I suppose it was inevitable.
I got bored this afternoon. And I've just discovered readanybook.com, where you can read a bunch of books online if you're not picky about format. And because I was bored I read the first page of the first book presented to me, which happened to be Twilight. Hey, I had to look. And I thought, okay. Maybe I should see what all the fuss was about. Expectations not high, but if I'm going to denounce a thing, I suppose I should at least have read it.
I tried, I really did, because goddamn it there has to be some reason so many people were so crazy about this book . . . but about a third of the way through it I just couldn't take any more.
It really is as godawful as people say. It is unspeakable. How in the name of all that is holy was this a bestseller?
Not only that, it really is poisonous in terms of what it says to young women about what's desirable in a man. Every single thing about Edward and how he treats and reacts to Bella should be sending off a million alarm bells screaming this guy is a psycho stalker, potential abuser, control freak with anger issues, big woop woop woop alarm klaxons going off avoid avoid avoid. Anyone - "perfect," "alabaster," "flawless," or not - who behaved like this around any rational female would instantly get filed under "keep-911-on-speed-dial." Even in high school. But no. She's irrevocably in love with him, pretty much immediately, because... he's perfect. A fact of which we're reminded about three times a page (note the above references to "perfect alabaster flawlessness").
So, in fact, every single thing about Bella also sends off huge alarm bells for me. She's a painful Mary Sue. She has no internal life outside of Edward, and even that is unconvincing. She doesn't act like a teenager, or like an actual human being for that matter. And apparently thinking it's hot to be terrified of someone (who's a perfect alabaster sparkly god who wants to kill you but that's totally okay because, you know, he's perfect) isn't a sign of any deepseated personality disorders at all.
On top of all that the writing is tooth-achingly dull and plodding.
Augh. AUGH. I have to go bleach my brain now.
Tuesday, September 17, 2013
Saturday, September 14, 2013
Getting the band back together!
I'm pretty excited. the Kymeras got invited, a while back, to perform at CanCon in October. We've really, for real, started putting the show together and I can't wait to see the final product. It'll be the first Kymeras show in... frankly, in donkey's years. I'm really happy we're performing together again.
This being us, of course, we weren't content to go the easy route and just put together a show where Sean and I do poetry, Ruthanne and Marie do some stories, and they all have the same general theme. No. This being us, we started spitballing some ideas, and now we've got ourselves embroiled in a multiple-voiced, multiple-faceted, single-arc story that will take us an hour or so to tell: a story spun out of a beautiful poem Sean performed at our steampunk show a couple of years ago; a story about love and time travel.
It's actually been a long time since I wrote much of anything, other than blog posts and news articles, and it was hard and effortful and eventually encouraging to go back to it. To sit down in front of the computer and get through that horrible first fifteen minutes or so where you really just want to go open the Facebook window and look at your friends' posts and get frustrated that no one has posted anything fascinating in the twenty minutes since the last time you checked and . . . well, you know. It's not pretty. I sit there staring at the screen, write a sentence or two, then delete them again, then lose focus. Then remember I should probably check that the cats' water bowl's been topped up.
But, in writing for this show, I got to break through that phase and actually start creating again. The other night, I actually wound up staying up late writing (haven't done that in so long). And then I went to our first real show-structure meeting today, where we took the stories and poems we've been working on and read them to each other and started figuring out exactly what would go where, and I admit I walked in thinking, as I usually do, "well, I've brought a load of crap." But I knew I was going to have to read them out loud. It was hard to work up to.
Funny how reluctant I can be to perform in front of three friends, rather than a room of a hundred strangers. And before I read, Sean was talking about what he imagined my part being - I'm basically playing the role of a character in his original poem - and it didn't seem to match up at all. Which made me feel a bit insecure - here I'd written my couple of crappy poems and they didn't do what they needed to do and . . . ah hell. But then the others made me read them. And when I was finished, Sean said, "You need to get over this insecurity thing, that was perfect, that was exactly what I was talking about, it was beautiful," and a bunch of other nice things, and I felt a lot better.
And besides. . . Man, it's fun to collaborate with these folks. For some reason, Sean and Ruthanne and Marie and I collaborate really well. And we're at our best when we're putting together a show like this one - one that's a cohesive tale or an arc, one where there's a certain amount of theatricality and staging involved (in this show, Marie and Ruthanne will act as narrators: Sean and I will be in first person, inhabiting the characters of John and Evelyn, and there's some staging to enhance that idea). As we started to talk through the show structure and the stories Marie and Ruthanne were crafting, I caught myself thinking, "Wouldn't it be cool if we did X?" only to have someone suggest it a moment later, or have that facet appear in the story they were planning. It was almost uncanny.
So yeah - it is great to have the band back together. We're planning this show, for October 5, and a reprise of our winter solstice show for a house concert in December, and already talking about touring Evelyn in 2014. It's pretty exciting.
Sunday, March 10, 2013
Hilarity (and some surprise) at the Haiku Death Match
The CPC's first Ottawa Haiku Death Match went down last night. And if you weren't there. . . sorry. You missed a hell of a good time.
I'd heard about other Haiku Death Matches before, and when I interviewed Rusty Priske, the Slam Master, about it a couple of weeks ago on Literary Landscape, we talked about what kind of haiku to expect. A haiku's short, and if you're going up against each other in an audience-judged competition, you go for pithy, funny, snappy, right? In Vancouver, I've been told, the competition is dominated by sex jokes.
When I got to the Mercury Lounge, they were tying balloons to the wrists of all the competitors who signed up. People were walking around counting syllables on their fingers and reading through notebooks.
Ten people were eventually signed on to the lists. I'd intended to sit back and enjoy the show, but then was asked to be a judge. "You don't have to give a grade," Brad said. "You just have to pick one poem or the other."
Well, how hard can that be? I thought to myself. I've judged at slams before but I really have a hard time giving a number grade to poetry.
I was a fool. Having to pick between two haiku was, at times, astonishingly difficult.
The competition was gleefully hosted by Brad Morden, who announced the rules: Two names would be drawn from a hat. Those two "haiku warriors" would come to the stage. Each would perform a haiku, and the judges would choose a winner (by flashing either a copy of the latest Capital Slam CD or the flyer for next week's VERSeFest). Best two out of three would take the bout. Once you lost two bouts. . . your balloon was popped. Ceremoniously. To a chorus of cries from the audience of "Aww... no! NO!" as Brad proclaimed, "We live and die by the pen!" and popped the balloon with a ballpoint.
Another rule: total silence during the bout. You could clap for the "haiku warriors" when they were called up (and as the night went on, you could hear the reaction from the audience when a particularly strong pair got called), but then Brad would call out, 'SILENCE!" and you were supposed to be quiet as the haiku, some of which were really funny, were read. This, of course, only served to heighten the hilarity as people either stifled laughs, or defied the silence rule and laughed out loud or shouted things.
Meanwhile, behind the competition, classical Japanese music played.
It was hilarious.
The haiku had a wide range: from the expected sex jokes, through pop culture references, to the stereotypical lyrical and evocative image. Some haiku warriors made their stuff up on the spot: "I love cats. Too much. / My arms are full of scratches. / Kitties, love me back!"
Others brought their books, and flipped through them madly trying to choose the right response. And then came the first balloon death. "No mercy at the death match!" Brad roared. "We live and die by the pen!"
I get the feeling he was enjoying himself.
Finally there were only four poets left standing, and we had a break. I had been surprised by what I was hearing. As a judge, I had to make a snap decision every time. The poems could be radically different, or both in similar modes: either way, it would be a serious bitch deciding which to give the win to. There were funny poems about zombies, or wistful poems about lost loves, or snappy self-referential poems - I liked Rusty's "haiku trash talking" poem, for one - or 'deep thoughts' poems (a lot of these brought out by a newcomer to the CPC scene, who went by K. G., an older man who got up to the mike each time with a sort of gravitas, and a measured, dignified, Caribbean accent, that inevitably slew the other poets, particularly if they brought a funny poem. We talked about it afterwards: If you were up against him, and all you had was a dick joke, you inevitably sounded trivial compared to his meditations on the human condition. You had to have one hell of a good dick joke to beat that.)
Which is the surprise, for me. I knew that in the Vancouver scene, the dick joke would normally win. As the night went on I saw the judging going in strange directions - not always in favor of the deep stuff, but definitely resistant to the cheap shot. I know I was giving more points to people whose phrasing sounded natural (it takes more skill to make a 5-7-5 syllable pattern sound like normal talk than to drop out the odd article because it saves a syllable, and I consciously rewarded that). I think my fellow judges were doing the same thing. Top marks, generally, would go to witty AND insightful, which was hard to go for.
My money, if I had had money riding on this thing, would have been on Kevin Matthews. He's the Master of Many Genres, and I've seen him do everything from slam to avant-garde. He's good at brevity and epigrammatic wit. And I know from his slam poems that he can do funny and perceptive at the same time. I'd have backed Kevin. And, when it came down to the final four, he was in the ranks.
It came down in the end to Kevin and K. G.
And, as it turned out, K. G. took the last bout. To cries for mercy from the audience, Brad popped Kevin's balloon: then the audience called for a victory haiku from K. G., which he read from his chapbook. (He also insisted on having his balloon popped as well, while the audience shouted, "Let him keep it!" But I thought it was fitting the whole pseudo-bushido atmosphere. All things are ephemeral, even victory: they all dissolve into a small, limp film of red rubber. We live and die by the pen.)
A bunch of us retired to Zak's afterward, to discuss how strange it is to find a poem that would slay them in one city flopping in another; how hard it is to decide whether you should follow your competitor's lyrical poem with a funny one, or to stay in the same mode; how fiendishly difficult it is to decide which poem should win when one of them made you stifle a laugh, and the other made you stop and think, "ahhh..."
Many things were good about this night. The novelty and fun of a new form of show, the sense of humor, Brad's sumo-referee style of hosting, and the revelation of how flexible and living the haiku is. Kevin and I were talking about modern haiku on the break. He said that while you think of traditional haiku as evoking nature, for many people now, going online is like going for a walk. So, once you're there, surfing around on the web, if you look around, you see things you can turn into haiku everywhere.
And there really is a skill to making such a limited number of syllables sound natural, and cause the audience to guffaw, murmur, or sigh.
I'd heard about other Haiku Death Matches before, and when I interviewed Rusty Priske, the Slam Master, about it a couple of weeks ago on Literary Landscape, we talked about what kind of haiku to expect. A haiku's short, and if you're going up against each other in an audience-judged competition, you go for pithy, funny, snappy, right? In Vancouver, I've been told, the competition is dominated by sex jokes.
Ten people were eventually signed on to the lists. I'd intended to sit back and enjoy the show, but then was asked to be a judge. "You don't have to give a grade," Brad said. "You just have to pick one poem or the other."
Well, how hard can that be? I thought to myself. I've judged at slams before but I really have a hard time giving a number grade to poetry.
I was a fool. Having to pick between two haiku was, at times, astonishingly difficult.
The competition was gleefully hosted by Brad Morden, who announced the rules: Two names would be drawn from a hat. Those two "haiku warriors" would come to the stage. Each would perform a haiku, and the judges would choose a winner (by flashing either a copy of the latest Capital Slam CD or the flyer for next week's VERSeFest). Best two out of three would take the bout. Once you lost two bouts. . . your balloon was popped. Ceremoniously. To a chorus of cries from the audience of "Aww... no! NO!" as Brad proclaimed, "We live and die by the pen!" and popped the balloon with a ballpoint.
Another rule: total silence during the bout. You could clap for the "haiku warriors" when they were called up (and as the night went on, you could hear the reaction from the audience when a particularly strong pair got called), but then Brad would call out, 'SILENCE!" and you were supposed to be quiet as the haiku, some of which were really funny, were read. This, of course, only served to heighten the hilarity as people either stifled laughs, or defied the silence rule and laughed out loud or shouted things.
Meanwhile, behind the competition, classical Japanese music played.
It was hilarious.
The haiku had a wide range: from the expected sex jokes, through pop culture references, to the stereotypical lyrical and evocative image. Some haiku warriors made their stuff up on the spot: "I love cats. Too much. / My arms are full of scratches. / Kitties, love me back!"
Others brought their books, and flipped through them madly trying to choose the right response. And then came the first balloon death. "No mercy at the death match!" Brad roared. "We live and die by the pen!"
I get the feeling he was enjoying himself.
Finally there were only four poets left standing, and we had a break. I had been surprised by what I was hearing. As a judge, I had to make a snap decision every time. The poems could be radically different, or both in similar modes: either way, it would be a serious bitch deciding which to give the win to. There were funny poems about zombies, or wistful poems about lost loves, or snappy self-referential poems - I liked Rusty's "haiku trash talking" poem, for one - or 'deep thoughts' poems (a lot of these brought out by a newcomer to the CPC scene, who went by K. G., an older man who got up to the mike each time with a sort of gravitas, and a measured, dignified, Caribbean accent, that inevitably slew the other poets, particularly if they brought a funny poem. We talked about it afterwards: If you were up against him, and all you had was a dick joke, you inevitably sounded trivial compared to his meditations on the human condition. You had to have one hell of a good dick joke to beat that.)
Which is the surprise, for me. I knew that in the Vancouver scene, the dick joke would normally win. As the night went on I saw the judging going in strange directions - not always in favor of the deep stuff, but definitely resistant to the cheap shot. I know I was giving more points to people whose phrasing sounded natural (it takes more skill to make a 5-7-5 syllable pattern sound like normal talk than to drop out the odd article because it saves a syllable, and I consciously rewarded that). I think my fellow judges were doing the same thing. Top marks, generally, would go to witty AND insightful, which was hard to go for.
My money, if I had had money riding on this thing, would have been on Kevin Matthews. He's the Master of Many Genres, and I've seen him do everything from slam to avant-garde. He's good at brevity and epigrammatic wit. And I know from his slam poems that he can do funny and perceptive at the same time. I'd have backed Kevin. And, when it came down to the final four, he was in the ranks.
 |
| Final Four: Uncle Kevin, K.G., Sean O'Gorman, Rock Howell. |
And, as it turned out, K. G. took the last bout. To cries for mercy from the audience, Brad popped Kevin's balloon: then the audience called for a victory haiku from K. G., which he read from his chapbook. (He also insisted on having his balloon popped as well, while the audience shouted, "Let him keep it!" But I thought it was fitting the whole pseudo-bushido atmosphere. All things are ephemeral, even victory: they all dissolve into a small, limp film of red rubber. We live and die by the pen.)
Many things were good about this night. The novelty and fun of a new form of show, the sense of humor, Brad's sumo-referee style of hosting, and the revelation of how flexible and living the haiku is. Kevin and I were talking about modern haiku on the break. He said that while you think of traditional haiku as evoking nature, for many people now, going online is like going for a walk. So, once you're there, surfing around on the web, if you look around, you see things you can turn into haiku everywhere.
And there really is a skill to making such a limited number of syllables sound natural, and cause the audience to guffaw, murmur, or sigh.
Wednesday, February 27, 2013
Adaptation fail
Something tells me that if a book is unfilmable, you should just, maybe, not try to make a movie out of it.
World War Z, by Max Brooks, is probably the best zombie book out there. (Although, I haven't read all of Walking Dead, to be fair.) The book is "an oral history of the Zombie War."
It's been some undisclosed number of years since the zombie threat was declared officially over, and our unnamed protagonist is a guy armed with a tape recorder, collecting the stories of people who were involved. Every story is told as a transcript from the tape: just a person speaking, starting with the doctor in China who discovers one of the early cases in a small village and is silenced by the government. Our journalist interviews human traffickers who make the problem worse, even though they suspect what's happening; intelligence officers who cover it up; the CEO of a company that knowingly sells a placebo "cure"; people who hole up in gated communities; soldiers who see action on the front lines against waves of undead; members of the world's governments who eventually have to implement the scariest, most draconian systems to ensure survival; an astronaut who spends the whole apocalypse watching helplessly from the International Space Station; and the people trying to put the world back together once the war has finally been won.
The thing I really like about World War Z is the scope of it. People from all over the world, in all levels of society, get a moment to have a voice. You watch single individuals and their choices make or break history, but you also watch what average people do (there's an autistic teenager who tells her entire story in sound effects and reenactments, which makes it worse when you realize she's reenacting the moment her mother tried to strangle her while they were hiding inside a church, rather than let her be turned.) And voices from India to Japan to South Africa to Canada get to speak.
It's a global book, and what scared me about it was that you could substitute pretty much any real threat - disease, global warming, food shortages - for the zombies and get a frighteningly plausible scenario for how the way we are as a species and society makes disaster possible.
Right. And then because the book was popular, someone made a movie. And this is the trailer. Yes, that's Brad Pitt.
1. This story is about one dude. Who is Brad Pitt.
2. This one dude seems to be pretty connected in the military. I'm guessing special ops or something. Woop,
3. This is only happening in America, and look at all the Americans! Something tells me General Raj-Singh, the Tiger of Delhi, will not be appearing. Something also tells me that the eventual Plan that saves humanity will not come from a South African white supremacist, you won't hear a character claim that Cuba's isolation helped it win the Zombie War, and we'll never hear from the Chinese nuclear sub crew or the South Asian 'snakehead.' And I will lay you money the Americans don't get their best tactical ideas from people in other countries.
4. Zombies don't run in Brooks' book (and a lot of zombie aficionados will tell you they should never run. I don't personally care, because zombies are a metaphor for every other disease and disaster, and if you want them to run, fine... but they don't run in Brooks' book.)
5. In the book, by the time the zombies are causing chaos in New York, people know what they are. They're already marketing a "vaccine."
6. Most of the book, in fact, is taken up with how things get to the point of no return when humanity almost gets wiped out. This movie appears to start pretty much at the point of no return.
7. Looks to me like things devolve pretty rapidly into "guy with gun and combat training saves world as byproduct of defending wife and children." Sure, I don't know that Brad Pitt saves the world in this movie, I've only seen the trailer, but that's the trope. And even if he doesn't literally save the world singlehandedly, when Our Hero gets Into The Fight, because he wants to protect His Family, the implication is that all that nobility makes it so the world can be saved.
Maybe World War Z is unfilmable (and why shouldn't it be? Must every good book be made into a movie?) Although I would love to have seen someone try to make it as a documentary, earnestly filmed, relying mostly on the verbal testimony of the witnesses (but you don't have to be totally low-budget: some footage from the combat cameras on the ground at Yonkers, views of the devastation, maybe cameraphone video clips of early patients or of stragglers outside the fences of the walled-off Plan compounds... even the scene where the woman is walking around in Northern Canada killing zombies as they start to thaw out of the permafrost could be really cool.) That would be a really innovative zombie movie. This... well, I'm wondering what arrangement they made with Max Brooks. About all I see that's similar is the title.
It's been some undisclosed number of years since the zombie threat was declared officially over, and our unnamed protagonist is a guy armed with a tape recorder, collecting the stories of people who were involved. Every story is told as a transcript from the tape: just a person speaking, starting with the doctor in China who discovers one of the early cases in a small village and is silenced by the government. Our journalist interviews human traffickers who make the problem worse, even though they suspect what's happening; intelligence officers who cover it up; the CEO of a company that knowingly sells a placebo "cure"; people who hole up in gated communities; soldiers who see action on the front lines against waves of undead; members of the world's governments who eventually have to implement the scariest, most draconian systems to ensure survival; an astronaut who spends the whole apocalypse watching helplessly from the International Space Station; and the people trying to put the world back together once the war has finally been won.
The thing I really like about World War Z is the scope of it. People from all over the world, in all levels of society, get a moment to have a voice. You watch single individuals and their choices make or break history, but you also watch what average people do (there's an autistic teenager who tells her entire story in sound effects and reenactments, which makes it worse when you realize she's reenacting the moment her mother tried to strangle her while they were hiding inside a church, rather than let her be turned.) And voices from India to Japan to South Africa to Canada get to speak.
It's a global book, and what scared me about it was that you could substitute pretty much any real threat - disease, global warming, food shortages - for the zombies and get a frighteningly plausible scenario for how the way we are as a species and society makes disaster possible.
Right. And then because the book was popular, someone made a movie. And this is the trailer. Yes, that's Brad Pitt.
1. This story is about one dude. Who is Brad Pitt.
2. This one dude seems to be pretty connected in the military. I'm guessing special ops or something. Woop,
3. This is only happening in America, and look at all the Americans! Something tells me General Raj-Singh, the Tiger of Delhi, will not be appearing. Something also tells me that the eventual Plan that saves humanity will not come from a South African white supremacist, you won't hear a character claim that Cuba's isolation helped it win the Zombie War, and we'll never hear from the Chinese nuclear sub crew or the South Asian 'snakehead.' And I will lay you money the Americans don't get their best tactical ideas from people in other countries.
4. Zombies don't run in Brooks' book (and a lot of zombie aficionados will tell you they should never run. I don't personally care, because zombies are a metaphor for every other disease and disaster, and if you want them to run, fine... but they don't run in Brooks' book.)
5. In the book, by the time the zombies are causing chaos in New York, people know what they are. They're already marketing a "vaccine."
6. Most of the book, in fact, is taken up with how things get to the point of no return when humanity almost gets wiped out. This movie appears to start pretty much at the point of no return.
7. Looks to me like things devolve pretty rapidly into "guy with gun and combat training saves world as byproduct of defending wife and children." Sure, I don't know that Brad Pitt saves the world in this movie, I've only seen the trailer, but that's the trope. And even if he doesn't literally save the world singlehandedly, when Our Hero gets Into The Fight, because he wants to protect His Family, the implication is that all that nobility makes it so the world can be saved.
Maybe World War Z is unfilmable (and why shouldn't it be? Must every good book be made into a movie?) Although I would love to have seen someone try to make it as a documentary, earnestly filmed, relying mostly on the verbal testimony of the witnesses (but you don't have to be totally low-budget: some footage from the combat cameras on the ground at Yonkers, views of the devastation, maybe cameraphone video clips of early patients or of stragglers outside the fences of the walled-off Plan compounds... even the scene where the woman is walking around in Northern Canada killing zombies as they start to thaw out of the permafrost could be really cool.) That would be a really innovative zombie movie. This... well, I'm wondering what arrangement they made with Max Brooks. About all I see that's similar is the title.
Tuesday, January 29, 2013
A non-slam poet goes to the slam
[insert usual stuff about how long it's been since I posted here]
Last fall I competed in the first round of the VERSe Ottawa Women's Slam Qualifiers, one of a set of three qualifying rounds to pick the twelve finalists for the 2013 Women's Slam Finals. Mostly, I competed because I support the idea of having a women's slam in Ottawa, for a lot of reasons, and because it was VERSe Ottawa and I want to support them (having worked for them in their second year), and because the coordinators are friends of mine.
But it was strange, because I had never been in a poetry slam before. Despite attending a lot of them, talking about slam a lot in reviews and on my radio show, and knowing a whole lot of people in the Ottawa slam scene, I had never felt like I needed to actually compete. "My poetry's not 'slam,'" I said, and generally, it isn't. But I had memorized several of my poems, for the three-woman show Chasing Boudicca that I was in a couple of years ago, and as a challenge for a couple of Kymeras shows. I have a bit more experience with the format now than when I first got into the scene, because I really got into story slam with Once Upon a Slam, and even came in second in the finals last year. But poetry's different somehow from storytelling, and slam in Ottawa is really established and the people who do it are really good. And I know how different my style is from the style of most people who slam.
I reworked a poem to make it 'slammier' that night: I performed a sort of mashup of two poems from the Chasing Boudicca series, knowing that the central poem (the angriest and most personal of the series, therefore the easiest to make into a slam piece) was too short. (A poem that comes in at less than about two minutes leaves the audience feeling cheated, in my experience: you're supposed to really push that three-minute limit. It's why so many slam poets talk so fast: they're cramming the poem into the maximum allowable time.)
So I added bits from another one, and while I thought the tone change in the middle was a little odd, it went over pretty well: not so much the second-round poem, my jokey, steampunky "The Scientifically Minded Young Lady's Letter to Her Suitor; or, A Gentleman's Warning." Note to self: Victorian-esque rhyme schemes don't go over well with a crowd used to hip-hop polysyllabic rhyme.
Anyway, I was surprised at the end of the night to find that I'd come in fifth. Not quite in the final four, who would go on to the finals. But nearly. I did a joking, comic-booky, "Whew!" forehead-wiping gesture. Dodged a bullet.
Except, Rusty (the coordinator) reminded me, someone could always drop out. And then I'd be back in. Depending on rankings.
And guess what.
Last Friday, I got a message from Rusty rather early in the morning, saying someone had had to pull out of the finals the next night, and he knew it was short notice, but would I be willing to slam?
I have a rule about scary things I might not otherwise have done, which I get challenged/asked/nudged to do: I tend to do them. So I checked to see if I could repeat something I'd done before (knowing that the "Chasing Boudicca" piece had been my strongest last time) and then said yes. I was at work: I would have Saturday morning, and a bit of the afternoon, to memorize my second poem and rehearse them both.
So I did that. I'm glad I'm pretty good at memorizing things: I wasn't entertaining any delusions about winning, which was kind of liberating really. But I didn't want to embarrass myself. I knew the Chasing Boudicca one had gone over well, so I reworked it a little again and rememorized it, and then I picked a lyric, pastoral, quiet, evocative little poem I wrote about being home in New Brunswick for the summer and working in the garden. Rusty said that when I performed it, he thought, "Well, this is interesting... it's not a slam poem. Just don't hate on it, judges!"
I sort of knew that I was, as I often am, being the slightly strange, foot-in-both-worlds poet. In the poetry scene in Ottawa, I'm neither fish for fowl, really. And I knew almost no one in the audience would recognize me, the way they would the rest of the competitors. V? Sure. Dimorphic? Sure. D-Lightfull? yup. Kate Hunt? Who the hell? Where'd she come from? So I figured I might as well go with that, and do something that would be totally different.
In the end, it cost me a couple of points - one judge gave me the lowest individual score of the whole night on it. But then Brad Morden yelled "READ A BOOK!" at him/her, which made me smile. And at the end of the round, I wasn't the lowest score of the night so far.
Then in the second round I got lucky and was drawn late in the round (you want to be later, because no matter what, scores creep upwards throughout the night) and brought out the Boudicca poem, and the judges dug it. It's definitely slammier, whatever that means: something about it being faster and (in this case) angrier and direct and about personal emotions, and ending with a bit of a bang. The judges liked it - all in the 9.something range. Which boosted me a lot, and I wound up coming in eighth overall, out of twelve, when the final scores got tallied up.
Not having had any delusions about winning, I was actually really impressed with that. I don't slam. Everyone else performing were experienced, and had competed at regular slams through the year. I've had a lot of experience at storytelling over the last year or so, but still, I was amazed.
And what it did was to remind me of a couple of things. One: I don't write enough lately. Or, really, at all. And two - maybe I should try this slam thing, just to see if I can do it. Apparently I don't make a half bad showing with a day's notice. . . so maybe I should give it a try?
Last fall I competed in the first round of the VERSe Ottawa Women's Slam Qualifiers, one of a set of three qualifying rounds to pick the twelve finalists for the 2013 Women's Slam Finals. Mostly, I competed because I support the idea of having a women's slam in Ottawa, for a lot of reasons, and because it was VERSe Ottawa and I want to support them (having worked for them in their second year), and because the coordinators are friends of mine.
But it was strange, because I had never been in a poetry slam before. Despite attending a lot of them, talking about slam a lot in reviews and on my radio show, and knowing a whole lot of people in the Ottawa slam scene, I had never felt like I needed to actually compete. "My poetry's not 'slam,'" I said, and generally, it isn't. But I had memorized several of my poems, for the three-woman show Chasing Boudicca that I was in a couple of years ago, and as a challenge for a couple of Kymeras shows. I have a bit more experience with the format now than when I first got into the scene, because I really got into story slam with Once Upon a Slam, and even came in second in the finals last year. But poetry's different somehow from storytelling, and slam in Ottawa is really established and the people who do it are really good. And I know how different my style is from the style of most people who slam.
I reworked a poem to make it 'slammier' that night: I performed a sort of mashup of two poems from the Chasing Boudicca series, knowing that the central poem (the angriest and most personal of the series, therefore the easiest to make into a slam piece) was too short. (A poem that comes in at less than about two minutes leaves the audience feeling cheated, in my experience: you're supposed to really push that three-minute limit. It's why so many slam poets talk so fast: they're cramming the poem into the maximum allowable time.)
So I added bits from another one, and while I thought the tone change in the middle was a little odd, it went over pretty well: not so much the second-round poem, my jokey, steampunky "The Scientifically Minded Young Lady's Letter to Her Suitor; or, A Gentleman's Warning." Note to self: Victorian-esque rhyme schemes don't go over well with a crowd used to hip-hop polysyllabic rhyme.
Anyway, I was surprised at the end of the night to find that I'd come in fifth. Not quite in the final four, who would go on to the finals. But nearly. I did a joking, comic-booky, "Whew!" forehead-wiping gesture. Dodged a bullet.
Except, Rusty (the coordinator) reminded me, someone could always drop out. And then I'd be back in. Depending on rankings.
And guess what.
Last Friday, I got a message from Rusty rather early in the morning, saying someone had had to pull out of the finals the next night, and he knew it was short notice, but would I be willing to slam?
I have a rule about scary things I might not otherwise have done, which I get challenged/asked/nudged to do: I tend to do them. So I checked to see if I could repeat something I'd done before (knowing that the "Chasing Boudicca" piece had been my strongest last time) and then said yes. I was at work: I would have Saturday morning, and a bit of the afternoon, to memorize my second poem and rehearse them both.
So I did that. I'm glad I'm pretty good at memorizing things: I wasn't entertaining any delusions about winning, which was kind of liberating really. But I didn't want to embarrass myself. I knew the Chasing Boudicca one had gone over well, so I reworked it a little again and rememorized it, and then I picked a lyric, pastoral, quiet, evocative little poem I wrote about being home in New Brunswick for the summer and working in the garden. Rusty said that when I performed it, he thought, "Well, this is interesting... it's not a slam poem. Just don't hate on it, judges!"
I sort of knew that I was, as I often am, being the slightly strange, foot-in-both-worlds poet. In the poetry scene in Ottawa, I'm neither fish for fowl, really. And I knew almost no one in the audience would recognize me, the way they would the rest of the competitors. V? Sure. Dimorphic? Sure. D-Lightfull? yup. Kate Hunt? Who the hell? Where'd she come from? So I figured I might as well go with that, and do something that would be totally different.
In the end, it cost me a couple of points - one judge gave me the lowest individual score of the whole night on it. But then Brad Morden yelled "READ A BOOK!" at him/her, which made me smile. And at the end of the round, I wasn't the lowest score of the night so far.
Then in the second round I got lucky and was drawn late in the round (you want to be later, because no matter what, scores creep upwards throughout the night) and brought out the Boudicca poem, and the judges dug it. It's definitely slammier, whatever that means: something about it being faster and (in this case) angrier and direct and about personal emotions, and ending with a bit of a bang. The judges liked it - all in the 9.something range. Which boosted me a lot, and I wound up coming in eighth overall, out of twelve, when the final scores got tallied up.
Not having had any delusions about winning, I was actually really impressed with that. I don't slam. Everyone else performing were experienced, and had competed at regular slams through the year. I've had a lot of experience at storytelling over the last year or so, but still, I was amazed.
And what it did was to remind me of a couple of things. One: I don't write enough lately. Or, really, at all. And two - maybe I should try this slam thing, just to see if I can do it. Apparently I don't make a half bad showing with a day's notice. . . so maybe I should give it a try?
Thursday, June 21, 2012
Going on the journey
I know some of the other people involved - and more involved than me - have already written about last weekend's epic telling of The Odyssey: Marie Bilodeau and Tom Lips, in particular. I was there, as usual for storytelling events, as a cheerleader and booster (and, for my sins, offerer of handmade cross stitched Dalek T-shirts in exchange for donations to the Indiegogo fundraiser . . . I now have a dozen Daleks to stitch . . .)
But to be totally honest, I think we all had our doubts. Would people really want to come to the NAC at 10:00 in the morning and commit themselves to a story until 10:00 at night? Is The Odyssey that timeless? Are people that curious?
As it turned out, they did, and it is, and they were.
My niece came up for the weekend from Montréal to see the show, intrigued by the idea. We got ourselves up and caffeinated in time to run some supplies over to the green room before the show at 8:30 a.m. - fruits, veggies, bread, dips, coffee, tea, chips, brownies, etc. - and I set them up while she went out and staked out a table. I'd been to a long telling before, a couple of years ago, when a group of storytellers took three days to tell the whole Norse myth cycle. This was different, though. This was more public, in a way. It was at the NAC, not under a tent in Jan Andrews and Jennifer Cayley's front lawn. It was more formal.
But the magic still happened - and people did come. At 10:00 the room was comfortably full of people who grabbed a coffee, found their seats, settled in, and got ready to go the distance with Odysseus, and we started out with the gods deciding what to do with him, as he was trapped on Calypso's island.
The time flew. There's no way I could reflect on every storyteller's performance (there were eighteen of them) but there were moments that stood out, and pairings that made perfect sense to me. Gail Anglin does the conversations of gods so well. Jacques Falquet's Calypso was, to be honest, dead sexy. Daniel Kletke's Cyclops was a wonderful juxtaposition of careful herdsman and vicious brute. Kim Kilpatrick's voice and humor were perfect for the scene with Nausicaa by the stream. Top Lips, in the protracted, viciously funny scene in the hall before Odysseus shows himself, was wonderful. When Marie Bilodeau's set was over, my niece leaned over to me and said that she guessed Marie got that bit so she could tell the part where Telemachus kicks Peisistratus awake at three in the morning because he's so impatient to get back to Ithaca, and I believe it: she made the two of them, in a couple of lines of dialogue, seem like college roommates, which is essentially what they are. Marta Singh made the scene where Odysseus first speaks with Penelope, and she thinks he's just a beggar, seem like a seduction, and when the nurse discovers who he is, she made me feel the vital importance of keeping her from spilling the secret. Katherine Grier's ending to her story, and the set, with Odysseus and Telemachus, finally revealed, armed, and side by side in the hall facing the suitors, "resplendent in bronze," rang for a few shocked seconds before the applause began. Jan Andrews' reflective style perfectly matched the final scenes, where Penelope and Odysseus are finally back together. . . and have no idea what to say to each other.
It's also a story about people, with so much humanity in it. There were things I'd never known about the story, like the way you get to watch Telemachus grow up, the way you get a sense of why those who stay loyal to Odysseus love him so much, the way Penelope is revealed to be far more complex than you'd think. And the way the ocean, and all those small rocky islands with their harbours and their seafaring people, are so prominently a part of the story.
There's something about committing to hearing a story the long way, sound by sound and word by word, that connects you to it. It takes time for things to happen. It takes nearly twenty minutes for Odysseus' great bow, which Penelope brings into the hall, to finally make it way inevitably into Odysseus' hands. Telemachus sails off, and a party of suitors follow to ambush and kill him on his way home, and hours and hours later you finally find out what happened. And I don't think I could have listened to a reading that was that long: but when it's storytellers, it's a different experience entirely.
I was also happy to see that although there were half-day tickets, starting at 4:30 (just after Odysseus lands in Ithaca, I believe) most people opted to come for the whole day, and take the whole journey. And very few, once they'd come in and started to listen, could bring themselves to leave. At the lunch and supper breaks, we wandered out into the bright daylight and found patios to sit on with other people from the audience, talked, ate, drank, and then headed back quickly, not wanting to miss a word.
The applause was resounding and long at the end, and then there was even more applause, and then Top Lips led everyone in a resounding chorus of "What Do You Do With A Drunken Suitor" ("Hey, hey, rosy fingers, earlie in the morning....") and there was more applause, and then people began, tired and with what my niece and I called "story-brain," to trickle away. But slowly: some of them not quite wanting to part company just yet. Not after having been on such a long journey together.
 |
| They have nothing to do with The Odyssey, no. Except in that the Doctor is a lot like Odysseus in many ways. Traveling from one adventure to the next, defeating monsters, putting everyone traveling with him in mortal danger, and having very clever plans which he makes up as he goes along. Poseidon's kinda like the Black Guardian, come to think of it. . . and the rest of the gods could be the High Council of the Time Lords, exiling him, then randomly deciding to send him home. . . someone stop me. |
As it turned out, they did, and it is, and they were.
My niece came up for the weekend from Montréal to see the show, intrigued by the idea. We got ourselves up and caffeinated in time to run some supplies over to the green room before the show at 8:30 a.m. - fruits, veggies, bread, dips, coffee, tea, chips, brownies, etc. - and I set them up while she went out and staked out a table. I'd been to a long telling before, a couple of years ago, when a group of storytellers took three days to tell the whole Norse myth cycle. This was different, though. This was more public, in a way. It was at the NAC, not under a tent in Jan Andrews and Jennifer Cayley's front lawn. It was more formal.
But the magic still happened - and people did come. At 10:00 the room was comfortably full of people who grabbed a coffee, found their seats, settled in, and got ready to go the distance with Odysseus, and we started out with the gods deciding what to do with him, as he was trapped on Calypso's island.
The time flew. There's no way I could reflect on every storyteller's performance (there were eighteen of them) but there were moments that stood out, and pairings that made perfect sense to me. Gail Anglin does the conversations of gods so well. Jacques Falquet's Calypso was, to be honest, dead sexy. Daniel Kletke's Cyclops was a wonderful juxtaposition of careful herdsman and vicious brute. Kim Kilpatrick's voice and humor were perfect for the scene with Nausicaa by the stream. Top Lips, in the protracted, viciously funny scene in the hall before Odysseus shows himself, was wonderful. When Marie Bilodeau's set was over, my niece leaned over to me and said that she guessed Marie got that bit so she could tell the part where Telemachus kicks Peisistratus awake at three in the morning because he's so impatient to get back to Ithaca, and I believe it: she made the two of them, in a couple of lines of dialogue, seem like college roommates, which is essentially what they are. Marta Singh made the scene where Odysseus first speaks with Penelope, and she thinks he's just a beggar, seem like a seduction, and when the nurse discovers who he is, she made me feel the vital importance of keeping her from spilling the secret. Katherine Grier's ending to her story, and the set, with Odysseus and Telemachus, finally revealed, armed, and side by side in the hall facing the suitors, "resplendent in bronze," rang for a few shocked seconds before the applause began. Jan Andrews' reflective style perfectly matched the final scenes, where Penelope and Odysseus are finally back together. . . and have no idea what to say to each other.
It's also a story about people, with so much humanity in it. There were things I'd never known about the story, like the way you get to watch Telemachus grow up, the way you get a sense of why those who stay loyal to Odysseus love him so much, the way Penelope is revealed to be far more complex than you'd think. And the way the ocean, and all those small rocky islands with their harbours and their seafaring people, are so prominently a part of the story.
There's something about committing to hearing a story the long way, sound by sound and word by word, that connects you to it. It takes time for things to happen. It takes nearly twenty minutes for Odysseus' great bow, which Penelope brings into the hall, to finally make it way inevitably into Odysseus' hands. Telemachus sails off, and a party of suitors follow to ambush and kill him on his way home, and hours and hours later you finally find out what happened. And I don't think I could have listened to a reading that was that long: but when it's storytellers, it's a different experience entirely.
I was also happy to see that although there were half-day tickets, starting at 4:30 (just after Odysseus lands in Ithaca, I believe) most people opted to come for the whole day, and take the whole journey. And very few, once they'd come in and started to listen, could bring themselves to leave. At the lunch and supper breaks, we wandered out into the bright daylight and found patios to sit on with other people from the audience, talked, ate, drank, and then headed back quickly, not wanting to miss a word.
The applause was resounding and long at the end, and then there was even more applause, and then Top Lips led everyone in a resounding chorus of "What Do You Do With A Drunken Suitor" ("Hey, hey, rosy fingers, earlie in the morning....") and there was more applause, and then people began, tired and with what my niece and I called "story-brain," to trickle away. But slowly: some of them not quite wanting to part company just yet. Not after having been on such a long journey together.
Thursday, June 7, 2012
Talking to Bernie
This week on Literary Landscape I got to talk to Bernie Finkelstein - a life-long insider in the Canadian music scene and the founder of True North Records. He was Bruce Cockburn and Murray McLauchlan's manager; he produced records by Rough Trade, Kensington Market and Dan Hill. Basically, his life has followed the track of the Canadian music business from "Business? What business?" through the 60s Yorkville boom and the slow but sure building of the profile of Canadian artists. He's been influential in the creation of a lot of the support systems that have allowed new Canadian musicians to flourish, like FACTOR, MuchFACT, and a bunch of other initiatives that help new Canadian artists hold their own against the tidal wave of the American industry. I loved what he had to say about how being Canadian doesn't necessarily make you 'indie' in any trendy, hipster way, but it does in that it makes you think, a lot of the time, about the giant you're lying cheek by jowl with.
I read the book in a matter of about two days - partly because it was sent to me on Tuesday, and I had to interview Bernie on Thursday. But it wasn't a trial to read it in that time. It felt like a chat, in part because of his writing style, which was very conversational, but also because all he was doing with the book was talking about what happened to him. And without laying it on thick about the points he was making, he let incidents illustrate the point. Like the moment with the CNE, when he ran into a director who refused to have Murray McLauchlan perform, saying he wouldn't put "that kind of stuff" on the stage at a family show.
Murray McLauchlan. This guy:
Apparently the problem was the director didn't know the difference between Murray McLauchlan and Maclean and Maclean. These guys.
Clearly, people didn't know anything about their own music scene, the incident seemed to say. Clearly, Canadian talent had a long fight ahead of it to be recognized by its own national institutions... Anyway, I read the book and felt like I had an idea of the guy I was going to be talking to, but I was still a little nervous talking to someone who's talked to everyone else. What am I going to be able to say that's remotely intelligent about the music industry? I thought.
Turned out, as it usually does, that I didn't have to. Bernie was a great interview: of course, he's had decades of experience. But he also managed to lead me nicely from one of the questions I'd meant to ask to the next. The whole thing went smoothly: I had time to get to the major points I wanted to nudge him into talking about, like the uneasy relationship with the American industry, his reasons for staying in Canada, not moving to New York like everyone else did in the early 60s, and talking about the 'bleep' that sold Rough Trade's single 'High School Confidential.' What I didn't get to, and wish I had, was his take on the disappearance of the 'single.' Wish I knew what he had to say about that. Maybe I'll ask him if I can make it to his reading at the Elmdale on Sunday (7:00: check it out at writersfestival.org.)
The interview is posted here! Click to listen: about 30 minutes.
Some songs we talked about during the interview, for your infotainment:
I read the book in a matter of about two days - partly because it was sent to me on Tuesday, and I had to interview Bernie on Thursday. But it wasn't a trial to read it in that time. It felt like a chat, in part because of his writing style, which was very conversational, but also because all he was doing with the book was talking about what happened to him. And without laying it on thick about the points he was making, he let incidents illustrate the point. Like the moment with the CNE, when he ran into a director who refused to have Murray McLauchlan perform, saying he wouldn't put "that kind of stuff" on the stage at a family show.
Murray McLauchlan. This guy:
Apparently the problem was the director didn't know the difference between Murray McLauchlan and Maclean and Maclean. These guys.
Clearly, people didn't know anything about their own music scene, the incident seemed to say. Clearly, Canadian talent had a long fight ahead of it to be recognized by its own national institutions... Anyway, I read the book and felt like I had an idea of the guy I was going to be talking to, but I was still a little nervous talking to someone who's talked to everyone else. What am I going to be able to say that's remotely intelligent about the music industry? I thought.
Turned out, as it usually does, that I didn't have to. Bernie was a great interview: of course, he's had decades of experience. But he also managed to lead me nicely from one of the questions I'd meant to ask to the next. The whole thing went smoothly: I had time to get to the major points I wanted to nudge him into talking about, like the uneasy relationship with the American industry, his reasons for staying in Canada, not moving to New York like everyone else did in the early 60s, and talking about the 'bleep' that sold Rough Trade's single 'High School Confidential.' What I didn't get to, and wish I had, was his take on the disappearance of the 'single.' Wish I knew what he had to say about that. Maybe I'll ask him if I can make it to his reading at the Elmdale on Sunday (7:00: check it out at writersfestival.org.)
The interview is posted here! Click to listen: about 30 minutes.
Some songs we talked about during the interview, for your infotainment:
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