IMMOBILE EXPLORATIONS

technical desires

2012-02-17T23:59:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I just like reading the specifics of things that I don't quite understand. It seems poetic in its impenetrability, somehow.

Single color Front light, 9 areas
Two color Back light, 4 areas
Single color High-sides, 6 areas
One (8') head-high and (2') shin Side lights, on four booms per side (16 circuits)
Three color top cyc strips
Nine center (Down light) specials, up-stage to downstage, (8 circuits)
9 extra circuits.

sunday movie: Kissing (1900)

2012-01-22T07:17:00.000-08:00

An article on Brainpickings sent me to this video. It makes me happy. It breaks down, in 37 seconds, the barrier that missives from the past must often shout through, the sense that those people in grainy black-and-white are not actually real.

birthday parties

2012-01-21T01:58:00.000-08:00

When I was a kid, I had epic birthday parties.

I think that word, in the context of birthday parties, has a whiff of terror about it now. The birthday parties that my sister and I had in childhood were not grossly extravagant or populated by hordes of schoolmates, but they were epic. Things I remember: decorating a table full of small white cakes with friends, each of us armed with colored frosting and plastic dinosaurs (I was in love with dinosaurs); a jungle themed carnival in the backyard, of which I distinctly remember a long sheet of paper painted to look like the Limpopo River; our panda bear puppet in a cowboy hat perched on a pile of straw bales; riding ponies with a (very) few of my friends across a scrubby California hill; drinking tea out of flowered cups while wearing a flowered dress and a flowered hat.

I'm sure that for our parents, the parties were stressful occasions, but for me (as far as I can remember), they were sheer pleasure.

On Tuesday, I had a birthday party that was just that. Pleasure all the way through. I went with some friends to the Verdi Club in San Francisco, where they have swing dancing and a live band every Tuesday night. The space is clean and large. The music is fantastic. The people, for the most part, are both polite and bracingly enthusiastic. They are there to dance (not to stand morose in corners or leer or wobble around in too high heels and too short skirts) and it doesn't strike them as odd that a group of young-ish people who don't know the proper steps, are nevertheless stomping and hopping and flinging themselves about however their fancy hits them. I got to hold hands with strangers, and look them in the eye, and dance with them. I got to hold hands with friends, and look them in the eye, and dance with them. We had conversations. We sat in corners and listened to music that called up all those magical, old movies where shadows and light feel more important because they're the only things there are. I felt very grown up. I felt very young. At no time did I find myself regarding a passing moment and thinking that it might be better.

It was wonderful.

quotes from a museum night

2012-01-13T01:46:00.000-08:00

"What is she doing to that bird?"
"I think she's taking its skin off."
"Is it alive?"

***

"OH MY GOD, I love those purple puff things!"

***

"It's like Mars. In a fish."
"Are jellyfish fish?"

***

"This is so much time. It's so intense. I mean, I wasn't expecting it to be anything like this. I assumed it would be crazy--of course--but, this... This is something else. I mean, all these people... Can I have some of your water?"

***

"And it shoots water out of that hole there, so it moves backwards."
"And that thing, that part, is that shell or is that flesh?"
"That's flesh. But it hangs over the shell, there. And those are its eyes."
"Really?"
"Yep."

***

sunday movie: "Arrow" by Bobbi Jene Smith

2012-01-08T07:26:00.000-08:00

Bobbi Jene Smith is one of my favorite dancers in the world to watch. Seeing Bobbi perform is like seeing, apart from you and in the flesh, all these things that you both recognize and never knew about how it feels to be a human being.

Creators: Bobbi Jene Smith & Tom Weinberger
Performers: Bobbi Jene Smith & Christian Burns
Music: Efrim Manuel Menuck

for H. McCalden

2012-01-06T15:58:00.001-08:00

dancing bears

2012-01-04T18:27:00.001-08:00

encyclopedia britannica

2012-01-03T10:47:00.000-08:00

making it up

2012-01-02T19:00:00.000-08:00

A little while ago, two of my writer friends, Monica Byrne and Kat Howard, asked me for advice about making up dances. Monica was feeling inspired by a piece of music. Kat was staring down the conviction that Shan and I had latched onto, slowly and in pieces, that having Kat (who is a fencer, but not a dancer) give us the bones of some movement for our project would be interesting, refreshing, and important for the whole idea of collaboration.

I can't say that I have much expertise to offer.

This project that I am bumbling through (madly, happily, blindly) with Kat and Shan is the first thing I've seriously tried to choreograph. I've improvised before. I've had the opportunity to work with choreographers who offer the challenge and respect of both tempered freedom and actual collaboration. But I've never been in the position of generating movement and beating it into a coherent whole. I've never had to build all the pieces of a dance and line them up and see they fall against each other so that they not only ring the bell of idea and emotion, but also carry someone across the landscape of it.

And to have such opportunity and support and brilliant workmates on the first time out... If I look at it too closely, the responsibility of it all makes me feel like the floor will vanish at any moment and I'll be standing on black, empty space.

So, I don't have a vast and comforting history to draw on, but in the course of this first and wonderful project, I have made some movement up. And these are some of the things I thought about.

1. The physical awfulness of grief.
I wanted to make a phrase that contained the physical reaction to loss. A year ago, my grandpa died. My physical reaction to that was so particular and peculiar and vivid that, when I think about it now, there's the factual memory (or, as factual as memory can be) and then there's the other one, all blown-out sensation, strange, high-contrast images, and terrible dreams. The feeling that I'd held my breath too long. The dream where all my bones had turned to compressed dust and were merely awaiting the disturbance that would cause their shape to fall away. How stiff the tops of my shoulders and the sides of my ribcage were, as if my whole body were filled with balloons that had been blown to squealing capacity.

2. Laurel & Hardy, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, terrible television commercials, and semaphore.
Neil Gaiman casually linked to this video and introduced me to the wonderful brilliance of Laurel and Hardy dance routines. Shan and I fell down the rabbit hole of YouTube, and watched videos of L&H, Chaplin, and Keaton to excess. Such finely executed, earnestly played physical comedy is a joy. It tells the audience something, compels attention, and elicits effortless emotional response. It's like a story in mute, shining miniature. And then we saw, I think, a terrible television commercial that showed one person helplessly wilting away from another, and somehow the two things seemed to go together in both of our heads and we wanted to make a duet that ran on shrinking violets, pratfalls, and slapstick. When we started putting it together, other things found their way in: stupid mermaids, crazed folkdancers, and semaphore.

3. Personal tics.
I became obsessed with one sentence in the piece of text that Kat originally sent us for the project. "The first thing you notice about being dead is that you can still see the stars." And it made me wonder. I think that the first thing a person notices about anything is an interesting tic of personality. I wanted to know the identity of the first things whose absence would strike us. I asked everyone to write lists of small, very specific things that they like and dislike. "I like the feeling of stepping on the gas pedal when you speed." "I don't like the smears on public windows." "I like the way you can see a person's pupil dilate after they blink when you're close enough to notice." (that last is mine... sometimes I'm impressed with my own creepiness.) And then we literally just made up gestures to match the sentences. Two hands chopping down from either side of the head. Rubbing the underside of the throat from left to right on an imaginary pane of glass. Cupping one hand over an eye and drawing it up like a weird jellyfish creature before slapping it down again.

Carson's solo is actually her likes and dislikes, strung together and built up to a full, exaggerated extreme.

4. Movement.
All the images and ideas and shiny, compelling treasures are important to me. They're important in the same way that the collage of disparate images that sit in my head when I'm writing a story are. They're the keys to telling something that will hopefully be true, the little knives that slice inside the workaday statement like, "Oh, yes, it hurts when someone dies," so the skin can be flensed and turned tender side out. But they just sit there, dull and laden with quirk, if there isn't some momentum behind them. I think that the movement itself has to be trusted, to some extent. That you have to follow the impulse that starts up in you when you hear a piece of music, or catch yourself thinking about the way a New Orleans funeral band marches. It might start out as the saddest step-touch in the world, to a sousaphone dirge, but the... I don't think the right word is joy... maybe, pleasure? the pleasure of work and of something coming together... comes from chasing after the little desires and convictions. The way my heels come together makes me want to fall on my face, which makes me want to swing my legs around and slam them on the floor which makes me want to... what?

5. Revision. And do-overs. And many more drafts than one. Also, serendipity.
This has been one of my favorite things. We go in with the bones of an idea, and our dancers take them on. At first, they're relatively faithful. They execute the choreography. But then they fill out their own images, whether they're physical geometry or more fanciful, and things bend. They become completely unrecognizable. And we watch each other and see that it might work to have an explosion, like a magnesium flare, here. Or that this phrase needs to be less jumbled, more stripped. And sometimes really weird, great things happen. Like when we asked Sarah to make a bit of movement based on the idea of flip books. Just a tiny thing that would fill maybe eight counts. And she came up with this gorgeous, three-minute long solo that looks like a sequence of Muybridge photos brought to life.

face to face

2012-01-02T09:00:00.000-08:00

new year's wish

2012-01-01T21:30:00.000-08:00

I've put this up elsewhere, but wanted to copy it down here:

Happy new year, dear world. You are quite lovable. Be brave. Be bold. Be foolish and kind. May some of your wishes come true. May you journey far and return home safe. May you fall on your face and trip the light fantastic. May you live another 365 days and remember more of them than you forget.

xoxo, M.

notes from pockets

2011-12-29T20:23:00.000-08:00

fig. 1

fig. 2

fig. 3

things done recently

2011-12-28T12:59:00.000-08:00

1.
Shan and I posted a video of a duet that we're making for two of our brilliant dancers, Josi and Kelvin. We film just about everything that we come up with in rehearsals because our memories are never as good as the camera's. Mostly, we've been using the clips to retrieve forgotten choreography and inflicting them on friends who are kind enough to give feedback on half-formed ideas, but we're so giddy with excitement for this project and our dancers that we couldn't resist putting up something to share.

2.
I reviewed a wonderful new(ish) YA novel, The Freedom Maze, for Fantasy Matters here...

3.
And interviewed the author, Delia Sherman, here.

4.
I put on my opinionated bookstore girl hat and contributed a "best of year" list for the Kepler's blog. I have a terrible memory for time when it comes to reading. Books blur together and go from unread to read, and the distinction of when, exactly, I've read something is only a rare landmark on the experience. This kind of list is always haphazard for me, though I cheerfully limited myself to books that came out this year (except for Holly Black's White Cat) to make the job (slightly) more manageable.

5.
We performed Liss Fain's "The False and True Are One" at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in November. They filmed one of the performances and have put up a brief edit of different clips. The camera people were literally in our faces for this--they darted around the space and would periodically shock you by appearing right at the edge of the dance floor when you turned around--so the footage actually gives an excellent approximation of the way the piece looks as an installation.

Liss Fain - "The False and the True are One" from Liss Fain Dance on Vimeo.

artifact

2011-12-18T01:42:00.000-08:00

I thought it was nothing serious because we only met through the distance of several friends and he was, in any case, late. I waited for him at a table in the restaurant, watching other people order and get and eat their meals. After that, I waited on what the restaurant insisted on calling "the terrace," where I could see people turning on the headlights of their cars and driving away into the night. It was the end of summer, and everything was warm. Even the metal chair that was slowly printing itself on the backs of my legs was warm.

It was too warm to move, too warm to leave, and I didn't feel like calling him, so I just sat. The chair was made for leaning forward in conversation and not for sitting, and the thought floated into my head, far away in the warm haze, that it might be uncomfortable enough to leave a bruise.

My phone rang. I thought about leaving it on the table. Lateness was an indication of something, a clue to consider, but I was too warm to care.
--------------------------->
This was in the first two pages of the notebook that I just dug out from under my bed to sacrifice to the dull duty of to do lists. The fragment stands alone. There are no notes to connect or extend it. It's the very first thing I wrote when I started thinking about a story that was going to be about the twelve dancing princesses.

And then I became obsessed with the idea of summer, and my own physical reactions to alcohol, and dancing as a mode of transportation, and the difference between getting lost and losing oneself on purpose, and the story in my head--the one that hadn't been written yet, but was gathering shape and heft and would soon be so solid that I would be less and less able to see it as anything else--changed. And now it's weird to read this artifact from the other story, the one I decided not to write.

Sunday Movie: "untitled" by Heather McCalden

2011-12-04T21:25:00.000-08:00

My friend, Heather McCalden, has made a small dance film. She is one of the most ravishing people I know, and you should watch it. The dancing and concept are by Heather. The camera work is by Sonia Reiter.

brief and recently read

2011-11-25T23:03:00.001-08:00

Some short fiction that I've read online and enjoyed of late, and can now recommend with enthusiasm unbridled:

"The Tenth of December"
by: George Saunders
(from The New Yorker, October 2011)

Please persist at least to the bottom of the first page. I started this story several times and was put off by the sudden immersion in the inexplicable make believe of a flailing kid. But, by the end of the story, by the ninth page of frozen pond, sickening man, and ever more flailing kid, I had tears all over my face. You need to read this.

"Nicholas Went Looking for the Mayor's Right Hand"
by: William Alexander
(from Zahir, July 2010)

This story reminds me of Lloyd Alexander, who was one of those authors who furnished the rooms in my head when I was a kid. Except this is darker, crueler, and more unsettling (and I mean to say those words in a tone of admiration).

"Snow"
by: John Crowley
(from Lightspeed, November 2011)

Romantic, in a depressed and hollowing way. It carries its skill lightly and tells the story with a refreshing lack of coyness (which isn't what I expected once I had read the first few paragraphs and understood the basic idea). Smooth and beautiful to read.

"The Ghost of a Girl Who Never Lived"
by: Keffy R. M. Kehrli
(from InterGalactic Medicine Show, October 2010)

Keffy is a friend of mine, but for some (inexcusable) odd reason, I bookmarked this story to read when it came out and then completely forgot about it. It's very good, completely distressing, and punches right at the tender obsessions of memory and endings (as, now that I look at my list, all of these stories do) that preoccupy the back of my head.

"iTime"
by: Ferrett Steinmetz
(from Redstone Science Fiction, October 2011)

Here is the thing about Ferrett: he is one of my Clarion classmates, so I admire him as a writer and comrade, but some of his stories absolutely do not touch me at all. And then some of them are just so very appealing, so clearly written and straightforward in emotion. They go down easily and stick. I catch myself thinking about them often and remember them clearly, which is a sign of great affection.

-------------------------------------->

And here are three stories that I read in print. I really think you should read them (I loved them to excess), but after a lazy search, I could not find them online, so you will have to search them out yourself.

"The First Several Hundred Years Following My Death"
(Shawn Vestal, Best American Fantasy 3)

"The Duck"
(Ben Loory/Stories for Nighttime and Some for Day)

"The Wolves of St. Etienne"
(A. D. Jameson/Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 27)

in the theater, #1

2011-11-17T11:27:00.001-08:00

The San Francisco Chronicle featured our piece today. And tonight is opening night. We'll be here through Sunday. If you come, say hello! There will probably be Q&A sessions after each show (except the 8 PM show on Saturday since we have a 9:30 show as well... and will need the intervening half hour to strip off our costumes and hang them in front of some fans to dry. Glamourous, I know...), so you'll get to see us hastily stuffed into normal people clothes and dripping makeup off our noses.

certain delights

2011-11-16T15:09:00.001-08:00

Since I have a few hours before heading to the theater, I wanted to make up for the disgruntled flavor of my last post by sharing some things that have recently delighted me.

1. "Section Eight" by Kapowski

Kapowski - Section Eight by jrimler

I believe this is from a new album that they're working on. Which is called "Boy Detective." Which reminds me of "The Girl Detective" by Kelly Link, which points me to...

2. "The Girl Detective" by Kelly Link, as interpreted by the artists of The Ninth Letter

Watching this video interpretation of Kelly's bizarre and amazing story reminds me of listening to my mom read The Story of Doctor Dolittle to me when I was sick in bed. The story passes through my ears and the strange or inexplicable parts of it float through my head like a vivid, inevitable parade.

3. "Break ton Neck"

This FANTASTIC video from Alex Yde features dancer Arthur Cadre. It is amazing and will probably make you fall just a little bit in love.

Break ton Neck from Alex Yde on Vimeo.

4. "Sophia" by Laura Marling

Sometimes, I get completely fascinated by the individual weirdness of certain voices, to the point where I can't even hear the actual words they're singing.

5. "The Way He Does It" by Jeffrey Ford

This short story from Electric Velocipede is utterly clever and wicked. It pricks your curiosity, rings it up to unbearable levels, and then renders it completely beside the point. Brilliant.

on manners and luxury deferred

2011-11-15T19:09:00.001-08:00

I have a weakness for fine cosmetics. Not that I wear them always, or buy vast quantities. As a dancer, I spend most of my days in the studio, working up a state of sweaty dishevelment that renders the application of expensive pigments and concoctions pointless. But, when I do have the occasion to paint my face, the whole point of it, for me, is the pleasure of doing so. Heavy cases that snap shut. Velvety powders and finely cut, nearly invisible spangles. Pigment that screams. Pencils that draw on skin like warm butter. Scents that are clean, or dusty, or flowered. I don't have the sort of money that one splashes about ridiculously, or throws out the window, but I am an enthusiast of sybaritic pleasures when taken in restrained doses, and there are certain things (fripperies, or foolishness, or everyday joys?) that I indulge in. Good notebooks. Beautiful shoes. Cashmere sweaters. Nice cosmetics.

Which is all to explain why I was in the cosmetics department of Barney's New York in downtown San Francisco yesterday afternoon. And why I am writing the following letter.

Dear Barney's New York (in San Francisco):

Yesterday, I arrived in your cosmetics department. I knew exactly what I wanted. I picked up a bottle from a shelf and walked to one of your many cash registers. I stood behind a customer (the only other) and waited while one of your sales people rung her up. The process wasn't particularly slow, but I had time enough while standing there to notice three more of your sales people, dressed in black and impeccable lipstick. I had time to notice how they emerged from behind their respective counters and looked at me. I had time to notice how they gazed at my torn jeans and flannel shirt, the bottle of lotion in one of my hands, and the scruffy wallet in my other. I had time to notice how they very definitively turned their backs to resume their conversation. I had time to notice how they did not ask if I desired help. I had time to notice how they did not offer to let me pay for what I wanted to buy. I had time to notice how, when another woman came in, coiffed and sleek in a business suit, they clicked their heels across the floor and buoyed her up with questions and suggestions and fluttering hands.

Let us be frank. I, too, have worked in shops. I have even worked in very nice shops. I have worked in shops where, on a Sunday morning, I have sent a woman away with ten thousand dollars in t-shirts and sundresses and a very decent purse because she wanted someone to help her pick out clothes for a cruise. I am familiar with the judgments made on customers. The jaded assumptions of who will be difficult, who will be a pleasure, who will fling open their wallets, who will not. But I was never so confident in my psychic ability to assume my assumptions were anything like fact. And didn't your parents, or Jiminy Cricket, or your own dear heart ever force upon you a hoary old chestnut about doing to others?

But, wait! How can I know that those women were not very busy? How can I know there was no pressing matter calling them away from me, a customer, with my wallet out and in my hand?

Because, dear Barney's, it has happened before. Do not fear! You are not alone. I have visited other shops scruffy and bare-faced. And I have visited them (and you) when I have dressed with an eye to looking pretty, and have put on makeup and pulled back my hair. Condescension, rudeness, and my apparent invisibility are always more likely in the first case. And (isn't it funny?) the kindness, accommodation, helpfulness--the manners, if we are still being blunt--have always been more in evidence in the second.

Now, I realize that the item I wanted to purchase was comparatively small. My lotion (Malin + Goetz) is $45 per 4-ounce bottle. A bargain of insane proportions when considered next to this $335 pot of cream. But, I go visit you every few months to pick up my lotion, and sometimes a lipstick, or a candle, or an eye shadow I can't resist. These purchases make me happy. I rarely regret them. I make the assumption that one does with habitual pleasures, that I will, sometime soon, return for more.

Dear Barney's. I would like you to know that I put the bottle of lotion back on the shelf. I put my wallet back into my purse. I walked up the stairs and away from your sleek, golden treasure cave. And now I have a new assumption in my head.

I highly doubt that you would like to hear it.

Best regards,
Megan

P. S. There is a salesperson I would like to make certain you know this letter does not apply to. Jonathan (with the glasses) is impeccably kind, constantly nice, and absolutely helpful. Unfortunately, yesterday he was not there. Too bad for me.

a show and a suggestion

2011-11-11T19:04:00.001-08:00

(the YBCA Forum, where we're performing)

In a bit less than a week, I'll be performing with Liss Fain Dance in "The False and True Are One" at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. The cast happens to include my sister, Shannon, and Carson, who is one of the dancers we're collaborating with on Sharp & Fine Project #1 and a very good friend. The piece is unusual. It combines Liss's choreography--which keeps a whole-hearted commitment to clarity and full, aesthetically aware movement--with short stories by Lydia Davis, an actress (the sweetly indomitable Nancy Shelby), an original score, and a set and structure that try their best to diminish the distance that buffers the audience from the labors of the stage.

The stage is divided into five spaces: four rectangles of varying size for the dance and a raised platform for Nancy. Screens of translucent, shifting blue and green hang between the spaces, and the audience is encouraged to move itself at will. They can stand right up against the dancing space, separated only by common sense (beware the high-flung leg) and modesty. They can walk away from one dancer and walk toward another. They can sit down, or get into staring contests, or install themselves right next to Nancy and listen intently as she reads about women turning into cedar trees, girls turning into stones, and a certain cedar of Lebanon (I have puzzled over that line an absurd number of times when I hear it in rehearsal and have only just now remembered to look it up. My favorite sentence in the Wikipedia article mentions that "the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh designates the cedar groves of Lebanon as the dwelling of the gods.")

(the Yerba Buena Gardens)

I've seen other installation-type dance pieces and work that shakes off the traditions of the proscenium, but I think this piece is interesting because of the way it refuses to turn away from movement that is both rigorous and appealing in its prettiness. There are no histrionics, overt aggression or invasions of privacy. I don't think it's necessarily better than pieces that build on those things, but I do think it's gentler and more welcoming.

The company has been putting up video interviews with some of the artists. Here's mine:

The False and True Are One
November 17-20
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Forum
Tickets available HERE. (general admission $25, seniors and students $12.50)
Also on Goldstar HERE. ($12.50, plus Goldstar fee... which I can't remember the amount of)

Come! We'd love to see you there!
---------------------------------------------------------------------------->
Malinda LaVelle, a friend of mine who is a daring, hilarious, and brilliant choreographer (and fabulous woman!), just launched a Kickstarter for a new piece that she's working on with five amazing dancers. "Urge" will explore "our untamed appetites" and be performed at two different San Francisco venues in 2012. Malinda's work is unsettling and funny, and it doesn't shirk the obligation of powerful art, which is to make you feel more like a human being. Please head over to Kickstarter and take a look!

Guilt and Conventions

2011-11-03T01:28:00.000-07:00

(this was under a freeway in San Diego. it made me laugh.)

I spent this past weekend in San Diego, playing truant from rehearsal (with Liss's approval) and stretching my usual one day per week away from the studio into three to accommodate this year's World Fantasy Convention. Twelve of my Clarion classmates were there, and two of our instructors. It was a joy to see them. I think there must be something uniquely traumatizing about Clarion, something rather like the battering that baptizes baby fowl as they emerge from their eggs. My Clarion classmates are my comrades in arms and my siblings in storytelling. They have propped me up through frenzy and desperation, held me accountable, and flayed my stories with their fine, sharp knives. Seeing them again is always a very good thing.

It is also the lion's share of the reason I go to conventions. I've been to three (Montreal, San Jose, San Diego), and each one was mostly an excuse to see some people I met in the summer of 2008.

Other reasons I go to conventions:

1. Meeting new people.

Please consider in particular the wonderful aspects and charming demeanor of the following characters: Nicole Taylor, Ben Loory, Joe Monti, Matt Kressel, William Alexander, and Charles Tan.

2. To admire the work of writers who I am excessively fond of.

Example no. 1: Jeffrey Ford read a short story from the upcoming Ellen Datlow/Terri Windling edited anthology, After. He was cut short by scheduling, and I am still, several days later, on cruel tenterhooks about the ending.

Example no. 2: Neil Gaiman read "The Case of Death and Honey," which is a story about Sherlock Holmes, bees, death, and China. I have been in love with this story for some time, ever since Neil mentioned it to me in an off-handed way back in the spring. And I had read it, several times, before this weekend, but still there I was, surreptitiously blinking my eyes harder than usual to disguise the tears.

Example no. 3: Nalo Hopkinson read a mad and bizarre scene from her upcoming novel, Taint. It was so vivid and impossible and absurd and shivering with movement and invention that all I could do was fall face-first into it and enjoy.

(I am possibly biased. Nalo and Neil were our instructors at Clarion, so I love them dearly.)

3. Guilt.

I am not as persistent as I should be in the pursuit of stories. I love writing them, even when it's difficult, frustrating, and involves a great deal of studying the wall above my desk. But I am slow, and when I'm tired from dancing (something that currently happens often), I tell myself that there is nothing finer than telling stories to the audience of one that resides inside my head. But it's a bad lie. Stories, for me, are always better, stronger, and more defined when I've done the wrestling required to put them on a piece of paper. They might not actually be better, stronger, and so on and so forth once they've actually hit the paper, but the work of putting them there changes the story in my head from a vague mess of images to something that makes a kind of sense.

Being around people who make stories happen, the ones who live them and breathe them and believe fiercely in the creation of them, floods me with guilt. I look at the dusty scraps drifting through my head and am struck with shame that they should be so foggy and indistinct.

I go home, and I retrieve my notebook from its lonely corner, and I start dredging things up by putting down one word and following it with another.

And that is why I go to conventions.

on falling in love

2011-10-17T00:45:00.000-07:00

You have to wonder, when does it happen?
------------------------------------------------->
Yesterday, I went to the Contemporary Jewish Museum to take in the Houdini exhibit. I went with Jesse, a friend I haven't know for very long, but an excellent museum companion. He wandered quietly, and had interesting facts tucked up in his head, and, every now and then, he asked a question. While we were walking the museum's short, broad corridors, admiring vaudeville broadsheets and reading placards, he asked me when I had gotten into magic.

As far as I can remember, I've always loved magic. Fairytales and miracles and talking beasts, yes, but also, and with fervency, the flourish, color, and bright deception of magic made for the stage. I love the story of it. I love the way a magician stands up in front of you and tells you, with his hands and his words, two things at the same time. One is true, and one is not true, but it's the magician who chooses which one you should believe.

When I was kid, I saw David Copperfield perform at a theater that normally held things like the touring productions of lavish Broadway musicals, or the Royal Ballet's Sleeping Beauty, or single-star shows that might fill 3,000 seats. It's the first magic show that I can remember. Mr. Copperfield wore a black suit for most of it and a gold one for part of it. He made a tissue from a woman's purse dance, and then burst into fire, and then turn into a rose. He caused a motorcycle (gold, in my memory) to materialize in the middle of the audience. He flew. I was young enough to convince myself that some of it might be real. But I was also fascinated and delighted by the likelihood that none of it was, that I was being fooled and tricked by this man with ridiculous hair to believe in impossible things.

I already loved magic though. It wasn't Mr. Copperfield who convinced me.

With most things that I love, I can point to the moment of tipping over from fondness or moderate interest to full-blooded commitment. I fell in love with the stage while taking a bow at the end of The King and I in that same theater where Mr. Copperfield flew through a silver hoop. And my eight-year-old self realized that all that darkness beyond the lights was filled with several thousand people who were moved enough to clap. I fell in love with my dog at first sight. I fell in love with Rothko's paintings the first time I went to a museum alone.

I can often point out to myself the period of time when I've fallen in love with people. When I've gone from liking and chatting and saying hello, to making a permanent place for them among the furnishings of my head.

But I don't remember falling in love with magic. I just did, somehow, without noticing and before I could imagine doing anything else.

leftovers

2011-09-08T17:38:00.000-07:00

I found this loitering in a notebook. It claims to be from December of 2008.

"A thing is still a thing no matter what you place in front of it."
"Why are people always so happy when they collide with someone from the same place?"

I like to imagine that if I could remember what I was making notes about, it would be clever or, at the very least, deeply felt. I'm almost certain it was not. I use notebooks indiscriminately and unfaithfully, dating entries at whim, littering them with post-it notes, newspaper clippings, and the tattered dregs of fashion magazines ("What Surrounds a Legend?" asks a fragment of the New York Times. "A 3,000-Pound Gilt Frame."). I mostly don't use them, except to write in, drafting stories and essays and interviews straight from beginning to end. I am not a habitual note taker, except in an academic setting (in which case my notes are minute and color-coded), and I rarely refer to the ones I commit to paper once I've finished writing them down.

From the notebook next to my bed: "DO YOU WANT TO LIVE FOREVER?"

The thought of composing from notes seems romantic. There must be satisfaction in building something from the accretion of thoughts had over a certain period of time. An assurance that what you're working on is strung along a consistent theme, something tested and engraved on your brain by the repetition of picking it up and putting it down again.

On a piece of Hello Kitty notepaper the exact shape of a dollar bill: "Cameroon, Africa. In 1986, the great lake Nyos (a name that means "good" in Mmen and "to crush" in Itangikom) turned red. The hue was a precursor to an explosion and a fountain of water 262 feet tall caused by pent-up gases deep beneath the surface of the lake. Limnologists (scientists who study lakes) have explained that the equatorial location of Cameroon, with its constant temperatures, enabled the layers of water to remain undisturbed by natural shifting caused by changing water temperatures in places of greater climate variation."

I enjoy making notes. I persist in keeping a piece of paper and a pen tucked into the pocket of my purse that contains inviolable necessities. Lip balm. Cash. Paper. Pen. I like the act of transferring some thought into words, or the comfort of copying down an interesting item in the belief that I will then never lose it to my own forgetfulness. I have notebooks that are composition workhorses and I have notebooks (a very few) that are only repositories. It's a pleasure to pick up those latter ones after abandoning them for months or years to read cryptic fragments, their meaning usually forgotten, or shuffle through bits of paper, whose selection for preservation is usually baffling. But, for the most part, they feel like leftovers, and while the details that piqued my interest may still be discernible, their allure was consumed in the moment of meeting.

A clipping from Smithsonian Magazine: "Another phenomenon of the ballet world that fascinated him was the presence of a number of men in top hats and fur-collared overcoats who were permitted to pay court to the dancers in the foyer de la danse (a kind of greenroom), as long as they took out a subscription for three seats a week."

I've never really been the kind of writer who can reanimate her notes and make them run together in a wholly satisfying collage. I have to worry at something in my head and, if I write it down in notes, it's like the entire thing has already been written, and where's the charm in doing it again? Maybe I'm just out of practice. Maybe I'm just shockingly lazy and the single fell swoop (even if this swoop is achieved in slow motion) is the only way I can fool myself into getting something done--beginning, middle, end.

An inexplicable description of a clown act that I never saw: "He had a long white lance, which he dropped. He had a sleek silver sword with which he skewered little flower wreaths and juggled them until they were sliced all to pieces. His armor, which was made of paper, fell away and all he wore were flannel pajamas."

bodies

2011-08-23T00:55:00.000-07:00

Many of my friends have extraordinary bodies.

As a dancer, many of my friends are elegantly muscled and finely detailed. Slim. Taut. Prominent are their ledges of bone, their planes of muscle, their particular and striated curves. They are rarely heavy and never what a sensible person might call fat. They are, without exception, beautiful.

Nalo Hopkinson is a writer. She is a hefty, sturdy woman with wild hair. When I met her, she was teaching my class at Clarion. She was standing in front of a classroom, or sitting at a desk, or walking sedately across a university campus, but it was still so obvious that she possessed an impressive physical spaciousness and an unusual combination of ebullience and gravitas that should drive any dancer to envy. Her body has the gift of bending space toward it when she moves, of being so interesting that she becomes a ravishing pool of motion that eyes continuously slide back to.

Some months ago, I read Nalo's blog post about a dance piece she performed in 1998. She writes about the experience of performing from a body that does not fall in the typical aesthetic range of Western theatrical dance and posts an article from the Toronto Star.

And, for some reason, it just smacked me between the eyes. The physical allocation of beauty plucks at us every day (of course it does). We try so hard to be beautiful, and we try so hard to know what is beautiful so that we can have it. And the funny thing is that, in the middle of trying so hard and wanting so much, we so often forget the substance of the thing that we're looking for.

Two things:

The only time I've seen the Mark Morris Dance Company perform live, Mark Morris himself danced a solo. His curly hair hung past his shoulders. He wore a bright red dress and sensible heels. He was rounded, puffy in the chest. When he moved, he was one of the most beautiful people that my 14-year-old self had ever seen. Glorious. Lovable. He was light, swift, sad. He rode the music and chased it down and was actually funny.

My first thought, upon seeing Jacques Poulin-Denis, was that he was very beautiful. He had a delicate bluntness to his dancing, an efficiency that struck me as truthfulness or daring. He was wearing a t-shirt that was faded and sweated through and long pants that crumpled over the tops of his feet, and it took me a while to observe that his right foot was a smooth beige that didn't bend or attempt to match the other side. And then he took it off. He took off his foot and proceeded to be one of the only dancers who has ever made me actually cry because his dancing was exactly what I needed to see.

monsters

2011-08-17T01:10:00.000-07:00

It has just occurred to me that, in the story that I am writing, the character whose head I am sitting in is going to do a terrible thing. I am not writing it now; I am only sitting in my bed, my fingers stained with the scent of a fashion magazine, and thinking about it. It looms ahead, but doesn't move closer. It's like watching someone walk into a darkened room while they're in a horror movie, except that you can't tell them to stop, not even in the hopeless and futile way you might shriek about the Man With the Knife!, because the monster that is hidden just ahead in the dark is the character themselves.

Alice is in a natural history museum. She is going to do a terrible thing.

modern dance, apparently

2011-08-09T23:35:00.000-07:00

show!

2011-08-02T01:14:00.000-07:00

I am performing in a show in about 19 hours. Our piece is called mid-c. It's choreographed by Christian Burns and we start out with ten minutes of improvisation, so every time we do it, it's something new. Bobbi, who is magnificent, is performing arrow, a piece that she choreographed. She's a member of Batsheva Dance Company and an extraordinary, extraordinary dancer.

You can buy tickets here until 8 AM. After that, they'll be at the box office.

8 PM, Z Space, 450 Florida Street, San Francisco.

See you there?

the difference between getting caught and dancing

2011-07-20T20:10:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, we spent six hours in this room. This is the Black Studio at Left Space in San Francisco. It's 3800 square feet, a cavernous cement box with white walls that curve into the floor on one side to create the illusion of a backdrop. There are fans to create the illusion of wind, and lamps that remain disconcertingly dark until the camera goes off. Then the lamps flash, at precisely the right time, and the photograph is flooded with illumination that is completely unlike the stark ambiance that otherwise fills the room. I couldn't get over this trick of technology. I hopped and twisted and flung myself about for six hours in a room that looked like the one in the photograph above. I watched my fellow dancers (the shoot was for a new batch of publicity photos for Liss Fain Dance) do the same. Over and over, a flash of light would go off, but nothing that felt any brighter or more intense than the flash of an ordinary camera.

And then we would look at the photos, beamed nearly instantly to a monitor on a rolling cart, and it was like RJ (Muna) was taking pictures of some other landscape that our eyes were just too slow or insensitive to appreciate. Those curtains, which were beautiful, but ordinary, wrinkled things of muslin or gauze, suddenly became sheets of ink, or paper sails, or strange and buff-colored sculptures, or columns of smoke. The light was golden and soft or so sharp that it sliced into every dip between muscles and bones. And then you looked back at the space and it looked exactly the way it had before, plain and mostly dim with a single strong light to mark the center. You couldn't even guess at how much time had passed since the light stayed exactly the same the entire six hours we were there.

The disorientation was extreme.

There is an enormous difference between moving for a photo shoot and dancing. In the former, you face a cement floor, excruciating repetition, and a merciless eye that captures rather than translates. In the latter, you need to deliver more goods, but you have an audience to talk to, a human brain that takes suggestions and applies connotations. In a photo shoot, you have to evoke movement, trying over and over to do something that can have a minute and static piece extracted from it that will remain beautiful or interesting without the before or the after. It was a weird thing to be reminded of, and it made me admire, more than ever, the work of the very great photographers who manage to invoke entire, open-ended worlds with a single shot.

in which I sharpen a pencil

2011-07-14T20:56:00.000-07:00

Recently, I started writing a column for Fantasy Matters, a website devoted to the idea that fantasy literature matters. For the longest time, I couldn't decide what to write about. I like fantasy in stories, but I couldn't imagine what I might have to say about it on a regular basis. Fortunately, I have friends who are smarter than I am. Two of them suggested that I write about the magical things you don't expect to see. You're already obsessed with the peculiar and the specific, they said, so why don't you just write about that?

This month, I wrote about the pleasures of slow motion. I urged readers (who are they? do I know them? are they few? are they many? who knows...) to video themselves doing something ordinary. Then, I asked them to slow the video down. As far as I can tell, no readers have decided to embark on this project. Granted, neither did I, until this afternoon.

2011-07-12T23:25:00.000-07:00

Read this:

"Valley of the Girls" by Kelly Link

It will make you feel sad and strange. It will make you want to read to the end.

2011-07-08T01:30:00.000-07:00

fragment from "anatomy of la mentira: red nose"

victor cartagena

sharp and fine

2011-06-26T22:47:00.000-07:00

We are having an adventure, fun, larks, and etc. Follow along:

Sharp and Fine, Project #1

careless

2011-06-22T22:06:00.000-07:00

My friend, Maya Hey, recently posted this video on Facebook. It had been a couple of years since I last saw it, and the sheer bombastic intensity of it surprised me. "Careless" was choreographed by Alex Ketley and premiered in 2006.

Alex challenged all these thoughts I had about being a "good" dancer, about being beautiful and being honest. The girls I danced with were maddening and wonderful, willing to crash into the air and through the floor and run full tilt at one another in the assumption that the collision would be worth it. It was a frustrating and exhausting project, but it shifted my ideals and virtues. Looking at it, I barely recognize those wild girls, newly let loose in unfamiliar movement, but I can appreciate now (and I didn't then; I was so stubborn!) how much being in this piece changed me as a dancer. It cracked open doors in my head in walls that I didn't even know were there.

I think it's also one of my favorite pieces that I've performed. Hurtling through ten minutes of extremely driven, violent movement, I felt like I was falling to pieces and exploding at the same time.
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Some of those girls I haven't seen in a very long time; at least one of them I'll never see again. It's funny (in the odd, melancholy, slightly discomfiting sense) to think about how, sometimes, the people who keep you company while your life becomes entirely different exit or fade away.

how to talk to girls at nightclubs

2011-06-19T22:11:00.000-07:00

Refrain. Nightclubs are for dancing. They are not for talking. They are not for striking up an acquaintance based on the brilliance of your mouth. They are not for leaning close, intimating a whisper, when, really, you are forced to shout. That music playing loud against the walls and hard on the space between you and she, it's there for a reason. It's there for dancing. It's not an excuse for a fumbled line. It's not an excuse for a clumsy line, a tawdry line, a foul and insinuating line.

The following conversation should not occur:

"YOU HAVE NICE MOVES."
(confusion stemming from the fact that your shout is inaudible)
"MOVES. YOURS. NICE.
(tepid smile)
"I HAVE MOVES TOO."
(silence, except for the music that is being shouted over)
"MINE AREN'T MEANT FOR THE DANCE FLOOR. IF YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN."
(unst-unst-unst-unst)
"GET IT?"

Exceptions:

You are friendly enough with the girl in question to feel no awkwardness in your attempts to be heard, even if your mouth ends up practically inside her ear.

You've been dancing together in a friendly way. She has not pushed you. She hasn't been staring with great concentration at the wall behind your shoulder. Smiles have been exchanged. The music has paused.

Even then you may want to limit yourself to an exchange of names, a brief comment on a song, a (if you're daring) request for a phone number. Don't try to be smart or, worse, sexy. Just be an ordinary human being.

And, don't forget to dance.
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And, for fun, you should read: "How To Talk To Girls At Parties" by Neil Gaiman. It contains one of my favorite long sentences in a short story.

daisy chain

2011-05-26T19:04:00.000-07:00

(for the inimitable Daisy P.)

mythical cities, personal museums, and the gerrymandering of memory

2011-05-26T00:53:00.000-07:00

On the 16th, a poem that I wrote called "Mythical Cities of Southwestern Minnesota" was published in Strange Horizons. I never thought I would publish a poem. The fact that I have strikes me as funny, bizarre, absurd, and completely satisfying. Stories are one thing, but poems are a different beast.

I wrote it while drifting in the still, still space that followed an unkind breakup. It was my version of sitting in a darkened room with a pint of ice cream and a single lonely spoon. I wrote it because I felt like I was mired on the thinnest skin of empty water, stretching all the way to an empty horizon, without a breath of wind to change the monotony.

I liked the way it turned out. I liked, even more, the way it appropriated the tiniest and briefest of moments from my memory--a split second of something I saw, thought, or imagined--and dragged it outside the territory of life circumscribed by factual experience. They suddenly existed somewhere else, lifted from the messy drawers in my head and pinned, still, to a plain wall. There they were, serving another purpose, rearranged and divided and carefully distorted to tell a story that was not at all what actually happened, but still something I wanted to say. Reading the poem on publication induced an odd kind of vertigo. It set off a spectacular display of interior fireworks, resuscitating details that I would have otherwise forgotten in enormous, full-blown pungency. It was a pleasure. Not because of any particular nostalgia for the moments in question, but just because they were there, rich and saturated and unexpected.

The title comes from an article I came across while looking for the names of mythical cities. It turned out to be about gerrymandering and the census of 1857, and not about mysterious cities that appear and disappear under certain depths of snow.
---------------------------------->
Kapowski, a band that the marvelous Daisy brought to my attention, is running a Kickstarter to produce a music video for one of their songs. They've already reached their goal, but you should still visit the project's page, if only to hear the song in question, which is an utter charmer.
---------------------------------->
A rarity:
I hardly ever "plan" stories. I think about them in the car, in bed, in the shower, on walks. I purse my lips over them, rub fists into eyes, make faces, despair. I make a great deal of mistakes, scratch out sentences, tear out pages. But I hardly ever "plan."

The story I'm working on now is doing a number on my head.

acquisition

2011-05-25T00:54:00.000-07:00

For my bookstore job, I don't often actually work in the bookstore. On the one hand, this is slightly sad. I adore bookstores, and working inside them gives you an unfair advantage when it comes to knowing the terrain. On another hand, I imagine it's a good thing that I don't visit my particular box/cubbyhole at the bookstore very often. It is frequently full of books, review copies both old and new, that might or might not be something I'd pick up of my own accord. I bring them all home, of course, and then feel guilty as they pile up around me.

I brought these home today. The Chabon I bought (I've been meaning to read The Yiddish Policeman's Union ever since I finished Kavalier & Clay), but the rest are blind dates.

smart mouth, #1

2011-05-14T15:28:00.000-07:00

For some reason, I find the following words (which I cut out of an issue of Esquire and pinned to my wall) from an interview with Ted Danson both oddly inspiring and comforting:

"Look, no one gets out of this alive. That's not the game plan. We all die. So nobody's going to get an award for saving the planet and get to live forever. Okay, then, let's engage the problems with a joyous and hopeful heart. Because it doesn't matter if we blow it. It's not like this is a desperate game where, if we win, we won't die. We all die."

Maybe it just goes along with the theme with which I'm currently pinning my heart to my sleeve: why not?

project bust

2011-05-13T22:38:00.000-07:00

This is the postcard that I designed for Project Bust, the wildly irreverent, witty, brilliant, strange, discomfiting, and absolutely gorgeous dance theater piece that Malinda LaVelle will be premiering this summer at Z Space. The incredibly beautiful dancer is Emily Jones. The incredibly stylish photo is the work of Elazar Harel. I recently had the opportunity to see the second half of the two-part piece (I talked about the first half here)... And, all I can say is that this is going to be an astonishing, punch you in the gut, grab you round the heart night in the theater. If you are in San Francisco on July 6th or August 3rd, you should see it, really you should.

I am so, so excited about this show.

youth, and fountains of it

2011-05-08T00:12:00.000-07:00

Today, while looking for a last-minute addition of small-portioned luxury to accompany the gift I bought for my lovely mother, I found myself standing in front of a cosmetics counter in a fancy department store, utterly bewildered.

I wear makeup. I'm often too lazy to bother with it, but I enjoy it when I do. I imagine myself to be relatively proficient with the various tubes, brushes, pigments, creams. But there is something stunning about a cosmetics counter. Unless you're armed with a specific desire (extremely specific: brand, hue, price, texture), the possible choices, the infinite stretches of tiny, shining containers filled with mysterious and minute variations on the same arsenal, turn themselves into a labyrinth.

Which is why I was standing and staring blankly at a glass case full of glass bottles when a stout man in a gray suit arrived behind me.

"Hello, dear," he said. "Is there anything I can help you with?" He was short, but very wide, and the separate pieces of his suit were all exactly the same color.

"No."

"Well..." He reached forward, possibly at random, and plucked a very small, silver tube off the counter. "This will give you perfect lips." He smiled and his teeth popped apart with the effort.

I've never been particularly concerned about my lips, never been dissatisfied with their lip-ness.

"This, my dear, will smooth them. It will brush away any dead cells, rejuvenate the color to a nice, fresh pink. It has apple extract in it, you see." He unscrewed the silver cap, squeezed a small dab of white cream onto my finger. "Just put that on, dear, just put that on." He pulled a magnifying mirror across the counter and gestured at it.

His face was very large behind mine. I put the cream on my lips, because what else are you supposed to do when it's already on your finger? It smelled like a weak, artificial coconut and was extremely slippery. It did make my lips smoother and pinker, as most any lip balm will do when you first put it on.

"Very nice, dear, isn't it? Very nice. You see, the reason it's so efficacious is the human growth hormone it contains. Yes! Isn't that wonderful? Human growth hormone! It's what we all need when we get older, isn't it? Oh, yes. It's like the fountain of youth, you know."

I'm not sure what else he said. I was too busy walking, very quickly, to another counter where I could see the blessed white tuft of tissues just waiting to be torn free.

april reading

2011-05-02T19:09:00.000-07:00

Doomsday Book
By: Connie Willis

I only discovered Connie Willis recently, but I've enjoyed (to that level of enjoyment where I'll stay up far too late if I'm 150 pages or less from the end because I can't bear to sleep without finishing) the three books of hers that I've read so far. They strike the same notes of pleasure for me that Laurie R. King's books do. History, a hurtling plot, and characters that make me both hate and grudgingly delight in the alternating story lines that dangle cliffhangers at the end of every chapter.

The Robot
by: Paul E. Watson
(forthcoming July 2011, from Razorbill)

A friend of mine who really knows her YA books (she's the children's buyer for a local bookstore) gave me this ARC because I liked Girl Parts by John M. Cusick. She liked this novel better, but I have to disagree and say that, in my mind, Girl Parts still wins.

The Magician King
by: Lev Grossman
(forthcoming August 2011, from Viking)

Lev Grossman has said that the version of the manuscript that was set in the ARCs for this novel and the final draft are completely different beasts, so I'll only say that I enjoyed it very much. I had a difficult time with The Magicians, mostly because I spent the entire novel wishing I could punch the main character in the face. It made me angry, and though I admired the intelligence and grace of the writing, I was not planning to read the sequel. But after reading this, I'm excited to see the final incarnation. The characters are firmly entrenched in my imagination, even Quentin, who shocked me with how much I found myself wanting something good to happen to him and who I only rarely wanted to punch.

glamour

2011-04-26T22:53:00.000-07:00

This is what I look like, generally speaking, after a day of rehearsals. I spend most of my working days in either shapeless cotton that could double as pajamas or in stretchy, thin things that could double as swimsuits, if they weren't so ratty and utilitarian. I look like a bedraggled character from a Dr. Seuss illustration. My clothes are mostly sweaty, my hair has gone mad, and I am usually stiff, bruised, or otherwise aching.

POSSIBLY STARTLING TRUTHS:
1. Ballet class remains hard, incredibly and painfully hard, about two decades after my first one.
2. Last week, I was very lazy. I had a light rehearsal schedule, so I skipped class on four days out of the possible seven. Still, I danced for twelve hours. And this is me being as slothful as I probably can without going on vacation. Usually, it's 30 hours or more.
3. All of this practice--class, rehearsal, being on stage--all of these hours and hours, thousands and thousands of them, add up to a certain level of skill that still leaves me working on such difficult things as Standing Up Properly.

Dance, for me, has lost its glamour. It's still beloved and beautiful, still capable of offering intellectual sparring, rapturous pleasure, and that particular satisfaction of time spent on something so worthwhile and good that you can't wish it had been allotted to anything else. But it has lost its slickness and soft unreality. I've lost the illusion that disconnects the magical, floating, impossible creatures onstage from the damp and unromantic confines of the studio.

It's a side effect of familiarity. Something like the sharpening of focus that takes place when you've known someone for years. It's intimacy in action and the exhaustion of mistruths. It's commitment and honesty and all that is good and solid and thrilling-yet-not. It's infinite possibility, and I am glad to have it. Even at the expense of glamour.

of possible interest, #1

2011-04-22T00:41:00.000-07:00

Alex Ketley, who is blast to work with, a choreographer, and a man in possession of a quite strange, though frequently gut-socking, artistic mind, is premiering a new piece at Ballet Nouveau Colorado this weekend. He made a very odd little film for it (a preview? a trailer? I do not know...) that mostly involves pandas staring at people. You should watch it.

- Happiness - from Alex Ketley on Vimeo.

Why is the panda so angry? Why is the panda so creepy? Don't you wish you were in Colorado so you could find out? If you are, you lucky duckster, why not assuage curiosity?
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The wonderful Kat Howard recently interviewed me about being a dancer and a writer for the Interstitial Arts Foundation. I was really, really honored that they were interested in my work, and Kat's questions were fun to think about.

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Next weekend, burns : work will be showing an excerpt of the new piece at Dancing in the Park, this great San Francisco dance extravaganza organized by Mark Foehringer Dance Project every year. A stage gets set up in that great space between the De Young and the California Academy, and starting from noon, you get five whole hours of dance, from all kinds of companies and schools. Hopefully, the weather will be nice. I'm excited. I like dancing in unusual spaces, and an outdoor stage takes me back to those years before I understood how hard dance can be, when it was all larks and we performed at fairs.

Grilled corn on the cob. Fried potatoes. Ferris wheels. Calliope music. And dancing. That's how it used to be.

girl books and boy books

2011-04-16T12:28:00.000-07:00

Some of my friends (Kat Howard, Morgan Dempsey) have been discussing Gina Bellafante's review of the new HBO adaptation of "Game of Thrones."

Let me first say that I agree that it's an oddly unpleasant, completely unenlightening piece of writing. There is a weird aggression and resentment in sentences like:

"Game of Thrones" is a costume-drama sexual hopscotch... The imagined historical universe... gives license for un-hindered bed jumping... The true perversion, though, is the sense you get that all of this illicitness has been tossed in as a little something for the ladies, out of a justifiable fear, perhaps, that no woman alive would watch otherwise. While I do not doubt that there are women in the world who read books like Mr. Martin’s, I can honestly say that I have never met a single woman who has stood up in indignation at her book club and refused to read the latest from Lorrie Moore unless everyone agreed to “The Hobbit” first. “Game of Thrones” is boy fiction patronizingly turned out to reach the population’s other half.

And while I, as a lady, a woman alive, am offended by the assumption that (firstly) I wouldn't want to watch a gritty fantasy epic without being thrown a juicy bone of gratuitous and graphic sex, and that (secondly) because I am inescapably female, I am only capable of truly appreciating quiet and spare novels that do not involve anything so dirty as magic, I must say that I do believe there are such things as "girl books" and "boy books." Not in broad, sweeping genres. I don't think that women, by virtue of their biological lot, can only enjoy cozy mysteries and cannot be excited by wicked books with flashing guns. I don't think that men, because of their one-legged chromosome, are barred from falling in love with Jane Austen, or have a monopoly on a predilection for spaceships.

However. In my head, there are "girl books" and "boy books." Not all books fall into one or the other of these categories, and they aren't labels that automatically come to mind, but sometimes I read a book and find it definitively male, or definitively female. It's a characteristic of the book itself, not of its possible or deserved audience. It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the gender of the author, or even the gender of the characters. A book just is, sometimes and to me, a girl book or a boy book.

GIRL BOOKS (off the top of my head)
How to be Good/Nick Hornby
The Golden Compass/Philip Pullman
White Teeth/Zadie Smith
Atonement/Ian McEwan
Swamlandia!/Karen Russell
The Baron in the Trees/Italo Calvino

BOY BOOKS (off the top of my head)
High Fidelity/Nick Hornby
Saturday/Ian McEwan
Oryx and Crake/Margaret Atwood
The Autograph Man/Zadie Smith
Kafka on the Shore/Haruki Murakami
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrel/Susanna Clarke
(my sister would like to add: "Anything by Chuck Palahniuk... Not that girls can't enjoy them too. But, definitely, BOY BOOK.")
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It took me a little while to write this. In the meantime, someone pointed me to this essay by Neil Gaiman: "All Books Have Genders." Which articulates what I'm trying to say, about the gender of books as opposed to the assumed gender of their audiences, much more gracefully.

spaces

2011-04-15T00:25:00.000-07:00

The Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier is one of the halls in the Place des Arts in Montreal. It seats 2,990 people and is a classic proscenium stage. Beyond that curtain, there is a sea of hinged seats covered in red velveteen; there are balconies and boxes; there are foyers, bars, and a cloakroom that charges a loonie and a toonie to care for your coat.

Look up, and a towering void threatens to fall on you. It houses lights on rigs and flattened worlds. Suspend belief, it says. Not you on the stage. You're supposed to stand here, or there, in this light and not in that one. It's so bright and so warm that you threaten to sweat, except for the moment when the curtain hauls up and it seems like everything is spilling out in the plushy dark beyond.

Theater Artaud was once a factory belonging to the American Can Company. It was built in 1925, in the Mission neighborhood of San Francisco. Cracks and gaps around the windows let in rogue chills, sometimes blocked by the enormous curtains provided for artificial blackout. It seats 256 people, and the seats climb steeply. There is more face to face here. If you find yourself at the front of the stage, you could hold a conversation with the first row in comfort. The stage is deep, though, and the audience can see right up to the ceiling, so there's a tiny rush of bottom of the well vertigo.

The Garage is what we call a "black box." Black floor, black walls, black ceiling. Encased in black. Floating in black. It's easy to lose track of where you are in this situation. Limbs feel outrageous in length. Feet are a distant country. The Garage was once a garage, and now it's a black box. Not many people can fit. It's nearly eye to eye here, and there's something secret about the whole venture, like you're in the center of a clamor and all around are sound-proof walls.

CounterPULSE is almost a white box. It's a few streets away from the Garage in the SOMA district of San Francisco. It holds, probably, about 80 people. You are pinned to the floor here, exposed. White walls cut your outline neatly from the surrounding space. Houselights up or houselights down, there's a finite spareness. You are on the spot. Hiding is not an option.

march reading

2011-04-12T18:00:00.000-07:00

The Family Fang
by: Kevin Wilson
(forthcoming, August 2011, HarperCollins/Ecco)

This novel is so lovable, so smart, sharp, and bizarrely funny, that it overcame my long-held prejudices against the brilliantly dysfunctional family saga. The Fang family is odd. In fact, the four characters who make it up--Caleb and Camille (Mr. and Mrs.), Buster and Annie (brother and sister)--are downright weird. Caleb and Camille are performance artists, the kind of people who wreck carefully planned havoc on ordinary life in order to say something, to make the quotidian into an occasion that is probably surreal, embarrassing, and shocking, but, at the very least, unforgettable. They throw their children (child A, child B) into their pieces and, predictably, leave them with scars. Annie becomes a drunken, moderately successful actress. Buster grows up to be a moderately successful journalist who persistently fails to finish his second novel.

But as their story becomes increasingly strange, the family Fang becomes increasingly less so. They grow familiar. They have hearts and warmth to them. They refuse to be limited by quirk, turning into people who you want to spend time with and want to get back to. They put on performances full of flashy, unlikely incident for each other and for themselves, but they are so tenderly written that you feel like you're standing on stage right next to them, watching their faces while they read their lines.

I liked it so much that I'm going to hang onto my ARC, just in case I want to read it again before it comes out. And just look at what a magical cover it has!

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
by: Charles Yu

This is one of those books that I appreciated, but didn't feel. It's ambitiously and elegantly well-written. I get why it received sheaves of thrilled reviews (NY Times, for example, or WIRED). It's perfect for anyone, especially men (it's built around a son's search for his father, who is lost in time), who has a fondness for both Douglas Adams and Jonathan Safran Foer. It's an extravagant, circuitous time-travelling journey that might have turned into a farce if it weren't so longingly sad.

But, for me, it just didn't hit the right spot.

golden dinners and milkfat

2011-04-07T00:41:00.000-07:00

On Sunday I had the very great pleasure of seeing the lovely Neil while he was in town over the weekend. We discussed jetlag and stories and music and exercising to old books (I am convinced that Tom Jones--the Fielding, not the musician--would be an excellent companion on the treadmill. Neil put forth Tristram Shandy, which I think I would be more kindly disposed to if I hadn't seen Michael Winterbottom's film version when I was feeling sick and hallucinatory.), and he introduced me to Olga Nunes, who is a wonderful musician herself.

I've just been listening to the samples that Olga has up on her site, and now I'm really excited about her current project. LAMP is going to an album AND a series of art installations, stories, letters in bottles, and other happenings... How fun is that? Very!

* Random interjection: I just looked up Tristram Shandy on Wikipedia, and it says that it originally appeared in nine volumes, the first two published in 1759 and the next seven coming out over the following TEN YEARS. Ten years! Can you imagine waiting a DECADE to get your hands on an entire book? The cruelty!*

We went out to dinner with a bunch of really wonderful, really hilarious and excellent people, at Farina over on 18th, between Valencia and Guerrero. The food was decadent Italian, but very well done. Heavenly burrata and this dessert that was basically the sweet version of fried cheese, feather light and smooth. I consumed so much milkfat that I'm convinced my blood actually thickened and sent me into a miniature hibernation as soon as I got home and climbed into bed. I even tried a tiny bite of the prosciutto, since someone assured me it was the best to be had in the city and I had just lovingly described it in a story, without ever having bothered to taste it.

*Random interjection: Things I blithely described in this story without knowing (or remembering) what they taste like: prosciutto, Grand Marnier, chocolate cake with a Grand Marnier reduction poured on top, pomegranate juice, ash.*

The thing about going out to dinner with Neil is that you feel you are at a dinner party in a book, one of those that happen at long tables, outfitted with comfortable chairs under golden lamps. Everyone is good natured; everyone is sharp and funny. Stories, both clever and odd, are thick in the air, and the conversation ranges from Australian radio contests to the physics of wrecking balls.

And the best part is that this golden, brilliant dinner doesn't obliterate the ordinary heft of everyone. We all still possess our jet-laggy fatigue or faint awkwardness or brash naivete, but we sit in our comfortable chairs and have a grand time anyway.

It was a really nice Sunday.

"I know now that I have not yet been in love."

2011-03-27T02:41:00.000-07:00

Last Friday, I went with my sister and some friends to see Nederlands Dance Theater, one of the most famous and well-respected contemporary dance companies in the world. We went with high expectations. We wished to be thrilled, impressed, inspired, agog. We desired insensibility dealt by beauty. We wanted theater with capital letters.We wanted the only thing that you should want when you sit yourself down in the dark, velvet cradle, which is to be completely and generously not bored.

The shock of getting a wish granted is infrequent. How does it feel?

It feels affecting enough that you say things you might otherwise be embarrassed to air in ordinary life. Things like, "I know now that I have not yet been in love," which is exactly what one of my friends said while we stood in the lobby afterward, engaged in post-performance dissection. She said it with humor, of course, but not irony.

Art is a tool for understanding the world. It holds it still long enough so we can see it. And if a dance performance can make you understand a little more about something as vast and strange as love, even if you can't explain it, exactly, in words, then that makes the minutes spent (from such a finite store!) on a night at the theater worth it.

miscellany

2011-03-24T00:50:00.000-07:00

For what it's worth:

burns : work will be performing an excerpt of the piece we're working on as part of a program featuring Alyce Finwall Dance Theater on the 30th and 31st at The Garage in San Francisco. The Garage is a tiny, but rather fiercely eclectic venue. It is, literally, a converted garage. Our piece is still only at the beginning stages, but we've started to explore some great ideas and this is a chance for us to take raw material and see how it fares under the eyes of an audience.

Some of my amazing dance friends work with Alyce, and these shows will hopefully help them raise funds for a tour to the Joyce SoHo in NY, so I'm really glad we get to share the experience with them.

Howl. Carson Stein and Joy Prendergast, two of my favorite people and dancers, performed at the Togonon Gallery as part of Dance Anywhere, an event that incited dance performances all over San Francisco in unexpected places and would probably have been immensely successful if it weren't for the terrible weather. Here's a video of them at work. Choreography by Malinda LaVelle.

"The Speaking Bone" Kat Howard, who has, just this week, saved my sanity when I thought I had tumbled down the rabbit-hole of a non-existent story (never underestimate the power of friends who can help you shine flashlights at dark and scary first drafts), has a story in the current issue of Apex Magazine. I am continually astonished by how Kat makes her stories bigger on the inside than their length would seem to merit. They unpack themselves inside your head as you read them and often leave an unexpected bruise.

------------------------>
One of my favorite people in the whole world is coming back to California. I am so happy about this that if I think too hard about it, I might burst.

For Coco. I can't wait til our clocks have the same face.

books of pleasure, #1

2011-03-16T14:49:00.000-07:00

I have a compulsion to finish every book that I start. The guilt ignited by a book set aside with a slip of paper marking a place somewhere before its end is enormous. You have to give it a chance, I tell myself, and unless the book is offensively terrible (and I can only think of one that was so hated that it ended up across the room, on the floor, and then in a box marked "DONATION," after 20 pages), I do. I will skim. I will even skip, whole chunks if necessary, but I will give the book its chance, all the way to the end.

(This is sometimes how I feel about dates as well, which is an altogether more worrying habit.)

But sometimes books are unadulterated pleasure, nothing but from beginning to end. These are my ten picks from a year's worth of reading (plus one sentence--or more. I cheat--from my first round review.) that I would prescribe for any kind of malaise.

1. The Varieties of Scientific Experience by Carl Sagan
Sagan offers such enthusiasm about the world as it is, such abundant pleasure in the discovery of knowledge, and such absolute faith in both our capacity to understand and the vastness of what we attempt to understand.

2. Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller
All of the virtue she presents begins to peel away, and still I balance on this razor of sympathy, quite sure that I'm not getting the whole story, but almost believing her anyway.

3. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
This book made me say, "really?" and "I can't believe that actually happened" and "people are amazing" and "people are awful" and "I am so freaking lucky to be living in a world where this kind of thing is real, and where someone will tell the whole mucky, awesome story of it."

4. The Cardturner by Louis Sachar
It's a story about figuring out that you love somebody, and it puts in all the expected bits -- the awkward, embarrassing, thrilling parts -- as well as all the bits that are unexpected but immediately recognizable as true.

5. Doing It by Melvin Burgess
Messy, awkward, imaginary, gorgeous, fantasized, humiliating, wonderful.

6. Not Now, Bernard by David McKee
It is an unapologetically, unexpectedly, remorselessly strange story about a boy who gets eaten by a monster.

7. Blackout by Connie Willis
Blackout is responsible for a few days of sleep deprivation.

8. Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer
It’s saturated with the kind of revelations that explode the mundane and offers them with such humor and intelligence that it’s an absolute pleasure to discover how unfamiliar we are with the contents of our own heads.

9. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
I don't know why it took me so long to get around to reading this. It is absolutely brilliant. It made me cry.

10. Oryx & Crake by Margaret Atwood
The world is messed up by people who are messed up, and in the midst of all the shiny bells and whistles, the luminous, giant bunnies and self-propelled myths, what is the thing that really gets you in the gut? That would be the reduction of the world to interactions of two.

evidence, on film

2011-03-09T23:05:00.000-08:00

Liss Fain Dance posted video excerpts of "The False and True are One," the piece we performed at Z Space/Theater Artaud in December and (in a slightly modified version) at the Mill Valley Public Library in February.

The piece was unusual in that it invited, encouraged, and demanded a certain kind of audience participation by transforming a proscenium stage space into four rooms separated by walls of varying transparency that the audience walked through to see the dance. The choreography is by Liss Fain, the music was composed (and mixed live) by Dan Wool, the production and lighting design is by Matthew Antaky, and Jeri Lynn Cohen is our fantastic narrator who reads short stories by Lydia Davis. The piece is also about 45 minutes long, and since we never actually leave the "stage," surprisingly intense. My white silk dress was thoroughly soaked after every show.

Most of the footage is from our dress rehearsal, except for the last video, which cuts together little snippets from an actual performance (I had no idea someone was filming us from above!). Anyway. This is me, dancing.

Excerpt 1: Me, Bethany Mitchell, Shannon Kurashige

Excerpt 2: Shannon's "Caveman Duet" with Private Freeman.

Excerpt 3: Alec Lytton hauls me through the air.

Excerpt 4: Shannon, Private, Bethany, and Jennifer Beamer Fernandez dance to "Happy Memories"

Bits and pieces from the whole thing, with the audience

I want to change the world.

2011-03-06T03:34:00.000-08:00

This hasn't been a lifelong ambition. I was never the kind of kid who wanted to be an astronaut or the President of the United States. I never wanted to be a doctor in an impoverished country, or an activist on a crusade. I never wanted to dream up technology. I never wanted to teach young children. I never wanted to be a knight in shining armor. I had no delusions about my chances of being heroic.

I was a self-possessed child, and I took it as a matter of course that I would throw my life, the whole kit and caboodle of it, after some sort of vocation, but only because I loved it. The world could go off to another room and close the door, for all I cared.

And now I find myself rather older and still committed to the things I fell in love with while young and impressionable, but haunted and obsessed by the need for it all to matter.

I can argue for why dance should matter and why stories so often do. It's easy to list the reasons for why you should go to the theater, why you should read a book. Pleasure, obviously. And beauty. The exercise of compassion, the shock of empathy, the way you are given transportation outside of your own experience and into the lives of others. An education in being a human being.

I can tell you, emphatically and with no equivocation, that the pursuit of dance and the pursuit of writing have made me a better person. They shaped my character, enforced ideals, and trained me to think with rigor and imagination. I would not change that education for any other... And, yet...

The last time I went to the theater, I saw an extravagant production featuring one of the most famous dancers in the world. I arrived early, so I went up to the cafe and had a cup of tea and leaned over the railing of the second floor promenade to watch people wander in across the lobby. They were all, almost without exception, older, obviously well-off, and spectacularly, breathtakingly bored. They seemed prepared to see something pretty, to have a cocktail, and to go home; there was so little expectation for anything more that I found myself uncomfortably depressed.

And now I find myself worrying, more than usual, about a person's responsibility to change the world. Is it right, is it good, is it a meaningful use of the privileges that I've been given if my life pursuits have such a narrow range of effect? I sometimes think about how much easier it would be, in certain ways, to go back to school, even this late in the game, and become something more clearly beneficial. Would I feel less conflicted about the minutes that I keep inexorably spending if I were a doctor, or lobbyist, or an investigative reporter?

It might be incredibly obnoxious to say that I want to change the world, but I do. Not necessarily in any grand or great or indelible way, but relevance seems like something we owe when we are so lucky as to do the things we love.

I so very badly want for this to be true.

point of no return

2011-03-03T23:29:00.000-08:00

When I am writing a story, there is always a point when I know that I can no longer turn back. There is an ending and I am falling toward it, like a marble that's been dropped down a series of connected tubes. Procrastination and free will won't deter it, and neither will manipulations of things like plot and character and color of the wallpaper. In some cases, I know what the ending looks like, and sometimes I don't recognize it until it hits me in the face; but once I pass the point of no return (and that's how I think of it... sometimes I hesitate because I know that, somewhere along the way, the story will clasp me to its chest and I will be doomed, but I never know how long a reach it will have), there's nothing that I can do except go onward to the end.
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I am, for some reason, completely obsessed with "All You Need is a Separation Barrier," a short audio documentary by Niall Farrell. And though I'm delighted by the Third Coast International Audio Festival site in general, it being full of treasures and useful inspiration, I keep going back to Farrell's piece and listening to the litany of walls.

february reading

2011-03-01T01:15:00.000-08:00

The Imperfectionists
by: Tom Rachman

I was told to read this book by several people, but I didn't actually pick it up until I heard Rachman being interviewed on the radio. It is a wonderful book. It's about the kind of things that make up real life and yet can so often be tiresome in fiction--love affairs, regrets, embarrassments, choices, work, sex and age and death. But this novel is a collection of tiny, intense portraits that you fall into. Stories that are bigger on the inside than you might expect. Reading it puts you inside the skin of eleven other people living eleven other lives, and the illusion is incredibly satisfying,

Divergent
(forthcoming: May 2011)
by: Veronica Roth

Dystopic adventure romp for teenagers. A clever, if rather unbelievable, portrait of the future. I mostly liked the characters and enjoyed the story, but found the romance tiresome. I can see it being incredibly popular though, and it would be a perfect fit for kids who like both Suzanne Collins and Tamora Pierce.

Red Glove
by: Holly Black
(forthcoming: April 2011)

I think this series is absolutely delicious. I love stories about clever, clever con men with hearts of gold, and the addition of magic makes it absurdly fun. Visual candy for the imagination. I like the nastiness that the story insists on, the way it doesn't offer absolution with bloodless crimes or simple characters. The people in this world are people who I want to spend time with because I find them fascinating, not because I'd want them for friends, and that is refreshing.

Shades of Milk and Honey
by: Mary Robinette Kowal

I love Jane Austen, so I was very dubious when my friend, Kat, sent me this book. Jane Austen with magic did not sound promising (though much more promising than Jane Austen with zombies). But this was fun. Reading it was comforting and comfortable. The story was unsurprising and satisfying, and I mean that as a compliment. It takes that almost entirely made up world that we're so familiar with from movies and BBC specials and simply elevates it to another level of fantasy.

The Bradbury Report
by: Steven Polansky

Mixed bag. There were some things that I thought were spectacularly done in this novel, and some that I thought were too easy and worn. I think it might be because it takes on that ever popular idea of human clones being brought into the world for spare parts and doesn't say anything particularly new, though it does wallow in the disturbing experience of confronting your own life to a degree that I thought was quite unflinching and bold.

Enchantment
by: Guy Kawasaki

I read this because I'm interviewing Kawasaki for work, and was surprised by how much I ended up enjoying it. Kawasaki offers some very good advice about communicating with people, dressed up as a book about promoting ideas and yourself successfully. It's clear, unpretentious, and almost ridiculously enthusiastic.

where I work, #1

2011-02-09T00:16:00.000-08:00

This is a dance studio. There are times when being in a dance studio is the most comforting situation in the world. I've spent hours and days and years in the studio--various rooms with mostly white walls, long windows, and wide, empty floors--and it still surprises me to discover how much they, any of them, can feel like home.
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Yesterday, I started rehearsals with Christian Burns. Christian is working on a new piece (tentatively titled "Mid-Century") for the premier of his company, burns/work. The starting idea for the work is the tipping point of eras, the mid-place where one thing becomes something else. There are so many things to throw into this hopper: furniture design, music, statuary, formal dance, social dance, science and literature and history. It's such a huge idea, easily applied to historic events and personal relationships alike. The whole world is up for grabs and open for play. It could be an overwhelming deluge of things to sift through, but I'm excited for the moment when we've picked out our anchors and themes, and when things start to feel like they cohere together. There's a stage of a project when it feels like everything you read and see and think seems to point effortlessly to the thing you're working on, as if the whole world has arranged itself, serendipitously, to support whatever it is you're trying to say. It's a great feeling, and it's even more satisfying when the things you're grasping at are far-flung and incongruous. Magic! Bunny rabbit. Hat. What do they have in common? Not much, really, except that they make up an odd rebus for vanishing and reappearing.

We'll be showing excerpts of the piece during the spring, and will hopefully have some fuller performances later in the year. I can't wait.
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If you happen to be reading this from Germany, please go see "Bande à Part." It's a new piece featuring the spectacular dance skills of two of my very brilliant friends, the magnificent Daisy Ransom Phillips and the inimitable Coco. Performances are this Saturday and Sunday, the 12th and 13th, in Berlin. I can't understand the website blurb (it's in German), but will reproduce it here in case you can:

"MIA: Ich denke doch, dass Marsellus Wallace, mein Mann und Ihr Boss, Ihnen gesagt hat, Sie sollen MICH ausführen und alles tun, WAS ICH WILL. Also: Ich will tanzen, ich will gewinnen, ich will diese Trophäe. Also, tanzen Sie gut." (aus "Pulp Fiction")


(photo: Coco)

libraries are for dancing in

2011-02-05T20:05:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, we performed "The False and True Are One" as an installation at the Mill Valley Public Library. The library, which is an absolutely gorgeous building surrounded by redwood trees and filled with amazing, mid-century furniture, is celebrating its hundredth anniversary. They're hosting a series of events that feature people or organizations with a connection to the North Bay/Marin County area, and as the event prior to us was a talk by Daniel Ellsberg (the man who let the Pentagon Papers out of the bag), we felt like we were in excellent company.

There's something charming about small town libraries, particularly beautiful ones like this one. You can imagine, quite easily, spending a large portion of your life there, bits and pieces of time that accumulate over the years. It's an entirely different feeling from the one I get when I visit one of the great libraries of the world, the ones that are vast and old and dreadfully famous. Those feel like cathedrals to me, and even if you spent the equivalent of years there, even if that was your library, I imagine there would still be a tiny bit of reverence hovering in the background.


(I really want this desk.)

They transformed the Main Reading Room into the dancing space. The periodical shelves and the couches were cleared away, leaving enough room to set out our separate "rooms." This piece was designed as an installation, but this was our first attempt to take it out of a theatrical setting and integrate it into an existing location.

There is a vogue in the world of contemporary dance right now for "escaping the proscenium." Everyone wants to make dance more relevant and more appealing, to shatter the "fourth wall" that develops between the stage and the audience. We go on and on about this kind of thing, really, we do. It's a strange and insidious concern for those of us on the inside of this particular fish bowl. Dance should be one of the most visceral, understandable, and universally appealing of arts. It is a natural human reaction, refined and exaggerated to the point of metaphor. But I don't know very many people who can say that they've gone to a dance performance that changed their life. I don't even know very many (non-dance attached) people who go to see dance (or even theater in general) just for the pleasure of it. Dance has somehow become intimidating, inscrutable. People have started to think that it requires translation, or that it's difficult.

It shouldn't be, really. And I think we're trying to figure that out.

Anyway, the original version of this piece invited the audience up onto a stage that had been transformed into this kind of strange, elegant gallery. They could walk through a set of hanging, transparent walls and watch the different pieces of the dance from whichever perspective they chose. We had some glorious lighting (designed by Matthew Antaky) and our composer (Dan Wool) mixed the score live.

In the library, we danced under the existing lights, in front of a massive fireplace and between the stacks. It was entirely more casual and entirely more strange. I didn't realize how much of a difference it would make to take away even more of the theatrical elements. It blew my mind to discover that the absence of the tiny membrane of distance provided by stage lighting, the flimsiest of barriers to separate the dancers from the audience, would be almost disorienting. We were suddenly existing in exactly the same world at exactly the same moment, and the intimacy and vulnerability of it was both wonderful and a challenge.

(The amazing library staff, reclaiming the Main Reading Room)

reading, of late

2011-01-31T20:11:00.001-08:00

I have been lax in keeping track of the books I've consumed in the last few months, but they are, roughly, as follows:

All Clear
by: Connie Willis

Not a sequel as much as the second half of Blackout. I enjoyed the first book more, but since I adored the first book, it's difficult to expect the second one to be quite as scintillating, without the spark of novelty. Still, it was very satisfying, in that particular way that the endings of good stories about time travel are. Details are explained. Separate pieces of the puzzle click into place. Those lost are found, and all the separate threads get smoothed out, braided together, and tied off with a nice, cathartic bow.

The Radleys
by: Matt Haig

I picked up this book because I couldn't resist the terrible cover and the premise, which waivers on the edge between disastrous and brilliant, of suburban familial dysfunction, with vampires. It was entirely better than I expected. Not, probably, something I would read again, but also not something I would dissuade friends from picking up. Which is saying a lot for a novel about vampires in the current environment.

The Silent Land
by: Graham Joyce
(publication: March 2011)

This novel is beautifully written. It's also one of those still, strange stories that aim to produce a certain effect, a sort of isolated and claustrophobic experience inside the characters' heads. It didn't quite touch me, though I can imagine that it might get under other people's skins.

Moonwalking with Einstein
by: Joshua Foer
(publication: March 2011)

I LOVE this book. I enjoyed it so much that I am just going to reproduce the review I wrote for the bookstore here:

This book drove me crazy. I could hardly put it down. It crept into my thoughts and badgered me with the intoxicating, alluring question: what can I remember?

Joshua Foer invites us to join him as he explores the strange world of memory. He digs through research on neurology, history, and culture. He introduces us to savants and eccentrics. He plunges right into the thick of memory techniques and finds himself–in what begins as a fantastic journalistic stunt and grows into a witty study of something universal, extraordinary, and strange–on the hunt for the U. S. Memory Championship. I love this book. It’s saturated with the kind of revelations that explode the mundane and offers them with such humor and intelligence that it’s an absolute pleasure to discover how unfamiliar we are with the contents of our own heads. Seriously, folks, this is my favorite out of all the books I’ve read in the past six months.

And that's that. Sometimes I gloss over little things that bother me, or amplify my affection for a book, but I really did like it that much.

Pink
by: Lili Wilkinson

This is a fantastic young adult novel. It has a terrible cover, but please ignore that. It manages that trick of character that puts you in complete sympathy, even when they commit those terrible things that we all do to each other from time to time. It's very funny, intelligent, and completely honest. It manages to do what I wish all stories about relationships could do, which is make you feel like you somehow figured out something about your life when you get to the end.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
by: Michael Chabon

I don't know why it took me so long to get around to reading this. It is absolutely brilliant. It made me cry. All the fame and glowing blurbs on the cover are completely deserved.

Guys Read: Funny Business
edited by: Jon Sczieska

Sczieska is editing a series of books aimed at encouraging reading among the younger, more reluctant male crowd. The table of contents is populated by many extremely famous children's authors, and the pieces range from great to pretty good. Mostly, I am just completely excited about the project in general.

The Emperor of All Maladies
by: Siddhartha Mukherjee

Terrifying. Cancer is a terrifying subject to think about, especially in the company of someone so intimately familiar with the workings of the disease on both a scientific and human level. But this is one of the best books I've read lately. The writing is astonishingly vivid and graceful, and the structure of the book, the simultaneous investigations of both history and current cases, makes it difficult to put down.

spellcheck

2011-01-28T21:10:00.001-08:00

I wonder if it was a very sad moment when they first switched it on.

Project THRUST, Project BUST

2011-01-28T18:17:00.000-08:00

My friend, Malinda LaVelle, is a dancer and choreographer possessed of extraordinary powers.

She started a company last year (Project THRUST) and is working on a piece (Project BUST, also known as BOOBS) which will eventually be an evening length extravaganza.

Project THRUST is performing on Sunday, and I want to give this more volume than my general internet shouts of excitement in the face of a friend's accomplishment because BUST is something rare and honestly thrilling. It is a night in the theater that presents a pungent, gut-socking, gorgeous, and hilarious argument for why dance should matter. It makes standing up on stage and moving under the eyes of other people as relevant as real life, as good film, as human interest stories ought to be, but mostly aren't.

Things I would compare it to: This American Life (the episodes that make you stagger in recognition, like "What You Lookin' At"), the photographs of Sandy Skoglund, Boccaccio '70 turned inside-out, reading old letters from people you once knew so well you imagined you would know them for always.

I've always had to miss previous performances of this piece. I've always had to be at work, or in rehearsal, or out of town. I'd heard it was good, and I knew it had to be a certain level of decent because Malinda has an interesting taste for movement and a particularly talented cast of dancers, but I didn't expect to like it as much as I did. I have trouble with art that is about "being a woman," and a piece about boobs is inevitably, at least partially, that.

But, my god, it impresses. It is the best dance thing I've seen in the past year. It is a piece of sheer and shameless entertainment, by which I mean something that engages you, that looks you in the eye and is not afraid of handing you your humanity on a plate. It carries you across a landscape of movement and emotion, and it periodically explodes with hilarity and sadness, sometimes at the exact same time.

It's the kind of thing that makes you recognize how silly and messy all of us are, and then it makes you happy that you do indeed suffer those side effects because you're lucky enough to be alive.

I say go. Sunday, January 30th, at 8:00 PM. And, if you can't go now, plan on August. That might be even better. The full shebang.

little boxes

2011-01-26T17:25:00.000-08:00

I like taxonomy. The art and practice of arranging things (organisms, ideas, postcards received, a pocketful of coins after international travel) like with like, in ever finer and more precise relationships, is a pleasure that thrills my enthusiasm for the particular.

(I do realize that I use the term "taxonomy" extravagantly and carelessly; I'm sure it would horrify any actual taxonomists.)

If there's something that bookish people love to do, it's arguing about genre classification, the names we give to certain types of books and the shelves where we keep them. My friend, the magnificent Kat Howard, calls the stories she writes "speculative fiction." Catherynne Valente, a writer whose work I admire, finds the term irritating. Margaret Atwood and Ursula K. LeGuin, two of the most brilliant authors I've ever read, have semi-famously (in a friendly way) sparred over what, exactly to call each other's work.

I have never inhabited academia, and have only recently walked into a bookshop with a foggy idea of where "speculative fiction" might be found, so I come from an entirely different, possibly uninformed, point of view.

(Yes. This is probably one of those subjects which looks like splitting hairs, storms in teacups, mountains from molehills, and etc. Unless you work in the business of books, or are armed with a taste for specificity.)

In my mind: "speculative fiction," is the label on the box where we most often throw stories of science fiction and fantasy. It is the box where anything might happen. At its best, it's a box where you find stories that refuse to accept the strictures of the literal moment they're written from while they're exploring what it's like to be a human being. They are curious about what might happen, how the world might be, if only.

I like the term. It's roomy. It tells me that the rules of the stories it contains are not exactly the rules of this particular world, at this particular point in time.

Of course, what you put in the box is a matter of personal opinion. I would put in "science fiction," which could be anything from I, Robot to Oryx and Crake to Super Sad True Love Story. If it gets its fizz of "might" by expanding on a scientific idea, either realistically or extravagantly, I think of it as science fiction.

I would put in "fantasy," including A Midsummer Night's Dream and Lord of the Rings and American Gods, among others. Angela Carter resides here, next to some of A. S. Byatt. If it plays with some kind of mythology or magic--our beliefs, familiar, ingrained, and strange--then, to me, it's fantasy.

I would also keep "magical realism." I like my (probably inaccurate) idea of what this term means. To me, magical realism identifies stories where the world is almost certainly ours, but aspects of the story's engine are unexpected, improbable, fantastical, and extraordinary. Everything is Illuminated, most of Haruki Murakami, Etgar Keret. This one is murky. There is plenty of spillage between this and fantasy. Maybe it's less soaked in the magical; maybe it only lets it through in bursts, bizarrely accepted by everyone living on the inside. Maybe it's sort of a fungus, sometimes more like an animal and sometimes more like a plant.

There could be "alternate history" (Michael Chabon, I'm looking at you) and "horror" (relatively easy to identify, though my horror shelf would hold both Peter Straub and Zoe Heller).

I guess that the whole point of putting things into boxes and labeling them is to make them easier to find. If you like this, then you might like that because they are cousins or residents of similar countries. These boxes aren't the same as the ones that make up "good" and "bad," "worthy" and "un-." They're the boxes that make up kingdom and family, regardless of how much you love or respect a particular specimen. It's one kind of division (work in a bookstore and you gather all kinds of others: "books for airplanes," "books with white covers," "books for people who are ill," "books for people who are tired of falling in love.") and one kind of terminology. Of course, what we call things is important, because it's a reflection of how we see them. Values and prejudices are all tied up with names. I know that lots of people conflate "speculative fiction" with "stuff I wouldn't be caught dead reading on the train," or "stuff that doesn't win proper awards," but it's also just a box and you can always change what people think belongs inside.

Besides, categorizing, organizing, and boxing things up is fun. And you can always rearrange it if you want.

five things I learned at Clarion

2011-01-24T17:55:00.000-08:00

In the summer of 2008, I spent six weeks being someone who, up until that particular chunk of sunny, strange time began, I didn't know existed.

Clarion and Clarion West are workshops for writers whose brains inhabit that slippery territory of "speculative fiction." Science fiction, fantasy, surreal this and magical that. They are hot houses, sparring rings, and summer camps. They let you go careening round the theater of story-telling, wielding real swords and shooting real guns (in a figurative sort of way, if you know what I mean), and then they pull up the work lights to point out where you made a mess. They are currently accepting applications and Jim Kelly, one of my Clarion instructors, asked that we talk about five things we learned there.

I went to Clarion because I tore a ligament in my knee. I applied because, while slouching on the sofa in a groggy, post-surgery haze of impatience and self-pity, I read Neil Gaiman's blog. American Gods was one of the books that made the hours of impersonating a sloth under the influence of vicodin and weirdly humming ice machines more bearable, and now its author, one of my literary heroes, said that he was teaching at this thing called Clarion.

I almost didn't go. I was scared that six weeks away from the studio and my brilliant physical therapist would derail me from the dancing life. My mom pointed out that I was being ridiculous. When else would I have the freedom to go off and explore? When else would I get to learn from someone who wrote stories that permanently haunt my head? My mom is very smart.

I'm telling you all of this because it's part of the most important thing I learned there, which is:

1. I love writing stories. Before Clarion, I didn't take writing seriously. I dabbled in it. I was completely ignorant of what a joy it is to craft a story, what an exhilarating and infuriating process goes into condensing the wild explosions in your head down to something that fits on the printed page. I can approach writing with the same level of seriousness and devotion that I give to dance. Life-changing revelation right there.

2. You have to walk the fine line between giving them everything and leaving them space to make art, and, at the same time, you can't be afraid of saying what you mean.

Also:

You have to care about the people in your stories. You are God. You have to believe in them and they have to matter. They better be worth caring for, worth crying for. Otherwise, they're just words on the page.

3. Stories can be about anything at all, as long as they're true. We had stories about crazy things. Zombie pregnancies, Oz mash-ups, advertising robots that crush an old lady's flowers. And something about these, admittedly unrealistic and wildly imaginative, stories felt absolutely honest. They were true, which is sometimes completely separate from being real.

4. Don't run away from conflict. Placidity is not your friend.

5. If you smash apart the dull, chronological line of cause and effect and replace it with story, you can start stringing together the tiny, pinprick lights of theme into a narrative of meaning. You can also more effectively lure the reader into the character's skin.

I highly recommend going. It's a crazy experience, but it can also be an amazing one. And you'll meet people who will absolutely delight you.

read me

2011-01-20T11:00:00.000-08:00

Senses Five Press has put up Sybil's Garage No. 7 as a free download until February 15th.

(Free! Can't get better than that!)

This is the home of my very first published story ("The Telescope). Go ahead, wallow in my deepest, darkest secrets.

(Okay, not really... but maybe a little. Don't all stories have a tiny bit of our mucky selves creeping in round the edges?).

kind words

2011-01-16T18:24:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine (the fantastic Paul Berger) just emailed me the following:

Hey Megan. Just wanted to make sure you saw this SF Site review:

http://www.sfsite.com/01b/sg336.htm

Megan Kurashige's "The Telescope," which relentlessly reminded me of the films of the Brothers Quay, with its finely wrought sense of tragedy (often critics describe prose as "painterly" -- Kurashige, a dancer, writes with the vigour, precision and delicacy of the dance) leaves the reader with some of the most lasting and haunting images of any of the stories.

Congrats!

I do believe that this is my very first writing review (Thank you very much, Seamus Sweeney of SF Site!). I feel so grown up.

------------------------------>
Possibly related:

One of the first comments that my fellow writers made to me at Clarion was that I must be a fan of David Lynch.

"Why?" I asked.

"Because your stories kind of remind me of him."

As I had never seen anything by David Lynch (except for Dune, once, when I was very young... the only thing I remember are silver unitards), this comment remained mystifying.

Some months later, I watched an episode of Twin Peaks. I was flattered, and also disturbed.

Every now and then, someone sends me a link to something with a caption that mostly goes like this: "This reminded me of your writing."

The Brothers Quay.

Skhizein

Motus

I am, obviously, very flattered that there might be even a passing resemblance or whiff of similarity between my work and these rather mercilessly strange, but lovely, things. I am also beginning to think that my own imagination might not be the safest thing to wander around in when it's dark, without a flashlight, and possibly not the most reassuring thing to look at in the eye.

stuff wanted

2011-01-15T00:48:00.001-08:00

Spoiled rotten.

My birthday wish, made forty-eight minutes late, is to meet some people in the next 365 days who are so wonderful, and from such utterly different stripes of life, that I am helpless to do anything but love their magnificence and eat up their enthusiasms, whether they be for spelunking or coding or phosphorescent fish or chandeliers or movies made by obscure French directors in the 1930s.

If some of them are, perhaps, suitable for kissing, that might be nice too.

I also wish, of course, for long conversations over tea with the friends I have, for family dinners and lazy afternoons, for great stories, for evenings in the theater and days in the studio. I want mad adventures, a dose of gumption, vast and wordless vistas of imperfect trees. I'd like to drive someplace in the summer with the windows rolled down, to visit a place unfamiliar, to dance away an entire night accompanied by a DJ worthy of angels and watch a sunrise arrive by rooftop. I'd like a minimum of finite goodbyes. Health, obviously, for me and mine. A distinct lack of newsworthy upheavals. I could do with a painting that stops my heart, just for a moment, and a song that sticks in my throat. I want to be useful. I want time to play.

I am greedy beyond belief, but it's my birthday, and that's my wish.

birthday

2011-01-14T01:31:00.000-08:00

My grandpa and I share a birthday. We were born on the 14th of January, sixty-two years apart.

My grandpa managed to be one of those very few people who somehow exist as heroes and gods in the part of my head or heart that tells me stories about the way I wish the world would be. He was an icon of my personal mythologies, but also a man who sat at the kitchen table and read the paper every single morning, comforting and vivid in his ordinariness.

A little more than a week ago, he died.

This birthday is a lonely one. It is, for the first time in my life, singular.

I spoke at the funeral. It was the hardest piece of reading that I've ever done. I stood there, alone, and a thousand moments, each of them sharper and more heartbreaking than I imagined possible, flew at me, one after another.

I wish that you could have met him. He was an astonishingly good man, and I loved him.

A few years ago, my sister and I asked Grandpa Megs to tell us about an adventure.

He said: “No need.”

We asked him again, and he asked why we wanted to hear things like that.

Because, Grandpa, we want to know something only you can tell us.

“Like what?” he said.

Like an adventure.

He didn’t say very much at first, just rubbed at his hands and nodded his head.

“Well,” he said. “There was a boat. We built it out of totong. We were really young and we took it down the river.”

We imagined that, my sister and I: the river sliding through Anahola, the little boat made out of metal scrap, and the magnificent captain, our own Grandpa Megs, but so, so young.

“Those were good times,” he told us. “On the river, you know, with friends.”

Megumu Hamamura—Megs—my grandpa—was a man who I cannot imagine as anything other than himself. If we could travel in time, we would recognize him immediately—man or boy, dad or grandpa, husband or brother or uncle or friend—as our very own Megs.

He once told me about a trip he took, about the way gutters smell in Morocco, and how it feels to look at the Rock of Gibraltar from the deck of a ship on the Mediterranean Sea. He told me about hijacking the little carts that transport sugar cane, and joy riding them down the hills of plantations. He told me about how movies used to be, when he rode to them in pick up trucks, and watched the cowboys and outlaws projected on the side of a tent, all for a few cents. He told me about the proper way to make a tin can.

These are not my memories. I never hurtled through a cane field, or strung wire through a house, and my memories are of Grandpa, telling me the stories of his. But maybe you were there. Maybe some of these memories are yours. If you are so lucky, I want you to examine them closely. They are an endangered species now, the last of something wonderful, and we should keep them for as long as we can.

My Grandpa Megs wears a navy blue worksuit. He parts his hair with a silver comb, and vanishes cigarettes inside his palms. He stretches out on the floor, and crosses his legs at the ankle, or sits in the yard in front of a fire, talking to his dog, or a cat, or me. He smells like brillantine… like smoke, coffee, and well-worn clothes. He can fix anything. He can wait patiently, forever. He is a man of character, in that old-fashioned and rare sense of stubborn goodness. He is kind and curious, graceful with competence, and loves so steadily and so deeply that there’s not much that he needs to say. He takes me riding, for beaches and ice creams, and he reads all the signs in every museum we go to.

“Incredible,” he says. “All of these things. Amazing, no? The way they all are.”

I’m sure you recognize him. I’m sure that if you could run into him, my Grandpa Megs, you would know him from last week, last year, or all the time you had in his company.

If he were here, now, I’m sure he would say: “Enough, already.”

He didn’t need so many words to say the things that he meant.

But since this is a day, the first day, when we can all start to say goodbye together, I think he would like it if we just remembered. Tell yourself the stories of the way you knew him best. Make your life a useful one. And say the things we all said to him, many, many times:

“You’ve got yourself a good life, Megs.”

And:

“I love you.”

how to pronounce loxioides kikuichi

2011-01-05T00:38:00.000-08:00

When you say goodbye, the day is long.

It takes the time, in whole and parts, between the black, dull dark that slips behind an eye just before it flicks awake, and the softer dark--more grey, more endless--that presses it shut when all is done and there is nothing left but still and quiet.

Say it:

Goodbye.

How round it is. How soft. How lacking in edge and point and anchor. It drifts into distance. It walks away. It leaves, at its tail, a shape that would be familiar, even beloved, if only you could see it, or if it were there.

Run hard.

Stay ahead by inches, by shivers, by the space left in the absence of a single breath. It will eat you alive; it will devour you whole. Its mouth is wide and its jaw, when it embraces you (with all the time in the world), is as crumbling and insidious as bones, turned suddenly to ash.

Dust your face. Dust your hands. Press them across every minute, all of these and all of those. Leave their tracks, both smudged and pale, on the ones dredged up from oceans where they settled and drifts where they sit abandoned. They were orphaned by breakfast, lunch, and dinner, by alarms and dates, by errands, trains, novels, love affairs, noble ventures, accidents, and plans.

Examine them closely. These are all there are. An extinct species, the last and lonely, gone.

These are your cages, golden and fine. Hold them up and see nothing between the bars. Keep them safe, like relics in stone, like bones in dirt, like long gone moments pinned still under glass. Let them rust and erode, and even when they are so old, you might hold one up, still empty as the couch unoccupied, and send an explosion of birds (loxioides kikuichi) across the long and grey.

stuff to look at

2010-12-15T15:11:00.000-08:00

Just a quick post before dashing off to the train and Booksmith.

1. We have new designs up at Fable & Tale. Shan posted some pretty pictures (featuring the lovely Emily Jones) over at the Fable & Tale blog. Our newest design is a mermaid who reminds me of an old fairy tale book I once had with black and white woodcut illustrations.

"The mermaid met your grandfather at the Santa Cruz County fair. There was a parade, and a contest, and all the young ladies wore tails and fins of sequins, satin, pailletes, glitter, and papier-mâché. Your grandfather was so young that you would never have recognized him. The mermaid was so beautiful—he might have told you this—that looking at her made him feel like he had been caught dancing to the most shockingly fine music, played so well that it would have made you cry."
2. The fabulous Mira Cook, who is a dancer, singer, musician, and all-around awesome individual, has just posted a music video for her song "Drum Machine." And, yes, she really is that adorable in real life.

3. Emily Jiang, who is one of the brightest, kindest people I know, has a poem up at Strange Horizons. It's called "Life Lessons" and you should read it.

4. Keffy Kehrli's story, "Advertising at the End of the World," is now available for your LISTENING pleasure at Escape Pod. I love this story. I've loved it since Keffy sent it round the critique table at Clarion, and I get ridiculously excited any time it appears somewhere else.

5. Paul Berger's lovely "Stereogram of the Gray Fort, in the Days of Her Glory" got picked up for a year's best anthology. He lists the entire table of contents here, with links to the online homes of quite a few of the stories. I'm linking to that, just in case you have need of any holiday reading.

***

And now I have to run for my train. And the post office. And the bookstore.

xx. M

caught in the act

2010-12-13T15:05:00.000-08:00

San Francisco video blogger, Diane Harrington, posted a small video and review of our show here.

on why dancing is like being a time lord

2010-12-09T00:09:00.000-08:00

If you had asked me, perhaps when I was eight, what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would probably have said:

"A zookeeper."

Or, maybe: "The person who swims with Shamu."

Or: "A paleontologist."

When I was about ten, I might have said, "veterinarian" or, "jockey."

When I was thirteen, it was a foregone conclusion, and the only thing I wanted to be was a dancer. I didn't want it desperately; I wanted it with steadfastness. It was the only thing I wanted to be, the only thing I could be, and the only thing I imagined I knew how to be. Everything else was either a pleasure, an irritation, or irrelevant.

I said no to lots of things. Horses, nice guys, invitations. A four-year scholarship to the University of California. Skis, hobbies, summer vacations. Dancing was so huge and complicated and wonderful that it took up all available space.

I sometimes wonder how I could possibly have been so sure, such an absolute and fervent believer.

***

I'm reading a book right now about memory. It makes the point that time seems to speed up as we get older because things are less new. We have done so many things for so long that our minds have less novelty to savor. The edges wear off and the seconds and minutes and days slide past us.

When dancing is going well, time does funny things. Sometimes it feels like the most perfect special effect. The suspended water drops. The muffled pause inside an explosion, with every piece of debris hanging still in midair. The only other time I've felt the same endless expansion was one evening when I drove down the freeway and a car in front of me lost control, spectacularly and ridiculously. It spun the way cars do in movies, actual elliptical twirls that carried it across the entire spread of lanes, first one way and then the other. It struck the central divider and pinwheeled off again, and everything looked so gentle and so inevitable that when it swung towards me, it seemed to drift along an obvious curve and I had all the time in the world to twitch my own car the smallest degree to the side and watch it slide past. Time suddenly opened up, every edge of it unfolding, like some sort of weird, reversed version of origami.

And that, I think, is one of the reasons why I still dance.

spaces for dancing

2010-12-02T23:35:00.000-08:00

The piece we're performing tomorrow (tomorrow! OH MY GOD.) has a really beautiful set. The stage, which is unusually deep, is divided into four rooms, each one containing a rectangular slab of white floor. The exterior borders are defined by tall panels of milky, translucent paper, and the interior ones by scrim fabric that turns green and blue and transparent under the lights.

Our tech rehearsal was an epic ordeal. For a 45-minute piece, our crew has to deal with at least 40-something lighting cues. The lights guide the audience's attention, change the pace, intensity, and flavor of the environment, and hopefully make us more beautiful than we deserve.

The audience is meant to walk between the rooms of the stage, making the choice to look at one thing or another. It should be interesting. It's both an extremely formal, artificial construct and a more casual experience than most performances that involve a proscenium stage. There will be wine and the element of chance. We're wearing white silk dresses splattered with grey and little ankle socks. We dance to stories about resolutions, sex, regret, women who turn into trees, women who turn into stone, carrying coal to Newcastle, boardgames, and petting cats. We have a crackling, insidious score.

I am so curious to know what this piece says to people. I'm not sure what it's saying myself. There's a lot of pretty movement, an interesting conceit, an appealing landscape, but what am I trying to say? I'm not sure...

mrorw (for H. McCalden)

2010-11-28T16:40:00.000-08:00

VL&Q: superhero

2010-11-15T21:15:00.000-08:00

My sister and I are putting together a dance about superheroes. We aren't sure yet how, exactly, it will turn out, where it will be performed, or what will end up being the fishing line of theme or narrative that will drag us through, but we've started something... And I'm really excited about it.

Things that we are thinking about: heroism, mythology, bandit masks, secret identities, klezmer music, interrogations, decisions, magic tricks, Jewish Americans in 1930s New York, J. S. Bach, paper bags, train rides...

On Sunday, we had our first rehearsal in the studio. The lovely Carson, who has magnanimously agreed to be part of our experiment, joined us. We each picked out a superpower and brought along some images or text that felt evocative of whatever it was. All of it was fodder for improvisation, and after two hours, we had three phrases, all of them odd and funny and hopefully useful as things to stick other things to.

Here are mine:

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.

september/october reading

2010-11-07T20:01:00.000-08:00

Our Tragic Universe
by: Scarlett Thomas

I find Scarlett Thomas immensely likable. There's something so ordinary and friendly about her characters, even in the midst of all the strange and bizarre details that she sweeps them up in. The previous novels of hers that I've read (PopCo and The End of Mr. Y) are witty, sharp, and addictive. I did not, however, particularly like this book. It has one of the most eye-catching covers that I've seen recently, but the story itself was a bit of a drag. Mostly, it provoked that feeling I get when a friend persists in doing something particularly unbearable in the name of romance.

Girl Parts
by: John M. Cusick

I picked up this novel because I couldn't quite believe the cover. A pretty red-headed girl wrapped up in bubble wrap and Styrofoam pellets lies smiling in a pink box. Then I read the cover copy and couldn't decide whether it would be amazing or absolutely terrible.

Yes, it goes there. The idea of beautiful, artificial "Companions" designed to teach disaffected and disconnected teenage boys the ways of emotional intimacy will obviously drag all kinds of lumpy baggage behind it, but this novel is actually charming, compassionate, and unabashedly prickly. It reminds me of Melvin Burgess in the way it doesn't balk from emotion--from being foolish, sentimental, lusty, or cruel--and in the way its characters are less than what you might expect, and so end up being much more haunting and memorable in all their messiness.

Zombies vs. Unicorns
edited by: Holly Black and Justine Larbaleister

I don't particularly like zombies *or* unicorns, but this was a fun collection. The introductions to each story are hilarious.

The Limit
by: Kristen Landon

Read this for my youth book club. It's a thriller complete with corrupt corporations, shadowy government agencies, the consequences of fiscal irresponsibility, and a revival of the workhouse institution. It doesn't sound like it would be a compelling idea for a young person's novel, but it is. The kids loved it.

Blackout
by: Connie Willis

It has been a really long time since I've read a "grown-up" novel that absorbed me so completely that I didn't want to put it down. I read a lot of books that are beautifully written, elegantly conceived, and thoughtful to the point of insulation, and however much I like them, they aren't difficult to put down at night when it's time to sleep. Blackout is responsible for a few days of sleep deprivation.

It's an extravagant story: Oxford in 2060, historians who travel in time to complete their dissertations, WWII, Shakespeare, Agatha Christie. It is completely believable, even in the middle of difficult to believe things. It's a historical novel and a contemporary novel, all dressed in the immensely attractive guises of science fiction.

I Shall Wear Midnight
by: Terry Pratchett

I like all of Terry Pratchett's books, but there are some that go right past liking and straight to instant happiness. This is one of them. There is a kind of settled wisdom in it, a definite recognition of what makes life worth being around for, and skill enough to convey the sense of it while keeping the reader swinging on the edge of either laughing or crying.

dancing sexy

2010-10-28T23:27:00.000-07:00

I rarely feel sexy when dancing.

I think this is a function of the supreme introspection required by practice.

I feel abandon, intellect, passion, frustration, and that particularly satisfying high that comes from dragging something from the cloudy, foggy, slippery cavities of my head to the hard and sharp counters of existence. But rarely, hardly ever that cranked up blast of invitation that focuses all efforts to a blazing spotlight turned on someone else.

Which is just funny to consider when thinking about all the things that I mean to say, but don't, and all the things I don't mean to say, but do.

For instance:
Yesterday, we danced some phrases while our actress read "This Condition" by Lydia Davis. "This Condition" is a story entirely contained in one extremely long sentence. It's a list of things, mostly mundane, and if taken bit by bit, they are not particularly sexy. But when they're allowed to collect, they become (like magic) strangely, outrageously, and hilariously so. They become the kind of story that might be uncomfortable for reading aloud. You are unavoidably talking about sex, even though you're really talking about hands searching in purses, things shaped like Florida, and snails. Dancing to it, you're inevitably reflecting the words, even if you're thinking about something else. Reaching up and touching an ear lobe, or pressing a finger against a nose suddenly says one thing instead of another.

Even if I dance exactly the same way that I would to a piece of classical music, anyone who is watching is going to fill it in with something else.

wrong shoes

2010-10-21T01:50:00.000-07:00

There's this really weird feeling that I get when I learn choreography that was created on someone with a completely different habit of moving. It's like I'm trying to fit myself into someone else's skin, and it's all tight in the strangest places, and has residual demands for nuances I would never notice, choices I would never make. Dragging and getting dragged at the same time. Everything feels like it's the wrong size.

And then it's all subsumed by familiarity. Practice sands it down to fit onto my body, to indulge all my habits, tics, and velocities; and it feels so much less like I've got my shirt on the wrong way and my shoes on the wrong feet.

hey there, I'm the new kid

2010-10-12T19:03:00.000-07:00

This is always how I feel on the first day of a new job. It is even more odd when the new job involves dancing. Hello, I say, I am new. You all might have it down. You know each other's names and heights and idiosyncrasies. You go fast and you go slow, and maybe you, holy cow, have got the greatest jump that I have ever seen.

It's a very steep curve to climb up, sometimes. So much choreography to learn; so much shorthand to acquire. The inside joke among groups of dancers is always tricky to understand because at least half of it is mime.

I like it though. I love working with people who I know so well that I've got at least a faint map of the interior of their minds, but the fizz that comes from something new makes me want to skip, at least, whenever I'm not afflicted with the need to flail.

Today was my first day of rehearsal with Liss Fain Dance (for those of you who are keeping score, this is New Job #2 out of two, which makes it Hat #4 out of a possible five). The project is a piece called "The False and the True Are One," which will be performed at the beginning of December. It has a number of interesting aspects: the transformation of a theater into a gallery set, the short stories of Lydia Davis, new music, and the always fascinating element of an audience released from their seats and set free to wander among the work. It's a new piece though, and since this was my first day, I can't say anything intelligent about the actual work, except that I am now very tired.

***
My friend, the wonderful Penelope, works in the kitchen of Station 1, a new restaurant in Woodside, doing chef things. She is, quite simply, a goddess of kitchens, and can make lemon bars that will change your life. She also sometimes contributes to a food blog and has just shared a recipe for grilled flatbread.

Another friend, the brilliant Damien, wrote about organizing a literacy festival in Leicester, England (which is a charming city; I must remember to write about their Roman ruins and museum... It was like school dioramas except with realio and trulio authentic antiquities) and about his belief in the value of reading. Inspiring stuff.

And the ever magnificent Kat posted an excerpt from a story that I really can't wait to read about a girl and King Arthur and the strangeness of scholarship.

Aaaand... You really need to keep an eye on Project Thrust, which is my friend Malinda's new(-ish) company. Malinda's choreography will make you laugh so hard that you won't be able to keep your eyes open, but you won't want to close them either because you'll be afraid of missing something of genius. You may also cry and definitely think.

coolest garage door ever

2010-10-07T12:59:00.000-07:00

where I've been recently

2010-10-06T20:13:00.000-07:00

This is from my walk to work yesterday. I love San Francisco. I mean, just look at that sky.

in which I begin to put on many hats

2010-10-02T23:53:00.000-07:00

This fall I will be wearing some new (metaphorical) hats.
Hat the First:
Today was my first day of training at Booksmith, a very charming, very sharp little bookstore in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. I'll be working there a couple evenings a week. I'm still not terribly familiar with the store, but I do know some of the people who work there, and they are absolutely fantastic. Oh, they also have an impressive music section and some very tantalizing art books.

Hat the Second:
In about a week I'll start working with Liss Fain Dance for a show in December. This is the company that Shan dances for, so I'm really excited to work with her. It's been ages since we've danced together, but we're slowly and vaguely thinking about doing some of our own dance projects, so it will be good to work together in the studio under the guidance of someone else to sort of rev our brains up. I like all the other dancers and am looking forward to the particular kind of focus that goes into preparing for a show.

Hat the Third:
Even though Monday is my last day on the floor there, I'll still be doing the editorial/marketing work that I do for Kepler's (I will not miss the commute!). It pacifies the vague desires I have now and again to get into either publishing or journalism. Sometimes it makes them much more ravenous. In any case, it's satisfying and mostly fun and I get to conduct interviews with wonderful writers. My next victims are Michael Krasny and Harold McGee.

Hat the Fourth:
I am now, officially, "Project Manager, Marketing" for the San Francisco Conservatory of Dance. This makes me incredibly happy because the Conservatory is an organization that I believe in, with all my heart, because the people who make up its bones are both some of the best artists and best human beings who I've ever met. We also just got a brand new office. I have a desk! And a Mac!

Hat the Fifth:
While I was in London, I met the lovely Neil for tea. At some point he said, as he always does, "And have you been writing, young Megan?" And I said, "Oh yes. Short stories and things. But, you know, I think I want to write a novel." And since I've been having the ideas and the desire for some months, and since there's no better encouragement for jumping off a (figurative) cliff than having articulated the desire to do so to someone who you both admire and look up to...

So. I will be busy. My work load is rather larger than it was before, but (theoretically) it's also arranged so I have a much more normal schedule. And that, I think, will be rather refreshing.

***

I like having full time, and I like having heavy time. I like time that's stuffed and time pulled so thin it might cut you with its edges.

I also like this poem. It doesn't really have anything to do with time, except maybe for being about one way you might like to spend it. Or how you've spent it.

this is what I want the story to be about

2010-09-27T00:59:00.000-07:00

I wonder why The Pirate's Own Book is levitating off the shelf.

magical internet things

2010-09-22T23:46:00.001-07:00

So, I only just discovered that I have a "bookshelf" for Google Books. And, while I'm not much for reading books online because it makes my eyeballs feel like they are shriveling beneath the computer glare, things that make my life easier make me happy.

I interview authors for work. I find all of them interesting people to correspond with. They have all these ideas that they've been steeping in long enough to write a book about them, and it's interesting to get a small peek at that odd, subterranean world. However, they're not all authors that I've actually read. Sometimes, they're authors who I know nothing about. Nothing. They're like guests at a party who turn up next to you, and you suddenly realise that you're standing in close proximity to a complete stranger, and you need to make some kind of pleasant conversation in the next few seconds because otherwise you will not seem mysterious and reserved, but instead something rather less nice.

Which is why I find it kind of magical that I have a "bookshelf" on Google Books with the forthcoming book of my next victim (it's not even officially out yet), complete with a substantial (but not overwhelming) preview, sitting there in its pretty, black cover, waiting to rescue me with conversational gambits.

this is the way it happened

2010-09-19T23:54:00.000-07:00

I feel I should explain, just a little, those postcards previously mentioned.

One afternoon, in Berlin, Heather and I went to a park. We took a camera and an ipod. We surveyed the park (both astonishingly lovely and astonishingly full of terrible statues) for a place to start. We picked out some music. We danced.

On further consideration, there isn't much to explain.

The funny thing about watching a video of yourself improvising, even when you're doing it on a lark, in the company of friends, under the eye of bemused strangers, is how frighteningly educational it is. Habits leap out. The tendency to explore the same kind of movement and relationship to time (in my case, a serious fear of the committed pause) becomes as obvious and odd as any other. I spin my rings around my fingers with my thumb when I'm thinking. Is this useful? No.

It makes me wonder. Is this me? Off the cuff, extemporaneous? Can I say what I mean when I don't have the chance to think it over? Is there anything more honest about that fiddling energy that happens when I'm not sure what to do next, that jigging urge to fill in the blank with anything, as long as it's not nothing?

Not that I thought about this while we were in the park. Mostly, I just thought about how fun it was to do something absolutely ridiculous and how lucky I am to have a friend who will gallop right into the ridiculous with me.

postcards from berlin (2)

2010-09-16T12:28:00.000-07:00

postcards from berlin (1)

2010-09-16T12:18:00.000-07:00

read in transit

2010-09-10T10:15:00.000-07:00

The Boy With the Cuckoo-Clock Heart
by: Mathias Malzieu

Fairy-tale quirk. A sometimes disappointing see-saw between extravagance and flippancy. I want to pretend that it's due to something not coming through in the translation because there were some absolutely stunning images.

Brilliant
by: Jane Brox

The history of artificial light and how it changed human life, deeply and irreversibly. Fascinating stuff about Tesla, world fairs, economics, the rise of factories, and the increasing number of stars being blotted out by our light.

Bliss
by: Peter Carey

Peter Carey does complete, mad weirdness. A man nearly dies, but wakes up believing he is dead and all the world is a simulacrum produced by Hell to torment him.

Not Now, Bernard
by: David McKee

I can't tell you how happy this book makes me. I mean, I can try, but you are unlikely to grasp exactly why just looking at it makes me giggle like a small and demented child. I found it in the wonderful St. Georges Bookshop in Berlin, just sitting propped up and waiting for me among the small selection of children's books. It is a very large, very floppy book, and when Heather and I were walking to a bar to get some of the nice German version of prosecco, I looked like I was wearing half of a very weird sandwich board. It is an unapologetically, unexpectedly, remorselessly strange story about a boy who gets eaten by a monster. It is also perfectly charming.

ghosts

2010-09-06T09:13:00.000-07:00

cause... effect

2010-08-17T15:41:00.000-07:00

I know that this is not actually funny. But the headline makes me laugh.

***
The thing about working at home is that you can take a break and draw a picture when you think you might go crazy.

The thing about working at home is that you're all alone when the deadlines come hunting.

Back to work.

bears repeating

2010-08-13T23:13:00.000-07:00

"He causes the release of oxytocin in anyone who returns his loving gaze." (quality soundbite from NatGeo, source of sensationalized "science"... did you see the piece about the tree-man? Made me lose my appetite, which is a rare and grave occurrence.)

"Never break up with someone on an invention." (sturdy piece of advice from Classy by Derek Blasberg, a guide on how to not be a bitch told in the bitchiest way possible.)

"If your life had a face, I would punch it." (from Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, a movie that I'm having a hard time deciding whether or not I liked.)

Acaciae quodammodo accedens, Myrobalano chebulo Veslingii similis arbor Americana spinosa, foliis ceratoniae in pediculo geminatis, siliqua bivalvi compressa corniculata seu cochlearum vel arietinorum cornuum in modum incurvata, sive Unguis cati. (or, why we needed Carl Linnaeus, as noted in Naming Nature by Carol Yoon.)

***

I've known Logan for years. We met almost a decade (a decade!) ago at a ballet program in Boston and at first he thought I didn't like him and I thought he didn't like me, though we eventually cleared that up and have been friends ever since. He lives in Florida now and we see each other only a few times a year, in the summer and in the winter.

Today, we talked for hours and played the Wii and went to see Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and looked at magazines and acted like children at the end of summer with nothing to do in the world. I feel funny when I see someone I've been friends with for years on an irregular basis because I'm in such a habit of considering them in a certain way, that it's shocking when a moment comes along that makes me realize that they're different. They have this enormous iceberg of a life that I'm mostly unaware of (because I'm sometimes rubbish at staying in touch), and while Logan is still my wonderful, charming, silly, endearing friend, he's also, just a little, someone else, and glimpsing that other person is both strange and really, really cool.

hello

2010-08-13T00:24:00.000-07:00

She resides in a park in Montreal, which is one of my favorite cities in North America. Two months in the depth of winter and you know you like it more than passing flirtation can account for. The reason I like her is that she seems less like an angel and more like a girl with wings.

I don't think I told you about this man, this violinist, who used to play music on the street, in the snow. It was so cold that the air held onto everything and the sound of his violin dropped into your ears and sliced them open.

july/august reading

2010-08-10T14:22:00.000-07:00

Monsters of Men
by: Patrick Ness

Still not as good as the first book, but a crackling, snapping, violent, and heartbreaking read.

Numbers
by: Rachel Ward

If you looking at a person in the eyes made you see the date of their death hovering somewhere in your head, how would that make you feel?

Fast Forward 1
Edited by: Lou Anders

Science fiction: bite-sized, numerous, varied.

The Rise of Renegade X
by: Chelsea M. Campbell

Romp through the teenage lives of superheros/villains, which turns out to have a lot in common with the teenage lives of normal people.

Oryx & Crake
by: Margaret Atwood

The world is messed up by people who are messed up, and in the midst of all the shiny bells and whistles, the luminous, giant bunnies and self-propelled myths, what is the thing that really gets you in the gut? That would be the reduction of the world to interactions of two. Brilliant and disturbing to a totally distracting degree.

you & me

2010-08-09T01:38:00.000-07:00

I was going to write a novel this summer, because I figured, why not? (I do many things on the basis of the idea that there's no reason not to. It's not the most practical of arguments.) It (this theoretical novel) was going to be about a girl who was sort of, but not really, a werewolf.

And then summer turned out to be busier than expected and I'm going out of town (on a poorly organized, but hopefully wonderful adventure to Germany and England to visit some of the most glorious people I know), so a novel hasn't been written. But, suddenly, I've got this idea, this other idea, and it won't go away.

Yeah, I know, that was a totally enlightening thing to say. Dime a dozen. Wishes, horses. This is the part where you say, "And?"

And this is the part where I say, "well, I haven't really gotten past that, but, you know... why not?"

***

As a small and grumpy sidenote: I spent my entire Sunday staring at the computer screen and doing editorial work. My eyeballs feel unpleasantly sticky. I completely failed to arrange necessary transportation between two German cities and various English ones. I did not buy an outlet converter thing. I feel I must look like Quasimodo. But! I've been listening to a totally awesome song. "Boat" by The Shivers. I can't decide whether finding a love worthy song makes up for a rat-wheel sort of day. It's a toss-up.

judge vaughn r. walker, you rock

2010-08-04T22:53:00.000-07:00

“Marriage is a coming together for better or for worse, hopefully enduring, and intimate to the degree of being sacred. It is an association that promotes a way of life, not causes; a harmony in living, not political faiths; a bilateral loyalty, not commercial or social projects."
- Griswold v. Connecticut

"The evidence shows that, by every available metric, opposite-sex couples are not better than their same-sex counterparts; instead, as partners, parents and citizens, opposite-sex couples and same-sex couples are equal."
-Perry v. Schwarzenegger

blue suede shoes

2010-08-03T23:13:00.000-07:00

Today, I went for lunch with the lovely Heather, who will soon depart for Boston and begin saving the world (and how I will miss her!). We ate seriously awesome Greek food (best pita bread I've ever had... I could have eaten a bucket load). We chattered our little hearts out. Heather sent me home with The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Mind: Introduction to Cognitive Science. I test drove my new shoes, which I had to buy because they are, literally, blue suede shoes (and having an Elvis song running through your head while wearing 4-inch high heels strikes me as irresistibly hilarious).

All of which made me think about the unexpected things (and extraordinary people, I count myself terribly lucky in that regard) that lead up to the current moment, all of them strung so neatly together that you don't register the geography you've travelled to get there. For example:

stories --> Clarion --> Neil --> Mike --> Heather --> Eric --> science --> stories

And the stories at the beginning and the stories now are so very different that I feel like the map of my imagination has gained a multitude of contour lines. Which maybe makes me sound like a self-absorbed dingbat (where are your crystals? your dreamcatchers? your incense and candlewax?), but I've always thought that the most luxurious side-effect of having people who you admire, enjoy, and adore, even momentarily, is the way they change your perception of the world.

(and, maybe the map isn't the territory, but it's certainly close enough to count.)

(end: maudlin sentiment)

music (in my ears)

2010-08-01T00:10:00.000-07:00

I've had my eye out for some good music because I'm not fond of air travel, and when I climb onto an airplane in a few weeks, I want something to drown my ears in. I'm really fascinated by Dark Night of the Soul (think: David Lynch + Sparklehorse + Danger Mouse) because it's strange and because it's title makes me think, not of Catholic mystics, but of Douglas Adams. The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul is one of my favorite titles, ever.

I'm also listening to Amanda Palmer Performs the Popular Hits of Radiohead On Her Magical Ukulele. "High and Dry" is gorgeous. I think I missed the initial boat on the Radiohead craze, though I remember that my roommate on the first summer I went away from home alternated between bouts of Radiohead and bouts of the Smashing Pumpkins played at volumes so high that I felt like our dorm room was a shivering gondola hurtling through the city's fog.

***

It's funny. I've known so many people who have an intense memory for music. It's like the songs are a card catalogue, and on each one is written a memory, compactly and stealthily stored for future resurrection, momentary resuscitation. I find myself lacking in this particular skill of nostalgia. I don't remember the first song I danced with a boy to. I don't remember the first piece I learned on the piano. I don't have songs that dredge up kisses or birthday parties or miseries or joys. I could (theoretically) still dance for you the Bluebird Pas de Deux (the first real and glittering classical partnering piece I ever did), but hearing Tchaikovsky's score doesn't bring me back to that day when my teacher coached me into such tears that I couldn't see straight.

It's not that music leaves me cold. I love music. I love to move to it. There are some pieces that have a direct and unfairly swift line to my heart. But I don't get that visceral dislocation. I miss out on the instant of time travel that leaves people all moist around the eyes when they hear that song.

I feel like I've been cheated. Where is my nostalgic soundtrack? Where are the songs that I'll play to wallow in my life? Maybe I'll have to artificially inject them. All moments carefully scored. All significant characters allotted a fitting theme song. I should hum them when they appear.

"What? That? Oh, it's just a little song that's going to make me think of you."

***
My friend, the lovely Mlle. X, is posting some glorious photographs on her blog. Look, admire. I dare you to resist the stories that come bleeding through them.

icarus

2010-07-29T15:26:00.001-07:00

run : fly

2010-07-27T00:07:00.000-07:00

what are you trying to say?

nothing.

what's the point, then?

well, isn't it fun?

let me entertain you

2010-07-20T01:11:00.000-07:00

Today, you can go out (or, via the magic of the internet, stay in) and buy a copy of Sybil's Garage, and so possess a tiny piece of my imagination. Let me tell you a story. It begins like this:

"On the day that Martin's leg turned to glass, they took out another seat from the theater."

Check out the table of contents here. My story is called "The Telescope," and there are many other tantalizing titles that I can't wait to sample for myself. You can acquire your very own copy (either paper or electronic) at the link above, or through Amazon. You can even ask your favorite bookstore to order you a copy by giving them this ISBN: 978-0-9796246-1-2 and telling them that it's available from Ingram (trust me, these are magical and soothing words to any bookstore employee).

This is my first story out in the wild world, guys! I am so happy!

observations from the dance floor

2010-07-12T00:10:00.000-07:00

So, last week I went dancing with some magnificent friends at this funny place that might be the illegitimate offspring of a rec center for retired hunters and a dive bar (skee ball, pool, taxidermy... loads and loads of taxidermy, arcade games, beer... loads and loads of beer, and a little kitchen making Southern food). The DJ was rubbish, but the dancing was a glory. I don't go dancing very often, but when I do, I mean it. One hundred percent, balls-to-the-walls, let's be ridiculous, three hours (but, oh my god, didn't that feel like 30 minutes?), sweat and jump and kick and shake, mean it. It's just so much fun. I feel like a kid running around outside and hollering just for the hell of it. Maybe I'm an airplane, maybe I'm a monster, but who cares?

And then I see people who are trying to be cool, or trying to be sexy, or sort of dancing, but not really, just kind of swaying so that they can still go hah, well aren't I silly? and I want to beg them to throw their dignity on the floor and just get on with it. Have some fun, it's good for you. Be silly, look me in the eye, don't worry about making a good impression, just move and listen and don't think.

***
Tuesday was the brilliant Chris's birthday, so I went along to birthday drinks. There was another birthday gathering there, a bunch of young people at the table next to ours. There was also this man, dancing. I don't know his name, but he comes into the bookstore sometimes and he has a disability. He is very large and middle-aged, but he acts like a child. He's gleeful, he stands too close, and he can talk for ages without filtering out repetitions or inappropriate things. He is deprived of the charm of a child though because of his size and his clumsiness and his obvious age.

He was dancing and singing and the people at the table next to ours were laughing and urging him on. They were videoing him on their phones and he kept saying, oh, you like my dancing, I'm so glad, and they kept saying nasty things to each other and then turning to him and saying, of course we like your dancing. Keep going. Ha ha ha! Look at him go, isn't that funny, isn't that the silliest piece of shit you've ever seen?

It broke my heart.

How are you supposed to feel in this situation? He's happy. They're amused. Neither party would appreciate my pity or anger. Why does it matter that they're laughing about different things? It's not like mean-spirited humor doesn't tickle me. I snark incessantly. This video puts me in stitches:

And still... It really upset me. Here was this guy dancing, going all out, saying here I am and this is me, and they were ridiculing him, yes, but that happens all the time... The thing is, they were pretending not to, so there he goes pinning more of his heart to his sleeve, and they just think it's the funniest thing, the stupidest thing, the most hilarious thing they've ever seen.

june reading

2010-07-10T02:46:00.000-07:00

(shall we be brief?)

Juliet, Naked
by: Nick Hornby

Fine and funny and sad. Absurd and hopeless, as life is, and ridiculous with desire. Portrait of inertia. Of age. Oh my god, here comes a sappy ending, but wait, no, I think we've glanced off of it now and it seems to be there, just to the right of us, in the distance.

Doing It
by: Melvin Burgess

Sex. Messy, awkward, imaginary, gorgeous, fantasized, humiliating, wonderful. Is that really what teenage boys think about? Disarmingly brilliant novel. Should be on some high school reading lists, or, at least, required reading for teachers. Brutally humane.

American Gods
by: Neil Gaiman

Road trip fantasia, plus an intermission in terrifying Midwestern winter. Gods everywhere. My favorites: Egyptian deities dressed up as undertakers. Coin tricks. Cons. That discomfiting feeling you get when you start out tasting something strange, and then you forget what's strange about it half-way through and all the important bits somehow turn out to be true.

The Billionaire's Curse
by: Richard Newsome

Indiana Jones meets classic English story about children with oddly absent parents and an excess of adventure. Slightly blocky characters. Bloodthirsty. A policeman shot in the bum with darts tipped with sleeping potion on one end, flowers on the other.

realizations that you are, in fact, incredibly short

2010-06-24T14:04:00.000-07:00

No. 1

When you have to open the car door and unbuckle your seat belt to reach the automated ticket machine at a parking lot. Not only that, but you may have to swing one leg out of the car and push against the toes of the other foot (firmly anchored on the brake pedal, please) before the ticket will finally, thankfully get devoured by the machine and you are free to go.