Looking For Venice

I used to go to Venice Beach fairly often in the late Sixties/early Seventies. It was a much hipper place to hang out than the Gidget-and-Moondoggie beaches of my Orange County home with all that good clean surfer fun. Venice Beach was a little darker, sometimes a little dangerous but always exciting. Long-haired hippies and sandal-clad beatniks strolled along a boardwalk lined with shops full of headbands and hookahs, psychadelic posters and paisley shirts. The Doors and the Grateful Dead played the Cheetah., and street musicians lined the boardwalk playing bongos, guitars, harmonicas. My girlfriends and I felt it was a place where adventure might be waiting behind every bead-curtained door.

I hadn't been there in years, but my daughter and her family have established a tradition of spending New Years Day having lunch at a favorite Marina Del Rey restaurant, then checking out the Venice Beach boardwalk. this year they invited me to go with them. Sure, I thought. I'm always up for a nice family lunch, I'd been hearing such good things about the restaurant, and I was a little curious to see if Venice Beach had changed.

The restaurant lived up completely to it's reputation...great food, plenty of it, wonderful atmosphere. Almost too stuffed to move, we trekked on to the boardwalk. My first shock was the parking lot. Nine dollars to park? Maybe my memory is faulty, but I don't remember a parking fee. As for the boardwalk itself, much more crowded than I'd ever seen it, both the street and the shops. My son-in-law mentioned that one of the shops he liked had partitioned itself in half since last year, and I thought OK, maybe that's why there seems to be so many more of them, and so much smaller, maybe several of them have done that over the years.

The merchandise they carried had changed, too. Gone was the drug paraphanalia cleverly disguised as something else, the rows and rows of stick, cone and powdered incense, the tie-dyed tapestries. Instead, nearly every block had it's medical marijuana facility, complete with pitchman urging passersby to throw away their aspirin, their tranquilizers and painkillers and to come in and sample the product.

Indian saris replaced by cheap Mexican blankets, stall after stall of junk jewelry, faux leather, plastic sunglasses....I felt as if I were in Tijuana. As for the street entertainers, except for the long haired guy playing piano, singing Leonard Cohen and looking like he'd been there since 1973, the musicians were pretty much all rappers and in your face. The act that got the most attention was the fool with the sign that said you could kick his butt for a dollar. A bunch of spectators stood around waiting to see if anyone would take him up on it and of course eventually someone did.

Disoriented and disappointed, I trudged on, trying not to show my daughter and grandson how let down I was feeling. This was not what I had expected. Where was the Venice Beach I remembered? Had it ever existed, or had my memory colored it, made it more romantic and edgy than it really was. Then my grandson pointed toward the sand where a big crowd had gathered.

"Let's go over there and see what's going on," he said.

As we got closer I heard the sound of drums, just a cacophony at first but as we got closer I began to isolate different rhythms and voices. There were full drum sets, doumbeks, bongos, bodhrans and tablas. There were maracas and rattles, flutes, and one man sat on the ground cradling a saxaphone in his lap, though I never saw him play it. People were dancing, chanting, laughing and swaying, smiling at each other, and I thought well, it does exist, it's still here after all. People not trying to be cool, not afraid to look silly, just being in the moment, having fun. This was the Venice Beach I remembered.

I've Moved!

After more than six months of paying no attention to this blog except for the nagging feeling that I should be doing something with it, here I am again. In the interim, I have moved from my studio overlooking the bay. After nine years there, I am now back on the ocean side of our little peninsula. In many ways, it was a difficult decision. Nine years is long enough to really settle in, and I was dug in pretty deep...one of the reasons I thought it was time to move. If I had stayed there much longer, I probably would not ever have been able to leave, and it was more than time to move on. The neighborhood, as well as ownership of the building, had changed since I first moved in. Transients, people who rented in our building and moved out again before I had a chance to learn their names. Desperately needed repairs that never got done. Party boats becoming noisier and more intrusive, especially the 'riverboat' whose owner fancied himself a karaoke star and regaled the neighborhood daily from noon to dusk with his renditions of Elvis' and Sinatra's greatest hits.

My new studio is downstairs, an easily accessible 1928 Spanish stucco. Its kitchen is more than twice the size of my old one, and I have a huge clawfoot bathtub, an unbelievable luxury after nine years of showers only. I love being back on the ocean side, walking on the boardwalk in the early mornings (need to do more of this) and sitting on a bench at the edge of the sand watching the sunsets. And even though I miss the barking of the sea lions under the Pavillion, the blast of the Catalina Flyer's whistle every morning, and the stunning view of sailboats on the bay, I am happy with my choice and look forward to the time I will spend here.

Touring the Blogosphere

Now that I have my own space, my clean white piece of virtual paper, I've been looking around the net to see what other people are writing. All my interests, cooking, photography, herb gardening, travel, sailing, needlework, classic cinema and the reading and writing of mystery fiction have been written about on some truly outstanding and professional looking blogs. I am thoroughly intimidated.
I am reminded of a scene in one of my favorite novels, The Caine Mutiny. Willie Keith, the hero, thinks it might be nice to have his own initialed coffee mug. He takes a standard china mug from the wardroom, painstakingly carves out the initials "W.K." and fills the letters in with blue paint. He goes to bed happy with his creation, leaving it on the wardroom shelf for others to admire. But when he enters the wardroom the next morning, he finds that his shipmates have created mug masterpieces of their own. There are mugs with gothic lettering, Old English script, fantastic animal shapes twisted to form initials. Willie's own mug now seems a poor thing compared to these new ones. Disgusted, he throws his mug into the sea.
I'm still not sure what I want to write here, but I know I want to write something. And no matter how awe-inspiring other people's blogs are, I'm not going to give up and throw my mug into the sea.

Why The Swan?

When I was a little girl, The Ugly Duckling was my favorite fairy tale. I loved hearing about the clumsy baby duck, waddling from place to place seeking a home and family, and finally finding it among the graceful swans. I was thrilled for him as he took his rightful place with them, so proud of him as the children on the bank called out "Oh, look at the new swan, he is the most beautiful of them all!"
I was maybe nine or ten when my great aunt Marion took me to see the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. It was my first live ballet performance, and of course it was Swan Lake. Here was a fairy tale being enacted before my eyes, romantic story, gorgeous costumes, beautiful dancing to Tchaikovsky's haunting, ominous score...I was transfixed. I was still in a trance when the matinee was over and my aunt took me to Clifton's and told me over tea and cakes how, years before, she had seen the great Anna Pavlova perform The Dying Swan.
I have continued all my life to love swans. Maybe it was no accident that I have ended up here, in a tiny studio overlooking this lovely bay whose mascot is a black swan. So whatever else I decide to write here, I will continue to post photos and drawings, stories and poems about my totem animal, the swan.