Not the best shot ever, but since it was sitting out on a branch with no obstructions, in bright light, I chased this raptor out into the swamp at Burnaby Lake today.
The real stroke of luck–after seeing the bird in the first place–was that I didn’t end up knee-deep in wet mud in the process. The masses of wet dead winter grass held me up, a little reluctantly, and the bird took wing before I had a chance to plunge out too far in pursuit.
Or maybe it’s just that they seem unfinished.
Last night the National Theater in London beamed a live performance of FRANKENSTEIN out to movie theaters ’round the world. The show has Benedict Cumberbatch of Sherlock as the Creature and Jonny Lee Miller, who we saw in a recent and rather shrill adaptation of Austen’s EMMA, as Victor “Whoops, shouldn’t have gone there!” Frankenstein. The two men trade off the lead roles, and I was glad Cumberbatch was the monster: he did some amazing physical acting, strenuous, fascinating stuff, in the coming-to-life scene. It was unbelievable.
Nick Dear’s script eases us smoothly through all the pivotal scenes in the Mary Shelly novel, but–and this was the show’s only flaw–the dialog was sorely lacking. The characters speeched at each other… and so their emotional connections came off a bit stilted. The actors did what they could to imbue these pedestrian exchanges with more charisma and passion than the words really deserved. And they did rise above. A good actor can lift workmanlike words, after all, and these performances were stunning. The staging, meanwhile, was utterly brilliant and creative. I am so glad I saw it. My brain is filled with happy theater vibes.
On the 31st NTLive is swapping the leads and doing it all again. If you want to see Benedict get his half-mad golden-haired Boy of Science on, there’s still time to get a ticket.
Or, if puppets are more your thing, Superbass and I also saw a preview for an upcoming NT show, War Horse, which I assume will get broadcast next season.
I have been trying to finish up a few non-fiction projects before diving into the next one(s) and the story intros are one of the things have been waiting. I set out to write a little something about those stories of mine that are available online in some format, and now I’ve pretty much finished all of them except for my baby werewolf story, “The Cage.” Saving it for last seemed reasonable, since it’s the piece that appeared most recently. It has only been a year since I wrote it, so it’s far less of a blast from the past than something like “A Key to the Illuminated Heretic.”
But I realized last week that when “The Cage,” made the LOCUS recommended reading list, it also went on what they call the drop-down list for the LOCUS reader’s poll. This probably should have been a no-brainer, since I did once write a fair number of reviews for LOCUS and contribute to that list, but I didn’t make the connection until I bought my tickets for the LOCUS shindig in Seattle in June. There are so many lovely things by people I adore on the drop-down list: M.K. Hobson‘s The Native Star
But this is a wide-open to all readers kind of poll, and you don’t have to restrict yourself to the drop down list. You can write in books and stories, like–for example–Jessica Wynne Reisman‘s “The Vostrasovitch Clockwork Animal and Traveling Forest Show at the End of the World,” or … hey, tell me about all the great fiction you published last year, folks! You’ll be reminding me about stuff I loved, or at the very least stuff I meant to read and temporarily lost in the pile.
Anyway. “The Cage” began with an anthology invite: my agent knew someone who was doing a book of urban fantasy stories with a specific theme–she’d told ’em I was just the thing, and I got the guidelines not long after that. I started researching March 2, 2010 and had a polished draft in hand by April 5th. But not fast enough: the antho filled. Between one thing and another and with a rewrite in between, it ended up zipping off to Tor.com on June 8th, where it got to be the final story in their urban fantasy spotlight.
As my intros for “What Song the Sirens Sang” and “Faces of Gemini” probably show, I love story assignments that come with a bit of a restriction in them. They push me out of the box, moving me into areas I wouldn’t necessarily have gone on my own. Some of my strongest shorts are the ones I wrote for Mojo: Conjure Stories
In this case, I merged the less familiar element–home renovation–with my own backyard. I made extensive use of my neighborhood and certain communities within Vancouver in writing “The Cage.” The Britannia Community Center branch of Vancouver Public Library, where the story begins, is just a few blocks from my home in little Italy. It is where I pick up my VPL holds and where I got my blue belt in aikido.
The physical terrain is quite faithfully rendered, in other words.
The community is stickier: people always are. But the story draws on the best of my experiences as an activist in the local feminist and queer communities. Catching us on a fictional best day maybe presents a bit of a rose colored view, but it’s not as though that version of the community doesn’t exist. It does–just not all the time. I believe that humans, in singles and in groups, oscillate in and out of states of perfection. That the statement “Nobody’s perfect” should be amended to “Nobody’s always perfect.”
In “The Cage,” Jude’s alternate family discovers or creates one of those perfect moments–one of those days when everyone’s pitching in and pulling together, when nobody’s too burned out or sick or pissed off or scraping after funds or endlessly chewing after consensus on an irrelevant frippery, at a meeting that’s gone on far too long. It’s Team Good Guys FTW, and Chase, Paige and Jude are the ones who benefit.
All that, and it even has romance!
Glee has become a lot more loosely scripted this season, which annoys the hell out of my writer brain. It shouldn’t, perhaps. I should just buy into it as if it were opera, because really that’s what it is evolving into: a series of loosely connected, genuinely awesome emotional moments–like the Kurt/Burt scene in “Sexy”– set to music.
There’s so much good I feel bad about complaining. An out gay kid, OMG! With a supportive family! Eee! And the expanded cast has some terrific new characters… though this does mean there’s less action for the folks I love. In particular there’s less Mercedes, less Kurt and less wild-eyed ranting of Sue. Then again, there’s also less of some of the characters I’m not so keen on, characters I don’t love, and plenty of wholesome Artie content.
Anyway, with my backbrain grumbling about the plot, what plot, got plot? between viewings, I forget, sometimes, how much I am enjoying the show now that things with That One storyline, the one that was troubling me, have moved on. One thing I am liking a lot is that there are three unabashedly plus-sized women on the show (that’d be Mercedes Jones, Coach Shannon Bieste, and lately, Lauren Zyses) and not one of them is a villain or a full-time object of ridicule.
Oh, Lauren, I’m oddly in love with you! The crap you hand out to Puck, and the way he bends himself, pretzel-like, around your boundaries, give me no end of joy. Everything you do is magic. And the simple fact that an undisputed high school hottie who could be banging the likes of Santana is instead pursuing a large, proud, demanding, athletic woman… well, it’s delightful. I remember the twiglike cast of Buffy (which I adored, don’t get me wrong) and I compare it with this trio of curvy womanhood and it warms the heart.
Sadly, no amount of Lauren can keep my writerbrain from carping about Will Schuster.
Will is, was and will always be the center of the adult-themed storyline. He’s the major driver for Glee‘s Let’s set the Karate Kid to Music! overall story arc. In the first season, he had so many interesting things to push against: his attraction to Emma, the failing marriage to Terri, Sue’s multiple attempts to sabotage him and, above all, his own competitive demons. The guy had to keep figuring out that glee club was about the kids, not him. It worked, I thought, pretty well.
Nowadays he seems to be all out of push.
Matthew Morrison is such a talented performer. I was thrilled to see him tango and sing in “Sexy.” But he’s seeming underused. Is this character at a dead end? Am I the only one who misses the days when he was fighting to hold the kids together, dodging Sue/Terri attacks of utter bizarre, and occasionally even managing to teach stuff?
These days, Will flails. Sometimes toward or away from Emma, sometimes at Sue, sometimes at getting the kids to Nationals. I am loving his friendship with Shannon, but that’s frosting–it doesn’t a storyline make. Getting just a mouthful of cake now and then would make me so much happier.
I’m not asking for Whedon here, or even Shakespeare, and I am having fun, I am. What do you think, interpeeps? Is it just me?
photo by Kristy Boyce
The Color of Paradox
The Cage