#charlie the host huxley

[rat-on-string]

having tons of fun doing portraits! I was trying my hand at the disco elysium portrait style again. I don't think its 100% accurate, but i like it enough!

[rat-off-string]

anyway. look . psppspsps warforrayuba fellers pspspsps come on out its charlie the host !! pspospsp SAD ART ATTACK! BLAST

[kvetchlandia]

Uncredited Photographer     Greta Garbo and Salka Viertel at Viertel’s House, Santa Monica, CA     c.1940

Salka Viertel had been a moderately successful actor in Austria and Germany, where her husband, Berthold Viertel was also a moderately successful director and producer.  Being Jews and leftists and seeing the way things were developing in Germany, they left and came to the United States, intending to spend a few years in the US and then return to Germany.  After Hitler’s rise to power, they of course decided to remain in their Santa Monica home. 

As the 30s progressed, things grew more desperate for their friends and colleagues in Europe.  Both of the Viertels became active in working for visas for artists seeking to see flee Hitler while that was still possible.  Salka became a founding member of the European Film Fund, which sought to help German language film writers, actors and directors to gain contact and contracts with American studios.  Salka Viertel also hosted what was essentially a European-style salon in her home, at which many of the the emigres could feel a bit more at home, and at which American artists could mingle with their European associates.  Among the regular participants at Salka Viertel’s salon in Santa Monica were Bertolt Brecht, Heinrich and Thomas Mann, Lion and Marta Feuchtwanger, Franz Werfel and Alma Mahler, Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, Sergei Eisenstein, Christopher Isherwood, Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo, Edward G Robinson and when they were in town, Aldous Huxley and Albert Einstein.  

Following is a quote from Salka Viertel’s memoir, “The Kindness of Strangers,” detailing an incident that happened following her allowing an interracial couple, the black documentary filmmaker, Carlton Moss and his wife, Lynn, to stay in a studio over her garage when no one would rent to them:

“In all the years I had lived on Mabery Road, I had exchanged merely friendly nods and brief greetings with my next-door neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Ferris, an old retired couple. Aloof and gentle, they did not even reproach me when my dogs dug a hole under the fence and killed their pet duck, Matilda. Lynn and Carlton had lived for some time in the ‘Schloss,’ as Carlton called the house (pronouncing it “slush”), when early one morning, as I was watering my roses, I saw Mrs. Ferris cutting flowers in her garden. I wished her a pleasant day; she called back: ‘Oh, I am so glad to see you,” and came to the fence with a huge bunch of sweetpeas.

‘I’d like you to give this to your mother.’ I thanked her and said that my mother would be enchanted with the lovely bouquet.

Then Mrs. Ferris asked: ‘That nice couple over your garage, are they staying with you for any length of time?’

‘As long as they wish it,’ I answered defensively.

But Mrs. Ferris had more on her mind and slowly and hesitantly it came out. ‘You know that Mrs. A., the lady who owns that large Spanish house down the road, has been canvassing for signatures to protest your renting to Negroes?’

‘No one can tell me who should or should not live in my house …’ I burst out angrily.

Mrs. Ferris reached over the fence and put her hand on my shoulder. ‘Don’t get excited! I want you to know that no one signed. We, the property owners on this side of the Canyon, had a meeting’–apparently I was not considered a ‘property owner’ as I had been excluded–’and my husband told them: These are friends of Mrs. Viertel. We are pleased she is our neighbor.’

Moved by the unexpected support, I thanked Mrs. Ferris profusely. But she had not finished. Taking a deep breath, she shook her head and looking reproachfully at me, added: ‘Yes, that’s what my husband told them, regardless of the fact that we’ve seen you driving around with that ‘Roosevelt for President’ sticker on your car.’” Salka Viertel, “The Kindness of Strangers” 1969

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

What other fandoms are you familiar enough with to use as an AU prompt? Pokemon Trainer AU? Homestuck AU (they'd still probably die but at least there are lots of ways to come back to life)?

I’m not that familiar with Homestuck, definitely not enough to do an AU.  I read the novelizations of the Pokemon show as a kid but never saw the show or played any of the video games.  I did play the super-obscure Pokemon board game, but most of my trading cards were printed in Japanese (I had a strange childhood), so my experience there is, uh, probably not quite overlapping with everyone else’s.

Anyway, if you want list of all my fandoms… Boy howdy.  I don’t think I can come up with them all.  However, I can list everything that comes to mind between now and ~20 minutes from now when I have to end my procrastination break and go back to dissertating.  So here it is, below the cut:

Okay, there is no way in hell I’ll be able to make an exhaustive list.  But off the top of my head, the fandoms I’m most familiar/comfortable with are as follows:

Authors (as in, I’ve read all or most of their books)

Patricia Briggs

Megan Whalen Turner

Michael Crichton

Marge Piercy

Stephenie Meyer

Dean Koontz

Stephen King

Neil Gaiman

K.A. Applegate

Ernest Hemingway

Tamora Pierce

Roald Dahl

Short Stories/Anthologies

A Good Man is Hard to Find, Flannery O’Connor

The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka

I Am Legend, Richard Matheson

Dubliners, James Joyce

Flowers for Algernon, Daniel Keyes

Who Goes There? John W. Campbell

The Man Who Bridged the Mist, Kij Johnson

Flatland, Edwin Abbott

I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream, Harlan Ellison

To Build a Fire, Jack London

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, Ambrose Bier

At the Mountains of Madness/Cthulu mythos, H.P. Lovecraft

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle

The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Washington Irving

The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury

Close Range: Wyoming Stories, E. Annie Proulx

The Curious Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson

Bartleby the Scrivener (and a bunch of others), Herman Melville

Books (Classics)

Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neal Hurston

The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery

The Secret Garden, Francis Hodgson Burnett

Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson

Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte

The Secret Annex, Anne Frank

Nine Stories, J.D. Salinger

Frankenstein, Mary Shelley

Tom Sawyer/Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain

East of Eden, John Steinbeck

To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee

The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison

Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut

The Stranger, Albert Camus

The Call of the Wild, Jack London

Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

Lord of the Flies, William Golding

Atonement, Ian McEwan

1984, George Orwell

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith

The Iliad/The Odyssey, Homer

Metamorphoses, Ovid

Journey to the Center of the Earth, Jules Verne

The Time-Machine, H.G. Wells

The Tempest, Much Ado About Nothing, Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet, Henry V, Hamlet, MacBeth, Othello, and The Taming of the Shrew, William Shakespeare

Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, Thomas Stoppard

Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett

Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood

Books (YA SF)

Young Wizards series, Diane Duane

Redwall, Brian Jaques

The Dark is Rising sequence, Susan Cooper

The Chronicles of Chrestomanci, Diana Wynne Jones

The Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis

Abhorsen trilogy, Garth Nix

The Giver series, Lois Lowry

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams

Uglies series, Scott Westerfeld

Tuck Everlasting, Natalie Babbitt

A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin

Song of the Lioness, Tamora Pierce

A Wrinkle in Time, Madeline L’Engle

Unwind, Neal Shusterman

The Maze Runner series, James Dashner

The Enchanted Forest Chronicles, Patricia C. Wrede

Sideways Stories from Wayside School, Louis Sachar

Ella Enchanted, Gail Carson Levine

Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card

The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster

Coraline, Neil Gaiman

Among the Hidden, Margaret Peterson Haddix

The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle, Avi

Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice

Poppy series, Avi

The Secret Life of Bees, Sue Monk Kidd

Tithe, Holly Black

Life as We Knew It, Susan Beth Pfeffer

Blood and Chocolate, Annette Curtis Klause

Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie

The Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum

Haunted, Gregory Maguire

Weetzie Bat, Francesca Lia Block

Charlotte’s Web, E.B. White

East, Edith Pattou

Z for Zachariah, Robert C. O’Brien

The Looking-Glass Wars, Frank Beddor

The Egypt Game, Zilpha Keatley Snyder

The Book Thief, Markus Zusak

Homecoming, Cynthia Voigt

Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll

The Landry News, Andrew Clements

Fever 1793, Laurie Halse Anderson

Bloody Jack, L.A. Meyer

The Boxcar Children, Gertrude Chandler Warner

A Certain Slant of Light, Laura Whitcomb

Generation Dead, Daniel Waters

Pendragon series, D.J. MacHale

Silverwing, Kenneth Oppel

Good Omens, Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

Define Normal, Julie Anne Peters

Hawksong, Ameila Atwater Rhodes

Heir Apparent, Vivian Vande Velde

Running Out of Time, Margaret Peterson Haddix

The Keys to the Kingdom series, Garth Nix

The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, Joan Aiken

The Seer and the Sword, Victoria Hanley

My Side of the Mountain, Jean Craighead George

Daughters of the Moon series, Lynne Ewing

The Midwife’s Apprentice, Karen Cushman

Island of the Aunts, Eva Ibbotson

The Night Circus, Erin Morgenstern

The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm, Nancy Farmer

A Great and Terrible Beauty, Libba Bray

A School for Sorcery, E. Rose Sabin

The House with a Clock in Its Walls, John Bellairs

The Edge Chronicles, Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell

Hope was Here, Joan Bauer

Bunnicula, James Howe

Wise Child, Monica Furlong

Silent to the Bone, E.L. Konigsburg

The Twenty-One Balloons, William Pene du Bois

Dead Girls Don’t Write Letters, Gail Giles

The Supernaturalist, Eoin Colfer

Blue is for Nightmares, Laurie Faria Stolarz

Mystery of the Blue Gowned Ghost, Linda Wirkner

Wait Till Helen Comes, Mary Downing Hahn

I was a Teenage Fairy, Francesca Lia Block

City of the Beasts series, Isabelle Allende

Summerland, Michael Chabon

The Geography Club, Brent Hartinger

The Last Safe Place on Earth, Richard Peck

Liar, Justine Larbalestier

The Doll People, Ann M. Martin

The Lost Years of Merlin, T.A. Barron

Matilda Bone, Karen Cushman

Nine Stories, J.D. Salinger

The Tiger Rising, Kate DiCamillo

The Spiderwick Chronicles, Holly Black and Tony DiTerlizzi

In the Forests of the Night, Amelia Atwater-Rhodes

My Teacher is an Alien, Bruce Coville

The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles, Julie Andrews Edwards

Storytime, Edward Bloor

Magic Shop series, Bruce Coville

A Series of Unfortunate Events, Lemony Snicket

Veritas Project series, Frank Peretti

The Once and Future King, T.H. White

Raven’s Strike, Patricia Briggs

What-the-Dickens: The Story of a Rogue Tooth Fairy, Gregory Maguire

The Wind Singer, William Nicholson

Sweetblood, Pete Hautman

The Trumpet of the Swan, E.B. White

Half Magic, Edward Eager

A Ring of Endless Light, Madeline L'Engle

The Heroes of Olympus, Rick Riordan

Maximum Ride series, James Patterson

The Edge on the Sword, Rebecca Tingle

World War Z, Max Brooks

Adaline Falling Star, Mary Pope Osborne

Six of Crows, Leigh Bardugo

Children of Blood and Bone, Tomi Adeyemi

Parable of the Sower series, Octavia Butler

I, Robot, Isaac Asimov

Neuomancer, William Gibson

Dune, Frank Herbert

The Miseducation of Cameron Post, Emily M. Danforth

The Martian, Andy Weir

Skeleton Man, Joseph Bruchac

Comics/Manga

Marvel 616 (most of the major titles)

Marvel 1610/Ultimates

Persepolis

This One Summer

Nimona

Death Note

Ouran High School Host Club

Vampire Knight

Emily Carroll comics

Watchmen

Fun Home

From Hell

American Born Chinese

Smile

The Eternal Smile

The Sandman

Calvin and Hobbes

The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For

TV Shows

Fullmetal Alchemist

Avatar the Last Airbender

Teen Titans (2003)

Luke Cage/Jessica Jones/Iron Fist/Defenders/Daredevil/The Punisher

Agents of SHIELD/Agent Carter

Supernatural

Sherlock

Brooklyn Nine-Nine

Angel/Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Firefly

American Horror Story

Ouran High School Host Club

Orange is the New Black

Black Sails

Stranger Things

Westworld

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt

Movies

Marvel Cinematic Universe

Jurassic Park/Lost World/Jurassic World/Lost Park?

The Breakfast Club

Cloverfield/10 Cloverfield Lane/The Cloverfield Paradox

Attack the Block

The Prestige

Moon

Ferris Bueler’s Day Off

Django Unchained/Kill Bill/Inglourious Basterds/Hateful 8/Pulp Fiction/etcetera

Primer

THX 1138/Akira/How I Live Now/Lost World/[anything I’ve named a fic after]

Star Wars

The Meg

A Quiet Place

Baby Driver

Mother!

Alien/Aliens/Prometheus

X-Men (et al.)

10 Things I Hate About You

The Lost Boys

Teen Wolf

Juno

Pirates of the Caribbean (et al.)

Die Hard

Most Disney classics: Toy Story, Mulan, Treasure Planet, Emperor’s New Groove, etc.

Most Pixar classics: Up, Wall-E, The Incredibles

The Matrix

Dark Knight trilogy

Halloween

Friday the 13th

A Nightmare on Elm Street

The Descent

Ghostbusters

Ocean’s Eight/11/12/13

King Kong

The Conjuring

Fantastic Four

Minority Report/Blade Runner/Adjustment Bureau/Total Recall

Fight Club

Spirited Away

O

Disturbing Behavior

The Faculty

Poets

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Marge Piercy

Thomas Hardy

Sigfried Sassoon

W. B. Yeats

Edgar Allan Poe

Ogden Nash

Margaret Atwood

Maya Angelou

Emily Dickinson

Matthew Dickman

Karen Skolfield

Kwame Alexander

Ellen Hopkins

Shel Silverstein

Musicals/Stage Plays

Les Miserables

Repo: The Genetic Opera

The Lion King

The Phantom of the Opera

Rent

The Prince of Egypt

Pippin

Into the Woods

A Chorus Line

Hairspray

Evita

Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog

Fiddler on the Roof

Annie

Fun Home

Spring Awakening

Chicago

Cabaret

The Miser

The Importance of Being Earnest

South Pacific

Godspell

Wicked

The Wiz

The Wizard of Oz

Man of La Mancha

The Sound of Music

West Side Story

Matilda

Sweeney Todd

Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat

Nunsense

You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown/Snoopy

1776

Something Rotten

A Very Potter Musical

Babes in Toyland

Carrie: The Musical

Amadeus

Annie Get Your Gun

25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee

The Final Battle

Rock of Ages

Cinderella

Moulin Rouge

Honk

Labyrinth

The Secret Garden

Reefer Madness

Bang Bang You’re Dead

NSFW

War Horse

Peter Pan

Suessical

Sister Act

The Secret Annex

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Disclaimer 1: Like a lot of people who went to high school in the American South, my education in literature is pretty shamefully lacking in a lot of areas.  (As in, during our African American History unit in ninth grade we read To Kill a Mockingbird, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn… and that was it.  As in, our twelfth-grade US History class, I shit you not, covered Gone With the Wind.)  There were a lot of good teachers in with the *ahem* Less Woke ones (how I read Their Eyes Were Watching God and The Bluest Eye) and college definitely set me on the path to trying to find books written/published outside the WASP-ier parts of the U.S., but the overall list is still embarrassingly hegemonic.

Disclaimer 2: There are a crapton of errors — typos, misspelled names, misattributions, questionable genre classifications, etc. — in here.  If you genuinely have no idea what a title is supposed to be, ask me.  Otherwise, please don’t bother letting me know about my mistakes.

Disclaimer 3: I am not looking for recommendations.  My Goodreads “To Read” list is already a good 700 items long, and people telling me “if you like X, then you’ll love Y!” genuinely stresses me the fuck out.

Disclaimer 4: There are no unproblematic faves on this list.  I love Supernatural, and I know that Supernatural is hella misogynistic.  On the flip side: I don’t love The Lord of the Rings at all, partially because LOTR is hella misogynistic, but I also don’t think that should stop anyone else from loving LOTR if they’re willing to love it and also acknowledge its flaws. 

[jeromenathen]

Celebrity Traveller: Konnie Huq

Writer and television presenter Konnie Huq shot to fame in the late Nineties hosting children's TV series Blue Peter and went on to be the show's longest-serving female presenter. Now 43, Konnie is married to Charlie Brooker and the pair live in Ealing, London, with their children, Covey, six, and Huxley, four. from Daily Express :: Travel Feed https://www.express.co.uk/travel/articles/1005080/Celebrity-Traveller-Konnie-Huq-holiday-brazil-romania-charlie-brooker

[ravelite]

This coming January, Charlie Chaplin’s film The Pilgrim and Cecil B. DeMille’s The 10 Commandments will slip the shackles of ownership, allowing any individual or company to release them freely, mash them up with other work, or sell them with no restriction. This will be true also for some compositions by Bela Bartok, Aldous Huxley’s Antic Hay, Winston Churchill’s The World Crisis, Carl Sandburg’s Rootabaga Pigeons, e.e. cummings’s Tulips and Chimneys, Noël Coward’s London Calling! musical, Edith Wharton’s A Son at the Front, many stories by P.G. Wodehouse, and hosts upon hosts of forgotten works, according to research by the Duke University School of Law’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain.

A Mass of Copyrighted Works Will Soon Enter the Public Domain - The Atlantic

[cheddarjacked-blog]

As it stands

So far I’ve been looking at philosophy, psychology filmmaking and neuroscience. In the process of making this film, I’ve been reading a range of works to try and broaden my knowledge on the subject of the dystopian world. The first book I bought after the initial idea of the dystopian film was conceived was on the advice of Tobias, it was A Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. [1]

This book has been helpful as a reference whilst writing the script. In the book, Huxley’s characters are quickly whisked away by high up decisions, their lives drastically changed by signatures on paper. I tried to embody this when Roy signs his contract to move into the cloud, in his efforts to rejoin his dead wife he misreads the small detail of his body being cremated to save space on earth. While I was reading this I realised that I hadn’t read George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four [2] and decided to digest that one as well. This book was far more dystopian than A Brave New World, its language was incredibly grey and flaccid. In this book I liked the idea of the separate Ministries, the Ministry of Love, of Truth, Plenty and Peace which are each focused on work aimed at the antithesis that the names suggest. This kind of, in your face deception, was disturbing and inspiring and aided the birth of our script. 

Another brilliant resource has been The Waking Up Podcast, hosted by Sam Harris. He has introduced me to philosophers Daniel Dennet, Richard Dawkins, Peter Singer, David Chalmers, Thomas Nagel and Thomas Metzinger. Physicists David Deutsch and Lawrence Krauss, cosmologist Max Tegmark, neuroendocrinologist Robert Sapolsky, computer scientist Stuart Russell and psychologist Paul Bloom. These brilliant minds have been the base from which I’ve formed my ideas in regards to this project. Their work has been priceless to me and in my other blogs, you can see my citing of their research and ideas. 

This short film is the first film since high school, four years ago, that I have made with actors and a crew. I’ve been making abstract videos since I left school that has not had narrative focus. This project has already been wonderful for me in regards to the application of producing a film. I’ve proved to myself that I can direct far better than I thought previously. While acting as the casting director I found myself in a state of clarity, where I could convey to the actors exactly what I wanted and could tell quickly if they were taking on my direction or not. In moving forward with the project I want to see what I can achieve as the director if I can successfully pull off scenes with our five actors and manage the crew. I want to develop as a director and move forward into the industry with this project as an example of work I can produce. We will see in four weeks time whether I’ve been able to achieve this goal. 

Our outcome is a short film, of three to five minutes. I’m not going to be exact in the timeline of the film because the filming may give us more or less than expected. What is a short film? To my understanding, it is a motion picture up to around 20 minutes in length that aims to tell a story of some kind. After doing some research, however, I found Dr Richard Raskin, a professor at Aarhus University in Denmark. [3] He poses that the short film is not a condensed feature film, rather it is a far freer art form, due to short films being able to work despite characters not engaging in conflict, characters do not have to undergo character arcs and that you can tell a story without dialogue. 

The industry of filmmaking has a classic saying "There are no rules in filmmaking. Only sins. And the cardinal sin is dullness." - Frank Capra. With that in mind we aim to have an outcome that is not dull, and one that is thought-provoking. My main worry is that we may not convey our ideas. I know that the film cannot hope to convey all the ideas that I want to but I hope we can convey our idea. In order to do this, we must outline our main idea. The main theme is that in the future there is a virtual world where humans can upload our consciousness and simulate a world unlike or like our own. Elon Musk is hoping to achieve this with his Neuralink [4] 

I’ve also taken to watch a few of the industry’s greatest dystopian works. My main inspiration is Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror [5]. The show is inspiring because it shares ideas about relevant and up and coming technology, I know it has production value miles ahead of us but it is quite simple in it’s approach. Little special effects and it hones in on simple character interaction with technology, much like us in everyday life. Which is why it’s so effective, it’s far fetched but not so far to be unrealistic, all of the scenarios are too me plausible. It’s what we aimed to do with our short film, provide a set of characters with a technology that is coming in the not to distant future and see what we can learn. It’s kind of like a simulation for our own future, acting out these scenarios to see what further ideas we can muster, to help us tackle the real technology when it comes. 

[1] Huxley, A. (2008). Brave new world. Ernst Klett Sprachen

[2] Orwell, G. (1990). Nineteen Eighty-Four. 1949. The Complete Novels, 7.

[3] M. (2017, September 26). New Theories of the Short Film: A Conversation with Dr Richard Raskin. Retrieved September 27, 2017, from https://blog.musicbed.com/articles/new-theories-of-the-short-film-a-conversation-with-dr-richard-raskin/77 

[4] Urban, T. (2017, September 22). Neuralink and the Brain's Magical Future. Retrieved September 27, 2017, from https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html 

[5] Brooker, C. (Writer). (2013, February 11). Be Right Back [Television series episode]. In Black Mirror .

[wedgesinusa]

Paradise Cove, Ventura and Ojai Round Trip

On Friday morning, Michelle arrived to take us out to Paradise Cove.  We drove off, little knowing that her enthusiasm and love of showing people the places she loves would take us on a 150 mile plus journey.

Paradise Cove was just that - formerly a few hippies living in trailer homes on the hillside, it is now populated by the rich and famous who pay millions to lease the land and stay in their luxury trailers.

For six years the popular series ‘The Rockford Files’, starring James Garner was filmed right here in the Cove.

The restaurant is a huge wooden building, with historic and celebrity photos lining the walls.  There are dozens of people eating and wanting to eat and we were lucky to get a booth with a beach view.  The food was amazing and we needed a walk along the shoreline before we set off for Ventura, where Michelle lived for several years.

Ventura is a beautiful little town, sandwiched between mountains and a gorgeous beach which is currently hosting the famous Ventura State Fair.  We loved the town, with its Art Deco and fifties architecture and a spectacular view can be had of the town and its beach from a park way up in the hills.

Not content with showing us Ventura, Michelle now drove us to the Ojai Valley and the town of Ojai, surrounded by mountains.  Like Sedona, Ojai is seen to be a very spiritual place and has an interesting history.  The philosopher, Krishnamurti first came to Ojai in 1922, finding unpaved roads, orange groves and unlocked doors.  It became his spiritual retreat until his death in1986 at the age of 90.  He said of Ojai, ‘If I had nowhere to go in the world, I would come to Ojai.  I would sit under an orange tree; it would shade me from the sun and I would eat its fruit.’

Krishnamurti’s teachings attracted intellectuals such as Christopher Isherwood and Aldous Huxley who spent time talking with him as well as Hollywood stars like Greta Garbo and Charlie Chaplin.  He went on to found the Krishnamurti Foundation of America, in Ojai, which still continues and provides a spiritual retreat for hundreds of people every year.

On a more mundane level, Michelle had been promised us the best strawberry shortcake at Buccoli’s, an Italian restaurant on the other side of the valley.  Indeed, it was!  Delicious!

Just on sunset we drove up the hill above the restaurant  to a meditation centre to see the last rays of sunset disappear behind the mountains.  The utter peace in the garden made it easy to see how this area attracted followers of spiritual and other forms of holistic therapy.

As night closed in, Michelle continued her drive through the small towns of Santa Paula, Fillmore and Santa Clarita before hitting the Valley and the freeway back to Santa Monica and our hotel.  It was a wonderful trip which we would not have made if Michelle had not taken us.

[rat-off-string]

new year, same old bitch ( redesigned. again )