it’s my cooking night and i’m in the middle of making heaps of baked potatoes when marÃa comes in the kitchen and announces that there is a beautiful family in front of the house. oh… lotte and wim and yoran and arwen have arrived. what a pleasure…
Category: home sweet home
house meeting
a house meeting this evening during which we get to talk a about guests and hospitality.
1/ mihui remains with us. a bit of a strange transition. she came to the house through her old school friend cynthia, who actually insists on charging her rent for the month that she’d be staying. a month in which cynthia is kind of pushing her to find a job, a house, a life, while mihui wants to catch her breath after NY law firms and hang out unemployed for a while. then came the moment we realized: she could live in my room in august, and in marÃa’s in september, when we’re back in europe. the question of rent is brought up and of course marÃa and i insist that there is no need for mihui to pay rent to us (remember marie curie…). the situation is a bit uncomfortable. for cynthia – who must be interpellated in some way – and also a bit for leta who seeks to keep peace. but mihui remains with us.
2/ i bring up how offensive cynthia’s remark, in front of a guest (cooking for the whole house…) was. this is how she takes my comment. first it’s about a deeper meaning, an underlying problem of negative energy between both of us. i resist the non-acknowlegement of what happened in the kitchen. when i explain again why i find what happened unacceptable, it becomes something else (aided by peace keeper leta): cultural difference. what in “my culture” is not done is an innocent situation from cynthia’s perspective. (leta affirms, yes, for her friend jenn from new orleans it would also be not done – do you see the connection? – but in california it is different.)
you know what, i settle for this. why? perhaps cause part of me got convinced that sociability and notions of community in this place are far off from the things i feel connected to and that it’s impossible to tackle the whole of it. “my culture” then becomes a way of protecting some things to which i’m very attached and unwilling to compromise. moreover, “cultural difference”, “different life-styles” is a language that is understood here. it works. it worked before – when i was hesitating whether i would live into this house or into the student coop i had a conversation with leta in which i insisted that i could only join the house if it was able to accomodate the fact that i would have lots of guests for long periods of time and that i would be back to europe for substantial periods of time. the particular discourse of communal living in the washington house is about “supporting each other life-styles” and this is how leta translated my concerns at the time: if that is your life-style and we want you in the house then that means we are willing and able to support your life-style. with the beautiful marÃa connection-companionship and the flow of our beautiful guests in the last two months the house has changed a lot. having a shared ground between us that enables another kind of daily communal living makes all the difference and works in contagious ways. but somehow i don’t expect that we’ll manage to create that kind of common ground between all of our house-mates. i wouldn’t even know where to start with lost-in-new-age cynthia’s relationship to money. and this is where “culture” (oh… not for a moment do i think that hospitality is a “flemish” or “european” thing, don’t get confused with this part of the story…) and “life-style” seem to work.
let there be no misunderstanding: i would like it to be otherwise. “different” has a negative function here: protection, liberal public space in which we tolerate all our differences, cultural relativism, suburbia-subjectivity. i mean, really, what would be the formulation if we’d be describing this “culture” cynthia claims to be different: so your culture or life-style is about charging excessive rent to unemployed old-time friends and asking money when someone joins us for a meal? interesting, adds the anthropologist, tell me more of these cultural habits of yours…
recipes of kinds
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lots of things to celebrate – sahar’s arrival in our house, giulia’s last night in santa cruz, 6 months of united states behind our teeth and a beautiful house – and so we must have an iranian dinner. sahar came well equiped, with spices and utensiles, to cook us some amazing food. (ah, remember that it’s the iranian cuisine that gave the first unmendable blow to my vegetarianism…) |
i’d write you down the recipes for tachin and more if my thoughts were not so preoccupied with recipes of living together and hospitality. remember that sociability and conceptions of living and doing life together are “different” in this place? join me in considering two events around our iranian dinner as an educational excercise.
first there was sweet leta who, yesterday evening when we announced that sahar would make us an iranian meal, jokingly asked whether we’d be eating eye balls. (in another conversation she had asked where sahar was from and subsequently inquired if tehran was a town. the kind of naivity that apparently has its legitimate place in santa cruz). we came up with the perfect response: after having called the family to table and before serving the delicious food, we put a “specially for leta” small plate on the table with ammon’s creation of two halves of litchis in which pieces of black olives made the irises. the “you got me” laughter of leta and the rest of our table guests made clear we scored.
then there was lost-in-the-new-age cynthia who ran into the kitchen while talking on her cellphone, looking for something in the fridge and exchanging some things with us while still talking on her cell phone, and as she heard me say that we had quite some guests tonite, she said that we shouldn’t forget that guests should chip in for the food. all of this while she was still talking on her cell phone and sahar was cooking an elaborate iranian meal for the house. i started to feel angry. “well, there are different ways to relate to money,” was the first thing that came to my mind. (as mihui says, for somebody who’s all about spirituality the level of materialism and attachment to money is amazing… a spirituality which is all about money…) she probably had no clue of what i could be refering to; in any case she insisted on asking guests for money again. i told her that this was so offensive. she was gone soon after that, and since then i’m having fantasies about the next house meeting in less than a week… to be continued…
porch 3
… sahar just arrived and what a joy and in between brackets the public transportation from santa cruz to san jose airport and back a bus a tram a shuttle worked like a well-oiled machine so now nobody will believe my stories about public transport here and sahar brought two big bags of the very best bagels from new york and pig and buffulo just love each other so much and we laugh a lot and i told sahar some cynthia stories on the bus just that she would not be too shocked and in between brackets sahar asked me on the bus if people in santa cruz are into spirituality and that made me laugh a lot and sahar’s arrival to the house is an immediate initiation to santa cruz life as we take a hot tub and at some point mihui needs to go for acupuncture and giulia, marÃa and i have our michael massage appointments today and leta needs to do stuff for her clinic integrating eastern and western medicine and everybody takes lots of time to hang in the kitchen and talk talk talk and susan doesn’t look like your typical professor and there are more dogs in santa cruz than people and the attic room like you read in novels makes sahar happy…
on the hill
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The desolation of the place. UCSC campus in summer is the next bit of evidence i have that these American-style campuses don’t work. Okay, i admit, there’s a bit of dishonestly in that claim: UCSC doesn’t count as a typical american campus. As a result of the experiment in decentralisation – i.e. the project of dropping a number of buildings randomly in a forest, in the name of having self-managed small communities (in colleges) – every attempt at creating some kind of beating heart is even more of a serious struggle against social geography than on the classic campus model with a central square. |
Please don’t get me wrong, you know that self-managed small communities are not part of things i consider problematic. The problem is that, without any real decentralisation of power – especially in the case of the University of California system, where decisions affecting the SC uni are not only taken by the governing board on campus but also between the different UC governing bodies – this decentralisation of the students smells like nasty fragmentation. Then there’s the physical geography: the fact that the campus is on the top of a hill outside of town in a way that does not challenge the expression “ivory tower” further than the adjective used.
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Anyway, we went to campus to today. We worked a bit, so we’re not complaining, and we ended up doing other beautiful things – there is no doubt that this is a beautiful place. But it continues to alienate me with respect to my work, it is as if i need to find all the force and courage to work despite the environment, when i know of so many environments that push me to sit down at a corner of a table or a sofa in midst of life’s joys and tragedies and business. You see, when Virginia Woolf wrote “think we must”, she was thinking of all of these places daily life takes us through, busses and streets and… But not easy to catch a bus here these days. |
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Dinner at our house. We have a new house-mate who will stay with us for a little while, Mihui, a high school friend of Cynthia’s. She’s taking refuge from the east coast; came to California, where she also grew up, to recover. Undergraduate at Harvard (bad start), law school at Columbia (got worse), working for a judge in court (Boston, New Orleans) (it gets tougher) and working for a big law firm (L.A., New York) (total burn-out). The remedy: hanging out in the house, having tea and conversation sessions with all of us, reading bad chick lit (like Mr. Maybe) with covers she tries to hide when she’s reading in public spaces, and feeding us court stories which leave us with stomach pains from laughing laughing laughing… |
porch 2
ed arrivata…
manifestation
Time to introduce you to our 5th housemate, Cynthia. Cynthia used to work in Hollywood, as an assistent to Tarantino during Kill Bill, till she couldn’t take the guy anymore and quit. Yet another story of some kind of burn-out and being in Santa Cruz to heal. Santa Cruz seems to be made up of healers or those in need of healing or both at the same time.
Cynthia lived in the house before, some years ago, so she and Leta used to be housemates. I didn’t meet Cynthia before she moved in, Leta assured me she’s great and that we’d all like her. Some days ago Cynthia cooked us a dinner and there was a chance to talk a bit more than the first exchanges of friendliness. Cynthia is into spiritual things big time. The red thread throughout her stories of spiritual quest and many years of following certain spiritual leaders, is the power of manifestation. Which boils down to the cultivation of will power and visualisation, i.e. of different levels of consciousness, to make things happen, real, material. Kind of like: all that is in the air can condense into the solid.
It’s not that i don’t believe in the power of will, of spirit, of intuition, of things that escape the radars of those senses which we have learned to develop better. But the form, content and extent it takes with Cynthia is sick, really. Which could just be a case of another weird inhabitant of Santa Cruz – the brand of this place functions as an open invitation… – only her stories suggest entire networks and powerful individuals involved. Like the story of one of her gurus who was received a phonecall from Clinton the evening before the Senate’s vote on impeachment. (“Bill, you’re not leaving me much of a margin to work here…”)
No doubt all of that (her fascination with power) is part of the conspiracy delirium of her universe – yet another vision of the elected few who hold the power – but i’m starting to see how important it could be to understand better how all this shit taps into existing power structures.
So i get into the fascination of investigation (in a positive mode, not only the “i have to write about this place or it makes me crazy”) and ask for more, like i ask her what people use manifestation for. The answer is immediate and clear: the top two among the people she knows is money and a partner for life. It disgusts me profoundly. And then there are all the stories i didn’t have to ask for (Cynthia is into monologues…), like the meeting with her boyfriend. The cold, instrumental dating. Not finding a connection at first but going back to the list of qualities she had written down (helps for the manifestation part) and concluding that he really is all she asked for. Laughing with the ironies of spiritual power – “tall” was one of the qualities in her (long) list, and Drew is giant. Then there is his previous life as a knight, when he was unhappy in an arranged marriage, found his true love but then she got killed by his wife. A trauma he is still working through. And Cynthia is keeping a watchful eye out for whomever might be the reincarnation of the wife, who might be seeking to kill her…
It’s all about creativity, it’s all about abundance. If you put your mind to it – and all that the mind is capable of – you can have what you want. American dream gone California nuts…
working house
A warm lazy sunday in a house full of working people (yes, i am going to finish that article today, for real…).
Note who is the wise & healthy one, not attained by the virus…
bellacasa
oh, marÃa moved in today. and didier.
and berna (only for this weekend though,
she’ll need some more convincing, so darling when you read this,
i won’t repeat what i’ve been saying, you know,…).
our house is so beautiful these days.