sophie heawood

wolfe with an e

Tue, 04 Jan 2011 17:41:00 -0800

It is late December, the last few days before Christmas, and I’m staying at The Jane hotel in New York for four nights while we shoot the ending to a film that we worked on in LA over the summer. It’s called Wolfe With An E, directed by David Zuckerman, produced by Michael Hekmat, written by DZ and Mandy Kahn. It’s about the musician Henry Wolfe, but he’s a mysterious figure, whose appearances are fleeting, and somehow my lines are more plentiful. I play a British music journalist from The Times, sent to America to interview Henry. She’s called Sophie Heawood. Yup, the method acting is killing me.

So I spent today pretending to be myself going record shopping in the West Village. Pretending to be myself running into an old friend. Pretending to go to her Brooklyn loft and pretending to get excited about Haydn’s clock symphony and then pretending to get so worked up about classical music and the mathematics of time travel and interplanetary egg breakfasts that I nearly slipped into unconsciousness. (Still not quite sure about that bit, but it was in the script. I did ask but they just frowned and muttered something about “the future”, and then started calling me Soph, always a sign I should have kept my mouth shut.)

Gaby Hoffman, who’s been acting professionally since she was a small kid living at the Chelsea Hotel, played my longlost friend. You can tell her to say anything and it just springs out of her mouth like she invented the language. I thought I sounded quite natural until I saw how she inhabited it; how the words she said didn’t sit and linger on her for a second. She seemed to be made of earth. I could have watched her for days.

My own experience of acting is quite like my experience of broadsheet journalism. You try and try to make sentences sound good while a small voice inside your head won’t stop nagging at you “but is this how you ACTUALLY TALK?”

Except today, acting was way better than journalism ever could be, cos I got given my very own hair and make-up lady to keep beside me all day long, patting my face down, sexing up my eyelash dossier and rearranging my “bangs”. She was, no word of a lie, the most exciting thing that has ever happened to the front section of my head.

starlings

Tue, 04 Jan 2011 17:37:25 -0800

“An introduced species is a species living outside its native distributional range, which has arrived there by human activity, either deliberate or accidental. Famous examples include the introduction of starlings to North America by an Englishman called Eugene Schieffelin, a lover of the works of Shakespeare, who, it is rumoured, wanted to introduce all of the birds mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays into the United States. He deliberately released eighty starlings into Central Park in New York City in 1890, and another forty in 1891.”

overheard in hollywood

Tue, 04 Jan 2011 17:36:00 -0800

RUNYON CANYON

Four young women out for a gentle hike; one is a white nanny with a pushchair containing a brown baby. The other women coo over the child and ask, “So, is this her second baby?”
“Yeah,” says the nanny.
“So, what, did she like RETURN the other one?”
“Yeah.”

A young white guy, maybe about 25, has been monologuing at his female friend for so long that I start subtly transcribing him into my Blackberry (with my super fast typing thumbs.) Seriously, this whole passage is verbatim:

“So I read in Oprah magazine about this kid who grew up in this super super strict family, like born again Christians? And like, he was gay? And obviously his family were not gonna be okay with this AT ALL, and he finally came out to his dad who was, like, traumatised and told him never to tell his mom, but his dad dropped dead a year later so he finally told his mom he was gay and she put him through all this electro shock therapy and all of this awful stuff to try and cure him and she pushed him and pushed him and so finally he snapped and he, like, KILLED his mom, and so the whole of the rest of the family was like really against him, you know, cos he’d killed his mom I guess, and nobody would support him and finally his grandmother on his dad’s side came out in support of him and she defended him at the trial and so her husband divorced her at the age of 75 and now the kid is still in jail and his grandma has moved to be near him so she can visit him but she’s totally alone and the whole rest of the family won’t have anything to do with them and it just goes to show that, you know, you don’t think something like that is going to come between you, because you think your family will always be there for you, but you know you’d be SURPRISED, sometimes at the end of the day it’s weird but people really don’t pull together over this stuff.”

GREENBLATT’S DELI, SUNSET BOULEVARD:

Waitress: Anger doesn’t get Russian dressing
Customer: What does get Russian dressing?
Waitress: Joy

Customer: Luxembourg? That country that was so random that Hitler forgot to invade it?
Waitress: That’s pretty much what they put on all their t-shirts. Have you seen In Bruges?
Customer: Sounds foreign
Waitress: I don’t think it is foreign, I think it’s English
Customer: Where is Bruges?
Waitress: Somewhere in Europe
Customer: Luxembourg.

Customer: Cindy was pretty wild when she lived in New York. She was dating some guy who had a dungeon. But these days people stay in touch.

For a mere 18,000 Euros you can buy this lovely Portuguese ruin....

Tue, 04 Jan 2011 15:36:00 -0800

For a mere 18,000 Euros you can buy this lovely Portuguese ruin. Do it now, so I am unable to. I must be stopped. It’s the dog.

by Jeana Sohn

Tue, 04 Jan 2011 15:07:37 -0800

by Jeana Sohn

levellers

Tue, 04 Jan 2011 15:00:00 -0800

Many years ago I started having singing lessons from a wonderful kind-hearted woman. I was younger and shyer then, and was immediately attracted to her generous philosophy. She told me that everybody has a voice, everybody can sing, and if they don’t sing in tune, well, maybe they’re singing a different tune, and that’s fine. I had lessons for some time and she taught me well. Once I spent a whole weekend at her house watching her work with another student - a middle-aged man, recently divorced - to successfully turn him from tone deaf to singing in harmony.

Now that I live on the other side of the world from her, we haven’t seen each other in a long time, but we recently met up in America and went on a retreat together. At this retreat there was a creative writing teacher who was going round saying that everybody has a voice, everybody has a story to tell, and everybody can be a writer. Now that I’m a professional writer, I found myself turning my nose up at his idea, and muttering darkly to myself that everyone can’t be a writer, just as not everyone can be a pastry chef or a chemical engineer.

Later, I told my singing teacher that I had become a horrible old snob who didn’t believe that everybody could write. She said that she no longer believed that everybody could sing. “But I watched you get that man from tone deaf to singing in tune!” I reminded her. “Oh GOD, but that was SUCH hard work,” she groaned. “I’ve realised that everyone in the world can make a noise,” she continued, “but… it isn’t always pleasant to listen to.”

My dark cynical heart felt quite a lot better after that.

Alexander Calder: Bird’s Nest

Tue, 04 Jan 2011 13:16:00 -0800

Alexander Calder: Bird’s Nest

Drew Barrymore on phone sex

Tue, 04 Jan 2011 01:25:00 -0800

“It was just a thing you try, like wearing orange for a while”

a tommy cooper joke for you

Mon, 03 Jan 2011 19:37:00 -0800

And the back of his anorak was leaping up and down, and people were chucking money to him, and I asked, “Do you earn a living doing that?” He said, “Yes, this is my livelihood.”

From Devendra Banhart’s heart of art

Mon, 03 Jan 2011 19:30:00 -0800

From Devendra Banhart’s heart of art

why is the dog called lucky?

Mon, 03 Jan 2011 19:23:00 -0800

Midge Ure’s house on the island of Monserrat had to be rebuilt after a termite infestation, after which it was promptly blown away by Hurricane Hugo. He restored it a second time but it was then destroyed by a volcano which had sleeping for 400 years. He bought his parents a thatched cottage in Devon, which caught fire. Twice.

Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband

Mon, 03 Jan 2011 19:19:00 -0800

SIR ROBERT CHILTERN
What an appalling philosophy that sounds! To attempt to classify you, Mrs. Cheveley, would be an impertinence. But may I ask, at heart, are you an optimist or a pessimist? Those seem to be the only two fashionable religions left to us nowadays.

MRS. CHEVELEY
Oh, I’m neither. Optimism begins in a broad grin, and Pessimism ends with blue spectacles. Besides, they are both of them merely poses.

SIR ROBERT CHILTERN
You prefer to be natural?

MRS. CHEVELEY
Sometimes. But it is such a very difficult pose to keep up.

Photo

Mon, 03 Jan 2011 19:18:14 -0800

GOOD HAIR DAY

Mon, 03 Jan 2011 02:56:00 -0800

A few years ago, Hillary Clinton stepped onto a podium before Yale’s graduation class to make a speech. “The most important thing I have to say,” she told her eager audience, “is that hair matters. Pay attention to your hair. Because everyone else will.”

(Here she is making the speech)

IT'S NOT EVEN WRONG

Mon, 03 Jan 2011 02:54:00 -0800

The nuclear physicist Wolfgang Pauli used to say of unsolicited student theses: “It’s not even wrong”, as if to suggest that being wrong would at least mean it was in the approximate area of being right.

Mon, 03 Jan 2011 02:52:00 -0800

recent readings

Mon, 03 Jan 2011 02:36:00 -0800

Just finished a novel called Room by Emma Donoghue, written in the voice of a five-year-old child trapped in one room with his mother all his life - no, honestly, it’s amazing. I was claustrophic at the start, but not by the end. He makes the spaces wider. Also recently finished Patti Smith’s Just Kids, which taught me everything I ever wanted to know about New York in the 60s and 70s, and the Chelsea Hotel, about committing to your art, and being poor, and being humble, and pure, and all the other things that I’m not.

La Paz. Not sure where I found this glorious photo, since I have...

Mon, 03 Jan 2011 02:29:00 -0800

La Paz. Not sure where I found this glorious photo, since I have a bad habit of dragging every attractive jpeg I see straight to my desktop until they all pile up like an EC Butter Mountain of other people’s lives. Suspect it may have come from my friend Todd, whose Facebook page is an endless stream of dreamy faraway towns. I regularly steal his and his wife Natashka’s photographs and pretend that I am on their holidays with them. Yeah now I’ve written that down it sounds pretty weird.

the loneliness of the long-distance GPS user

Sun, 02 Jan 2011 22:44:00 -0800

My lowest point of 2010: When I had been on so many flights for so many days that I had completely lost track of which city I was flying to. So I got off the plane, walked into the terminal with the other passengers, and then panicked internally. As they headed for baggage reclaim I instead dived straight into the ladies loos, locked myself in a cubicle, sat on the bog, and got my Blackberry out. I turned on the GPS navigation and kept pressing ZOOM OUT until it went from showing that I was in terminal two to actually telling me which airport I was in, in which world. As I recall it was Phoenix, Arizona, The Desert, The US, The Universe, The Wide Sheltering Galaxy of Gods.

Of course, there were lower points than that. When my friend in London died of cancer in his 30s. And his devoted wife Geri updated his Facebook page to let us know that that “we lost our Jerome today”, that his battle with sarcoma was over, that she and his family were so grateful for all our support these last few months. By the time I saw the post, only shortly after she’d written it, somebody had already clicked that they “liked” this.

And so I sat there in bed in LA by myself, having just woken up and switched on my laptop, weeping, unable to believe that Jerome had actually gone and died and wasn’t just going to keep posting funny updates about the weird spluttering noises coming from the other beds during chemo night at the Royal Marsden forever. But during those next few days when his death was too big and too unfathomable to rage against, I found myself stumbling around in a sad swearing fury that somebody had “liked” this.

My friend David wants to write a guidebook to social etiquette in the iPhone age. I’m thinking of offering to write the chapter on not “liking” it when somebody’s young happy husband drops dead.

dead men's bones

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 23:09:00 -0700

I spend a lot of my life in what Brits call charity or junk shops, and what Americans call thrift stores. In England you go to Oxfam or the British Heart Foundation; here in LA you go to Goodwill or Out of the Closet, (which my friend Ki and I call The Aids Shop, because we are five.)

Anyway, I’ve been a repeat offender in charity shops since I was about 13 and developed an obsession with wearing oversized blazers that always made my grandmother protest, “Ugh darling, you can’t possibly buy that, a man surely DIED in it.” I suppose if you’re a granny, you know that charity shops are where clothes go when you die, but 13-year-olds with limited pocket money are immortal.

Here is what you should buy in charity shops:

1) VASES. Old dead people always have the best vases and you can pick them up for about dirt cheap. There is literally no need to ever buy a vase in a normal shop ever again. Charity shops are OVERFLOWING with the stemmy buggers.

2) BAKING DISHES that look a bit like Le Creuset casseroles and may in fact be just that if you’re lucky. Also any sort of glass dishes to bake things in. Or trays, or eggcups. But NOT mugs. You must only buy the mugs if you never had a father and need to pretend that somebody in your family went on a corporate away-day to SUNSHINE GOLF TAMPA RECRUITMENT JAMBOREE in 1987.

3) BOOKS about gardening. This isn’t proving so true in America, where the books sections are full of self-help tomes about how to get your meth addict boyfriend to call you when he says he will, but in England you can always score the most amazing books about flowers.

4) BLAZERS, macs and woollen winter coats. Men’s or women’s. Thin enough for tennis or thick enough for Siberia. Always amazing. I think every coat I own comes from a charity shop and people always ask me where they’re from, so they must be brilliant. Unless it’s the stench of death that’s attracting all the attention. Hard to know for sure.

5) Specifically: this season’s camel coats! I’ve just been reading Vogue and it’s full of eulogies for autumn 2010’s camel-coloured wool coats. So I went straight out and found one for ten dollars at a Goodwill in the Valley, and another for 20 bucks in one of those council thrift stores on Fairfax, West Hollywood. The latter one is particularly fine. Proper vintage American and looks like it cost ten times that amount.

In fact, here it is:

6) ART. Even if you don’t like any of the paintings in there, take a close look at the frame. I often buy crap paintings with a nice frame and just yank the art out of it when I get home. Sometimes I do feel a bit evil, as the picture tends to be of some soggy begonias that someone’s uncle painted while his wife lay in the hospital wearing all of his blazers and dying, dying, dying. But it’s no more evil than wasting your life on the internet, and yet here we all are, rolling in the mud again.

7) DESK LAMPS. I realise that buying second-hand electrical goods gives you the winning card in the How To Die In A House Fire game, but all I can say is that I am Not Dead Yet. Unlike all the men who once owned my coats.

So, all in all. Charity shops are full of death, but a nice sort of death that really wants to come to life again. The world has limited resources - why not buy stuff that already smells a bit?