Netsuke and New (to me!) Manga

After feasting on literary delights as rich and elegant as Edmund de Waal's The Hare With Amber Eyes, wonderful though it undoubtedly was, I need to pause and...well, digest. Any book about netsuke is always going to put me in mind of other Things Japanese. Here is my favourite netsuke at the V&A (a monk carrying his familiars around inside peaches):

Then there's Sam's and my new Manga addiction. I say new not because we're new to liking Manga, but that we're new to actually BUYING lots of it. 'It's ok', we say to each other now, 'we're supporting our local bookshop'. Well, we are! There are few causes more deserving than the Big Green Bookshop, as many, including the redoubtable Scott Pack (who likes cake almost as much as I do as well as being rather brilliant) who held a 'tweet-up' there this week, will testify...although should we really be having this much fun doing something heroic?

Latest and best so far for me is probably Kou Yaginuma's Twin Spica - the enchanting story of Asumi Kamogawa and her adventures at Space School. Mini amaretti biscuits, both of them:

But then altogether darker, beautifully illustrated, thinner, but just as addictive, is Tsutomu Nihei's Biomega. The first three volumes have me completely hooked into a dark, scratchy, vast future cityscape peopled with  huge motorbikes, half-human heroes and a gun-toting bear. Akira on crack. Brilliant. Green and Black's Dark Chocolate covered shortbread. Almost too much!

Books and Biscuits

My two favourite things in the world are Books and Biscuits.If a book reminds me of a biscuit I've loved, or a biscuit reminds me of a book I loved, I think ''why not say so"?

So, a hypothetical one to start with. I've never actually associated Moby Dick with a biscuit before...but if I did, would probably be a Fox's Classic. Silly though the analogy may seem, it follows certain simple criteria. Both rich and delicious on the outside, both 'classics' (of course), both probably enjoyed just slightly too long ago to actually remember them with any clarity; with a centre that is just a little bit difficult to get through...ok I'll stop there.  There is, of course, NOTHING sweet about Moby Dick, and the centre is hard to get through because it describes such paroxysms of boredom, rather than because it's sickly. Followed through to its logical conclusion, this would be unbelievably silly. In fact, it IS unbelievably silly. But no system is perfect. For me, though, the idea of being duty bound to treat myself to the one or the other a bit more often than I perhaps otherwise would, it simply too delicious to resist!

Mad March Hares

Hurray! Crick! Crack! I have completed the first step on my voyage of Performance Storytelling discovery! My mission: to see as much storytelling as I can in the next three months - ha. So, off I went to an evening at Rich Mix to  see and hear Hugh Lupton, Jan Blake and Tim Ralphs do their stuff. Two days later, I still can't get the image out of my head of a cow removing her (human) daughter's face by licking it...yuck! Or anansi sitting on a cart singing the oddest girls' name in the world to a ragga tune...OR a giantess climbing into a small sack...OR a billy goat's innocent stare at an evil and clearly smelly troll...I could go on.

All three storytellers were in tip top form in my humble opinion. They became all of their characters with  amazing agility which I have the hugest respect for -  as my rather shaky performances as a clown and at the end of the Pleasance Drama course I just finished will testify, I have trouble enough just dealing with one at the moment! But o, what better motivation to learn a craft than seeing the masters at work!?

Enter Wordbird!

Stories, Stories, Stories

Ever since I resolved to tell stories better, inspired by the Japanese storytelling group Spice Arthur 702's masterful performance of contemporary Kamishibai (basically 'comics performed live'), almost no day goes by without me spotting a new storytelling event which I see to HAVE to go to! That has made for a very busy few weeks. A taste of Spice Arthur themselves:

Last night my first visit to the Storytellers' Club at the Pleasance turned out to be a pretty interesting evening: Sarah Bennetto's opening story about a long-time Barrista (not 'barrister') who plays his favourite band in the shop every day but misses them the one day they actually come to the shop, was heartbreaking. I love the idea of indie coffee shops (I don't really drink coffee but the cakes are usually better) but the East London Coffee Disloyalty Card featured in the story is probably one commitment to far for me. But it does look nice.

Add all this to the upcoming 'Yarnfest 2011' in February (which to my slight horror, starts tomorrow), and that makes a very busy wordbird!

And that's as WELL as the monthly outing for the Crick Crack Club at the Soho Theatre. This Tuesday, the club takes on takes on the Animal World.

A Tender Morsel...

...of very pleasing news, that the brilliant Margo Lanagan's novel Tender Morsels has won the World Fantasty Award for Best Novel. It's a controversial win - the book is harrowing and horrible, and the bittersweet ending is far more bitter than sweet, but it is also utterly compelling. Wonderful news!

I first came across Margo Lanagan on the way to the 2006 BFS Fantasycon in Nottingham, when I read her second collection Black Juice in one sitting. I'm looking forward to finding out more about the novels she wrote before which still don't seem to be readily available in the UK but do appear on her Wikipedia page

Sisters, Superheroines and Polish Theatre (!)

After a frustrating week of losing my carefully written blog posts before putting them up (stupid) I start this week knackered but with new resolve after spending the weekend in Cardiff with my two (not so) little sisters. We took lots of silly photos, generally shopped, drank, danced and talked far too much, which was fantastic, and bought the most adorable she-ra pants from Topshop. Aren't they gorgeous?     I still have copies of my old She-Ra book and tapes from when I was a kid: not even this 80's characters website has THOSE.

This weekend was certainly a change from last, which was theatre-filled: I was on a performance course in the bowels of the Barbican, going back to my youth acting roots with a weekend of homage to Grotowski and his TOWARDS A POOR THEATRE. Which I loved: the devotion of it, and the almost architectural theatrical effects you can get with just bodies, and light, and voices. Blown away by the photo exhibition at the National of Grotowski's last performance, APOKALYPSIS CUM FIGURIS. This was my favourite image, I stood in front of it, trying to draw the shapes, for FAR too long:



Might go and see it again. Shiver with temptation and glee! Also saw the brilliantly-sung but pretty hardgoing GOSPELS OF CHILDHOOD by Theatr Zar.  It was one of those performances which are better once you've had a bit of time to think about them. And, I have to admit, once you have the opportunity to quiz the director about it for an hour.