Summer Hotel Retreat Day 1

Yes, I'm back in Culver City.  When I got in to LAX, getting bags and rental car took way longer than I would have dreamed.  This was going to make what I'd imagined as a relaxing time before the Q.E.D. panel at the MAK Center into a rushed frenzy, except I was too tired and steeped in the endless monotone of airport time to feel frenzy.  I played on Facebook on my iphone as I waited in the scandalously long line at the rental car place.  I had fun standing in the scandalously long line, turning fucking off into a survival skill.  I stopped at the Trader Joe's near the airport and picked up a few things like water and soy coffee creamer and some organic apricots and blackberries, and these lovely peonies.  What do you put peonies in, in a hotel room?  The full stems I put in the ice bucket, and the blossom that broke, I put in a water glass.  These peonies make me insanely happy.  Small comforts excite in a hotel room.  I brought with me the sprig of mugwort Ariana Reines gave me when we had dinner on Sunday.  Ariana's mugwort also makes me very happy.

Here's a picture of Ariana at Ritual Cafe on Valencia Street, looking wonderfully happy.

I don't know how regularly I'll be chronicling this summer's hotel retreat, as I plan to work on other writing projects while here, but doing this is oddly seductive for me—again, the small things make you happy in a hotel room, so we'll see.

The Authentic Objects panel was great.  Terry Castle was spunky and playful and super smart, projecting an eccentricity of someone who's put up with so much in life and just isn't going to fucking put up with it any longer.  Judie Bamber talked about her series of drawings and paintings based on photos of her mother.  Kevin and I were lucky enough go to a show of them in Culver City the last time I came down here.  Here's a link to some of the images, they're awesome, with an eroticism that really mucks around with conventional notions of the mother-daughter romance.  I loved what Judie had to say about how making the pieces was an enactment of her unfulfilled desire for her mother.  I got the sense that making the art was invoking a love that's never attainable.  Lots of talk on the panel about the unattainability of the loved object.  Vanessa Place was a marvel of spontaneously explicating threads she saw in all our work, and she brought our discussion of objects back to women, women's status as objects.  At dinner afterwards she said she wanted the panel to be all women, to hear women, who are objects, speaking about objects.  The event deserves much more unpacking than my tired brain will allow.  I'll end with a group photo taken outside the sushi place we ate at after the panel.

Terry Castle, Judie Bamber, Teresa Carmody, Vanessa Place, Kimberli Meyer