THE HERMES IN BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S is happening in reality to set a wrong right. The world-altering artist tricksters are in full view. They are always necessary when freedom and spiritual abundance have been closed off. It started with a concocted lie about John Mayer brewing from 2008 from a young plagiarist in the music industry with hired marketers and publicists from a capitalist's investment. Already ‘The Best Year of the Millennium’: From a 2024 New Year’s Eve Breakfast at Tiffany’s Cat Bar in Japan and Anderson Cooper’s Times Square Infectious Giggle, We Culminate on a Note First Discerned in the 1960s at Truman Capote’s Self-Entitled ‘Party of the Century’ (and Anderson Was There—In the Womb) . . . Not to Mention that Truman’s Last Word on the Matter, His Last Word, was a Story Written about Willa Cather Intended for a Birthday in October 1984—The Moment Katy Perry was Born. Read On, Party-Goers, and Get Ready for the Holidays!
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California and Finding the Very Real in Place

Happy last day of 39 and 40th Birthday, Katy. You’ve changed everything. All the Love. 🩵🧡

I was at The Grove Farmer’s Market in Los Angeles last Wednesday seated at a covered colorful bistro table in the afternoon amidst all the bustle talking to John Mayer when the urgent news came up that Liam Payne had just fallen in Buenos Aires. It was John’s birthday. I had gone off on my cute, sleek 2010 black Vespa to explore Los Angeles on my own, (he can’t very well go with me without making the news and that is not what is wanted that way for a number of reasons—this isn’t trading on fame, this is lifting things to a whole new level), so I was out to feel it for myself, in Roman Holiday freedom—in the very wild traffic, to understand both what has happened over these past years of things coming together, the highest peopled voltage here of Los Angeles and the depths of place, to discover the rest of the depths, the immaterial subterranean intensity come into view of what I’ve been writing across time and place that’s taking us somewhere stunning—arrival in Place in a whole new way.
The trip to California for me was intensely transitional. (It was even heavenly cosmic in-between the powerful eclipse on my natal Uranus in Libra and then a Super Full Moon in Aries conjuncting my natal Rising Sign—there is so much intense happening in the heavens for all of us. It is, to say the least, causing its cosmic uprising.) I went in the human sense and experienced something else. A big part of this experience over the last 14 1/2 years since I first came to know John has been having two lives happen: the daily human experience, accepting that as the struggle of learning how to create a very real sacred space out of small life, and this broader, more all-encompassing social picture.
Since Liam had become famous as just a beautiful teenager with so much eagerness and kindness, from the very beginning and in that meteoric rise to fame, he had still in all of that participated in keeping me company in songs, album concepts, and sending special messages to me—me, not a famous person, but a person whom he knew suffered loneliness and isolation brought on by the brutality of money and power plays for fame—some devoid of spirit. It was our greater cause. It was my auguring from literature now come to life, now having to live it and see it through for the bigger picture. He had the power to alter that seriously mistaken status quo. That’s what fame meant for One Direction. They were a new breed of famous, a gorgeous new generation of open consciousness with nothing to lose in being wonderful. Power plays could be of the heart and smashing global records.
The day before John’s birthday, 16 October, and the day Liam felt complete loss enough to break all of our hearts, I drove the 100 miles from Los Angeles to the Old Mission Santa Barbara. It was exactly what I was looking for, and by ‘looking’ I mean divining—feeling out a sense of Presence and Place that would speak to me and quite literally tell me what I need to know. It has happened to me with actual wonder and patterns and with literature and art my whole life in a very real way, enough that I couldn’t stay inside a classroom or just talking about it, always uncanny things deeply intuited to go further, it beckoning to look at it beyond its surface, and Place—seemingly by happenstance that turns out to be exact destiny, but the welling up has grown so much stronger, more distinct, and more defined that now I follow it out what I think it will be and kind of just wait on it to happen, to speak, not knowing what it will show me. It is always striking and certain. What it will say will always be dead on the money. It will be exact. It’s always something I wouldn’t have known until I got there.
I’d already been having some really powerfully present sweet experiences in Los Angeles visiting places like a building and room where Breakfast at Tiffany’s was filmed on the Paramount lot and Audrey Hepburn’s former apartment on Hollywood Boulevard. (There’s a very large white dog at Target happily watching out for it with that funny apropos target symbol on its eye). I just wouldn’t be able to tell you what the feeling would be of a Place or what it would tell me before I got there or exactly why I had to go. I just know that’s where I needed to go. I wouldn’t be able to tell you how powerful it was to walk from Audrey’s apartment to Andy Cohen’s star on the Walk of Fame, the immediacy of spirit. These power plays are of a different dimension. There’s the intensity of capitalism—the very top of it—and there’s this going deeper hand in hand with that, taking it all there. I didn’t expect that of Los Angeles amidst the filth and traffic in Hollywood. But it’s there, the vital emergence of the health and beauty of the human body, self-care and finally self-love through actual love, blooming right from the furthest humanity can take the acme. It makes sense as what we want is to feel the realness in the human body. How else would we want to experience it? It has to arrive there.
As unrelated as it first might appear, there is an incredible connection coming together between experiencing Audrey Hepburn’s sweet presence there and L.A. itself, the difference of her presence there, and why I was at this mission, but it’s a connection I’ll let speak—Place, Willa Cather, Hollywood, the whole West Coast, how it all comes together even from the East Coast, even from a tremendous ancient history of love and loss pointing to this beauty of the earth and the human body. There’s even the spirit of Old Hollywood saying of its creativity, “We meant to tell you something more, of creativity, what more there is now that we see, what this machine was built for, beyond the machine—capitalism may be its structure, but is not its reach, just beyond stardom, which appeared so eternal, and why it lingers here, it goes further.”
At this moment I used the excuse to myself of going to see the ocean in Santa Barbara and that would turn out to be a stunning realization of the whole of it, this mission, these mountains, this beach, the fog, the quiet moment there. I would like to convey it in its simplest, utmost beauty as it happened—the things you wouldn’t know immediately on the surface if you just looked at the appearances. Time has been no accident. Feeling the certainty there in Santa Barbara was uncommonly wonderful (as if wonder could ever be common).
As I walked through the Old Mission first built there in the late 1700s there was a very sweet feeling that I didn’t expect. It was, as I walked to the sanctuary, playful and warm and sweet, even light-heartedly, invitingly humorous as if there was something very secret held in its air. This was another reason I had come. I had wondered for a lot of years, since 2012 from on the 12th of November, just as I was leaving that December for San Miguel de Allende in Guanajuato, Mexico to film at a cathedral there, the stunning Parroquia de San Miguel Arcángel—with Jesus right inside the sanctuary in the life-size art sculptures suffering in a glass-encased box (and filming with the descendants of the founders of the first missions in San Antonio, Texas, a former senator in Mexico, a beautiful Mexican family who was making the trip possible in the dangerous climate) the video for “Apocalypse of the Heart/“Something Like Olivia” short film and music video, when Katy Perry and John Mayer visited here together as a couple at this Old Mission in Santa Barbara, Katy’s hometown. These were the revelations now awaiting, as if wanting to talk and tell me all about it, wanting me there to see. It was this light, very playful spirit in the air. I knew it was a remnant of John and Katy’s presences here and the spirit of what they had done. I did not know how it would feel. Mind you when it happened I knew it was lovely of them, but I was also devastated at the time as I had wanted to be the one with John, but he had to move on with Katy who had loved him longer.

The reason I was making that video was to show what had happened in 2010 and since, to set things right in the public view what the public saw but couldn’t see: a deception, content being rabidly grabbed up (not created or written as was marketingly packaged) and fed into the cogs of the capitalistic machine built for it, spitting it out as an image, a mirage, based on always sellable controversy with pointedly harmful untruths, a narcissistic victim giving not certainty, but a purposeful unclear cloud of obfuscation sold as fairy tale mystique, mismanaged answers gone unnoticed, and a climate of humanity twisted. Teams behind the scenes took the money and their place in the gears and kept their mouths sealed. The system, the magazines, the Recording Academy, instead of being altered, conformed to this ‘success’ of the ages-old ‘we need a controversy to make a sale.’ Truth was the unwanted step-child. I was not to be with John in this way, it was Katy with him and you will see why. I want you to see the beauty of why.

Of Katy and John being there Us Magazine described at that time, “It was just the two of them walking around at their own pace, just normal behavior,” an eyewitness tells Us of Perry, 28, and Mayer, 35, who were on site for about an hour. Later, the couple visited the Santa Barbara Mission Archived Library, where Mayer chatted up librarians about the local history.”

It got loftier. I knew the pictures were taken here, but I wasn’t quite sure where as I didn’t at first see the statues they were photographed by, now twelve years ago. There was good reason. They were up in the air.

X17online reported:

[ . . . ] a photographer on the scene tells X17online exclusively, “When they got to the mission, they were holding hands and laughing and when they visited the balcony of the building, they kissed a few times. It was really romantic."

"They were SO in love," our photog added. "They were all over each other the whole time, and this was a total lovers' getaway."

Think John will gift Katy with a hefty sparkler this Christmas?

My impression of this old mission was its earthiness, especially here near the islands, ocean, and mountains, everything made out of the earth, a part of it, not removed from its elemental nature, not an ostentatious step away from it, but very much a part of the terrain that seems the same as it was when it was first built in the late 1700s by people struggling to survive. It has held its verisimilitude in its down-to-earthiness. Even the artwork, the altar paintings, were some out of Old Mexico with hopes and no pretense. At the back of the sanctuary in a small recessed cove with side altar for kneeling is artwork, sculptures of unassuming life-like statues of the man, Jesus, and woman, Mary of Magdala captured looking at each other in the very instant the Madeleine looks up at Jesus after he has risen—the one witness to his resurrection in the moment she supposedly doesn’t know who he is—the extremely pivotal moment of recognition. It’s a moment of shock and questioning, but also that instant of breaking-through recognizing not someone you know, but the mind-shattering jolt of what this is along with who it is, equal parts shooting through the veins in all that it thus means about the man you love. I had looked at most of the sanctuary old artwork when I came to this and in that very instant I knew, “Here it is,” in wonderful, earthy simplicity, a simple earth-shaking moment, this is what the place was saying, without a doubt. It was talking, and talking in such a way that the whole thing—I mean the whole place—in a broad sweep all made sense at once—its terrain, its old cemetery turned into a garden, its skull and bones door cemetery door entry, the down-to-earthiness, its realness, its lack of elevation and pretension, its humans trying to survive. It felt like this very story was meant to arrive here on this coast, a line of missions bringing it from across the continents and oceans. Here was a simplicity of it arriving on this coast in an elemental way, arrived across of all the stories that could come, and across so much time, Jesus and Mary Magdalene and ocean and mountains on the far side of the world, and survival.

It’s a mythological tale made real like coming upon a real person and a real moment, a story that feels like, “Of course its realness arrived to this real place, just human,” like being washed up on the shore, and this place feeling that simply elemental, like what else would you do but try to survive here? It is life arrived to its furthest reach of coast, as if finally of all the things that could come, just this story survived it, and now earth, mountains, ocean. It has the primitive feel of a Blue Lagoon, stripped down to essentials. And in that down-to-earthiness it is also that moment of utter shock that it would be as Mary Magdalene looks back at Jesus who is standing there after he’s been buried and is now showing her his wounds—the gash through his hand held out to her, a flood of understanding that would come in this very moment she looks up at his face and he speaks to her. One would be stunned. It might be just between a man and a woman, but it is the moment in ancient rite when the brain would be shock-jolted from its former state of reality into that this man doesn’t suffer death, that death doesn’t exist, that he’s divine like he said he was, and that you would know who he is through the flesh: he’s got the scars to show it, his identity, which is now an identity changing the conception of Beingness, he’s both human and divine. And so looking at Jesus it is Mary who is transformed in recognizing him, and in us, now we can see Beingness, even in her, doesn’t mean a body, doesn’t mean death, and yet here it is, the man she loved looking at her. He made the trip. As if to this coast, exactly to this coast. The story made it here. He’s back. He’s different. We know something more about him now. We’ll never be the same. We also know in this moment that she was the one who believed him, saw it all through no matter what was said and done, the one who held his body knowing there was more, who had to let him leave, had no choice, suffered his death, and he’s standing here looking at her.

One might would think then, Mary of Magdala is hardly important to the story. She just saw something. She’s on on-looker. But it is she who knows, knew it of birth, in bringing life into the world, of life leaving in her arms, knew it of eternity, knew it of her body, knew it when she loved him and looked into his eyes. The story now rests on her, about him but also about herself; how she knew, what she knows and what that now makes her—a Being in a Body. There’s the shock that it’s true, that his divine self is standing there right in front of her in the flesh, proving it all true, the woven scars of flesh to show it, the truth made very real, elemental, and if it is true of him, it’s true of her, what could not be seen of her before, her eternal Beingness proved of her in the Body. She can’t be thrown away, that would be throwing away the very recognition that just happened in what we now know that is in the body, and through rite, come to see it also of ourselves. This beach, this ocean, these mountains, this little chapel, this survival of story without ostentation, is “What do you see in me?”

And that’s what visiting California was. There’s the massively built highest-height of capitalism churning, the height of health and creativity, income, glorious properties overlooking the ocean and from the hills in Los Angeles, and there’s this spirit of the thing lingering, eternal truths in simple stories, there’s fame, and a place that is speaking about something bigger, something more, an arrival in just a body that can see something bigger than a human-made machine. Something drawing us to something more real.

I did go and eat breakfast where Audrey actually did at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and riding my Vespa through Beverly Hills. It was a wild, wonderful morning on John’s birthday. Where was he, you might ask? Maybe after my story we both know. That historic hotel opened in May 1912, just two months after Willa Cather sold her “The Bohemian Girl” at the Brevoort in NYC beginning the road of Breakfast at Tiffany’s and a wild new story of the feminine rooted in place, and one month after she arrived in Arizona to her realization in her Body on the red rocks there. Willa Cather didn’t like what they did with her stories in 1930s Hollywood, they had missed the point and she was after the very real and elemental, coming from the land and the primitive. She even said ‘no more movies,’ and went on to have the biggest one ever with the biggest star, by fate and destiny of her work.

I got to visit the NYC street at Paramount Studios about what has become of her work, Audrey’s sweet and simple, unassuming efforts, eternal there, and where it is leading to unravel Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Willa’s realization, into the bigger picture, not just a studio system, but the girl who walked in and was the spirit of the thing. I didn’t know it would feel like that, impact me so much, to see the realness of Audrey’s life there. That was the effect even across the years since she’s lived there, the realness, the humanness of caring about what she was doing, of carrying little Mr. Famous with her everywhere on the lot. Audrey came in with her softness, gentleness, open heart, playfulness, high intelligence, and was able to open a studio ‘system’ to her remarkableness without a whiff of arrogance or forceful ambition. You wouldn’t very much expect to find the real here, but it lingers.

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