Wednesday in Los Angeles: The Getty Villa, Malibu Seafood and El Matador Beach

I have always had an incredible passion for western art, and since my first trip to Italy, I have had an incredible passion for ancient Roman art and architecture. Since that time, I have had the amazing opportunity to work with Dr. Eleonora Del Federico and Dr. Bernhard Blümich

in Herculaneum, Italy where we studied and had access to some of the greatest examples of Roman architecture, wall paintings and mosaics. We had the opportunity to research in the newly excavated Villa dei Papiri which few people are allowed to enter, and we were only allowed to go in two people at a time to prevent any excess change in humidity.

Standing barefoot on the remains of the tiled floors of the patio in Herculaneum, I would wonder how the columns would have stacked up around me to the intricate sculpted and painted ceilings and how luxurious the sculptured gardens would look if I had the opportunity to see them in their prime. The Getty Institute has been doing a significant amount of research in the Villa dei Papiri and has recreated the original site in their Getty Villa museum. I was thrilled at the opportunity to see the Getty's recreation of the villa and to have the opportunity to walk its halls mumbling "I touched the real one."

The halls of the museum are sheltered within a just, if not somewhat enlarged, recreation of a roman villa. The entrance leads to a handsome atrium from which a series of small rooms spider out in every direction. Within these rooms are held glass artifacts, stoneware and beautiful ornaments excavated from the Herculaneum site and other sites of the same time period. After wandering through the maze of rooms, a brightly lit doorway leads you out to a small garden in the center of which is a shallow pool flanked by at least 16 bronze statues. This garden seems like quite the main event, until you walk through to the central garden which boasts an incredibly symmetrical plan with a vast pool and fountain, beautifully sculpted bushes and a variety of fig and pomegranate trees.

It seems the Romans were just as fond of gardens as I am: every entryway leads to another garden. The eastern gallery boasts mosaic structure which serves as a fountain and water source to a small pool filled with water lilies and lotus plants, and the side of the mansion is flanked by a huge herb garden, planted with all of the plants that have been depicted on Roman wall paintings. Thyme and rosemary fill neat, rectangular plots while ripening pomegranate and fig trees contour the plots and provide an incredible shaded walk.

Each piece of statuary and carved scenery in the museum's well rounded collection is an inspiration to any painter, and my particular interest in figural compositions and relief-esque sense of space made the Getty Villa an amazing museum for me to visit. I would recommend it to anyone.

After the museum we drove over to Malibu Seafood, a great place to get fish and chips about 20 feet away from the shoreline. I was introduced to this place a year ago on my first visit to Los Angeles and couldn't wait to go back. We sat on their opened air patio in the sunshine eating fried fish and watching waves crash onto the beach.

We continued on our drive along the coast line and arrived at El Matador beach. The amazing beaches on the Malibu coast are surrounded by cliffs and provide safe heaven from the freeway that stretches along the coast. We parked and made our way to the edge of the cliff and as we followed a curving, dusty pathway down the cliff-side, we were honored by an incredible prospect of the wide open sea and the sculptured rocks it repeatedly crashes into.

El Matador beach is known for its romantic nooks and as we descended to the beach we found no more than 10 couples within eyes' breadth and settled by a private cavern by the famous Matador. We had no neighbors in site save for the albatross, who was incredibly interested in my purse and would saunter across the beach to it any time we were more than 15 feet away from our camp.

For as long as I can remember, I have had an incredible passion for the ocean and romantic caverns by the sea. This beach was perfect. A great stone structure abuts the edge of the beach, the strength of the waves has carved out caverns in the stone and years of dust and debris have given refuge to flowers and succulents that grow atop the rock structure and droop down its sides.

Walking around the rocky shoreline, we discovered a vast display of sea life, biding time until the return of the high tide, a seemingly dangerous lifestyle, but it seems they have been surviving in that manner for years. Giant orange and violet starfish clung to the undersides of rocks and hid covered by disturbed clumps of seaweed. To my amazement, a large population of anemones clustered behind every shady rock. They drooped lifelessly in the low tide, but awakened instantly as the waves ushered water between the crannies of their rocky homes.

The Pacific Ocean is incredibly cold, at least in the summer, as that is the only time I have yet visited the west coast, so most of our meanderings on the beach were in the safety of the warm sand. Only once did I venture past ankle deep in the waves, and had to recuperate for quite a while afterwards.

We walked up and down the shore and amused ourselves with photoshoots and feeling the sand shift under out feet as the waves hit our feet. We would have waited for the sun to set behind the glistening sea had we not been recalled to the present and packed our things to join our friends for dinner.

Robert Moses Beach Package

Is there a greater felicity than feeling your toes sink under the sand as the waves hit your feet? I have never found anything more profound than the combination of wind, sand and water (and gravity, of course).

I spent the day at Robert Moses beach, Long Island with my friend Tamar today, and a lovely day it was. We took the train in to Babylon and a bus to Robert Moses, and within 2 hours of leaving the city, we were hoofing it across the iron-streaked sand to reach the cool of the water. The MTA has set up some incredible getaway packages for day trips to the beach and other great spots outside of the city. Tamar and I are fond of the beach packages, we try to get out as much as possible during the summers. You go to the LIRR counters at Penn Station and ask for the Robert Moses Beach Package and pay $19 for a round trip train ticket and bus tickets that get you right to the shore.

Most of the day was spent lying on a blanket staring at the waves crashing into the shore wondering if it would be lonely to be out at sea. I was thinking about that girl who made the news recently with her attempt to be the youngest to circumnavigate the globe on a one-man sail boat. Like Odysseys on his raft, she spent her days without any physical human contact. I have never known how that feels, to feel alone with a world of life around you. Would I feel like I was the only living thing around me, or would I recognize the world of life that shared the water on which I float?

I have always felt the water to be a giant organism full of life and feeling, water connects everything: you can throw a bottle into the ocean and months or years later, it will end up somewhere completely different, in a different part of the world. In 1992, 29,000 rubber duckies broke free from a boat traveling from China. In the 18 years following this accident, the duckies have shown up in Australia, Britain, Hawaii and the Arctic, many traveling over 15,000 miles to get to their new homes. It is amazing that an object can go anywhere in the world with the help of one seemingly simple set of elements.

I packed my picnic basket with tomato mozzarella sandwiches, grapes, guacamole, a few bars of chocolate and Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, which I haven't read since high school, when I used to underline quotes for myself. In it I found this (which still touches me the same way it did when I first read it):

"Do you wonder why I avow this to you? Know, that in the course of your future life you will often find yourself elected the involuntary confidant of your acquaintances' secrets. People will instinctively find out, as I have done, that it is not your forte to talk of yourself, but to listen while others talk of themselves; they will feel, too, that you listen with no malevolent scorn of their indiscretion, but with a kind of innate sympathy - not the less comforting and encouraging because it is very unobstrusive in its manifestations."

My mind has been somewhat disjointed today, which accounts for the lack of fluidity in this post, but hey, I post them like I see them. I have often lost myself at the beach and falling into sentimental thoughts about the most disparate subjects, and it seems today is no different.

Fundependence Day Weekend

I have rarely celebrated Independence Day on my own, since I have only been a citizen of this country for a few years, but amazingly, I always get invited to the most hard core Independence Day celebrations by my friends. This year was no different: My dear friend Vicki and her parents Anne and Bill Boardman invited me over to their New Jersey Shore home to spend the weekend.

The house stands blocks away from a river and an ocean, its quite amazing. My first night there, the 3rd, we took a boat out and parked it in the middle of the river to watch the Red Bank fireworks from 100 feet away... on the water. It was crazy! The Red Bank fireworks are actually done by the same guys who do our fantastical NYC celebration, just the night before. It is a slightly more intimate affair as they use only one barge instead of four.

The show was incredible. We tied our boat off with two other boats whose owners the Boardmans knew and had a three boat picnic with crab dip and fried clams and hot dogs and gallons of beer. Some chose to swim, even though there were thousands of little jelly fish in the water. We sat around in the boat and watched the fireworks and their distorted reflections in the ripples of the water.

The actual 4th was spent soaking up the glorious sun on the beach. Vicki, Anne and I set up three beach chairs by the shore, slathered ourselves in sunblock and watched the sun creep across the horizon. It was hot, crazy hot. The sand was so scalding as we walked from the boardwalk, that we had to sprint from shade spot to shade spot until we found a spot to land (we were wearing shoes...). Amazingly, the water was incredibly cold, colder than that in California or Perth, but in we went, and once our bodies adjusted, it was a great break from the heat on the beach.

Vicki and I took a stroll down the beach and chatted as the waves hit our feet and soaked the bottom of my skirt. It was a lovely walk and I got a good glimpse of the "Jersey Shore" lifestyle: a couple fornicating in the water and a hard pressed suitor that ran and slid under us on the beach and got up to perform an unabridged version of "Like a Virgin" rubbing his nipples with beach sand. Quite a performance!

I have never been sailing, and this oversight was finally corrected this Monday when the Boardmans took me out on their sail boat, the Anne Marie. We got bagels and soda and prepared for an amazing sail, on somewhat limited gusts of wind. My main responsibilities included staying still, not getting in the way and properly weighing down the boat, but I got to pull a couple of ropes and change the direction of the sail and tie a knot, which I apparently did properly (to the captain's surprise!).

Sailing was amazing. I have always loved water: it is incredibly calming yet instantaneously full of life and fervor. Water can fill any container and go into any crack, but can hold its shape and seems to turn into a solid on impact, but what I really love it for is the way it moves and how it moves you. Previously, my experience with this has only been through swimming in currents and such, but seeing and feeling our four bodies propelled by wind and water on a simple craft blew my mind. Vicki would not agree, but my favorite part was when the wind caught the boat and the side I sat on tipped towards the water, a thrilling experience (softened by me being told that the boat is weighed down with lead and would not in fact flip over.)

After sailing, we feasted on shrimp and asparagus risotto, which almost didn't happen due to our chronic napping during the remainder of the day and the blackout once we did finally get our acts together. Vicki's pirate brother Billy came over and enchanted us with tales of the sea... He told us incredible, and sometimes frightening, stories of his adventures at sea. Stories of castaways, crazy shipmen, sailors incessant need to throw everything that injured them overboard and the incredible number of whales they have plowed over with their ships :(.

Vicki and I went on a hike Tuesday morning which turned into much more of an adventure than we had set out for. A 2 mile hike soon turned into a 3 hour black diamond hike during which we got lost and wandered through the entire park and ended up on the wrong parking lot and had to find our way back in 100 degree weather. As much as we pouted during the last hour, it was a great hike and a beautiful park and I feel justified in saying that I can hike when I am not being forced to run up a mountain while while being a life coach.

I had a great weekend and am very thankful for the Boardman's taking me into their home and sharing their holiday weekend with me. I don't think I have ever spent that much time with the sea.