I’ve already whinged about this on the Twitter, but hey, this is mah blog and no one can stop me if I want to whinge some more.

Being a grownup sucks. Yeah, I can buy all the lollies I want, just like I dreamed when I was little, but the good stuff is all in Australia and the crap they have here – they call it “candy” – tastes like an alloy of high fructose corn syrup, trans fats and Bisphenol A plastic. Yeah I don’t have to go to school any more and can work whatever hours I want: pity those hours are 8am – 6pm most days. Yeah I could afford a spectacular horse. Pity that money is earmarked for trivialities like, you know, my kids.

It is in dentistry that these conflicts are made explicit. I never liked dentists much anyway, and after the gross dentist in the Manning Building who would make inappropriate comments and “accidentally” brush my breasts, dislike turned to something not far off panic. I do love the dentist I have now, Claude Sidi. He is an amateur Impressionist painter in the style of Monet, and he works out of 450 Sutter, a dazzling Deco masterpiece whose lobby is panelled in insane faux-Mayan bronze. The building is full of dentists, so its nickname is 450 Suffer.

And that’s the thing. I was appalled the first time I came to an American dentist. They have these – metal spikes. They use them to scrape all the tartar off your teeth, where they meet the gums. Actually below that, in what they call the “pockets.” So they dig around in there. With metal spikes. Did I mention the metal spikes? Next comes an ultrasonic tool, which whines at you while doing much the same thing. It’s not agonizing. The first few minutes you think, This is not so bad. But you’re upside down, with your mouth open and a stranger inside it, and a tiny vacuum sucking away the water and saliva and blood and pieces of tartar and gum. And it goes on, and on.

This kind of invasive cleaning has no doubt kept my teeth much healthier than they used to be, and this is the most irksome thing of all. I’m a staunch advocate of preventive health as cheaper and more effective than reactive emergency measures. Deferring present gratification for future gain is wise and mature and rational. It just sucks. I don’t like it. I want lollies. And a pony. Wah.

There was a gopher snake at the farm. Jamey saw that it had eaten a mouse; there was a mouse shape halfway down its slender body. Jamey lifted it! Where I come from you do not take liberties with snakes to whom you haven’t been introduced. This snake was very forbearing. Julia did not get to pet it, though, and she wept all the way back to the domes.

When we first arrived there was a little bird peeping in the cabin. She beat herself against the windows overlooking the river until she was exhausted. Then she let me pick her up in my hands and carry her quickly to the door. Her feathers thrummed. She leapt into the air, apparently unharmed, and soared across the river to the trees on the far ridge.

We packed up the Jetta and hit the road on Friday. North over the GG Bridge to Santa Rosa, where we hit Trader Joe’s and stocked up on salad and filet mignon. North again to logging town Cloverdale then out on 128 to Boonville, funny little Anderson Valley enclave that used to have its own language. We grabbed a late lunch and I called my Dad to note that Boonville is Barraba’s Californian twin.

Up and over Mountain View Road, which predictably made Julia sick. Jeremy cleverly had her catch the product in his empty coffee cup, so clothes and car were unscathed. And then we were out in the coastal meadows, and we drove down the dirt road that leads through a redwood glen and down to Oz.

We parked on the gravel by the Garcia River and carried all our bags and groceries over the makeshift bridge and up through the oak glen. On the other side of the river, in a meadow ringed with redwoods, are two wooden geodesic domes. One dome has a kitchen and the other a bathtub, and there are five beds tucked into lofts and so on. The whole building is ringed with decks that look out on the river and meadow. There’s a hot shower out on the deck, under a tree.

We stayed there all weekend. Jamey and Carole and Rowan arrived late on Friday night, after seeing deer and a skunk and a bat and a wild boar on the drive up. We woke the next morning to hear all the children playing together happily. We made scrambled eggs with smoked salmon and a huge salad, and ate it out on the deck. We swam in the river. We made a fire in the potbellied stove and read library books. We napped. We made rack of lamb for dinner.

It was heaven. I feel really human again. I have lots to blog. Watch this space.

We’ve had a run of really lovely date nights lately, mostly because Jeremy has been letting me pick the films.

Medicine for Melancholy

Oh how I loved this little film, shot in bleached-out near-black-and-white and set in my own dear darling San Francisco. Not tourist San Francisco, where stchoopid things like Monk and Robyn Williams movies are set in Rice-a-Roni cable cars. The real place. The main characters wake up after a party in Glen Park and hike over Billy Goat Hill to Cafe XO, three blocks from my house. After a day of wandering and biking the city, from the Marina to a downtown gallery near my office, to the Museum of the African Diaspora and the carousel in Yerba Buena, they go out drinking at the Knockout, my local bar. Then they get a burrito from the taco truck.

Oh, and there’s a talky interlude at a Housing Rights Committee meeting which arguably doesn’t work, except that Jeremy and I were utterly charmed to see a cameo from our sexy and righteous Alabama Street neighbour Ondine. (Our old neighbours were awesome: Ondine on one side and Parents for Public Schools powerhouse Eos de Feminis on the other. Of course, our new neighbours rock the known universe also. I love this town.)

Would it work for someone less hopelessly infatuated with the city than I am? I’m not sure. It’s a tender, abrasive film, a love story that doesn’t gloss over the basic difficulties of real life – race, money, class, gentrification, change, geopolitics, injustice, identity. Wyatt Cenac gives a brave and accurate performance. Tracey Heggins, as his foil, has a less fleshed-out character and is a bit of a cipher, but the camera loves her and so do I. It’s been months since we saw this and I still think of it, and of the atmosphere it evoked: clear-eyed, intelligent cynics still risking themselves for their ideals. Home.

Lost in the Fog

Another ultra-local film, this one a documentary. I’d walked past Harry Aleo’s Noe Valley storefront dozens of times when I was pregnant with Claire and our birth prep class was around the corner on Castro Street. Harry, the owner of Twin Peaks Properties and a die-hard Republican, advertised himself with hand-written signs as “an island of tradtional values in a sea of liberal loonies.” He owned racehorses – of course he did. Northern California is a racing backwater, down to one working-class track from two, but Harry did well enough, until he bought the aptly-named Lost in the Fog.

Every now and then in racing there’s a horse that transcends. Secretariat, who won the 1973 Belmont Stakes by a gobsmacking 31 lengths. You watch the race now and you still can’t believe it. Ruffian, the black filly that won every start in 1974 and 1975 until the match race with Kentucky Derby winner Foolish Pleasure that claimed her life. Barbaro, Smarty Jones, and – racing right now – two extraordinary fillies, Zenyatta and Rachel Alexandra.

Lost in the Fog was one of these. From November 2004 to October 2005 he won every race. Local filmmaker and liberal loonie John Corey got interested and ended up quitting his job to make a movie about the crusty Aleo and his fabulous horse. And then the great Fog lost a race. He was given a break, and came back for a second and a win, and then he lost again, badly. He was trucked up to the great vet school at the University of California, Davis (where Ann Bowling, the brilliant geneticist, rewrote horse coat colour and Arabian and Mongolian horse genetics). Surgery revealed that Fog had a huge, rare and inoperable cancer. He had been carrying it for months. He had carried it when he won his last race. Corey got Aleo’s reaction to the news on film. It’s an amazing documentary.

Aleo himself died of cancer last year, and is much mourned by his liberal loonie neighbours.

Moon

Okay, Jeremy chose this one. I was very skeptical. It looked like there might be guns; it also looked like it might overlap with Leonard’s terrific “The Eyes of Ceres.” There are no guns, which, yay! (I have had it with movies with guns in them. They are mean and boring and rarely pass the Bechdel Test. See especially: all action films, everything by Michael Bay, In Bruges.) There’s some thematic overlap with The Eyes of Ceres but it works to the advantage of both. And Sam Rockwell hits it out of the park. It’s an incredibly sympathetic and authentic set of performances.

A gorgeous film to look at, too. There are a few nerdy oopses – gravity inside the base, but not outside it? Oh well. The plot is nonsense. And I have some problems with the use of the two female characters, who of course do not pass Bechdel and who are close to being In Refrigerators. But for beautiful, character-driven, cerebral hard SF, I will forgive a lot.

Easy Virtue

Jeremy picked this as well, mostly because I’d been feeling down and he wanted to cheer me up. This film was made for demographic: Rach. It has the divine Kristin Scott Thomas as a disapproving aristocratic mother-in-law. It gives great house and horse and frock. There are Mitford and Dorothy L. Sayers echoes galore, and the director is Stephan Elliott, whose Priscilla: Queen of the Desert remains a happy memory.

Unfortunately the film doesn’t quite hang together; is in fact, extremely silly. The foolish young man is too foolish, the American vamp too blonde and the increasingly insufferable Colin Firth is too schmoopy for words. Nevertheless I enjoyed every minute. And if I had to pick a favourite minute it would be the sight of Jessica Biel’s world-class ass tangoing in an ivory brocade sheath.

Palin’s resignation: best America’s birthday present ever!

Also fabulous this weekend: riding at the barn, lunch at Mission Beach with Mr J, Claire’s last show at Coastal Camp (she was Four Insect Wings), SF Mime Troupe in Dolores Park (I got sunburnt), fireworks from Bernal Hill, riding again with Salome and a date night with Mr J: Easy Virtue and dinner at the bar at Zuni.

Palin, though. How awesome was that?

There’s a vertical fence – three blue and white poles stacked one on top of the other. You come into it by way of a long, easy half-circle on the right rein, and then you are supposed to land on the left canter lead, loop around a small gate and tackle another vertical.

Sounds so simple! I cannot get this right. The first time, when I was sort of on my game, Austin landed on the right, incorrect lead and did a flying change in the first stride out. Acceptable, but things have gone badly downhill from there.

This time he is taking the left turn on the wrong canter lead, curving his body to the outside. It’s like trying to ride a bicycle shaped like an irritated banana. In my eagerness to change his canter lead I have completely forgotten the second vertical, with this utterly predictable result: Austin sees it before I do and picks a long spot, more or less at random.

He launches into space. I am what is called “left behind”. His forward movement over the fence catapults me from the back of the saddle onto his neck and we land in complete disarray. I fail to fall off by purest luck.

Of course the next fence, an oxer with a pole in front and back, is the biggest and most imposing jump on the course. I have a Thing about oxers. It is an entirely irrational Thing, because horses like them perfectly well and they often jump better than plain old verticals. Nevertheless I can’t quite believe forward movement will carry us over. I think I picture a Wile E. Coyote species of fall, where we hover gallopping in the air for a minute or two before looking down in chagrin and plummeting into the gap between the two rails.

This by way of digression. I am, you will recall, hanging around Austin’s neck trying to recover the steering and brakes before the giant fence ahead.

I begin at the beginning. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. My entire riding life passes before my eyes, every lesson to be reapplied. Heels down, getting my calves back on the horse’s sides and my thighs and butt back in the saddle. Eyes up and locked onto our track. Back straight, shoulders back, chest out, hands low and forgiving and forward on the horse’s neck. The lightest check on the reins, to tell him I am back in business, and pressure from my restored calves, to bring his canter up and bouncy and strong into the oxer.

This time I am not left behind. This time I am taken up in the Rapture.

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Originally uploaded by Goop on the lens

It is a Princess Clock.

I drove Claire out to Coastal Camp this morning.

Some explanation for the non-USonians may be called for: school is out, and thanks to the weird counterintuitive school calendar around here this means we rejoice in our graduating-kindergartener’s company for the next eleven weeks. Fortunately everyone else is in the same boat, so there are many options for parking your beloved short person with responsible adults during the working day. I went a bit mad with credit cards back in February, and Claire got the classic career mom’s overcompensatory holidays: spring break at Acrosports, then this camp, a science camp in Noe and a Mandarin immersion program over the summer.

My God, but Rodeo Lagoon is beautiful in the morning. It’s a green-grey, steep-sided valley, full of wildflowers, that opens out to the green-grey Pacific. Flocks of turkeys walked around gobbling; Claire found them hilarious. I left her with the very sweet and competent camp counselors, and she grinned and gave me two thumbs up as I drove away. It felt like ripping my heart out. These days my separation anxiety is worse than hers. I suspect that trend will continue.

Three deer walked in front of my car and stopped and looked at me with their lovely inhuman expressionless faces, like models. One had a scruffy little fawn, white spots still bright on its rump.

How come grownups don’t get summer camp?

“Look, mummy!”

Julia has her dress pulled up like an apron. It is full of sand.

“It is my baby belly,” she explains.

“You’re having a baby?”

“Yes.”

“A boy or a girl?”

“A girl.”

“What’s her name?”

Julia looks thoughtfully into her dress.

“Sandy.”

Claire’s choice for bedtime reading was the Cartoon Shakespeare Twelfth Night.

Here’s an observation. If your God is telling you to go and shoot a doctor while he is at church with his family? You have a bad God.

Abortion is a matter on which people of conscience can differ, but murder is not.

Doctor Tiller had more compassion and human decency than all of his opponents combined.

I gave in his memory to Medical Students for Choice and the National Network of Abortion Funds.

ETA: Abortion protestors have abortions.

Birth moms have abortions.

My friend had an abortion that saved her life.

Claire: “I am emptying my Carnavale balloons.” Jeremy: “You are Deflater-mouse.”

—–

Claire: “But the TV is our God!

—–

Ruairi appears with the pony puppet, all tangled in its strings. “I knitting!” he cries. “I knitting a HORSE!”

—–

Small robots marched around my coffee table, and were given tangerine food cubes.

—–

“Lost In The Fog” at the Roxie: boy meets horse, boy loses horse.

—–

Julia: “It’s raining mucher! It’s raining even much!”

—–

Rach betters TV: The News Hour With Tom Lehrer

—–

Claire to Julia, in bath: “The water snakes are not, I repeat, NOT, your friends.”

—–

For all its downsides, a plutonium mug would keep my coffee hot.

—–

Julia: “WHOO! I’m fallin’! Oof! I falled.”

—–

According to my records this is the second Thursday this week.

Kamikaze Heart

Longtime readers (there will be a test) may recall my delight in Sweet Can Productions’ marvellous show Habitat; Kamikaze Heart, from the performance arm of local urban circus school Acrosports, draws on many of the same traditions, including the brilliant and eye-popping art of aerial silks.

The plot of Kamikaze Heart is pretty much a wry tall tale on which to string a bunch of feats. My favourite bit was where the swan-who-was-the-ghost-of-the-beautiful-grantwriter was flying over the b-boy competition on her way back from Iraq (long story) and the performer did a dance with two bungees fixed to her hips from opposite sides above the stage.

As she bounced and swung the rhythm of the elastics really did seem like great wings, beating: a primal archetype for the harbingers of death, or birth. It reminded me of Grant’s description of the first production he saw of Tony Kushner’s Millennium Approaches, where the Angel came down from on a wire above the heads of the audience, screaming.

Where Acrosports won my heart for ever and always, though, was as we came out into the lobby. The whole cast was there, and the instant that Nancy Kate “Fancy Legs” Siefker, in full costume and makeup, laid her eyes on my Claire, she recognized her from Acrosports spring camp, went down on one knee and held out her arms: Claire flew into her embrace.

The Girlfriend Experience

I enjoyed this film as I was watching it. I like Steven Soderbergh’s laconic, respectful direction, his subdued palette and his attention to his actors, and his films have, for the most part, treated women as human – Sex, Lies and Videotape, Out of Sight, The Limey, Erin Brockovich, even the completely unnecessary remake of Solaris. I never bothered with the Oceans films because with few expections I find celebrities boring and the prospect of watching them have a circle-jerk is deeply unappealling.

The best thing about Girlfriend, by far, is Sasha Grey’s performance as the expensive escort. Grey’s a porn star looking to diversify, and she’s brilliant at showing how an escort needs to be a sort of social chameleon, giving every client what he thinks he needs, while keeping her important part locked away where no one can get at it. (She’s also rapturously, implausibly beautiful.)

But Girlfriend left a bad taste in my mouth. The script is from the same team that brought us the Oceans films and while it tries to satirize that clubby, rich-men atmosphere of Hollywood and Wall Street pre-crash and the kinds of people who use wildly expensive escort services, it’s a bit inescapably of that world itself.

Most damningly, the only sympathetic male character, David, a client who actually listens to the escort and who of course she falls for, is played by one of the writers. His name is, guess what, David. The character is a Mary Sue, a Mary Sue of a rich john, and that makes me feel ill.

As another character points out, the only reason anyone is shelling out thousands for the girlfriend experience is because this woman is so improbably gorgeous. No one would care about her inner life if she weren’t so radiant, and by the same token, it’s not really her inner life, her thoughts and feelings and desires and hopes, that everyone is trying to drag out of her. What her greedy clients (and by implication we as the voyeuristic audience) really want is to break down her defenses and possess her.

Yuck. And what if she were just ordinary-looking? I was teaching Julia Marxist chess the other day. “These are the pawns. The point of this game is that the pawns all die, and nobody cares.”

Marie Antoinette

Kirsten Dunst is adorable. I have a new theory about anachronistic period films like this one and A Knight’s Tale; the music is of our youth, and as we age it all gets wound up in generic yardage of Pastness imported fresh from the Past fields of darkest Past-landia. Our high school dances are so long ago now we might as well have been wearing corsets and bustles and have had absurd beehive hair. Winona is Spock’s mother! We are old.

JULIA: Tell me a story! Tell me a story about MERMAIDS!

RACHEL: Well. Hundreds of years ago when the British were exploring the oceans in huge wooden ships, sometimes the sailors would be months and months away from land and they would start to miss women. Because the sailors were nearly all men. And sometimes when they were in the waters around say Australia or Florida they would see dugongs or manatees and think that they were women with the tails of fish. And that is where mermaids came from. Look, here is a picture of a manatee. Isn’t she lovely? Doesn’t she look like a mermaid?

JULIA: Yes!

RACHEL: Manatees like to be thought of as very big. So when you meet a manatee, the polite way to greet her is to say “Oh, the huge manatee!”

JULIA: “Oh, the huge manatee!”

RACHEL: Excellent. Go and tell your daddy.

ME: …my old riding instructor, David.

CLAIRE (uncertainly): His name was Day-vid?

ME: Yes, that’s right, David.

CLAIRE (scornfully): That’s not a real name.

ME: Whuh?

CLAIRE: I’ve never heard of it!

ME: *wibble*

CLAIRE (with finality): *I* don’t know anyone called David.

ME: Well. No. I guess you don’t.

1. ordinary everyday suckage

They love to live in big groups and move around and graze for twenty hours a day, so we split them up and put them in 12×12 stalls and give them a handful of big meals. Eighty percent of show horses have ulcers. We give them grain to build up their muscle; the protein and carbs can make them colic or founder. Horses can’t throw up, so colic is often fatal. Founder is toxic buildup inside the hoofs, where the inflamed tissue can’t swell but must press against the hoof wall. It’s agonizing.

Showjumping champion and USET president William Steinkraus says we keep them like prisoners in solitary confinement.

Just sitting on their backs is bad enough; that’s where a big cat would jump on them to break their necks. The vast majority of us, myself absolutely included, ride badly and jab their mouths, kick their ribs and flop around on their backs.

And this is just the beginning.

2. advanced suckage in many diabolical forms

These are only the English sports, that I know reasonably well.

In dressage, aficionados of rollkur fill the horse’s mouth with bondage equipment that would not disgrace an Inquisition torturer, and force the animal to walk, trot and canter with its chin to its chest.

In showjumping, lazy trainers will have assistants lift the top pole of the fence to hit a jumping horse on the sensitive coronet band, a practice known as rapping or poling. It’s supposed to teach the horse to be more careful. What I think it teaches the horse is that neither its own best judgment nor the sense and goodwill of its rider are to be trusted.

Almost unbelievably, showjumping was also the sport where an unknown but large number of big-name trainers paid a hit man to electrocute their horses for the insurance money.

Eventing may be the ultimate test of horsemanship. It’s the sport I used to watch on TV with my dad, the one I always dreamed of competing in. It combines dressage and showjumping with a thrilling, gruelling cross-country course over fixed fences. In showjumping, if you hit a fence, the fence falls. In cross-country, you fall.

1997 was supposed to be a bad year for the sport. Three top riders died. But the bad year never ended. In the ten years that followed, thirty-seven more people have been killed. That’s not including the catastrophic injuries to riders, or the dead horses. Mike Winter’s Kingpin died at Kentucky Rolex this year. His heart exploded. Phillip Dutton’s Bailey Wick died at Jersey Fresh on the weekend. His pelvis broke and opened an artery. These days it’s considered a good upper-level 3DE if no horse or rider is killed or maimed.

I love eventing, but here’s a prediction so blindingly obvious at this point that it’s practically just an observation. If the sport doesn’t stop slaughtering its own athletes it won’t exist in another ten years.

JULIA: Mama, copy me!

ME, OBEDIENTLY: Mama, copy me!

JULIA: Good!

ME: Good!

JULIA: Julia, would you like some ice cream?

ME: Julia, would you like – hey! Wait a minute!

At YO’S SUSHI, soaking up Asahi beer and SUNSHINE. The children are fed MISO. IDYLLIC, it is.

ME: Hey Claire, there’s a position coming open on the Supreme Court.

CLAIRE: Hmm?

ME: Do you think you could finish your law degree by, oh, say June?

CLAIRE: But I’m just a kid.

ME: But I’ve always wanted to say “my daughter, the Supreme Court justice.”

CLAIRE, PRAGMATICALLY: Well, you just said it.

There is a PAUSE.

ME: I’ve dreamed of this moment for so long.

JEREMY: At least we know she has the right kind of legalistic mind.