In the Labyrinth

Women Who Shoulder Animals.

 Woman Carrying A Bull by Vladimir Fokanov

I like this image a lot -- the wonderful cognative dissonence between the nude female and the impossibile weight of the bull carried so easily on her shoulder. She is not alone you know -- there are quite a few such images of women with animals hefted on their shoulders. And I find them all compelling...still trying to figure out what it is that pleases me so. In the meantime...I'll just leave her here engaged in her task and figure she and the bull will find a future place in the writing.

Please visit Vladimir Fokanov's Flickr account to see more of his work. 

Because A Woman with a Really Big Sword...

...is still the coolest thing ever. This is  Samantha Swords, who last February won the Longswords Competition at the Harcourt World Invitiational Jousting Tournament. The sword isn't sharp, but definitely heavy, and weilding it effectively is a challenge for any swordfighter. She is a writer, an artist, and has an impressive list of credits in the film industry. Just. Awesome.

The New Oral Tradition.

Watch this fabulously entertaining video of storyteller and performer, Shlomo recounting an evening spent at his the home of his Jewish - Iraqi grandparents. And then...treat yourself some more and head over to Band of Wild Petticoats to read this fascinating response to the film that intermingles oral narrative theory, Socrates, belly dancing, and the transformation of the storyteller tradition. A total blast.

 

"The act of reading a text is markedly different from the experience of hearing a story performed aloud: the former is a solitary act that requires the reader to consume and process content separated from external influences, while in the latter, an audience is expected to laugh or cry at the same junctures during a story’s oral performance. So how can I say that this oral narrative (the video above) can be considered the same as a short story if the impact on the audience is so different for textually and orally constructed stories? " --Taiko Haessler, (In Short: Belly Dancing and Oral Narrative.)

Tijuanalandia, The Other Bordertown: A Return

There's a new article featuring Laura Shipley's intriguing photography of the US- Mexican border which reminded me of another photojournalist I really admire, Jason Thomas Fritz, whose work on and in Tijauna -- the quintessential bordertown -- is remarkable too and featured on his blog Tiajuanlandia. So I thought I would repost this original look at his work. (And you can check out his more recent Instagram account which a huge trove of his photographs -- though without his insightful commentary.)

Lately, I have been following Tijuanalandia, the astonishing blog/photographic journal of Jason Thomas Fritz, a graduate student working on a project to photo-document life in Tijuana, perhaps one of the most famous (and infamous) bordertowns between the US and Mexico. His photographs, and occasional reportage on politics, sports, and popular culture are absolutely fascinating.

Here is Jason's description of his project: "Tijuanalandia is the creation of Jason Thomas Fritz, a journalist and graduate student at San Diego State University living in Tijuana. Acknowledging that Tijuana defies any attempt at defining it, Tijuanalandia aims to explore this most misunderstood of cities through visual dispatches. The outsider’s portrait of the city that emerges is an effort to challenge the narratives of crime, violence and vice that dominate popular conceptions of Tijuana."

There are moments in this journal that are just surreal -- such as La Mona -- a five story tall sculpture of a completely nude woman in the middle of a slum neighborhood. Or A Toy Story, about the man who has collected over 30,000 discarded children's toys and affixed them in a riotous collage on every surface of his sun-baked house. There are soccer games and bullfights, ice cream parlors, the late night scenes of local bars, the itinerant musicians, and the border, with its daily traffic.

Spook's Apprentice versus Seventh Son

Ok..so I have been reading The Last Apprentice series by English author Joseph Delaney, and really digging them. They are for around 10-15 year old readers -- and they are really scary -- dark, creepy encounters at night with very powerful forces. The protagonist is young in the first book -- a mere 13 and the seventh son of a seventh son when he is apprenticed to a Spook -- a man who must spend his life chasing and confining harmful ghosts and supernatural beings. Thomas is smart, but a kid, and he spends most of his time in book one Revenge of the Witch, learning the basics of digging holding pens for nasty spirits, boggans, and witches, a little Latin, and a lot about how to walk for days without getting hungry. Delaney is one of those lovely north country British authors who writes so well about the country, its folklore, and dark things underground (and brings to mind another north country and award winning author David Almond, whose work I also admire). Just for fun, here is a video interview of Delaney (done for Harper Children's Books)-- I do love his thick, treacle-y accent and the obvious love he has for his characters and their stories.

After so many years of crafting the series (there are now 11 books!) Hollywood has taken notice and will be releasing a film in January, 2014 "inspired" by the series. But one look at the trailer tells me that in their hands, the story has lost its charm and in a way, its innocence. In the novels, young Thomas Ward struggles to be the sort of brave child his family and the community expects of him, and to accept a life of loneliness and pariah status as a "Spook," someone who protects the rest of the population from supernatural harm. In Delaney's books, there are a lot of frightening scenes, waiting tensely in the dark, muffled in a silence broken only by the ominous sounds of snuffling, chomping, and the hard breathing of a frightened hero. The Spook and his Apprentice use no magic wands or weapons -- just a stout staff, and elements like salt, and iron.

But, in Hollywood's vision, everything is large, deafening, and over the top battles and really lethal looking weapons. Thomas Ward is in his 20's, the witch Mother Malikin (more Baba Yaga in the novels than Jullian Moore) is a seductive, dangerous beauty. Will I go and see the movie...yea, of course I will. But it's truly a beast of a different stripe and beyond a basic understanding of the forces involved taken from the novels, it has recreated itself as a story for grownups raised on CGI. Pity too ... because the books give children and young adult readers something this movie can't -- a young, affable hero like them, who pushes back the dark with his courage and his wits.