blaziefrancine

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Went to a party last night hosted by Sylvie (pseudonym), a heiress and philanthropist and her friend X, a performer/house DJ famous throughout Europe.

Sylvie is leasing a loft in Venice, off Abbot Kinney. I found myself resonating with the sights and sounds of Venice in a way that makes me think I might want to live there. There's a cool, edgy, artsy, urban vibe to Venice that its continuing gentrification hasn't managed to kill.

Sylvie and I bonded over footwear. Women do this. She was wearing a magnificent pair of custom-made hot pink platform pumps with 6 inch heels. Later, when the dancing started, she swapped them out for some avant-garde flat black boots. I was wearing my splurge of the year: thigh-high suede high-heeled Manolo Blahnik boots (over black leggings with a black cashmere off-the-shoulders tunic). They make me feel like a stud.

The music was excellent. X had arranged the playlist -- "Someone might think you do this for a living," I said, to which X replied, in a spiffy British accent, "I do!" before realizing I was teasing -- and obsessed over the music, often darting through the crowd to change the song. (At one point he announced, "I am now going to play some bad cheese.") I was talking to people upstairs on the terrace, enjoying the sultry, hazy view of street and palm trees, when the rhythm pounding up from below called me back to the party.

These people could dance.

I fell into my own groove with Dude, who is not a bad dancer himself.

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X reminds me of my DJ friend Michael Smith, who invited me to watch him spin at a party for the cast of Mad Men after the show won some kind of award(s).

I stood beside him in the booth and he explained his song selections to me, how it was all about reading the crowd, building the mood, kicking it high when the party peaked and knowing when to bring it down and wind it up.

The party organizer offered him an extra thousand to spin an hour longer than planned. (When people still showed no signs of leaving, Michael said, a bit gleefully, "Now I'm going to kill it," and played music that chased them out the door.) At one point a couple started dancing below the DJ booth and Michael played a couple of dance-friendly songs just for them -- "I'll throw them a bone" -- until they started grinding into each other. Michael abruptly changed the beat and sent them wandering back into the crowd.

What impresses me about Michael isn't just his diverse and wide-ranging knowledge of music, but his obsession with sound in general. Once we were talking in a cafe and Michael interrupted his own story to cock his head and say, "Do you hear that?" I had no idea what he was talking about. "That's a really cool sound." I still didn't know what he was talking about. He explained it to me: something in the hum of the fan overhead. He listened for another couple of moments and then continued with his story.

I like people who are obsessed, who have figured how to work their obsession. Obsession gets a bad rap in this culture but gives life juice and fire. Nobody can take that from you.

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Early in the evening I was introduced to a tall slender blonde named Angela. At some point in our conversation recognition clicked and I said, "Wait. Your last name is Lindvall." She of course already knew this. I told her that I'd been at the Gorgeous and Green event in San Francisco last week: "Photographers and journalists were coming up to me thinking I was you."

It turned out she was supposed to be at the event and her name was listed on the press registry. But she hadn't been able to attend. Photographers had been wandering the place looking for her and finding only me. The unfortunate souls.

She introduced me to her boyfriend, whom I had already noticed as the best-looking man in the room (with the happy exception of Dude). I'm not sure it should be legal for a couple to be so high-wattage. When beauty combines like that, it causes accidents. People get hurt.



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I ended the night back on the roof in conversation with the intensely likeable Stephan McGuire, who impressed me with his passion (his obsession) for Africa and his organization Coalition for a Sustainable Africa.

Stephan has been friends with Dude for ten years: "You're my hero," he told him, then shifted to me and said, "What this man has done for people -- for the planet --"

Which I knew, of course, but is awesome to hear.

One of the people to leave some of the most remarkable comments on my blog Tribal Writer is Dan Owens, who was referring to my 'body language' posts just when I am thinking about writing an essay called "Body Language for Writers" for my next date with Storytellers Unplugged (I post a piece there on the 20th of every month).

We betray ourselves with body language in a myriad of subtle ways because it stems from a part of our brain that is beyond our control. It gives emphasis to the phrase "the truth will out"; it's as if we're so wired into the human network that we need to communicate even when we don't want to or are attempting not to.

Every now and then I'll notice something that I'm doing -- revealing the inside of my wrist (a classic female flirtation move) when I'm talking to a man I find attractive -- or feeling myself shake my head 'no' when I once lied, "Yeah, I think he's a great guy."

An incident with Dude stands out in my mind.

We were at a party talking with a guy we'd just met who had some things in common with Dude. They started talking about financial and business-related things, which lost me (I do not speak that language) and so to amuse myself I started paying attention to how the three of us were standing.

Dude was standing beside me, casually, to my right. Even though the guy was talking to Dude, I noticed that his body was oriented towards me and he had fallen into the 'cowboy stance' which is one of the signs that a guy finds a girl attractive and is signaling his sexual prowess to her. As they continued to talk, Dude began subtly shifting his own body so that instead of standing beside me he was starting to wall me off, finally extending his hand to a place on the wall beside my head, his body angled so that he formed a bit of a barrier between me and the other guy.

It was as if they were talking about one thing (financial stuff) while their bodies were having a different conversation entirely, the guy finding me kind of cute and Dude signaling that I was not available and he should look elsewhere.

I mentioned this to Dude a couple of hours later and he looked blank and bemused. "I had no idea that was happening," he said.

Which brought home to me just how unconscious the process is -- how our bodies have a mind of their own.

It's kind of cool.

cross-posted to Tribal Writer



When people ask, “Where do you get your ideas?” the answer is as simple as “Everywhere!” and too complex to explain without fear of boring the person to death.

To get ideas, you need to be open to the world, you need to be curious and interested, you need to give yourself permission to follow your obsessions wherever they might lead you, no matter how trivial they seem at the time.

I went through a fascination with Britney Spears. I couldn’t get enough of reading about her: I tend not to buy or read tabloids…except if Britney is on the cover. I wasn’t proud of this, and uneasily aware that I was contributing to something dark in Britney’s downward spiral. But I also knew that the stuff I was feeding my mind would help to inform my fiction.

From my current standpoint of the two interrelated novels about LA that I’m writing, I can see how my fascination with Britney evolved into themes of narcissism in the culture as well as the individual and how it expresses itself. When someone asks me what one novel is about, I like to say, “It’s about narcissism and the New Hollywood” and that sounds respectable enough. But it all started with Britney.

So much of the creative process is about faith, and sometimes it feels like blind faith: that this path that you’re following will lead somewhere interesting, that it will make the journey – including all those paths that lead nowhere – worthwhile. Not knowing where you’re headed – and even when you have an outline you can’t be sure – and not knowing how you’ll get there is enough to make a strong woman procrastinate like hell.

And yet the discovery process – of connections and insights you didn’t know you were able to make, seeing how it all comes together – is one of the most remarkable aspects of writing.

You?

Where do you get your ideas?

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I am collecting thoughts and opinions on Livejournal vs Blogger vs Wordpress vs Typepad. Would love to know yours -- which do you use, and why?

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Dinner last night at Craft, which is Top Chef judge's Tom Colicchio's restaurant in Century City (a financial district in Los Angeles not far from where I live in Bel Air). Rich good food served family style, but what won me over were the packaged muffins served with the check for us to take home for breakfast the next morning. It's only the second or third restaurant I've experienced to do that (the most memorable being a ridiculously expensive place in New York that presented us at the door with the BEST chocolate chip brioche in the history of the universe).

I was wondering about how, as a writer, you could serve up the equivalent of a great meal in a great environment with an unexpected takeaway treat: go above and beyond in the experience you create for the reader.

One of the ideas I became interested in and want to explore in my novel-in-progress THE DECADENTS is, to paraphrase a character from one of my favorite novels of all time, WHAT I LOVED (Siri Husvedt) is "mapping the space between us, where one person ends and another person begins."

This is the concept of personal boundaries, and when you're fleshing out your characters it's useful to think of how healthy -- or not -- their boundaries are. If I have boundaries with holes in them (and most of us tend to in one way or another), I can't fully contain my thoughts and feelings and subconscious fantasies; I project them onto you, hold you responsible for my feelings, or think I'm responsible for your feelings (or your actions or your life). I don't know where I end and you begin. I mistake the stuff in my head for an objective reality that lies between us.

It's why people who are emotionally manipulative -- be they sociopaths or seducers or actors -- know instinctively to maintain an ambiguity, keep enough of a distance to become human screens on which the rest of us project our fantasies and emotion. They become what we expect them to be, or what on some level we need them to be. By withholding themselves they allow us the space to invent them.

cross-posted to Tribal Writer


One of the challenges for any writer is to find that balance between solitude and intimacy, independence and community.

An artist – and by this I mean anyone who takes art-making seriously, whatever kind of art that may be – is by definition a rebel. The whole point of art is to shake things up, challenge the status quo, get people to look at things anew and maybe, just maybe, alter their belief system.

An artist is a witness: to make art is to make meaning of things, and in order for that to happen you have to tune into the world around you. You have to steep yourself in your own place and time, because even if your work involves a different historical period, you yourself are a product of the culture that shaped you, and your art a commentary on it.

An artist is an outsider: to try and live as an artist is to set yourself against the usual structures of day to day living.

An artist is an outlaw: we steal from the stories around us to make stories of our own.

Rebel, witness, outsider, outlaw: these are all romantic notions, but can lead to an alienation that can slowly crush your soul. They can take you to a place so far outside the ‘normal’ world – and deep inside your own personality – that the things you say through your creations no longer have meaning for anyone except yourself.

Artists take a certain pride in their sense of ‘difference’, probably because that ‘difference’ was a source of shame when we were younger.

But it’s not enough to be different; we also need to be whole.

We need to be connected to something larger than ourselves and experience our place in the world.

We need ties – strong ties – to our community, our society, other people. Otherwise we risk depression and despair – and even the loss of ourselves, since you can’t know yourself without knowing other people, just as you can’t know other people without knowing yourself.

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On Tuesday I went to the Gorgeous & Green event in San Francisco that was put on by the environmental organization Global Green. I like clothes -- very much, actually -- and the outfit is half the fun at these things, so I wore a silk backless jumpsuit with a sash neckline that ties in the back and drapes down along your spine.

One of the highlights of the night was meeting Kate Dillon. My immediate impression of her was that she was a) gorgeous and b) taller than me (I am used to being the taller woman, especially given my fondness for heels, so that when I stand beside a woman who is taller than I am, I can't help feeling as if space and time have tilted in some odd and mysterious way) and c) incredibly familiar. But only when she told me that she was a model who "gained some attention for not being emaciated" did I recognize her as one of the most prominent plus-sized models in the industry.

Plus-sized model, of course, is a bit of a joke: Kate is to the plus-sized American woman what Giselle is to us regular sizes: an aspiration, a fantasy.

Kate is smart and educated and utterly delightful to talk to. I am irritated that she lives in New York. Doesn't New York have enough cool women (the city stole my friend Katherine Anne many months ago)?

But Los Angeles does have, at least for the moment, my new friend Sylvie (pseudonym), who's been shifting between LA and Europe in the way that only a single wealthy twentysomething can.

It would be easy to look at Sylvie and look at her life and think you have her all figured out -- and you would be wrong. So incredibly, unbelievably wrong. "I hate the 'what do you do' question," she told me. "I know I could say something about my business, or my philanthropy, but I've just gotten to the point where: I'm a fucking heiress, okay?" (In my past life as a trophy wife, I rarely got asked that question at all.)

I thought that was an interesting contrast to another young heiress who likes to say she "runs two multimillion dollar companies" at the age of 21 and doesn't acknowledge or seem to understand the role her family plays in that.

Another woman who had an impact on my evening was Victoria's Secret model Angela Lindvall. I did not speak to her or even see her but apparently she was also wearing black, because a photographer and then a journalist approached me thinking I was her. The journalist (who said to her cameraman, "I just want to talk to Angela") realized her mistake when she asked me to spell my last name. She looked flustered, we both felt awkward, and then she gamely (and politely) soldiered on and asked me questions about sustainable fabrics and what people should know before they buy and how we can make a better world.

Then, in the hall, a photographer took my picture and asked me who I was wearing -- quite possibly the only time in my life a person will ask me that without irony. I suspect I have Angela to thank for the experience.





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A couple of nights later Dude and I went to a very different gathering, a holiday office party for friends and family of a young and thriving start-up that works with nonprofits and online technology. The "world headquarters", as the company called it on their invite, is a brick warehouse with wood-beamed ceilings that would make a killer art studio. It was fun to see our friend amid his everyday context of work, if also slightly odd. When I asked him where I could put my (cool Balenciaga schoolboy) jacket, he said, "You can put it in my office," and pointed to the spacious room behind a glass wall that was filled with a desk and comfortable sofas.

"That?" I said. "That's your office?" I looked at him. "It's impressive."

He touched my arm and said, gently, "Justine. I am the CEO."

Over at Tribal Writer: building your author platform even if you're not published yet, part one, a series I started partly because the information I have found on author platforms for fiction writers is so unsatisfying (it's been much more helpful to immerse myself in books about social media and Internet marketing) and surfing the brain waves: managing your mind and unleashing your creative beast.

Been getting into a YA frame of mind in order to write a YA paranormal story due for an anthology end of Jan (I have 10,000 words to play with, so I'm psyched). Hit the bookstore yesterday and picked up SHIVER by Maggie Stiefvater, THIRTEEN REASONS WHY by Jay Asher and HOW BEAUTIFUL THE ORDINARY: Stories About Identity including one by the awesome Francesca Lia Block.

And found a new blog to adore: WHITE HOT TRUTH by Danielle LaPorte because of articles like this one.

What a gray, rainy day.

That is all. I'm off to kick some ass and look cute doing it.

....plans for which were promptly curtailed by back spasms.