Danielle Speaks

Embracing the inner freak in the schoolyard.

Moving log: 6 weeks in the golden state. Grade for move so far is still a 5. Why? Because the endless array of calamaty continues but I can still approach/attack it with humour and strength and therefore can still see that it is indeed all worth something. As my days grow more habitual I begin to see the deeper meaning  behind it all here and deal with the fact that I just don't really know myself as well as I thought. This comes out when I realize that I am becoming increasingly uncomfortable with being the new person.  As I talk to folks I am learning that I am not everyman's Danielle. Instead I am an aqquired taste. I use to think i could get along with anyone and that I could make friends anywhere. I patted myself on the back for being easy going, mutable almost to a fault. But as my universal trust in others gives way to a more strained and exhausting social training course I realize that I need to develop even more acumen in these departments. I can not rest on my laurels if all my success as a social being was all too close to the nest.  Last night I met some prospective contacts and friends and I felt crippled by being the annoying desperate new friend. I am obsessed with not being that person. I don't know how to read what LA peeps want. Everyone wants a piece of everyone here. Everyone represents some small step upwards in their ascendency to the hierarchy. Because of this even the most genuine people have to tread carefully not to burn a bridge or lose a connection. So you are both predator and prey at all given moments.  I suppose one could embrace the game or challenge- after all I came out here to learn and succeed and if these are the rules then so  be it. But I don't like not being able to read people.   I experienced this shift in my inner plate techtonics when I lost weight. After going from a morbitly obese person to a "thin" person i had to reassign what things meant. People not only treated me differently, but I was not so quick any more to assume the worst. I had a watered down understanding of other people's shallow assessments. On the one hand I could be angry that my changing of my outer shell somehow made it ok to be given positive attention, but didn't I just work hard for a year and a half to become this person- didn't I on some level now respect myself now more for being thin? I was now the prey and preditor of my own self image.   If it makes any of you feel better- I don't have any more friends or receive any more positive feedback on myself now that I am thin. I just get hit on more and am treated like a normal person as a opposed to a person with a problem-  I'm pittied less.  Somehow I think the topic of being the crazy new girl needing help in LA is related to being the crazy new thin person in NYC.  Both times were equally trying but in different ways. Perhaps I am more prepared for this because of the prior experience. Perhaps I will always know that nothing is ever as it seems because of the prior experience and in someways know that for every cocky congradulatory veneer I come across here- that it is just a suit of armor to protect themselves from the preditory nature of schmoozing. Writers especially. I don't know.  Certainly its a joyous anthropological adventure worth  having. The fact that even in the worst moments i can think that tells me that this is still a 5 but not a 3- and that is good!

Uhm watch Robert Downey Jr!!!!

I've been cheating.

• I've been posting other people's words instead of writing my own blog entries
• I've been reading friends' blogs insead of calling
• I've been watching TV instead of writing

But thats the way life goes I guess.  This week I have had another buddy in town for a long time. I've hung out with him more this week then I have in 4 yrs.  He just told me last night that he is moving here May 1st. I literallly almost cried from joy- another New Yorker and a close friend who gets me at that. I think I hugged the life out of him- which he gladly excepted. Thats another thing out here- people don't touch eachother. I have to control my touching.

In other good news, I have been working.  It ranges from canvasing neighborhoods with flyers, cards and movie passes to promote the one week that this film will be playing at the Laemle Music Hall: http://www.dyingtolivethemovie.com/ to doing more associate producing things in the office. I really don't mind the canvasing as i have been basically driving and walking around this entire city- its really teaching me about the life of each neighborhood. Yesterday morning I was covering the Pico/Robertson neighborhood- its extremely Jewish. It was a fortunate act of kismit as it was Purim and I had forgotten. Every store I walked into i was offered a happy Purim and a spin of the grog.  I had so many Hamantaschen that I was on a sugar high.  In some ways it felt good to walk around and have that part of me be automatically recognized and warmly greeted. My mom always say, " you know your own people."  With Jews this is particularly fascinating; there is no one look or personality -although others might disagree. However, elder yids always know me from a mile away...funny.   The film maker i am working for is actually profoundly religious and went off to the synagogue to hear them read from the Midrash I am sure there was a small child's costume parade as well although i hear the Esther and Hayman garbs are being replaced by Sponge Bob and Square Pants- OY. In any case I felt strange because i was almost jealous- I wanted to go.

I found myself wondering inwardly and pleasantly about where I belong.  I've been obsessed with personal history and roots and yet virolently opposed to being typecast or aligned to just one group.  I find solice out here in the few small groups I can align myself with:  Jews, Columbia Alums, Yogis, Ex-NYers... this is cheating- thats the thing about moving- nothing is organic, everything is an effort to open up and create more vast network for you to fall upon- it is forced cnnectivity.

And then there's Hillary's even worse affiliations! (YIKES)

(NOTE: I have no idea how true the facts are for either of these two articles but its interestiing to me that one must affiliate with contagious thought to be in power in this country)

Hillary's Nasty Pastorate
By Barbara Ehrenreich- for the Huffington Post

There's a reason why Hillary Clinton has remained relatively silent during the flap over intemperate remarks by Barack Obama's former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. When it comes to unsavory religious affiliations, she's a lot more vulnerable than Obama.

You can find all about it in a widely under-read article in the September 2007 issue of Mother Jones, in which Kathryn Joyce and Jeff Sharlet reported that "through all of her years in Washington, Clinton has been an active participant in conservative Bible study and prayer circles that are part of a secretive Capitol Hill group known as the "Fellowship," aka The Family. But it won't be a secret much longer. Jeff Sharlet's shocking exposé, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power will be published in May.

Sean Hannity has called Obama's church a "cult," but that term applies far more aptly to Clinton's "Family," which is organized into "cells" -- their term -- and operates sex-segregated group homes for young people in northern Virginia.  In 2002, writer Jeff Sharlet joined the Family's home for young men, foreswearing sex, drugs, and alcohol, and participating in endless discussions of Jesus and power. He wasn't undercover; he used his own name and admitted to being a writer. But he wasn't completely out of danger either. When he went outdoors one night to make a cell phone call, he was followed. He still gets calls from Family associates asking him to meet them in diners -- alone.

The Family's most visible activity is its blandly innocuous National Prayer Breakfast, held every February in Washington. But almost all its real work goes on behind the scenes -- knitting together international networks of rightwing leaders, most of them ostensibly Christian. In the 1940s, The Family  reached out to former and not-so-former Nazis, and its fascination with that exemplary leader, Adolph Hitler, has continued, along with ties to a whole bestiary of murderous thugs. As Sharlet reported in Harper's in 2003:

During the 1960s the Family forged relationships between the U.S. government and some of the most anti-Communist (and dictatorial) elements within Africa's postcolonial leadership. The Brazilian dictator General Costa e Silva, with Family support, was overseeing regular fellowship groups for Latin American leaders, while, in Indonesia, General Suharto (whose tally of several hundred thousand "Communists" killed marks him as one of the century's most murderous dictators) was presiding over a group of fifty Indonesian legislators. During the Reagan Administration the Family helped build friendships between the U.S. government and men such as Salvadoran general Carlos Eugenios Vides Casanova, convicted by a Florida jury of the torture of thousands, and Honduran general Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, himself an evangelical minister, who was linked to both the CIA and death squads before his own demise.

At the heart of the Family's American branch is a collection of powerful rightwing politicos, who include, or have included, Sam Brownback, Ed Meese, John Ashcroft, James Inhofe, and Rick Santorum. They get to use the Family's spacious estate on the Potomac, the Cedars, which is maintained by young men in Family group homes and where meals are served by the Family's young women's group. And, at the Family's frequent prayer gatherings, they get powerful jolts of spiritual refreshment, tailored to the already-powerful.

Clinton fell in with the Family in 1993, when she joined a Bible study group composed of wives of conservative leaders like Jack Kemp and James Baker. When she ascended to the senate, she was promoted to what Sharlet calls the Family's "most elite cell," the weekly Senate Prayer Breakfast, which included, until his downfall, Virginia's notoriously racist Senator George Allen. This has not been a casual connection for Clinton. She has written of Doug Coe, the Family's publicity-averse leader, that he is "a unique presence in Washington: a genuinely loving spiritual mentor and guide to anyone, regardless of party or faith, who wants to deepen his or her relationship with God."

Furthermore, the Family takes credit for some of Clinton's rightward legislative tendencies, including her support for a law guaranteeing "religious freedom" in the workplace, such as for pharmacists who refuse to fill birth control prescriptions and police officers who refuse to guard abortion clinics.

What drew Clinton into the sinister heart of the international right? Maybe it was just a phase in her tormented search for identity, marked by ever-changing hairstyles and names: Hillary Rodham, Mrs. Bill Clinton, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and now Hillary Clinton. She reached out to many potential spiritual mentors during her White House days, including new age guru Marianne Williamson and the liberal Rabbi Michael Lerner. But it was the Family association that stuck.

Sharlet generously attributes Clinton's involvement to the underappreciated depth of her religiosity, but he himself struggles to define the Family's theological underpinnings. The Family avoids the word Christian but worship Jesus, though not the Jesus who promised the earth to the "meek." They believe that, in mass societies, it's only the elites who matter, the political leaders who can build God's "dominion" on earth. Insofar as the Family has a consistent philosophy, it's all about power -- cultivating it, building it, and networking it together into ever-stronger units, or "cells." "We work with power where we can," Doug Coe has said, and "build new power where we can't."

Obama has given a beautiful speech on race and his affiliation with the Trinity Unity Church of Christ. Now it's up to Clinton to explain -- or, better yet, renounce -- her longstanding connection with the fascist-leaning Family.

Obama's Farrakhan Test

By Richard Cohen for the Washington Post.

Tuesday, January 15, 2008; A13

Barack Obama is a member of Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ. Its minister, and Obama's spiritual adviser, is the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. In 1982, the church launched Trumpet Newsmagazine; Wright's daughters serve as publisher and executive editor. Every year, the magazine makes awards in various categories. Last year, it gave the Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. Trumpeter Award to a man it said "truly epitomized greatness." That man is Louis Farrakhan.

Maybe for Wright and some others, Farrakhan "epitomized greatness." For most Americans, though, Farrakhan epitomizes racism, particularly in the form of anti-Semitism. Over the years, he has compiled an awesome record of offensive statements, even denigrating the Holocaust by falsely attributing it to Jewish cooperation with Hitler -- "They helped him get the Third Reich on the road." His history is a rancid stew of lies.

It's important to state right off that nothing in Obama's record suggests he harbors anti-Semitic views or agrees with Wright when it comes to Farrakhan. Instead, as Obama's top campaign aide, David Axelrod, points out, Obama often has said that he and his minister sometimes disagree. Farrakhan, Axelrod told me, is one of those instances.

Fine. But where I differ with Axelrod and, I assume, Obama is that praise for an anti-Semitic demagogue is not a minor difference or an intrachurch issue. The Obama camp takes the view that its candidate, now that he has been told about the award, is under no obligation to speak out on the Farrakhan matter. It was not Obama's church that made the award but a magazine. This is a distinction without much of a difference. And given who the parishioner is, the obligation to speak out is all the greater. He could be the next American president. Where is his sense of outrage?

Any praise of Farrakhan heightens the prestige of the leader of the Nation of Islam. For good reasons and bad, he is already admired in portions of the black community, sometimes for his efforts to rehabilitate criminals. His anti-Semitism is either not considered relevant or is shared, particularly his false insistence that Jews have played an inordinate role in victimizing African Americans.

In this, Farrakhan stands history on its head. It was Jews who disproportionately marched for civil rights and, in Mississippi, died for that cause. Farrakhan and, in effect, Wright, despoil the graves of Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and, of course, their black colleague James Chaney.

I can even see how someone, maybe even Obama, could dismiss Farrakhan as a pest, a silly man pushing a silly cause that poses no real threat to the Jewish community. Still, history tells us that anti-Semitism is not to be trifled with. It is a botulism of the mind.

The Obama and Clinton campaigns are involved in a tasteless tussle over the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. What is clear from rereading King's celebrated "I Have a Dream" speech of Aug. 28, 1963, is how inclusive that dream was -- "all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, 'Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!' "

This, though, is not Farrakhan's dream. He has vilified whites and singled out Jews to blame for crimes large and small, either committed by others as well or not at all. (A dominant role in the slave trade, for instance.) He has talked of Jewish conspiracies to set a media line for the whole nation. He has reviled Jews in a manner that brings Hitler to mind.

And yet Wright heaped praise on Farrakhan. According to Trumpet, he applauded his "depth of analysis when it comes to the racial ills of this nation." He praised "his integrity and honesty." He called him "an unforgettable force, a catalyst for change and a religious leader who is sincere about his faith and his purpose." These are the words of a man who prayed with Obama just before the Illinois senator announced his run for the presidency. Will he pray with him just before his inaugural?

I don't for a moment think that Obama shares Wright's views on Farrakhan. But the rap on Obama is that he is a fog of a man. We know little about him, and, for all my admiration of him, I wonder about his mettle. The New York Times recently reported on Obama's penchant while serving in the Illinois legislature for merely voting "present" when faced with some tough issues. Farrakhan, in a strictly political sense, may be a tough issue for him. This time, though, "present" will not do.

( I look forward to your opinions- beebs)

Ways of The Wayword

By Maureen Dowd (nytimes)     

Just when I thought my head would explode from trying to figure out delegate math, I’m hit with call-girl math.

The arithmetic of procuring a prostitute who is both experienced and inspirational is even more complicated than the arithmetic of procuring a president who is both experienced and inspirational.

If you’re a frugal governor who doesn’t even like paying his political consultant bills, as opposed to an Arab sheik or a Vegas high roller, do you really need to shell out $4,300, plus minibar expenses, to a shell company for two hours with a shady lady? Aren’t there cheaper hooker hook-ups on Craigslist? It makes you wonder how sharp Eliot Spitzer’s pencil was on the state’s fiscal discipline.

And how does it add up that Steamroller No. 1 suddenly morphs into Client No. 9, a nom d’amour with the ring of an overpriced Gucci cologne for men, giving untold thousands for untold years to a prostitution ring that has hourly rates based on rating its girls on a diamond scale of 1 to 7, with 7 being $3,100, and above 7 in a special club for $5,500 and up?

(A friend of mine who knows the ways of the wayward, explained that the flesh-peddlers no doubt had a shell game as well as a shell company: “They say, ‘You can have Jane. She’s $1,000 an hour. Or, you can have Tiffany for $5,000 an hour.’ The client doesn’t know that Jane and Tiffany are the same girl. It’s not like clients are going to compare notes. ‘I paid $5,000 for Kristen. You only paid 1,000 for Chrissy?’ ”).

If blood will have blood, as Shakespeare said in “Macbeth,” power will have sex.

Some people took the saga of Eliot Ness in the boudoir, the old yarn of holier-than-thou caught in flagrante delicto, as a sign that a woman should be president.

“I would think the story about our esteemed governor is all the proof we need that we should have a woman as president,” a woman I know said in an e-mail message.

Another woman e-mailed the reverse to a friend: “I hope this makes people think back to Monica Lewinsky. Can sex scandals be well timed?”

In modern times, you rarely see any men having to stand ashenly by their women.

But in the past, women got tangled up with sex and power. When Bette Davis played Elizabeth I, she was always sending her lovers off to the Tower of London when they made eyes at her pretty ladies-in-waiting. Catherine the Great was hardly known for her restraint. And there were Agrippina and Cleopatra, of course.

Hillary could not have been pleased to be in all the TV stand-by-your-man features, or to hear David Letterman’s Spitzer Top Ten list which included, “I thought Bill Clinton legalized this years ago.”

Lyndon Johnson once observed that the two things that make politicians more stupid than anything else are sex and envy.

Even as Governor Spitzer struggled with the sex story on Tuesday, the Clinton campaign struggled with the envy story.

Geraldine Ferraro, who helped Walter Mondale lose 49 states in 1984, was clearly stung at what she considered Obama’s easy rise to celebrity and electoral success. Last Friday, Ms. Ferraro, who is on Hillary’s national finance committee, told The Daily Breeze, a small newspaper in Torrance, Calif.: “If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman (of any color), he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.”

Obama acknowledged when he arrived in the Senate that he got more attention, his big book deal and his celebrity, because he is not white. He was only the third black senator elected since Reconstruction.

But as he campaigned here Tuesday, he was outraged at Ferraro’s comments. “They are divisive,” he said. “I think anybody who understands the history of this country knows they are patently absurd.”

Obama’s campaign strategist, David Axelrod, said that Ferraro should be removed from her campaign post, and that made her even more irritated. She told The Times on Tuesday night that she was “livid,” adding: “Anytime you say anything to anybody about the Obama campaign, it immediately becomes a racist attack.”

When Ferraro felt patronized by Mondale’s staff, she suggested that his aides “should pretend every time they talk to me or even look at me that I’m a gray-haired Southern gentleman, a senator from Texas.”

Hillary would never have to pretend to be a man to get aides to respect her, proving that she has moved past gender in a way Ferraro never did.

My Love Horoscope:

Attractive Venus entering your 7th House of Partnership this week is a positive signal for love. Drop any ideas about commitment or practicality, though, since pure romance requires faith not facts. Of course, your relationship future counts, but this is a time when the present offers a precious gift.

BRING ON THE ROMANTIC FLING!

No Country for Old Men

I finally saw it. I'm not going to go on about it because I know I was too Johny Come lately to even bemuse about how extraordinary it was. All I will say is that the attention to detail, the meticulous directing of even the small acting parts and the soulfulness of the pace is what could make anyone remember why we see movies. The Coen Brothers are my heroes for the week! Oh the only bad thing  I will say is that this stupid buster brown haircut on Javier only distracted me- I don't think it was a wise quirck- but hey - who the hell am I?

The Olympic Day Spa

Where every itch you ever had in your life gets scratched!  A couple of days ago Tuck and I went to a Korean Spa called The Olympic Spa on- you guessed it- Olympic Blvd off of Wilton. This experience without, any hesitance, was my favorite experience in LA so far. I walked out with a Koolaid grin and giggle that could have brightened anyone's day.  I warn you though, this is not a place for the faint of heart! If you are a: germaphobe, judgmental body gawker, or haphephobe don't show up, deal with your repressed sad self and eventually you too can be polished within an inch of your life and love every freaking minute of it. This is a nude place.

When you walk in to the spa an extremely kind gentlemen valet parks your car for FREE. You enter and deal minimally with some irate Korean women who obviously are not taking advantage enough of the hot soaks out back.  After five minutes lost in translation Tuck and I decided on an Akisuri scrub for me and a milk and honey scrub for her- the later $10 dollars more but worth it if your skin is super dry.  For $15 dollars more (which you kinda don't have to pay because you go back to where the pools are for the scrub no matter what- but karma is important) you have access to a highly chlorinated super jet jacuzzi, and herbal eucalyptus cold plunge pool, a super hot pool filled with mugworts herbs, kumabochi tea and a variety of other Chinese medicinal herbs, a dry Swedish sauna with ceder wood, a hot stone room with tatami mats, a super powered steam room, a heated floor with blankets for a nap and a running hot water stream with soapy scrubs and scrub mitts so that you can polish your self in case you don't want the bikini clad Joy Luck Club in the back to go to second base with you.
We entered and perused the joint. We were given a locker, a really comfy robe and a couple of small towels.  The clientele was incredibly diverse both racially and style wise. Most of the woman looked like they took care of themselves. This was obviously a regular ritual for them.  (For $15 why not????) At first, it was a rather funny site to see five or six naked ladies of various races gossiping about frenemies while soaking in a red pool of water. We walked towards the pool, paused for a millisecond and then did as the Romans do.  In ancient Hindi and Buddhists cultures it is a belief that the secret to longevity - the fountain of youth in a way, is actually just water- but the perpetual contrast of plunging one's body in cold and hot baths. This would form a pump action to the blood and increase the circulation in the body. The extremity of feeling such alternate temperatures would invigorate the heart, the soul and the mind.  I really felt this.  I felt high. I somehow could have swam in the chilly cold pool for hours. I could have boiled in the mugworts for days. We did not want to go.  And to be honest after 15 minutes all the naked bodies just seem like an extended part of the geometry of the room.  It's also good to remember that bodies, and grooming styles really do come in all shapes and sizes and that there is no one type that's right or better.  I felt like the most beautiful woman in the whole wide world when I left- and i have not even gotten to the scrub. Tuck agreed though that she felt like she looked like a million bucks - and she did. We were glowing from within.

The Akisuri scrub: Oy vey is meir, The spa is a large room with pools of water in the center- different therapeutic rooms, as I have mentioned, are on the periphery and to the right when you walk in there is a room partitioned of with low lying cubicle walls for the scrubbing.

There are about 6 tables that divots in the center so that when you are lying down on them the hot cucumber infused water that is doused on you remains puddled around you.  There is no privacy. You lie there naked, and no matter where your eyes turn, some other chick is naked and getting scrubbed.  The women, 40s or so, are sweet. They are all wearing black bikinis. They call you by number and gently lay you down on your table. They poor tons of water on you and then scrub with these mittens several times over your ENTIRE BODY!  No, there is no happy ending and they do not touch your lower privates- this is not by any means a skanky establishment.  Everyone respects everyone else. No one cares what is going on with your body - all they care about is their own!  The clientele were classy, healthy women of all ages, sizes, races, creeds... etc. You close your eyes and fall into a dreamy sort of slumber. The scrub is like a massage. They also scrub your scalp and give your hair a good shampoo and conditioning. It is Amazing. The scrubbing lasts 45 minutes! Afterwords you can continue to do a round robin of the other amenities.  With tip the whole 3 hour event cost me $55.  My skin felt like butter, my hair smelled and looked amazing and I had a flush that can only be compared to a good sex or in love flush.  If you live in NYC they have places like this in Queens- DO IT! Let go of your issues- its worth it friends- it is worth it!  Thank you Jolene P for telling Tuck about this- you are my hero!