Category: blog

Play like a girl

Another in the occasional Being Human series of posts.

Nicola posted this today. And I love it. I love that these young women are so brilliant at this. I would have killed for mad body skills like this as a young woman. I always admired the girls I knew who were good at sports, and this… well, it combines grace and talent and skill and a hundred split-second decisions about physics and geometry, and I just stand in awe.

And they make it look so easy. I just love their absolute sense of expertise, their genuine pleasure in making the shots, and the total lack of any body language that “apologizes” for either. And the ending is priceless, all the more so because it’s not that she didn’t make the cool shot, it’s just not the cool shot she was going for…

Anyway, go watch, and enjoy. I sure did.

Edited to add: Aha… it turns out that this is a viral marketing video from Nike. Well, here’s what I think about that.

Patricia Barber, wow

Last month we saw Patricia Barber do a supper club show here in Seattle, on the recommendation of Sly in Alaska who had previously sent us a bunch of Barber music.

Big thank you to Sly. Barber is an awesome musician and puts on a great show. If you’re lucky enough to live in Chicago, you can find her most Mondays at Green Mill Jazz Club, where for the unbelievably low cover of $7 you can get 4 hours of Barber’s lush voice and gorgeous music from a tight band (including the brilliant bassist Michael Arnopol).

Barber sips cognac on stage in between songs; she takes her shoes off; and her music sounds like all that, like warm brandy in the throat of an old friend who is telling you stories and reminding you of things you should know. The music is expert, inquiring, intimate, musing, pointed, and always personal. Seriously, she’s fabulous. Go buy her music, go see her live.

We’re no angels

There is a bit of insanity in dancing that does everybody a great deal of good. — Edwin Denby

I don’t expect heaven when I die, but I’m getting a little Heaven right here in Seattle — the new location of my part-time dancing gig.

Dancers are on summer hiatus — things typically slow down in July and August, and the Hot Flash schedule is variable because of Mariners’ games (baseball in Seattle = parking hell). But the dances and the dancers will be back on a regularly scheduled basis in September.

In the meantime, I’m making noises with the management about a volunteer schedule — hey, I’ll be there dancing anyway, may as well do it on stage — but we’ll see. Either way, come dance with me on July 26 (Hawaiian shirt and bikini night!) and August 16. (Sorry, guys — Hot Flash dances are for women and transgendered people only.)

Making better managers

Dilbert 18 July 2008

How true.

I haven’t mentioned recently the business idea I’m working on, but it’s still alive and on the horizon. I’ve been all about screenplay for a while, and the Humans At Work program has been on the back burner. No regrets — writing is better — but I’m determined not to let it die on the vine, either. So here’s an update for those who are interested.

Humans At WorkSM is a training program specifically designed to ground new managers in the basic skills of managing human beings. Because that’s what no one ever teaches us… and we bruise the hell out of each other learning on the job. It’s my experience that managing people well is a) the most important thing we can do in the workplace to ensure that the business succeeds in the long term, and b) not rocket science. Management (like communication, and marriage, and sex, and friendship, and pretty much every other relationship) is about behavior. It’s about skills, models, ways of being and doing, no different at its core than learning how to drive properly or understanding that you don’t shoot your neighbor just because his dog is barking (no matter how tempted you might be…).

So I’ve developed an intensive curriculum to help new managers start from a good base, so they can build experience in constructive ways rather than by damaging people around them through sheer ignorance. The curriculum is done (just needs a few tweaks). I’m building the website. And I’ve made some decisions that I think will raise a few eyebrows and possibly make some folks think I’m an idiot. Or maybe the whole thing will sink without a trace. It’ll be interesting to see how it all plays out.

I hope I can finish the site soon. It’s just fussy gruntwork at this point, and I need to buckle down and do it. But I also need to write an original screenplay, and plot out a YA novel, and get ready for more work on the current screenplay, and eat dinners and drink wine and see friends and dance and go to the movies and the park and and and… and it’s already July. It’s not stunningly original of me to say Oh wow, it’s true, time really does go by faster as you age. But oh, if only I’d known what I like to do and be, and had the skills to make it happen when I was 20, when I also had so much more energy.

But that’s not generally how life works. And you know what? If that’s the way it is, that’s cool. Knowing, being skilled, being confident, having focused passions as opposed to muddy longings — if I were given the choice between being 20 as I was, or 47 as I am, I choose now. This is better.

Hmm. Not sure how I got here from Dilbert, but there you go, sometimes the path is not straight.

I’m the Irish guy

It says so right here. (Thanks to Jill for the link.)

I will also speak to the truth of this one — the 80’s are hugely popular at the club where I dance, and even if I am only an Irish guy, I do know the words to all those songs (with a particular soft spot in my heart for “Tainted Love”.)

Also, you cannot be a Real Lesbian in a dance club unless you can do the Electric Slide. I myself cannot (yet), but I’m working on it!

Why are we so scared of naked people?

PBS. Shakespeare. Not exactly a combination that screams evil pornographic smutty filthy filth, now is it? Until you hear about Sir Ian McKellen getting naked as King Lear, and marvel at the mix of outrage and ewww that the notion seems to bring out of people. Just read the comments on the above linked post alone… and if you need more convincing that Americans are tight-assed about nudity, ask ten people in line at the supermarket whether it’s okay for people to get naked on screen or on stage or on the beach or in the fenced-in privacy of their own back yard.

Here, by way of contrast, is a thoughtful article and discussion (in the comments section) of real-live nudity and whether or not it’s artistically and culturally appropriate, aesthetic and/or harmful.

When I was 15 or 16, my high school bought a block of tickets to the touring production of Equus in Boston. Any student could sign up and go for free. A faculty member drove us in, fed us dinner, and herded us all efficiently into our seats. I didn’t know in advance that two characters (a young man and woman) would get naked onstage. And it wasn’t her nakedness that made everyone shift in their seats, it was his. I’d seen a penis before, but never a real live stranger’s penis loose in the wild, so to speak… and I remember the subtle shock that rippled through the audience. It was partly the sheer vulnerability of it, and partly the symbolic value — anything might now happen. And because of the staging — the play is typically done in the round, and the audience is essentially right on stage — the whole experience was very immediate. We could see the sweat in the actors’ armpits and the goosebumps on their thighs when the air-conditioning hit their bare skin… and suddenly the whole scene was so much more visceral.

That was 30 years ago, and things have moved forward. But this culture is still pretty damn confused in its response to public nudity. Nowadays it seems pretty much accepted for beautiful people to get naked, but let a non-airbrushed person show their skin and suddenly it’s icky and…. and what? I think that word we’re looking for is real. Nudity that we can objectify is fine. Nudity that makes a person more real instead of less — even in a completely non-sexual context — now, that’s scary.

And it is scary, that’s the thing. I say on the talk to me contact form that I won’t send people naked pictures. I’m not sure I would even take naked pictures of myself, not because I’m ashamed of my body, but because I have been socialized to believe that bodies are private. And also because so often women don’t have control over our own bodies, and so the idea of physical privacy becomes much more twined with ideas of safety and self-determination.

So I wouldn’t do a reading naked. I wouldn’t get naked to sell my books. But I might go to a naked beach one of these days. I would definitely skinny-dip with strangers (have done it before). And I would probably get naked on stage or on screen for a role, if it was what the story required.

So what’s the difference? What are the boundaries? No answers here, just questions right now, and curiosity about what others think and feel.

Horror stories

I have been a Stephen King fan since I was a teenager. I think, at his best, he is one of the all-time masters of story and character. He understands how the smallest moment or seemingly unimportant choice can utterly change a life. He can tell a hell of a story. And no one does a particular kind of American voice better. Stephen King books can scare the shit out of me every time, to the point that I get spooked reading them by myself at night.

Other horror books I love: Ghost Story and Shadowland by Peter Straub, The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, Stoker’s Dracula, most all of Poe…

And every once in a while I’ll watch a horror movie. I like Alien, Aliens, Jaws, The Haunting (the 1963 Robert Wise film, not the cringe-inducing Jan de Bont 1999 remake).

All in all, a very short list from a very large field. I stopped appreciating horror when the splatterpunks came along in the 80’s. I’ve read the Books of Blood and the rest of the splattercanon, and you know what? Just don’t like it.

Today I watched 30 Days of Night. Well, I watched about 70% and fast-forwarded through the rest. It wasn’t offensive. It was a smart premise. And the violence was as much suggested as shown — it certainly earns the R rating, but it’s not the linger-lovingly-on-the-violence-in-slow-motion approach that made me turn off Robocop (and please, can someone please help Verhoeven with his issues? It’s getting so I won’t watch a movie with his name on it…).

But in other ways it was too routine to elevate it above the formulaic. A bunch of demographically-varied people get picked off one by one, some because they are stupid and some because they are noble. The nice touch was the ending….

SPOILER ALERT
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… in which the hero realizes that he has to become a monster in order to be able to fight them (they are really strong), so he injects himself with the tainted blood of a victim in order to induce a transformation. He saves his ex-girlfriend and the obligatory orphaned child (yep, same old instant-family routine), and then dies in her arms as the sun finally comes up. No last-minute reprieve.

I wouldn’t watch this movie again, but because it bored me, not because it offended me. And I can certainly be offended. I won’t ever watch the Saw movies or Hostel or Funny Games any of the other torture-porn/let’s-get-sadistic-on-someone’s-ass films that seem to be the new splatterpunk.

If it’s true that horror films help us cathartize (is that a word?) deep cultural fears, allow us to bleed energy out of some personal demons, then maybe it makes some kind of sense that so many of these movies are about random, sadistic violence. The kind of thing any of us are helpless to prevent or to control, that we can only try to survive. Maybe that’s how we’re all feeling about our world and our lives right now. There’s a line I heard that to me is a perfect example, from the new movie The Strangers, in which the heroine asks one of the random masked-into-facelessness strangers, “Why are you doing this to us?” and the stranger says, “Because you were home.” It doesn’t get any more pointed than that.

But I fucking hate those movies. In the worst moments (mine or theirs), I leave them feeling both compartmentalized and complicit in something nasty. I feel flattened. Reduced. I hate the whole story ethic that trivializes human violence by making it “just because” and then making that the center of a story. To me, that’s a rotton core. To me, it’s the same nihilism as the root of splatterpunk — let’s just think of worse and worse things to describe, to witness, to be on some level engaged with, and the first one to blink and turn away is a wuss.

That particular kind of human violence is too frightening and too real to treat that way. I don’t want to see it turned into entertainment, any more than I want to see rape turned into entertainment. But clearly a lot of people do want to see it. And I’m curious why. Anyone who has theories to share (actual theories as opposed to judgment of the audience), I’d really like to hear them. As a storyteller, it’s something I’d like to understand even if I don’t ever want to do it.

I am interested in writing a horror novel someday — but it’ll be more King than Saw. I’d like to explore the kind of scare that seems to be out of vogue right now (typical Eskridge timing) — the fear of the unknown and unknowable, the unexplained, the monsters that scare us because they come from deep within us, or because we are tempted to let them that far in. I hope there will still be a place for that when I get around to it.

What horror films or books have you liked? Can you tell me why? I’m interested in refining my own notions about these things.

Bear bad, BRMC good

So the Wall Street Journal (not the last bastion of cutting-edge cultural hipness, to be sure) thinks that big bad bear markets are responsible for hard rock.

Maybe so, although I’d like to think that I fell in love with Aerosmith in the 80’s because I was 15 and full of hormones, not because someone in Manhattan was losing their shirt on steel shares. Oh, and because of “Dream On,”, still on my favorites list.

Note the last line of the WSJ article, which implies that no great hard rock bands emerged from the dip in 2001….

I beg to differ.

Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, “Love Burns” from their debut album B.R.M.C. 2001.
You can, if you like, imagine Noir listening to BRMC on the bus…

(Oh, and will someone please let me know if the WSJ article link doesn’t work? It’s not clear to me whether the WSJ blog section is public or subscription-only…)

Scalzi’s excellent rant about Fox News

In my house, we haven’t watched television news for more than 10 years. Seriously. Because TV news has become a sad and disgraceful circus of whipped-up frenzy where all headlines are breathlessly delivered with great import, and the news is “teased” during prime-time commercial breaks with summaries intended to scare the pants off god-fearin’ white heterosexual middle-class home owners, where everything comes down to the terrorists, e coli, or Danger To Your Children.

So I get my news from NPR and the BBC, from Nicola (who gets hers from The Economist), and online — in this case from John Scalzi, who wrote about Fox News taking a racist swipe at Michelle Obama last month, and expressed himself so well that I just want to point to it and say, Yep, what he said.

So: Yep, what he said.

I’ve been meaning to link to this ever since I read it, but I dropped off the grid for a while right around that time, so it’s taken me until now to return to it. And isn’t it weird that I feel like I have to apologize for being “late”? Yeeps, internet culture is so… immediate. But there’s unfortunately no shelf life on racism, and there shouldn’t be a shelf life on smacking it down either.