Shakespeare Squad

(apologies for the cross-posting, and for those who’ve seen the news elsewhere already!)

About a month ago, Jim let me know that he wanted to take me to New York City for the Dances of Vice festival. I’ve been drooling over the online photos from this event for years now, but the idea of traveling to NYC for a costume party has always seemed excessive, especially for my inclined-to-the-frugal self. I hesitated a bit, but he made a good argument, so I gave in and let him set things up.

Boy, am I glad I did that!

The festival itself was a lot of fun, although there were a couple of stumbling points. We got in mid-Friday and just chilled near our Brooklyn hotel for a while before the Friday night cruise around Manhattan. It was a bit harder to meet people on the cruise than I’d hoped – the deck was chilly and the interior was one large, noisy room with bands and bellydancers – but we had fun admiring the outfits and the skyline. Still, it was a bit of a soft note to start the weekend, and I think we were both a little worried about it.

Saturday made up for all that in spades. We did a whirlwind tour around Manhattan, hitting all the key spots (for us): Uniqlo shopping for Jim, a couple of fun stores around SoHo, a long wander through Central Park, lunch at a funky diner, watching a proposal at Rockerfeller Plaza, Grand Central and Times Square and a whole bunch more. We were pretty exhausted by the time we headed out for the Shipwreck Ball that night, but happy – especially once we reached the location and discovered that people were much friendlier at this event than they’d been at the cruise. We met some great folks and were having a pretty awesome time….

And then Jim conspired with Coco, the MC, to grab the mike and drag me up front before Hellblinki’s set in order to propose:

(click-through for a photo set from the weekend)

Obviously, I said YES.

The rest of the trip was a bit of a blur after that: Jim managed to catch me truly off-guard and it took a while for the reality of it all to sink it. We did have a great time, including a lovely brunch on Sunday at the Montauk Club and a hilarious adventure at the Brooklyn Superhero Supply company, but mostly I was busy boggling at my ridiculous good fortune.

Since everyone keeps asking: we don’t have any specific plans in mind yet, aside from trying to find a date outside the ongoing con schedule (which is challenging, considering that UDON’s con schedule currently runs mid-March through mid-Sept!). I’ll try to keep y’all updated, without babbling incessantly about the whole thing.

Originally published at Stacy King. You can comment here or there.

Given how the month is shaping up, it’s unlikely I’m going to manage more than a sparse post every week or so. Which is possibly just as well: my friend Chris commented last weekend that my posts have been sounding a bit dissatisfied, which is not really how I want to be coming across.

Things are going well: plugging away on UDON’s 2010 convention schedule, starting the (far too soon, eek!) preparations for the dread December holiday season, and keeping to a solid writing schedule. The last is probably most exciting to me (well, the con planning is pretty exciting too!). I’m doing a sort of UnNaNoWriMo: taking the concept of just write, dammit and tweaking it for my own needs. The goal right now is to hit the NaNo 50K mark by end of the month, and carry on at the same pace to wrap up the full draft by Dec 15. So far I’m on track, which means – in superstitious writer fashion – I’m unwilling to talk about it much more than that, lest I jinx myself!

…. and I’m out of time.

Originally published at Stacy King. You can comment here or there.

I was planning to post about Halloween: costumes (keymaster & gatekeeper from GHOSTBUSTERS), pumpkins, parties and comic book treats, but the week started busy and then Maine voted against same-sex marriage rights and I was back to my usual misanthropic self, which is generally a Not Good place from which to blog.

And then mid-week got even more busy and I didn’t have time to post and now it’s Friday and I still don’t have time, darnit, because I spent most of today trying to find out why other people haven’t gotten their work done and now I’m seriously behind on my daily word-count, argh!

So this isn’t a real post either. This is the blog equivalent of wiping off the sink with a rag and shoving the dirty socks under the sofa, lest your guests think you have no sense of cleanliness and decorum at all.

Ahem. In the meantime, here’s a picture of the thing that made me laugh the hardest today:

Sweater shorts.

No, really.
SWEATER SHORTS.
A steal at just 15,000 yen! (about $150 US)

Originally published at Stacy King. You can comment here or there.

Although New York tempts me with its cinematic offerings, London is the city that really knows how to lure me in: the bookstores. Oh, oh, the London bookstores. Specifically, the London esoteric bookstores, with their pedigrees and their events and their shelves stacked high with obscure grimoires and dusty alchemical texts. Oh! It sets my bibliophile heart aflutter, just thinking of it!

Treadwell’s is top of my personal list, if only for the delightfully tempting list of titles and events listed on their webpage. They’re the newest of the lot, open less than six years now, but the owner has an academic background in medieval history and their selection seems both interesting and reasonably-priced (well, as far as antiquarian book collecting goes). Their lectures series is absolutely fascinating to me, and I’m likely to make Jim batty when we visit London by trying to plan our trip to accommodate some upcoming Treadwell’s speaker or event.

Next on the tour is Atlantis Bookshop, one of London’s oldest occult bookshops. It should probably be first, given it was founded in 1922 by a group of magicians that included Austin Osman Spare, Dion Fortune and Aleister Crowley, and they do run another impressive series of events, lectures and pub nights. Chalk it up to nostalgia: Treadwell’s was the first bookstore I fell in love with online, and I’m still a bit sweet on them as a result.

Finally, there’s Watkins Books, who almost got the top billing when I spotted the A.O. Spare book on the top of their Antiquarian page. (Then I spotted the price, which may well be reasonable for Spare’s extraordinarily rare works, but still!) Watkins was actually founded before Atlantis Bookshop, issuing their first catalog in 1987 and opening doors on their current location in 1901. W.B. Yeats used to shop here, and the original owner was a friend (and printer) for H P. Blavatsky, a key figure in the Victorian occult revival. Like I said, pedigree!

Londonist.com has some lovely photos of all three shops in their Biblio-Text series: Treadwell’s, Watkins and Atlantis.

Ah me. In lieu of an overseas trip, I’ll have to make time this weekend for a stop-in at The Monkey’s Paw, one of my favorite browsing spots in Toronto. They may not have a specific focus in esoteric/occult texts, but there’s always one or two books in their little glass shelf to make my heart go pit-a-pat.

Originally published at Stacy King. You can comment here or there.

As much as I adore my adopted hometown of Toronto, there are times when I wish I lived elsewhere. Usually New York, and usually because of some film-related event. Like right now, when I’m staring at the schedule for the upcoming MOMA To Save and Project film festival. Newly restored versions of NANOOK OF THE NORTH and Frank Capra’s FORBIDDEN on the big screen? A showing of HAXAN: WITCHCRAFT THROUGH THE AGES, a 1922 silent Swedish film that’s been on my want-to-see list since I missed out on the last Toronto screening years ago due to schedule conflicts*? And – gem of gems – a restored print of Lotte Reiniger’s THE ADVENTURES OF PRINCE ACHMED? What a feast of old-timey cinematic glee!

I’ve seen a few of Lotte Reiniger’s shorts, and outtakes from an unrestored version of ACHMED, but never the full film; hopefully, this new restoration will merit a DVD release (there’s one currently available, but I’ve been a bit hesitant about the transfer quality). Her life story is pretty interesting, and her influence resonates clearly among modern directors such as the Brothers Quay and Guy Maddin (in particular, the silhouette sequences in ARCHANGEL).

“I love working for children, because they are a very critical and very thankful public.” – Lotte Reiniger

(links via the Dangerous Minds blog)

* – oh, and it turns out HAXAN is public domain and thus available online; the quality won’t be as nice as a print, of course, but I’ll have to give it a try this weekend, just to see.

Originally published at Stacy King. You can comment here or there.

SYMBOL (Shinboru): my twitter review for this film pretty much sums it up: “never has one man’s surreal angst been so incredibly funny”. SYMBOL was definitely the weirdest film I saw at TIFF this year, and also the funniest. Funny in that hand-over-mouth,-faintly-embarrassed-to-be-laughing-so-hard-at-this kind of way. If you enjoy those odd Japanese game shows that pop up on Youtube once in a while, SYMBOL is probably for you.

The film starts with two plotlines: one follows a Japanese man who awakens alone in an all-white room with no apparent means of escape, the other follows a Mexican wrestler preparing for a match. The connection between the two isn’t immediately obvious, and even once it’s revealed, may leave some viewers scratching their heads. It gets stranger from there, building up to an ending that’s either jaw-dropping or totally pretentious, depending on your personal feelings about life, the universe and everything. I thought it was awesome, but I also saw it on the last day of the festival, so that might just be my sleep dep talking.

Also: this film is not for those who find male nudity uncomfortable. There is literally more angel penis in this film than I would have ever thought possible; it’s not obscene, but it is hilarious. And difficult to explain to anyone under 16, I’d imagine.

Originally published at Stacy King. You can comment here or there.

Valhalla Rising: I learned a very valuable lesson from VALHALLA RISING; never take your friends to see an art house film, even if said art house film involves a good deal of viking violence. They won’t enjoy it, and their obvious non-enjoyment is going to keep knocking you out of the film as well.

VALHALLA RISING is perhaps the most metal film I’ve ever seen; brutal, vicious, desolate and strangely powerful. I’m not really sure I can recommend it, but if you’re up for a curiously-paced exploration of inhumanity, faith and delirium, this would be a good place to start. The first 30 minutes play like a Hong Kong action film, loaded up with ugly yet compelling combat sequences; the last hour is a surrealist descent into increasing chaos and solitude, like watching a group of people slowly starve to death in the woods. Only with more axe fights and mud baths. The film is soaked in an unrelenting bleakness, from the characters and plot to the cinematography itself, a monochromatic palette that strips forest and ocean down to a stark, sad beauty.

Don’t let the trailer fool you, by the way, as to the amount of narrative explanation the film provides – about a third of the dialogue in the film is in the trailer, and the closer the film moves towards the climax, the less vocal everyone becomes, leaving the audience to puzzle out scenes and motivations on their own.

THE WAITING CITY: My viewing of this film was no doubt influenced by the terrible mood I was in the day I saw it, but it managed to strike all the wrong notes with me. The basics: uptight professional woman and her laid-back musician husband travel to India to complete a long-planned adoption; delays happen and their relationship starts to strain as a result. There really wasn’t much here that struck me as new or fresh; not the unraveling plot, not the oh-so-typical characters, not the “attractive white people exploring an exotic culture” motif. It’s competent enough, and probably worth watching if you have an interest in international adoption or India, but nothing groundbreaking.

Originally published at Stacy King. You can comment here or there.

Jos asked for weird movies, so weird movies it is! I still haven't done anything longer than a Twitter review for any of the Toronto International Film Fest screenings I saw, so there's plenty for me to catch up on. To be honest, I saw far fewer films this year than I usually cram in. A typical TIFF, for me, involves anywhere from 35 to 50+ films over 10 days; this year was a paltry 24, if you count the short film screening as a single movie. I also saw more "mainstream" films this year, which translates to anything hitting theatres in the six months following the fest. I missed out on a bunch of films I really wanted to see - AIR DOLL and MALL GIRLS I'm particularly sorry to have not seen - but hopefully I'll have a chance to track those down, either at indie cinema showings or DVD.

HIPSTERS (Stilyagi): To be honest, I almost skipped this film based on the translated name alone. So I owe a massive thanks to Matt for recommending I check it out, given that it turned out to be one of my favorite films of the entire fest.

The core premise is classic musical with a Russian twist: during the height of the Cold War, a member of the Communist Youth Party falls for a rebellious girl and dives head-first into a forbidden subculture of jazz, flashy clothes and swing dance to win her heart, discovering himself along the way. Sappy as all good musicals must be, but leavened by the constant background of the oppressive Soviet regime and a slightly odd pacing that keeps it from being too pat. The dance numbers are a blur of color and joy, the acting is solid, and it's a fascinating peek into a little-known youth subculture. The Stilyagi were a cultural palimpsest, an attempt to recreate a forbidden style with little clear information and lots of misconceptions to go on. It reminds me of a bunch of the Japanese youth movements, especially the rockabillies, who are a darker take on the stilyagi style: James Dean versus Chuck Berry, as it were. I'm fascinated by the way cultures borrow and rewrite one another (on that take, I highly recommend SUKIYAKI WESTERN DJANGO for a wild rethinking of the Samuri Cowboy aesthetic) and HIPSTERS has a great deal of fun exploring this area. The closing song sequence, in particular, is one of the most uplifting, glee-soaked bits of cinema I've ever seen.

Unfortunately, I can't find any subtitled video clips online, but there's a trailer here and one of my favorite numbers (when the main character gets kicked out of the Youth Group, a tribute to unity and conformity) online here to give you a flavor. Like the Stilyagi themselves, the film is a pastiche of musical and cinematic styles, blended together into an odd but satisfying whole.

“I can resist anything except temptation.” – Oscar Wilde

Wilde’s amusingly accurate quote lies at the core of my writing discipline, such as it is: if temptation can not be resisted, it must be removed. Which is to say, I mostly manage to write once I have made it impossible to do anything else.

I’m one of those terrible café writers, the sort who spend hours nursing a single coffee while tapping away. This is not because I want to be seen writing, which is the general stereotype about café writers, but because I am incapable of working at home, where there are so many constant tugs on my attention. Laundry to be done! Emails to be answered! Puttering to be putted! Embarrassing as it may be, I’m much more productive now that I’ve accepted my weakness.

Hence, the café, and the laptop with disabled wireless access. (I am among the few who mourned when Starbucks introduced free wifi; although my machine doesn’t log-on automatically, knowing the option exists is a breech of the temptation avoidance rules.) Access to the Internet inevitably leads to meandering on the internet, usually under the pretext of looking up “just one thing”. Zero tolerance is the only policy which really works for me.

Those of you who can plonk down in the middle of everything and focus: how do you do it? Temptation-riddled minds want to know!

Clearly trying to update this blog based solely on my writing life isn’t working out all that well, mostly because there’s not much to say. I’ve discovered from a couple of recent stumbles that talking about a work in progress is a fast route to losing direction on the manuscript, so that topic’s a no go. My process doesn’t really involve anything that hasn’t already been covered in-depth elsewhere, and repetition for the sake of filling up space isn’t my style. And I can’t help but feel that talking about the whole querying process, while in the midst, qualifies as an Extremely Poor Idea.

So what’s a blogger to do? Talk about something else! I’m going to try and keep the focus fairly light, mostly pop culture musings around my core obsessions: alternative fashion, art house cinema, quirky Toronto and publishing. I’ll try and keep my other main interests, politics and feminism, to a light sprinkling, mostly because I have neither the time nor interest to a/ educate or b/argue about those topics via this medium. I’m unlikely to review YA or MG fiction, largely because I’d feel awkward posting about anything I didn’t like, and always-positive reviews are a bit dull, but I will talk about publishing trends and some specific, outstanding titles.

Please feel welcome to suggest other topics you’d be interested in, noting that my personal life is largely off the table. (as a related note: if you happen to be an ex-boyfriend, please bugger off. Seriously.)