The Temescal Canyon Association hikers explore the Venice canals in their Christmas glory on Sunday, December 16. The public is invited. Hikers should meet at 5 p.m., in the Temescal Gateway parking lot (just north of Sunset) for carpooling. The Venice canals were part of Abbott Kinney’s dream of transforming his property south of Ocean Park into a Venice of America, complete with amusement piers, Venetian-style buildings and gondolas. The original 16 miles of canals were dug in 1904. The half-mile long 70-ft. wide Grand Canal became the centerpiece of the development, which also included the 900-ft. long, 30-ft. wide amusement pier at Windward Avenue. On July 4, 1905, the project was opened for business and festivities, which included yacht racing and swimming races in the lagoon, and band concerts and fireworks at the lagoon’s 2,500-seat amphitheater. By the 1920s, the automobile had made its mark, making the canals impractical, and in 1929, the majority of the canals were filled in and converted to roads. In 1994, Los Angeles refurbished the six remaining canals, and the neighborhood that has developed on the west side of the canals celebrates the holiday season with lights and decorations. For more information and possible updates, visit temcanyon.org or call (310) 459-5931.

When Benedicte Schoyen moved her dance studio to Pacific Palisades in April, she discovered that in addition to her kids’ dance program, she was filling an empty spot for an adult dance program. Joining the Adderley School at the corner of Sunset and Palisades, the school, The Santa Monica Dance Studio offers classes Monday through Sunday in ballet, jazz, cardio-funk, cardio-Latin, hip-hop, Pilates, and even belly dance’without intimidation. Levels vary from intro, beginner, intermediate to open. ‘It’s a friendly atmosphere, which is what I wanted, not a studio full of attitude like what you might find in L.A.,’ Schoyen says. ‘I’m not into foo foo costumes. It’s about the dancing; total beginners can come.’ Schoyen, a ballet dancer from Norway, first visited the United States on a three-work trip with a dance troupe and ended up leaving behind her job as a dance instructor in Oslo, remaining in America for almost 20 years. ‘It was never intentionally planned,’ she admits. Schoyen studied at Norwegian Opera Ballet, The Royal Academy of Dance in London and the Studio Paris Centre in Paris. She danced professionally for years at Morolandis Studio, Debbie Reynolds Studio and Third Street Dance Academy. Currently, she is an assistant professor at UCLA, where she teaches ballet to students in the Music Theatre Department. She comes from a very different background and training than what she can teach in the Palisades. ‘It’s hard these days,’ she says. ‘Kids do so many activities. When I was growing up, you concentrated in one area. It’s hard to be a teacher and have kids leave for a soccer team. This is when dancing becomes more recreational.’ Still, Schoyen loves having children in her dance programs. At Santa Monica Dance Studio, children can begin learning dance as early as three years old. ‘At that age it’s more about how to behave in class, discipline and structure. They are too young to do any real technique, so I have them in position doing things like holding a beach ball. They come in by themselves and they love it! It’s one of my favorite classes to teach because the kids are so cute,’ Schoyen says. Schoyen teaches classical and jazz ballet to children and all levels of dance to adults. She wants to uphold her vision of ‘creating a place for serious study in a relaxed and unpretentious environment, a studio that welcomes professional and amateur dancers alike, under the guidance of outstanding and dedicated instructors.’ Palisadian Clarice Gargour has been a student of the studio for the past five years. ‘As you can imagine, we Palisadians are very happy about this move. Many loyal students continue to commute to the Palisades from as far as West Hollywood and Beverly Hills,’ Gargour says. ‘I am in my early 50’s and SMDS helps me stay in shape, engaged in learning dance, which, by the way, does not come easy to me, having fun, and the added bonus of meeting some pretty terrific and interesting friends.’ Schoyen moved her studio from Santa Monica to the Palisades in April because of rising costs. ‘I ran into so many obstacles. Small businesses just can’t compete in that atmosphere or deal with the rules,’ she says. ‘Ten years ago I paid $1,300 a month for 1,000 ft. square space. When I left it was $11,000. You can’t charge $25 a dance class and pay your instructors well too.’ Schoyen kept the name ‘Santa Monica Dance Studio’ during the transition because the move happened so quickly that she wanted her students to be able to find the new studio. Gargour is not the only student who has found a home in the new studio. Maralyn Facey Leski is a student at SMDS in Jill Strauss’ jazz class, a Broadway professional who also teaches advanced jazz at Crossroads School. Leski says ‘As a traffic phobe, you must know that only a class of this quality would roust me out of Beverly Hills to the Palisades three days a week!’ When hiring teachers Schoyen admits, ‘I’m very selective.’ One of her staff members is ballet teacher Yana Makarova, who has performed in the Bolshoi Ballet. She teaches all levels of adult ballet from beginner to advanced. ‘I have found that teaching anyone who wants to learn ballet to be a beautiful experience,’ Makarova says. ‘Teaching is just another way to stay in touch with what you do. It is one of my favorite things to make others be happy and learn a form of dance that is not easy. It is great to feel free, spin, fly and leap! Dancing is a form of meditation and expression, a chance to be yourself.’ She trained in Russia at Moscow Ballet’s Academic School of Choreography and performed as a solo ballerina in numerous classical ballets and with the Stanislaviski Ballet as a solo ballerina. Despite Makarova’s extensive performing background as a solo ballerina she has found teaching all the more rewarding. ‘On stage you’re alone with your flowers and there is nothing else you can do. There is a time to give the stage to someone else.’ For more information contact SMDS at Palisades: (310) 319-5339 or go to www.santamonicadancestudio.com.

Judith Freeman Portrays A City and A Marriage

By STEPHEN MOTIKA Palisadian-Post Contributor Judith Freeman moved to Los Angeles 30 years ago to become a writer. Not for the screen, but the page. She discovered the work of Raymond Chandler soon after arriving in this city, and became, in her words, obsesed. Now, four novels and a collection of short stories later, Freeman’s ‘The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved’ (Pantheon; $25.95) has been published to glowing reviews. The book is a carefully constructed amalgam of forms, as much belles lettres as anything else. Freeman, 61, recently spoke with the Palisadian-Post while on her book tour and explained: ‘I knew it wasn’t going to be a biography or a linear account of a life, but a portrait of a marriage and a city, and of me, although I didn’t realize it at the time.’ The project had became her Los Angeles book, a chronicle and meditative account of her travels photographing and considering the more than 35 locations where Chandler lived in Southern California. Pico Iyer, writing in The New York Review of Books notes that ‘Freeman does not try to explain Chandler so much as to reclaim his world.’ Born in Chicago in 1888, but raised primarily in England, Chandler arrived in Los Angeles in 1912 ‘It was attracting people by the tens of thousands during that time,’ Freeman says. Many of these buildings were built in her own neighborhood, MacArthur Park, during the teens and 1920s and became the very apartment buildings Chandler used in his stories. He fought briefly in World War I, but returned to Los Angeles in 1918, where he soon met Cissy Pascal, a woman 18 years his senior, who was married to a wealthy businessman. They began an affair and married in 1924 after she had divorced Pascal and Chandler’s mother had died. During the early years of their marriage, Chandler worked in the finance department Dabney Oil, drank heavily, and was unfaithful to Cissy. Freeman thinks it was a good marriage so long as it was the two of them. The relationship could not accommodate outside engagements.’ The marriage survived. Indeed, after losing his job at Dabney Oil in 1932, Chandler withdrew from the social scene he had once frequented. He cut back on his drinking and began writing, publishing his first story in the magazine Black Mask in 1933. His first novel, ‘The Big Sleep,’ featuring the detective Philip Marlowe, appeared in 1939. Six more Marlowe books followed, including ‘Farewell, My Lovely,’ ‘The Little Sister’ and ‘The Long Goodbye.’ He also worked, unhappily, in Hollywood, co-writing ‘Double Indemnity’ with Billy Wilder, and writing the original screenplay for ‘The Blue Dahlia.’ For Freeman, understanding Marlowe ‘as a heroic white-knight figure’ is the key to understanding the Chandler’s marriage. She relates the fact that Cissy called Ray ‘Gallibeoth’ in private. She writes: ‘The name invokes the Arthurian figure of Galahad and suggests that from the very beginning he played the role of white knight with her.’ At the same time, Chandler needed to be cared for. During the process of writing her book, Freeman befriended Natasha Spender, the widow of the British poet Stephen Spender, who met Chandler late in his life. She compared him to Auden in his need for a structured domicile. ‘Both men needed a daily round of domestic chores to anchor them,’ Freeman says. Yet, this domesticity never involved settling down in one place. During the early 1940s, the Chandlers lived at 857 Iliff Street in Pacific Palisades. For Freeman, it’s while living on Iliff that Chandler realizes that he and wife are ‘rootless, without a sense of home.’ She writes: ‘They moved to Iliff to escape an apartment on San Vicente (in Santa Monica), where they had lived for less than four months. After settling on Iliff, Chandler wrote to Earl Stanley Gardner: ‘Good God, we have moved again’ Living, if you can call it that, in a big apartment house in Santa Monica, brand new and all that, I longed for your ranch. I longed for some place where I could go out at night and listen and hear the grass growing. But of course it wouldn’t do for us, just the two of us, even if I had the price of a piece of virgin foothill. It’s better over here, quiet and a house and nice garden. But they are just beginning to build a house across the way.’ It was the new house that drove them from Iliff Street. Ironically, it’s not too far from Iliff, at 379 West Channel Road, where Freeman lived contentedly from 1981 to 1985: ‘I wrote my first stories there. It was a place where I really became a writer. I loved the canyon and taught myself to swim in the ocean there.’ She moved to MacArthur Park when she moved in with her husband, the photographer Anthony Hernandez. After Chandler’s final stint in Hollywood, the couple settled in La Jolla, where they finally bought a house. ‘As L.A. became despoiled, in the 1940s, he turned against it. The booterism, ruthless exploitation and corruption began to effect the quality of the city’s life and he left in 1946,’ Freeman says. The very things he hated in the city, however, was the fodder for his novels. Chandler wrote ‘The Long Goodbye’ in La Jolla in the early 1950s while caring for the ailing Cissy. It’s Freeman’s favorite Chandler novel. ‘It’s very powerful; it depicts Marlowe becoming fully human, with an inner life. The three main characters represent Chandler’s fractured psyche: Terry Lennox, the damaged war hero; Roger Wade, the alcoholic writer who realizes his work isn’t literature; and Philip Marlowe, his best self.’ Following Cissy’s death in 1954, Chandler drank heavily, even attempting suicide in 1955. After selling the house in La Jolla, he spent long stretches of time in England. He died in San Diego on March 26, 1959. In the nearly 50 years since his death, Chandler’s novels of Los Angeles remain inedible. Freeman thinks he wrote about this ‘unfathomable place’ like no one else. ‘Chandler got it as well as anyone,’ she says. ‘It gave him his material and he gave it a lasting identity. A marriage like that hasn’t happened since.’ Judith Freeman will read from and discuss ‘The Long Embrace’ on Thursday, January 10 at 7 p.m. at the Los Angeles Public Library downtown. Info: (213) 228-7025.