wildcat

Went to the ballet last night, at the Royal Theatre, looking hopelessly underdressed in a sea of women in short skirts and shining materials, men in suits -- let's face it, I was wearing cargo pants and I'd just come from work. Beforehand, the Accomplice and I went to the little Japanese restaurant that used to be Hime, the name escapes me, and it was like bizarre parallel universe. I kept expecting to see Gloriee to come out of the kitchen with a beard. It wasn't bad, food delivered with an unnatural efficiency, but the negitoro roll was a bit bland.

The ballet was the Royal Winnipeg Ballet's production of Dracula, the same one Guy Maddin adapted to make Pages from a Virgin's Diary. It is pure coincidence that this happened to come to town just after I watched the film. Highly enjoyable, even from the bizarre angle we were sitting at, although the second half of the ballet proper was a bit weaker -- it lost a fair amount of plot progression and as a consequence, the choreography seemed to spin out, losing its focus in the process. The first half had to do with Lucy Westernra's seduction by the Count, and as the Accomplice pointed out the two dancers had a great deal more chemistry than the second half's Mina had with Dracula.

In between the halves was a pantomime wich compressed the novel's storyline until about six minutes which was quite fun (vampires brides chasing after baby carriages!) although some of the narration could have been rewritten to make it a bit stronger and funnier. After that was the Red Dance, which was supposedly an examination of Dracula's place and function in society's unconscious, taking the form of a furred wolf-man moving through forests of dancers in red. Scantily clad, highly athletic dancers in a variety of negligible red outfits, sex and death and pudding. The heat was rather palpable, although at one point two of the dancers broke out of character and said something to each other, possibly forgetting they were on stage.

The whole thing was flawed, certainly, by some weak adaptation choices - if you're going to lose plot elements for the sake of the art you still need to put something into it to keep the thing from becoming listless - but quite beautiful all around. The red dance boiled the blood and there was a beautiful mirror-dance sequence between Lucy and her fiancé as he gave her a transfusion on stage.

I've been wondering, for a while, where Jason Lutes went. Lutes is a comic book artist and writer with certain historical proclivities who penned two elegant pieces that I happened upon in the distant past and fell in love with: Berlin, an interlocking ensemble story taking place during the final throes of the Weimar Republic, and Jar of Fools, a story about failed romance and failed stage magicians. Lutes favours a graphic design sense that recalls the clean cartoons of Hergé, and demonstrated a capable hand when it came to juggling a large cast with characters all moving inexplicably in seperate, disconcerting directions. Only Berlin dried up after the first book, subtitled "City of Stones," and "City of Smoke" never quite materialized, although I seem to recall seeing a chapter of it show up at random. I didn't pick it up because with Lutes I want them collected, in the trades, where the connections are sumptuously made more tangible.

Only Lutes went away. What was Lutes doing? When was more of Berlin coming out? I forgot about it for the most part, although the idea of Lutes and his preoccupations remained, occasionally out of sunlight in the dusky regions at the back of my head.

And then.

The other day I was drifting through town and ended up stopping in at Legends on Johnson, looking through the new racks, and my eye caught something. A stark white, red, and black hardcover book on the top shelf, with a man in fetal position hurtling off a bridge, with a crowd of faceless onlookers watching. Houdini: The Handcuff King, declared the crisp, serifed font (with italics for the subtitle), followed with by Jason Lutes & Nick Bertozzi. Now I like Lutes, obviously, and I love escape artists in much the same way I love stage magicians - the way performance and burlesque are combined with the fantastic - so I picked it up, shocked, dazzled, and a little surprised. So this is what Lutes has been doing.

Lutes doesn't draw it, unfortunately, this Bertozzi chap does that. His line work is much fatter than Lutes's, favouring a much broader, sketchier look to Berlin's clean, crystalline artwork. Bertozzi's obviously quite competent, although the look of the piece isn't quite to my tastes but he does have strong composition and a calm mastery of the two-tone (black & white with blue in this case). Lutes is strictly in the writing camp and he does a simple story: a day in the life of Harry Houdini, performing one of his escapes before crowds in Cambridge. It demonstrates the lengths Houdini went to in order to cement his fame and attract crowds. It also introduces us to his wife Bess and illustrates one of the theories about how exactly Houdini pulled off his escapes, in much the same way Alan Moore used one of the theories about who Jack the Ripper was in From Hell.

The story's quite minimalist in its tack, soft and quiet -- just a short thing, perhaps a little colder than Lutes's other work; Berlin is certainly notable for its detached, flat tone but uses it to evoke emotional responses from the audience, while Houdini leaves us mostly ignorant to the characters' motivations (fictionalized as they would be). There isn't the same sense of conflict except on the small-scale, the small prejudices and violences cropping up around Houdini in his context.

The backmatter's full of information about Houdini's methods, history, and life - well-researched, a little patronizing - it has that tone of being for younger readers which is a good thing, but ends up talking down a little too much, and I probably could have done without it. Looking at comics for younger readers I'm still more prone to suggesting Jeff Smith's Bone series or his more recent Shazam! Monster Society of Evil comic, where the tone is all-ages but veers in the direction of talking to rather than at.

Houdini's a decent read, quick and sharp. However, it's worth it more for the pacing and the structure.

It's been a long weekend. It isn't over yet but it's been a long weekend.

The sky broke on Good Friday, or it mended itself, but: sunlight poured down, the air grew hot and listless, I noticed the pollen for the first time all year (only distantly, though), and I saw my mother. I walked over to the Grandparents' house and picked her up, we dropped the car off over where the Oak Bay People have seen fit to fence in an area of "natural plant growth" and then walked around Beach Drive in the heat.

Then we had to go to a meeting. Well, Mum had to go to a meeting, and she figured I should go to the meeting so I could see what's involved and understand what she's experiencing in the Alcoholics Anonymous program. She had to go to the meeting because this the very first trip she's made down to Victoria since going into the program, the very first time she's been around my grandparents while she's been sober. And the standard method of dealing with the grandparents has always been drinking, drinking, drinking. My grandmother is an alcoholic as well, "raging," as Mum says, and even if you ignore that she's a frustrating mass of destructive insecurities focused outward on all those around her. She hates women, she hates men, she gets caught up in her little control dramas and psychological gambits. It's all rather exhausting.

Naturally, my mother is staying with my grandparents and not drinking and watching my grandmother drink and my grandfather shout things at my grandmother and the house is (always) dirty and she's not in her own bed and she can't remember where anything is in Victoria anymore. She's stressed, she had to go to a meeting.

Admittedly, I was edgy about coming with her. I'm neurotic and tend to feel awkward about new social situations and of course our parents reduce us to disgruntled adolescents no matter how old we get. But we pulled into the church parking lot and I got out of the car with her. There were people milling about at a back door.

I can't rightly say what I expected.

The room was one of those old church meeting rooms, closed off from the majority of the building with plywood floors and it had clearly been converted, an old store room, with dusty windows and school chairs all around the walls. Someone had set up a couple big tables in the middle and the Twelve Steps were on a big piece of cardboard up at the front. The lettering was a little small so I didn't get a proper look at them, what with my eyes and the dim.

There were several large, wooden crosses leaning against the walls, unfinished-looking with obvious nails sticking out, holding them together.

They were very big on introducing themselves to us, engaging us, although I remained relatively impassive because you never quite get over being a shy six-year-old and I was uncomfortable, even if I can't articulate all the exact reasons for this, but I sat down beside Mum and the meeting started and people were called upon to talk. Faith in various things was brought up quite often. It was hot. Mum talked for a while, about dealing with her parents while she down in Victoria, about the drinking and the not drinking and how things were. She talked about being dragged down by negativity and dark thoughts and having to work out how to get away from them. Other people talked. They asked me if I'd like to speak but I declined, preferring to play the observer. It's dumb, the clichés that sprout, about the diversity of the people at the meeting, and you'd never expect, and all of that. But there were those who didn't want to speak and tried to hide but spoke anyway, and they were funny.

There were some people who spoke about alcohol like it was a demon and there were those who spoke about their alcoholism as something within themselves, and the drink was inert, a receptacle for disaster, which felt more honest to me.

Things finished up and we went around to a bistro on Oak Bay Avenue for lunch, which was a salad with avocado, papaya, and prawns. Sweet dressing, glasses of iced tea. We talked about the meeting and the religious undercurrents, her use of "God" as shorthand for talking about nature, how the program emphasized personal choice in higher power, even if that gets muddled in the religious climate of Oak Bay, and we talked about the grandparents so more, and I'm almost done, I think, with talking about the grandparents. I don't want to talk about them anymore. I'm tired of talking about them.

The rest of the day was a typical visit with Mum; the complaining and frustration and shopping -- shopping with the same attitude I had when I was ten -- and I ended up with two pairs of new shoes and she'd brought a couple books down with her for me, and my dad had sent down a fake, hollowed out book with her, so of course I can hide things when the horrible Fascists come to break my windows with rocks and climb inside to cuff me. We picked up Michael and ended up on the patio at my aunt's house, then at Don Mee's for dinner. The three of us went our way from the family and drove around in the dark, walked up and down the breakwater, then went home.

Nothing accomplished today. I stared at the blank page and put shit down on it and then deleted, deleted, deleted. Multiple times. I stared at the damned blank page and the words didn't move, only sort of lay there dead-like and did nothing.

Anyway, I'm going to sit in bed and stare at another blank page and maybe someone else's art until may something spews forth, only it probably won't beyond a dull shit-trickle that will have to be ripped up later.

In an uncharacteristic show of vigour, I got up and had a shower, then walked over to the grocery store to buy food to make a smoothie with, came home and made the smoothie (yogurt, banana, honey, strawberries, raspberries) communicated with a couple people like Joanna and Sarah. I have to go to work shortly. Technically it's new comics day but as usual I work too early to actually get there in time if I try to go to the comics shop as well, so that will have to happen tomorrow even though there's about four books I'm hotly anticipating. I like weeks like this: lots of comics that I'm waiting for, rather than wandering over to the shop to stare in horror at the bland recycled crap that's been foisted off on the nerds and having console myself with old Legion comics or Steve Ditko's Doctor Strange.

I know, I know, my life is so hard.

Last night, Christian and I went for Pho and then wandered over to Dolce to drink too much hot chocolate while he graded mock exams and I worked on the opening to a story. Story's sort of limp, flaccid, undeveloped at the moment - it fails to evoke the proper sense of energy, but you know: early days. It's not firing up my neurons like some other stories have, which means it could just as easily be another false start, but I wrote, dammit.

Drinks with Penny and Michael tonight.

I am alive, I'm just busy writing a story and reading Vonnegut's Sirens of Titan, which I will write an extensive examination of whenever I finish it. Because it's beautiful. The story has had its ups and downs but I had quite a good session with it tonight at the coffee shop while Christian marked papers and Jenny worked on her thesis proposal. There was much intellectual stimulation right up until all the loud talkers started. Some girl who worked at Sugar was complaining about wannabe go-go dancers who were really just drunk girls under the impression that pole dancing was what she was looking for. I found somebody's abandoned eyelash curler on the bus and that's going in the story.

I have tomorrow off. I'm going to go for a walk with Jenny in the morning and then I'm going up to Hillside Mall to find out about the pair of shoes that I ordered which haven't come in yet.

I finished Vonnegut's Sirens of Titan a few hours ago and then just now picked up his Cat's Cradle, which was on my bookshelf in spite of the fact that I've never read it and don't even remember acquiring it. I'm sure there was a reason, and let's face it -- this is not the first book to arrive on my shelf without any logical explanation. After that I went through my bookshelves to find any other errant Vonneguts that I hadn't read and came up with Bluebeard, but I'll pick at that one after I've read this one. I seem to remember Deadeye Dick was in there somewhere but it's dissolved into the firmament.

Not the first time or last et cetera et cetera Amen.

Sirens is very effective at making you dislike it's characters but still root for them, or forget that you don't like them right up until they disappoint you again. They're like people like that. It would appear that Vonnegut was trying to rewrite the Bible and Alice in Wonderland at the very same time and maybe if you cock your eye it's A Christmas Carol as well, although the only holiday-related paraphenalia in book are effigies of Malachi Constant for burning. And the only young boy to catch your hearts is a little monster who turns into an evil alien Mowgli. In short, this book is every other major book ever published, ever. That's a lie, by the way, and it's both quite readable and easily lifted with only one hand, which means something in a time when that new Annie Leibowitz book is out and you could very seriously injure someone by hefting it over your head and bashing their head with it.

Quite simply, the book is about people using other people and then looking quite shocked to learn that, yes, they themselves have been used. It's rather expertly done -- I spent much of the book trying to figure out why a particular character acted in the way that he did only to discover why, and then to discover that the reasons may have been an illusion.

Names are interesting in the book. Not because they're all weird, which is fun, but because there are so many of them; people are saddled with names and change them, are renamed, almost at whim - well, not whim, plot, but the process leaves them sagging under the weight of discarded and forgotten identities.

Where have I been lately?

It's one of those ridiculous days in Victoria where the sun's out and the air's warm - but for the occasional gust of wind. It's one of those ridiculous days and we ended up in Beacon Hill with herons screaming in the distance - a bald eagle attacking their nest, trying to feast on their eggs.

Picnicking next to a massacre. It's that awkward moment where you don't know what to do - enjoy the sunshine or focus on the carnage generated by nature when unhindered by humans?

Work is a changing beast, of course, and now I have a permanent position rather than being an auxiliary. I'm not an auxiliary. That's new and different.

But, I'm home and there's music and I need to start firing off words into the story I'm writing. Something has to stick.

I walked away from the coffee shop with just a newborn paragraph, paranoid-dripping and gunk hung from its sentences. There was some awkward parentheses and probably too many commas. The adjectives piled and the sentences ran on. But, as babies go: sort of cute and assembled from the usual gurgling Winston Churchill identikit.

That is all.