid even caring what someone might or might not do. It is a freakin' drag being such an emotional retard.

But like falling off your bicycle when you are a kid, and your mum says ' just get back on it again', I am filled with the optimism of learning how to do it, even at this middle aged stage. But given that I am actually falling off bicycles...now....

happy birthday mum

My mum, born Elizabeth Middleton in Eastbourne, a lesser resort on the south England coast overshadowed by it's sexy nearby neighbour Brighton, would have become 81 years old today. And I, dutiful daughter - or as she said on her deathbed 'never the daughter I wanted' - would have called her from the safe distance of another continent. And would have arranged for her favorite fresias to arrive at her door. A cruel unnecessary early death took that ritual from us when she died when I was 37, and she a ravaged 62.

I often think that I have no real idea who she was - Elizabeth, who renamed herself Charmian and who barely finished school, and married a Jewish intellectual 24 years older than she was, after being introduced to him in a hotel bar in central London where she worked as a chambermaid. I think The Strand Palace Hotel if I'm not mistaken. Introduced to Julius by another expatriate German Jew old enough to be her father who had tired of this smart, beautiful, but immature 19 year old. Her mother's family were a grand proud south England family. But because it clearly runs in the family, Florence Dulcie Booth (the only grandparent I knew) had run off with the son of a Scottish cattle trader, one of 12 children only half of whom made it out of childhood, from the Aberdeen area. Gruff, dashing and apparently quite brutal it is a very good thing that I never met James Middleton. But the physical way in which he disciplined his own 2 kids - my mum and her brother - left indelible marks on my face and on my soul nonetheless.

My Mum always said all she wanted was to be a mum. A loving family around her. A grandma. But then did nothing really to ensure that outcome. Always searching for adventure, always leaving for another risk, always leaving. After my Granny died in the hospital after a stroke, my mother cleaned up her apartment with such speed that I didn't even have a chance to gather together some of the sweetest memories and mementos of my gran to take with me. My mum arranged for the entire contents of the flat to be removed. My grandmother's most personal items, my rocking horse, letters, photos,my grandfather's uniform and regimental sword. Even my grannys' astonishing collection of cigarette cards of film stars and cricket players. She didn't take a thing. When, a few years later I asked her why, she answered simply 'Darling you remember, I left in a hurry'. I certainly remember the leavings, and how many times I watched as animals were left behind, being gathered up by strangers to be removed. To where? Now, of course I know. Then, the powerlessness of childhood left me with no other option than to construct another wall...

I adored my mother. Adored and feared her dependence on me. Her tears and rages, her sobbing uncontrollably and the hand with those long graceful fingers slapping with a crack across my cheeks. Her laugh and smiles, her dirty sense of humour, her deep humility and shame, her ability to turn her back on me as I begged her not to go. By the time the Summer of Love in 1967 arrived I was being thrown out of the boarding school she had abandoned me in and the headmistress was writing a desperate plea to my father 'What is to become of Jill? She is filled with rage towards her mother.'

The problem is I had no idea I was filled with such rage. I sought out my mother's love again and again but always with the same result. And I would have her back in an instant if it were only possible. Happy Birthday Mum.

some kind of (wonderful) adventure

I'm almost embarrassed to admit that I enjoyed the movie Mamma Mia which I watched last night as the rain deposited even more misery on my head - more specifically I laughed till I cried watching Julie Walters who has been for many many years one of Britain's premier comic actresses with an acute sense of physical timing which would be the envy of a gymnast and an accent which can make you laugh even before she's opened her mouth. I sat, surrounded by a bunch of small dogs entwined in each other, sipping my PG Tips and punching the rewind button so that I could laugh over and over again at the sight of her sliding down a banister (you know the sense of exhilaration you get until that dreadful moment when your skin scrapes against the polished mahogany and you screech to a halt) and there isn't a funnier moment in the film than Julie Walters trying - and failing - to navigate a small dinghy.

I photographed Julie Walters once, with her onetime partner in comedy Victoria Wood, whose comic skit where she plays an overweight lonely teenage girl swimming the English Channel in freezing weather ranks as one of English comedy's funniest moments, and whose sister Penny Wood once played in a women's band that I almost managed to stardom (have I lost you yet?). I photographed Julie and Victoria in Covent Garden before the market was redeveloped and laughed so hard the whole time that almost all the shots were a little...shall we say...soft on focus?

I was crazy in love with Penny Wood's band The Mistakes, but between Georgina downing a bottle of vodka as she staggered offstage between songs, Mavis writing political anthems about radiation sickness that no-one could understand and Penny and Alison gamely trying to craft perfect pop songs, it was probably a mercy killing when Judy the drummer was stolen away by a band that become famous with a remake of Iko Iko - the Bellestars. And then I photographed the Bellestars for the Daily Mirror, when I almost became successful working for the Features editor, later to become incredibly famous, Ann Robinson, standing in a circle of hopeless contestants in her show 'The Weakest Link'.

I have lived. That much is true.

But I'll add some other little embarrassments. I'm admitting sheepishly that I listen to Barry White and that I crack up watching the deeply nasty Gordon Ramsey slice and dice his poor reality wannabe chefs on 'Hell's Kitchen' (the only TV I watch beside Seinfeld re-runs). My ipod is crammed full of Coldplay, AFI and Citizen Cope, Aretha, Otis and Elvis. I'm as likely to be listening to the Pogues as to KT Tunstall, Mary Gauthier and Alanis as to Wolfgang Amadeus, Weezer and Toots and the Maytals. I'm embarrassed to admit that I blew an opportunity to sell a great pop song to EMI records and that I once turned down Depeche Mode when I was booking bands for a venue in London. But I did book the Au Pairs, Poison Girls and the astonishingly crude Crass. That was the night all the fire extinguishers in the building were set off by some dumb drunk fucks.

Yup, it's been some kind of (wonderful) adventure.

I'm deeply embarrassed to admit I've been the affair too many freakin' times and I didn't seem to learn the lesson until....well, until just now really. I've been threatened, had someone's irate ex try to run my car into incoming traffic, had a chunky guy tell me - as if I should feel sorry for him - that it took all his self control not to come over to his ex girlfriends house, shoot us both and then kill himself. For someone who hates secrets as much as I do, I've certainly helped create a whole bunch of them. Right now, I'm contemplating the wisdom of a far away distant love affair with someone I never meet. She's there, I'm here. She's never late for lunch. No conflict, no pain, no romantic screwups. It's sounding like the sort of simple scenario that might just avoid embarrassment.

Much too clean for my kind of life!