neoNuma Arts: literature, performance, art

With Regard to the Publishing Venture

2011-01-02T19:27:00.000-08:00

neoNuma Arts has, for intents and purposes, has ceased to exist as a publishing venture. The neonuma.com website no longer exists and I may not bring it back. It sort of slipped out of existence when I was preoccupied with other things and not sure when or if I'll get it back.

The books that neoNuma Arts published continue to be available. Those books are:

Nighthawks by Evan Guilford-Blake. Evan continues to get produced here and there and around the world. Check out this play. It's a lovely piece of drama.

The Comic Flaw by Alan Berecka. I've recently described this as "Sh*t my Dad Says only in poetry." Except it's the whole family. Alan isn't all laughs, as he usually turns the hysterical anecdote into poignant human commentary---which is what makes him brilliant. It seems this book has a special resonance with people who grew up in a strongly ethnic, Roman Catholic family, but that doesn't describe me, so the appeal is broader than that. I'm just saying, in case a Roman Catholic from a distinct ethnic heritage is reading. (There are rumors of a second Berecka collection coming in 2011 --- get this one now so you don't have to buy too many books at once!)

Necropolis by Jill Alexander Essbaum. Jill is the superstar of the neoNuma fold. She had a poem in the 2010 Best American Poetry and her name is on the cover of the January, 2011 issue of Poetry Magazine (on stands now). She's even in a text book, now. I forget which one. A Longman anthology, if I'm not mistaken. Anyway. I'm biased, but I still love this collection best of all, dark and brooding as it is.

The Fatal Gift of Beauty and Other Plays by Christopher E. Ellis. Christopher isn't as produced as Evan, but these plays are such little gems of theater. The title play is a tour de force for two young actors. Give this a chance, especially if you're in the theater world and have need of short plays. There's some beautiful stuff here.

Able to... edited by Neil Ellis Orts. This was the first venture into literary publishing and I only have the rights to publish these stories through the end of 2011, so if you're interested, get it in the next 12 months. These stories about people (not superheroes) with super-powers still remain close to my heart. I always feel like they never found their audience. Poignant, horrific, wonder-filled, funny . . . they run a gamut of emotions. Perhaps that's its weakness---to many flavors between one cover---but I've always thought variety was a good thing. Check it out and see if you can't be persuaded. You'll believe a man can glow. And that a boy can run on water. And a girl can speak flowers. Among other things.

And if you've found this blog while looking for the old neonuma.com and you're needing to contact me, here is one place to do so, or you can reach me at neilellisorts (at) yahoo dot com. (The neo@neonuma.com address died with the website.) The P.O. Box remains available for contact as well:

P.O. Box 460248
Houston, TX 77056

These are rare gems of books and I'm so proud to have presented them to the world. If you haven't yet, won't you purchase one (or more) soon?

'Splaining . . .

2010-11-30T17:37:00.000-08:00

Well, my attempt to re-start this blog fell apart pretty quickly.

Let's just say I've been a bit . . . down lately.

Shortly after I started work on the Desert Fathers project, I learned that my day job would be quitting me. The retail store where I've worked for the last seven years is closing at the end of the year. Suddenly, everything seemed overwhelming and I felt like something had to give. The only thing that didn't have either income potential or other people counting on me was the Desert Fathers project. So that gave.

It's been a couple of months and I realize that those few short weeks with the project have been terribly clarifying, so hardly wasted time. When I return to this---probably next summer---it will be with a clearer vision of what it can be.

So . . . stay tuned. It's not over, just postponed.

Forward Movement and Problem Solving

2010-09-19T20:17:00.000-07:00

In my head, and occasionally with in range of other human ears, I'm calling this Fieldwork session "Desert Fathers, Phase One." What I'm really doing is seeing if the crazy notions in my head will translate into reality.

I've a small group working with me for three sessions now. I'm encouraged. I think there are possibilities that what's in my head might find expression on a stage. The people who have shown up for this are willing to do some odd things and they seem not at all phased by it. Movement, sounds, really exaggerated line readings . . . they're playing along beautifully.

That's not to say there aren't problems to solve. This is almost like a sketch comedy show (except not everything is comedy) where every few minutes we're in a new scene, and everyone is playing a different character. How do I simply, effectively, QUICKLY denote that the not-so-bright character in one scene and the centered, peaceful, wise character in the next scene are, indeed, different characters even though they're played by the same actor? I have some ideas, but I've yet to start practically solving that.

And this phase one isn't really about solving all those technical things. There are stories from the Desert Fathers that I've adapted but are prop heavy. I don' think this Fieldwork session is props. That's at the very least a phase two problem to solve, but it's in the back of my mind. I've cobbled together a short script that we'll perform for the Showcase in November. No props in this one.

Because, really, the big part of what I have to solve at this first stage is how to make transitions between the scenes. Some scenes are very short---as quick as two lines---others are longer. I feel in me a rhythm for these transitions that I think is going to be rather hard to put on the stage. I'm working on a device that is either going to cue the audience that we're changing scenes again, or is going to drive them absolutely crazy by evening's end. I think the answer to this problem is in the rhythm, the timing of the transitions. And if I end up doing small costume changes between scenes to denote change of character, the rhythm becomes even more difficult.

This probably makes no sense at all, and I'm not ready to explain it. I'm ruminating in public. I'm simply finding this to be a great deal of fun while noting some struggles ahead.

But, you know, if art was easy, everyone would be doing it.

I'll just repeat: I'm encouraged by what's happening so far and leave it at that.

First Fieldwork with the Desert Fathers

2010-09-08T20:18:00.000-07:00

Let me first just say, I'm a doofus. And I owe my cast this enormous crazy big apology. So I asked them if they could be at the first Fieldwork session a little early, to go over the bit we were showing. Well, they could, but obviously I couldn't. I'd forgotten how far it is from my apartment to Barnevelder, especially by bus. Also, I've not met this facilitator before. I always intend to make better first impressions and never quite manage.

This first snippet of the project is one of the funnier stories from the Fathers. Two monks who have lived in peace together for years attempt to have an argument and fail. In my adaptation, I have two of us (the two men, in fact) cross the stage in a ridiculous, cartoonish argument. The two monks are played by two women.

The feedback I received was both encouraging and troubling and I plow ahead with the hope that the larger context that will grow around this snippet will ease some of the troubling feedback. I also didn't give any background or information about what we were doing, we just got up and did it. Even so, I'm not sure a program or show publicity will completely erase what I don't want to convey.

Here's the thing. I think it was Balanchine, in talking about his abstract ballets, who said, "You put a man and a woman on a stage and you have a story." (Or something like that---maybe one of my readers will know the exact quote and correct me if it wasn't Balanchine.) I got a lot of feedback about gender roles, gender traits, that sort of thing. The two men arguing were displaying masculinity and abundant testosterone, the women were being woman who are more peaceful. I actually hadn't considered all of that, but I had considered that if I had a man and a woman arguing, that's a whole other rack of luggage to unpack. And a man and a woman living in peace together for decades leads us to another type of relationship. So I went with the same gender pairs (using, by the way, the people who came to play---I didn't cast these looking for any particular sex to play any role), thinking we'd at least keep away ideas about comparing marriages. I didn't completely---people still spoke of both pairs as "couples," which is its own sort of progress. And I wonder if we'd had the women arguing and the men living in peace together, if we would have had the "male=calm rational thinking, female=irrational emotion" dichotomy (cf Herman Hesse's Narcissus and Goldmund).

So, I'm left with no good solution with a mixed sex cast. And, well, we control what we can, we must let go what we can't.

It does cause me to reflect on the fact of humans having sexed bodies. I really don't want that to matter, but I'm always confronted with it. Whether it's on a stage where a man and a woman on stage creates a story, no matter how abstract the material presented or whether it's in real life where I meet people for whom having the correctly sexed body is worth surgeries and prescriptions to have some peace of mind. "So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them." My desire is to focus on the Imago Dei, but the male and female of it keeps causing me troubles. Which, of course, means the Imago Dei causes me troubles. And really, depending upon the person in the audience, personal histories, other "texts" (to use the deconstructionist term) will influence what is seen anyway. Any two bearers of the Image of God on a stage creates stories that the storyteller can't control.

The work before me is going to be challenging. And worth doing.

On a lighter note, I remain crazy happy with the people I have working with me on this. One of the familiar Fielders asked me, "where did you find these people?" I said, "I posted some things on an internet site and they showed up." Which is a long way of answering, "Grace."

And So it Begins . . .

2010-09-05T19:59:00.000-07:00

Just home from my first rehearsal for my Desert Fathers performance piece.

Could I be happier? I don't know how.

After posting for actors/movers on various websites and bulletin boards, there were five of us gathered in a room at my church. We moved around, we made loud, interesting noises, we laughed, we got a really good start on the style I'm going for in this production.

Sometimes, you don't know what you're looking for, but the right people show up.

Well, I'll probably post more about them as the process progresses. But the energy and openness to exploring some of my odder notions . . . it was all so welcome and surprising. One woman ended the evening with telling me I wasn't all that weird after all, that I could get weirder.

Nothing like encouragement. Or was that a challenge?

I'm approaching this thing a bit as a workshop, a bit as a rehearsal. The first half of the evening, I took us through some movement and vocal exercises. I noted my influences, I noted a few of my theological thoughts about them. I admitted where I took someone's practice, baptized it, and think if it as "practicing resurrection." No one seemed to think that was weird.

This makes me very happy, very encouraged that the right people have shown up to let me get some ideas out of my head and into practice.

Anything can happen. That includes bad disappointing things, I suppose, but tonight I feel like the "anything" is wide open and exciting and full of exploration and discovery.

After playing around physically and vocally, we looked at one piece of the script I'm developing. It was awesome. I gave direction, they took to it with ease. They had ideas and everything became better.

This may be the best I've felt all year.

It's only one rehearsal. But I'm crazy encouraged. And maybe a little inarticulate. I don't know if I'm saying anything. I'm just trying to record how I feel right now after one rehearsal. It'll be something to look back at when/if we hit a snag in the development of this thing I'm creating. We're creating.

More another time. It's a ridiculously crazy week and I have other responsibilities pressing. I'm just spilling here. I'll come back another time with more about the process. I think I want to record the process of this thing.

Starting Something

2010-08-13T22:27:00.000-07:00

This fall, I am going to be working on a brief performance piece. The hope is that this will grow into a full evening's work. I'm looking for people to join me in this endeavor.

Who I'm Looking For:

You are a performer who has maybe some dance training, maybe not, but are interested in the ways bodies can be expressive. You are interested in exaggerated physicality. Maybe you can't leap across the stage, but your body is expressive. That's the key word here: expressive bodies.

But that's not all. You are also interested in being vocal. That includes speaking lines of dialog, but it also means making sounds that are not words. This might include singing, but only if you define singing in the broadest possible sense. The performers I'm looking for are not afraid to make noise. That noise may or may not be beautiful, but it will definitely be interesting.

So, in other words, I need people who are not afraid to be foolish in rehearsal in order to find something extraordinary for performance. A sense of humor (and some comic timing) will be vital.

A tolerance for, affinity for, or belief in Christianity would be helpful. Read on below.

The Project:

I have been adapting some of the sayings and stories of the Desert Fathers and Mothers into script form. We will not be portraying these in historical (i.e. 4th Century) context, but in modern dress (albeit in modern rags). This first outing for the fall will only be presenting maybe three stories, intertwined. The working title for the piece is The City, A Desert (in homage to the classic work on the Desert Fathers, The Desert, A City, by Derwas Chitty). This will be more theater than dance, but have dance elements. It will definitely be influenced by modern and post-modern dance techniques.

Regardless of what else I say below, the main point is to create a piece of performance art. It will be serious art but with a sense of humor. Much of what I outline below will not be "seen" by the audience in any tangible way.

The Process:
We'll meet once a week, according to everyone's availability and schedule. These meetings will be as much workshop as rehearsal. I have some definite ideas on how to build the look of this performance, those ideas being more starting points than anything set in stone. We'll be working on not only expressive bodies but on things like stage presence.

The project itself has religious content. The process will, as well. Theological ideas such as resurrection, incarnation, spirit, and creation (to name only a very few) will be brought up and used as imagery.

We'll be making this work in the context of the Fieldwork workshop, sponsored in Houston by Several Dancers Core. Fieldwork is a series of sessions during which artists show work and get feedback from the other artists in the session. Dates for this fall's Fieldwork are not nailed down yet, but will most certainly be on Wednesday nights, most likely starting on September 8. You may not be needed each week for the Wednesday night session. A public showcase will be produced at the end of the sessions, currently tentatively the first Sunday of November. I'll update this information as it becomes available.

Theory:
This may be my work more than participants, but I'm hopeful I'll find participants who will be animated by these two inverse ideas:

Doing theology is a site for making art.
Making art is a site for doing theology.

Theology and art, in my mind, have these things in common:
Both require occasional leaps of faith.
Both are about learning how to see.
Both are concerned with creativity, creating, creation.
Both are personal but not isolating, that is, both are best undertaken in community.

I hope that discussions will spin out of the process, and maybe some fresh theological insight for broader consumption will result. As noted above, however, this is not what the audience will see on stage. It will merely inform the making of the performance.

Interested? Intrigued? Email me at neilellisorts at yahoo dot com.

Moving Forward

2010-04-18T18:33:00.000-07:00

Obviously, I've not posted here in a few months. At the end of last year, I started a re-evaluation of my work and time allotted to the various facets of my life.

One of those things is this: neoNuma Arts as a micropress has ceased operations, at least for 2010. I'm not saying it's gone forever, I'm not saying it's coming back. As something that basically broke even, I count it a success. However, life sometimes demands you make money (a demand I despise, but what are you gonna do?). I'd started to make a little dough on the side doing some freelance writing. This is not making me rich or buying me a new car, but it's better than breaking even. Life also sometimes demands that we sleep sometime. So between a full time day job, a micropress, and freelancing, something had to give. The micropress lost out. I remain disappointed by this, because I had a couple of things in the pipeline that I was really excited about, but I've encouraged the people behind those projects to shop them around elsewhere.

Meanwhile, the books published by neoNuma Arts continue to be in print and available at all the major websites that sell books. Links to all of them are at the end of the blog post.

This blog, in general, feels like it's lost its way. It was started to talk about my own work as a writer and performer, and as I got busier with other things, it became a blog about other people's work. Part of my 2010 goals is to do more of my own work---yes, in between the day job and freelancing, writing about other people's work. You can guess which is going to get short shrift. *sigh* But, hey, I did have a short story published in the literary mag, The Blotter, last January. A pdf of the magazine in which it appears is online here. My story starts on page 6. Hopefully, in the next couple of weeks, I'll write about a couple of other things, one I've done recently (a small thing, but the process was fun and want to reflect on it), another I'm doing this week. Watch this space for more.

Then, finally, I'm starting a third blog. It's up without content at this point, but I'll change that soon. It turns out arts organizations like to be written about even if it's on a blog that is read by tens of people. I occasionally get asked to write a review for my blog, but since I've been in this re-evaluation phase, I didn't know where or when I'd do it. Well, now there's Orts on Arts. What that space for my reviews and reflections on art I see.

And I guess that's the update and the plan, going forward. Oh, yes, there's still the religion blog, Crumbs at the Feast. That rounds out my irregular blogging life.

Below are the promised links to books published by neoNuma Arts. It's a small catalog, but truly worthy of your time and attention.

Able to..., a fiction anthology edited by yours truly, a collection of fantastical and magical realism stories wherein a character has an unnatural ability. Think super-powers without the super-heroics.

The Fatal Gift of Beauty and Other Plays by Christopher Ellis, a collection of short plays by the Chicago playwright and screenwriter. Beautiful, hard writing. If you are a theater person, check out these plays.

Necropolis by Jill Alexander Essbaum. Jill continues to burn up the poetry world. She's forever flying around, giving readings here and there. She has a poem in an upcoming (or is it out? not sure) Longman's anthology of poetry (so she's getting taught to college students) and she's in another upcoming anthology that is rather impressive, but I don't think is announced and hence I can't announce. But yeah. She's a superstar of poetry.

The Comic Flaw by Alan Berecka. Alan gives readings all over Texas and sometimes beyond. He usually sells lots of books after a reading. Take a chance on this one and see why. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll laugh some more. He's a serious poet with a serious sense of humor.

Nighthawks by Evan Guilford-Blake. Based upon the painting by Edward Hopper, Evan imagines the lives of the lonely people in that painting. It's really two plays, one taking place in the 1940s, the other in the 1980s. Theater people, take note of this one. It's a beautiful piece of drama, and has been produced in several major cities in the U.S.

Nighthawks have Landed!

2009-09-27T19:30:00.000-07:00

Finally available after many delays and difficulties, neoNuma Arts is quite pleased to present to the world a trade paperback edition of the play, Nighthawks by Evan Guilford-Blake. Above is the front and back cover, the latter so you can see for yourself the type of reviews this fine play gets when it is produced. Below are two blurbs that were given to me but I ended up not using. They are longer recommendations from previous directors of the play. After you've read them, please consider adding Nighthawks to your drama library, either from Barnes & Noble or Amazon.

Our theatre department produced Nighthawks by Evan Blake in 1999. Several factors influenced our selection of the script, but most important was the acting work it provided for our students. This one-act offers four fine roles, which are challenging, yet within the range of freshmen and sophomore actors. An added benefit was the cross-disciplinary connections our production made with art history and humanities students on campus, who had studied the works of Edward Hopper. Our set reproduced the buildings and the cafe in the Hopper's painting; the faculty had their students write about our three-dimensional version of the painting, how art (Hopper's) inspires art (Blake’s), and provided a springboard for diversity discussions.

Sheilah A. Philip
Professor of Theatre, Academic Coordinator for Theatre
Johnson County Community College
Overland Park, KS

I found this play to be a heartbreaking evocation of isolation and loneliness at the center of every human heart. Evan painstakingly delineates his wounded midnight characters reaching out to connect with one another, sometimes violently, sometimes yearningly. His ultimate lesson? Reach out, hold on; none of us can traverse this journey of life alone; our emptiness can only be filled by others of our kind through mutual caring. We must shoulder each others' burdens.

The action moves from the dark, stormy, early-morning hours of despair to a slow-breaking dawn of hope.

Glenn Meche
Theater Director
New Orleans, LA
(see more about Meche's production of the play here.)

Lament of a Dance Fan

2009-09-02T16:58:00.000-07:00

My day job is in a bookstore. One phenomenon you can count on is that when a famous person dies, You'll be asked for books by or about that person. Not a lot, not enough to put a book on the best seller list, but a few. Even the books about Michael Jackson haven't done all that well. Better than most, perhaps, but not outrageously well (to the disappointment of the buyers who decided we all need mountains of some books). When E. Lynn Harris died, his books, especially his latest (last?) novel, Basketball Jones. Walter Conkrite's memoir picked up in sales. Again, these are small jumps in sales, but there is acknowledgment of someone passing. I think part of being American is mourning famous people through books and magazines. (Or, if not mourning, living vicariously the crazy media circus a celebrity death can be.)

This past summer, as I was at the American Dance Festival, it was impressed upon us how precarious is the existence (i.e., the funding) of the arts in general and of dance in particular. This left me in a funk for some weeks afterward.

A couple of months ago, I read a review of a new book of photography by Mikhail Baryshnikov, Merce My Way. Working in a bookstore, I ordered in two copies. It is a lovely book, really. The photos are of the Cunningham company in motion. These are not the photos of someone like Lois Greenfield, with her stunning, crisp moments captured in mid-air. Baryshnikov's clarity comes not in the focus but in the blur. He captures a path the dancers travel. So, you can't see every detail of the dancer's face or body. You do see every detail of how they're moving.

Over a month ago, when Merce died, I put those two copies on display, hoping that someone will see them, want to mourn Merce with these photos. A major, giant of a dancer and choreographer had just died and I thought surely someone would come in asking about books on him. Some one.

But it hasn't happened. And the books sit on a display. They'll probably be returned to the warehouse soon.

I'm not sure what I want to say about this. Maybe I just want to say it. Maybe I've said enough.

Merce

2009-07-27T11:47:00.000-07:00

While I was in Durham, the world lost a dance innovator, Pina Bausch. I'd only seen one live performance of her company and various YouTube videos, but her death was sad in that she wasn't very old. She was not yet 60 years old and it happened suddenly, unexpectedly. I often say that I reserve my grieving for people I actually know, but it's hard not to feel sadness at her passing.

Of course, many people have been discussing the death of Michael Jackson. I might still have a Michael Jackson post in me somewhere. He was a part of my high school and college experience and there's some sadness at his untimely death, maybe even more sadness at his unfortunate life. But as far as his dancing is concerned, Joan Acocella has written much of what I thought about MJ and his dancing, so I needn't repeat it here. (I'm not entirely comfortable writing about MJ in the same post as Pina Bausch and Merce Cunningham---these are entirely separate worlds.)

Today the dance world is taking in the news that Merce Cunningham has died. Some are mourning, yes. His company and the countless dancers who passed through it are doubtlessly more affected by his death than most. But I say "taking in the news" instead of "mourning" for a very particular reason.

Merce was 90 years old. He found his path and followed it with great success. He had a partner in life and collaboration in John Cage. He was innovating, using computers to help choreograph when he could no longer stand on arthritic feet. From what has been said of him, I would expect he went to sleep last night with some new idea floating in his head, some new dance that we'll never see.

And there is the sadness, I suppose. The flow of creativity and curiousity is stopped.

But for finite people, Merce had an incredibly good run (full, no doubt, of hardship and sadness of his own---one does not create the body of work he leaves without hardship and sadness).

So, for someone like me, who never met the man, who experienced him mostly through books and video, I merely take in the news that he has died. Merce Cunningham is canon, pantheon, legend. He is as alive to me today as he was yesterday.

Blessings on his memory.

3 weeks out of 2,378

2009-07-15T18:45:00.000-07:00

2,378 weeks. That's roughly what I've lived so far.

So 3 weeks shouldn't have too much influence, right? It's only 3 weeks out of 2,378 weeks.

Of course, when the 3 weeks in question ended just last Friday and were an intensive, stamina-testing 3 weeks of watching dance, talking about dance, and writing about dance . . .

Here's the thing. The arts are grossly under appreciated in the world. People sacrifice their entire lives in pursuit of some artistic expression and too often it is swept aside as the work of crazy people. Meanwhile, truly crazy, power-mad people are running around, claiming to be too big to fail, too important to go bankrupt, and other truly crazy, power-mad people listen to them and we're left with money being spent to keep some of these people in their penthouse apartments. Money for making beauty, for making mirrors to the society, for waking up the sleepers . . . it gets cut and what's left to spend is called waste.

All of which to say, my 3 weeks as an NEA Fellow at the American Dance Festival as part of the Institute for Dance Criticism has put me in a funk.

I don't think this was the expected outcome.

Is this fatigue or depression? Is there a difference? I find myself roller-coastering between re-dedicating myself to my sacrificing life of artistic pursuits and wondering if it's too late to learn engineering or accounting or something practical, something this culture respects.

I'm not as angry as I might sound.

I'm not as depressed as I might sound.

But I am angry and a bit depressed. And I feel a bit derailed.

Of course, 3 weeks is plenty time to influence a life. Lives are altered in much less time. Lives change in seconds.

Perhaps my greatest worry is the weight of helplessness I feel in the wake of these 3 weeks. My greatest worry is that these 3 weeks won't change a thing.

But perhaps that's up to me, eh?

A few more full nights of rest. Let's see what that will do for me . . .

Duham Blogging

2009-07-05T20:37:00.000-07:00

Here I am in Durham, NC, attending multiple performances at the American Dance Festival and I'm not sure what to tell you. It's been nearly nonstop talk with fellow critics-in-training, with choreographers, dancers, technicians. I've now sat in the same room as 3 former dancers who were there at the beginning of Paul Taylor's career (oh, how I'd love to spend more time with them! Delightful doesn't even begin to cover how much fun these women are!) and I've heard a lighting designer talk about his years putting illumination on Merce Cunningham's company. I've been able to ask questions of two Israeli choreographers and one Japanese choreographer, the latter through an interpreter since she doesn't speak English. I've met and been critiqued by leading dance critics in the nation. I'm colleagues with a 11 other dance writers from around the nation, most of whom have incredible careers in journalism.

It makes me wonder how a farm boy from Paige got here.

It's all too much to process as it's happening. Maybe when I'm back in Houston, I'll post the reviews I wrote for the critique sessions. Maybe I'll have time to think about what has happened here and how to frame it all, what it means for me as a writer and dance lover.

But here, on the first day of the last week here, I'm nearly fried. Really. I don't know where to begin.

It just seemed appropriate that I blog Something from this place. Pretty content free, isn't it? Well, that's a bit how I feel. Content free and full, all at the same time.

KDH Dance - 10!

2009-06-19T06:31:00.000-07:00

This is not unbiased reporting. This is not a fair and even review. This is a mash note to a company I love enough to drive 6 hours round trip to see a 2 hour performance.

The Kathy Dunn Hamrick Dance Company (these days more often seen advertised as the more abbreviated [initialized?] KDH Dance Company). I used to take a modern class with Kathy and yoga with associate Kate Warren. Of all the things I miss about Austin, these two women are pretty darn near the center of them.

So I'm flying out of Houston to the American Dance Festival tomorrow morning. I'd sort of assumed I'd just have to miss this KDH concert. So much not getting done here. Then I was looking at the program. They revived two of my favorite pieces: Brief Histories in Three Acts and Framed. I knew it would hurt---and I'll be up late tonight packing the final things I need for my trip---but I became determined to make this performance.

It was well worth the trip. Both of these pieces were tweaked. The company has changed a lot since they were first performed and Kathy naturally enough recasts the piece according to personalities and strengths of the current company. The feelings generated with the pieces remain intact, however. The longing and nostalgia in Framed is made more tender by Kate's taking over the central role of the piece, a woman sitting immobile, staring off into space. The role was originated by Lisa Nicks, who is still with the company (and a fine dancer---a master of the solo dance), but for whatever reason Kate took on the role, Kate brought a vulnerability that I hadn't seen before. When Kate made her first movement, it was so tender and full of memory and loss, well, a my eyes teared up. Then she gets up and dances with the other women (who, if I read the dance correctly, are younger versions of the character), you see that not everything that immobile woman is remembering is sad or wistful. There is joy and excitement, as well as loss and pain.

I never saw the full lenght Brief Histories when it was created. I was living in Chicago at the time, but saw an excerpt of it when I brought the company up to Chicago to perform. It is the KDH company at it's most introspective. I should note that this company is more known for it's humor and athleticism, but being something of a contemplative myself, I especially respond to their quieter pieces. Brief Histories has a haunting quality, as if our pasts are always there directing our futures, like a ghost who keeps rearranging the funiture, blocking certain paths. Again, it's not all wistful---there are moments of happiness and excitement, not to mention anger and frustration---but the images that stay with me are the wistful moments. (This may say more about me than the actual dance. Maybe I say too much!)

The other two pieces in the evening---The Loop, another revived piece, and Green Piece, the only new piece of the evening---are a bit more abstract dance, although there's clearly something of a narrative behind them (Kathy is a storyteller as much as a dancer). The Loop explores the repetive or cyclical nature of our lives, Green Piece seems to have a number of themes running through it---from "living green" to being new, or not quite ripe---and there are more than a few apples abused throughout. (I predict apple sauce in someone's future.) I heard in the audience that someone "didn't like the apples," but I found them cleverly used in some places. I suppose it depends upon what "apple" means for you, which is, after all, a symbol full of cultural information---from the Eden debacle to keeping the doctor away. There are times I'm not always certain what's going on in an dance, I just like the movement. The apples were a prop that, for me, were simply something the dancers were using. Any associations I had in passing were simply layers along the way. It's otherwise a lovely piece.

I don't have any more time this morning. I'll have to leave my KDH report at that. If you are in Austin---or within a 3 hour drive!---make the effort to see the last two performances tonight and Saturday. I admit, I love this company and the women behind it, but I'll also defend that bias by saying: If they made crap work, I wouldn't be writing this now, on too little sleep after too much driving.

Okay, that's all for today. Next blot spot (so to speak): Durham, NC, and the American Dance Festival!

Got Met

2009-06-12T22:21:00.000-07:00

Just got in a bit ago from the Summer Sampler of Dance with the Houston Metropolitan Dance Company. It was at Houston's outdoor venue, the Miller Outdoor Theater and the hillside was loaded with people. Really impressive turnout! Events at Miller are free, but that doesn't always mean people take advantage of it. (I know I don't, to my shame!)

Just some quick impressions. jhon stronks, one of the better choreographers in Houston, gave a nice piece in the first act. It looked highly improvisational, and it wouldn't surprise me, knowing jhon. The soundtrack he put together was quite fun. He used some poems from mutual friend, Margo Toombs, mixed in with the music and other sounds. I was sitting next to Margo and it was fun watching her react to her own voice, especially when it turned out jhon used a piece she wasn't expecting. Even more fun was when some kids near us started to repeat one repeated line of Margo's: Everyone has a cape. I leaned over and told Margo, "Listen, you're being quoted!"

In the second act, the youth/student company, Houston Met Too, tore up the stage with some extraordinary dancing, every bit as good as the parent company. Very, very impressive.

The piece I went to see, really, was the piece I blogged about last time, Salim Gauwloos' Elevated. Salim is the choreographer I interviewed for OutSmart this month (scroll down to last entry for more info). I'm happy to report that it's a lovely piece. The middle section, with two pairs of dancers, is especially moving and tender. (After the show, I'd mentioned how tender this section was, and Margo said "and bendy!" I said, "Yes, tender and bendy!" She said, "You'll have to use that in your review." I said, "I try not to use too many technical terms in my review.")

I'd write more, but it's late and I need to cut this short. Just wanted to give some very brief, quick impressions (and expose myself and my friends for how silly we are). All in all, a fine night on the hillside.

Dance, Dance, and Dance (among other things)

2009-06-10T19:28:00.000-07:00

It's 10 days until I fly off to the American Dance Festival to experience 3 weeks of dance watching, dance talking, and dance writing. So I think it's only appropriate that I talk about all the dance watching, talking, and writing I've been doing lately.

Most recently, I went to the Big Range Dance Festival' Program B here in Houston. I wrote a review for it and you can find it here. I won't repost it here (although I'm told I may---but you can click the link, right?), but I will add that NobleMotion Dance is added to my list of companies I hope to see regularly. Check out their collage video on their homepage. If you're in the Huntsville area (I know, right? Huntsville? Home of a very fine modern dance company?), make the effort to see them. Really.

The June issue of OutSmart is out and up on the web. I have several pieces in it this month. A book review of a wonderful new novel, Blue Jesus by Tom Edwards (plus a web extra interview with the author), a DVD review, and a profile of dancer/choreography Salim Gauwloos. Click the OutSmart link, scroll down to the Salim interview ("No Posseur"), and read it before continuing here. We'll wait.

hum de dum de dum la de dah . . .

Back? Yeah, I got to talk to a Vogue dancer. I feel really badly about referring to him that way because he's obviously moved beyond music videos (and good for him, I say!), but hey, the Vogue video was really very fun and stylish and he's clearly not the type of person who is saying he's above all that now. I could tell from talking to him that he really cherished his time with Madonna and doesn't in any way disown that experience. But surely he must think "That was over 15 years ago. I've done other things." The way of popular culture, I guess.

During our interview, he invited me to come to a rehearsal at the Met studios. I told him I wouldn't be able to use it for the article because the deadline was Immediately If Not Sooner. He said, not for the article or whatever, just because. So I said, sure and two days later, I watched about 20 minutes of a rehearsal.

It was quite a lot of fun. It was very early in the rehearsal process, of course, so there wasn't a lot set, but I saw enough to know that I'm interested in Salim's choreography. There was some very interesting partnering going on (and I'm a sucker for interesting partnering---I love how bodies play against each other's weight), so I'm looking forward to seeing the performance this Friday night. (Miller Outdoor Theatre, the Houston Met's Summer Sampler of Dance, 8:30pm---check the Met's website for more information)

What I want to say now about Salim is more of a personal reaction, but I think it's worth saying. I guess I have preconceived notions about fame or something, but I expected someone who has toured with Madonna and been in multiple music videos (not just with Madonna---check out Salim's website for more on his history) to be, I don't know, more aloof. I found him about as friendly and warm as you'd want a stranger to be. I felt that as I was interviewing him on the phone, and it was confirmed in person. Salim and his partner (who I shamefully cannot name just now---I'm terrible with names!) seemed like just really nice guys, the type of guys you'd hang out with at a coffee house for a couple of hours. The invitation to the rehearsal, without any real publicity to be gotten out of it, was very nice, but to meet him and see how he interacted with his dancers---he simply strikes me as a man who is comfortable in his skin. He's toured with Madonna and he wanted to show me his work in progress. It was all the same to him. I almost felt like I was doing him a favor by stopping by the studio.

I'm anxious to see the dance he made for the Met on Friday. I'll post my reactions here afterward.

To back up a moment, I will also take the time to point out the Blue Jesus/Tom Edwards interview. When I picked up the Blue Jesus review copy at the OutSmart offices, I wasn't really sure what I was getting into. Blue people in Georgia? I hadn't heard of it, so I thought this was some sort of magical realism thing. Well, in some ways, it is, but it's also based on the real blue people of Georgia, who, these days, are mostly cured of the condition that made them blue. The point being, really, that I've seldom been so charmed by a book. The voice of young Buddy Dean is so strong and so engaging, you swear you knew this kid in elementary school---or else were him. He is a mixture of having to grow up too fast (his mom is dead, and he gets pounded at school because he's a sissy and pounded at home because his dad is having trouble grieving and, well, also because Buddy is a sissy) and having a wonderful innocence about the world (he has this very obvious crush on Tony Dow, but he doesn't name it as such---he just wants to move to Hollywood and be Tony's best friend). There's much about the book that is laugh-out-loud funny and much that will break your heart---sometimes in the same line---and the ruminations on faith and courage and race and identity . . . it's just a fine, fine book. Find it, read it, tell others. I'm going out on a limb by calling it a new Southern classic, but I think it's the kind of book that could/should eventually find its way onto syllabi for literature courses.

That's enough for now. I really should be doing more prep for ADF. 10 days!

Comic Flaw review

2009-05-18T10:35:00.000-07:00

I just remembered I wanted to share the great review The Comic Flaw by Alan Berecka (published by neoNuma Arts, of course) got at the Midwest Book Review. Click here and scroll down a bit.

You can also see it on the book's Amazon page. While you're there, if you're in the mood for some great poetry, see that little button that says "add to shopping cart" . . . ?

this/that/hodge/podge

2009-05-15T22:20:00.000-07:00

A little bit of different things.

Recommended: Isadora Duncan: A Graphic Biography by Sabrina Jones. This is a well-done biography of Duncan done in comics style. It covers Isadora's mercurial personality well, including her series of lovers, without getting to (pardon the pun) graphic and with the exception of one bared breast, it does a remarkable job keeping this friendly for younger readers. I don't know what the standards are for school libraries, if one drawing of a breast is considered too risque these days, but if a library carries the Gossip Girl series, they should have no problem justifying this purchase. At any rate, I think it should be available to the young women who are devouring manga and maybe taking a dance class. Isadora was a world changer in her force of personality and insistence of doing things her way. She had contemporaries who were doing similar things, perhaps (Loie Fuller and Ruth St. Denis most notably), but in a world where there were vaudeville high-kicks and ballet with not much in between, Isadora created the path that would lead to modern dance. Dance students today should know her and this is a great introduction.

Even more, I want to say that what delights me most is that comics suddenly seem to me the absolute best print medium for doing dancer biography. I've read a couple of biographies (or collections of biographical sketches), and what Jones does here is she not only tells us Isadora's life, but through the drawings, gives us a taste of how she must have moved. From the few pictures that exist of Isadora, I'd say Jones captures her quite well. I'd love to see more dancer biographies done in this fashion. In fact, if any comics artists are out there reading this and want to collaborate with a writer on one, I'm raising my hand. I'd love to do a similar volume on maybe Rudolf Laban or Denishawn (Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn). Just putting it out there.

Speaking of comics, this month's OutSmart magazine has an article by me on gay comics creators in Texas. Read it here.

(It's hard to believe that they did a graphic bio of Isadora. Two of geek interests, coming together in one package---was there ever a chance I would not pick up the Isadora book?)

BIG News: This summer, I'm going to the American Dance Festival to attend the Institute for Dance Criticism. This is an NEA sponsored event and I'll spend three weeks seeing dance, writing about dance, attending workshops about writing about dance . . . basically living dance. It's all very exciting and an great opportunity for me. I guess the few dance pieces I wrote for OutSmart are paying off big dividends this summer.

What else . . . I guess that's all that's on my mind tonight. It had been so long since I last posted, and I did want to put the word out about the Isadora book. There's much on my plate these days and not always juggling as fast as I might, but it's exciting times, full of forward motion. Stay tuned through the summer, for sure . . .

Stations of the Cross coming down

2009-04-24T07:54:00.001-07:00

I managed to get by Xnihilo Gallery this week to see the unveiled final piece in their Stations of the Cross show. J and Tyndall Wakeham are the artists on the resurrection station (which isn't part of the traditional stations of the cross and is an Xnihilo innovation) and it's a large computer generated print of either a sunrise or else just a sunburst through clouds, as one might see from an airplane. I couldn't tell which, but that's not exactly the point. It's photograph of a burst of light, yellows and reds and darker hues from the clouds, and on top of it are superimposed four contemporary faces. Honestly, I only recognized Bill Maher but the artists' statement identified the others as Margot Kidder, Jeffrey Skilling, and an unknown face from the street.

I'm tempted to leave it at that and let you puzzle about those faces. In fact, I think I will for now. It's one of those pieces that works best with the artists' statement beside it, and I'm not sure that means it works at all. But I'll try to remember to come back in a couple of days to reveal what the artists said about those faces and see if anyone has responses to those faces in an art piece about the resurrection.

In the meantime, if you're in Houston, stop by Xnhilo and take a look yourself. The show is only up through this weekend, so hurry! 2115 Taft St. (And have a beverage at the coffe house and browse their bookstore while you're there!)

Ros Warby's Monumental (and the Places it Took Me)

2009-04-19T22:20:00.000-07:00

This past Friday evening (April 17), I waded through a torrential downpour to the theater district to see Australian dancer/choreographer Ros Warby in her solo piece, Monumental. This is going to be part review, part personal reflection. I'll try not to ramble.

There are some thing that I really appreciate about performing artists and one of them is a willingness to be still. The opening moments were very satisfying to me as Warby stood on stage, lit from the side, making small gestures with moments of stillness between. I was with her immediately, enjoying her stage presence and her willingness to simple let us look at her in her skull cap and tutu.

For the next hour, Warby moved about the stage with an almost matter-of-fact-ness. That is, she maintained a stage presence without doing particularly flashy dance moves. There were turns and dips and floor work and all kinds of dancerly things going on---don't get me wrong---but there was also a lack of pretense of the work. More on that later.

Warby was playing with images from classical dance, specifically the swan and the soldier. She danced in front of film and video projections of large waterfowl and her own dancing. The archival footage of the waterfowl were often grainy and lent a certain feeling of nostalgia. It reminded me of nature films in grade school, back when teachers had to know how to thread a film projector. The moments when her own dancing was projected behind her gave us that impression of dancing with herself---something that also often fascinates me. There were many elements of what she did that captured my attention in these small ways.

As for her actual movement vocabulary, her referencing the ballet images worked for me because she looked like someone who was playing at ballet, not trying to actually do ballet. (I was a bit surprised in her talk-back after the show when she said she was classically trained and much of her work is trying to undo that training---I'd say she's done well in the undoing.) There were no virtuoso turns or leaps. The most articulat part of her body appeared to be her shoulders, which I admit I found fascinating. Her shoulders were the source for most of her arm gestures and I was amazed at the range of motion there. There were times I would have sworn that her shoulder blades slid halfway around her rib cage or her clavicle might fold in half

All of which to say, this performance kept my attention. It played with conventions and devices that I find interesting and engaging.

This is not true of everyone in the audience.

Early in the performance---with all that small gesture and stillness---I heard a couple behind me make comments about falling asleep. They were not engaged and left about halfway into the performance. A man and a child two rows in front of me left just before the performance ended. The child especially appeared bored.

And I thought---This is not dance for a beginner dance audience. It is, in fact, advanced dance viewing. In hearing the comments behind me, I realized that I might have been in the same frame of mind several years ago. I would have been a bit more judgmental, also thinking, "would you please just DO something!"

But I brought to this performance not only a history of dance viewing, but also a knowledge of dance history. There was a point in the performance when I thought, "this owes so much to the Judson Dance Theater." That performance style I mentioned early---no pretense, no virtuosity---brought to mind the "No Manifesto" of Yvonne Rainer, who was a founder of the Judson group. It came as no surprise, then, when Warby told us in her talk-back that she was a student of Deborah Hay, also a member of the Judson group.

Much of this dance history is the result of my time at Columbia College Chicago, studying for my M.A. in Interdisciplinary Arts. One of the strongest aspects of that program was the dance history we got in out "movement images" class. When I lived in Austin, I had taken a couple of classes with Deborah Hay but was mostly befuddled by them---I didn't understand where she was coming from or what she was doing. After the movement images class, I had a much better appreciation for what she was doing. I understood more where she was in the spectrum of dance.

All of which raises the question: Do you need a master's degree to appreciate this art?

I'm not sure. Certainly there will be people who will pick up on the thought and intention behind post-modern art, just as I believe there are people who can pick up on the energy behind abstract expressionist painting without knowing the art history behind the movement.

At the same time, I sympathized with the people behind me. They simply didn't have the eyes for what Warby was presenting. I'd attained the eyes for it relatively recently myself. For me, that took studying for a master's degree.

Does that make what I saw Friday night "high art," or at least "higher" art?

I wouldn't say that. I would say that I've seen dance by, say a company like Philadanco, that was high energy, full of razzle-dazzle, full of crowd pleasing feats of physical prowess---and I would suspect the same amount of thought and creativity went into making that dance as Warby put into hers. It's different art. To use a loaded term, it's more accessible art. But low art?

Let's not kid ourselves. There is plenty of bad dance to be found. A lot of it is easy, move-and-pose dance, no matter how much energy goes into it. It's simply not that interesting. It might be entertaining, but it's ultimately eye candy. And I'm all for some eye-candy now and then---I sometimes say I like broccoli and I like Hershey's kisses, but I know the difference between their nutritional value and which is likely to better sustain me.

I enjoyed myself Friday night. I'm also glad that I didn't try to take certain friends with me to the show. It isn't the type of show that will fill a venue like the Cullen Theater and if it weren't for the huge projections, I would say it was better suited for a more intimate space. It's a credit to the Society for the Peforming Arts that they will book such challenging shows.

I often ponder the place of arts education in expanding an art audience. The above doesn't begin to cover all my ruminations over the last 48 hours since I left the theater.

But these are the places this performance took me. I would very much welcome comments on personal experiences with education and "getting" different styles or forms of art.

True Love from Xnihilo Gallery's Stations of the Cross Exhibit

2009-03-27T08:49:00.001-07:00

A few weeks ago, I posted about attending the opening of this year's Stations of the Cross exhibit at Xnihilo Gallery. One of the stronger pieces was Station 11 by Jessica Adams. Her father has sent me photos to post of this piece, which I'm glad to do. These photos show not only the final piece, but also the process. (I had not known, previously, that this piece had been made by a high school student. I saw that it had been created at a high school, it just didn't occur to me that it was a student who created it.)

Divergence Vocal Theater

2009-03-24T22:59:00.000-07:00

This past weekend was the second production from new indie performance company, Divergence Vocal Theater. The 10th Muse was a musical, theatrical, poetic meditation on love, heartbreak, and other such manipulations of Eros. Artistic director, Misha Penton, pulled from Berlioz, Gounod, and Boulanger (among others) for music. For text, she appropriated text from Sapho and also 4 poems from neoNuma poet, Jill Alexander Essbaum. Throw in some modern dance choreography by Toni Leago Valle, and you begin to get an idea of how fully packed a one-hour performance from DVT can be.

I should say up front---I've known Misha for 5 years now. I met her at Fieldwork and we became fast friends and fans of each other's work. We've worked together on a few things here and there and so I have some idea of how she works and her intentions behind the work she presents.

So I can't really do a review of what I saw this past Saturday night. What I want to do instead is talk a bit about one artist's evolution into force for re-imaging opera for the 21st Century.

First of all, Misha breaks a few rules just by forming this company. Opera companies are not formed by mezzo-sopranos. Mezzo-sopranos go and audition for opera companies, which are run by conductors or somesuch (I'm not entirely clear on all that, actually), and they wait for the permission of the conductor or director to be creative, i.e., to be cast in a production. Misha's background, however, is in dance and rock bands. Dancers form companies (Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, Alvin Ailey, on and on) and dance in their productions because they have the need to be creative and can't wait to be invited to dance for someone. Rock bands pretty well do the same thing. Someone gets together a group of musicians and they meet for rehearsals in someone's garage and they start gigging. So it shouln't surprise anyone that Misha has taken her ideas for shows, gone out and assembled her "band" and called rehearsals.

On top of this, Misha has a history as a visual artist, a painter of abstract canvases that are all color and texture and mood and movement. This comes into play in her stage productions in that there is an arc to the evening, but not necessarily a story. She describes The Tenth Muse as a "watercolor collage" in her program notes and that's certainly one way to experience the evening. It's performance art as much as performing art. It's juxtaposition of ancient and modern art, it's a collection of thoughts on a theme, it is a collection of impressions intended to evoke feelings.

An evening with DVT, then, is a feast for the eyes and ears, with video projection, dancers, and highly trained voices and musicians. Mixing in spoken word fragments and poetry ups the intellectual involvement. It seems unlikely that someone would leave a performance without having seen or heard something that stimulated them on some level.

If this interdisciplinary approach to performance piques your interest in the least, I recommend you head over to DVT's website and subscribe to their email list. There are sure to be new and exciting things developing in the months to come and you won't want to miss out.

New Necropolis Video on YouTube

2009-03-20T20:37:00.000-07:00

I just posted a new video on YouTube. This one is my performance of Jill Alexander Essbaum's "Last Day," which is from her neoNuma Arts collection, Necropolis. Note the contest in the video description.

(full disclosure: I made this a couple of months ago, finished it all up, and THEN noticed the mistakes. I always intended to re-shoot it, but since that seemed to be an unlikelihood, I just decided to just admit my mistakes, post the video, and make a contest out of it. Lazy or overwhelmed? A little of both, but hopefully someone will have fun with this . . .)

Funny in a Sad Sort of Way.

2009-03-19T20:55:00.000-07:00

So there's this journal that I'd seen many many times at work. It's called The Book of Myself, and it's one of those things where you go through and answer questions about yourself.

What I'd never noticed before was the somewhat frilly writing that is the subtitle: A Do-It-Yourself Autobiography.

I kept looking back to see if it really said that.

A Do-it-Yourself Autobiography.

As they sometimes say in comic strips: ?!

March 14 Corpses

2009-03-17T23:09:00.000-07:00

This past Saturday (3/14), we had another Writing Marathon at the Montrose Library. As usual, we played a few rounds of Exquisite Corpse. In fact, we may have played more rounds of it this time than in the past. We were especially "on" this past Saturday and kept coming up with very interesting images. Here's most of 'em:

A red mouse dances a jaunty espresso.

A high-flying twirler regrets the sad apron.

A hopeful vine spills the golden desert.

A rowdy penguin climbs a lukewarm cheese.

The ecstatic hummingbird reads the warm closet.

A broken lion stung the slivered vacation.

The pretty heart creates the wimpish man.

The paltry sign flips the reckless story.

A humming person fastens the soft apprentice.

An imaginative horse watched an alarming book.

A western cowboy sipped the prismatic mess. (We commented on the fact that two players, sitting side-by-side, gave us the phrase "a western cowboy." We decided they were influenced by Houston's currently running Livestock Show and Rodeo.)

An ugly bee drives the thirsty ragdoll.

The fiery woman writes a diaphanous plate.

A hungry president wraps the hot forrest.

The pretentious tree swallows the intriguing paper. (cannibalism, anyone?)

The flirtatious margarita brings a perfect knee.

The beautiful performance writes the limited shore.

The squeaky girl captivates an appalling space.

A monstrous ferris wheel jumps the cynical watch.

A gray lover inhaled a red statement.

The pink storm washed the blue audience.

The gray day fell a stunning woman.

The timid hula-hoop chug-a-lugs a lukewarm coat.

The illustrious kite pounded a downy piano.

The breathtaking notebook flies the worn cushion.

A thin bowl clutched a surly thigh. (A fun thing about this sentence: it was written on lined paper and all the players put all the words on the same line, except the word "surly," which made the word itself appear a little surly. Or at least nonconformist.)

The hard spy transports a merry wassail.

The voracious stone sips the mysterious child. (A mysteriously liquified child? Um, ew.)

A wet nobleman holds a nasty window.

The strong cup nibbled a tasty girl. (And how did two players use nibbled and tasty in the same sentence?)

The gentle bandana smoldered the arid anteater.

The itchy offering spits a fresh choice.

The cloudy girl cracks the enchanted man.

So a lot of nonsense, to be sure, but some interesting images, too. And that's the fun of the game. Those surrealists really knew how to have a good time, huh?

I haven't set the date for the next marathon yet, but I will soon. Email me if you want to be put on the neoNuma Arts mailing list to keep up to date on these and other events. neo (at) neonuma (dot) com.

Joe Goode Performance Group

2009-03-06T22:04:00.000-08:00

Just in from an evening at the Cullen Theater. I had been looking forward to the evening for weeks, ever since I interviewed Joe Goode of the Joe Goode Performance Group for OutSmart magazine. It was well worth the wait.

Goode introduced himself to the audience, dressed in cowboy drag (which is really the only way to describe it in this context). It's cowboy by way of Porter Waggoner's closet. Lots of fringe, in other words (although not so many sequins). Goode immediately endeared himself to the Houston audience by pointing out that it was a costume and that he wasn't dressed up as he was simply because the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo are in full swing this week. He went on to say that they're performing in other cities across the U.S. where the costume is actually ironic. The audience warmed up to Goode's charm and his company would have had to screw up royally to lose it.

His company, of course, did not screw up royally. We were treated to a wonderfully inventive evening of dance theater. The first half of the evening was a revived piece from his history, Maverick Strain. This was inspired by the movie, The Misfits, and played with the American ideal of rugged individualism, machismo, John Wayne and Montgomery Clift. The company danced, they sang, they played out scenes that reversed gender roles. Joe Goode himself would swagger one moment in imitation of a Hollywood cowboy, then give us a swishy counterpoint to that image. What's most amazing is that he was able to do it, get laughs, and it never felt forced or cheesy or played only for laughs. As he said in the after-show talk, it was about being male in America---and all the ways a male is in America. It's agenda was laid out in a very friendly way, not pushed, not a strident voice, just politely presented with humor and grace.

Wonderboy, the second half of the evening, was a bit different. Using a puppet as the main character---a quiet, sensitive boy who watches the world from his window, but is afraid to go outside and engage the world---we're given a story of self-discovery that again uses humor to tell the tale, but doesn't shout. Goode may talk about the difficulties of growing up gay in Virginia in the 1950s, but his work suggests that he isn't angry or bitter about it, only that he wants people to see what that experience was like. This is very appealing to me. As a gay writer and sometimes performer, I know it can be hard to present the work without being defensive or antagonistic to a straight audience. It's a joy to see someone modeling a way to do it, to create work that makes seeing the difficulty easy, that doesn't place blame for the difficulty or rails against the oppressor. Goode has found a way to present the difficulty that makes it possible for others to identify with it, even if it isn't the viewer's personal difficulty. Wonderboy is, in the end, about wanting to belong, and pretty much everyone who has survived being a teenager identifies with that.

Even going in with some knowledge of what Wondergoy was about, even after talking with Joe Goode about it for the interview, I was surprised by my own emotional response to the climax of the piece. I knew it was about a boy discovering that his gift and, indeed, his power lay in his being sensitive. Still, when the puppet proclaims, "I'm sensitive!" I had this internal response of wanting to shout, "Yeah! That's right! You're sensitive!" It's a funny moment, yes, there's something kind of funny about this sweet little puppet proclaiming his power with the very thing that had made him afraid to go outside, but it also touched something in me that I wasn't expecting. It's nothing new, really. Mystics and poets have been saying this for centuries. Our weakness is our strength. My own religion proclaims the weakness of a state execution is the power of our proclamation. Humility, the Desert Fathers and Mothers told us, is the one thing that the devil can't match and so is our greatest strength. So it wasn't a new idea, that senstitivity, a "weakness," could be powerful. Goode just built up to it in such a way that swept me into a catharsis of sorts. And that is, the ancient Greeks would have told us, the point of theater.

I should talk about one aspect of the evening that I was most interested in. Goode is known for making his dancers sing and speak. His shows apparently rely heavily on text to create the story he's telling. This is an interest of mine, one that drew me to Toni Leago Valle (see a couple of posts ago) and when I was making performance myself, a thing I tried to explore. I often feel like dancers use text to explain the dance or else use dance to illustrate the text---neither of which is particularly wrong, but not what interests me. In my work, I would try to layer text and movement so that each element offered more information, that there would be information left out if one element was absent. Whether or not I succeeded with those attempts, I wouldn't dare say. But I wanted to see how Goode used text, how he integrated the two.

Here, tonight, fresh from his show, I would say Joe Goode is a storyteller, and he uses many elements to tell the story. There are moments of dialog/monolog that do that, and ther are moments of "pure dance" that propel the story forward. There are times the two overlap, but I'm not sure I would say they are completely integrated in the same way I was attempting, but neither are they simply illustrative/explicative. From my point of view, he uses all elements with ease and the result is a seamless story. It is a layering in that all these disciplines do add a different dimension the the overall work. It is skillfully done and I cannot fault it one bit.

But I'm still searching for some thing I can't quite describe, haven't really managed myself, and may be an unattainable idea---this notion that text and movement might be integrated so that one requires the other to create a third thing. I'm high on what I saw tonight and I want to stress that what I saw was wonderful, skillful, full of creativity. And I'm looking for someone to do something . . . else with text and movement. But that's my notion, and is no fault on the part of Goode for what he offered his audience tonight.

Oh, and for heaven's sake, the other thing I wanted to mention is his choreography for duets. I'm a sucker for inventive partnering, and there was some very exciting and breathtaking partnering in tonight's work. There was even one point that I literally thought, "that defies the laws of science! How are they doing that?" Someone in the after-show discussion noted it, too, so it wasn't just me.

But that's enough gushing. This was one wonderful evening of performance. I have a new favorite dance company, another troupe to keep my eyes open for. If you run across this and the Joe Goode Peformance Group is coming to your city, I highly recommend arranging your life around it.

Nothing Says Lent Like Necropolis

2009-03-02T11:18:00.001-08:00

I'd be a very bad publisher if I didn't mention that there is a really good poetry book, basically just made for the lenten season. It is Necropolis by Jill Alexander Essbaum. The cheapest place I've seen to purchase it remains Tower.com but you can order it wherever you like. Actually, it's very much a Holy Week kind of book. So order now so you have it in time . . .

Stations of the Cross at Xnihilo Gallery

2009-02-27T20:52:00.000-08:00

For at least the last two years, I've made a point of seeing the annual Stations of the Cross art show at Xnihilo Gallery, which is part of Taft St. Coffee House and emergent worshiping community, Ecclesia. The opening reception for the 2009 edition was tonight and I went and had a peek.

Each station is done by a different artist, and so immediately you know this is not a body of work really intended to "hang together" in the traditional sense of the stations you might find in a Roman Catholic church. Some are very literal in their interpretation, some are very abstract. Some have religious significance only in the context of the show itself. This is a strength of the show each year, a way of getting the viewer to see divine significance in non-religious subject matter and artistic interpretation to traditional religious subject matter. It also makes the entire enterprise a crap shoot, as invariably one piece will be wildly arresting, demanding attention while next to it is something that is . . . not so much. But maybe this is also the point.

I'm not going to go through piece by piece or even in order of the stations, but I made some notes on about half the pieces. Here's some thoughts and responses. I hope they encourage you to go take a look at the work, too (assuming you're in Houston, of course). (I'll provide links to webpages of the artists where I find them or can verify them.)

Station 2: Jesus Takes Up His Cross by Jack Potts. I start with this one because it is the one that I know least what to do with it. It is a photograph of a young man, short cropped hair, shirtless, wearing what looks like a towel, very much sporting a 21st Century gym body, and he has a cross on his back. He's bowed under it's weight, but the strain in his arms tells us he is lifting it. He is sweaty, but very clean. His head is down, but his eyes are looking at the camera. He is sexy. He could be selling perfume in a fashion magazine. The artist's statement said that he was going for an image of the beauty of Christ and the strength to go willingly to the cross. The model is clearly beautiful and strong, but in the end the image is, to slip into theologese, a bit to triumphalist for my christology. Furthermore, while artists have pushed the eroticism around the naked Jesus on the cross image for centuries, I've never been comfortable with that trip. Torturous death isn't sexy to me. But that's my thing. Insofar as art is made to illicit a response, I suppose this is a success. I'm just not sure it's a response the artist would appreciate. Truly, the image belongs in an issue of The Wittenburg Door with a tagline like: Golgotha Fragrance for Men.

That's as negative as this gets, folks. And I don't consider the above negative. Just an honest response.

Station 1: Jesus is Condemned to Die by Delores Comstock. To back up one station, this is a piece that demands some time. It is a large giclee print on canvass, manipulated photos and scribbles with many layers to look it. The predominent color is red and we clearly see a head crowned with thorns and wrists in shackles, but it's the smaller details that require attention. Very arresting.

Station 5: Simon Helps Jesus Carry the Cross by Wayne Leal & Allison Smythe. This is a simple and elegant piece. The media listed on the wall are "earth, sand, wood and acrylic washes." The background is the sand, that grainy sandbox color---something comforting about it, I think. On top of that is a layer of wood chips, slightly charred. It is in the same shape as the sand, but much smaller, making the sand something of a broad border. (I should say the whole shape is something like a freehanded doodle of South America.) Across the top of the whole piece is a plank of wood. It's a quiet piece. Powerful in it's silence. Reminds me of some Asian altar pieces I've seen. I could easily see this as a focal point for a prayer space.

Station 8: Jesus Meets the Women of Jerusalem by Billy Hollis. This piece is the one that is probably the very least religious in the whole room, and as such, captures the attention. It is a very large, graphite on paper drawing of a single, battered, leaf. The only hint of religion is where light (sun, presumably) is shining through a tear in it. The scripture reference is Luke 23:27-31, where Jesus asks the women of Jerusalem not to weep, and says if this is what happens when the wood is green what will happen when it is dry? In other words, Hollis says, this is bad, but it'll get worse than you imagine. This leaf (which, by the way, I thought was a photo at first), speaks to our fragile life, to the fragile moment between Jesus and some weeping women in a subtle way.

Station 11: Jesus is Nailed to the Cross by Jessica Adams. This piece, to me, was the one that I found absolutely brilliant. It is a shrouded and bound human torso and head, full of darts. The darts are labeled with words like "sin," "guilt," "burden," and the Seven Deadly Sins---the only piece of this project I could have skipped (a bit heavy-handed, if you ask me). The darts were all over the head and shoulders of the figure and the white linen shroud was soaked in red. Reading the artist statement and attendant photos, you discover the piece was a collaborative effort at Adams' High School for Peforming and Visual Arts class. Under the shroud were what looked like Ziploc bags full of red paint. After shrouding the figure, she handed out darts to the class, who started out with a rather lighthearted approach, even trading off "sins" like baseball cards. But once they got to the business of throwing the darts and as the figure "bled" into the linen, she said the room became somber and a heavy discussion followed. Granted, this piece falls under the category of postmodern art where the documentation of the performance of the artmaking is what's most arresting about the piece, but it's powerful all the same. When I go back to the show, this is the piece I'm likely to look at more closely again.

And I will return to the show. As is the annual custom, there remains one more piece, shrouded for now, that will be unveiled at Easter, to complete the journey of Christ from condemnation to resurrection. But for now, I hope the above will give you some idea of what you might find at this show---and be encouraged to check it out yourself. I hope the Xnihilo site will eventually put up a few images from the show, as my descriptions no doubt fail to convey what I saw.

tetris by Toni Leago Valle

2009-02-06T09:42:00.000-08:00

When I first moved to Houston 5 years ago, one of the first artists to whom I was drawn was Toni Leago Valle. I met her in Fieldwork, where she was showing work that incorporated storytelling and dance---which was exactly where my head was at the time. I was especially drawn, however, by her choreography. She uses an interesting and often surprising movement vocabulary, especially when partnering with another dancer. There are images from the first piece I saw of hers in Fieldwork that remain in my head, simply because the partnering work surprised and delighted me.

In the intervening years, Toni has become a friend and sometimes collaborator. She hired me as director for her last evening-length work, Cracked (2006), during the last two weeks of rehearsal of which I had the poor judgment to have a "heart event" and have since felt guilty that I wasn't there to play more in the final moments. (Oh, but wait, this isn't about me, is it?) She also worked with me on a short movement piece I made for a Fieldwork showcase (along with another friend and sometimes collaborator, Misha Penton of the new Divergence Vocal Theater).

So, last night, I went to see Toni's latest full-evening show, tetris. I'd seen a lot of photos from the show, had her bring a snippet of it to the neoNuma Arts Holiday Salon back in December, and even wrote a preview piece about it for OutSmart's January issue. So going in, I knew this piece was about a young woman's fractured identity and all the dancers around her were the many voices inside her head---from internal critic to inner child.

What I saw last night was a surprise.

First of all, this is the first piece I've ever from Toni that didn't use text. All the storytelling was accomplished via the movement, music, and news and pop culture video and audio clips from the 1980s. Not relying on text makes for more ambigous storytelling, but that's not a bad thing. In fact, that's the most appealing thing about this show. Back when I was helping Toni on Cracked, one of the things I remember saying to her more than once was, "cut this bit of text---you don't have to explain everything, we get it---or if we don't it's still there and it's not your fault that we don't." By doing away with the text---and I'm speaking of this piece in the context of Toni's larger body of work---it feels like Toni took a big personal risk, to let the storytelling happen or not, according to the audience's ability to look at dance.

But second, and perhaps most important, it works marvelously. Even when I wasn't clear on every dancer's role in the main character's head, I was enthralled. Even when I wasn't syncing up the video to the movement, it was never dull and never looked thrown together. If I wasn't "getting" every moment, I was getting that there was purpose and thought to every moment.

The evening itself is a bit of roller coaster, starting as it does with video of the Challenger crew boarding the shuttle to the tune of Peter Schilling's "Major Tom." I hadn't seen that video in years and it was a sucker punch to the gut, especially how Toni reminded us of how often we saw that explosion, over and over, with stops to point out where it begain and diagrams that gave us nearly second by second explanations of it.

But it's not all doom, as Toni's sense of humor is evident throughout the evening. A highlight of that being a duet wherein each dancer is trying harder than the other to pose for the flashing cameras about them, occasionally pointing out someone out in the audience and motioning "call me." Very funny stuff, expertly played by the dancers.

And speaking of the dancers, I want to mention two in particular. Priscilla Nathan-Murphy was also in Toni's Cracked. She was mesmerizing then and she's no less so now. She is able to fill the theater with her presence and deliver the goods on her movement ability. From her toes to her fingertips, everything is articulated and everything moves with purpose. I have no idea if she thinks so, but when I watch Priscilla dance, I feel like she's aware of every movement she makes. Some dancers get by with occasional tossing off of unfocused movement. Priscilla never lets you see those, if she makes them at all.

Also of amazing stage presence was a dancer making her contemporary dance debut, 9-year-old Bianca Torres-Aponte. I've never seen a child on stage be so focused and in the moment of the performance. When she first appeared, I was drawn by her presence, but then when she actually danced, I realized here is a little girl with no little ability. I half expected her to do mostly pedestrian movement, but Toni gave her some more complex choreography and it was lovely. At her age, any number of interests might come her way before she makes grown-up decicions about her life, but if she's able to maintain the focus she displayed last night, there's little doubt she'll grow up to do well, whatever she does.

Go to Toni's website and see if you can still score tickets for her last two performances. tetris is an evening in the theater well spent.

New Flaw Review on Amazon.com

2009-01-30T16:04:00.001-08:00

A retired English professor, Donald C. Wall from Washington state, has posted a very positive review of The Comic Flaw on Amazon.com. Check it out.

Never Ending Conversation

2009-01-28T21:02:00.000-08:00

In recent years, I've not bought much music and what I've bought hasn't excited me much. There have been exceptions, and there have been CDs that have grown on me after repeated listenings (which is, I submit, the best way to fall in love with music).

At the University of Mary-Hardin Baylor's recent Writers' Festival, I heard a folk duo from Arkansas, Still on the Hill. The husband of the team, Kelly Mulhollan, created a solo project entitled Never Ending Conversation (although the wife of the team, Donna Stjerna, is all over this album, too). It is an attempt to create art songs in a folk idiom, using the words of highly regarded poets for their texts.

It's an attempt that I can't stop listening to. It's a bit hard to describe because all the words that come to mind sound cliche and non-descriptive: Beautiful, melodic, haunting, playful, inventive . . . all those music review words that don't really tell you much. It's music that, say, Grieg might have composed, had he grown up in the Ozarks.

What I like most about it, though, is that I'm not yet able to sing along with any of the songs completely through. Pop music is created so that you can sing along on the second listen, and while there's something fun to appreciate about that, on this album only snippets of melody stay with me afterwards and I have to go back to the recording to hear what was next. It's music that has to be listened to carefully, lived with for a while.

At the same time, the instruments---banjo, mandolin, harmonica, and more---are familiar and comfortable. It lends a familiarity to the project that might not be there if it was orchestrated for the philharmonic. It's a brilliant combination, art song and folk instruments.

It also helps that Kelly's voice is a rich and expressive (without being overly so, as is so popular these days). In his lower register, he sometimes reminds me of that rich sound Gordon Lightfoot could create.

But let me say no more about the sounds. Go yourself to CD Baby and hear some samples of this album. If I were to direct you to my favorite cuts, I would have to say give these three a listen:

W.H. Auden's "In Memory of W.B. Yeats, Part III"
the Pygmies of Gabon's "The Great Cold"
Jeremiah 4:19-26, "End of the World"

But you may prefer to lend your ear to one of the Langston Hughes poems. Or Blake, Stevens or cummings.

But give it a listen. More, go ahead and buy it from CD Baby (a site I've used before and love). It'll be worth the fifteen bucks to get lost in this fascinating, layered album.

Exquisite Corpses for 01/17

2009-01-24T20:46:00.000-08:00

Last weekend, a few writers gathered for the New Year's Writing Marathon, and as always, we played a few rounds of Exquisite Corpse. Here's some of the results:

The absolute child kisses the luscious hand.

The watching boy drove the religious arm.

A beautiful operation bounced the bruised crayon.

A compromised wrestler heightened the green girl. (I think this happened on Star Trek once.)

The cheesy baker prances a vivid priest. (It was remarked that this happens all the time in the Montrose neighborhood.)

A fearful king tramples his master's potsucker. (Upon reading this in the session, no one would admit to knowing what a potsucker is and I decided that whoever wrote it was just making up words to be provocative. Upon googling the work, I discovered that there is such a thing as a pot sucker. It is a sucker---as in lollipop---that tastes like pot---as in weed, grass, mary jane, marijuana. . .)

An inspiring brute pinches a brimming dinosaur. (We puzzled a bit over how a dinosaur might brim.)

The excited boy angers an exposed foot. (Beware of angry, exposed feet!)

A tasteful puppy licked the desperate grass.

An adverse chicken measured an overbearing illustration.

The hungry bathtub promotes a divine jug.

The dingy watch ate an olive tree. (That someone chose the adjective "olive" and the next person used the noun "tree" seems highly unlikely, doesn't it?)

A tough actor cut the beautiful ball.

The hopeless poem drinks an angelic spoonful of sugar. (A compound direct object!)

The Comic Flaw Review

2009-01-22T22:19:00.000-08:00

Steven Schroeder, Chicago poet and scholar, wrote a blurb for the back cover of Alan Berecka's The Comic Flaw and has, basically, expanded that into a full review. See it here.

Berecka Press Release / Quick Art Viewing

2009-01-21T14:12:00.000-08:00

Alan Berecka (who, if you're not keeping track, is the author of the recently released neoNuma Arts collection of poetry, The Comic Flaw) spends his days as a librarian for Del Mar College in Corpus Christi, TX. They put together a nice press release about it all here. Give it a read. It's a nice job.

While I'm logged in here, I thought I'd jot a note about a couple of things I did a bit on the fly today. After a doctor's appointment (cholesterol is still to high!), I impulsively pulled the "stop request" wire on the bus as we passed the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. The CAMH is always free and having spent money to find out I haven't yet done enough to regulate my cholesterol (although, I'm happy to say, everything else checked out just fine), I decided I needed some art and free worked.

The current show is called The Puppet Show and in the center of ground-level space are five pupets, about 3 feet tall (although I'm terrible at judging such things), suspended from the ceiling. I assume the gizmos in the ceiling were set on a timer, because every once in a while, they'd take to tap dancing. Lot of fun.

The rest of the display was a mix of puppet museum type stuff and video-viewing booths and rooms of short films starring puppets. The one I watched longest had a story-line I couln't quite follow (there was no dialog and I came in the middle, so this might be all my fault) but the manipulations of the puppets are fascinating to watch. At one point, a stack of sticks are pulled upward until there is the framework for a structure the puppets can enter and interact with. When I saw what was happening to those sticks, I couldn't help but smile at the ingenuity and engineering.

The best part of the exhibit, though, had little to do with puppets. There was a round table set up in the middle of the room and a circular projection beamed down upon it, spinning around and around. The projection was a swirl of what I thought, at first glance, to be abstract animation. In the center of the table was a shiny metal tube (I have no idea how big---big enough to put a grown man's arm into, I'd say) that reflected the projections. I'm slow, but I finally realized that the shiny tube was the point. When the projections were reflected on it, they became no-so-abstract. In fact, suddenly we saw the animation was country side passing by, an airplane floating in a sky full of clouds, or people walking, reclining, or some more fantastical elements such as a robot-like thing towering over the view. Again, quite a lot of fun.

In both cases, I don't know that I found any deeper meaning behind the artwork---although the intelligence exhibited suggested that there likely was something there---but the incredible craft and wit was plenty to recommend the exhibit. One of the more delightful exhibits I've seen at the CAMH.

On my way home, I had to transfer buses, so I decided to see what was on display in the Williams Tower, that skysraper that wandered away from downtown and settled by the Galleria. The lobby of the tower always has an art display, and quite often it's very very good.

Today's exhibit was Grounded: Contemporary Works by Australian Aboriginal Artists. This was a mixed bag for me, but there was enough eye candy to keep me there a bit. These artists from Down Under like their dots and sometimes it was tedious, other times mesmerizing. I couldn't tell what made sone piece exciting and another less so, but like so much about art, I'm sure it was just my perspective and tastes. You can see what I mean at the Booker-Lowe Gallery, which curated this show. Check it out if you find yourself near the Water Wall. It's a bit difficult to describe and should be seen in person.

The Comic Flaw by Alan Berecka

2009-01-15T20:45:00.000-08:00

It was a year in the making and it was a wild ride to get it together at the end, but The Comic Flaw by Alan Berecka, the latest collection of poetry from neoNuma Arts, is available. More than that, it debuted to much success last week at the University of Mary Hardin Baylor's annual Writers' Festival. A good time was had by all, but maybe especially by Alan and his publisher (yours truly).

I've known Alan probably about 5 years and to be honest, I hesitated to publish his book. Yes, I can be that dumb sometimes. My reasoning was that Alan had good publication credits, was popular at readings, and just a really, really good poet. I felt he deserved better than my micropress. Maybe I still do. But he had sent out the manuscript to a few places with nothing more than a nibble here and there.

And then it was Larry D. Thomas, who just completed his tenure as the 2008 Texas Poet Laureate, who brought me to my senses. How often was I going to get to publish someone like Alan's first full collection? What was I saying about my aspirations by not jumping on this opportunity? In a world where too few publishers even consider poetry, why shouldn't I take this gift of publishing such an accomplished poet?

So I said, okay, I want to publish Alan Berecka's first full length collection. (He's previously had two very fine chapbooks published---both quite successful for their respective presses, as I understand it.)

I've really been quite lucky with the people I've gotten to publish so far. Starting with that short story collection, Able to..., with such an eclectic mix of the best writers you've never heard of, to Christopher E. Ellis's Fatal Gift of Beauty and Other plays, a collection every theater should take a look at if they're producing short plays at all, to Necropolis by poetry rock star Jill Alexander Essbaum . . . I sometimes have a hard time believing I could be so lucky. I've thought about using "Publishing writers who deserve a much better publisher" as a slogan for neoNuma Arts! I mean, I'm very tiny, publishing these gem of books with too little time, money, and knowledge for getting the word out about them properly.

But I've come to accept that I have to take the gifts that are handed to me with this enterprise and do the best I can. Let's face it, with people like these in my "catalog" (which still fits in a tri-fold brochure!), I can't help but feel like I have more than a little "lit cred."

I hope you'll check all of them out, but since I've said so little about Alan's book let me type on a bit about it. These poems are funny. They're heartbreaking. They're profound in their simplicity. Seldom has a childhood full of rough characters resulted in so much beauty. A father who drank too much and flipped the bird at his children, an aunt who thought she was a cow, a priest who dies during the Easter Vigil, Lithuanian and Polish ancestry visiting in dreams, dirty tricks and cruel turns of fate . . . all of these are viewed through Alan's wonderfully skewed lens. Even more, we see them as Alan sees them, with an affection that saves them all from condemnation.

In other words, this book is a work of grace. Steven Schroeder called it a sacrament, and that sounds right.

Next up, and I really mean it, is Nighthawks by Evan Guilford-Blake. This has hit some snags along the way, but it will truly be worth it when it arrives. A wonder of a play, stark in its realism, moving in its humanity, another work of grace.

Perhaps the slogan: Another work of grace from neoNuma Arts.

Happy New Year! (so a few days late)

2009-01-06T22:43:00.000-08:00

Can it really be ten years since we partied like it was 1999?

Since everyone was Chicken Little and crying "Y2K! Y2K!"?

Since, well, since 1999?

Time seems to slip away so easily . . .

Well, neoNuma Arts is off to a good start with the release of Alan Berecka's The Comic Flaw this very week at the Writer's Festival of the University of Mary Hardin Baylor in Belton, Texas. The Festival kicks off tomorrow, but the book won't be there until Friday because I was apparently 2 days late getting it to the printer. Eh, not what I had intended, but it'll be there before the festival is over (God and UPS willing).

On the Amazon page, all the blurbs got run together inton one big block of text. I don't know why. I can control so little. But click over there and take a look and I think you'll see where one blurb begins and another ends. There are some very good people saying very nice things about this book. I know I had a great time putting it together.

I'll write more soon, I hope, as I realize I'm possibly the worst blogger ever. Someone is going to revoke my blogging license. It's amazing the pithy thoughts one has when one is away from the computer. Those thoughts often appear with the thought, "that's a good idea for a blog entry." Then that's the last of it.

But this year, a minor resolution is to keep note of those ideas and blog a bit more, maybe even once a week! And maybe some of them will be about things other than what I'm trying to sell! Crazy, I know. But I do think about other things. Some may be interesting to other people, 'though I hate to presume.

I've slipped into rambling mode, so that's that for tonight. Many things percolating for the new year. Stay tuned.

Media Notes

2008-12-09T22:15:00.000-08:00

There's a couple of things you might want to try to catch this week and through the month.

First, this Friday, December 12, if you can, head over to the Independent Theatre Collective to hear streaming audio of a reading of Nighthawks, by Evan Guilford-Blake. Nighthawks has been delayed on the publishing schedule, here at neoNuma, but it will be published and I can tell you that it's a wonderful piece of theater. They have a series called Friday Night Footlights, which appears to be a reading series to determine their next season. They have three different times that they'll be "broadcasting" (I'm not sure if that's the term used in the internet world, but it'll do) so check their site and see what time works for you. Then write me and tell me about it---I'll be at my "day job" every single time they broadcast! (Yeah, sucks to be me sometimes.)

Also on the theater front, Christopher E. Ellis, the playwright behind the neoNuma title, The Fatal Gift of Beauty and Other Plays, cowrote a short film, Wrestled, directed by Phil Donlon. The film will be playing on the Independent Film Channel throughout December so you might want to check that out. I don't see an immediately easy way to see a schedule for the film on the IFC site, so here's the schedule Donlon sent me:

Wednesday, Dec. 10 at 11:25 AM EDT
Friday, Dec. 12 at 12:00 PM EDT
Sunday, Dec. 14 at 5:30 AM EDT
Friday, Dec. 19 at 11:15 AM EDT
Wednesday, Dec. 24 at 6:00 AM EDT
Monday, Dec. 29 at 1:30 PM EDT
Tuesday, Dec. 30 at 11:05 AM EDT

I had not known that the film also features music by the Tony award winning musician, Duncan Sheik of Spring Awakening fame.

So try to catch the film and if you like it, maybe you'll also like The Fatal Gift of Beauty and Other Plays. (Yes, as a matter of fact, I do have to try to sell the book!)

I'm typing after midnight and rather quickly. If I left out some vital information or link, let me know and I'll try to correct. But I think that's the gist of current media appearances of neoNuma folk. They really are some talented folk in the neoNuma catalog. I'm always excited to see them get exposure elsewhere. Gives me hope for the larger culture!

That's all I have to tell you tonight.

wow

2008-12-06T19:55:00.000-08:00

On this Feast Day of St. Nicholas, I feel as if the old bishop has visited me and thrown a bag of gold into my window.

This afternoon was the neoNuma Arts Holiday Salon. By any measurement, it was a great success. Jill Alexander Essbaum, Anne McCrady, Alan Berecka, Winston Derden, and David LeMaster wowed a room full of people with their craft of writing. We stepped outdoors briefly to the parking lot to see a section of Toni Leago Valle's choreography from her upcoming show, tetris. Sara Draper had a laptop set up to show some of her choreography on video. Saute laid out some great finger foods. All in all, it was a wonderful event and I'm a bit amazed at how it all went.

Jill was also featured on the Houston Public Radio program, the Front Row this past Wednesday. You can still hear her interview in their archives.

It's been a very busy week, preparing for this event, but I can honestly say it was worth it. It exceeded all my expectations.

Thanks to all who showed up for it and supported these literary and dance artists.

the neoNuma Arts Holiday Salon

2008-11-24T21:44:00.000-08:00

The Salon is upon me. And much too soon. It seems several things are converging upon me this very week and, ACK! I still have to put in time at the day job. Oh the humanity!

But the Salon is shaping up nicely in that it's got some really good authors reading at it. Jill Alexander Essbaum, author of Necropolis. Alan Berecka, author of the forthcoming The Comic Flaw. Anne McCrady, author of Along Greathouse Road and, with the aforementioned poets, co-editor of the forthcoming Psalms Project book (which will get a real title soon!). Winston Derden, David LeMaster, Neil Ellis Orts, all of the neoNuma anthology Able to....

And just today, I confirmed that choreographer Toni Leago Valle will be bringing a section of her new dance/theater work, Tetris.

Oh yeah, and all neoNuma titles will be available for purchase---at reduced prices!

So a full afternoon, but a relaxed afternoon. Should be fun for literature and arts fans.

Date/Place to be:
December 6
3-6:00pm
Saute
2303 Richmond
Houston

Email me at neo (at) neonuma.com for a pdf flyer or more information. Spread the word!

That's all that I've got tonight.

Things You Notice When You Work in a Bookstore

2008-11-02T18:46:00.000-08:00

Exquisite Corpses for 10/25

2008-10-26T19:11:00.000-07:00

We had another writing marathon yesterday, and we again played a few rounds of Exquisite Corpse, the surrealist game. Below are some of the results.

The hairy worm danced a red water tower.

A fuzzy mermaid invigorates a greenish book.

A spunky bottle eats a creepy hair.

A large shoe burped a red tiger.

I decided to mix it up a bit and see what would happen if we tried to make tongue twisters by making each word start with the same letter. I chose the letter "P" because it's just a funny letter. I think this has even been studied and comedians use P words because they sound funnier (admit it---Peoria sounds funnier than Houston). Would we tap into the collective unconscious and choose the same words or would we prove to be more individual? Read on . . .

The powerful puppy pulls the pudgy pile. (There was a collective "ew" after that one was read.)

A prickly pants pinches a poor puzzle piece.

A pretty penguin pokes a plump plot.

A pooped popinjay performed a perfect person.

A pretty pioneer pushes a pompous pot.

A pitiful prisoner pranced the precious piano. (I need to find a way to better explain transitive verbs . . . )

Over all, I think it's pretty amazing that only "pretty" was used twice. And, in retrospect, I'm sort of surprised there were no purples or pinks. So much for the collective unconscious.

Then Margo asked if we could use Halloween words. I sort of puzzled over it a moment then shrugged my shoulders and said, okay, make this round all Halloweeny.

An orange witch sickened a bloody goblin.

The frightening scarecrow tricked the ugly zombie.

A gruesome goblin scared the sparkling elm street. (I'd never before thought of "sparkling" as a Halloween sort of word, but it works here nicely, I think.)

A spooky brew boils the petrified ghost.

A harrowing black cat terrified a pumpkin-flavored witch.

A scary pumpkin scares a blood-deprived cadaver. (When I read this, I was sorry that we didn't get one that was something like "a scary pumpkin scares a scary cadaver." Scary, huh?)

Those are the corpses for this Writing Marathon. We'll do another New Year's Marathon in January. January 17, to be exact. Mark yer calenders now!

a little YouTube fun

2008-10-22T12:21:00.000-07:00

In an effort to increase interest in Necropolis I've posted a video of me performing one of the poems found therein. (With Jill Alexander Essbaum's permission, of course.) Not seeing how to do that embedded thing with the video, I'll simply ask you to click here to see it.

At least I hope that works.

Someday, I'll be proficient at this internet thing.

Necropolis in the Midwest Book Review!

2008-10-13T22:10:00.001-07:00

See the review here or on the Amazon listing for Necropolis by Jill Alexander Essbaum, where it is published as a 5-star review. (On the MBR page, click on "poetry shelf" and Necropolis is the first book reviewed there.)

This is neoNuma's first appearance in the MBR, so this is very cool.

This, That, and (mostly) The Other Thing

2008-10-01T20:04:00.000-07:00

Candace Chellew-Hodge and Bulletproof Faith

For my semi-regular gig at OutSmart, I got to interview Candace Chellew-Hodge, author of the new book, Bulletproof Faith. I've "known" Candace for a decade or more at this point---I've written several things for her webzine, Whosoever, and I've participated in her listserv, but I've never met her and until this interview, I've never spoken with her on the phone for longer than maybe 5 minutes (and maybe twice at that).

I had a good time talking to her. Listening to the recording, I was suprised to hear how much we laughed. Of course, as I'm editing the conversation for the magazine, we're going to lose a lot of that laughter, I'm afraid. I only have space for about 750 words and the point of the interview is her book, so as I focus the interview, I'm losing some of the fun stuff.

This is a hard lesson to learn as I'm doing more interviews for OutSmart. When I interviewed Tony Kushner, I felt like some of the fun we had got lost in the interest of space and focus. Perhaps this is how it is in this biz, to which I'm new. Maybe someday, I'll get to do one of those sprawling, ten page interviews you see in national magazines, but I guess every form has it's limitations.

But while I'm on Candace, I'm excited that I will finally get to meet her in November (the same month her interview will run in OutSmart). She'll be in Houston doing a workshop at Grace Lutheran Church on November 8. I hope we'll laugh as much (and more) in person as we did on the phone.

I've Been Quoted!

One of the first books I reviewed for OutSmart was Robin Lippincott's In the Meantime, which was just released in paperback. I picked up the paperback at the store where I work the other day, just to see the new cover that is on it. I then flipped to the first few pages of the book, just inside the front cover, where there were a couple of pages of reviews for the hardcover edition. Lo and behold, there's my review from OutSmart! My name isn't mentioned, just the magazine, but this is the first time this has happened. It feels like some sort of validation of my existence. I mean, I write these reviews and I sort of expect no one sees them. But someone saw this one and quoted it! I literally jumped and down and clapped my hands.

It takes so little, I know . . .

Nick Cave and Necroplis

For those of you who have gotten your copy of Necropolis, you'll note that it is dedicated to Nick Cave. Poet Jill Alexander Essbaum is a bit of a Cave groupie, which is to say she's seen him in concert so often that he's started dedicating songs to her from the stage. Deadheads have nothing on Jillie's devotion to Cave.

So I had a message on my voicemail from Jill, telling me that she was able to put a copy of Necropolis into Nick Cave's hands at a recent concert somewhere in North America (I can't keep up with Jill's travels anymore).

All of which is very cool. Maybe Nick will start to endorse it in his travels . . .

Nighthawks in November

Nighthawks by Evan Guilford-Blake looks on target for a November release. I suppose it's time to offer a pre-pub special. It's going to retail at $14.95, so let's say that if you order it before the end of October, you can get it directly from me for $10.00. It's a lovely piece of theater, hard and compassionate. Issues of prejudice of all sorts permeate a cast of oh-so-human characters, as their hopes and dreams are exposed and sometimes crushed before our eyes. If you ever wondered what those four people were doing in that all-night diner in Edward Hopper's painting, this is the play for you. Email me at neo (at) neonuma.com for more information about pre-pub orders.

October Writing Marathon

It's nearly time for another Writing Marathon. It'll again be at the Montrose Library here in Houston, on October 25, 10:30am-1:30pm. I'll write more abou that in a week or so. I think I'm calling it The Post-Ike, Pre-Spook Writing Marathon.

December Holiday Salon

I mentioned it some time back. I should mention it again. And I have tons to do on it . . . but it will be December 6, 3:00pm-6:00pm, at Sauté, 2303 Richmond, here in Houston. Jill Alexander Essbaum will be there reading, as will be Alan Berecka, another poet I'll be publishing soon (that reminds me, I need to make an official announcement about that). I'm talking to other artists, but nothing set in stone at this date. But put it on your calendar. It's going to be a good time and a chance to get some autographs and deals on neoNuma books.

(y)IKE(s)!

Oh, yeah, you may have heard about this hurricane, Ike? It's still a bit of a mess here in Houston three weeks later. I can't imagine what it's like farther down I-45 in Galveston. We're slowly getting back to normal here, but I think most of Galveston is going to be looking for a new normal. And then I would hear from people in Chicago who were experiencing flooding due to Ike a couple of days after it passed us here. That was one mean mother of a storm. Keep the coast in thoughts and prayers. The recovery isn't going to all happen at once.

That's enough for tonight. Maybe if I blogged more often, I wouldn't have to write so much at one time, eh? But hey, I've been doing better than once a month lately. Baby steps, you know?

Tip of the Day: Tower.com

2008-09-09T23:17:00.001-07:00

Okay, so I check out these sorts of things. I like to see where neoNuma Arts books are available.

Well, it turns out the best deal I've found by far on neoNuma Arts titles is, unexpectedly, at Tower.com.

So you can find Christopher E. Ellis's excellent collection of plays, The Fatal Gift of Beauty and Other Plays for only $9.99, 38% off the cover price. Similarly, at the same discount/price is Able to... , the first neoNuma title (which I'll probably blog about some more sometime soon, as I've never felt it really found it's audience). Jill Alexander Essbaum's Necropolis gets only a 36% discount, but still, it's a steal at $8.99. Heck, even my "practice" book, Thirty-Six Echoes, gets 31% off (going for $8.99 as well)---which doesn't affect me at all and I'll still give the same $1.30 to Lutheran World Relief for every copy sold. (I haven't blogged about Thirty-Six Echoes, I don't think. It's a collection of writings that were originally published in The Echoes, the newsletter of First English Lutheran Church between 1995 and 1998. Since I originally published them there for free, I'd decided to donate my "royalties" to LWR---one of the more highly regarded hunger and disaster relief organizations. So a purchase of this book also helps victims of disaster around the world.)

So, how's that for a deal? Hie thee over to Tower.com and check out the neoNuma titles---and check out what else you might find there. It may be the best kept book-buying secret on the web!

modern art (in a postmodern world?)

2008-09-01T17:05:00.001-07:00

Last spring, when I went to see the touring show of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company's Chapel/Chapter, I stayed for the artist "talk-back" afterwards. I'd just written a profile of Bill T. Jones for OutSmart and wanted to hear more from the man with whom I'd had about 15 minutes on the phone.

One of the things he said, in response to a question from the audience, was that the best way to look at modern art was to look at yourself looking at it. (He may have been quoting someone else and of course I'm paraphrasing here. If anyone knows the source of this, I'd love to know it.)

I've been thinking about this, of and on, ever since. I've also, of course, been watching myself looking at modern (or postmodern or contemporary---choose your term and realize each has its own set of luggage) art. Reactions vary, of course, depending upon what I'm seeing, the day I'm seeing it, my mood, and (sometimes) who is the artist. Among other factors.

Watching myself look at art, I find I'm sometimes dismissive. Or judgmental in that really awful way. Sometimes, I'm awed, if the piece meets my personal set of aesthetic sensibilities. Sometimes, I'm just curious.

If I am not awed, it's that last response that I'm working on cultivating. What is that? What is it trying to say? Why would someone do that? This seems, to me, a much richer engagement with art. I may walk away not liking the artwork, I might walk away disagreeing with what (I perceive) the piece is saying, but the process of engaging the work beyond the initial, "what is this crap?" is proving to be rewarding.

Being dismissive or judgmental is just too easy and I find I spent a lot of my life having those reactions. "That's not art!" "Who does the artist thing s/he's fooling?" Or my (least) favorite: "A five year old could have done that!"

Yes, I've had all those reactions. And as I've grown in art education, I find all those reactions were made out of both ignorance and out of a culture that rejects what is unusual or unfamiliar. Is that who I want to be? It seems I can make some decisions about my own reactions. And maybe I can apply those decisions to not only art but to my fellow human beings.

So what do you see when you see yourself seeing art? The artwork itself may be irrelevant. The revelation may come from behind your eyes.

busy busy crazy busy time

2008-08-21T22:23:00.000-07:00

This has been a full summer, heading into a full fall.

This coming weekend, I'll be joining my church, Salem Evangelical Lutheran Church, in dedicating a new building. All summer long, I've been meeting with a committee, planning the dedication service and it's finally going to happen this Sunday at 3:30pm.

Of course, we're not ready.

But it's going to be great anyway. This new building was built with music in mind. This past Wednesday, the choir (with which I sing bass) had its first rehearsal in the new nave and I have to admit, it sounded great. It's going to be a great space for musical performance of all kinds, but of course the main purpose of the building is Sunday morning worship and I'm looking forward to hearing us sing each Sunday. I'm hoping it will push us to being a better choir (and maybe convince some other people to join us---we could use a few more voices!).

In other news, Fieldwork is coming around again. We'll be doing Sunday afternoons this fall, starting Sunday September 14. I'll post more about it soon, but if you're in Houston and interested in knowing more, feel free to leave a note or else email me for more information.

I'm tired and seeing not much hope for slowing down in the next few weeks, although having the dedication behind me will be a huge load off. Nighthawks by Evan Guilford-Blake appears to be on track for a November release, despite all my distractions, and then I'm heading right into work on another poetry volume, The Comic Flaw by Alan Berecka. More on that soon.

It's a time of rapid catalog building for neoNuma and I'm really excited about what's in the pipeline. Stay tuned. Really, it's great stuff.

For now, i must lay my weary bones down.

Houstonians, Mark Your Calendars

2008-08-06T20:37:00.000-07:00

December 6, 2008
3:00-6:00 p.m.
The First Annual neoNuma Arts Holiday Salon

Other details being hammered out, but the point being, it will be like a big book signing. Not all neoNuma authors will be there, but some will and they'll be reading and signing books, and I'm looking into other attractions (maybe some music?). It should be a fun, artsy way to spend a Saturday afternoon.

~~~~~~~~

In other news . . . I'm working away on Nighthawks, now that Necropolis is out in the world. (have you secured your copy?) It's only been a year since The Fatal Gift of Beauty was published (have you secured your copy?), but I'm being reminded how much work goes into formatting a play. I haven't done that many kinds of books yet, but short of heavy graphics, I have to say that plays win the tedium race. Not that I'm complaining. I wouldn't do it if I didn't think it was worth it. It's just that there are a lot more elements to play layouts than a straight ahead prose or poetry book. Speakers, stage directions, all kinds of little cues to help the reader (especially the non-theater professional reader) see the script on stage, hear the actors, get the rhythm of a scene. The playwright does some of this, of course, but my task as editor is to make sure it all translates to a general audience.

What is fun about the process is how much time I get to spend with the words. When I first read Evan Guilford-Blake's play (based upon the Edward Hopper painting), of course I liked it. I wouldn't be telling you about it now if I hadn't. But now that I have to go through the play line by line, it's fun to see the craft of playwriting up close.

Playwriting is all about the sound, of course. In that sense, it's not all that different from poetry, except the sound has to sound like speech, and what's more, each character has to sound like an individual speaker. There can be heightened language, as in poetry, but it has to fit a character. Evan does that nicely with these characters. I can tell he heard these characters in his head and he worked hard to make sure we could hear them, too. Now, that means there's some dialect in this script. Conventional wisdom says (at least among prose fiction writers) that if you can avoid dialect, do so. Convey education or regionalism with speech patterns or other descriptive words, but avoid the contractions and misspellings that can make a reader go crazy trying to decipher words.

Evan uses dialect. He conveys characters with misspelled words. And I don't think you could get the sound he has in his head without it. "Okay" doesn't tell me the same thing about a character that "Ah-kay." does. I think (and I hope casual readers will agree) that Evan gives us these clues to the characters' speech patterns without making our eyes stumble---or if we stumble, we re-read it, get it, and get more than the simple words on the page tell us.

There's much work to be done on this book, but I'm finding it very enjoyable labor. This is going to be a fine addition to the neoNuma catalog. Keep watching this blog for announcements about availability.

-Neil

A Thought

2008-07-30T18:16:00.000-07:00

From Against the Wind by Dorothee Soelle:

"When I learned Greek, the concept kalonkagathon became very dear to my heart. In my seventeen-year-old unintelligence, I wondered how the Greeks could take two words that for us have nothing to do with each other, and turn them into the one word: beauty-good. Where on earth would one find aesthetics and ethics in the same dish? My amazement was deepened even more when I found out that medieval theology taught that God touches us through beauty, changes us, and draws us Godward." (page 151)

Regarding Art Stimulates Lit and the Psalms Project

2008-07-24T20:59:00.000-07:00

I don't know how many people check this blog, but I thought I should at least put out there some information on two calls for work that I put out last fall.

First, the "psalms project," which is being edited by Jill Alexander Essbaum, Anne McCrady, and Alan Berecka. They have been going through the many submissions and are working on getting a final list of work to be included in the final book. There have been some delays due to everyone's full schedules (including, in one case, a trans-Atlantic move), but the project is moving ahead and I project we'll be sending out notifications regarding acceptance and rejection (what an ugly word, but there it is) in early fall. Maybe sooner.

The Art Stimulates Lit project is a little stickier. I'm trying to read through the submissions this summer and see if I have a book. I'm not sure that I do, yet. I'm hoping that in September, I can start emailing authors with firm status of their work. That's a long wait for some of you who submitted with the first call I put out. I've closed the call for now, but may reopen it if I don't have enough material. Stay tuned.

It's all rather embarrassing to admit, but I bit off more than I could chew this year. It seems everything has been delayed (remember when the just released Necropolis was announced for an April release?) and things snowball. I'm very sorry. Until I get some of the things I've committed to cleared off the plate, I won't be looking at any new projects, possibly for up to a year.

In the meantime, all of you who submitted stories for Art Stimulates Lit, I encourage you to continue to send your work around, if it's not previously published. Because this is an anthology, I don't mind using previously published work, and there's no need for you to wait around for me to play catch up with my schedule. Even if I find I have enough material for a book this fall, the very earliest it would be published is fall of 2009, and a more realistic time frame is early 2010. (yikes! That looks so very much like The Future, doesn't it?)

If you have any questions about either of these projects, please feel free to email me at neo (at) neonuma.com, but there's not much more to tell you than what's above. Again, very sorry for the delays. I'm still trying to figure out these entrepreneurial endeavors.

Exquisite Corpses

2008-07-17T21:51:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, about a half dozen writers gathered together for another Writing Marathon at the Montrose Library branch, here in Houston, and as near as I can tell, a good time was had by all.

One of the things we do between writing prompts is we play a round of Exquisite Corpse. If you're not familiar with this Surrealist game, go here to read more. (See? I learned a new skill. Thanks again, Didi!)

I thought I'd share a few of the surreal sentences we created as we played our rounds.

A pretty mermaid stroked the awful tree.

The gracious watchman carries a big boat.

The crumpling bagpipe writes a colored boat.

An extraordinary chair dreamed of the hot situation.

A bearded vision receives a strong sky. (I like the idea of receiving a strong sky. And I am bearded. Whether or not I'm a vision is highly subjective.)

The frivolous juniper tree whips a timeless fish.

The extraordinary woman guzzles a slippery bottle. (Perhaps to latter sit in an extraordinary chair and fulfill dreams of a hot situation?)

The enchanted bartender crashed into the blazing peanut.

The playful grasshopper recognizes the musical giraffe. (I want this to be from an African fairy tale.)

The impertinent lion attacked an extraordinary fairy. (I may ban the adjective "extraordinary" next time.)

The angry orangutan smashed the sneaky gypsy. (Edited for spelling--which doesn't matter in the game. Also, this one makes me think of Poe's "Murders in Rue Morgue" taking place in eastern Europe.)

The discombobulated zoo plays an awesome game.

And those are just the ones that make sense!

Maybe none of them have the same ring as "The exquisite corpse drinks the new wine," but there are a few images in there that animates my imagination. I hope they do the same for you.

If you're in the Houston area, I'll just go ahead and say mark your calendar for the next Writing Marathon: October 25.

In the meantime---Check out Necropolis by Jill Alexander Essbaum. It's available on all the major bookselling sites and available for order through your local bookstore. You'll be glad you did!

Necropolis. You Know You Want It.

2008-07-09T17:33:00.001-07:00

Necropolis has now gone live on bn.com. I really need to learn how to work this internet thing so I can do the link thing without giving the full URL, but until I actually enter the 21st Century, here's the link in all it's wrapping glory:

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Necropolis/Jill-Alexander-Essbaum/e/9780974162348/?itm=1

This is a good book. Really. You'll read it over and over. You'll reference it in conversations. You'll find it sneaking into your consciousness when you least expect it. It's that kind of book. And you need it. Your neighbor needs it, too, so you may as well buy 2.

Okay, perhaps I overstate things. Well, no I don't. But you get the point. I hope you will check it out.

I should note the cover illustration is by Misha Penton, created from photos taken by Dave Nickerson. Isn't it lovely? It'll look better if you hold a copy of the book in your hand. It's true.

Okay, on to other places to push this book. Hopefully, more soon. (Or at least sooner than a month and half.)

Cool Violence and Artist Responsibility

2008-05-15T09:15:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I'm going to let out my peacenik persona today. And I'm going to use Angelina Jolie as a case in point. She just happens to be a timely example, but far from the only one.

Jolie has set herself up, somewhat, as an international humanitarian. She has made trips to troubled areas and adopted children from all over the world. This is all well and good as far as it goes. It's good to see celebrities spend their millions on things other than the outfit for their next photo op.

I just watched a trailer online for Jolie's next movie, Wanted. It seems to be an ultra-violent story of a society of assassins. I have no idea where the story goes (despite it being based upon a comic book series---I'm reading a lot less comics these days) and it may be that it is, ultimately, an anti-violence film.

But the trailer is just so damned sexy. It is slick and cool and all the violence looks very exciting and clean and shiny . . .

It is a huge disconnect from the humanitarian work that Jolie does.

I won't see this movie, so if it is a story of a society of assassins being brought low by their own violent lives, if there is, indeed, a moral to this story, someone will have to tell me about it. The trailer doesn't leave me much hope for that, however.

My point being, how do we hope for a better world, wherein the need for international humanitarian trips are reserved for natural disasters and make---and consume---entertainment that glorifies the violence that creates orphans? As other people have asked before me, if we contend that art can inspire us to becoming better people, the opposite is also true---art can inspire us to become worse people.

This isn't a cry for censorship. I would never call for laws that say movies like Wanted shouldn't be made or distributed.

This is a call for artists to think about what they're doing, what they're putting out in the culture. I don't believe in censorship but I do believe in responsibility. If violence is part of a story, I find it irresponsible to make it look cool and attractive and sexy and smart. I recall reading that part of the impact of Bonnie and Clyde, some 40 years ago, was that it was violent, yes, but it was a sickening violence. It revealed violence for what it was. To me, that's a more responsible artistic statement.

Again, I don't believe in censorship. Make all the sexy violent movies you want. Just be aware that there is responsibility in what we create. There can be incredible influence in what we put out into the world, and it's just plain hypocritical to offer humanitarian aid one day and create ultra-violent, super-sexy assassins the next.

Fieldwork Showcase on Tuesday

2008-04-26T10:40:00.000-07:00

I am running behind on nearly every conceivable part of my life. It feels as if I started out 2008 with the flu and never quite recovered. Physically, yes, of course, but not the time. Stupid flu.

Anyway. This coming Tuesday, April 29, is the Spring Fieldwork Showcase. The official announcement is on the Several Dancers Core website (as they are the sponsors of Houston's Fieldwork) and you can see it here:

http://www.severaldancerscore.org/flyers/field/houspr08fieldshow.htm

The basics are: 7:30pm, Barnevelder Movement Arts Complex, 2201 Preston, just blocks from Minute Maid Park (man, I hope there's not an Astros game that night---baseball fans take over that neighborhood during games!).

Fieldwork colleagues showing new and developing work will be playwright Kay McStay, choreographer/dancer jhon r. stronks, writer/comedian Margo Stutts Toombs, performance artist/writer Angel Viator Smith, playwright Diana Weeks. You'll see work about living close and isolated, escaping Hurricane Rita, visiting New Orleans, writing a nudie movie in the 1960s, and you'll also see a dozen roses get destroyed. In other words, something for everyone!

(and of course, no one's work is "about" these surface descriptions. but these are things you'll notice. what else they're "about" is up to you, the audience. but i'll guarantee you laugh and maybe cry, and if you can stand it, think.)

I will be reading an older short story that I worked on this session. It's called "Men, Dancing" and is inspired, in part, by Ted Shawn and especially by Barton Mumaw's autobiography. Ted Shawn, with his wife, Ruth St. Denis, were dance pioneers in the early 20th Century (contemporary with Isadora Duncan). Their Denishawn Dancers included such future luminaries as Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey. Ted later went on to found Ted Shawn and his Men Dancers, the first all male dance company, which toured the U.S. in the early 1940s. Barton was Ted's principal dancer and, oh yeah, his lover. (Ted and Ruth were estranged for most of their 50+ years of marriage---they never divorced, but lived together only briefly.) Anyway, parts of my story take place in the historical world of Ted and Barton, and parts take place in a fictional world of a small town university dance department.

And that's probably enough said about that.

Looking ahead, I've scheduled another Writing Marathon for Saturday, July 12, again at the Montrose Library here in Houston. Hopefully, I'll blog several times before then, but given my recent record for blogging, perhaps I should mention it now so any of you interested can mark it on your calendar now . . .

Necropolis is behind schedule. Another 3 weeks? 4? Hopefully no more than 4 . . . But it's coming and it's good. You'll want to buy a copy for every room of your house. Really.

Necropolis is coming . . .

2008-03-12T16:05:00.001-07:00

Okay, just a quickie post.

Necropolis, by Jill Alexander Essbaum, is inching its way towards publication. I now have an introduction/foreword (I have to decide which word soon) by Jill Baumgaertner, the Poetry Editor at The Christian Century, and so I'm getting really really really close. Mostly, I have a lot of tedious, dumb noodling to do in the typesetting. Hours worth, really.

But as I press toward a late April release date, I've decided to offer a prepublication price of only $10. It'll retail at $13.95, so that's a pretty good deal, as deals go in these (not really, not quite) recession-like days. Oh yeah, and postpaid, if you're okay with media mail. (Add 2 bucks if you wnat other shipping.) Payments via PayPal or U.S. Mail. Email me at neo (at) neonuma (dot) com for details. This offer is good until April 15.

I'll be posting more about Jill and her poetry (she has some new poems forthcoming in Poetry, and for you poets out there, you know that's a bit like climbing Mt. Everest, winning the Super Bowl, or maybe winning American Idol---except way cooler and of more lasting value).

That's all I have time for today. More soon. Lots going on.

-Neil

The Purpose of Literature

2008-02-28T10:58:00.000-08:00

In his introduction to the new anthology, Vital Signs: Essential AIDS Fiction (a very good collection, BTW), Dale Peck drops this line:

"It's important to remember that literature doesn't facilitate understanding but rather empathy, which is a very different proposition; and for some people the mere fact of a book's existence can effect extraordinary personal change."

I remember a lot of English teachers telling us that we read to learn and understand about other people and cultures, but Peck's assertion above seems to be more to the point.

Any thoughts?

Catching Up; Under a Blameless Moon by Anne McCrady, Bits and Pieces

2008-02-04T11:53:00.000-08:00

OOF! Happy New Year, I guess, since I haven't posted since last year. Let me give you a little rundown of how 2008 has started.

That writing marathon I wrote about? Well, two days, before the event, I came down with the flu. Fevers, shakes, aches, all of those symptoms. Knocked me down low. There was no way I could have done the marathon. In my fevered panic, I wondered if I could contact everyone to let them know the event was canceled. Then I remembered that writer, performer, humorist, and Fieldwork colleague Margo Toombs had signed up for the marathon. She's the adventuresome type and I figured she would have the enthusiasm and energy I was hoping to promote with this marathon. So I typed at her, she typed back, I typed an outline of what I had planned, and the marathon went on! About 20 people gathered at the Montrose library and from what I can tell, a good time was had by all. Perhaps best of all, two trashcan bags full of canned foods were collected for the Braes Interfaith Ministries food pantry! Just goes to show that you can throw a successful event without showing up!

Many thanks to Margo and her "can do" attitude. It's good to have colleagues.

Since I last wrote, I was contacted by Becky Haigler, one of the authors in Able to..., and asked if I would come to Shreveport to run a marathon there. I hesitated and said, I could send the outline and she could run it, but she and her co-conspirators said they would like a guest from outside Shreveport, which would make for more participation. So, I thought, okay, it's a nice drive up to Shreveport. And then we typed at each other some more and decided that since I was driving 5 hours north, I could do another workshop, and so a session of my Creative Crosstraining workshop was scheduled as well.

I'll let someone else give the report on that day. Go to:

http://anchorpoet.blogspot.com/

for a report with pictures.

Otherwise, January felt a little lost to the flu. Even though I made the Shreveport trip, I was still low on energy and a tickle in my throat would give me coughing fits for most of the month. I seem to be back on track (or as on track as I get) and moving forward. It seems like a million things are going on but I won't put it all in this one blog entry. I do want to tell you about one thing more in detail . . .

Under a Blameless Moon by Anne McCrady

Part of my trip to Shreveport included a stop on the way back at the East Texas home of Anne McCrady, poet, storyteller, exceptional human being. I had known she'd won a poetry chapbook competition, but had not yet seen it. Let me tell you about it.

Under a Blameless Moon by Anne McCrady broke my heart several times before I was halfway through it. These are poems that look at the violence and injustice of the world with a direct but compassionate stare. Indictments are few as Anne doesn't look to blame but looks at the human lives in the midst of violence, looks at the sad, crushing results of war and terror and helps the reader ask the "why?" or the "how?" and the "how long?" questions. Perhaps most importantly, Anne looks at the rubble she sees on the TV and the comfort of her pine woods home and wonders what role she plays in world events, helps the reader ask "what now?" and "how can I?" questions. The world needs these poems.

Order yourself a signed copy of this book via Anne's website. Tell her neoNuma sent you: http://www.inspiritry.com

You can also read sample poems from the book on her page. (I had to read "Just War" to my adult Sunday school class. I've been thinking along similar lines the last year and Anne beat me to expressing this thought while at the same time inspiring me to find my own voice on the subject . . . )

Bits and Pieces

Okay, that's enough for this blog. Otherwise, I'll just say I continue to write book reviews for OutSmart Magazine (with some other opportunities coming up---stay tuned!) and I've begun writing a little bit for Whosoever webzine again , where I used to publish a lot but took a few years vacation. Fieldwork starts up February 19 and I'm facilitating again---Houston artists, come join us for 10 weeks of creating new work! http://severaldancerscore.org/flyers/field/houfieldspring08.htm

Next time, I'll make a couple of new neoNuma announcements. Hopefully, it'll before the month is out . . .

-Neil

a New Year's Writing Marathon--Jan. 5, 2008

2007-12-10T15:58:00.000-08:00

Here's the next event from neoNuma Arts.

A New Year's Writing Marathon
(kick-start that resolution to write more in 2008!)
Saturday, January 5, 2008
10:00am to 1:00pm (let's do lunch afterward!)
Freed-Montrose Library, 4100 Montrose (a block north of Richmond Ave. in Houston, TX)
Cost: a snack to share and a canned food item for Braes Interfaith Ministry Food Pantry
bring:
1. pens, pencils, or your choice of mark-making things
2. notebooks, journals, looseleaf paper, paper bags, napkins, or whatever you like writing upon.
3. laptops---but only if you’re high-tech that way.

We'll spend the three hours doing writing exercises---very Natalie Goldberg Writing Down the Bones kind of stuff. You'll leave with a lot of ideas for future work---maybe more than you'll get to in 2008!

It's going to be as much fun as a room full of people furiously writing away can possibly have. (Which, if you're a writer, can be quite a lot.)

It's cheap (almost free!) and full of potential. Pass it on to your writing friends. Register by emailing neo (at) neonuma.com

Using the public library requires the following small print:

This program is not sponsored or endorsed by Houston Public Library.

If you have a special physical or communications need that may impact your participation in this activity, please contact Neil Orts at neo (at) neonuma.com at least 48 hours prior to the event to discuss accommodations. We cannot ensure availability of appropriate accommodations without prior notification of need.

Christmas Mondegreen

2007-12-07T19:18:00.001-08:00

Appropos of nothing . . .

The other day, in my retail life, the incessant satellite radio was playing yet another version of "Jingle Bells" (which, in my opinion, really does not need to be sexed up, emoted up, or otherwise given an imaginary weightiness---you may feel differently).

I was reminded how, as I very young boy, I wondered and wondered what "one horse soap and sleigh" could possibly mean. Or maybe it was "one horse soaping sleigh." Either way, I couldn't figure out what soap had to do with anything else in the song.

In my defense, I have to say this: I grew up in central Texas. What could I know about sleighs, opened, closed, soaping or otherwise?

community and cautionary tales

2007-12-05T23:30:00.000-08:00

I finally got around to reading a book I've had on my shelf a couple of years. February House by Sherrill Tippins. It is the story of a house in Brooklyn Heights where Carson McCullers, W.H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, Gypsy Rose Lee, and a few others live---at the same time in 1940.

I don't know if I've blogged about my love for Carson McCullers before, but let's just say she is my favorite author and leave it at that for now. She is the reason I picked up this book to begin with. The things I found out about her in this book make me love her more. I need to read that biography of her that I've owned for a few hundred years. But the main thing is that she was one of the instigators in this experiment in communal living. It seems she had been at Breadloaf and loved the experience so much, she wondered why she couldn't live in such intellectually and creatively stimulating company all the time. Turns out she found a few people to give it a go with her.

But read the book. It's fascinating (and has made Auden a character I want to know more about, too).

What I'm typing about this morning at 1:30 is the notion of community. Maybe communities. I completely get what Carson was desiring. I've been to writers conferences and never wanted to leave. Grad school was a bit like that for me. I had a phenomenal community with my classmates at Columbia College Chicago. Being around other creative types makes it seem less unusual. Or at least less unlikely. It's very easy to go along in life thinking people who write stories and books are not your kind of people. Or you're not that kind of people. That's sort of how I grew up, being told (subtly, not overtly) that those kind of people are another sort of people, not our kind of people. I didn't know any writers until I was in college.

And it's important that we find each other. Make creating seem more likely. If I know a writer, maybe I can be a writer too. That sort of thinking. Same goes for other arts. If you actually know someone who is a professional dancer, dancing seems like a less unlikely thing to pursue.

Maybe this is all obvious. It wasn't always obvious to me, though.

February House is exciting to me, because here were big name people, from different disciplines, feeding off each other, inspiring each other. Success of one made success for another appear possible. Collaborations grew out of the experience. Gypsy Rose Lee would never have written her mysteries had she not been in that house. (and it's good for a stripper to have a back-up career.)

It was a failed experiment, in some ways. The personalities were so different, hours kept were so wide, needs for getting work done was so varied . . . it was a chaotic place, really. If Auden tried to set some rules (he was very British that way, trying to create order), there was a housefull of rule breakers to upset him. The despairing part of me is saddened by the apparent truism that only people of great similarity can live together in peace. This has great implications for the world!

But reading this book has stimulated my imagination again. If it is a cautionary tale to counter the idealism of, say, Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Life Together (which is full of its own cautions), it still looks like a very good idea worth trying.

So I don't know what that means, what it means tonight. But, like Carson, I know I crave that sort of close community, even in my crazy extreme introvert ways. In my defiantly independent ways, I crave community.

I have some. I have some good friends who are writers, dancers, musicians, you-name-it. I have a good church. I have good colleagues in my day job. I am not discounting these.

I am, this morning, wondering if there's a house in Houston somewhere that might contain a group of creative types. If so, where is it? And if it's now empty, how do we start filling it?

Bonhoeffer said it was hard. Tippins showed illustrated how hard it is. Both suggest it's worth trying.

How do I find people who make this more likely than not?

Fieldwork Showcase This Week

2007-11-26T03:52:00.000-08:00

Hello, everyone. This is a Houston resident sort of note.

I have been, once again, facilitating the Fieldwork workshops here in Houston and this week, Wednesday night, is the culminating Showcase of the works-in-progress. The details:

Fieldwork Showcase
Wednesday, November 28
7:30pm
Barnevelder Movement/Arts Complex
2201 Preston Street
(for directions and maps, go to http://barnevelder. org/ and click on "directions"
Admission: $7

Presenting new work are:

dancer/choreographe r Sara Draper, presenting a short study in integrating Middle Eastern and Modern dance, performed to the poetry of Nathalie Handal

choreographer jhon r. stronks, presenting a new dance duet performed by Rhodessa Bell and Jonnesha Hawkins-Mintor

writer and performer Diana Weeks, presenting two pieces, a memoir/monolog "The She-Mob," and a duet comic skit, "Tonette & Tanika, the Tiger Ladies" with Susan Raffle

writer and comic Margo Stutts Toombs, presenting her comic monolog, "Twirling," about her lifelong relationship with her baton.

writer and performer Angel Viator Smith, presenting "Operator," a quick tour through little-known historical moments in Houston

and, of course, yours truly, Neil Ellis Orts, reading the first chapter from a book-in-progress, a "theological memoir" called The Good News Creed.

I hope some of you Houstonians can join us.

Houston Writers Festival a success, now what?

2007-11-21T11:04:00.000-08:00

It's four days after the Houston Writers Festival and I still feel like I'm recovering.

First, it was a big success. We had 19 authors represented and everyone sold something---and that's a success in itself, If you've ever done a book signing, you know what I mean. But the traffic and the sales all added up to a success for the management at the Barnes & Noble where it was held. That means there's a good chance that other events to promote local authors are forthcoming.

Let's hear it for local authors, huh?

There was also some networking and a bit of a party atmosphere for some authors. There were several mystery writers present and while most knew each other, I think some were meeting for the first time. This is important to me, as well, as I very much believe in the power of networking and creating these sorts of communities. If anyone experienced the day as a true festival, I'd have to say it was the mystery writers (along with the one science fiction and one romance writer who were seated in the same vicinity).

It's hard for this German Lutheran farmboy to say things like this, but . . . I'm really pleased with how the whole day went. The things to complain about were minor and greatly overshadowed by the good the day brought. I met some wonderful writers and hope to keep them in my circle for future events.

Of course, I'm the sort that can only rest in the afterglow for a few days, if not a few hours. Next week, for example, is the Fieldwork Showcase at Barnevelder. http://severaldancerscore.org/calendar/cal_houston.htm I'm the facilitator and there's much left to be done with this event. With the holiday in between, it may as well be tomorrow, which is a little stress inducing. But it'll be fine, it always is. There'll just be some late nights between now and then.

And after that event, I'm laying low a bit for December. Working retail in December is enough of a project, don't you think? Of course, I'll have my writing and publishing projects to keep me busy at home. I've got a good start on laying out the next book from neoNuma Arts, Jill Alexander Essbaum's Necropolis. I also hope to make some headway on this theological memoir I'm working on (which got a bit derailed in the prep for the writers festival). I'll be reading the first chapter of this memoir at the Fieldwork Showcase, but I had hoped to have all chapters in a first draft by now. I don't. *heavy sigh* Well, like I say, I'm not doing any extra-curricular for December (other than the church choir) and so I'm hoping it will be a productive month, despite the holiday hubbub.

Speaking of holiday hubbub, I'm required to say things like "remember neoNuma Arts for your holiday gift giving." Really, for the friend on your list who likes the TV show Heroes, Able to... (edited by yours truly, Neil Ellis Orts) might be a welcome and unique gift. For your theater friend who reads plays, The Fatal Gift of Beauty and Other Plays by Christopher E. Ellis is a collection that likely will be new to them---none of that, "but I already have that" business. Both are available via your local bookstores or order online at your favorite site-- bn.com or amazon.com or any number of other sites. They're easily found if you type in the title and author name.

More soon. Just finished reading a book I'm anxious to talk about. Just not today.

-Neil

Promoting Houston Writers, etc.

2007-11-03T09:44:00.000-07:00

Time goes so quickly when you're busy like a bee.

So the main thing I'm trying to promote right now is this Houston Writers Festival I'm sponsoring in conjunction with the Barnes & Noble where I have my day job. Basic information:

Nearly 20 authors appearing throughout the day at 5000 Westheimer. Store hours: 9am-11pm.

Poetry readings, featuring 2008 Texas Poet Laureate Larry D. Thomas (http://larrydthomas.com/), will take place at 11:30am at Canyon Cafe (in the same shopping center).

Prose readings, featuring Katherine Center (http://katherinecenter.com/), will take place at 5:30pm, also at Canyon Cafe.

Children's books readings will take place in the store's Children's departement at 2pm.

It's going to be a lot of fun. And a lot tiring. Two weeks from today. I feel like there's much to be done, and yet, there's not much to be done at this point except wait until there's something to be done. You know? I find event planning to be like this. There's a flurry of activity, followed by a lot of waiting, followed by a lot of activity.

Mostly, though, it's going to be a lot of fun.

If you know someone in Houston, be sure to tell them about it. I hope it's the start building a more visible literary community here.

And if you're in Houston, your presence is greatly appreciated. (I'd like to say required, but I hate to sound pushy.)

A full listing of the authors to be present can be found at: http://neonuma.com/festival.html

Etc

I'm also busy with Fieldwork workshops. It's going especially well this session. There's six of us, so a small group, but it feels very comfortable. People are trying out a lot of different material and everyone seems energized by the feedback sessions---no small trick, for those of you familiar with feedback at workshops!

I've mentioned writing book reviews for OutSmart magazine, here in Houston. I don't have anything in the new, November issue, but I'll be reviewing the new Nureyev biography for the December issue. I'll even get more than 70 words to do it! It's space well spent. The biography is 800 pages---seems like it should get more than 70 words, eh? Not that I'm complaining either way. I'm really enjoying doing these small reviews. It's forcing me to read books I normally wouldn't have noticed.

I did want to say a few more words about the first review I wrote for them, however. The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue by Manuel Munoz is the book I reviewed because I just liked it a lot and thought it should get more exposure. But 70 words doesn't really allow for the depth of this book.

First of all, it's a short story collection, but the stories all take place in one town in southern California, and characters reappear throughout the book. If the book isn't exactly a novel, it's definitely a layered exploration of one community.

And here's the thing about Munoz's writing: He has no heroes, no villains, just people for you to identify with. He manages to get into the skin of the character who could easily be seen as a monster (like the father who pushes his overweight son to suicide or the man who is left to raise a kid his partner adopted but never wanted himself) and makes your heart ache for them. Gay characters, straight characters, men, women---it's as if Munoz has been all of them and proves the old adage: there are no villains, everyone thinks of him/herself as a sympathetic character doing the best they can.

One thing that Munoz does is he manages to pick up on subtleties and makes you notice them. I've learned about myself from reading Munoz stories. One thing he's especially adept at is handling the ambiguities between gay men and straight men. A little gay boy, for example, being taught by his sister, how men greet one another---and how he was doing it wrong. And that sounds like it was a lesson. It's not as if the sister said, "Men do this when they meet each other." But at the end of the incident, the little boy understands his sister had inadvertently told him who he is. It's just masterfully done.

This is Munoz's second short story collection. His first was Zigzagger and I found it only because it was published by Northwestern University Press, where I was working at the time. Both collections are worthy of space on your bookshelf. Gay, straight, male, female, Hispanic or not---Munoz has something to say to us all.

That's all for today. Onward to my lengthy list of things to do . . .

Things I'm Not Reading

2007-09-19T22:20:00.000-07:00

You know, I've been saying for a couple of weeks now that I was going to write a bit about what I'm reading. Here's an embarrassing thing: As I'm looking at what I've recently read, I find I'm not terribly excited about much except maybe one or two things.

Here's the thing. When your work is centered around writing and publishing, you find yourself reading things you have to read and then you start thinking about what you should read. This summer, I actually had a bit of a crisis when I realized that I didn't read so much for pleasure anymore.

I'm not sure I've corrected that.

But I consider it something to work on.

Something I recently read for pleasure (although since neoNuma Arts is all about the arts, it has some bearing on that part of my life) is the first couple of chapters of No Fixed Points by Nancy Reynolds and Malcolm McCormick. This is a history of dance in the 20th Century. It has 928 pages. I love dance, but this is mostly on my shelf as a reference book, for when I want to look up a particular dancer, to get some background on some particular choreographer. In the two years since I bought the book, that's how I've used it.

I picked it up the other night, however, because I love the characters of modern dance, especially the proto-moderns---Isadora Duncan, Loie Fuller, Ruth St. Denis, Ted Shawn. These are such fascinating characters to me. They had such force of personality to accomplish what they did. Oh, they were arrogant, self-important, and often bombastic in their claims. And they changed the world of dance, arguably took it out of the burlesque show and put it in the art world.

These chapters were refresher courses for me, as I've read a bit about these folks before. Maybe more than a bit. Definitely more than a bit when it comes to St. Denis and Shawn. But reading Reynolds & McCormick's retelling of familiar tales was pleasurable reading indeed.
No Fixed Points isn't only about Modern Dance, but also about ballet. It's a personal failing, but I have so little interest in ballet, so when I got to the chapters about ballet in the early 20th century, I set the book down and I haven't picked it up in a week. I'll probably get back to it---if only the chapters on the Moderns.

This summer, I plugged one of many many holes in my reading education. I finally read Willa Cather's My Antonia. This book came into vogue as high school required reading a few years after I graduated from high school and I watch high school students buy it all the time in my day job at the bookstore. I figured it was time to read it myself, especially since I had a copy on my shelves.

I thoroughly enjoyed it. Cather managed to write her characters with such warmth and care---even the ones you clearly were not meant to like---that it was pretty hard to avoid getting involved in the prairie story of immigrants. There are also a multitude of meta-textual information on my head that sometimes interfered with that involvement, most notably the much discussed sexuality of Cather. There were passages that made me stop and think, "yes, I suppose that is a lesbian point of view." Or something like that. There are also conceits of the time period, stylistic choices that would get slammed in a modern writing critique group. For instance, there's a section when Antonia is barely a background character. It seems as if Cather forgot for a moment that Antonia was the titular character. I can just imagine how that would play in an MFA thesis committee today.

But the story is engaging, really quite modern. If you've not read it, I say check it out at the library and give it a go. It's worth the time.

Speaking of what high school students have to read, I watch what they have to buy and wonder if teachers are programed to take the joy out of reading for students. I read this a couple of years ago, mostly because I had a copy on my shelf and I was seeing students buying it: A Separate Peace by John Knowles. I head young readers complain about it, how boring it was, etc. I actually rather enjoyed it, but I was reading it in my 40s, not my teens. It seems to me that the story is a bit slow moving, a bit subtle for kids raised on "explosion movies" (my dismissive term for most Hollywood fare) and video games. I wonder if teachers assign it because they have to, or because it's about teenagers and therefore should be relevant to the students . . . or what? I don't know. Surely there's more relevant books for high school students than this World War II era story of friendships in an all-boys prep school. Of course, as we are currently in a war without an end in sight, the anxiety about graduating and going to war may be relevant. But in any case, it is a book I enjoyed without seeing why anyone thought a modern high school student might. If anyone knows a teenager who actually grooved on this book, I'd love to hear from him/her.

In Other News
I've started writing these tiny, 70 word reviews for a local gay magazine called OutSmart. You can see what I've read recently by going to www.outsmartmagazine.com and clicking on "readout" (you have to scroll down quite a bit). One of the books I reviewed this month is one I Really Like A Lot. I suddenly feel like I shouldn't talk about it here, though, while the current issue of OutSmart is on the stands. In October, I'll talk more about it.

I'm starting to get information out about this Houston Writers Festival that I'm putting together for the Barnes & Noble where I work. I've started a webpage for it here: http://neonuma.com/festival.html. Check it periodically for additional information as it becomes available/confirmed.

And while you're at the neoNuma homepage, I'll point out that the calls for work page is updated with the calls I posted a couple of weeks ago. I've already gotten a few submissions (which fall under the category of things I have to read, but that's okay).

Fieldwork begins next week. It looks like an interesting group is forming. Can't wait to see what everyone will bring to show.

That should be more than plenty for tonight. More soon.
-Neil

ACK!!!

2007-09-17T19:47:00.000-07:00

Good heavens. I just noticed a big ol' blunder.

In the call for work below, I put in the wrong zip code for submissions.

I've corrected it now, but if you've mailed me anything before today (09-17-08), please email me at: neo (at) neonuma (dot) com. If it was already returned, email me. And for the record, the correct mailing address for all things neoNuma is:

neoNuma Arts
P.O. Box 460248
Houston, TX 77056

-Neil
needs a proofreader

addendum/correction/clarification on submission guidelines

2007-09-09T06:14:00.000-07:00

Just a quick note this morning to say I wasn't clear enough on my submission guidelines for the "Art Stimulates Lit" anthology.

The stories must have, central to it's workings, some historical artist or work of art. Hence my examples of novels that are about or based upon Nureyev, Woolf, or Whitman. Another example comes to mind from another medium---Sondheim's Sunday in the Park with George, based upon George Seurat and his painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte'. I've also recently noticed a novel (but haven't read it) called The Uncertain Hour about Petronius, the author of The Satyricon.

That sort of thing.

Clearer? Ask questions if I'm not communicating.

Submission Guidelines

2007-09-03T12:13:00.000-07:00

Howdy, everyone. I know I said the next blog would be about what I'm reading, but this is what I'm hoping to be reading in the next few months. If you're not a writer, point out this blog to someone who is! Thanks!

(i'll be back soon enough with some blather about some books i've read recently.)

Art Stimulates Lit
a fiction anthology about art and artists

neoNuma Arts, publisher of Able to... and The Fatal Gift of Beauty and Other Plays, is soliciting short fiction on the theme of art and artists for an anthology to be published in 2008.

In each story, an artist or work of art must play an integral part. This may be a fictionalized biography, a story of one person’s relationship to an artist or work of art, or some combination or permutation of the same. The artwork may be from any realm of creative endeavor, not only visual art, but dance, theater, music, and other literary figures are equally fair game for stimulating the literary imagination. For models, consider Colum McCann’s Dancer (Rudolf Nureyev), or Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (Virginia Woolf) or Specimen Days (Walt Whitman). Do NOT consider Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code.

Length is open—shorter than a novella (although neoNuma would be interested in seeing novels and novellas along similar themes). Genre is open. Stories should be human, character driven explorations of art and artistry.

Submit stories to:

neoNuma Arts
P.O. Box 460248
Houston, TX 77056

Authors will be paid a royalty, based on sales. Previously published stories are acceptable, with proof of available anthology rights.

Questions to: neo@neonuma.com
Deadline: March 31

neoNuma Arts is looking for a few good psalms

Here, at the beginning of the 21st Century, life is much different from ancient Israel. The world of electronics and instant communication give us a different set of images to use in expressing our praise and worship, new cultural contexts within which to speak of and to God.

As such, neoNuma Arts is seeking out poets and other wordsmiths to create a modern psalter, one that uses imagery that might draw modern people into worship and praise in new and unexpected ways.

Form is open—free verse or any form known to poetry.

Content may be as broad as the Biblical psalms, which are:

songs of praise and worship to God (Praise be to the LORD, the God of Israel, from everlasting to everlasting. –Psalm 41)

songs of despair and lament (My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? –Psalm 22)

songs addressed to the faithful (Come, let us sing for joy to the LORD; let us shout aloud to the Rock of our salvation. –Psalm 95)

even personal songs (O LORD, you have searched me and you know me. –Psalm 139)

but they are all songs that might be useful in personal devotion and corporate worship. While we don’t expect this book to become standard use in any church’s worship services, the intention is that any of these modern psalms could be used in such a way.

Is there poetry and praise in modern church architecture as the ancient psalmists found in the tabernacle and temple? Can SUVs and jets evoke imagery that draws us to God as chariots and horses once did? What in this 21st Century world brings us to joy and praise and awe? Conversely, what modern imagery might we borrow to express our despair and loneliness and brokenness?

The editors for this volume, Alan Berecka, Jill Alexander Essbaum, and Anne McCrady, will be looking for psalms of high craft and literary worth.

Submissions to: psalter2008@gmail.com
Deadline: February 29, 2008
Projected publication date: November, 2008

Fatal Gift of Beauty arrives--amidst the usual turmoil

2007-08-29T20:55:00.000-07:00

So, The Fatal Gift of Beauty and Other Plays by Christopher E. Ellis is finally available. Order your copy now from your favorite bookseller. (Amazon has a great discount on it right now, no pressure.)

So the book that would not be published is now published and I would have blogged about it last week, but I had another bout of computer woes. A virus attacked me. It was ugly. I'm still getting things put back together. So much was lost. I try not to think about it.

But The Fatal Gift of Beauty is published. Have you ordered your copy yet? What are you waiting for?

Let's see, what else . . .

Clearly, I'm in a rambling mood . . .

Here's something that I find interesting and unexplainable. As I may have mentioned some months ago, I dipped my toe into this publishing venture with a self-published collection of short pieces I wrote nearly ten years ago for my then home congregation (First English Lutheran Church, Austin, TX). Named after the church's newsletter (The Echoes) and the fact that I wrote for it for 3 years (36 months), Thirty-Six Echoes was a hodgepodge of writings and styles. It is some of my very earliest "serious" writing and as such, I see some places where I've grown, and I see some places that are still some of my best writing. It's probably wrong, but I'm still quite pleased with the line, " . . . and like the travelers on the way to Emmaus, you wish you had paid more attention."

Well, this odd little book (with pieces that were republished in places like The Door and anthologized just pages away from Frederick Buechner in A Voice of Many Waters (I think that anthology is still availably, I'm not sure . . . it was edited by Kay Snodgrass) was sort of created and set aside. I didn't market it because it has all the earmarks of a self-published book---disparate content, quickly and a bit carelessly typeset pages, some design choices I wouldn't make now---and it really was created just to see how it was done. I was gearing up for Able to... and I didn't want to experiment on strangers' work.

But last week, suddenly 6 copies were sent out from my distributor. I have no idea to where or why. I have a slightly unlikely suspicion, but I may never know for sure. It's as if a bookstore was ordering stock of the book. Or someone was buying it for gifts for a group. Very odd. Pleasing, but odd. Unexpected, at least.

Then, there is the copy I had at the bookstore where I'm employed. They had let me order in a couple just to see if it would sell. Well, we sold a couple of copies, and I know who bought them and it was sort of people supporting me because they're nice people. One last copy sat on the shelf for a very long time, though and I suspected I would be buying it myself one day. Except it sold last Saturday. I don't know who bought it or why. But it's gone. And it's kind of cool.

This is, I'm sure, just a strange hiccup. It's certainly not a sign that this little practice book is "catching on" or anything. But it's strange that I watched 7 copies move last week and so far as I know, they didn't go to someone just being nice to me.

Let's hope this carries over to my other published works . . .

That's enought rambling tonight. Next time, I'll talk a bit about what I've read recently. I haven't done that in a while.

Until then . . .

Still, the Life of a Publisher, Workshops

2007-08-16T12:28:00.000-07:00

Still, the Life of a Publisher (or WHEW!)

I got the new proof of Chistopher E. Ellis' Fatal Gift of Beauty and Other Plays. It looks good. I've approved the proof, and it should go into production directly. Amazon still isn't listing it, but BN.com has been listing it for weeks now. Order there, or at your favorite local store. Amazon should be listing it in a week or two (hopefully sooner).

Chicago residents should watch for signings by Christopher, as we get those set up.

I think that's all I have to say about that today.

Workshops

The creative writing workshops that I've been holding this summer have gone well enough to encourage me to continue them in the fall. September 10th, to be exact. So if you're in Houston, want an inexpensive writers workshop, contact me. neo (at) neonuma (dot) com.

I've set a few other things in motion in the last week or so. Watch for more announcements soon.

Life of Publisher and other thoughts

2007-08-08T22:52:00.000-07:00

Life of a Publisher (or AARRRGH!)

Okay, so The Fatal Gift of Beauty and Other Plays by Christopher E. Ellis (which I name and attribute in full each time to increase search engine hits or something, I think) went to the printer. They sent a proof of the book last week Thursday, overnight. Due to it being sent overnight (and I having among the wonkiest schedules on the planet) I finally got my overnight package today---Wednesday. Only a week.

So today, I open the package and I have to say the cover looks great. I'm really really pleased with it. The colors work, the typeface works, the potentially cheesy fade of a color works. In fact, you can find the cover by searching for the book on bn.com.

But I digress. This is a tale of woe, or at least a tale of AARRRGH!

I turn to the title page. The picture that is supposed to be there isn't. In fact the wrong picture is there. And the type for the title has shifted so that the "and other plays" got cut off.

And just flipping through randomly, I've already found two other places where the type has shifted, creating other problems.

I probably didn't put enough R's in my AARRRGH!

This means I have to really go over this with a fine tooth comb. And try to figure out why this happened with the printer.

Now, I've used this printer a couple of times before and I've had nothing but positive experiences with them, so I'm hoping fixing these problems will become positive.

But tonight, at 1:00am, it begins to feel like this is the book that would not be published.

But it will. It will. One way or another.

Other thoughts

Last post, I tried changing font size between headers and paragraphs, as I'm doing this time. For some reason, a lot of the text ended up really big throughout. I tried several times to edit the size and it kept publishing at the really big size. I hope this post does better. I didn't really like the way it looked. Maybe I'm just having a bad summer for publishing.

The workshops I started last month is going pretty well, and there's been enough interest generated to suggest that it behooves me to continue. Pending agreement with the owners of the space, I'll do just that in September. Stay tuned.

I'm putting out feelers for other types of workshops, as well. I guess I'm in my workshop building phase of growing neoNuma Arts. The publishing is moving along (sort of), so I guess this is the next logical step. Who's up for a weekend creativity retreat? That's probably a goal for 2008.

Oh, yes, I'm planning/coordinating/facilitating what will be a one-day Houston author festival at Barnes and Noble, 5000 Westheimer, Houston. If you're a Houston author with a book or two published--or know one--email me (neo at neonuma dot com) for details as they develop. It's going to be on Saturday, November 17. There will be readings and signings and such goings on. It'll be a good time. Plan on it. If you're near Houston, anyway.

Fieldwork begins in September, too. September 26, in fact. I'll be facilitating that series, too. Email me for more info on that, as well.

This past Sunday, during the offering, I had the honor of singing a hymn composed by Patricia Blaze Clark and Kathleen Thomerson. Pat is a classmate of mine from my seminary days, and it was a delight to sing her words. She's been making a name for herself in hymn writing circles. Her biggest gig was probably having a couple of hymns included in a recent Episcopal hymnal supplement--I forget the name of it, unfortunately. But Pat has a couple of books out herself. One is strictly hymn texts, with meter noted so you can match it to a tune out of your own hymnal. It is called The Still Small Voice and is published by Selah Publishing Co. (catalog number 125-441).

The other book, from which I selected our offertory hymn (which is called "Long Before Creation's Dawning"), is called A Taste of Heaven's Joys. It is published by MorningStar Music Publishers (isbn: 0-944529-39-9). This book is all original hymns by Pat and Kathleen. Kathleen, of course, is quite prominent in modern hymn writing circles, her most popular hymn being "I Want to Walk as a Child of the Light."

Of course, I recommend both books, if you're the sort to buy hymn books.

And I've gone on longer than I meant already, so I'll end for now. Except to note that this year's peaches have been especially good. Has anyone else noticed? Sometimes, I eat one and am amazed at what a gift it is to eat something that is so good and not be bad for me. This is capital G Grace.

Cussing for Jesus, Little Things on the Horizon

2007-07-23T22:33:00.000-07:00

Cussing for Jesus (or keeping it real in theological memoir)

So I've set this little goal before me. I'm trying to get a rough draft (and boy, it's looking like sandpaper right now) completed by the end of summer.

But here's the thing. I'm calling it a theological memoir, because it's really about tracing my theological development over the last 10-12 years. A lot has changed in my beliefs (or sometimes lack thereof). Sometimes this has involved what my mother would have called "rough language."

I'm going to blame Anne Lamott. She has proven that essays on faith doesn't need the sanitized language of your basic daily devotional. In Travelling Mercies, her telling of her conversion to Christianity is funny, poignant, and too real to read at pretty much any Sunday morning service. Or even Sunday school. Or pretty much most meetings of the faithful (although I'm sure there are exceptions). Reading her work has made me brave enough to tell some of my story with the language that accompanied the living of it.

But then she only has the stigma of being an unwed mother, raising a child alone, and writing about Jesus. I have the stigma of being gay and writing about Jesus. I don't care what anyone says, she's more likely to get the speaking gig at the Christian arts festival, even if she does use words you can't say on the radio.

So I find myself wanting to clean it up so that, even if a crazy huge piece of my faith journey includes being gay, at least people can say, "at least he doesn't cuss like that Anne Lamott."

But you know, who am I kidding? The people who won't read me because I cuss won't read me because I'm gay, even if I don't cuss. I needn't worry about trying to please anyone on the religious radio stations because they're not going to bring me on to talk about the book, no matter how politely worded it is. I need not fear Thomas Nelson on Zondervan turning down my manuscript because there's a bad word in it because I'm pretty sure they're nowhere near considering publishing any gay-positive material. (I'd love to be proven wrong. And I'd love to jump from my roof and soar to the moon, while I'm wishing.)

And I'm pretty sure they're not interested in publishing Anne Lamott, either.

Besides, the people I want to talk to are going to be the people who are already having trouble with church and its uptight image. They're going to be the ones who struggling with leaving or staying with the church or else have already left because they couldn't buy the entire package the church was offering and felt like they couldn't stay and continue to have doubts. I'm guessing this audience isn't going to be overly concerned with a few bad words. It's not as if they'll be on every page. Or even every chapter.

So I'm plowing on and letting fly with the language I need to tell the story as authentically as possible. I'll worry about a publisher later. (And the reaction from some in my faith community . . . later still.)

Little Things on the Horizon

Speaking of being gay, it looks like I might have a small gig writing book reviews for a local gay mag. I sort of stumbled into it. We'll see how it goes. I'll announce more as the first review hits.

I'll be facilitating the Fieldwork workshops again this fall. If you're in Houston and have interest in them, leave me a note.

The Fatal Gift of Beauty and Other Plays by Christopher E. Ellis is on its way to the printers. It'll be available soon. Finally.

Planting a few other seeds here and there. The creative writing workshops I've been leading for two weeks now are going along, doing well. There's some interest in keeping them up beyond the six week session I advertised. I do want to do that, but have to figure out my own limits. Unfortunately, time is finite. This is the biggest complaint I have.

So many possibilities. So little time.

Stay tuned. Keep in touch. Some possibilities are probable.

a writer's life, a publisher's life, a workshop leader's life

2007-07-13T19:37:00.000-07:00

A Writer's Life (or thriving on rejection)

Came home from the day job this evening to a rejection letter in my email box. It was one of those form letters that tries to sound supportive and apologetic. ("We receive manywell-written, compelling, stories, but can only take a verylimited number due to constraints of space and style. ") I'm in a pretty good mood lately, so I kind of shrugged and was about to close out the email when I noticed the p.s. "P.S. Your story was a near miss."

This is not the first such rejection I've gotten. What do you do with these? I mean, the first couple were kind of exciting. They are, after all, a higher caliber of rejection.

And yet, they're rejections all the same. The easily frustrated part of me wants to shake my fist and cry out: when will it be a dead on hit???

Eh. Some days rejections sting more than others. Today, I took the compliment of the near miss and surfed the web to another journal's webpage. I already had another place picked out for this story. The second journal also accepts electronic submissions. They already have it in their inbox.

A Publisher's Life (or becoming that guy that delays the release of your book)

The Fatal Gift of Beauty and Other Plays by Christopher E. Ellis is just days from being sent to the printer. Hours, if you count the actual time I need to put into it to finalize the files. Unfortunately, the time I need to put into it requires some amount of concentration, which I lack after 8 hours at the day job. But next week. It's going to the printer next week. Email me at neo@neonuma.com to place your pre-publication order. It'll definitely be ready by September 1.

A Workshop Leader's Life (or learning to lead by pleading)

I have enough participants signed up for the creative writing workshop I'm leading, starting on Monday evening. Now I have the awkward task of getting someone to submit work to go first with the critique session. Actually, the task isn't awkward, but it's going to be awkward Monday evening if we don't have anything to discuss. Actually, we do have one piece, so it won't get awkward immediately. But mid-evening . . . well, I'm sure someone will come through. I actually believe I have the second volunteer, the writer is just retyping the manuscript. Hopefully, this will get easier after the first session.

Having said all that, which I realize sounds like a lot of complaining, which it probably is because I love complaining, I'm also quite excited about this workshop. I've long wanted to try my hand at leading one, indeed, I've been in workshops when I've felt certain I could do better than the person leading it.

Pride goeth before a fall, so this will be interesting.

Nonetheless, I'm excited about the mix of people I have. I haven't met most of them, so I don't know exactly how broad a selection I have, but there is at least a 30+ spread in years among the participants. I can't wait to see what each participant brings to the mix. I think it's going to be a good time.

Most of all, I'm excited to finally fulfill one of the goals of neoNuma Arts, and that's to offer affordable workshops for creative people. Of course, I'm starting with writing, as that's my primary focus, personally, but I hope to eventually (probably very slowly) expand into presenting workshops by other people, perhaps putting together a creativity retreat. Those sorts of things.

I'm all about the slow build, making sure I'm ready before moving forward. This isn't going to happen overnight but it is happening. Keep tuned.

4 a.m. blogging

2007-06-28T02:25:00.000-07:00

Yeah. So, I can't seem to get to sleep. It's one of those nights when the voices inside the head won't stop.

Very annoying.

To understate.

Actually, I think it's a sandwich I ate at Starbucks that won't stop. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Like so many ideas, I guess.

So, it's been over 2 (count 'em) months since I last posted and I decide to post in a sleep deprived state. Another idea that seems good right now. We shall see.

The Fatal Gift of Beauty and Other Plays by Christopher E. Ellis WILL be published this summer. It's so so very very close close. This publishing thing is, as I often say, done with on the job training. I've learned a lot about publishing plays with this book. I'd like to stop learning, now, please, thank you. But it's very nearly ready to burn to a cd and send off to the printer.

It's good stuff. Christopher has a way of revealing the best and worst of humanity in very short plays, often in one character. His play Dirt, for example, reveals in about 10 minutes how faith in God can lead to both self-sacrifice and self-delusion. With only two characters, he tells us what frail creatures we all are, even when we invest ourselves in something bigger than ourselves. It's an amazing, tight, little piece of theater.

The Broken Museum, which I referred to earlier as Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf on a Streetcar Named Desire, remains my personal favorite of the collection. Christopher tells me that he gets polar opposite reactions to that play---very little lukewarm, all either love or hate. I obviously fall in the love category. I think this play should be picked up by every short play festival in the country. Because good theater will evoke strong emotions. This is good theater.

Phil Donlon, the film director who supplies the foreword to the book, calls the titular play a poker game with the characters holding their cards very close to their chest. This is an apt description. Celeste, a would-be runaway, asks nice guy Karl for a favor on her way out of town. He wants to help but doesn't think running away is a good idea. Here begins a series of deceptions and manipulations by both characters as their hidden agendas come to light. This is the longest play in the collection. It's a tour de force for a pair of young actors. College theaters should be all over this play.

Zero Wun Niner Tango Copy is just heart breaking. With overlapping dialog, we see two characters, husband and wife, communicate to the audience what they can't communicate to each other. What is genius about this play is that Christopher gives us no good guy and no bad guy ("guy" used in a midwestern, genderless way here). Both characters are self-centered and ignorant of the other's needs, even as we see that their own needs are real. You want to call the man a jerk until he reveals his own hurt. You want to call the woman a needy whiner except you can't help but see she has a point. The play is set against a Viet Nam war backdrop, but for all that, it's really a story about communication and just how hard it is.

The final play in the book is a ten-minute monolog called My Dear America. This is contemporary, political commentary and it's pretty sharp. This play is all about the current state of these United States and how it's easy for your average citizen to feel a bit beat up by the country s/he loves. Written to be played by either a man or a woman, this piece should be performed at political rallies as well as at theater festivals. It's funny and sad and painful.

Really, this collection will be ready soon. Email neo at neonuma.com for pre-publication ordering info.

Me? I keep busy besides this publishing thing. I'll be leading a creative writing workshop here in Houston for six weeks, mid-July to late August. Cheap, too. Sixty bucks for six weeks. Use the same email for more info if you're in Houston.

Also, I've placed a prose poem (I think that's what it is---the editor called it a short story) in a journal called NANO fiction. It's a new journal published out of the English department at the U. of Houston. I'm told it'll be in the fall issue, whatever that means. The piece is called "Trailing" and I think it's about feeling lost. It might be about something else to someone else. I can't control these things.

The little bitty clock in the lower right hand corner of my screen says its now 5 a.m. Tomorrow is going to be a long hard day. Or I guess that's today is going to be a long hard day. At any rate, I hope I haven't embarrassed myself or, more importantly, Christopher with my sleepless typing.

I'm going to go try for a nap before the alarm goes off.

Time, Plays, Giovanni

2007-04-23T07:54:00.000-07:00

Time: Over a month since my last entry. 2007 is already a third gone. I'm tired a lot and the apartment not only doesn't get cleaned, but the entropy continues and I calculate that by June, I won't be able to step over the debris anymore but will have to resort to mountain climbing gear just to get from kitchen to bedroom.

Cunningham the Boycatt doesn't seem to mind. He finds the piles endlessly entertaining as he bats golf balls into, under, around them.

What's going on?

Me, I survived my first Fieldwork session as facilitator. Debuted "What Should I Do?" (my God-iest performance piece ever) with the able help of Toni Leago Valle and Misha Penton, at the closing showcase. Made my second appearance on The Front Row, Houston Public Radio's local arts program, to talk about Fieldwork (listen to us on the 4/12/07 show here: http://www.kuhf.org/site/PageServer?pagename=The_Front_Row_archive ) Wrote a few sentences of useless trash here and there. Collected a rejection letter. Put in my usual 40 hours/week at the retail master. Celebrated Easter with many trips to the church. Set in motion what will, with luck, work, and certain people's approvals, turn into a one-day literature mini-festival in November. Exchanged e-mails with a woman about conducting writing workshops in her organization's space but so far have been unable to synchronize calendars so that we can meet and hammer out details. I've fretted, groused, and whispered "thank you."

So, yeah, the last 2 months have been pretty normal.

But it's almost May. The reading/signing at West Edge Books & News in Shreveport is less than 2 weeks away (May 4, 2007, 725 Milam St. 7:00pm), which seems so unlikely. When we started talking about this (and by talking, I mean emailing) it was nearly 6 months away. I'm in the final push to get Christopher Ellis's collection of short plays out this summer. And don't get me started on all the things I'd like to do and just can't fit in.

Most days, I'd like to disappear into a cabin in the woods somewhere, just me and Cunningham. For about a week, yes, that would be nice. I think I can pencil it in for 2009. Late 2009. But I shouldn't write it in ink just yet.

For no particular reason, I quote my favorite piece of bathroom graffiti: Time flies like the wind. Fruit flies like bananas.

Plays: So I'm in the final push on Christopher E. (I just learned to insert the "E.") Ellis's collection of short plays, The Fatal Gift of Beauty and Other Plays. I had fallen behind on it but this week I feel pretty much up to speed again.

It's good stuff. That's the joy of publishing and editing work you choose. You get to spend time on it, live with it intimately as you catch spelling errors and format it into something the public will see as worthy of their hard-earned cash.

Right now, my favorite play in the collection is "The Broken Museum." That's probably because I just finished doing initial layout schtuff on it last night. It's a twisty-turny play of language. That's my blurb for it, which is why I'll be using other blurbs on the cover. Really, Christopher has crafted a play with seeming non-sequitors (and devastating sequitors) that makes me think of Tennessee Williams, had he been born a little bit later. Maybe that's just because the play takes place in New Orleans. Maybe it has no connection to Williams at all. What I'm trying to say, is that there is a pacing and a heated, roiling subtext to this text that makes me think of swealtering, gulf-coastal weather. There's sex, there's violence, there's restraint in presenting both and power in the restraint. That's a lot of abstractions for a simple play about an artist, his wife, and the street boy they draw into their web of love, infidelity. amd fantasy games. It's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf on a Streetcar Named Desire. Sort of. I'm probably misrepresenting it completely and Christopher will be emailing me gentle corrections and threats. I don't do good soundbites.

But I like this play. And the other plays in this collection. I hope some of you will check it out when it's available in July.

Giovanni: I don't have any sage words regarding the horrors at Virginia Tech. I listen to the "shouldas" and the "couldas" and mostly, I wonder whoever gets a guarantee of a safe day? Yes, we need to pay attention to one another. Yes, we need to hold interventions now and then. And no, it's not all up to legislation and "authorities" to do this. I hear all these reports about a history of antisocial behavior and clues that should have warned everyone that there was violence brewing. I've heard no reports of any attempt at reaching out to the young man, other than the most clinical, authoritarian means available. Did anyone try to befriend the loner?

I probably wouldn't have, either.

In our world of crowded lives, it's amazing how easy it is to get disconnected, isolated. It's amazing how easy it is to do it to ourselves.

But what I really want to point out about it all are the words of Nikki Giovanni. I know her name, not her work. I know she's something of a rock star among poets. I didn't know until last week that she was a professor at Virginia Tech.

Sunday morning, my pastor read her convocation address as part of his sermon. It's short and you can read it all here: http://www.vt.edu/tragedy/giovanni_transcript.php

My pastor highlighted a paragraph, and I also believe it is the genius of her address. In this paragraph, she acknowledges the horror and grief of what happened on their campus and at the same time draws her listeners out of their grief to acknowledge that there is horror all around the world, that their grief is but one instance of grief throughout this big world full of hurt. Giovanni was a genius in noting such tragedies without using such obvious and politically charged examples as Iraq. She didn't use her address to make a statement on our current politics--which would have been so easy to do, and I don't know I could have resisted the temptation. But she set her own tragedy in the wider grief of the entire human family. In so doing, she tells us (or at least me) that we are not alone in our griefs. We are not the only ones who hurt, even as we most surely do hurt. It's a way of embracing our profound sadness while embracing the entire world.

My favorite line: "We are better than we think and not quite what we want to be."

Today, I am thankful that there is someone so wise and strong as Nikki Giovanni, giving words of consolation and encouragement in a senseless situation.

Semi-Public Art; Performance Process and Progress; Contest

2007-03-08T00:06:00.000-08:00

Semi-Public Art

Since my little adventure in health care a few months back, I've been trying (honest, I have!) to get a little exercise, emphasis on little. Mostly, I've been taking 30+ minute walks around my neighborhood. Now, my neighborhood doesn't generally draw tourists. Mostly, I'm walking past warehouses and other industrial types of business. And condos, of course. It's a fairly unremarkable place.

Last week, I decided to cross a street that I'd somehow decided was a boundary street for my walks. I'm a creature of ingrained habit, and once I decide upon a route, I tend to take the same one over and over. But, I don't know, I was feeling wild and crazy that day.

So I'm walking along, seeing more condos, a self-storage place I hadn't seen before, and quite a lot of houses that were probably on the edge of the city 50 - 60 years ago, before NASA and air conditioning made Houston the fourth largest city in the USA. Old suburbia, in other words.

I came across on house on a corner lot that made me pause in my travels. In the yard were several metal sculptures. They are spare, you might even say minimalist. One is a slightly larger than life sculpture of a dancing figure. It's very interesting to me in that the legs are very solid, with plate metal forming them, but the torso is a mangled series of metal bar. It's quite effective, giving the torso a sense of lightness and movement on what look like really powerful legs. This was the sculpture that first caught my eye, dance geek that I am.

There are a couple of other pieces that are harder to describe. They are also made of metal bars or rods, I'd guess no more than a quarter inch thick. They're bent and welded so that they form these rather large . . . not quite curly cues, but that's close enough. They spin out of themselves and into the ground. They're fun, but I don't have an emotional response to them.

I do have an emotional response to the other sculptures, though. At first, I couldn't figure out what they were. They are also made out of these metal rods and they fairly quickly took form as kneeling figures, but with all those skinny lines, it was a bit hard to see what they were other than squiggly lines. Slowly, I began to see that each of these kneeling stick figures was holding a smaller figure in it's arms. The smaller figure was in a back-bend, as in death or grave injury or illness.

I realized I was looking at a half-dozen stick figure pietas. It is remarkably affecting. I wonder if there is a story behind them. They strike me as very sad.

I went again for a walk into that part of the neighborhood today. It appeared as though the figures were moved. I remembered them all facing the street, but today, some were turned to each other.

I wonder if the artist lives in the house or if it's just a fan of this one artist. Maybe, after the light in the evenings get longer, I'll take a walk that way and get up the courage to knock on the door and ask about them.

Performance Process and Progress

So I'm making my first trio performance piece. This is going to be a growing experience. It's going to alter the way that I make work. After making only solo work, this challenges my process in ways that surprise me.

This is the Desert Fathers piece I mentioned last post. It still lacks a title and even the theme is just starting to emerge for me. Yes, still about weakness being strength, but also something about ritual and community.

I have more to say about this, but not right now. I think I need another meeting with my collaborators. I think I'm going to learn a lot. About myself and about making non-solo work.

Contest

For the five or so following this blog, you'll note that the first of March has come and gone without an announcement about a contest to win a copy of Able to.... Well, I'm suspending the monthly contest for the moment. I'm just not getting response to it. The last message board I posted it to keeps track of how many people read a post, and over one hundred people looked at the contest posting . . . and no one, not one, entered.

The previous month wasn't much better.

So I have to rethink this and I'm open to ideas as to why no one responded. Maybe I haven't described the book well enough to build interest? Maybe asking for an answer to a question ("What kind of super power would you like to have and why?") was too much to ask contestants? (maybe I should have stated I wasn't really expecting much more than a simple "I'd like to fly because I really dig looking at those Earth from Above books.") Maybe it's the request to post the entries on my website---even as I gave people the option of being anonymous?

I don't know, I thought it would be fun. But, you know, I have a skewed sense of fun. I often point to the magazine racks at work as a microcosm of my world. Over here we have a whole bay and several shelves of car magazines (no interest) and over here we have three dance magazines (huge interest). What I think of as fun may appeal to only something like .o25% of the population.

But Able to... is a good book, and I'll find other ways to promote. I may even come back to this monthly contest idea, only with some tweaking. Feel free to offer tweaking advice.

-Neil

New Work, Performance and Writing

2007-02-22T22:16:00.000-08:00

Well, I'm published again, this latest time in a webzine called Defenestration.

http://defenestrationmag.net/

It's a piece of silliness about a Christian jewelry ministry. Okay, maybe it's less silly and more satire. I'm not sure, in some places, how satirical I am and how serious I am. Part of me wants to be the jeweler in the piece, only not out of the same . . . shall we say, convictions?

It's a piece I wrote and wasn't sure what to do with, so I'm glad it found a home. I say that like it up and wandered the world until it settled at Defenestration. I have a couple of other pieces that should do likewise.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I'm involved with Fieldwork this spring. By "involved," I mean I'm the facilitator of the session. The people we're getting are topnotch, I just wish it were twice as many. Or just two more would be about right. Finding independent artists who want to show new work and receive feedback is harder than I would have imagined. But that's not the point here tonight.

I'm making a new performance piece. Now, all my work has a religious bent, even though I often fight against that. But this new piece is perhaps more overtly religious. Or maybe I'm just not fighting the religiosity. I'm embracing it. I just hope it doesn't come off like some evangelistic pamphlet. That's always my worry. It needs to have it's own integrity, apart from any message. And at this very moment, I'm not even entirely certain what the "message" might be (although I'd prefer to think of it as a "theme").

Here's what I do know: It's a piece that I'm building based upon three sayings of the Desert Fathers, the 4th century monks who started the whole Christian monastic tradition. Perhaps even more, it's based upon Roberta Bondi's book, T0 Love as God Loves, which is about the Desert Fathers. But I'm not paraphrasing her, I'm paraphrasing the Fathers. The feedback that I've gotten so far is that the rough beginnings remind people of Buddhist ritual or maybe Yogic movement. It has something about our weakness being strength, which a notion from St. Paul. Yes, I guess that is the theme.

I also know that I don't want it to be a solo piece, although I've been showing these rough beginnings as solo performance. I'm talking to two friends/colleagues about performing with me and they're amenable, now we just have to coordinate rehearsal schedules and the like--which is always the hardest part. I'm tired of solo performance. I'm sure I'll do it again, but right now, I'm itching to work with other performers. And these two friends/colleagues are two people I respect and enjoy. We're brainstorming other ways to work together. We'll see how this goes.

There's so little financial reward in making performance work, which is disheartening at times. Especially if you're doing performance like I tend to make: meditative, introspective pieces for people with measurable attention spans. But when it's not disheartening, it's such a joy to me. The work is its own reason, commerce be damned. I don't want to say I make performance just for me--an audience is essential! But if my audience is a handful rather than an auditorium-full, well, the audience gives me joy as well, no matter what size.

I'll tell you more about the piece as it's made. And about the performers as the schedules clear up to reveal who'll actually be with me . . .

February Site to Win a Copy of Able to...

2007-02-01T10:09:00.000-08:00

Last month, I instituted a monthly contest to win a copy of Able to.... The winner was Nick Hodge of Ontario. His copy of Able to... is on its way to him, if it hasn't reached him already.

This month, the rules for the drawing are posted to the Image Journal forum. Go to:

http://forum.imagejournal.org/

and click on the Announcements forum. There, you'll find full rules for entering the competition. To make sure people are going to the forum-of-the-month, I've instituted a "code word" requirement. Part of the reason I'm doing this, besides publicity for the book, is to drive people to forums I enjoy. So while you're there, poke around the other forums and, if you're so moved, enter the conversations. I admit, I'm a bit of a lurker on this forum myself, but it's full of interesting people and ideas.

Go on, now. Enter.

The Accidental, State-Funded Installation

2007-01-30T22:35:00.000-08:00

There is an intersection I go through nearly every day of my life here in Houston. It's as I pass under Highway 59, aka the Southwest Freeway. At night, as I'm coming home from the day job that is sometimes an evening job, I usually have to stop at this intersection. It's a very urban scene, all white concrete under the overpass, not anything particularly striking in and of itself. Any city dweller sees the like daily.

This intersection's stoplights are angled in such a way that both, the light facing on-coming traffic and the light facing the one-way traffic coming from my left, gets reflected on the concrete. Some of the light falls under the overpass, on those lines that look like gigantic corrugated cardboard. The play of the green, the yellow, the red against the deeper, black shadows always holds my interest. I find the colors on the concrete somewhat soothing, maybe a bit eerie, but peaceful. There's not much traffic some nights, and there's a feeling of--I hesitate to use the word--intimacy, just me waiting for my green and the changing hues on the concrete. It's like a light installation project just for me and it makes me smile.

I tell you, there is beauty everywhere.

happy new year!

2007-01-01T10:40:00.000-08:00

2006 is now history and 2007 lays out before us like a new world to be conquered. While I'm not comfortable with the imperialist nature of that comment, I hope we can move forward with new energy and new vision and be a kinder, gentler conquerer of new years.

Or something like that.

This past year has been a great ride for me. Obviously, the big news here was that neoNuma published its first book, Able to... to more success than I might have hoped for. Of course, I hope it will continue to sell into 2007 and if you haven't gotten your copy yet, bn.com, amazon.com, and oh so many other places are easy to get to. That includes your local bookstore, which can order you a copy as well.

Throughout 2007, there will also be opportunities for you win a free copy. On the first of each month, I plan on posting a contest to different online bulletin boards announcing a drawing for a free copy. The first place I'm posting the contest is on the DC Comics message board for DC Novels and other Books. If you're interested in entering, go to dccomics.com and click on message boards and scroll down until the Novels board. I post there as neowrites. I'm starting on that board because I'm already registered there and I'm lazy, but also because I'd always hoped that I'd get more response or interest from the comics community. I'll also eventually post to boards that are more broadly defined. The only place I'll announce where I'll be posting is on this blog and maybe my newsletter (go to yahoogroups.com and sign up for my newsletter, neoNews, if you haven't already).

Also in 2007, allegedly in late spring, I'll be releasing a collection of short plays by Chicago playwright, screenwriter, actor, and arts entrepreneur Chrstopher Ellis. (No relation to me--he just happens to have a very cool last name. Or I have a very cool middle name.) As I work on that through the winter months, you'll see me talking more and more about The Fatal Gift of Beauty and Other Plays. If you have thespian leanings or know someone who does, you'll want to watch for this. It's a beautiful collection of plays, ranging in length from an extended monolgue (about 10 minutes?) to a long one-act (I'm guessing running time of 45-60 minutes). Christopher and screenwriting partner and director Phillip G. Donlon have had some success on the festival circuit with the short film, Wrestled, which recently premiered on the Independent Film Channel. They have other film projects in the works as well. I first came to know Christopher and his work while living in Chicago. With his wife, Dawn Marie Galtieri, they run The Arts Alliance in the Logan Square neighborhood and Christopher is familiar to audiences there as the host of Vaudeville Underground. I'm excited to be presenting his short plays, but that will become more clear as the year progresses.

Of course, there will be other things coming along in 2007, but there's time for all that later.

Thank you to everyone who helped make 2006 a landmark year for neoNuma Arts. I'll be back soon with more meanderings about neoNuma and artschtuff in general.

Happy 2007 to one and all!

The Year of Living Sedentarily (or the longest post ever)

2006-12-05T16:37:00.000-08:00

Normally, I'm here to write about arts related things. Today is a fairly arts-free entry, in part because it lets me tell people, "just go read my blog." All the same, I'll try to keep it brief, difficult for me. Imagine if I told it over and over and over.

Most people seem to think of me as being fairly active, usually due to some performance they've seen me do. This past year, however, has been fairly sedentary. I haven't performed since January and so much of my life was spent at the computer working on Able to... and the promotion of that. The day job is in retail and so I spend about 40 hours a week on my feet, but it's not exactly aerobic exercise.

So I'm not saying that what follows is the result of the past year, but I can't prove it isn't. It does let me use a word like "sedentarily."

Tuesday, November 28, 2006

Just before heading into the day job, I started feeling a very mild pressure in my left chest/shoulder. After being at work a couple of hours, I went to the health shelves (my day job is at a book store) and looked up "heart." From the dictionary definition, I felt secure that I was not having a heart attack. "Angina" did fit what I was experiencing, but that said it was not a dangerous thing and usually passed after 15 minutes or so. Of course, I'd been feeling it for nearly 2 hours.

So I waited a couple more hours. After 4 hours at work, I told a manager I should probably go to a doctor. One of the managers drove me to a nearby clinic, which, it turns out, didn't have an ER. They chastised me for not dialing 911, and gave me a lookover. EKG was good, blood pressure good, no real reason to believe anything was going on, really, but they gave me a patch of nitro and called an ambulance to take me to an ER anyway, for further overlooking.
Shortly, I was in the ER of St. Luke's Episcopal Hospital here in Houston. After more blood and more EKG, they still couldn't find anything that suggested my heart was a problem, and my chest pressure had been relieved. The ER doctor gave me the option of going home, but he also said, "If my brother had gone to another ER with your symptoms, and they'd just dismissed him, I'd be pissed." The seed of doubt having been planted, I agreed to stay the night for a stress test in the morning. I was a little pouty and didn't want to spend the night, but I hunkered down and accepted my fate. Meanwhile, the nitro had given me a migraine. I hadn't had lunch and by the time they brought me supper, I couldn't eat much. That was the worst pain I'd felt all day and I went to bed swearing I would never go see a doctor, ever, again.

This was my first night in a hospital as a patient. Ever.

Wednesday, November 29

They wake me up several times in the night to take blood and blood pressure and finally to give me the stress test. This has to be done on an empty stomach, of course, so I was ravenously hungry and was pretty sure I would pass out from that alone. They gave me a CAT scan, and then put me on a treadmill. The treadmill tech was sort of like a P.E. teacher, and so I didn't respond too warmly to her, especially when I said I'd like to stop and she said, "Can we go one more minute?" I felt more intense pressure, more like pain, in the same area as the day before and they gave me a nitro pill (which I resisted because I didn't want another headache, but was convinced that a migraine was better than a heart seizing up), and then another scan. They returned me to my room and gave me lunch (bland bland bland, but oh I ate it all up).

After much waiting and a day of "you'll likely go home this evening," I was told, around 7pm, that the stress test suggested some blockage of one artery, so I would have to stay another night and they'd do a catheterization of my heart the next day, to determine the extent of the blockage and subsequent treatment. .

I asked my friend, Celina, to get me a pair of sweat pants and a t-shirt because all I had was what I had worn to work the day before. She brought me a duffle bag full of new clothes from Target. There were some things on sale. Misha also came that evening and so I had my first hospital visitors. A good time was had by all. When I wasn't pouting about spending a second night in the hospital.

Thursday, November 30

About 3am, I wake up with more severe pressure in my chest. I call the nurse, she takes blood (I later realized all the blood-letting was to determine if my heart had released enzymes that defined a heart attack), takes blood pressure, takes EKG. No heart attack evident. She gives me some nitro, which doesn't really help me. She gives me some morphine, which helps some.

Here's a thing that got on my nerves: I kept being asked, "On a scale of one to ten, where is the pain." Sometimes, it was "On a scale of one to five," which made me crazy because I felt like I had to do some algebraic conversion to another scale. Dumb, I know. Anyway, up until Thursday morning, I had been no worse than a 4 (on the ten scale) during the stress test. I said the Thursday morning pain was up to 7. And all the while, I kept asking myself, "If a 10 is the worst possible pain . . . well what is that? I seem to tolerate pain pretty well, so what if this is really a 10? HOW DO I KNOW???"

Finally, my turn in the heart catheter room is up. Let me tell you, if this had been happening to someone else, this would have been fascinating. What am I saying, it was fascinating anyway. You stay awake for the procedure, during which they stick a tube into your groin and up a very large vessel that goes straight to the heart. They pump iodine into the heart to see where a blockage is. They also pumped something else in there at some point. I'm not sure what it was, but the doctor said, "Mr. Orts, you're going to feel a rush of heat throughout your body." Shortly, I felt this heat hit my heart and then disperse throughout my torso. It was amazing. Kind of felt good, even. I watch as much of this as I can on a screen they have set up for that reason.

Finally, the doctor said, "Mr. Orts, there are three major blood vessels to your heart and one is completely blocked." He paused dramatically, so I said, "Really? Wow." Or something equally inane. Then he said, "There seems to be some blood circulation to that part of the heart via minor vessels, so that part of the heart isn't dead, yet." This became the biggest thing I learned all week: A part of my heart could be dead and I could still be carrying on a conversation. (Certain past dates may say they knew this already.) After another dramatic pause, the doctor went on to say that they were calling another cardiologist to consult with them about whether to try to open up the vessel with a balloon and stent or if they should just crack open my rib cage and touch my heart with their bare, latex gloves. (He may not have said exactly that.) After a bit, they informed me they would try the stent. A little bit later still, the doctor said, "Mr. Orts, your artery is open."

"Thank you," I answered politely.

Outside the catheter room, people started passing around my paperwork and reacting with "Wow." and "whoa!" and "you came in with only a little pressure on your chest?"

Silly as it seems, this was the first time I started to understand this was really serious. Because, you know, serious things only happen to other people.

They did bring me a sandwich as I was waiting to go the Cardiac Care Unit. I laughed as I opened the thing. There was a package of mayonnaise on the side. I said to the nurse, "So I just had a completely blocked artery and you give me mayonnaise? I LOVE THIS PLACE!"

I had to spend the night flat on my back and never bending because of the puncture wound in my groin, where the catheter went in. I had a couple of visitors. Otherwise, the rest of the day was uneventful.

Friday, December 1

Not much to report on that day. Doctors came in and said cryptic things about needing to watch me closely and then evaporated into mist. A couple of guys came into the room to do a sonogram of my heart. I watch the images on their screen. Honestly, if you've seen one sonogram, you've seen them all. A month old embryo flutters murkily much like a 43 year old heart. I suppressed the urge to ask if it was a boy or a girl.

They said that post catheterization, heart attack enzymes were showing up in my blood.

In the afternoon, I was allowed to stand up and sit in a chair. I ate supper sitting up.

The main thing I learned that day was that most people with a stent go home the next day. Most.

Saturday, December 2

Just another day in paradise. I finally ask Celina to raid Doug's, her husband's, library (he's an English phd student) for a book or two. I ask Misha to bring me some doodling (AKA art) supplies.

The weekend doctor told me that the enzymes were trending down, so that looked good. She also said that they were still wanting to watch me to make sure I wasn't having a silent heart attack. I asked her if they were now saying I actually had a heart attack. She said, "Not technically, but it's really splitting hairs."

Great.

My pastor dropped by and left a bulletin for Sunday's service (which I saw was "good hymn Sunday"). I spoke with a hospital chaplain. I washed my hair.

Sunday, December 2

A different weekend doctor saw me that morning. I asked him about the sonogram, since no one had said anything more about it since it was taken. He pulled it up on a computer. He showed me how one side of my heart was beating a little bit better than the other side, so I had suffered some minor scarring. He said it was very minor, especially considering the extent of my blockage.

I watched TV, I read a bit, I spoke to people on the phone.

They told me I would either go to a regular room that night and go home the next day or just go home from CCU the next day. Either way, they felt confident I was leaving soon. It all depended upon whether they could find a room

Finally, at about 8pm, I was transferred to a regular room. I'm not sure why finding a room was such a problem because it was a semi-private room, but the other bed was empty. Doug said, the next day when he came to get me, that they literally couldn't find the room, that, like he, they got lost looking for it. Could be. Hospitals always strike me as being layed out so as to confound navigation.

Monday, December 3

They discharge me shortly before noon. The internist, the cardiologist, and the RN all give me slightly different instructions, but mostly I learn that the largest concern is for the puncture wound in my leg. All the lifting restrictions, for example, had nothing to do with my heart, but about not rupturing the groin. Suddenly, my heart was only peripherally important.

I had the handful of prescriptions filled. Only one is forever, the one that keeps my white blood cells from attacking my stent. The others might (might) be phased out later. Counting the baby aspirin, I have 5 different pills to take daily. One, I have to take twice a day.

When I get home, my cat is furious with me and maybe a little traumatized. He runs from me, talking the whole time. "Don't you touch me, don't you dare touch me, you bastard. Leave me alone for 6 nights, sending strangers in to touch my food, who do you think you are? You think you can just abandon me for 6 nights and then expect to touch me?" (That's translated from "meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow.") He has since come to sit on my lap for extended periods of time, so I think this, too, has passed.

Tuesday, December 4

Today, I started in resenting. How dare my heart get clogged? How dare my heart turn me into one of those people who has to remember to pack my meds when I travel? And yes, I am carrying the cordless phone around the apartment with me. Doesn't mean I'm worried or scared or anything like that.

In short, I'm great in a crisis—calm, cool, collected—but I think the crumbling could start soon. Or not. It's hard to predict these things.

I go back to the bookstore tomorrow to face the holiday crush.

For those of you who read all this—wow, what stamina. And it was for you that I wrote it. I'm already tiring of telling the story and I'm forgetting who I told what. Here's as good a place as any to tell everyone at once.

And the moral of the story is: The stress test is your friend. If your insurance covers it or if you can afford it, I'm thinking it's a good thing to do every year. It was all that headed off what could have been a massive coronary event.

Okay, back to arts related stuff next time. No more heart talk from me on the blog (unless I get my hands on the video from the catheterization and/or the sonogram and this becomes a performance).

real

2006-11-09T19:41:00.000-08:00

A couple of weeks ago, I took a short road trip with a friend, a rhetorician, who told me how he had dismantled a piece of propaganda, not by arguing against the actual thing it was promoting (a screed on the horrors of illegal immigration, if I recall correctly), but by taking it apart rhetorically, showing the flaws in the arguments (non sequitors and the like). I should add the propaganda was one of those forwarded e-mails we all seem to get from certain friends and/or relatives.

Anyway, after his careful dismantling of the argument (without taking sides in the argument), he received the response that he wasn't living in the real world. The implication was that with all his education, he had lost touch with the reality this forwarded e-mail was clearly exposing.

The details of that particular story aside, I've pondered this for days now. What is the real world? I admit, I find my grasp on the concept to be slippery at best. Setting aside political views, let's just look at one simple way reality is very different to different people, yet very much a way of life on this big ol' planet.

I live here in the U.S. of A. where, I heard on the radio a few weeks ago, that the average citizen uses over 100 gallons of water per day. Per day. I heard that and it seemed just ridiculous. Impossible. How could I possibly be responsible for using 100 gallons of water each day? But as I added it up--showers, clothes and dish washing, food prep . . . not to mention the amount I just drink everyday . . . it still seems unlikely, but I suppose it could add up. (I now feel better about never washing my car.)

There still exists, in some parts of the world, communities that must walk to a central well or river or cistern of some sort and carry the day's water back to the home. How much water can one person carry? I'm guessing between 10 and 20 gallons. I've carried two 5 gallon buckets full of water at one time, and I can't imagine someone being able to carry much more than that for a very long distance.

So, just that as a base measurement of reality . . . which circumstance is more real?

Given the economic strata that I hold here in this country, I've looked at the way some people live and think they exist in some fairy tale world. There are families of 4 living in 20 room mansions not that far from me, and look forward to a time when I might be able to afford a second bedroom and move my home office out of the living room.

But I suppose those lives lived in opulence . . . really, is their circumstance any more or less real?

There are many, much more complex ways this has been rattling in my brain. Lies and "realities" we present to people who then live in a world not quite as real as it might be if we told the truth. The unrealities we continue to create and present because it's easier than exposing the real circumstances. For some reason, people seem to find me a good place to tell about their extramarital affairs. I wonder, then, about the reality of the spouse, who thinks he or she is in a monogamous relationship.

Those sorts of things.

I've seen different fiction writers talk about writing stories as a way of organizing and making sense of the real world. I suppose that's true . . .

I'm not sure I have a point. Except maybe to pay attention to other realities, to not assume ours is the only one, that anyone living differently is out of touch with reality. Maybe I meant to say something about discounting someone else's viewpoint as not in the real world is to miss out on the many ways reality can be experienced, is to cut oneself off from compassion for others, is to disregard others' concrete experiences as somehow unworthy of consideration. I probably had some sort of point about those sorts of things.

I suppose I'll continue to ponder this. If I come up with anything more lucid, I'll try to write about it.

Does anyone out there read Sojourners magazine? The current issue has an article about fiction writers, Barbara Kingsolver among the more prominent featured. In some way, I think of that article as having something to say about fiction as arranging--and transmitting--reality so as to foster intimacy between diparate folk. Kingsolver said somethign about that intimacy being the opposite of war.

I'm feeling particularly inarticulate about all this. I suppose that can happen when discussing reality. Feel free to comment and help me arrange my thoughts more thoughtfully.

~~~~~~~~~
While writing this, I was reminded of a couple of lines from the late great songwriter, Mark Heard:

To the poor we are swaddled in riches
To the rich we ain't nothing but poor

http://mhlp.rru.com/we_know_too_much.html

Maybe I'm trying to get at something about perspective . . .

better vocabulary through pop songs

2006-10-18T19:30:00.000-07:00

Today I heard a song from my high school senior year and I was reminded that this song had an educational aspect for me. The lyrics in question are:

"I wanna tell her that I love her, but the point is probably moot."

Yes, Rick Springfield introduced the word "moot" to my vocabulary. I distinctly remember seeing that word on the lyrics sheet and asking a girl from the class before me what that meant.

(Because dictionaries aren't cool. Or something.)

Man, that was a catchy song. It's been in my head all afternoon. C'mon, sing along with me:

"you know I wish that I had Jesse's girl . . . "

Corpus Christi report

2006-10-17T20:34:00.000-07:00

This seemed important to blog about.

I had my first Barnes & Noble signing this past Friday night. It went well enough. We didn't sell a bunch of books, but I'm still at the stage that getting to do signings is success enough. I'm glad I did it and I'd do it again. There are many reasons for that, but one in particular stays with me.

A young girl--I didn't ask her age and I'm not good at guessing ages, but let's say somewhere around 11-13ish?--came up to talk to me as we were winding down. She was very serious and her family left her to fend for herself with the author doing a signing. Her mom did hide around the corner of some bookshelves, keeping an eye on the interaction. I imagine it was to make sure her daughter wasn't bothering me as well as to make sure I wasn't some creepy guy. I found it all quite charming.

The girl was, of course, a young writer and she wanted to talk to an author. We chatted just briefly, but I asked about what she wrote and if she was showing it to anyone, teachers at least. She said yes and that she hoped to get something published. I asked her if she was familiar with Stone Soup, and she said she was not. I told her to look it up, as they are a magazine that publishes young writers. I also suggested she go to her public library and just start looking though the Writer's Market, to see who was publishing what. At her age, I had no idea either of these things existed and I hope just this knowledge will help her see her own possibilities.

I wrote these things down on an Able to... postcard I had with me and signed that for her. Her brother came to get her and she said, very politely and seriously, "Well, I won't keep you." I waved to her mother, still watching us, and wished her well in her writing.

And as much as I enjoyed that interaction, there are things I wished I had said and done.

I wished I had gotten up from my table and walked with her (and her mother) to the newstand and looked for Stone Soup. Barnes & Noble usually carries it and it would have been good for her to actually see it. It's not as if I had a line waiting for me to sign books.

I wish I had told her to not give up. Too many people are put off by rejection letters and I wish I had told her that as disappointing they can be, they are part of the work. They have nothing to do with her talent or the worthiness of her writing. I wish I had told her that the story I just got accepted was written 4 years ago and has gone through a few rejections---and revisions---on its way to publication.

I wish I'd told her that I got my first rejection letter the summer after I was in 8th grade and hadn't gotten my first acceptance letter until I was well into adulthood. Well, that may be daunting for a young person to hear. Maybe it's just as well that I didn't say that. Unless I also told her that there were a few years in there when I did let the rejections get to me and I didn't seriously put things out there until I was much older. Maybe that's the thing I should have said. I should have said that getting rejections early in life made me give it up for a time or else just treat it as a hobby. I wish I'd told her not to follow my example in that. I wish I had told her to never give up being serious about writing because only a very, very few hobbyists ever get published.

But maybe what I did say and what I did do was somewhat helpful. I think I can put myself in her place and feel the excitement of someone who has published. Just seeing a real person who does this thing can be an encouragement. I don't think I met a published writer until I was in college. I'm pretty sure I hadn't. I've sometimes wondered what it might have done to/for me had I known a writer as a kid. I think it would have made being a writer seem a lot more possible, would have made "writer" a real person instead of a creature I read about, which made them as real as unicorns, superheroes, and Martian princesses.

This girl lives in (or near) Corpus Christi, which is much larger than where I grew up. She has a Barnes & Noble that has author signings regularly. I may not be the first author she's met and I certainly won't be the last one she has access to in her teen years. But I was glad to have been there that night to talk to her, even as briefly as I did.

Because, in truth, I felt a little validated, too. She came to me because I was a published author and I suddenly have a different appreciation for the responsibility that status gives me.

NYC Reflections, part three

2006-10-11T11:40:00.000-07:00

As noted early in the blogging venture, blogging is hard. The NYC trip is over a month in the past and I still haven't said all I wanted to say about it. Well, this is the last entry on that adventure. (Finally, they all said under their breath.)

My last day in NYC was pretty uneventful. I was staying out in Brooklyn and so I just sort of wandered around the neighborhood there. I kept trying to remember an old Neil Diamond song but could only remember "two floors above the butcher, first door on the right." Of course, Neil Diamond was pretty much all a farm boy from Paige would know of Brooklyn and everything was new to me. Maybe not entirely, but somewhat. Walking under a freeway overpass is not much different from doing so in Chicago or even Houston. Some of the empty buildings and lots have some visual affinity to Chicago. But I was a little surprised at how different from Chicago it all "felt." I kept wanting to transplant my experience from living in Chicago to this other major city, and I have to say, each city has a distinct flavor, a particulary spirit to it. The achitecture is subtly different, even if they are storefronts with apartments over them. Even the new condos going in, while having a sort of sterile appearance next to the older buildings, are a different sterile from the Chicago condos. I find it hard to qualify beyond an intuitive feeling. I think I could be blindfolded and set down in either city and know almost immediately which city I was in.

I realize that the above could only be written by someone who retains a certain naivete about big cities. They're all alike, right? Sort of silly to put it out there, that I was surprised by the differences. But then, when I was in Manhattan and seeing all those familiar sights from tv shows and movies, I also have a feeling of walking into a story book. "Oh, the Empire State Building is real, not a set piece." I think you could put me in the Emerald City of Oz and get a similar reaction.

Brunch was on my agenda and after walking past some really overflowing diner sort of playes (Brooklyn folks apparently love their Saturday morning brunches), I stopped in at a little place that, in retrospect, was probably too hip for me. It was a mild September day, so I sat out back, in their outdoor seating. I didn't recognize anything on the menu, so I went with the safest thing I could find, yogurt with granola and fruit. I'm not terribly adventurous with the whole food thing.

And once I ordered, I looked around the small seating area. When I first came in, there were only 6 other people, all at one table. They were all 20-something and they had two open bottles of wine on their table. As other people drifted in, I started to realize that I was close to twice the age of everyone else. Well, that's maybe exaggerating, I'm still in the first half of my 40s. But still, 15-20 years younger than me. I'd stumbled into a conclave of hip, cosmopolitan young people who had wine with brunch. Thrift store chic, tattoos, hair dye, and wine for brunch. Even with my long, post-hippie hair, I felt quite old and square. I mean, I don't even have wine with dinner. Luckily, I'm fairly secure in my lack of cosmopolitan sophistication and went about the business of eating my yogurt. (The yogurt, etc, was really very, very good. It was a generous bowl of it and the fruit and berries in it were fresh and flavorful. I do not regret going with the safe item on the menu.)

There were two young women who came in and sat at the table nearest mine. Eavesdropping is the work of a writer, and I soon discovered that one was a playwright and the other was an actress and, near as I could tell, budding producer. The producer chick was talking about how much she loved the script the playwright chick had written and how much she looked forward to putting this play onstage. I identified with the playwright much more, as she had a sort of reticent excitement about it all, an innocence about having someone like her work. She was excited and I enjoyed seeing that. The producer had more "slick" to her. She was very complimentary and encouraging, but she also had that sort of authority some theater folk get when declaring something good--and her age made that attitude appear to be more act than convincing voice. These were both Serious Theater Artists and I went back and forth between being amused by them (for I, too, was once a Serious Theater---no no--Theatre Artist), and admiring them. I loved their energy, their excitement about what was possible.

And that was the most interesting thing about my Saturday, I suppose. I wandered until I had to go to the airport. A day well spent, really.

It wasn't until I got back to Houston that I noticed something I hadn't noticed in the nearly 3 years I've been back in Texas. And it revolves around the overheard conversations. The Serious Theatre Artists at brunch on Saturday morning were part of it. So was a conversation at the Oscar Wilde Bookstore between a patron and the store clerk. I realize this observation is heavily influenced by where I was in NYC and my purpose for being there, and where I spend most of my time in Houston, which is at a job in the Galleria area.

In NYC, I over heard two extended conversations about working in theater, the struggles of putting up a show in an un-air conditioned theater which was so tiny it was sweltering even in February, the excitement of producing a new script (probably also in some tiny theater), of catching up about so-and-so who "did a show with us two years ago, have you heard from him--he'd be great for our next production." In Houston, most of the overheard conversations I hear are about "did you get the fax?" and "is he on board for this opportunity" and advice on investing and who is the real power player in this situation and on and on.

Very odd, I think, when NYC is also the home of Wall Street.

But, again, I didn't hang out near Wall Street. I hung out in book shops and hipster brunch spots. On the other hand, I do go hang out in coffee shops in more hipster parts of Houston. And I still don't overhear conversations about people putting up new theater or much of any creative endeavor. I still overhear the same conversations, perhaps the most creative being from some guys with a lap top discussing building a website.

Houston has a lot of arts organizations and an active arts community, but what it lacks, it seems to me, is the same sense of wonder and excitement I heard from the young women at brunch. They didn't talk about funding or how they were going to put up this brand new script. Some the producer's attitude suggested to me that she wasn't entirely sure of the "how" yet--but they were going to do it anyway. In Houston, I get the feeling that the art talk and excitement comes after the funding is secured and that happens in some more private space.

In other words, I came back from NYC with a sense that there is a lot more possible there. That's the real word: possible. There are possibilities there just because it's NYC and they're going to make art anyway. There's a sense of wonder and excitement that I don't find in Houston. Wonder is weighted down with the more practical matters of paying for everything.

Naturally, paying for a theater production is a big concern. It has stopped me more than once--I am Lutheran and we are a pragmatic people. And I'm not writing this to bash my current hometown.

But the NYC trip has helped me to see and understand some things, most importantly the type of culture and environment I want to create and be a part of here. Or, preferably, find.

But help create if it truly is missing here.

Art should be about wonder, excitement, and possibilities. That's today's manifesto. Check back to see how that all works out.

NYC Reflections, part two

2006-09-20T18:19:00.000-07:00

This is my second attempt. Something went kerfizzle a few nights ago--after I had nearly the whole entry written. It's taken me this long to forgive Blogger and/or Internet Explorer. (And this time, I'm using Firefox . . . )

Okay. So my second morning in NYC, I woke up at a leisurely hour and moved about the studio quietly as a rehearsal was going on. Maybe I should explain that. I was staying at Studio 111 in Brooklyn (Williamsburg, to be exact) and the set-up is a front space with two rehearsal/performance spaces and then a living space for three resident artists. One of the artists was out of town the week I was up there and had graciously offered his space to me. I must say, there is something sort of exciting and energizing about waking up in a space full of artists working at their craft. I didn't see or hear what they were working on--it seemed rude to eaves drop on them--but that's beside the point.

It was about 10am by the time I got around to looking for a place to breakfast (or brunch, I guess, by that hour). The morning before, I'd had a really good bagel at a shop in the neighborhood, but I was looking for something more filling. I was expecting this meal to last me well into the afternoon.

I decided to try out a diner-ish looking place called Daniella's Luncheonette on Graham. It was a long, narrow eatery with a one long side of the wall filled with small tables to seat 4 and the other side occupied by a lunch counter and stools. At the counter sat a group of men chatting and giving each other (and occasionally the waitress) a hard time. One guy in particular sort of stood out if only because he was the most boisterous. I didn't hear what preceded his, but at one point, I heard him declare (and try to hear this in your head with a thick Brooklyn accent), "Oh yeah, I'm real genteel. I'm gentilly." Later, someone brought in a bag of what I guessed was sunflower seeds--I didn't get a good luck. The same man was not impressed with whatever it was. "What? You want me to eat bird seed? You want me to cheep, too? Cheep! Cheep!"

Quite the character.

I should also mention that the omelet I had was pretty good. Nothing especially outstanding, but good food and lots of it. Impulsively, when I ordered it, I asked for a side of bacon because, well, because I love love love bacon. (It's how I keep my boyish figure.) This side order was, also, a lot of food. Anyplace that serves that much bacon as a side order gets five stars from me.

Having consumed my daily requirement of fat vitamins, I was ready for my day of checking out upper Manhattan.

My destination was the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Years ago, in grad school, I was doing a lot reading (it's hard for me to call it "research") on Rudolf Laban, the dance innovator and movement analyst of pre-war Germany. I had been trying to find some film of him dancing, which may or may not exist. I'm having some trouble locating it, anyway. The point is, while reading up on Laban, it had been suggested to me that I might try the NYPL collection, as they had a lot of rare footage of early modern dance types. But I get ahead of myself.

I found the Library easily enough. It's by the Lincoln Center, which I found at about noon. I found a NYPL and when I pushed on the revolving door, it pushed back. I looked at the posted hours of operation and they didn't open until 1pm. No problem. When I came up out of the subway, I emerged right by a large Barnes & Noble. An hour is nothing in a bookstore. So I went in there to while away some time.

And I have to say, it's an AWESOME bookstore. Okay, it's pretty much like any other B&N, except twice as big. Maybe more than twice. My main delight was in finding the performing arts section of the store and looking at their dance shelves. In "my" B&N in houston, there is one shelf devoted to dance and it's not too tightly packed. This store had TWO BAYS of dance books.
I wouldn't allow myself to buy anything. All the books I saw I was pretty much aware of and can order through my local store if/when I want to. (Well, the new Yvonne Rainer book was a surprise, but it was, you know, new.) I had packed lightly and didn't want to lug back a lot of books. Well, I did want to, but I was doing m best to be sensible.

Which is a failed enterprise. B&N is currently having a sale--3 remainder/clearance books for $9.99. Of course I had to briefly browse through their stock. I found a book I had been thinking about getting in paperback, and here it was in hardcover for $3.33. So I took that. (Turns out I'm glad I didn't spend more than $3.33 on it, but that's a topic, perhaps, for another blog entry.)

And I bought a magazine.

But that was all. Not bad for a book addict like me.

Back out on the street, I made my way back to the library--only to discover the library I had attempted to enter was a standard branch library. The Performing Arts collection was across the street. And it had opened at noon. Oh well. I still had the rest of the afternoon to spend.

The NYPL has a visitor card for people like me and I had been warned to allow for a lot of time to fill it out and such. It actually took about ten minutes. The people there were friendly, patient, very very helpful. So much for the rude New Yorker.

I was able to look at three video tapes, none of which were exactly what I was looking for but none of which were disappointments, either. I had actualy written down some call numbers for videos before I left Houston and had ranked them in importance. I was focusing on Denishawn, the proto-modern company that gave us Doris Humphrey and Martha Graham, and, of course, Rudolf Laban.

From the Denishawn side, I saw a very informal lecture given by Barton Mumaw at Jacob's Pillow, the dance studio/center founded by Ted Shawn (which is still an active and vital dance center--http://jacobspillow.org/--one that I have to visit before I die). Mumaw was one of the last of the Denishawn dancers and principal dancer for Ted Shawn's Men Dancers. A couple of years ago, I had read Mumaw's memoirs, so it was great fun for me to watch him tell some of the same stories he told in his book.

There was another film I watched that was also a video of some gathering of dance pioneers. Mumaw was part of that as well. In that one, I got to see him lead a class of yound dancers in Denishawn technique. It wasn't a full class, just a few scenes played under narration. But it was kind of interesting. You see the rebellion against ballet, but not yet the rigor of, say, Graham technique. The other dancer I recall in that video was Hanya Holme, a German emigrate who had been a student of Mary Wigman. Holme choreographed many Broadway musicals of the fifties, including some that featured Barton Mumaw. It was really quite fascinating for this dance history geek.

The last film I watched was a more polished documentary on German expressionist dance. This had a lot of content about Laban, but alas, no dancing. There was one snippet of a dark-haired man demonstrating Laban's swinging gestures within a life-sized icosahedron, Laban's multifaceted sphere of movement. I rewound that snippet several times but could never get a good enough look at the face to tell if it was Laban himself. I'm guessing not, more likely one of his students. But this had more of his movement work than I'd ever seen before, so I was quite pleased to see this documentary.

There was also a lot of content on Mary Wigman and Kurt Jooss, the two most famous of Laban's students.

All in all, it was an afternoon well spent.

But it wasn't over yet. I then headed a few more blocks north to Times Square to indulge my other geek interest--comics. Midtown Comics was hosting comics artist and theorist, Scott McCloud for a signing of his new book, Making Comics. I won't say much about this except to say that it was pretty cool to meet Scott and his family, who is joining him on a nationwide, year-long bookstore tour of the United States. It turns out that this was also his first stop on the tour and so I may very well be the first person in Texas to have a signed copy of Making Comics. It's the little claims to fame, isn't it?

And that was pretty much my second day in NYC. I still had the evening in Battery Park with the free dance concert and then Saturday morning before heading back to LaGuardia. I'll type about all that in a couple more days. Hopefully not another week from now . . .

NYC Reflections, part one

2006-09-10T20:51:00.000-07:00

So last week Wednesday (9/6) I got up and caught a plane to NYC. I had about 2 hours of sleep because I couldn't sleep. It's not everyday a farmboy from Paige, Texas goes to NYC.

I was going for a Fieldwork facilitator training session. The Field (www.thefield.org) is a national network of independent performance artists and Fieldwork is their 10 week workshop wherein artists develop new work with weekly feedback from the other artists in the workshop. It then culminates in a showing of new work or works-in-progress. I've participated in Fieldwork in Chicago and Houston and Several Dancers Core, the sponsor for Fieldwork here in Houston and in Atlanta, sent me to NYC for the facilitator training.

All of which isn't terribly interesting unless you're involved in the Field, so I won't talk much about that.

But I made arrangements to hang out in NYC for a couple of days extra because I've never really been to NYC. Or as I told people who asked if this was my first visit, I answered, "It may as well be." You see, back in 1982, I was a senior in Giddings High School, and the drama teacher had found a fairly reasonably priced package for student groups to go to NYC---for a weekend. As I recall, it was a long weekend. Maybe Friday through Sunday? But that was more than 20 years ago, I didn't know enough to really look for the things NYC has to offer, and we were pretty well herded about our routes by tour guides and sponsors. So it's hard to say I actually experienced NYC on that trip. Perhaps the most interesting thing I recall about that experience was that our Beta Club (does Beta Club still exist?) had been to Austin to see the road show of Annie and then we saw the Broadway version in NYC. (Our original Broadway choice, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, had just closed a week or two before and we'd listed Annie as our second choice before we knew the Beta Club was going to Austin to see the road show.) So this future theater major got to see the differences between the road show and the Broadway show while still in high school, which I guess was sort of a remarkable thing for someone from Giddings.

The only other time I'd been to NYC was when I was in New Jersey a couple of years ago and a group went into the city to eat dinner. And that's all it was, really. Took a train into NYC, ate, took a train back to Jersey. Not really a trip to NYC.

So. This may as well be my first trip there. I was pretty much on my own and was able to wander around a bit without anyone's agenda but my own.

We were done with the Fieldwork training at noon on Thursday and so my adventure began then. I had lunch with a Fielder from Atlanta, a little Cuban place on 8th Avenue, if I recall, and then I went back uptown to the Field offices on 6th Avenue and Spring Street, to get my bearings.

I walked a whole lot after that. A whole very lot.

From Spring Street, I walked south to Christopher Street, to visit Oscar Wilde Books, said to be the oldest gay and lesbian bookstore in the world. I was fairly impressed. My experiences with gay bookstores have not been terribly positive. Most of them are over half, if not 80% or more, porn. Oscar Wilde Books has a small section of skin mags, but for the most part, it is a bookstore with honest to goodness literature on its shelves. Of course, they didn't have the one book I'd sort of been keeping my eyes open for, but I did pick up a clever little graphic novel by German cartoonist Ralf Konig called Maybe . . . Maybe Not. I'd run across the name before, but had not seen any of his books and I did find it clever and fun. My souvenir from Oscar Wilde Books.

Then I walked a few more blocks south to meet up with an internet connection that is really the result of my working at Northwestern University Press during my Chicago days. I'd say more about it, but it might sound more impressive than it really is. It's a nice connection to have in the world of book publishing and I'm grateful to have it and it was a very pleasant hour spent in Cafe Loup, chatting about books and such. But to say much more might give more weight in my readers minds than it has in my mind.

This acquaintance asked me what my plans for the evening was and I said I'd seen an ad in the Village Voice for a dance concert in Battery Park, assuming I could find Battery Park. He suggested that I just continue walking down 6th Avenue and take in the city some. This turned out to be a very good suggestion, as I did get to see things above ground that I might have missed underground on the subway. There weren't a lot of very touristy sort of things, really, but it gave me a feel for the city in a way I might not have otherwise had.

And that route took right to the one site that everyone was talking about, the one that I was neither seeking out nor avoiding, but suddenly I was one the edge of the crater that is Ground Zero.

I suppose I should say something about NYC and the week before th 5th anniversary of the attacks, especially since I type here on the eve of said anniversary.

First, there's not much in the print media about it, but I found a variety of attitudes about the World Trade Center. Of course, there are signs all over the city of the collective grief. I walked past a fire station and just inside the open garage doors is a huge memorial with pictures of all the men who died from that station. There are plaques and other signs in businesses memorializing the friends and family members lost. I was staying in Brooklyn and each day I walked past a small granite marker memorializing, I presume, people from that neighborhood who died that day. So there's that, which is to be expected.

But there were other opinions expressed, some spoken to me, others overheard. There's a definite feeling by some folks of wanting to move on, not dwell on the event. I heard a comment about how the Towers were ugly and disliked anyway. I heard small rants about how tired of the sentimentality one person was, the manipulating of emotions to carry forward all sorts of agendas, personal and political. This is a city that not only grieves, but is trying to move on from the grief and is feeling held back by the grief.

Obviously, it's complicated. I can't imagine living there through all of it.

It's hard to say much about the enormous crater. If I didn't know what it was, it could easily been seen as a construction site. I kept looking around at the buildings around the crater. There were a few on the south side that appeared to still show signs of the destruction, but I was amazed at how pristine other buildings looked. Then I realized that I didn't know what had been there before and maybe these pristine buildings had been protected by other buildings that were now gone. I just don't know.

Going back, a minute, to that 1982 trip to NYC, we country kids were herded through the World Trade Center plaza. I remember being between the two towers. It was a misty, foggy day and the towers disappeared into the mist above us. We were supposed to go into one of the towers, but we'd lost time somwhere in the touring and didn't have time to go in. I do have a picture of them, though, in my old photo album with all my NYC pictures. I also remember taking the pictures, getting down on my knees next to them, looking up and clicking.

I did eventually get to Battery Park, but I think I'll save my dance reviews for the last NYC blog, talk about them all at one time. It was a treat, to say the least, to see companies like Pilobolus, Trisha Brown, and Phildanco for free . . .

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Briefly, I want to mention that when I got back from NYC last night, I had in my mailbox an acceptance letter for a short story. It seems my "Vernal Visitation" will appear in the next edition of Windhover, published by the University of Mary Hardin Baylor. I always hear aspiring writers despair about rejections and things never getting published. By way of backhanded encouragement, I'd like to point out that this story has collected a few rejections letters since I first wrote it---in 2003. You know, actually I think I wrote the first draft in 2002. I don' t think I got around to revising it until 2003, though. Anyway, the point is this: These things take time. Aspiring writers, take note!

slowing down?; there is a balm in Gilead

2006-08-28T21:45:00.000-07:00

So I wrote in my last entry that I was trying to slow down, do less, etc.

That Very Night . . .

As I lay in my bed, in the dark, I started thinking about the one-man show that keeps getting pushed back. I want to get back to work on that and the opening section of it is envisioned to be vocalizations and movements in response to breath.

So, I start vocalizing.

It doesn't take long before my live-in feline companion, Cunningham the Boycatt, jumps up on the bed and comes to check out my face, curious and perhaps a little disturbed by all those odd sounds coming from it.

I give him a pat on the head and tell him, "It's okay, Boycatt, I'm just rehearsing."

In bed, of course.

After laughing for a bit, I rolled over and tried to slow down my mind a bit so I could sleep.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Marilynne Robinson's Gilead won the Pulitzer Prize last year and it sold a lot of books and seemed to be a popular choice for a good many book clubs. All of which triggered my knee-jerk inner snob. If it's that popular, how good can it be?

And yet I was curious because it seemed to be a book of religious themes, indeed about a Christian minister, and that it won the reasonably secular Pulitzer told me something was up with it.

Briefly, the book is a first person narrative from an aging 70-something preacher who re-married late in life and has a kindergarten-ish aged son. He's also recently been diagnosed with some heart condition that will certainly take his life before too very long. So the conceit of the narrative is that it's a long letter to the adult son he won't see grow up.

And it's fairly brilliant.

Quietly brilliant, but brilliant all the same.

That's the thing about this book, really, and it was named for me by a co-worker who also read it. It's a quiet book. The narrative voice is strong and compelling and even if it started out a bit slow (I remember looking to see the book had 247 pages and thinking, "200 more pages of this?"), it quietly grabs you can asks you to keep reading.

Because in this small, midwestern town, this Congregationalist preacher has been the one people told their scandals to, told him their secrets and fears. Oh, even the scandals are really rather quiet by Hollywood standards, but the big one, the one that bothers the preacher the most, is a scandal that was really testing the times they were living in. (The time of the book is the 1950s, if I understood and remember the references correctly.) The scandal involves the son of a colleague, named after the narrator when it looked like the narrator would have no heirs. This name, passed down to the next generation not via blood but through the bonds of friendship become more burden than blessing. That child becomes the one that gives preacher's kids a bad name. Except he's not a bad kid. He's just too perceptive for his own good, too much of a free thinker to take anything that is as the way it has to be.

And so I'll leave you with that mystery because Robinson unfolds it so beautifully. Just when you've accepted that the narrator is a saint without measure, this son, now a fully grown man, maybe 40-ish, returns to the town and stirs up old feelings and old resentments and finally this old man, writing to his adult son decades in advance, finally the preacher confesses his own regrets, his own shortcomings, his own questions about how he's spent his life.

There were moments when I thought, would someone write this to his child, especially when the child is truly still a child, even if the intent is that the child read it as a grown man? But then I realized that this part of the magic of what Robinson accomplishes here. What starts out as a letter to tell a young man all the things a father should tell a young man, it slips into an accounting, as in giving an account, of his life. He starts by giving a lesson in family history, how his father and grandfather (both preachers) would argue and the hurts nursed between them, and then almost unexpectedly slips into the history and hurts he has nursed and has no way of changing. It starts out as a letter of encouragement and instruction and becomes a journal of confession.

The other bit of magic that Robinson created is that I never once doubted that the person writing the letter was an old man. Seems silly to say that because of course I bought a book by Marilynne Robinson and I knew she composed the words on the page. And yet, after I finished reading it and thought on it, I realized I completely believed the persona Robinson took on to write this book. It seems to me she knows how old preachers think. As the narrator himself might say, it's a remarkable thing.

In short, read this book. Even if it is a religious setting and a religious mind narrating the story, it's not about religion or even religious things. It's about humanity in all it's strength and frailty.

Which, now that I write that, pretty much requires religious language to illuminate it.

Slowing down; recent books by my bed

2006-08-23T19:54:00.000-07:00

You'd think that releasing Able to... and getting past the party, things would slow down.

Not really.

I've been busy with finding places to do readings and signings and I feel pretty good about that. I have at least one event per month for the rest of the year. Well, through December. Nothing in December yet.

I say "yet" like I'm looking for something. If it comes knocking on my door, I'll do it, but I think I'm not looking for it. For one thing, the dance theater piece I'm directing goes up in December and I might want to carve out some time for that, eh?

But in general, I need to slow down. This past week was a good start. I some vacation days from the day job, drove down the coast to see friends (although that wasn't a work-free jaunt--I have a signing at the Corpus Christi Barnes & Noble for October [Friday] the 13th), and I'm trying to get back into the the swing of things with a little more balance than I've experienced recently. There's still plenty to do, no mistake about it. But I think I slow down just a tad from the crazed pace I had up to and slightly after the release party.

Besides, I'm not writing. And when I'm not writing, I get a little nuts. So promotional things for Able to... can take a breather for a month or two while I let out some of the people in my brain onto paper.

And by "breather," I mean I have only one other place I'd like to get into before the end of the year.

Insert rolling eyes here.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

It's been a while since I talked about what I'm reading. So I turn to the pile beside my bed to see what I've made it through recently. Note that I'm a slow reader. Or a careful reader? Mostly, a tired reader. The time I've had for reading lately is just before bed and so it's just a few pages a night before I have to give up and turn out the lights.

(I'm currently trying to read Don Quixote before bed. I'm averaging about 10 pages a night for a 1,000 page book. You do the math, I would just get overwhelmed.)

About the time I last wrote about books (other than my own), I picked up a slim novel called The All of It by Jeannette Haien. It's a tale that is set in Ireland and it's a curious thing. After the first few pages, I wasn't too enthralled. I kept reading, however, because I'd bought the thing and it was so short. And it's one of those books that sort of creeps up on you. Now, I don't find the prose particularly artful, neither do I find anything particularly surprising in the plot. Oh, there were a couple of turns I hadn't expected, but I'd guessed some of it.

And yet, once I got going, Haien had me. The story has a mystery--a deathbed confession to the local priest starts to unravel a life of layered lies. Had it all been more sensational (and it could easily have gone that way), this would be a summer beach read. Haien's art, then, is in the quiet subtlety and human voices of the characters.

It also strikes me as the sort of mystery that could only have taken place before the internet age, indeed, the main mystery and lie is laid in an age before there were much of any instant communications. It struck me that the ruse that is played out over a lifetime would require it's setting--a time of few background checks, a time of taking things at face value, a time of sketchy record keeping.

Did I like the book? As I write about it, I admit a sort of lukewarm feeling about it. And yet, I was drawn in, I found one or two surprises. I found humanity in the characters. Given so much of what passes for writing these days, I think that's enough to say the reading was time well spent.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I was also going to write about Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, but I think this entry is long enough. Part of my slowing down is taking more time for this blog, so come back in a couple of days and hopefully I'll have passed judgment on last year's Pulitzer Prize winner . . .

Midnight blogging; book titles; "The Changing Light" by Vincent Craig Wright

2006-08-14T23:17:00.000-07:00

It's actually well past midnight now. The little clock in the lower right hand corner says 1:15. I got off from the "day job" at midnight. And while I should be in bed--I'm due back at the day job in 10 hours--I have that "not quite wound down" feeling.

So I blog.

And it's way overdue.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I've noticed a couple of book titles that seemed silly or sent my mind down a silly path. So I share the silliness.

The first one is self-explanatory, no path to follow. It was something like: Fix It Quick Slow Cooker Recipes.

The other one, a home decorating book, was called something like: How to Get that Country Look. Now, as a former farmboy (and it's true I've lost most of my "country look," although it wasn't entirely intentional), I've always been fascinated by those darling "country kitchen" sort of decorations you see in some catalogs. My mother's kitchen looked nothing like any of those pictures and so I've come to think of all that gingham and decorated Mason jar nonsense as a city person's idea of what a country kitchen might look like. For the record, we didn't decorate Mason jars on our farm--we used them to can peaches, tomatoes, pickles, green beans, grape juice . . . I'm sure a few other things. But we didn't decorate them. I can't imagine it ever occurring to us to do so. But that's a bit beside the point, too. How to Get that Country Look? You get up very early in the morning, go take care of livestock (pigs, cows, chickens, in our case), then have breakfast and then spend a long day doing really hard work. Fixing fence. Hauling hay. Loading grain to take to the mill to be ground into cow or pig feed. Working the cattle (which may mean vaccinating them or separating calves from cows for weaning or loading them up for the auction barn or slaughter house). I've probably forgotten more about how to get that country look than the authors of that interior design book every knew. But then I doubt they were thinking of farmer tans and smelly boots out by the back door . . .

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
FINALLY, I get around to posting some thoughts on Vincent Craig Wright's story, "The Changing Light." This story is the final one in Able to... for a reason. Let me see if I can put into words.

Like Becky Haigler's stories, I received "The Changing Light" very early in the game, and like Becky's stories, I loved it immediately and knew I wanted it. Unlike Becky's flower-speaking girl, Craig's resurrecting protagonist didn't surprise me so much as Craig's language did. He has a way of taking a fairly ordinary phrase and reinventing it and then using the same construction over and over, turning it over and inside out, making it mean something different while retaining the echo of the first use. There's also a rhythm to the language he uses, which is one of those really hard-to-define things--it's possibly due to his other career as a musician and songwriter or maybe it's why he's a musician and songwriter. It's stream of consciousness in a way that isn't immediately noticeable. The opening scene, for example, is a car wreck. This accident is played out in super-slow motion with all the crazy thoughts that go through a person's mind in 4 seconds or less. This car wreck goes on for 4 or 5 pages and it is full of story and backstory and foreshadowing and all these tricks that I saw only on the second reading. I was surprised to notice after the first reading how many words he used to get us through this car wreck. It never felt wordy, never felt over-wrought. It is, in fact, beautiful.

But this is a collection of well-written stories (if I do say so myself--I mean, why would I have published them otherwise?). This story gets the final slot for another reason (and I come from the school of thought that the first and last story of a collection holds very powerful positions). If, as I opine in the book's introduction, this is a collection of "adult power fantasies" (in contrast to the adolescent power fantasies of super-hero comics), then it seems to me that there are few powers that might resonate so strongly as the desire to come back to life. Of course, we have in this collection a woman who resurrects the dead, which is maybe a stronger desire, but in this story, the protagonist does it not just to exercise power, but to save someone grief. He seems not entirely comfortable with his power, but he uses it because he wants to save a loved one grief. There's something very lovely about that to me, something slightly self-sacrificing in it. To bring someone else back to life could be selfish--and certainly not dying permantly could be also. But that's not how it's played here.

Ah, you need to read this story. You need to read this collection.

Oh, there is one more reason this story is the final one in the collection. It's the final line. I won't quote it here because I don't want to ruin it out of context. I also don't want to build it up to something more than it is. It's a quiet ending and a lovely way to end a book. There's something existential in it's most positive sense, it seems to me. After all the flowers spoken and realities altered, the subtle scents smelled and the emotions manipulated, after all the music and miracles and talking frogs--Craig gave me a line that summed it all up for me.

Even after you read it, you may not get what I mean by that. So maybe the story is the final one in the collection for completely idiosyncratic reasons. I hope not, but there it is.

I know I'm here to sell this book, Able to..., and I know there's supposed to be some salesman hyperbole involved with that. But I'm also a terrible salesman and move given to understatement than bombast. This is a book of stories I'm very pleased to present to the world. If you haven't given it a try yet, I hope you will.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

So finally, a month after the release party, I get through the book, story by story.

I'll get back to my more rambly thoughts on things I'm reading and other art I'm seeing. There's quite a bit going on with the promotion of this book and getting busy with putting together the next book (a collection of short plays by Christopher Ellis, Chicago playwright). Other things in the pot I'm stirring.

And now that it's after 2am, I think it's time I stopped stirring. More soon.

Tentativity; "Levi's Landing" by Jan Carrington

2006-07-31T22:09:00.000-07:00

It seems so much of my life these days are tentative. I make contact with a bookstore to set up a signing and get a "we'll see" and I wait for answers. Ithink I have something booked but then I get mixed signals or no signal and so I'm uncertain about announcing stuff. It gets frustrating, to say the least. I like the sort that likes to announce things.

So here're things that seem pretty darn certain:

Three Able to... authors (at last count) will be doing a signing at River Oaks Bookstore, 3270 Westheimer, here in Houston on September 27, 4-6pm.

September 5, I'm scheduled to be on an internet radio program called Calling All Authors ( http://www.globaltalkradio.com/shows/callingallauthors/ ) to talk about Able to... and neoNuma Arts.

I'll be doing Fieldwork facilitator training in New York City, September 6-9. (http://thefield.org/)

The same week is the Langdon Weekend, sponsored by Tarleton State University ( http://www.tarleton.edu/~langdonreview ). Usually, I'd be there except for the NYC thing. Still, Able to... will be represented by Winston Derden and maybe other authors.

Dagnabbit, there goes that tentativity thing.

There's something tentatively in November. And something I may still try to do in September and even in August. Tentatively, of course.

Visit often for tentative developments.
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"Levi's Landing" is Jan Carrington's second story in Able to..., and more easily completes the "able to ______" phrase. Levi is able to hear the voice of the universe. Some people may say it's the drugs, even though he's been clean for quite a while, and some people may say it's the burned synapses from before he was clean, and some people may say he's just crazy, regardless of drugs.

Much like "Blues in the Rafters," Jan writes the type of story that could go to all kinds of sickly sweet sentimental places. Levi has, after all, taken his two children up to a high desert mountain in order to leap into the universe, to join the voice he hears there. The kids go along and they're concerned for their father, but they're also used to his alleged craziness. There's no melodramatic pleading. There are questions and there are concerns, but Jan manages to keep it out of TV movie-of-the week sappiness with characterizations of the children that are at once complex and yet believable as a child's point of view.

In many ways, it's a simple story and to say much more here is to take away from the reader's discovery in the book, but the simplicity is a bit of a smoke screen for the levels at work in the story. Once you read the story and see the simple rightness of how it goes, read it again and see if you also see the complexity of the situation, of the relationships at work. It's a subtle piece.

Directing; advice requested; "Max's Colossus Proboscis" by Theodore Carter

2006-07-24T20:54:00.000-07:00

Living this life as a "multi-artist" (as some friends up in Chicago call themselves--and it seems a lot more succinct and even accurate than "interdisciplinary artist") is kind of fun, exciting, and exhausting. I still have this book I've published that I'm working to promote, which includes updating the website (I hate updating the website) and last night I learned that my skills as a director are desired for a dance theater piece to be produced this fall. Goodness, I need more days in the week! Anyway, I'll talk more about the directing gig as I find out more about it and feel more solid as to what it is I'm doing. It's crazy, but I feel more comfortable talking when I what I'm talking about.
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I need a slogan. I don't like that sentence, but there it is. A few entries ago, I wrote about what a "neoNuma" is, and I've been toying with some ideas as to how I wrap a slogan around the notion of pneuma. I'm not sure that "wind" is a good word to use and certainly not "blow." I've toyed with "a new spirit in the arts" but that's really not true. I'm not cutting edge by any stretch of the imagination. Well, maybe compared to some things I've seen, I'm practically avant garde, but I'm really not about the business of breaking paradigms and pushing boundaries. If I do any of that, it's really an accident. But I do think neoNuma Arts is about presenting good, solid, literature, performance, and art and I think art and creativity is so necessary to anything called a civilization. So I've most seriously considered something like:

"breathe art"

How does that sound? Have a better idea? If you do, tell me about it. I don't have much to offer. If you want a book of mine, I can set you up. Or a neoNuma T-shirt or mug or cap.

"T-shirt, mug, or cap?" you ask? Yeah. During an evening of procrastination and displaced effort, I did this:

http://www.cafepress.com/neonuma

Kind of dumb, but it was putting this stuff together that made me realize I need a slogan. I think the back of the T-shirts, at least, need something. I was thinking the website big (www.neonuma.com) with "breath art" below it.

So tell me if that totally sucks. Or is totally brilliant. Or at least relatively inoffensive. And like I said, if you come up with something I like better, you could be the first person with a neoNuma T-shirt with the slogan on back.

That's sort of like a contest, isn't it? Huh. My first contest. Well, then.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Last November, when I had originally set the deadline for story submissions for Able to..., I saw I didn't have quite enough stories to make a book, but what I had, I liked quite a lot. So I forged ahead and posted more calls for stories on Craigslist and other places, extended the deadline, and nervously waited for more stories.

Which came, of course. But I also started looking at what I had and realizing I'd set a dumb rule for the collection. I originally wanted to have only one story per author. Oddly enough, more than one author had sent me two stories at the same time, in all cases, I liked both stories, but had decided on only one because, well, I had that dumb rule. One day, I had an epiphany: why am I rejecting perfectly stories by authors who get the premise?

(I pause to note that most of these authors happened to have these stories already written when they saw the call for stories--and I could usually tell from the submissions who had written stories to fit the submission guidelines. This isn't to denigrate the stories which were written to the guidelines and still made it in the collection, but it does point out a piece of advice I would give to most writers: write what you want, even if it seems odd or unusual or un-placeable. Some oddball in Texas might be creating an anthology that's perfect for your vision.)

Somewhere over the winter months, Theodore Carter contacted me and described two stories he had--the kid who ran on water and the kid with the big nose. The water-running kid had already been published in North American Review, so I hungrily asked for the NAR story first, thinking that if it fit, it would give me some "lit cred" to have a NAR story in the acknowledgments (which makes me sound like an 0pportunistic capitalist--and so there you are). Of course I delight in "Jesus Lizard," and would have used it even if it had not been published before, but when I decided that I would double-dip with authors (so to speak), I asked Theodore to send me the big nosed kid story, too.

"Max's Colossus Proboscis" is slightly different in tone from "Jesus Lizard." It's told from the point of view of a doctor who specializes in smelling disorders, and while it has the sense of fun and absurdity of "Jesus Lizard," it also has the doctor's serious tone. While "Jesus Lizard" is a third person narrative that nonetheless has the point of view of a youth looking at the unfathomable and ridiculous reactions of adults around him, Max has the adult looking at the adolescent and recognizing the painful alienation a teenager feels at being decidedly and unattractively different. "Jesus Lizard" makes me laugh, but "Max's Colossus Proboscis" makes me smile and wince simultaneously. Ralph, of the former story, doesn't mean to stand out, but he also doesn't care much about fitting in and could have this sort of exasperated, eye-rolling reaction to events around him. Max desperately wants to fit in, to impress the girl, to be normal, and no matter how ridiculous the unfolding events might be, we also have the heartbreaking reportage of the doctor to remind us how awkward being a teenager can be.

I'm so glad I broke my dumb rule.

Release Party Report, "The Mesmerizer" by David J. LeMaster

2006-07-18T09:53:00.000-07:00

Well, the release party for Able to... has come and gone and I feel like I'm still recovering 3 days later. We had a good turnout, good readings, really good feelings of well-wishes and congratulations from everyone. The Square Moon Gallery turned out to be a very fine site for the party--just the right size and with so many beautiful things around us that those in attendance had plenty to talk about in the event they ran out of things to say about the publication of the book.

If you were there, thanks for coming by. If you missed it, well, sorry you did because it was a good time, but watch the neonuma.com website (which now needs updating--this week!) for other signings and events. There's more to come and I imagine they'll also be good times.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

So I didn't get through the entire book's contents before the release party. Such is life, I guess. But I still have four more stories to discuss and I won't short-change anyone. So without any further ado . . .

"The Mesmerizer" was the first thing I read by David LeMaster after we made contact. He pointed it out on the Spoiled Ink website, where it was previously published. It was a bit of a departure from the other stories in the book for a couple of reasons, but still fit in the overall theme.

First of all, the supposed "power" of the title character is a sham. He's a stage hypnotist who counts on the power of suggestion and cooperation from his audience participants to make his act work. He performs a lot at college campuses and he finds that there is a certain sort of young woman who will swoon at anyone on a stage and so he takes advantage of these young women for his own pleasure. In other words, he gets laid a lot.

Nevermind that he has a wife at home who never really got over the death of their infant son.

So this is where this story departs from other stories in the collection. This one is pretty much a horror story. Very dark, very disturbing. The infant son starts appearing to the Mesmerizer, during his stage act, during his post-performance trysts, always accusing the father of complicity in his death, always threatening to carry the father down to hell with him.

Does it get darker than deadly dead babies?

Anyway, I knew I risked this story sticking out a bit because the subject matter was so dark and because it uses a lot of what my mother would have called "rough language," but it also added a darker hue to the overall package of the anthology.

And David plays so well with the notion of the guilty conscience. There is a sense in which the only one the Mesmerizer mesmerizes is himself. That's fun, but it is also a result of, I believe, a guilty conscience--but not due to the thing the character is actually guilty of. If I read it right at all, he's having these horrific visions due to guilt over something he didn't really have any part in.

It's not so simple as all that. And I may have said too much already. I don't want to spoil any stories for those who haven't already read them. But if the subject matter doesn't put you off (I've already told one friend she might want to skip this story!), I hope you'll respond here or to me personally and tell me what you think. You might not think it has anything to do with a guilty conscience at all . . .

"Mr. Merrill's Extraordinary Driving Cap" by Becky Haigler and "Phos Hilaron" by Neil Ellis Orts

2006-07-11T08:19:00.000-07:00

I've covered Becky's "Gates of Eden" earlier. When she submitted that story, she also included this story about one Mr. Merrill, a dealer in used and collectable books. One day, as he's closing up shop, he comes across an abandoned leather driving cap. It is this cap that gives Merrill his extraordinary ability, a device that I liked when I read it because it was a variation on innate super-powers, a variation that is perhaps best known in the comic books with Green Lantern's ring (which, in turn, is a riff on Aladdin's magic lamp).

But the power in the cap is subtle and not at all as flashy as Green Lantern's ring. It, shall we say, improves Merrill's hearing. Or perhaps his perceptions. He hears what is not being said. And the story is about the things he learns when he wears this cap--things not only about his neighbors, but also about himself.

It was exactly the sort of story I was looking for in that the story isn't about the power so much as it is about the man. Mr. Merrill, older, a widower, finding himself alone more often than not . . . like stories in the Bible, the miracle isn't the point, but what happens afterward.

It's a poignant story, lightly told. I like that about it, too. The violins, if they'er played at all, are played lightly and maybe there's a light piano and flute accompaniment in the soundtrack. (Can you tell I'm listening to KUHF, Houston's classical station, as I write this?)

As with all my previews on this blog, I have to stop there lest I give too much away. It's a good story. You should read it.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Just to mention briefly--I have a story in this collection, too. It's the gay story. It's the story with theological mumbo jumbo. It's the story that say's "look at me, look at me! I know at least 2 words of Greek!"

Synopsis: A gay couple, both ex-seminarians, one the founder and pastor of an independent church, argue about theology, integrity, and sex.

It's an okay story. I'm glad I wrote it. I just don't know how to talk about my own work. People who've read it seemed to like it. Maybe you will, too.

The Kathy Dunn Hamrick Dance Company; "Rubato" by Winston Derden

2006-07-09T21:41:00.000-07:00

Spent 24 hours in Austin over the weekend. Maybe a little less. Anyway, was there for the latest dance work of the Kathy Dunn Hamrick Dance Company. My heart is a bit enmeshed with this company so I can' t claim I approach their concerts with anything but an expectation that I'll love what I see. This is simply my favorite dance company and I will do what I can to see them whenever they perform.

Not that I'm a complete sycophant. I will and have told Kathy when something wasn't up to her usual standards. I'll be e-mailing her my personal critique of this show in the next day or two.

But for the purposes of this blog, I just want to say I had a great time. There were three live dances and a short dance film presented. The dances were all quite different, but all showcased the KDHDC trademark athleticism and attention to detail. This company works hard and it shows. I covet their energy and work ethic.

They're coming to Houston September 22-23 for the Weekend of Texas Contemporary Dance at Miller Outdoor Theater. You can bet I'll arranage my life around it.

And when they present at College Station on November 4 . . . well, I won't make any immediate promises, but I've noted it on my calendar . . .

Anyone who likes modern dance even a little bit and lives in driving distance of these places should mark their their calendars as well.

No pressure, I'm just saying.

Visit her website: http://kdhdance.com/
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Winston Derden is the only author I knew before I started this little Able to... project. We met when we both sort of haphazardly attended a local comics creators event at Borders and we exchanged e-mails and then exchanged some stories for critique. I asked several of my writer friends and acquaintances to submit to this project and Winston was the only to come through.

"Rubato" takes place in the courtyard of a restaurant. The narrator is a bit smitten with Chantal, an enigmatic woman with a sly smile and an unusual ability. She senses and catches ripples (her word--she admits she doesn't really have a better word for it) in time and then replays a moment time so it comes out differently. And that's all I should say about the plot. It's a short piece, really, and to say more is to give too much away.

But I can say this. Despite having seen a few stories from Winston, this one surprised me. It's a romance and it's some of his most lyrical writing. I suppose that makes sense, the title being a musical term. Still, while much of what I've read from Winston is either about a rougher element in our culture or else has a bit of a satirical bite, this story is, well, sexy, but not in any obvious or cliched way. Although Chantal is a bit of a cool character, she also has a quiet sensuality about her, as described by the narrator, and its difficult not to develop a crush on her along with him.

For Houstonians, the restaurant is recognizable, if not named. I won't name it here, as I think not knowing lends something to the mystery of the piece. What's funny is that it was so clearly described that I had pictured the setting in pretty good detail before I realized it was set in a real place. Then one day, I was walking past this restaurant and I thought, "this is familiar, where have I seen it before?" It took me a moment to realize that I hadn't seen it, just read its description. Maybe I should have a contest of some sort for Houstonians, to see who recognizes it . . .

"Lucky Max" by Mark Jansen

2006-07-07T23:55:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, when I picked up the stories from my post office box in the Galleria, they'd go into my briefcase (which is what I think we used to call a satchel, but now they're marketed at Office Max as briefcases) and I'd read the story later, at home or in a coffee shop.

I guess I was feeling leisurely the day I got Mark's story in the mail. I remember pulling it out and wandering around the mall, reading it as I walked (a dangerous, bad habit I have--reading while I walk).

I should note here that I don't like malls, particularly. I used to love them, but at some point they lost favor with me. The only reason I ever go to the Galleria is because it's across the street from where I hold the day job and its food court is very nearly the only place to get something reasonably priced for lunch for blocks around. Oh, and there's the post office in the Galleria, where I have my post offfice box. But I don't generally like shopping and I usually go in, get my lunch or my mail, and I'm gone again.

But that day, I guess I wasn't anxious to get out and I wandered aimlessly as I read Mark's tale of young Max and how he slips into the quantum field and alters reality. At some point, I got tired of walking and reading (and watching out for people between phrases) but by that time I'd found myself in a part of the mall that I'd never been in before, and it was nearly people-free. I found a bench, sat down, and finished reading "Lucky Max," knowing I had another story for my anthology.

In terms of genre, "Lucky Max" is the Able to... story that most comfortably fits into the science fiction category. There's talk of "sidestepping" and "I-maps" and other such technical jargon, but one of the things I found appealing about this story was that it uses these terms without requiring the reader to have a degree in quantum physics. I'm not a scientist, but Mark kept me up to speed with deft, nearly invisible explanations of the science terms while keeping to the task at hand, that being telling a story about a little boy and his friends and how he tries to use his ability to help them feel better.

In my introduction to the book, I talk a bit about how, with the call for stories, I was looking for "adult power fantasies," in contrast to how superheroes are often referred to as "adolescent power fantasies." This story really plays into the sort of power fantasy it takes some amount of water under the bridge to appreciate. The opening scene in the story is at a funeral and Max slips onto (into?) the I-map to alleviate his friends' grief. It may be a little boy doing this, but it's not many adults who haven't felt the sting of grief and wished for a way to alter reality so that the deceased were not deceased.

Like all really good science fiction, the story isn't really about the technical stuff. It's really about the humanity behind it. And that's what we have here in "Lucky Max."

Opps and Exhaustion; "His Stop's 28th Street" by Michael Buozis

2006-07-06T10:12:00.000-07:00

Whew.

As I'm getting close to the release party I'm looking around for escape. As in vacation. And not seeing an escape route. Yet. Instead, I keep finding opps for promoting Able to... that need forms filled out and whatnot.

Clearly, I can't take advantage of every opportunity and clearly I need to get some rest soon. But it's exciting. At least I'm excited. Even as I put my tired body down each night, my mind races, trying to find ways to do everything I see I want to do to promote this book.

I love this book. It deserves readers.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Michael Buozis' "His Stop's 28th Street" has a fun story to tell behind the story. You see, I initially rejected it.

When I got Michael's story of a subway conversation between a young man and a frog, I really liked it. It was quirky, fun, had something to say as well. I was also wrapped up in my criteria of completing the phrase, "able to _______." Able to talk to frogs? Well, in the context of the story, that didn't seem relegated to Martin, the human half of the duo. So I sort of got stuck there and sent out my rejection letters. On many of them, I hand-wrote comments, as I did on Michael's. I don't remember exactly what I said in the handwritten notes, but I think I mostly said, "good work, doesn't fit."

A few days later, I got an e-mail from Michael, thanking me for the personal comments and wishing me well with my project. I thought that was nice and made me look at the story again.

Maybe I had read all the stories too close together. Maybe I had let myself get into that place of trying so hard to make everything fit in a box I couldn't see outside it (despite my hedging a bit on "Blues in the Rafters"). Maybe I just needed some time to step back from the hard work of passing judgment on other writers' work (an exercise in bad karma for a writer). But in that blinding flash sort of moment, it hit me--it wasn't the human who had super-powers in this story. Able to talk to humans. Able to do accounting! Maybe not super-powers for a human, but for a frog, Ithink this counts. After all, the comics had Krypto the Superdog and Ace the Bathound. I could easily justify including it in the collection from that point of view.

So I e-mailed Michael back, apologized for my limited vision, and asked if he would still like to be a part of this project. Lucky for me, he did.

I've sort of covered a lot about the story above, but to add a bit more, what I love about this story is that in the middle of the clever repartee and ridiculous images of a frog on a subway seat, you have a subtle exploration of a lonely man's search for connection. It's a search Martin may not have even realized he was on.

Some writers obsessively keep every rejection letter they get and other's discard them as quickly as possible. I have no idea what Michael's practice is with these things, but there's a part of me that hopes that he kept that letter and will frame it next to a picture of the book with his name on the cover.

Superman Returns; "Jesus Lizard" by Theodore Carter

2006-07-04T12:19:00.000-07:00

Okay, I went to see the superhero movie of the summer (no offense to X-Men). I liked it okay. It didn't offend my superhero geek fanboy side and had some interesting moments. What follows are some random thoughts on it, mostly criticisms, I guess, and while I'll try to avoid spoilers, if you haven't seen it you may want to avoid the first half of this post until you have (if you intend to see it, that is).

The jet/space shuttle save scene was easily the best, most exciting piece of superheroics in the film. Really nicely done. It's a shame it came so early in the movie.

Does Lois Lane not bruise at all? She took some heavy hits throughout this movie and her complexion remained milky white throughout. Just who is the super-powered character here?

I'd heard that the first cut of the film was a bit longer than the one in the theaters. I think it shows. I get the feeling that some things (like Martha Kent and the farm) got shorted or at least they felt like they had more to the story than what we saw.

I was glad that Lois's new boyfriend was likeable. It would have been way too easy to make him a villain. I also liked that they hinted at his jealousy with Superman, but didn't go all out on it and especially liked that he didn't have any "how do you compete with Superman" kind of speeches.

There's a scene where Superman is basically a super-stalker. Did anyone else find the Man of Steel a little creepy here?

Frank Langella as Perry White, yes. Sam Huntington as Jimmy Olsen, holy cow, yes. These were the stand-outs for me, cast-wise.

Kate Bosworth as Lois Lane . . . eh. She's been quoted as saying that she had studied people like Kate Hepburn to get feel for Lois. I don't see it. Compared to previous incarnations of Lois (and it's hard not to compare), Bosworth doesn't have the hardness of Margot Kidder or even of Phyllis Coates or Noel Neill. Even though I thought Teri Hatcher played Lois as a bit of a ditz, she still had that spunky reporter thing going on. I felt Bosworth had neither toughness nor spunk. She was sweet. She was pretty. She was kind of bland.

I feel like most of the actors were given very little to do, and I think this goes double for Brandon Routh. Can he act? Well, he's pretty good at mimicking Christopher Reeve, but he's not given much to do besides be iconic. That doesn't require much emotional range. In other words, Superman struck me as bit bland, too.

Kryptonite apparently has a (plot-driven) variance in how much it affects Superman. Herein lies the weakest part of the movie. The green crystal is shown to weaken him enough to take some harsh blows from Luthor's henchmen. But he's also able to hoist a small continent laced with it into space while also carring a shard of it IMBEDDED IN HIS SKIN. It's only lethal when the writers need it to be. There's the trouble with mot super-hero stories in a nutshell.

Forgot Luthor. Kevin Spacey . . . is okay. I expected to like him more. Perhaps here's where my superhero geekboy gets in the way. I never liked the Gene Hackman Luthor, either, and Spacey seems to take some of his cues from Hackman. A little bumbling, a little campy, a little hard to take seriously as a real threat.

And one last thing---there's a plot point used once and only once despite ample opportunity to use it again later (see the above Kryptonite rant). It's big enough to keep quiet about, especially since it actually caught me off guard, me a jaded old-time comic reader. If this film becomes a film series, this one reveal is good for maybe one sequel and then will likely become an albatross around the series neck. Then Superman will have to lid dormant for a couple of decades again before being rebooted from scratch (a la Batman Begins). I find it hard to see many good places this particular plot device can go, but if they do it well it could be pretty interesting, a truly fresh take on the Superman myth.

Oh, that was one other thing I wanted to comment on. All the talk of Superman as savior of the planet. Well, I'm not offended by this religiously, but I am offended aesthetically as they took some really heavy-handed, obvious ways to visualize this. I mean, really, did they have to do the cruciform pose before Superman plummeted to earth? And did we have to see the flatline in the hospital (which was never sufficiently explained away)? I get it, Jor-El is God and sent his only son to save the earth. Again, could Routh been given something more to do besides look iconic? (Or, as noted earlier, be creepy.)

So maybe I didn't like the movie so much. I don't know. I don't feel the need to see it again. I am thinking I need to go see the first Christopher Reeve movie again, though. I don't think I've actually seen that since I was 14 years old, geeking out in the movie theater . . .

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Theodore Carter e-mailed me from one of my Craigslist postings for stories about super-powered stories. He told me he had two different stories, one had been published in North American Review. Despite having recently received a rejection letter from NAR, I decided not to hold that against him and told him to send me that one first.

"Jesus Lizard" tells the story of a boy who gets a bit carried away with his homework. His ability to run on water comes from his over-zealous research into the titular lizard.

It's a very funny story. I knew this on first read and I was pleased, upon the final reading before sending it off to the printer, that it still made me laugh after working with it for months.

Theodore has a quick and incisive way with showing the way the community round Ralph (the water-running boy) reacts to the feat. It accurately skewers both left and right wing reactionaries and still manages to keep everyone human and engaging.

When Greg Garrett sent me his blurb for the back cover of the book, I hadn't expected the phrase "Twain-ian tall tales." After thinking about it, however, I'm nearly certain "Jesus Lizard" was the impetus for the Twain-ian comment. It does function, in many ways, as a tall tale, at least in the way that really good tall tales do. It magnifies our human foibles while never forgetting that we are still capable of amazing things.

In a few days, I'll talk a bit about the other story I eventually took as well. And while I'm still getting over the whole NAR rejection thing, I'm glad to have Theodore on board for this collection.

Blogging is Hard; What's a neoNuma? and "Blues in the Rafters" by Jan Carrington

2006-06-29T10:37:00.000-07:00

A couple of entries ago, I noted that Art is Hard, Publishing is Hard, and now I'm finding Blogging is Hard. Not really, but I have good intentions of doing a couple of entries a week and here's it's been well over a week . . . I need to get it in gear so I can get through the contents of this book before the release party. (By the way, those of you far away needn't wait for the release party to order a book. It's now available for order, either through me or your favorite bookstore/online bookseller.)

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I get asked regularly what "neoNuma" stands for. Well, it's a bit of a story and not very interesting at that, but let's get it out in the open and out of the way, shall we?

I suppose I've always expected, on some level, to have my own company as I remember even back in college playing with my initials (N.E.O.) as a prefix to . . . something. When you have initials like that, you should use them, yes?

Well, three years ago, now, I was finishing up my M.A. in Interdisciplinary Arts at Columbia College Chicago. My thesis project was a comic book (Body of Grace--still amply available, by the way) that I wanted to self-publish. I went back to the neo idea (as I like to say, I was neo before Keanu existed) and started googling names with neo as a prefix.

It is amazing how many neo_______s there are in the world.

neoworks, neowerks, neo productions . . . I don't remember what all I tried, but that gives you some ideas.

Then I remembered that I'd read that many new companies were using made up words for trademark purposes. That's why you have words like "Cingular" or (to make a Lutheran reference) "Thrivent." They aren't real words or else they're misspellings of words and so you know they're associated with a particular product or service.

And so I started babbling. A sort of brainstorming speaking in tongues. neolala neobaba neobula neonuma . . .

neonuma . . .

Pneuma--Greek for breath, wind, spirit.

I liked it. The anal retentive part of me is a bit uncomfortable with the mixing of Latin and Greek, but I'm pretty much over that now.

And so I published Body of Grace under the name neoNuma Arts. Later that year, I produced a dance concert in Chicago, featuring Adler Danztheatre Project of Chicago and the Kathy Dunn Hamrick Dance Company of Austin, Texas under the neoNuma Arts name. When I moved to Houston, I filed my "doing business as" paperwork and started looking around for things to slap this name on. My friend, Misha Penton (artbymisha.com) designed a logo for me and here we are. I put neoNuma Arts on one other project, my self-published collection of church newsletter writings, Thirty-Six Echoes, but I consider Able to... to be my first real publication. The other publications were just me practicing on myself before I practiced on someone else.

Anyway, that's the story of neoNuma. Are you stll awake? I hope so (or that you skipped down to the important stuff below).
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The third story in Able to... is Jan Carrington's "Blues in the Rafters." I placed this third in part because it continued, somewhat, thematic threads from "Light Readings of Ebony," but also because it lets you know, if you're reading straight through the collection, that I played a little fast and loose with my own rules.

Perhaps I should state the rule I had for myself: I wanted each story to have a clear super-power and I wanted it to fit into the sentence, "this character is able to __________."

"Blues in the Rafters" is basically a ghost story, so I easily enough completed the sentence with "able to communicate with the living," or, depending upon the day, "able to communicate with the dead." Both are correct for this story, but I believe there's something more going on in this story that takes it just a step beyond a typical ghost story.

And it's hard to talk about without giving too much away.

But I'll say this . . . it's a story about legacy, about remembering, about keeping something alive even as we all eventually die. In that sense, the communication across the divide between life and death isn't so much the super-power as is the the ability to pass on the legacy.

So you see, the sentence isn't completed so easily or definitively.

And that almost had me reject this story, but I justified its inclusion because it also does something not many stories of this type accomplish. Jan wrote a story that could very easily have slipped into sentimentality but she avoids it beautifully. The longing in the story isn't cheap emotion. What's more, she manages to work a joyous aspect into the sadness and longing we all feel when separated from a loved one by death.

I think you'll be glad I included this story in the collection.

Big Range Dance; "Light Readings of Ebony" by David J. LeMaster

2006-06-17T22:15:00.000-07:00

It's a little past midnight and I just got in from seeing an evening of dance. Most people who know me know I love modern dance and I can be a tough critic. Lately, with most of my finances going toward the publishing venture or the electric bill, I haven't been able to get out to see much, and I have to choose carefully.

But tonight I attended the final night of performances of Houston's Big Range Dance Festival. I didn't make it to any of the other events during the fest, and honestly, I went tonight just to see the work of people I know (who also used my voice in their soundtracks, which was a gas, but also another story).

I had a very good time.

Sara Draper and Elizabeth Gilbert are doing some interesting work in collaboration. Elizabeth was in an auto accident some time ago which has left her in a wheel chair with limited mobility. Between Sara's movement and Elizabeth's poetry, they're exploring the being/doing dichotomy, how doing affects our sense of identity---those sorts of things. They do the work without self-pity or easy sentiment; neither do they avoid the difficulties of becoming wheel chair bound. It's fairly direct and postitive at the same time. The line that sums up the work for me is when Elizabeth says in one of her poems, "difficult is merely different." I could stand to remember that sometimes, myself.

Sara also choreographed a new work called "Breasts X Censored," which was about our culture's simultaneous obsession and shame surrounding women's breasts. To be honest, I wasn't sure what Sara was doing with this, even though I recorded some text for the soundtrack. I don't want to say it's subtle, but it's more nuanced than I was expecting. And funny as hell. All the dancers are women and they're all topless, but they all have black pieces of foam-core board (?) taped to their breasts, like thos black bars you see across photos. That in itself was funnier (ridiculous, really) than I was expecting it to be. That the dancers pretty much just did their choreography without emphasizing the boards made it even funnier. It's hard to talk about the piece because it keeps looking cliched in cold type, but it was really much more clever than I'm making it sound.

Toni Valle Leago also premiered a piece tonight that was more serious in tone, but also addressed some body issues from a woman's point of view. Toni is a choreographer whose work I generally enjoy and this was no exception. Her sense of humor is strong and her more dramatic moments pack punch because of the humor. I don't know what to say about it tonight, except that I'm looking forward to the evening-length work she's creating.

Both Toni and Sara were recently awarded a DiverseWorks Houston Artist residency. You'll like see more about them here in the future.

Three other companies/artists danced tonight, and I enjoyed what I saw there, too, but it's coming on 1am and I need to head to bed, soon. Ask me to talk more about this night of dance if you're interested. I'm always ready to talk about dance.
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In my ongoing discussion of the stories in the forthcoming Able to... I turn my attention to David J. LeMaster's "Light Readings of Ebony."

David has two stories in this collection and they are both the darkest of the book. This is the lighter of the two. Make of that what you will (or wait until I tell you about "The Mesmerizer" in a couple of weeks).

"Light Readings of Ebony" tells the story of a man, Joel, who goes to a bar for quick hook-up and find that and so much more. A fortune teller in the corner of the bar draws him in and soon he finds he's part of some grand design that only she, Ebony, can foresee. Ebony wears symbols of most of the world's religions. Joel is an avowed agnostic. At the core of this story---which is probably what appeals to me most---is that it's about belief. I don't really want to say faith, because there's a subtle difference between the two. But Ebony believes Joel is more important than he currently appears and is willing to act on that belief. Joel claims neither belief nor disbelief, but that in between stance keeps him a place of inaction.

As for the extraordinary ability of this story, it belongs to Ebony who, we learn, can resurrect dead creatures. This, of course, plays into both characters' belief and unbelief. Interesting questions are asked here, and David doesn't really answer them so much as shows us one possibility of what a certain sort of belief can lead to.

I know most people (myself included) don't read anthologies straight through, starting with page one and continuing through each story to the end. If you're like me, you'll go to the story that is the proper length to fill the time you have at a give time, or you look at the contents page and see what title strikes you or some other criteria dictates the order in which you read.

But I placed this story second because it is a good contrast to the first story, "Gates of Eden." "Gates of Eden," while not all sweetness and light, does have an airier feel to it. It is, after all, a story about a young woman who speaks flowers. I wanted to follow that story with something that let the rare, sequential reader know that this is a collection of stories with a range of stories, that there is a journey through the book of lightness and heaviness, of different textures, if you will.
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That's all for this very early morning. More soon . . .

-Neil