Crow Dog, Tricksters and The Crow King

I'd been buried deep in Snorri's Prose Edda during the day, but in the evening, at the Soho Theatre, just as night was falling...TUUP's irresistible voice, wirf box shaped accordion and mischeivious smile snatched me away to the woods and plains of the southern USA, when slavery was just about still ok. A boy escapes a massacre and becomes a shaman, and just...well, just lives, I guess. Not much to separate this story from lots of others except that the way TUUP told it had me laughing and crying and hurting and flying like some sort of puppet. Grandfather Grizzly Bear was there - then he was gone. The sight of the moon through the leaves of the trees when you're lying on a stretcher mortally wounded was there - then gone. I could go on.

Afterwards, in the bar, I needed (needed!) two glasses of wine before I sounded like myself, and not some starstruck 15 year old. Loki made an appearance, for a second. Anansi fixed to fight him.

Story Hunting Part 1

What can be more alluring to a wordaholic than evangelising about stories, and making them relevant? I can't think of anything.

Having spent most of my life reading everything I could get my hands on, until not so very long ago I didn't really even think that the telling of a story, unscripted, out loud, to an audience, could be where it comes most alive. But it can. And it is! I spent most of last week in Worcestershire at 'Story-telling camp' exploring hundreds of different ways of 'freeing' a traditional story (I'm sure it would work for other stories too) from its text form. It's actually more helpful if you DON'T think of it as text, major discovery of the week. Up until recently, I'd almost always learnt or composed lines, memorised them, and then recited them back unless I was telling very informally. I was good at that. Storytelling, real live Storytelling there is nothing of the 'comfort zone' about it - but it's vital, exciting, and relevant in a way that scripted things simply can't be, I don't think! I had to get used to my own speaking voice again. But the stories...oh, the stories I heard, and saw, and learnt, and discovered. I have to learn how to do it myself. So, I will. Well, I am.

So this week's educational reading is Afanasiev's Russian Folk Tales, Angela Carter's Virago Book of Fairy Tales, Hrolf's Saga Kraka, and Snorri's Prose Edda. I'm hunting a trickster fable, and a tellable section of an Epic, for Story Camp Take 2 the week after next.

Watching the masters at work was another pleasure of this week. I took myself off to see Jo Blake telling The Girl Who Became a Boy (Adam and Eve, Tiresias, a brave soldier girl, a talking horse and a case of mistaken identity...and lots lots more) at the Royal and Derngate Theatre in Northampton.

Jo Blake in a previous show - no pics of the new one online!

Now, I don't usually travel half way up the country on a school night to see a performance billed to last less than the time it took to get there, so I was completely delighted that it was so much more than worth it! Even before I knew what was going on in the story, I loved her voice, and the way she didn't need to do exaggerated accents to suggest character. I can't usually sit still for more than half an hour without starting to fizz and buzz and fidget in the most annoying way...but if my legs went dead during this performance (which was so packed there was only room to sit around the edges) I didn't notice until it was over. Just her, on stage, two props and a cardigan, with two musicians off to the side playing the occasional interlude. Hahhh. Amazing.

'Good'

I often worry that the older I get, the less I am able to distinguish between 'good' (i.e. original, engaging, profound) and 'entertaining' (not original, not profound, but engaging). I worry whether my good opinion of a book I've read or a performance I've seen is mistaken. When I am wrong, it's embarrassing: on a second reading or even a proper moment of thought, the value I saw dissolves like wet candyfloss. I hope this happens to other people, too. What, apart from a lazy mind, makes a first reaction so clearly wrong?

Last month I went to the Arcola to see The Piano Removal Company's final performance of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina as retold by Helen Edmundson. None of the reviewers had liked it that much so I had relatively low expectations. But, I ended up being totally enthralled by the exuberant final performance. I laughed, and cried and felt for Anna and Levin. Edmundson's play has each telling their stories to each other, which enhanced both to an intensity I haven't seen in a while. And it was played with such utter and charming commitment that it swept me away completely (I love it when that happens). It didn't bother me that none of the physical theatre devices they used – chairs turning into other things, folk songs and dances, fast changes in dramatic perspective, minimal props and lots of mime – were original. A horse race could be a sex scene, a marriage proposal and a divorce could happen in the same moment because two tables were set up the same way on stage. A crop harvest scene could be superimposed onto a Moscow drawing room. It didn't bother me on the night. But the following morning, like a hangover, it did.

Theatre doesn't last, I suppose, it isn't built to, but I can't help feeling a bit cheated that it's a hazy sadness, the odd set piece and how young and beautiful all the actors were, rather than the play itself, that I remember best. I remember loving the fact that they played a rock and roll version of the Tetris theme tune at the beginning of the second half, and that at one point later a hooded man (death?) dances a bullfight with Levin. Totally engaging at the time, but not enough now to disguise that the second half should have been half as long. I didn't need to see Anna die on stage. I didn't need to see her cry quite so much. The birth and death scenes, so effective in the first half, felt a bit overdone in the second.

But it still made me go out and buy the book

Anime All Nighter

I've been consistently tempted by Sci-Fi London's Anime for a couple of years now, even though I have never, ever, been able to stay up all night and am generally sceptical of anything that locks you in a room with people you don't know for 10 hours, even if they ARE antisocial ones. I took the plunge this year though, and, starting at midnight, finishing at 8.30am, I watched AKIRA in HD, REDLINE, and two feature length films of EDEN OF THE EAST.

I've lost count of the number of times I've seen bits of AKIRA, but it was only on Saturday night, coming up for 2 in the morning, that I realised I'd never actually seen / it / all / the / way / through. The story is much thinner than my Manga-rhapsodised heart remembers, but the scale and beauty of it more than make up for that. I was awestruck. Again. And I stayed awake!

After a cool few hours sleep through EDEN OF THE EAST (not a late night movie, and (sorry) not dark enough for me), REDLINE - perhaps more aptly named red EYE for the state of mine by that time - kept me happily awake between 6.30 and 8.30am. Loud, brash animation and a soundtrack to match, romantic, sexist in the best way possible...what more could I possibly want? Other than some sleep. In a bed, preferably.

EasterCon and The Desert

I usually like to talk about books before I read them, so I have no idea why the brilliant Lauren Beukes' ZOO CITY (yes I DID buy it before it won), a slightly dubious 'Con tombola' win of book I already forgot the name of, and my five-years belated subscriptions to Interzone and Black Static have languished unwritten about for almost a fortnight.

 Perhaps it's because I got a sneak preview of Hari Kunzru's new Arizona Desert epic GODS WITHOUT MEN the same weekend. I've always loved the desert (the idea and the reality of it) and stories where the setting is a character in itself. I wasn't disappointed here: the menace and otherworldliness of it was evoked so well it gave me the shivers. Perhaps there were one or two too many storylines to follow, but since they all mean something, and all add up to this heartbreaking exploration of loss -the grief, the hallucinations, the fear, the euphoria...you juse can't fault the guy. It's out in August. By which time I hope to have read his other books - something I've been meaning to do for about ten years.

But getting back to ZOO CITY. Hardboiled, accessibly, utterly absorbing, dirty, violent, and fun. It also blows the fantastical lid off Johannesburg, a city I knew nothing about before - a treat and a half. The reviews say everything useful I can think of - particularly taken with 'Raymond Chandler's BIG SLEEP crossed with Jeff Noon's VURT'... perhaps there's a shade of Michael Marshall Smith's early stuff in there too.  I'll be looking out for Lauren Beukes' other books now - MOXYLAND, of course, since its out...but I'll be first in the queue for the next Zinzi novel if there is one. What a great new female 'PI' to add to the acres of hardass men: Beukes gives her a turn of phrase that I'd sell my soul to have myself.

'Bliss' is the wrong word for my Bank Holiday reading, every book was far too dark for that...perhaps the utter dirty addictiveness of it has more in common with the Dark Chocolate Hob Nob.

Kapow! 2011

Having had a great time, met a brilliant new author, and finally subscribed to Murky Depths quarterly magazine which I've been meaning to do since last year's EasterCon, I am ashamed not to have written anything at all yet about the Kapow! Comic Con 2011. Pictures probably say it best:

Translation: It was at the Business Design Centre in Islington, and it was big!

Translation: there was a cosplay competition, and these are only a few of the fantastic costumes people had on during the weekend! I personally met a very talkative Jedi knight and a giant rabbit. Myself, I made do with the usual 'vaguely reminiscent of Ghost in the Shell android' biker boots and garishly shiny blue hair.

I got a promising looking non-Japanese Tokyopop manga (soon to be rare now their shutting up shop in the US) called Poison Candy, another 3 volumes of Naoki Urazawa's delightfully meaty and multifaceted near-future 'novel in manga form' 20th Century Boys, a properly nice Manga t-shirt which I am seriously considering wearing to work I like it so much, and evangelised about Self Made Hero and Kiki de Montparnasse to a hardened Marvel fan which seemed to go remarkably well. And...

Ok I admit it. I also raided the CyberCandy stall and am still feasting on 'Amped Apple' favour Super Sour Nerds. Mmmm.

Kiki de Montparnasse

Lots of people know that Kiki de Montparnasse was Man Ray's muse, but I had no idea that she knew and inspired so many others: Mendjisky, Soutine, Modigliani, Matisse are only a few of them. So the fast-moving, lusciously produced, completely addictive, Angouleme prize-winning comic by Jose Louis Bocquet and Catel Muller was educational as well as an absolute pleasure to read.

I like learning about people and events through comics. The story gets so many more chances to come to life when the teller can give you look and the speed of the story visually and in words, and when the two complement each other as well. Always looking for ways to express the relationship between stories and real life, I was particularly taken with a line spoken by Maurice Mendjisky just before he and Kiki fall in love, that 'we're all just tenants in our own stories'. Is that true? Perhaps it is. Do we leave when we can't pay the rent? Is it more about choice - you choose where you are and who have to justify your existence there in some way? Or is it about situation - the walls, the room, don't belong to you, and everything you take with you when you leave doesn't depend on the situation you first got it in?

I had a terrible craving for millionaire's shortbread while I was reading this. I blame that craving on 1) wanting to have as much fun as Kiki but the nearest fun thing being a cake shop and 2) that like millionaire's shortbread the story was surprisingly easy to digest for something so rich. Nonsense? Perhaps.

I learned even more about Kiki in the beautifully illlustrated 4 part guest blog by the authors on the Self Made Hero website. Self Made Hero are on fire at the moment, it seems - next I'll be tucking into the new Lovecraft anthology which has had nothing but good reviews. And I have a copy at home, to boot. Bring it on!