Annenberg Beach House Artist in Residence

Hello Friends,

Greetings from the Annenberg Beach House in Santa Monica where my residency continues.

It’s Saturday and I am sitting out here on the porch watching the water, the volleyball games and a gigantic group of what look like High School kids try and do a human pyramid. To the human spirit!

Or to beach culture, at least.

I live about thirty minutes from here, but it never fails to surprise me, week after week, how this is another world unto itself. The beach, nature, does something to you, it opens things; pores, lungs and mind. There is such a lovely sense of community next to the water, no one can really own something as large as the Pacific Ocean. It equalizes one and all.

It’s a chilly, freezing California 68 degrees today, but still, the transplants are treating it like a summer day. Lots of folks are playing volleyball and the towels are all laid out on the sand.

I am having an amazing time. It’s been a productive period, generating a lot of material. Not all of it good, of course.

Writing is a lot like cooking; you throw a bunch of seemingly compatible items in the pot and hope for depth, innovation and taste, but a good deal of the time it’s more like; ‘wait I’ve had this before’ or ‘my casserole has become mush’. Nevertheless, the process is the point here and if I knew where I was going, I probably wouldn’t go.

I love writing.

Lately, I have been writing all through the night and sleeping during the day. Maybe because I am writing about the culture of what happens overnight, I seem to have just gravitated to those hours. It’s a mess on my system, as I still have daylight duties, but naps are coming in very handy.

I continue to investigate the state of homelessness in Los Angeles County. The statistics do not lie. According to the Los Angeles Times; “The number of those living in the streets and shelters of the city of L.A. and most of the county surged 75% — to roughly 55,000 from about 32,000 — in the last six years. (Including Glendale, Pasadena and Long Beach, which conduct their own homeless counts, the total is nearly 58,000.)”

So, what does the Beach House have anything to do with that?

The beach house is as much a refuge as it is an experiment for me. It is giving me an opportunity to research, to write, but most important of all, something we never get to do, and that is to dream.

The meditative space. The space for clear and practical thinking. It is one of the most essential elements of art making – the conceptualization period – but one we in our culture don’t give much time to. Partly, because there is so little time!

So, when I come here, I slow down. I sit and think. I look at the art. I look at the sky. I look at the water. And I am in a state of wonder, literally, a kind of dream state of asking. Full of inquiry.

I love the way time passes here. It seems eternal. And yet, there are always people moving through here, on a tour, so they stop time, and stop me, which I find healthy and good. They make me articulate who I am and what I am doing here. I personally think it’s good to name yourself and your process, so I find it refreshing. Lord knows, I ask visitors to talk about themselves all the time.

So, when you come visit; come dream. And don’t feel bad about interrupting me. That’s part of the ball game here. This is a public space, so graciously donated by the Annenberg Foundation and run by the City of Santa Monica.

I feel grateful here. It’s not at all what I expected.

And that’s one of the joys of making art.