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Haha! Whenever my friends roll their eyes at me when I want to go out for a drink after the ballet (as I nearly always do; I don’t usually write my reviews until at least the next day), I will now proudly refer them to this.
Via Mr. Elegant.
Above quote by Brendan Behan; above photo by moi, of my Parisienne, taken in the Algonquin lounge a few days ago.
I’ve been reading this book, which was given to me by the publicist for purposes of review. It’s by Alex Ewing, about his mother, Lucia Chase, who basically founded what is now American Ballet Theater.
I’m about halfway through it now (I tend to read non-fiction a lot more slowly than fiction) and it’s very informative and very entertaining in places. I thought this following passage was particularly amusing. It’s 1950 and ABT (then called Ballet Theatre) is embarking on its first European tour when, unexpectedly, the Korean War breaks out, making a mess of, amongst other things, international travel:
“…Although the Air Force had officially agreed to provide the transatlantic travel, suddenly all government planes were diverted to the Pacific. The company took off instead on a commercial flight to Brussels, then proceeded on to Frankfurt where army buses transported them to Wiesbaden for their first performances. When it came time a few days later to fly behind the Iron Curtain to Berlin, an outpost city occupied by the four Allied powers, the approach into Tempelhof Airport had to be made through ‘the corridor,’ a narrow strip between Russian gun emplacements. The Russian government, in order to prevent spying on the surrounding sector that it controlled, required all arriving flights to come in at frighteningly low altitude, and the dancers were told to don heavy parachutes for the flight into Berlin.
“As recounted by Charles Payne, then editor and publisher of the Ballet Theatre Annual, the company was flown ‘in a transport plane equipped with bucket seats suspended from the inner walls, with parachute tracks leading to the escape hatches.’ Understandably, everything was much less formal than a standard commercial flight. The pilot even invited the dancers to visit the cockpit a few at a time, and at one point Nora Kaye emerged from up front, greenish-white in the face, to scream back at the others, ‘Do you know who’s flying this plane? Alicia Alonso! Do something about it!’”
Can you imagine?!
The great Alicia Alonso is turning 90 this year and ABT will honor her during the Met season, on June 3rd. ABT turns 70 this year. Image of Alonso above taken from here.
I was in the Tribeca Barnes & Noble yesterday and saw this poster. Tonight, at 7:00, my former Feminist Jurisprudence professor is giving a talk about her latest book, about Clint Eastwood (as director) and contemporary American masculinity. I think it sounds fascinating. Unfortunately, I have a prior commitment and can’t go, but if you have no plans and you’re in NY, please don’t miss her. She is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met in my life and I’m sure it will be well worth it to hear her speak.
Hehe, here’s a new book I just saw up on Amazon. It’s by Colin M. Jarman and is a collection of humorous quotes from TV dance shows — mainly Dancing With the Stars and So You Think You Can Dance. Apparently I’m quoted somewhere inside (from my Huffington Post column). There’s a little quiz you can take to win a copy of the book on the book’s website.
Just FYI, I’ve finally managed to reduce my novel’s Amazon price from $17.99 to $14.99. That’s the print price; the Kindle is $9.99. The endlessly wonderful James Wolcott has given me yet another shout-out — thank you Mr. Wolcott! And how sweet is this, and this!
I haven’t participated in a meme for a long time and so thought I’d take the one posted by Laurel-Rain in her Seasons blog (the last link above). The rules are to find the book nearest you, turn to page 56 and write the 5th sentence (and maybe a sentence or two after that for context, if you like). For me, that book is
Bravura! Lucia Chase and the American Ballet Theatre by Alex C. Ewing (Chase’s son), which I received for review purposes. I’m about a quarter of the way through; so review coming soon. Here’s the passage:
“Lucia would have had to be blind not to see that Mordkin was being pushed out of the picture. Yet she was most decidedly not the author of the early plans for Ballet Theatre, nor was she calling the critical shots. Other than providing the seed money for Pleasant to proceed with his grand design, Lucia had made a strict and unequivocal effort to stay out of management.”
So far, my favorite parts have been more about Lucia’s personal life than the details of setting up the company — such as her relationship with her husband, who died tragically young, when the couple’s two children were still babies. For years after his death, she would write him notes, telling him what she was doing, thinking, about her life. A way of keeping him around, I guess. So heartbreaking. Right now I’m reading about her love / hate relationship with Agnes de Mille — delicious fun!
That’s nonfiction. Here is a novel, Picking Bones From Ash, that was just about the same distance away from me. It’s by my friend, Marie Mutsuki Mockett, and I recently finished it and wrote a review of it on Goodreads. I absolutely loved it; I learned so much — about Japanese culture, European culture, Japan itself, Buddhism, classical music, historical artifacts, how to discern the period in which a piece of art was made — just read it, it’s filled with such beautiful detail and the story is so suspenseful you really won’t be able to put it down after a certain point. Anyway, here is page 56’s fifth sentence:
“We continued to spend time together on the weekends and during the holidays when I was home in Hachinohe. In the middle of my second year of college, however, Masayoshi began to act a little bit strange again. It all started when his father had a small stroke around the same time that I was caught up in preparing for the annual Messiah concert.”
One other book I just received in the mail and am currently reading is this:
Anatolia and Other Stories is a collection of short stories by Anis Shivani, whose work I became familiar with in the literary journal Boulevard. According to a quote by award-winning novelist Laila Halaby on the inside cover, the collection “takes us around the globe in stories that juxtapose old and new, east and west, with characters that do their best to navigate the generational / religious / cultural / socioeconomic tensions inherent in our global economy. Shivani’s observations are dead-on, especially when dealing with themes of loss, family dynamics, and subtleties of power.”
Finally, here’s another book related to dance that I didn’t have time to review, but that is getting good reviews.
The Sugarless Plum, by Zippora Karz, details the New York City Ballet dancer’s struggles coping with the dangerous and life-altering Type 1 Diabetes, which she was diagnosed with at age 21, while still a corps member in the company. Despite the disease she nevertheless managed to rise through the ranks and enjoy a solid, 16-year ballet career.
If anyone wants to participate in the meme, just link back to this post on your blog, or, if you don’t have a blog, you can write the book’s passage in a comment here.
Another positive review for Swallow from an Amazon top 500 reviewer! (Scroll all the way down until you see the reviews; the newest is at the bottom.)
This is my first novel and I really value people’s thoughts and reactions — what affected people the most and what affected them the least (because it’s definitely not always what I’d think). I’m so grateful to everyone who’s supported me by buying it and reading it and thinking about it, and then commenting or writing on the Amazon page. So grateful!
to everyone who celebrates is. I found this video from my friend, the great writer Michael Northrop 
I love it.
It reminds me of a scene in my favorite novelist Andrei Makine’s Once Upon the River Love, where two Siberian boys wake up to find their entire town covered in snow, as they often do during winter there, and they have a blast burrowing their way up and out.
My novel is finally up on Amazon. Eeek, am kind of freaking out a bit…
Went to my local bookstore last night and couldn’t find it, but apparently it’s now available for sale in online (European) bookstores at least.
In addition to original writing by Weber and Bolle, it includes text by D.H. Lawrence, and illustrations by Paul Cadmus! Hmmm…
(all photos by Weber and taken from teNeues)
Sorry posting has been kind of lame over the past week. I’m working really hard on finishing the final read-throughs of my novel and, as always, it’s more involved than I expected. I have several exciting Fall For Dance programs still to write about — a puppet-performed Petrushka, Bronislava Nijinska’s Les Biches, the fabulous Trocks, Dance Brazil’s unique capoeira / samba / modern blend, Tiler and Gonzalo 
, the best Afternoon of a Faun (involving two fauns actually) I’ve ever seen — this is by far the best FFD Festival I can remember — and I plan to write about it all at the end of the weekend or early next week; after, hopefully, I’ve finished my rewrites.
In the meantime, above is my final cover. Took me forever to okay something I was happy with. At first I was going to go with this one:
But then I had dinner with a gay male friend, who said of this bottom one, “Okay. This looks like it’s about a girl who goes around New York giving blow jobs.”
Which my novel is NOT about! I sought others’ opinions — nearly drove all of my friends crazy — and most people agreed that, since it’s about a young woman with a disorder, the cover should indicate that. It’s just that the disorder she develops is due in part to her moving into the city — a city she feels largely alienated by — and so it’s partly about her ability to make her own home here. Which is why I thought an arty cityscape would work.
But apparently not with this title!
I’d gotten the idea for the arty cityscape cover from my favorite Breakfast at Tiffany’s edition.
I also love this cover, for Charles Jackson’s The Lost Weekend:
This is as large as I could blow it up, but it’s one of my very favorite covers. I’d asked my design team to come up with something similar (with a woman looking into the abyss), and they couldn’t. I showed a friend and she kind of burst out laughing and told me I’d need to hire an artist to make me something wholly original if I wanted something approaching it. I have that Lost Weekend edition (which I found at a rare bookstore in Durham, NC) and the cover is an actual piece art — it’s actually painted onto the cover, which is made of a sturdier material than regular covers — the result being that once the years go by and the cover ages, you literally can’t open the book without breaking it. So, the irony is that that book is unreadable; it must simply sit on my bookshelf facing out, to showcase the piece of visual art that it’s now solely become. In any event, even if I did want a book that could only be enjoyed for its cover, I don’t have the money to hire my own artist.
But I think my design team came up with something that works anyway.
My biggest problem with having a photo of a woman on the cover is that I was afraid it’d be taken for Chick-lit, a moniker I think every female writer has some kind of issue with, or at least thinks about. I thought an illustration would make it look like it’s about art — which it partly is: one of the protagonist’s friends is an artist and he’s an important character. And I thought a photo of a woman would alienate male readers. But then a friend who works as an artistic director of a magazine said illustrations don’t sell; you gotta have a photo, which she insisted was pertinent to books as well as magazines (and she has two published books of her own out). She’s one of four or five people (as I said, I drove all of my friends stark raving nuts) who helped me come up with the idea for my final cover.
…which I’m happy with — I think it hints at what the book is about and is dramatic and somewhat provocative without being over the top. I just hope it doesn’t alienate potential male readers. But then, as practically everyone I know (of both sexes) have told me ad nauseam, men don’t read anyway — especially fiction; women read and Chick-lit sells. So just embrace it.
Anyway, there are many other issues involved in the whole Chick-lit quandary, and in book cover art, but I’ve blabbered for too long. Have to get back to my rewrites… And I need to go out for my Friday cupcake.
Have a good weekend everyone!
Oh how I wish Anthony Lane would have reviewed this film; unfortunately the New Yorker didn’t assign him. I always value his insights, particularly on movies I find disturbing. And I found this one so not because of the subject matter (race and gender-based violence in post-apartheid South Africa), but because of the way men, women, blacks and whites are all depicted, the extremely outmoded essentialist terms in which women and men are portrayed (ie: I am man, therefore I desire to rape women; I am woman therefore I love children and won’t have an abortion, etc. etc.)
The film is based on the Booker-prize-winning novel of the same name by Nobel-winning writer, J.M. Coetzee, a white man from South Africa who currently lives in Australia.
David Lurie (Malkovich) is a 52-year-old white professor at a Cape Town university who’s attracted to younger biracial women. As the movie opens, we see him soliciting a prostitute who fits such description, and shortly thereafter he becomes taken with one of his students, Melanie, and the two begin having an affair. It’s not clear how Melanie feels about him though. She seems completely dead during their sex scenes, and whenever she leaves his house, she always looks sad and violated. But it’s not like he’s raping her; she’s there of her own volition and she’s an adult and went into the affair knowingly. Nor is it made clear that he’s committing quid pro quo sexual harrassment — telling her he’ll fail her if she doesn’t do as he pleases; in fact it’s later revealed that the opposite is true — he passes her even though she’s truant and fails to show up for exams.
Eventually her young black boyfriend finds out about them and exposes Lurie. Students drop his classes and the disciplinary committee calls him for a hearing. Lurie seems to agree with the committee that he’s done something wrong (though it’s not clear to me what this is — again, she’s an adult and the sex seems consensual), but won’t defend himself because he can’t apologize for what he considers his (male) “nature.” The disciplinary committee dismisses him from his post and he moves to the country, into his daughter’s farmhouse.
His daughter, Lucy, is a lesbian whose lover has just left her. She shares the farm with a black man, Petrus – -he lives not in the main house but in a shed — who’s worked part of the land, installing pipelines and a well, and who, because of his labor, now owns part of the land. I wish the film had done more to educate viewers about this practice. It’s not clear, in post-apartheid S.A., whether Lucy is trying to help Petrus (she’s clearly liberal-minded and believes in righting historical wrongs) or whether this is the way the new system works to enable black South Africans to gain land ownership. In any event, Petrus is depicted early on as someone who’s up to no good. He’s nearly drooling at the mouth when we (and Lurie) first meet him (like a dog, I guess, since that seems to be the main — totally overdone — metaphor here).
So the dogs: Lucy houses several out back in a cage, partly for humane purposes — apparently there’s an over-population of dogs in S.A. and Lucy’s friends with a female veterinary nurse who catches them, tries to adopt them out and then euthanizes them when she can’t — and partly for protection. We’re made aware up front it’s very dangerous out on the farm — there’s been a lot of pillagings. She also keeps a loaded rifle in the house. At one point, she and Lurie are walking one of the dogs and Lurie tells her dogs are “creatures of habit.” He tells her a story of his childhood neighbor’s dog. The dog (a male) would always go nuts when the bitch next door was in heat. He’d dig holes in the yard, tear things up, etc. — create chaos basically. So his owner would punish him every time this happened. Eventually, the minute the female dog went into heat, the male dog would crouch and whine and walk around with his tail between his legs. The horror of this Pavlovian game, Lurie says, is that the dog eventually learned to deny his own nature. This is why, Lurie says, he shouldn’t be expected to deny his own nature (screwing around with young women, presumably to their detriment).
One day, Lucy and Lurie return to the farm after walking some of the dogs, to find three young black men taunting the caged dogs. Lucy approaches them and asks them to stop. They give her a story about one of the boys being stranded and ask if he can come inside and use her phone. She cages the dogs she’s walked and tells him yes; he alone can come inside. This is a ruse and after she’s caged her dogs, the boys drag her and Lurie into the house, gang rape her, lock Lurie in the bathroom where they douse him with gasoline and set him on fire, and use Lucy’s gun to shoot and kill all of the caged dogs. They also loot the place and cart off Lucy’s possessions in Lurie’s car. Lurie manages to save himself with toilet water but he’s still badly burned.
Lurie tries to get Lucy to go to police but for some nonsensical reason she won’t. Ludicrously, she tells him he doesn’t know what happened because he didn’t witness “the crime” — ie, he wasn’t in her bedroom, which, ridiculously, he doesn’t argue with. Her friend echoes her — he “wasn’t there” during “the crime.” He tells her he’d like to talk to the police, but she tells him there’s no information he could give them that she can’t, which he also inexplicably doesn’t argue with.
So a man is bludgeoned and set on fire and almost killed, but he isn’t the victim of a crime? He sees the attackers as they kill the dogs and pour gasoline on him, then throw a match at him, while Lucy is still in the bedroom, but he has “no information” of “the crime” that she doesn’t have?
Sadly, there are still parts of the world where women are considered male property, and therefore her rape is seen as the worst possible thing that could ever happen to her (or her “owners”). Worse than being set on fire. Worse than being shot and killed. I find it beyond shocking that the rape is seen as the only crime here.
It turns out Lucy is pregnant with the child of one of the rapists. Lurie tries to get her to have an abortion but she responds with, “I’m a woman. I don’t hate children because of where they came from.”
Petrus, who was suspiciously missing during the time of the break-in and whom Lurie suspects of having set the whole thing up so that he could scare Lucy away and own the farm himself, returns to the farm, with a new wife, and throws a party in the shed. At this party, Lucy and Lurie discover that one of the boys who raped her is the son of Petrus’s new wife. Lurie wants to call the police but Lucy forbids him from doing so, saying she needs to get along with these people since they’re now co-owners of the farm.
Lurie goes to talk to Petrus. Petrus insists his new son is not one of the rapists, but tells Lurie because of what’s happened, he would still make him marry Lucy but for the fact that he is too young for her. Petrus then tells Lurie he will marry Lucy himself (I don’t know if the filmmakers forgot that Petrus is already married or whether in S.A. bigamy is legal). Lurie delivers this message to Lucy and she accepts Petrus’s marriage proposal. Lurie thinks she is completely nuts (as does most of the audience, I’d venture to say) and tries to plead with her but to no avail.
Eventually, through all of this trauma, Lurie realizes the wrongness of his ways (because, apparently, in this world, rape is equal to sex with prostitutes and consensual sex with adults). He visits the father of the student he seduced to apologize. It’s a testament to Malkovich’s enormous talents that this climactic scene actually works, based in nonsense though it is since he’s really done nothing wrong to this supposedly full-grown woman.
Lurie begins having an affair with Lucy’s friend, the humane euthanizer, and helps her put the dogs down. In the second climactic moment, Lurie sacrifices his favorite dog in order to show that he’s finally has decided to disavow his own male / dog “nature.”
By the end of the movie, Lurie has learned to accept his daughter and her pregancy. In the last shot, the camera slowly pans across the land (like in Howard’s End) to reveal the entire farm. The bright new house Petrus has built himself is a marked contrast from the shabby, broken home housing Lucy. So, through rape and pillage, black South Africans have “taken over.”
The biggest problem with the movie (apart from the bad metaphors, the infantalizing of women and the equating of sex with rape) is that all the black South Africans are portrayed either as evil or easily taken advantage of. I’m sure it can be very dangerous for whites on those farms, particularly for women living alone, and I’m sure there are many rapes. But the film doesn’t present the perspective of any of the black South Africans, the historical oppression, the conditions creating the severe inequality that have led to such hatred and violence. The film is one-sided and in my mind comes across as feeding into racist stereotypes.
The film’s only redeeming quality, to me (apart from some beautiful shots of South Africa), is Malkovich, who — I have no idea how — was able to make his way through all the aforementioned problems and create a truly sympathetic, memorable portrait of this man. He always does that though, no matter how unlikeable the character. The man is a genius.
Has anyone else seen the movie? Or read the book? I have the book, but haven’t gotten around to reading it yet. I didn’t like Diary of a Bad Year and so was putting it off but I probably should now because I have a feeling there was a lot left out. I hope there was anyway.
Photo taken from Rotten Tomatoes.
I was browsing around in the bookstore yesterday and spotted this. Apparently in the summer of 1518, in Strasbourg, one woman began dancing and couldn’t stop. This “hysteria” spread until a great number of people had literally danced themselves to death. It’s referred to as the dancing plague, which I’d never heard of before. The book is written by medical historian John Waller, and has received pretty good reviews. I’m definitely going to read it.
Of course it reminded me of the wilis of Giselle and made me think, though we moderns love to roll our eyes at some of these “silly” ballet characters — girls being turned into swans, maiden ghosts forcing the men who snubbed them in life to dance to their deaths — it’s interesting to explore their bases in history, myth and literature. The ideas usually came from somewhere.
I know, I post this link every time this year. I can’t help it — it’s my favorite essay about New York ever.
Over the weekend I went to see The September Issue, the documentary about Anna Wintour and Vogue, focusing on the mag’s — well, the fashion industry’s — most important issue of the year. I found it thoroughly entertaining, but not in the way I expected. I expected it to be a real-life Devil Wears Prada, but it wasn’t that at all. I remember from the book, Lauren Weisberger’s main character constantly feeling like a horrid slob amongst all the fashionistas — or fashionista wannabes — who worked at the magazine, and I remember her even being ridiculed by everyone for wearing Ann Taylor, supposedly a cheap designer.
Of course Devil Wears Prada, the film, played up on all of that, having Meryl Streep lecture Anne Hathaway on her decidedly frumpy wardrobe and call her (a size 6) “fat.” But here, everyone who works at Vogue — particularly Wintour and other higher-ups like creative director Grace Coddington (who is really the emotional centerpiece of the film) are pretty mundanely dressed. They seem more like incredibly hard-working women who are far too busy to care much about how they look everyday at the office. No one wears much makeup, hair looks completely unstyled, Coddington munches on a rather bland-looking corner deli-bought salad while enthusing about the photo-shoots she’s designed and her romantic vision for the issue, talking about her past as a model and how she turned to the editorial side of things early on after a car accident ended her modeling career, and bemoaning the wasted money spent on photo spreads Wintour ended up not liking and axing entirely.
But my biggest surprise was how unattractive I found the models to be. And they weren’t — they were all really beautiful. But I think I’ve seen so much dance now that, as much as I used to admire models, I’m now almost horrified at their bad posture, their boney bodies, their completely uncoordinated frames, their sloppy-looking lines. During a shoot, this one model was playing around and she decided to do a kick — a battement — for the photographer and it was just about the worst kick I’ve ever seen. Her knee was bent awkwardly, her foot was doing nothing at all and gave her leg no line, and she almost fell over. The photographer seemed to think it was great though.
Made me think how much better dancers might be at making the clothes look good. I don’t know, maybe most dancers are too short or the fabric doesn’t drape as well over built musculature as it does over basically skin-covered bone.
This wasn’t the same model from the film — I can’t find a photo of her — but it’s taken from Italian Vogue. I mean the clothes look good — she’s pretty — but look at her lines underneath…
This in contrast to the New York City Ballet dancers, as photographed with this gorgeous flowing diaphanous fabric for NYCB’s Winter season calendar, which I just received in the mail today.
(There’s another ballerina, to the left, in that first photo, but I’m still pretty amateur at scanning and couldn’t get her in.) Doesn’t say who took the photos but I assume it’s company photographer Paul Kolnik.
My new balletomane friend (who I met this past ABT season), Marie Mutsuki Mockett, has a book due out at the end of September. It’s her debut novel, Picking Bones From Ash (published by prestigious indie house Graywolf), and so far it’s received a couple of great reviews. Go Marie!
It’s the story of two women, a mother and daughter, one Japanese, the other Japanese-American, and it takes place between Japan (past and present) and San Francisco. I haven’t read it yet but can’t wait! I love novels that examine gender across cultures and generations, and it looks like it has a fair amount of suspense to boot.
For those who missed it last night (as I did; was out watching this excellent albeit very disturbing film), here is a clip of Anna Wintour’s David Letterman appearance last night. I love how he gets her to talk about Devil Wears Prada and how real the character is who’s allegedly based on her, when it’s so obvious she really doesn’t want to go there. Hehe, go Dave. No seriously, Ms. Wintour was spotted several times at ABT during the recent Met season so we like her for that reason alone. Plus, DWP is fiction…
She does seem a lot more nervous than I’d expect, and a lot younger.
Very excited. One of my favorite actresses will be dancing at BAM’s Harvey Theater from September 15-21 with Akram Khan in their collaborative work, in-i (post-show talk with her and Khan is on Sept.17). I’d actually blogged about this a while back after seeing it reviewed in the English papers, so I’m very glad they are finally bringing this show to the US. Here’s a sampling of how it was received in the UK.
And, to coincide with the dance tour, BAM Cinematek is having a downright mouthwatering retrospective of her films. It begins with her latest movie, Paris, on September 11th. Following that 7pm screening, she’s to give an audience Q&A with the film’s director Cedric Klapisch. (Only prob with the retrospective: BAM doesn’t appear ever to be screening The Unbearable Lightness of Being…)
Also on September 11th, earlier that evening, at 6pm (I honestly don’t know how she’s going to fit all of this in…), she’s scheduled to be in uptown Manhattan at the Barnes & Noble Lincoln Square to talk about and sign copies of her new book, Portraits – In Eyes. (Binoche is currently taking a year-long hiatus from her acting career to fulfill other artistic passions — dance, poetry, and painting). This time B&N is making clear up front seating inside the little glass-encased area is primarily for book buyers.
All of this is exceedingly cool for Binoche fans, like me
(Above image taken from Aufemin.com)
Karina Smirnoff talks about two books she’s currently working on with Galley Cat’s Jeff Rivera.
is available for pre-order on Amazon. Good lord, look at those tag categories down below…
_____
“Well I’ve only been twice,” Margret answered, realizing her mouth wasn’t working so well. “I mean, the one about Oedip … Oedipus.”
The wine was warping her consonants.
“Night Journey,” he prompted.
“Is that the one? It was like an Assyrian,” she said slowly, “bas-relief. Those little palms and things in profile.”
Her face was hot. Why did he keep looking at her?
“What I want to know,” Emily said, pointing a pretty finger at Azam, “is why Graham men are always in such skimpy costumes? I mean, really, Azam, it’s jockstraps and loincloths. Do you guys ever, among yourselves, admit she was sexist?”
“Noooo.” He smiled lazily. “She just liked to see men’s bodies. You know the famous line?” He squared his shoulders. “Walk like you carry the seed.”
“What seed?” Nan called from the far end.
“Sperm,” Fred said.
“What are you talking about?” Ollie demanded.
“Martha Graham,” Emily, Fred, and Azam said in unison.
______
Above text from The Bird Catcher, by Laura Jacobs.
Photo from Night Journey (with requisite male dancer in loincloth) by John Deane, taken from here.
I’d really liked dance critic Laura Jacobs’ first novel, Women About Town, so I was really excited for her second one to come out. She writes fiction like she writes about dance (for the New Criterion; she also has a collection of her dance writings): lyrically, beautifully, poetically.
The Bird Catcher is the story of Margret Snow, a young New York artist working as a window-dresser at Saks, and her attempts to overcome the grief caused by her husband’s untimely death. She and her late husband, Charles, a Columbia professor several years her elder, had loved to bird-watch together in Cape May, New Jersey. So one of the ways she salvages his memory and pulls herself back into life is to go down to lower Manhattan and collect various birds who, during their migration, were felled by the glass skyscrapers. She retrieves their bodies and performs taxidermy on them — and, really, I never knew how poetic this practice could be, how artistic! And this project of hers eventually figures, rather dangerously, into her job.
There are lighter moments in the novel as well, like the scene above, where she’s at a dinner party and meets this young, sexy Martha Graham dancer named, fittingly, Azam, who ends up figuring rather prominently into things as well.
It’s a really beautiful book. One of those you want to read slowly and really savor the language. And she has a way of making you really feel for her characters. It’s also rather educational. I didn’t know much about different bird species and their migration patterns, or the variety of bird-life passing through New York City and how dangerous those skyscrapers can be to them.
Anyway, Emdashes currently has a contest on, through which you can win a free copy of the book. You have to enter by this Friday. You can do that if you’re on Twitter by responding to @emdashes and giving the name of your favorite bird. If you don’t tweet, then visit James Wolcott’s blog for more details.
And if you don’t yet have a favorite bird (as I didn’t — I mean aside from the obvious), this site seems to be pretty informative.
Today my friend, Michael Northrop’s, debut novel, Gentlemen, officially comes out!
Published by Scholastic, it’s classified as a Young Adult book, which means it’s geared mainly toward a teenage audience.
I have to admit I never read much YA even when I was that age (was too busy reading books like Valley of the Dolls and Peyton Place and thinking I was ooooh so sophisticated — big laugh, of course ) Anyway, I have flipped through a few recently to see what’s out there and it seems that many of them are kind of about teenage girls and the whole popularity thing, about fitting in, some more serious and about eating disorders and multicultural issues, etc., but many are about girls and by women authors. So, Michael’s is a bit different in that it focuses on boys from a rather tough, working-class background, and is a bit darker. My kind of book! And one of my favorite novels, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, is at its center. Honestly, I read it quickly and really really liked it. It should be widely available, as of today. Yay
Last night at Barnes & Noble, Lincoln Square, Mikhail Baryshnikov talked briefly with New Yorker dance critic Joan Acocella about his new book of photos of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Merce My Way. (I love the title, by the way).
The talk was brief (about half an hour) but pretty good. But, honestly, I had a very hard time getting over my anger at Barnes & Noble. I arrived early in order to get a good seat up front, knowing (hoping at least) it would be crowded. But on my way in, I was stopped by a B&N employee. She said they were giving “preference” to people who purchased his book, which cost $36. She pointed me to the cash register, set up, conveniently, right next to the entrance.
I was so mad. There was such a crowd already, it was pretty clear “preference” meant that unless you were buying a book, you weren’t getting in. And in this economy, $40 is a lot to spend when you’re not expecting it. Honestly, I found it a really sleazy, unfair corporate practice to take advantage of his fame like that to sell books. A lot of people must have come from a ways away to see him, and you’re not really going to walk away if you’ve traveled. People were standing around looking like they didn’t know what to do, hesitantly withdrawing their wallets and picking up a book. “We’re a couple, can we get in on one book?” I heard someone ask the people at the door.
I mean, this was advertised as a regular talk / author reading event, which are always free. Nothing in the adverts (at least the ones I saw) said anything about having to purchase a book. As Ron Hogan (of the pub / book blogs Galley Cat and Beatrice) tweeted me (and damn, was I a mad tweeter last night), “seriously. if bookstores want to pull that crap, let them charge $40 IN ADVANCE and include the book w/admission.”
Just as I was getting mad about missing Bill T. Jones (who was giving a talk downtown) for this b.s., I saw my friend Monica Wellington (who I met through Philip). They’d agreed to let her buy the Joan Acocella book instead, which was less expensive. She told them at the door we were together, so they let me in. Thank you thank you, Monica!!
Anyway, the talk was pretty good, albeit short (about half an hour). I’d never heard him speak before, other than giving a brief sound byte on a pre-recorded interview. He is, as expected, charming and smart, though he talks very slowly, thinks hard about his words as if he’s always too far ahead of himself, struggles with English, and digresses frequently. None of which were a big deal, and his digressions often led to entertaining little tidbits.
Continue reading ‘BARYSHNIKOV TALK GOOD BUT I AM PISSED AT BARNES & NOBLE’
Please excuse the blurry photo; I took it on the escalator last night at Barnes and Noble, where I went after Paul Taylor (review soon!) Thankfully I decided to visit the bookstore; I hadn’t known about this, even though I’m on B&N’s events mailing list…
So, this Tuesday, March 10th, Joan Acocella (New Yorker dance critic) will be in conversation with Mikhail Baryshnikov at Barnes & Noble, Lincoln Square (66th and Broadway) to discuss Baryshnikov’s new book of photos of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Merce My Way.
But same night same time, Bill T. Jones is giving a talk at Skirball. Now what?
Last night Ariel and I went to a launch party for the new online version of Read Russia, a magazine about all things Russian, at Idlewild Books in Union Square. I’d heard about the event through Lauren Cerand’s happening Monday column, The Smart Set, on Maud Newton’s literary blog.
I hadn’t heard of the magazine before, but it looks like a fun, informative read, and just the kind of publication I’d be into, nostalgic Russophile that I am. I say nostalgic because it seems kind of like a zine for Russian expats living here — as well as Americans– but kind of the reverse of the Prague Post and St. Petersburg Times, and all those literary mags founded by members of my generation for Americans living in Eastern Europe in the 90s, right after the fall of Communism. Oh, to be young in the fin de siecle again :S…
And totally fell in love with Idlewild Books. Honestly, best bookstore I think I’ve seen. At least it suits me to a t. They specialize in foreign and “travel books” but I put the latter in quotes because they’re not only the kind of cheesy travel books you’re used to that really might better be called tourist books, but novels, historical accounts, and the like, written by that region’s writers, or insightful visitors, that give you a much richer, deeper sense of the place.
And, unbelievably, they had this back table of heavily discounted books, which I don’t think I’ve ever seen at a small, independent bookstore before! Books I can actually afford I had an armful ready to buy but the cash register was long closed by the time Ariel and I ended our vodka fest (okay, my vodka fest) and got ready to leave.
Yes, they had free flavored vodka, which of course I had to have. Right when I got there, a man had just emptied into his cup the remaining bottle on the table, so a Read Russia editor brought out a new one. But she didn’t open it, and I couldn’t figure out the blasted cap to save my life. A guy must have seen me picking desperately at the thing, then giving up, and embarrased, placing it back down on the table and trying to walk away nonchalantly. He came up, unscrewed it, and without pouring himself a glass, sat the bottle right back down before where I’d been standing and looked at me out of the corner of his eye. How embarrasing.
They also had these delicious Russian candies, but the blasted things were downright elephantine. I unwrapped a cherry-wrapped log thinking it was going to be all squishy and gummy-bear-like so I could tear it apart with my teeth, but no, it was hard candy. I couldn’t bite it apart, so had to put the whole thing in my mouth. It was like the size of a small hot dog — like the kind you use for pigs in blankets! I couldn’t talk without my mouth drooling red syrup, and I kept feeling like I was going to choke, so I nonchalantly wrapped it in a napkin and placed it in an empty, used vodka cup. Apparently it takes practice to be Russian.
At the end of the evening, they gave us each as parting gifts a “Literary Map of St. Petersburg.” I was so excited — just my kind of thing! I have one of London as well. And even more exciting when Ariel discovered that there were series numbers listed on the bottom right corners. Mine was 25/100 and hers 24/100. Real, original prints! Oh how I love free art!
How does it look on my wall?
Update: for more info on this lovely little gem, go here.
Wow, a future female Junot Diaz? We need one!
By posing questions like, “how old am I?” And, “who am I?”
Karina Smirnoff, Blackpool 2006, photo by Tonya Plank
Regarding the first: apparently 10 years old, as I just became ridiculously giddy on Facebook’s pronouncement: “Tonya is now friends with Karina Smirnoff.” My longtime Latin ballroom IDOL
Regarding second question: one of my new FB friends asked me, “Hey, what’s up with all this Miami City Ballet stuff? Are you a dance critic?” (My status updates lately have been about going to see Miami City Ballet, where I spent the past two days).
So, hmmm. I honestly don’t know. Do bloggers = amateur (or in some cases pro) critics in this new media world? I guess it depends on the blogger and how s/he defines him/herself. I guess I want to be taken seriously as someone who gives her honest opinions and assessments of things and certainly don’t want to be seen as a lackey to any dance company, but I also try to make my connection with dance personal in a way that a newspaper critic really can’t. Ie: writing in a bit of a persona, calling dancers I really like by their first names, etc. Makes it more interesting albeit less “objective” I think.
I also want to try to avoid being too hard on an artist. I have been and it’s really upset a couple of them. As someone who’s really trying to segue from a career in law to a career as a writer — and especially a writer of fiction — I can relate to and have a deep respect for how difficult the artistic process is and how much you are really putting yourself out there when you subject yourself to public scrutiny. But then again, we all need to have thick skin if we are doing that. And writers do have to keep in mind that our readers are relying on us for our honest opinions; we’re not writing for the artists but for other dance-goers. I do make a distinction between creators who it seems are primarily interested in entertaining and maximizing profit above all else. That’s why I don’t feel badly about being harsh on the TV show producers
Oscar Wilde says a critic is a kind of artist.
So, I basically didn’t answer my the second question at all… Anyway, any other thoughts on the roles of blogger vs. critic in the age of new media, or on critic as artist?
Okay, here’s my (late) list of favorites from 2008: (click on highlights to read what I wrote about each dance)
Favorite overall dance of the year:
Revelations by Alvin Ailey. Because the movement language — a unique blend of American Modern with African — is highly evocative, richly varied, and, because it’s set in a specific time and place recognizable to most if not all of us, it’s imbued with meaning and feeling accessible to everyone. And because it speaks to the human condition like no other dance I’ve ever seen. I’m still looking for something to top this and don’t know if I’ll ever find it.
(photo by Paul Kolnick)
Favorite new dances:
1) Nimrod Freed’s PeepDance in Central Park;
