You try to tell people what it’s like living here, but you’re not sure you know. You’ve lived here nearly your whole life, and you’re numb to this place. You have to push yourself to see it. — Jennifer McGuiggan

 Town & Country: Part 1

You tell people that this small town, situated thirty-five miles southeast of Pittsburgh, is the last bastion of suburbia before the routes go rural. You live in a thirty-year-old subdivision of single family homes and townhouses. One way in, same way out. No one drives by your house unless he’s headed to or from one of your neighbors’ houses. The well-tended lawns reach right up to the curb, no sidewalks needed in this quiet maze of streets. Yet even in all of this deliberate, manicured space you notice bits of the wild popping up close to the ground: purple crocus and green onion peeking out from the undergrowth in spring; yellow dandelions gone downy white polka-dotting the yards by mid-summer; crackly piles of jeweled leaves lining the curbs in autumn; and bleached twigs littering the mulched beds in winter.

Two minutes from your front door stand a dozen cows, and sometimes one lone goat, in the field next to St. Emma Monastery, where a handful of Benedictine nuns live out their days. People use the parking lot between the monastery and the cow field as a sort of informal, unmanned swap meet. They leave all kinds of junk there, sometimes with a sign that says “Free,” but more often with the simple assumption of freedom. Recently there was a small cardboard box of old Christmas cookie tins and a large, upholstered chair with carved wooden legs and arms, castoff seating for one. Every day for nearly two weeks you spotted the chair’s orange, mustard, and cream flowers as you drove past. Now you look for new treasures to pop up—and for the cop who sometimes sits in the parking lot waiting for anyone to break the 45-mph speed limit.

If you drive five minutes more down the road, you’ll be bobbing along in farm country: rolling hills, corn fields, metal silos, the occasional sheep. On Sundays you drive along the sweetly winding backroads to Bardine’s Country Smokehouse, where you can buy fresh chicken breasts, all manner of beef and pork, and more varieties of sausage than you knew there were names for. The folks at Bardine’s wear shirts that read “Nice to meat you” across the back, and they’re always happy to answer your questions and cut your meat to order. Blue ribbons, award plaques, and glossy photos of prize-winning pigs line the walls. There are cows and a barn out back of the store. When you ask if the chickens are their own too, the woman behind the counter says they come from Michigan. You wonder why there aren’t more locally available birds.

Along the way to Bardine’s you pass more fields of cows and try not to think about their sisters, whom you’re about to see splayed out, red and naked, in the display cases. It’s hard to be a vegetarian in this part of southwestern Pennsylvania, but you give it a try every few months. Going out to eat is your undoing, since most non-meat options here are limited to pasta with soggy vegetables. You have to drive thirty minutes for the nearest Indian restaurant, and thirty more past that to find Thai food, both good options for meat-free meals. But your real downfall is bacon, which you sometimes pick up at Bardine’s with a twinge of guilt, placing it on the counter alongside one of those Michigan chicken breasts. Most weeks you can’t bring yourself to buy the beef.

If you time the Sunday trip just right you can catch part of “A Prairie Home Companion” on NPR. Garrison Keillor’s molasses voice makes the country way of life sound so lovely, so vivid, so very nice. You listen because it fits the landscape, and because for those fifteen minutes each way, Garrison and his guests charm you into thinking that you’re cozy at home in these green, green hills, even though you know in your heart you’re not really a country girl.

Town & Country: Part 2

If you come out your front door, drive past the cows and the nuns, and keep going for ten minutes in the opposite direction of Bardine’s, you’ll run into the sad asphalt of highways, big box stores, and strip malls saturated with fast food. But if you want to avoid all that (and you do, unless you need groceries), you can be smack-dab downtown in five minutes. Here in the county seat, “smack-dab downtown” amounts to just a few streets’ worth of small-town city. The big draws, for you, are the library and the post office, which face each other across Pennsylvania Avenue. You occasionally treat yourself to a red velvet with cream cheese icing at the cupcake shop that recently opened around the corner, evidence that all good trends come to those who wait, even in small town America. More often, you stop by the coffee shop just down the street. They make a decent latte, and the vibe is funky, with angry, edgy art that you don’t really like, but that you appreciate just for existing in this little town. You hear that they’re planning to stay open until 9:00 on Friday and Saturday nights. This is good news, since the one or two other cafés that manage to stay in business here close by 6:00 p.m. during the week and 2:00 p.m. on Saturdays. There aren’t many places to go in this town after business hours unless you fancy one of the many bars: sports, dive, biker, or—the newest addition—the county’s first hookah bar, which opened last year in the strip behind the mall, sandwiched somewhere between Buffalo Wild Wings and Hallmark. But let’s face it, you’re not much of a bar girl.

This should be a college town, but it’s not quite that. Within a ten-mile radius sit four colleges and universities, albeit small ones. You’re well past college age, but you wonder where all the students are, where they go and what they do. Where are the late night caffeine-and-study haunts? The street musicians? Where’s the diversity? More to the point, where are all the young people? And by young people you don’t mean the 2.5 kids for every family on your street. There’s a sizable under-18 demographic in this town, rivaled only by the over-65 population. In 2007 U.S. News & World Report named Greensburg one of the best places to retire. From hookah bars to bingo nights, what’s a girl like you to do?

To be fair, there does seem to be a mini-Renaissance subtly taking shape here: cupcakes, evening coffee shop hours, flavored tobacco, even a few locally-owned, independent restaurants to combat the fluorescent chains along the highway. One of them features a menu of local and sometimes organic offerings, including meat from Bardine’s. (You think again about that Michigan chicken. Does five-hundred miles count as local in the world of food?) You’re really trying to be a small-town girl.

The In-between

As a teenager you had a boyfriend who loved living here, touting its ideal location halfway between the mountains and the city, forty-five minutes either way, he said. He was technically correct, but fifteen years later you’re still not buying it. It’s not the math or the mileage that’s wrong, just everything else. The problem is that neither the mountains nor the city on either side of this small town satisfy you. The Laurel Highlands to the east aren’t much when it comes to mountains, just Appalachia’s afterthought foothills. Pretty enough, sure, but nothing that catches your breath.

To the west, Pittsburgh keeps trying to shrug off its old blue collar, Steel Town image with new biotech firms and glossy marketing initiatives. But beneath the progress and the gloss, it’s the same old gritty city, the same squashed-voweled accents of the local “Yinzer” dialect, the longstanding adoration of Primanti Brothers sandwiches with their french fries and coleslaw piled high atop the meat and cheese, as though the sandwich itself were in a hurry for you to eat it. You’re just far enough outside of the city to be disconnected from the art scene that you hear is buzzing. People who live closer in think you live out in the sticks, and maybe you do (think of all those cows). You once went to an evening event in the city and someone asked if you were driving “all the way” back home that same night. One hour by car is a world away.

The city offers plenty to do. There’s the Pittsburgh Symphony, the Pittsburgh Opera, and the Pittsburgh Public Theater, but looming above all of these are the Pittsburgh Steelers. Football reigns supreme here in the capital city of “Steeler Nation,” a geographically amorphous land populated with just as many women as men. You don’t really care about football, which is considered unnatural and blasphemous in these parts. This somewhat frivolous outcast status serves as the symbol for all the ways you don’t feel at home here. You daydream about cities like Portland, Oregon, cities with good public transportation, public recycling bins, and bicycle culture. Places where you—wearing a dress over your jeans and with small swatch of pink hair—aren’t the most outrageous hipster on the scene. You wonder if this makes you a snob in some way. (You fear that it does.)

Land and Sky

Pittsburgh’s three rivers notwithstanding, this is a landlocked pocket of earth. Lake Erie grazes the top of the state three hours to your north, but that’s not local, even if it is closer than those Michigan chickens. And this is the crux of your discontent: You are an ocean girl. You daydream about it the way you used to daydream about your old love who lived across the continent and then across the Atlantic. All of this land maroons you from your true self.

But all of this land is why you love the sky so much: It’s the closest thing you have to the sea and the only thing that seems to change much around here. On good days you watch the currents of the sky, the tide of blue and white and grey ebbing and flowing. But even the sky stays the same for too many days on end here, with more cloudy days than the Pacific Northwest, which, incidentally, is where you’d like to live—between the evergreen mountains and wild seashore. On winter days, when slate grey skies fit over these pale winter lawns like a too-tight skullcap, you feel claustrophobic inside and out, cabin fever that has nothing to do with walls.

Still, the sky is your saving grace. Late in the afternoon, when tentative patches of blue sometimes peek through the cloud lid, you go out for a walk. Every day around this time a fat hound dog cries with an alarming and mournful insistence. On one of your walks you see the dog and its owner. The hound snuffles in circles for all it’s worth, hot on the trail of something along the cold asphalt, braying every few seconds in a plea or an announcement or some triumph, you can’t be sure which.

These feeble splotches of color in the anemic sky remind you that above the colorless canvas that you can see is a wide space of blue that you cannot. Of course, above that lurks the cold dark of space, but that’s neither here nor there. The point is this: The sky is out there. This is how you feel in general: Things are out there, somewhere. Beyond the grey sky; beyond this solidly middle class, suburban development; beyond this small town creviced between the city and the foothills; beyond the farmland and rolling hills; thirty-five miles from urban culture, three-hundred miles from the nearest shoreline, and two-thousand-six-hundred-seventy-four from that beach you love the most on the Oregon coast.

When you force yourself to look at this place where you’ve lived for 35 of your 36 years, you can’t help but wonder what “home” really means. Is it where you hang your hat? Where you lay your head? Or is it, to mix the metaphors, where you hang your head? Even as you think about moving across the country, you push yourself to see this place you call home. You notice the pleasing contrast of brown branches against the whiteout sky, the melancholy music of the hound dog, the sinewy energy of angry art on coffee shop walls. As winter ends, warmer weather creeps back in, the sky blooms into a soft blue, and each spring you notice more purple crocus pushing their way up through the dry sticks of last year’s growth.

   — Jennifer McGuiggan

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Jennifer (Jenna) McGuiggan lives in the rolling hills of Pennsylvania and longs for the sea. To soothe her wanderlust she is working on a collection of essays set at seashores around the world. She holds an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. In 2009 she curated and published Lanterns: A Gathering of Stories, a collaborative collection of prose, poetry, and photography celebrating women in creative community. Visit her in The Word Cellar, where she writes about everything from navigating the writing life to venturing into the world of roller derby.

This is the 38th “What It’s Like Living Here” on NC. See the complete collection here.

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Johan Renck’s music video for The Knife’s “Pass This On” throws us into one of the most uncomfortable football award banquets ever, complete with three of my favourite things: drag queens, The Knife’s infectious song, and awkward straight boy dancing.

Renck works to build an aesthetics of discomfort here. The film finds the painful, rumpus room décor, the apathetic-to-the-point-of-aggressive blank faces of the audience, the drag queen’s Xanadu-esque outfit, and the lyrics she sings about preying on another girl’s brother (“I’m in love with your brother / What’s his name? / I thought I’d come by to see him again”). Terribly awkward. All of it. Made more awkward, not less, with the plethora of awkward dances the drag queen’s performance inspires. Most striking visually is the young blond man’s earnest courtship dance: to desire in Renck’s uncomfortable world is to be beauteous and a fool at the same time.

This aesthetics of discomfort recurs in Renck’s other works and is particularly similar in his video for Madonna’s “Hung Up.”

The lighting has all the florescent ambiance of a coroner’s autopsy theatre and the room’s pale blue floor and fake wood paneling scream sad basement from the ‘70s where sad things will happen. Madonna’s outfit and hair might have been designed and styled by the same perversely retro stylists who worked on the drag queen in “Pass This On.”

The difference between the two videos is that Renck permits Madonna to escape to beauty in the segments where she dances with beautiful young dancers in a night club (though Renck throws her back on the floor in the basement in the very last shot). For “Pass This On,” however, Renck doesn’t let the footballers or the drag queen find the exits in their rumpus room hell.

Through the first half of “Pass This On,” much of the discomfort comes from the juxtaposition of a drag queen performer with an unsympathetic audience. This fancy fish out of water tale then courts our expectations that, washed up here, the fish is in danger. Who booked her for this event and how badly is this going to end?

I am all for dance as the panacea to most social conflicts, but the film nicely resists that. Certainly, the men get up and dance instead of resorting to violence or panic at the sight of the drag queen, but the aesthetic of discomfort does not ease, helped in part by that glorious bad straight boy dancing, but ultimately secured by the film’s resistance to Broadway show tune resolutions: the last shot is of a young woman watching all the dancing footballers, the old men, and the drag queen with the same apathy the chorus of faces showed at the beginning. She is immune to this panacea. She won’t let this song and dance go full flash mob. Renck won’t let the film escape the aesthetics of discomfort.

Renck’s penchant for discomfort is perhaps at its most extreme in his “Mobile Movies: Self Portrait,” where he chronicles a solitary evening in a sparse apartment.

Sure, he pees on the toilet seat, but he does clean it up. This painful visual honesty is most realized in the low shot which starts with his naked butt and then holds on him as he awkwardly puts on his underwear and socks. Throughout this he angles himself towards the left of the screen and this suggests the presence of a mirror off screen. The self-consciousness, the awkwardness of him dressing, are vulnerable and disarming. We see him seeing himself, and we wonder what he sees. Again with the aesthetics of discomfort, the ambivalent desiring gaze.

Terribly talented Canadian director Xavier Dolan chose The Knife’s song for a sort of dervish subtext in his gorgeous second film Les Amours Imaginaires (a title terribly translated by –I am assuming – the film distribution company as Heartbeats).

Click here to view the embedded video.

The clip is in French, but the translation of their dialogue appears below the video frame. The awkwardness from Renck’s video is mirrored here as son and mother sexy dance at his birthday party while his two would-be suitors watch on.  There’s a similar thread of discomfort running through the rest of Dolan’s film, too, in the awkward documentary footage where random eccentric characters discuss their most obsessive loves and in the mise en scene that frames lovers talking in bed like awkward portraits. Desire, for Dolan’s film, is awkward and uncomfortable, built on unresolvable distances.

Reading this sense of desire and awkwardness back to Renck’s music videos, we can perhaps see that desire, too, plays a part in the music video worlds orbiting the drag queen and Madonna. The aesthetic of discomfort is not just about wanting to get away from anxiety provoking interiors and awkward social situations. There is something desirable about these worlds, too. And even something desirable about the discomfort itself. This, it seems, is at the core of Renck’s films. This discomforting desire that the drag queen passes on to the young man, that the young man passes on to the other men, that is held in the gaze of the young woman at the end of the video. Pass it on.

– R W Gray

Herewith a strange and lurid scene from the bar life — gangsters, music, and a quasi-ritual violence — in Piraeus, after the ravaging of Smyrna during the 1922 Greco-Turkish war (one of the many Greco-Turkish wars) in Tess Fragoulis‘s brand new novel The Goodtime Girl (Cormorant Books). The scene is foreign, surprising because it lets the reader see, in its details, the mix of cultural history in the land that is often called the cradle of Western civilization while, at the same time, letting us know that gangsters are kind of like gangsters wherever they are — strutting cockerels with a peculiar sense of social harmony — whether they inhabit Isaac Babel’s Odessa or Mario Puzo’s Las Vegas. Tess Fragoulis, the author of two previous books, the novel Ariadne’s Dream and a story collection called Stories to Hide from Your Mother, writes and teaches teaches in Montreal. You can read the first review of her novel here.

dg

10.

You strut up to me
with a double-edged blade
Who’s your business with wise-guy,
what debts must be paid?

It was early evening and the taverna was empty except for a few members of the band escaping their wives, and a gang of codgers who wouldn’t last past eleven. They were playing endless hands of kseri, drinking retsina and reminiscing about the good old days when the taverna was their territory and no one came in without a brick of hashish as an offering. Now they were harmless granddads, coughing with every inhale of the narghile and gossiping about the preening young manghites with as much indulgence as disdain. Kivelli liked the taverna at this time of day, before the atmosphere was choked with grudges and bravado. She sat by herself, drinking coffee and waiting for the air to shift, for the old men to cede their places to the young.

To pass the time, she turned her little white cup onto its saucer and watched the muddy grounds ooze out the side while her future was being etched on the inner walls in lacy patterns. Barba Yannis claimed he could read palms, though everyone knew it was just an excuse to hold women’s hands and make predictions that gave him some sort of advantage. He’d already taken turns with Kiki and Lola, as well as several of the other girls because they liked what he saw in their future. He didn’t read cups, however, which was the territory of old ladies with black dresses and headscarves, their evil eyes usually aimed in his direction. As Kivelli peered into the cup’s miniature abyss at something that might have been a flower or a fallen sun, she sensed someone behind her and looked over her shoulder.

A short, skinny man Kivelli hadn’t seen before stood there, erect as a post, his nervous blinking the only sign he was alive. He wore an impeccable grey serge suit with a burgundy bow tie, and a black fedora pulled down over his forehead and ears, which made him look as if he had something to hide. He smelled familiar, however, of lemon verbena and fine tobacco, like her sleek-haired suitors in Smyrna, though he was nowhere near as handsome with his flaccid skin and thin, pale lips. When his mouth began to move, Kivelli couldn’t hear his words over the din of old men nattering and musicians fooling around with their instruments. She narrowed her eyes and cupped a hand by her ear.

“I am the Smyrniot,” the man repeated testily and paused a moment, waiting for a reaction. So many guys had adopted that nickname since the Catastrophe — whether they’d come from the city or a nearby village — it had become meaningless. Kivelli studied his grim face, but it told her nothing. He wasn’t distinct enough to be remembered. Even now, standing before her, her memory resisted him.

“What can I do for you?” she asked, not impolitely, but not graciously either. He threw her a sharp look that in the past might have frightened her, but now only made her more defiant. She compressed her lips and folded her arms over her chest, her eyes hard as diamonds. If he really wanted trouble, she could call the Cucumber. For a few uncomfortable seconds, they looked each other over with equal doubt. But before either could make a move, Barba Yannis rushed over and slapped the Smyrniot on the back, then shook his hand vigorously. Kivelli had seen that happy dog look on her boss’s face before: he was both impressed and slightly unnerved by the presence of the man he called Panayotis.

“What brings you here, my friend?” he asked Panayotis the Smyrniot, who pulled on the brim of his hat until his eyes all but disappeared. With an almost imperceptible tilt of his chin, he pointed in Kivelli’s direction. Barba Yannis looked as thrilled as Kyria Effie had on the day he’d arrived with his proposition. “You should be very flattered, girlie.” He then winked at the Smyrniot. “Don’t ask about the hole I found her in …” And with that he left, blissfully unaware that his taverna was just a different type of hole.

The Smyrniot looked left and right, as if plotting his escape. He was becoming more agitated by the minute; he fiddled with something in his pocket Kivelli hoped was neither a wedding ring nor a pistol. Barba Yannis was sitting with the old men, whispering and staring and whispering some more. There was a rumble of laughter, and someone began plucking a baglama, yowling between notes.

When the Smyrniot spoke again, he lowered his voice as if he feared being caught in an indiscretion. “Miss Kivelli,” he began, his words tentative, forced. “I have a song for you. Come to my house tomorrow afternoon if you want to try it on for size.” He pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket and handed it to her, then scurried out of the taverna without waiting for her reply, or pulling on the narghile, or talking to anyone else — not even Barba Yannis. His address was outside the neighbourhood, over the bridge and up Castella Hill, in a better part of Piraeus. Kivelli stared at the piece of paper in her hand, then crumpled it and stuffed it in her coffee cup. The place was starting to fill up, and it was time for her to disappear into the storeroom so she could later make her entrance. Barba Yannis hurried over, his eyebrows twitching eagerly.

“What did he say, what did he want from you?” He wiped his forehead with a white handkerchief edged with pink embroidery.

“Who knows … something about a song … to each his own.” Barba Yannis looked at her as if she’d fallen on her head.

“Are you crazy? The Smyrniot wants to give you a song and you flick him off like lice? What’s the matter with you? Don’t you know who he is?” This was the first time he’d ever scolded her, and the strain soaked his handkerchief with sweat.

Kivelli admitted she didn’t know, and she didn’t care either. As far as she was concerned, he was one of a dozen newborn Smyrniots, and nobody to her. Barba Yannis plucked the crumpled, coffee-stained paper out of the cup, smoothed its wrinkles against the table. He held it at arm’s length to read it, then pressed it into her hand. “You go there and apologize, Miss Kivelli, or don’t bother showing up tomorrow night. I have no room here for women who live on the moon.” He then spelled it out for her and walked off to tell the other musicians, who had a good laugh at her expense.

This Smyrniot was Panayotis “The Smyrniot” Doukas, one of the most renowned musicians in Smyrna. Kivelli had heard his name and had danced to his music at balls and private functions where his orchestra played, but had certainly never met him. His were not the circles she travelled in, neither there nor here. The band hardly ever played his songs at the taverna; they weren’t raw or hard enough for the regular crowd, even when the lyrics were about hashish and prison and heartbreak. The music raised a different spirit — too happy, too romantic, even in its melancholy. Kivelli knew a few of his hits — “Maria, Stop Your Nagging,” and “Someone’s Stolen the Wine” — and sang them on request when one of her compatriots who could afford it was in the audience, which was not very often. They had their own clubs where they tried to recreate what they had lost, places named after Smyrna’s richest neighbourhoods — Bella Vista, Cordelio, Bournova. The mere thought of going there made Kivelli as sick as bad wine.

But now that she knew who the Smyrniot was, she was curious to hear what kind of song he thought was cut to her measure, and to find out how he knew, since she’d never seen him at the taverna. Though, admittedly, he could have been lurking in a smoky corner all along, testing and assessing her, or standing right under her nose, unremarkable and easily forgotten.

There was still this night to live through, however, and tomorrow seemed a thousand years away, during which the sun might be extinguished once and for all, if not for her, then for someone else. This had become a given since the Cucumber’s gang had taken up residence at the taverna. Notoriety had to be fed with flesh and blood, or it went somewhere else. So incidents of the kind that were never reported to the police escalated, and it was left to the manghes to sort things out, using their own code, imposing their own sentence.

At around two in the morning, a young swag from the neighbourhood sauntered in, high as Jupiter. Crazy Manos dropped in on most nights to flirt with the girls, exchange barbs with the guys. He was lean-faced and handsome, with dark blond hair and the green eyes of a wildcat, wary and always halfway shut. Rumour had it that he slept with ten women a day and stole from them all, which was how he could afford his fine suits and enough hashish to keep him flying most of the time. He collected his allowance throughout the day in exchange for a kiss on the forehead, and blew it all by dawn. Kivelli hoped it was worth it, but she had her doubts.

Crazy Manos was a bit of a show-off. He strutted around the room, glass of wine in hand, laughing uncontrollably and flashing his new double-edged dagger with the polished deer stag handle. He slid it through his fingers, ran it over the insides of his wrists and hefted it between his hands. He was also throwing his weight around with the girls in the corner, but from their scowls and waving hands, Kivelli could tell they were not enjoying his attentions. Narella left the table and went to speak with Barba Yannis, who consulted a few of his buddies and then called over Mortis, the taverna’s only waiter.

The older manghes had nothing against Crazy Manos. They admired his looks, his luck with the ladies and his fancy blade. They’d all been young and high and crazy once. He was one of them, but there was no bigger anathema than a guy who called attention to himself for no good reason. If you took out your sword, you’d better be ready to use it. They tried to ignore him at first, but this only encouraged his strutting. When Mortis refused to bring him more wine, Crazy Manos stood on a chair and smashed the empty glass on the floor, then began laughing like a maniac. One by one the instruments stopped playing, Kivelli stopped singing, the men stopped talking and even the girls’ gasps were soundless. A group of Barba Yannis’s tightest friends surrounded Crazy Manos, who cursed and spat like the devil as they dragged him outside. Barba Yannis signalled the band to start playing again, but Kivelli could still hear the shouting and swearing through the thick wooden door.

After two or three songs the manghes returned, wiping their hands on their trousers, tucking in their shirttails, looking neither happy nor angry nor proud. They had done what was necessary because they’d been provoked. They took their places at their tables as if nothing had happened, resumed their conversations as if they’d never been interrupted. That was that, Kivelli thought, and after a few more songs she too had forgotten the scuffle, though the broken glass still lay on the floor, twinkling like ice that would never melt.

Then Crazy Manos stumbled back in. Blood running from his nose and mouth stained his white shirt, both his eyes were blackened, swollen, his jacket was ripped and his hat had been crushed. This did not make him look ugly, just wilder. Before anyone could stop him, he ran to the front of the room with his dagger between his teeth and began dancing like a woman, clapping his hands above his head and shimmying his hips. He waggled his tongue at Kivelli as the same group of manghes carried him out again. But within two or three songs, Crazy Manos was back, as defiant as ever, blowing kisses and offering wine to everyone in the house. Those must have been powerful drugs coursing through his body. Corpse-raising drugs. A lesser mangha would have crawled home to die in his mother’s lap.

The rest of the night was punctuated by this back and forth, this in and out and in again. When Crazy Manos did not crawl back on his hands and knees after the final bout, Kivelli was sure they’d killed him, and she felt bad for a moment. He was a young guy trying to have some fun, a handsome mangha, just a little bit reckless.

After the taverna closed and the broken glass was swept up, Kivelli searched for Barba Yannis, but he was nowhere to be found. All she wanted was to get paid so she could go home and consider the Smyrniot’s invitation, the memory of which had been almost entirely wiped out by the night’s main event. If it disappeared by morning, she would be relieved of the decision, though she was not certain how much longer she could bear the brutishness of the taverna. Narella walked over and said she’d seen Barba Yannis leave by himself, and that she too was waiting for him because they had their own bills to settle. “He read my palm and paid me a visit at Kyria Effie’s,” she confessed sheepishly. She’d hoped to make Crazy Manos jealous, to get back at him for his philandering, but things had gone too far. She wiped away a tear. Narella had a soft spot for that little butcher.

Just then Barba Yannis returned. He and Mortis were holding Crazy Manos up by the armpits, helping him to a table near the back. Narella ran to him, threw her arms around his neck. Crazy Manos cursed, but didn’t push her away. He was a sorry sight, his pretty face puffed up like that of a drowned man, his fine threads dark with blood and dirt. But there he sat, holding hands with Narella and drinking the cup of coffee Barba Yannis himself had brought him, while Mortis dusted off his jacket with a white cloth.

 — Tess Fragoulis

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Tess Fragoulis is the author of Stories to Hide from Your Mother (Arsenal Pulp, 1997), which was nominated for the QWF First Book Prize; Ariadne’s Dream (Thistledown, 2001), which was long-listed for the International IMPAC DUBLIN Literary Award; and is the editor of Musings, an anthology of Greek-Canadian Literature (Vehicule, 2004). Her latest novel, The Goodtime Girl, is published by Cormorant Books in Canada, and will be published in Greek by Psichogios Publications in Greece in 2013. She has also written for newspapers, magazines and television. She lives in Montreal and teaches writing part-time at Concordia University.

See also:

http://robmclennan.blogspot.ca/2009/07/12-or-20-questions-with-tess-fragoulis.html
http://montrealmagazine.ca/MM/content/view/47/
http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art41481.asp

Here are some luscious photographs of Paris, not your tourist Paris, but the Paris streets, and not just the Paris streets but a selection of photos that are in many ways a homage to the history of Parisian street photography, that is, photographs with a particularity, an edge, derived from history and impersonation. These are from the Montreal poet/novelist Mark Lavorato (see his poem in the last issue) who started taking pictures as a moment of research for a new novel. He impersonated a 1920s Parisian street photographer who would be a character in his book, and, Lo! he became a photographer himself.

dg

I was researching my third novel, Burning-In (forthcoming), in which one of my characters is a photographer in the 1920s. What I soon learned in my research is that the art of street photography came before the advent of photojournalism. This was astounding to me; that the art aspect of photography came well before its utility.

I picked up a camera and took to the streets to learn about how my protagonist would feel as a street photographer, and I found that, surprisingly, it was me, and not my protagonist, who was doing all the feeling. So I dove into street photography with all the fascination and intensity of someone discovering a new and rich medium.

— Mark Lavorato

— Mark Lavorato

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Mark Lavorato is the author of three novels, Veracity, Believing Cedric, and the forthcoming Burning-In. His first collection of poetry, Wayworn Wooden Floors, had just been published. One of the poems from that book was published in a previous issue of Numéro Cinq. Mark lives in Montreal and is currently seeking galleries to exhibit his work. You can see more of my photos here.

I met Emily Pulfer-Terino on the jet to Chicago for the AWP Conference last, a comical, sleepy morning meeting made somewhat impossible by my grumpy desire not to talk to ANYONE. Later, at the conference, we re-met with CONTEXT and it came out that she is a poet. Actually, a lovely poet who teaches at a girls’ private school in Massachusetts and has to do amusing things like chaperone dances. Emily Pulfer-Terino can build a beautiful line. Watch the verbs and verbals. Everything is moving, shifting, pelting, fraying in these poems.

this heaving air, the sound of air inborn
as effort. And what washes up, limp, inside-
out, jellyfish, empty skate, cartilage
fraying.

Meditate upon the gorgeous concision of these lines. Think about the powerful rhetoric of lists and series and the dense concreteness of the words. Watch the way the grammar and drama of the sentences surges beyond the line to the next and the next.

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The Vineyard

November wind persuades the dunes
You’ve brought me to. Dunes thin and swell.
Near, gray trees strain. Your friends
build houses and couple here;

I prefer mountains. But your heart
pelts against your ribs. You trudge
at wind and turn, grinning
over your shoulder at me. Constant here,

this heaving air, the sound of air inborn
as effort. And what washes up, limp, inside-
out, jellyfish, empty skate, cartilage
fraying. And there’s your dog,

who into the pluming water follows tossed planks,
again pleased and flapping, again,
salted by seaspume. Even in this
constant reshaping of ground by wind, of wave

by wind, with these cold shocks
of beachwinter numbing the skin,
how isolate each breathing thing must be.
Scents of wet wood, aged fish wed

these drowsy ions. I hate it here.
The way you clasp against this afternoon
into me, our two breaths chalking one,
your face a mortifying pink.

Tinctures

Yarrow, she says, wading through the weeds
beside the mountain road, will purify the blood.

Gathering plants to make tinctures and balms,
serious and thinner now, my friend is learning

how to heal. Red clover lowers fever, quiets
frantic nerves. Stinging nettle soothes the skin,

the pain of aging joints. Saint John’s wart, common
yellow flower, homely as a pillowcase, soothes the pain

of life itself. Well, pain has made a pagan of my friend.
At twenty-two, she has already learned to celebrate

death: friends, her father. Alone in her sugar shack home
up here, grown sinewy and stern, she studies the natural world

as if the names of living things, repeated, were a spell to undo loss.
She gives me what she gathers—hawthorn blossom, elder,

comfrey—to seal in jars with stones and alcohol. We’re pulled over
here forever. The sun, once heavy gold with heat, is growing tired

over us, pale white light of evening setting in. Soon, she’ll stop
and we’ll start to enjoy what we always do together: at her place,

sepia sounds of guitar steeping from the record player, outside,
lake water steadying slowly under lowered sun. And we enjoy

the wine she makes: dandelion, lemon mint. Tasting of flowers
and of fire. Strong wine, and good, it puts us under fast.

 — Emily Pulfer-Terino

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Emily Pulfer-Terino grew up in Western Massachusetts, where she lives and teaches English at Miss Hall’s School, a boarding school for girls. She holds a BA from Sarah Lawrence College and an MFA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University. More of her work is published or forthcoming in Hunger Mountain, Stone Canoe, The Louisville Review, The Alembic, Oberon, and other journals and anthologies.

The Terrace

You live off the six-lane U.S. State Road 17-92 which cuts through Orlando and one of the city’s major arteries. Even though your building is close to the road, you are not bothered by the traffic; you can barely detect the whoosh of passing cars. This may be because these buildings—the oldest condominium complex in Orange County, erected in  the 1950s—are two stories of concrete block, hurricane-proof. You know because you’ve ridden out at least a Category Two here, and plenty of tropical storms.

The buildings retain retro detailing in the porch latticework and New England-inspired names—Gladstone, Kingston, Exeter—which hardly fit the shrubs flowering fire-orange petals, geckos flitting up your porch screens, the lemon tree outside your bedroom which bears fruit in the winter. The complex is notoriously well-kept by the landscapers who descend on Wednesdays, clipping hedges and parading down the sidewalks wielding leaf-blowers like jet-packs, calling to each other in Spanish and Creole, or another Caribbean patois, you’re not sure which. Most of your neighbors have lived here for years. Many are elderly, and a good number are snowbirds—Canadians and Northern retirees who arrive in October and leave around April, with the heat’s descent. But a good number of young couples and singles have moved in recently. You have lived here a decade, and with each passing year, find it more difficult to imagine ever leaving.

 The Birds

Sometimes when you are climbing in or out of your jeep, the water birds catch your eye. Herons, pelicans, ibis, and others hunt in the stream behind your building, some so tall they would likely reach your shoulder. You try and sneak up on them, but can get no closer than a dozen feet before they scamper away awkwardly on legs like bent chopsticks, or take flight. Even though the birds are a fixture, they fascinate you. Perhaps it’s the elegant, precise way they hunt in the rushing water as their long beaks hover, then strike, in the weeds. Or perhaps it’s the sheer size of some of them, the uncanny way they can sense one’s approach even as they stare in the opposite direction. They are simultaneously graceful yet goofy, like jabberwockies. Sometimes you find giant white splatters on the jeep’s hood and windshield, dotted with seeds, which ignite a string of under-the-breath curses from your lips because of course you have somewhere to go and cannot stop to get the car washed. But you find it difficult to stay mad at them.

The Room of Your Own 

Your office is in the back room which doubles for storage and laundry. While the washer spins and groans in the closet behind you, you peck away on your laptop. So far you have written only nonfiction here, but you are between novels anyway. The vestiges of your most recent project, research for your first novel, are still fixed on your desk—Blood and Capital, America’s Other War, Revolutionary Social Change in Colombia—ominous-sounding titles you would never have predicted yourself reading a few years ago, but that your creative pursuits led you to discover. Literary journals have found their way here, including the final issue of The Southern Review published under the editorship of your friend and mentor, Jeanne Leiby, who died swiftly, shockingly, in a car accident last April. The issues don’t belong on your desk, but you don’t know where else to put them; sometimes you find yourself picking up those with forwards by Jeannie and reading them, some comfort to feel that she is there, yet, within those pages. So every time you replace the issues in their spot, knowing one day soon you will have to clear the desk, make room for new projects, but not wanting to yet. For now, they stay.

Lake Lily Park

You meet someone, a music teacher, at the bar next door. He tells you he’s playing the violin the following night in the park across the street. You decide to check it out.

It’s a balmy February evening, enough for a light jacket or sweater, but as you enter the park’s south side, you pass dog walkers in flip flops and t-shirts, a lone jogger in shorts. Above the lamp-lit brick walk, the Spanish moss dangles from the oaks like lace. This side of the park is vacant, but gradually you round the horseshoe path past the playground alive with children, and the din of music and chatter grows louder. In the daytime you can gaze down among the lily pads in the shallows and spot turtles and fish, but tonight Lake Lily looms dark except for the illuminated fountain in the middle, and the full moon rising in the misty clouds above. A young man steps to the lake’s shore, snaps a photo with his Smartphone. You think of doing the same but don’t. You have never been a fan of stepping out of a magical moment to try and capture it.

Rounding the bend to the far end of the lake is the “food truck round-up,” a modern-day caravan minus gypsies and fortune tellers. Uneven lines form at the truck windows; couples, families, and teenagers stream to the crowded picnic tables with fish tacos and cupcakes. In the center, under a white tent, a new age band strums ambient music—guitar, tambourine, violin, no vocals to disrupt the conversation or mood.

You run into a neighbor and his foreign exchange student, Vika, from the Ukraine, a high school sophomore in glasses who smiles a lot over her burger and fries. She displays a firm grasp of conversational English, and even though you are sitting right beside the band she laughs at the jokes between you and your neighbor, strains to hear your questions but answers them without hesitation. She says it’s thirty below zero back home, that Eastern Europe is experiencing the coldest temperatures on record. She likes American high school because it’s easier. In Ukraine, she studied sixteen subjects a week.

As you rise and say goodbye, you glance at the music teacher—he’s on violin, nods in return, but a restlessness stirs within you. Perhaps it is the ambient music, which alternates between uplifting and melancholy, as now, matching the cozy din of the residents milling about the brightly lit trucks, young and old, married and divorced. You leave and walk around the lake, but there is no escaping this feeling of having one foot in an old chapter that is closing, and another in the new, opening up; you have been in this love-limbo before, this splitting of self. You are almost, once again, single.

The Dance Studio

You bustle into the studio at nine-thirty, water bottle in hand and dance bag bulging with your tambourine and gypsy skirt. Lively Indian music stops and starts from the class in medias res, and when they file out at ten, skin glistening and faces flushed, they talk of costumes for the upcoming show—wrong sizes ordered, jewelry to be borrowed, sewing to be done. They are the professional Belly dance class; many of them have been dancing for years, grew up taking ballet and jazz. Some dance at various themed restaurants in Orlando, for Disney and Universal Studios. You had one semester of ballet, but somehow you are here. At twenty-seven, you discovered your gift for dance, and now, like writing, can’t imagine giving it up.

Tonight, your troupe practices tambourine first—a rollicking number with spins and changing line formations. You split: one half of the group performs for the other half, who sits along the mirror and scribbles critique on scraps of paper. Then one by one, you fire off feedback (“The push backs are getting lost, make them bigger” and “Keep energy in the arms! No chicken wings”). When your turn comes to the galloping music, your coin earrings flick against your neck. Your timing is good. All you need is to slip fully into the dream on stage, and you will be great. The same rules for fiction apply to dance: forget the self, and the art shines through.          

Then you run through the Persian routine. The green velvet and gold-trimmed costumes have arrived, Renaissance style with bell sleeves, complete with gold tiaras and veils. You look like queens, or at least ladies-in-waiting. This dance is sweet, graceful, totally unlike the other. Just after eleven, you finish. Before exiting, you remove your checkbook to pay for the costume. Your stomach squeezes as you write the amount. What is the cost of fantasy? Are you living the life of a Winter Park housewife as someone close to you recently claimed, the bourgeoisie woman in her prime, claiming she’s an artist? Should you stop all of this, and focus on paying the rent?

You should, argues the logos mind. But how can you? The stronger half of your brain, the half that is toned and strong from crafting critical essays, thirty stories, and a novel these past five years, is as sculpted and agile as your limbs as they carry you to your dented, shit-splattered jeep in the night. That brain and body, blood pulsing with adrenaline and spirit as you sweep through the barren streets, wails no, you cannot stop. To stop is death.

You pull into the complex, park in front of the lemon tree. Climbing from the jeep, you are grateful for the spotlight illuminating the lot vacant of persons, or birds—where do they go at night, the spindly-legged hunters of the stream? Through the trees, laughter and loud voices escape from the bar next door. The scent of night-blooming jasmine trails after you, up the sidewalk; the Canadian couple, down for vacation, sit outside the unit beside yours, smoking, cradling glasses of red wine. You are back at the condo, alone.

—Vanessa Blakeslee

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Vanessa Blakeslee’s fiction has been published in The Southern Review, The Good Men Project, Ascent, and The Drum, among many others, and her short story “Shadow Boxes” won the inaugural Bosque Fiction Prize. She has been awarded grants and fellowships from Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Ragdale Foundation, and recently was one of twelve writers selected by Margaret Atwood for her 2012 Key West Literary Seminar workshop, “The Time Machine Doorway.” Vanessa’s nonfiction and reviews have been featured or are forthcoming at Numéro Cinq, The Paris Review Daily, The New Republic, KR Online, and The Millions, to name a few. In addition to writing, she’s a professional dancer with the Orlando Bellydance Performance Company in the troupe Gypsy Sa’har. Find her online at www.vanessablakeslee.com and at the Burrow Press Review blog, where’s she’s the resident “Shimmying Writer.”

Christina Hutchings is a Bermudian artist and architect who does painting & sculpture or sculpture & painting or something that is in between painting & sculpture, using a variety of media, collage, and found objects to create art in three dimensions. Hutchings describes how her experience as an architect has helped to shape her thinking as an artist: “In the architectural design process, the idea is represented as a diagram, the diagram drives the organization of spaces in plan, section and elevation. I am in love with this way of working.”

But she combines this process with “a more intuitive approach—something in the studio catches [my] eye, one thing follows another and the piece seems to make itself.”

“When I begin a piece,” she says, “I think of it [both] as a painting and as an object…The frame defines a space in which to work and provides a boundary either to respect, or disregard with extensions and additions. At some point the pieces will be stacked one on top of another. And I will think of them as a stack of sketchbooks.

“The fact that Bermuda is a small British island situated in the Atlantic Ocean is a major influence. I cannot help but think of a lifeboat situation. I am surprised by what has inspired me: … school images, life boats, ships, rigging, buoys and channel markers, transistor radio broadcasts of Gemini space capsule launches, submarines, lines of rope, nautical charts, flags, undersea cables, shipping routes, a ride on the ferry.”

—Kim Aubrey

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High Tide, gouache,coloured pencil and conte on wood 100″ x 70″, 2010

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Camera, gouache on paper, gouache on wood and electrical tape 24″ x 22″ varies, 2011

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Coordinates, ink and pencil on vellum with Color-aid paper 10″ x 10″, 2010

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Yes No, oil on paper, gouache on paper, string and ruler 12.75″ x 16.75″, 2010

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Henry’s Office, pencil, foam core, tracing paper, painted vellum and cardboard mounted on board 12.75″ x 16.75″, 2011

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Site Plan, gouache on paper cup and grid paper 12.75″ x 16.75″, 2006-2012

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Classroom, gouache on paper, and gouache on paper mounted on wood 12.75″ x 16.75″, 2011

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Book Cover, oil on paper and acrylic on hinged wood panel 12.75″ x 29″ varies, 2011-2012

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Book Jacket, gouache on paper, charcoal on paper mounted on wood 22″ x 22″ varies, 2004-2012

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Sunday Night, wind gage, barograph paper, painted paper mounted on board 12.75″ x 16.75″, 2010

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Gemini Capsule, gouache on paper cup mounted on painted paper 12.75″ x 16.75″, 2006-2011

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Walled Garden, gouache on paper, electrical tape on board and painted kite sticks 12.75″ x 16.75″, 2011

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Christina Hutchings was born and grew up in Bermuda, but lived and worked in New York City as an architect and designer for many years before returning to the island to live in 2008. She holds a BFA in Painting from Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, and a Master’s degree in Architecture from the University of Virginia. Christina has received visual arts fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, The Edward Albee Foundation and others. She has exhibited her work in galleries in the U.S. and Bermuda, and her work was selected for inclusion in the Bermuda Biennial in 2010 and 2012. A number of her paintings have been purchased for the Bermuda National Gallery’s Permanent Collection.

Photos of Christina’s artwork were taken by Ann Spurling.

Part of the genius of Zona is Dyer’s skill at taking art and turning it on himself and his reader to reveal the exquisite longing of the heart. Dyer does what all great writers do: he makes you interested in his subject matter, he makes you excited to learn more.          — Jason DeYoung

Geoff Dyer
Zona
Pantheon, 2012
$24.00, 228 pages

Geoff Dyer is a British-born essayist and novelist. While he has written a number of smart novels—probably his best being Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi—his nonfiction (written mostly as book-length essays) is thought of as especially original and brilliant. Dyer’s broad intelligence and charm make the work addictive. He has a gift for putting oddly diverse cultural touchstones—Hakim Bey to Wordsworth, Thievery Corporation to Miguel De Unamuno—together with his own offbeat insights to create keys to contemporary culture (and personal understanding).

In a recent Bookforum interview Dyer was asked if was fair to say that his work is written in part “against clichés of genre, clichés of convention.” Here’s what he said:

Oh, indeed. Absolutely. That’s one of the reasons why I’ve drifted away from fiction as a reader as well as a writer…[S]ome novels can actually be conceived at the level of cliché. The whole idea of what we want from a novel sometimes is for it to conform to a very familiar set of conventions.

Dyer’s nonfiction often falls within two categories. While he has written books on serious subjects such as The Missing of the Somme (about World War I) and the Ongoing Moment (about documentary photography), he also has a cannon of playful and irreverent books such as Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It (a collection of travel writings) and Out of Sheer Rage (a quasi-memoir devoted to Dyer’s own desire to write a “sober academic study” of D. H. Lawrence —he never does; he just writes one about wanting to write one).

Zona­—a book devoted to writing a gloss on Stalker, a ’70 Russian art-house film—seems to belong somewhere in that whimsical column. With his trademark wit and whine, Dyer humorously summarizes the rather humorless Stalker, lovingly interpreting it through a combination of autobiography, literary theory, and cultural criticism, opening up a rather difficult film so that even non-cinéastes can find pleasure and meaning in it.

Stalker, released in 1979, is Andrei Tarkovsky’s sixth full-length movie, and it’s loosely based on Roadside Picnic, a science fiction novel written by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky.  As the opening caption of Stalker sets things up: something has happened—a meteorite crash or alien visitation(?)—which has led to the creation of the Zone, a place “troops where sent in and never returned.” The boundaries of the Zone are now outlined with barbed wire and cinderblock walls and militarized.  The movie depicts an illegal expedition lead by the eponymous Stalker who guides two characters simply known as Writer and Professor into the Zone.

Somewhere within the Zone there is a room that that will fulfill your most deeply held wish. The Writer and the Professor want to go to this room.  The Professor and Writer both want something like greatness. Writer, in particular, wants inspiration, and Dyer can’t help but identify with him:

[Writer] is washed up. Finished. Maybe by going to the Zone he’ll be rejuvenated. Man, I know how he feels.  I could do with a piece of that action myself. I mean, do you think I would be spending my time summarizing the action of a film almost devoid of action—not frame by frame, perhaps, but certainly take by take—if I was capable of writing anything else? In my way I’m going to the Room—following these three to the Room—to save myself

Reading Zona is not unlike being with a friend who talks excitedly over movies. The actual pages are often halved with the top half occupied by Dyer’s “take by take” summary and with the bottom occupied with an abundance of footnotes—which cannot be dismissed and have equal prominence. In Zona, Dyer keeps hitting the metaphorical pause button to tell about his childhood, the movie, his insights into it, its history, Tarkovsky himself, or share bits of cinematic-lore, such as how Mick Jagger remarked that Godard was such a “fucking twat,” speaking of the experience with the filmmaker on the documentary Sympathy for the Devil.  It’s all very noteworthy and compelling.  As Dyer writes: “In a sense this book is a catalogue or compendium of proposals for potentially interesting studies.”

After a journey through a landscape that is “completely weird and completely ordinary,” the three characters arrive at the Room’s door. At the entrance, Stalker tells Writer and Professor to think back over their entire life. Writer seems to be the one who’ll enter first.  But he stops.  He cannot go.  Why?  Donno. Even Tarkovsky confesses in a 1980 interview that he didn’t know why*. In fact, neither Writer nor Professor can enter the room. (Note: I’m not spoiling the movie here.)

For Tarkovsky the existence of the Room “serves solely as pretext to revealing the personalities of the three protagonists.” And as a person who is following these three characters in the movie, Dyer stands at the door, too.  Unable to make a decision whether to enter, Dyer meditates on desire, faith and belief: “Is one’s deepest desire always the same as one’s greatest regret?”  Is this why Writer and Professor cannot enter the Room, since they will have to face their true selves? As Tarkovsky puts it: the Room fulfills “a hidden vision lying deep within the heart of each person” because they don’t ask the Room for what they want, the Room will just know.  At the Room’s threshold, Dyer bares his own desires and begins to question their validity.

There is such sincerity and allure in Dyer’s prose that the reader ends up following him to the Room as well, and his interpretation of the film leaves a lasting impact. As the author questions his wants, you can’t help but to question the faith you have in your own desires, and if obtaining them will make you happy. And this is part of the genius of Zona, Dyer’s skill at taking art and turning it on himself and his reader to reveal the exquisite longing of the heart.

Dyer does what all great writers do: he makes you interested in his subject matter, he makes you excited to learn more.  Tarkovsky is a difficult filmmaker—in pacing and in image—and his films demand thoughtful viewing and patience, something that’s becoming increasingly more difficult—even for Dyer—because of our diminishing attention span. But he laments, “a lot of what’s being shown on the world’s screens—television, cinemas, computers—is fit only for morons.” I cannot say whether it’s a good idea to see Stalker first or read Zona first.  I saw the movie before reading Zona, and it helped me to hold the thread of Dyer’s synopsis while reading the footnotes.  But I wonder what it would be like to experience the book without knowing the movie, experiencing Zona as “book” instead of something like companion piece, because there’s something so dreamy in how Dyer describes his personal vision and experience of watching Stalker, and entering his Zone, a “place of refuge and sanctuary. A sanctuary…from cliché.”

— Review by Jason DeYoung

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Jason DeYoung lives in Atlanta, Georgia. His work has recently appeared in Corium, The Los Angeles Review, The Fiddleback, New Orleans Review, and Numéro Cinq.

*All quotations by Andre Tarkovsky come from Andre Tarkovsky: Interviews, ed. by John Gianvito, University Press of Mississippi, 2006.

For you aural delectation on this sunny weekend (at least here it’s sunny) NC offers a delightful, whimsical, lilting, sunny, multi-ethnic  jazz piano & ensemble performance, “La Danse,” from my old friend Elizabeth Woodbury Kasius and the group Heard. I have known Elizabeth, yea, these 15 years and more, ever since she lived in the walk-up apartment on Broadway in Saratoga Springs and was my boys’ first piano teacher. Eventually she moved out of town to a rambling house in Middle Grove where she hosted huge bonfire and potluck parties with masses of friends, children and dogs. Then she moved again, to Troy, NY, (no more piano lessons) and got married and had a daughter — but we’ve always kept in touch and she performs in the area constantly. Elizabeth was an inspirational teacher and certainly had a profound effect on  Jonah who has played in half-a-dozen bands and still composes. But she always had her own art and it was pleasant, after lessons, to talk about plans and projects.

Her first CD (Shade Songs) cover featured a painting by another NC friend and contributor Laura Von Rosk (see Laura’s paintings and her photo essays from Antarctica on Numéro Cinq — NC sometimes seem less like a magazine than a family). Eventually, the group Heard formed around her and there have been four more CDs, the latest being the marvelous Karibu of which “La Danse” is part.

If you’re in the area or feel like jetting in, Elizabeth and Heard will be performing at the legendary Saratoga Springs coffee house Caffe Lena on Friday May 25th, 8pm. It be well worth the trip.

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La Danse from Karibu (click the player and listen)

The original repertoire of Heard is the work of composer-arranger-pianist Elizabeth Woodbury Kasius who brings a wide array of styles — jazz, classical and world music — into her captivating soundscape. Her inspirations come from her diverse experiences and interests and are often drawn from the raw and powerful sources that nature provides. Heard’s dynamic and eclectic lineup of musicians gives Elizabeth a multitude of talents and textures to compose for, and to perform with.

Elizabeth received her formal musical training at the University of Washington and Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, where she studied ethnomusicology, piano performance and composition with Brazilian pianist Jovino Santos Neto, trombonist Julian Priester and Big Band leader/trumpet player Jim Knapp, as well as with Nigerian Juju musician IK Dairo.

In addition to teaching composition and piano privately, she has been an adjunct professor for 12 years in the Dance Department at Russell Sage College in Troy, NY, where she works as a dance musician and composer-in-residence. Her collaborations with dancers have also led her to work with the NYC-based Mark Morris, Jose Limon, and Doug Varone Companies, and the NYC Ballet, and with Saratoga Springs’ TangoFusion. Her work with the Capital-District based Ellen Sinopoli Modern Dance Company has led to numerous Arts-in-Education Residencies in regional elementary schools. Elizabeth has also played keyboard and percussion with the Brazilian group The Berkshire Bateria for eight years, as well as with vocalist/songwriter Joy Adler.

Eddie White and Ari Gibson’s “The Cat Piano” delightfully combines the innocence of animation with the bleak mysteries of film noir, creating a hybrid genre as our expectations of animation’s typical child-like subject matter are interwoven with noir’s darkness and moral ambiguity. What starts off as playful, fun animation with ferociously witty anthropomorphic cats, quickly turns into a tale of despair, corruption, and vengeance.

The story opens with a lonely cat poet recounting his dreary past. He takes us through the crowded urban landscape, filled with bars and nightclubs as musical cats lounge about. We are also introduced to the angelic obsession of this poet’s alienated mind, the soprano siren in white fur.

Things seem splendid as these cats relish in breezy jazz and musical beats, but there is an underlying evil that creeps in and, before they know it, the voices that bring them such joy begin to vanish one by one. The poet quickly transforms into detective mode and makes a terrifying discovery, the blueprints for perhaps the most detestable creation ever conceived: the cat piano. Before he can warn the soprano in white of these dangers, she disappears. Searching for her, the poet descends into madness on his quest for vengeance.

“The Cat Piano” is narrated by the multi-talented Nick Cave, mostly known for his work as front man of the band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and for his musical scores of the films The Assassination of Jesse James and The Road. His narration plays off the double meaning of words in a fascinating and playful way, giving this short a significant amount of replay value. His voice adds a flush and sophisticated warmth to the noir underbelly and switches to a treacherous rasp during the short’s darker, almost black moments.

As with most film noir, the short is notable for its harsh contrasts in lighting, made even more substantial by the beautiful animation. The low-key lighting and shadow patterns are exceptional, directing our eyes specifically towards the terror, fear, and heartache the protagonist experiences. Most of the colors are overwhelmingly black and blue, adding atmosphere, mood, and foreshadowing the darkness that looms over this underground world. Green is used to represent the sickness of loneliness brought on by the soprano in white’s disappearance. And a red tint is added in the scenes where the poet reveals his violent and aggressive side in his quest for revenge.

There are several similarities between this short and David Lynch’s feature film Blue Velvet. After being love stricken by a female with a beautiful voice, both protagonists begin to discover hidden secrets in their respective, seemingly happy settings (a white picket fence suburbia in Blue Velvet and a fresh underground music scene in “The Cat Piano”). As they dig deeper into increasingly haunting mysteries, they both horrifically discover the corruption and darkness that exists all around them and within others.

The endings of both films are relatively happy, but with a more monotone revelation as it’s uncertain if either of the protagonists will be able to return to the naivety of their former selves. Their innocence has been forever corrupted and lost.

“The Cat Piano” is a great film noir crime thriller with captivating characters, bold visuals, and spine tingling mysteries. It pushes our comfort zones by blending the innocence typically associated with animation and film noir’s characteristic darkness and gloomy tone. On a larger level this mixing of genres mirrors the protagonist’s loss of innocence, his turn to his darker self. Like him, once you know the cat piano, you cannot walk away unscathed.

–Jon Dewar

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Jon Dewar is a grad student at University of New Brunswick, Fredericton and is working towards a degree in education. He is an avid film fan, interested in both film analysis and filmmaking. Some of his inspirations include directors such as Paul Thomas Anderson, Steve McQueen, and Martin Scorsese. Jon has written numerous screenplays and is working towards eventually producing some of these projects.