K.A. Laity's Blog, page 165

BitchBuzz: The Social Network

My latest for which I cannibalize a bit of my review of The Social Network in order to make a different point, namely that women need to continue to squeeze their way into these clubs and make friends with the boys despite their resistance -- oh, and have the skills to do so:



The Social Network aka The Old Boys ClubBy K.A. Laity  I tweeted my initial review of The Social Network: Why not spend a couple of hours with really unpleasant people? No? Well, I did so you don't have to do so. As many of you know, I am a happy user of "The Facebook" and have written about it once or twice - or maybe a lot. So I had to see The Social Network for professional reasons.



Sigh.

Despite the inexplicably glowing notices for it, there are all kinds of problems with this film but let me start with the most irksome because it's a problem bigger than this picture. Sorkin's screenplay paints Zuckerberg as a pathetic misogynist whose empire is based on rejection by one woman. No, I don't have a problem with that portrayal, it looks to jibe with the facts as known. It rings a little hollow, however, coming from the same misogynist Hollywood system that cannot conceive of women as anything but sexual trophies or emotional security blankets. This is film is yet another example of the dread Movies Without Women™.

Read more: http://tech.bitchbuzz.com/the-social-network-aka-the-old-boys-club.html#ixzz12Qez7EvH Isn't that a lovely picture from Women in Technology?  It would be tedious to mention yet again how busy I have been -- same old, same old -- so I'll just say I'm seeing Laurie Anderson tonight at EMPAC, that gorgeous venue! But right now, I'm going to head out for a walk if it's stopped raining. Much writing to do this weekend and a bit of grading, too. Still feeling fatigued -- can I keep blaming Albacon for it?

Review: Phèdre

Despite being exhausted by Albacon, I decided to head out to the Spectrum Monday night with my pals Ron and Peg because they were rebroadcasting Helen Mirren's star turn in Ted Hughes' translation of Racine's Phèdre at the National Theatre in London. I was sighing from the get go: they had a new introduction from one of the execs at NT, who was speaking from somewhere up high, so you could see Waterloo Bridge and the Southbank Centre in the background across the Thames.



I miss London so much :-(



But the production at the Lyttleton (the medium size of the three stages) quickly made me forget about London as it thrust us back to ancient Greece and the illicit longings of the queen for her stepson, Hippolytus, played by the smoldering Dominic Cooper. It's amazing to think how much fear and disgust an older woman's sexuality can still arouse (hence the existence of the disparaging term "cougar"). In the play, it brings down a nation.



The absolutely gorgeous Ruth Negga plays Aricia, the true love of Hippolytus and the rival to power in the vacuum created by the supposed death of Theseus. The only other older woman, Oenone, played by the always amazing Margaret Tyzack, proves to be scheming and trouble-making even more so than her queen, condemning them all in this tragedy by her maneuverings. John Schrapnel as Théramène, not only has to act as wise adviser to Hippolytus, but also has to relate a tragic death that happens off-stage (as is normal for Greek drama). Schrapnel brought the audience to tears with his moving re-enactment with just words and gestures. The real power of theatre.



The only weak link was Stanley Townsend's Theseus; perhaps he was having an off night, because at times he seemed to capture the magic that the others made look effortless, but all too often his movements and speech fell flat, losing that fragile connection to the imitation of life. A pity.



I love the NT and I am really grateful that the Spectrum 8 carries their broadcasts -- really looking forward to the Hamlet with Rory Kinnear and Danny Boyle's Frankenstein.

Kit Marlowe & The Big Splash

Today's the day! Kit Marlowe's debut novella is now available from Noble Romance. Here's the blurb:



It's London in the Jazz Age: the times are fast and the women faster. Constance Wynne Hare has men eager to throw themselves at her feet—so why does she pine for the one man who takes her for granted? 



I wrote this story in a rush last Christmas, inspired in equal parts by Winifred Watson (author of Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day) and P. G. Wodehouse, creator of Jeeves and Wooster. I tried to capture that same sense of madcap wildness, humor and adventure. It's such a sparkling era -- at least for the well-to-do. As I discovered in my research, the era produced its own Lady Gaga and a whole host of Bright Young Things. And yes, I hope to have more Constance and Collier stories.



All right, time to recover from Albacon and get work done. I'll write up my adventures when I get a chance. I got to hang out with a bunch of writer pals, sat on a couple of panels, sold some books and got some new ideas.

Albacon!

Crazy, busy -- wild times! Check the program to see what's up: more when it's over but here's my tea.



Fab friends here: Susan Hanniford Crowley, Stella Price, Morven Westfield (who just gave me some Cadbury Whole Nut!!), KT Pinto, Isabel Roman (yes both of them :-), Jackie Kessler and a whole lot more. Dancing last night, so tired this morning, and there's a long day ahead, but filled with fun.



Thanks, Debi, for the Reese's!

Utter Nonsense

Thanks to the fabulous Adele at Un:Bound, I have a post up at Everybody's Reading, the site for the festival of reading in Leicester this week. I wish I could be in Leicester for the celebration, but I suppose this will be the next best thing.



I write about my love of nonsense and its roots in Lewis Carroll's books (which is of course why I insert a picture of me in my Mad Hatter hat from Brussels):



If there is one theme of my life, it has to be nonsense. I blame Lewis Carroll. I had a jacket-less hard cover edition of both Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There that was the lynchpin of my childhood. Along with the Mary Poppins series, Alice's adventures filled my head as a child in some profound kind of way that – looking back – I realised has shaped me ever since. Carroll's books prepared me to discover Peter Cook, Monty Python and Vic Reeves and put me permanently out of step with my contemporaries.



I don't care. 



Read the rest over at their site and please consider leaving a comment so they know you dropped by. By the by, if you're wondering where my BitchBuzz columns are, my editor is on holiday in Greece and I didn't get it together to write posts in advance (madness! utter madness!), so I got a two week holiday, too. However, there are still fantastic columns by our other writers so drop by.



I have to run to campus now because I realise it's probably my duty as programming chair to print the placards for all the panelists so you can know who's talking in the panels at Albacon. Sigh. At least I remembered!



Kit Marlowe and I will be there, of course, flogging our books. Kit's got her own Facebook page now, so drop by and "like" it as we say in the parlance of our times. Look for our lovely promo postcards -- and our lovely selves who are really one. Of course. But I'm talking nonsense again...

Albacon & Publishing News

Yes, I'm going to be tied up all this weekend at Albacon, so if you're trying to reach me, you may have to wait a bit for me to get back to you. Here's my schedule, but you can see the entire schedule on the wiki and see the website for a full list of guests who are not me (there are many friends!):



Thu 7.30pm

Writers & Artists Reception



Fri 3pm

Social Media & Promotion

How to use the myriad frequencies of social media to promote your work without allowing it to suck up all your time

Alexandre (M), Holzner, Laity, Roman, Ventrella



Fri 5pm

General Signing with All Workshop Authors



Fri 8pm

Ice Cream Social AKA Meet the panelists



Fri 9pm

Fantasy Ball



Sat 1pm

Broad Universe Rapid-Fire Reading:

Arthen, Kempe, Laity, Rogow, Westfield



Sat 11pm

Steamy Romance Reading

The stories don't have to be scorching, but it helps! This is a 18+ event. Attendees will have the chance to win some swag thanks to Authors After Dark. 

Alexandre, Arthen, Crowley, D'Arc, Darvill, Jamison, Kempe, Lynne, Marlowe, Price, Westfield [MC: Laity]



Sun 2pm

Comics that Rock

What should you be reading right now?

Fludd (M), Laity, Martineck, Prellwitz



And of course, I will be running around meeting and greeting all weekend. It's also Kit Marlowe's debut on Monday :-) She's pretty excited about her cover for her first publication, the novella:



Though I'd have loved to have something like you find here, but I understand the need for corporate branding -- and the need to keep costs low! And I just got the proofs for the zombie Western novella, High Plains Lazarus, in the collection that now has the name Rotting Tales from Pill Hill Press. Now I just need time to go through them carefully -- why do I write such long stories! The edits for The Mangrove Legacy took a long long time because it's over 100,000 words -- insane! But you knew that, right?

Filament @ EMPAC

Thank you, thank you, thank you, Nippertown! I was planning to see some events at Filament, the weekend long fest at EMPAC, AKA the finest performing arts center in the region, but thanks to the free pass I won, I got to see a LOT. It was a gorgeous weekend -- inside and out. Cool but sunny and the big wooden ball inside the glass case looked lovely. That's the thing about EMPAC, it's aesthetically appealing but also amazingly and intricately functional. Each performance space can be endlessly rearranged to accommodate sound, lighting, screens and so on. The small studio spaces have mobile seating as well.



Things we saw: Early Morning Opera's ABACUS performance in the main concert hall, presented by Early Morning Opera, directed by Lars Jan and performed by Paul Abacus. It was inspired by R. Buckminster Fuller, he of the geodesic dome, whom I learned about from the inner sleeves of Harry Nilsson albums. The multimedia presentation, was a combination of Abacus' exhortations, video screens, music, the steadicam dancers and -- briefly -- a giant panda. It was meant to be a melding of Powerpoint business lectures, stadium church preaching and genuine appeal. Much of it worked well, although I thought the final shooting in the hallway tried too hard to connect the radical notion of a world without borders to the fates of leaders who had been assassinated for their radical views. The Q&A after was hampered by Abacus appearing in one of the studios in another performance and for me, because Jan looks disconcertingly like David Baddiel but talks Californian. We went to the installation afterward, which happened in the same space but for one person at a time. We each went in for our encounter with Dr. Hieronymus Yang, "the world's first accredited giant panda" which involved touch screen control of images projected on the six giant screens (although not all the bugs had been worked out).



By far my favourite pieces were the live shorts, which were in Studio 1 (in various configurations). Standouts included "The Golden Veil: A Cautionary Entertainment" by the National Theater of the United States of America who offered a spookily creepy, fairytale-like narrative. "Sheepspace" by Sue-C and Laetitia Sonami offered a video projection into the secret world of sheepwomen who live between the boundaries of known worlds. "Intervention #2" by Wally Cardona + Heidi Jo Newberg, professor of Physics, Applied Physics and Astronomy at RPI, featured an interview with Newberg to which Cardona creates a choreography. Items that seemed like random things strewn across the space

ended up being part of the tools by which Newberg helped students understand infinity and the vastness of space. Cardona's amazing movements created an extra layer of wonder. It's been so long since I've seen a dance performance, I had forgotten just how amazing the human body can be.



MTAA did a twitter performance called "You Don't Know What You're Talking About" which allowed the audience to tweet things that they would read. Of course I was pleased that several of my tweets got read :-) It was great to see people tweeting ways to involve the whole audience, too. Despite the short time (10 minutes) it was wonderful to see how the performance innovated. I liked the ideas behind Trouble's performance "A Narrow Vehicle" but their attempt to utilize ritual elements for a kind of spiritual performance fell a little flat because the ritual didn't go anywhere, it certainly wasn't (as they claimed) shamanistic in any way and wow, people are not observant. A lot of people just walked off the path. The ballet-centric piece "Another Circle" by Jen DeNike and Rose Kallal likewise tried to call on the power of ritual magic, but didn't quite come together. The hypnotic pirouettes of the dancer on screen and live did offer a sort of abstract meditative energy, but the assaultive soundscape undercut any meditative impulse. A real crowd-pleaser was "Amazingland in Troy EMagicPAC" by Steve Cuiffo, Trey Lyford and Geoff Sobelle, which used the practices of popular magic and showmanship.



We finished Saturday night with BalletLab's Miracle, "a triumphant onslaught of choreographic hysteria performed against repetitive mantra, movement, and hym-like voices." It was cathartic, emotional -- I think I felt exhausted just watching the dancers perform. It was remarkable how they evoked scenes of religious and social hysteria, cult behaviour and terrible emotional suffering. Near the end the sound became almost too much for me to bear (high sharp tones at high volume always bother me), but it was an arresting performance that left the audience simply limp by the end.



There was more -- installations, performances, the crowds roosting in the trees surrounding the site, lots of conversation and a gorgeous weekend of weather. I'm exhausted just typing all this and it's taken me all day to finally sit down to do it, so this will have to do for now. But if you haven't got yourself up to EMPAC, you need to do so with all due speed. Amazing and beautiful. My head is humming with ideas and inspirations -- and that's what it's all about.

Review: The Social Network

Why not spend a couple of hours with really unpleasant people? No? Well, I did so you don't have to do so. Yes, intrepid movie pal Peg and I headed over to the Spectrum, fortified by a good lunch at the Fountain. As many of you know, I am a happy user of "The Facebook" and have written about it once or twice -- or maybe a lot. So I had to see if for professional reasons.



Sigh.



There are all kinds of problems with this film; I'll get to a few of them in a moment, but let me start with the most irksome because it's a problem bigger than this picture. Sorkin's screenplay paints Zuckerberg as a pathetic misogynist whose empire is based on rejection by one woman. No, I don't have a problem with that portrayal, it looks to jibe with the facts as known. It rings a little hollow, however, coming from the same misogynist Hollywood system that cannot conceive of women as anything but sexual trophies or emotional security blankets. This is film is yet another example of the dread Movie Without Women.



Yeah, there are female actors in the film, but not a one is a character. They're just props: one to make him angry, others as trophies to demonstrate success, one to cross examine him, one to offer an emotional pat on the head. There's even a "crazy girlfriend out of left field" to ramp up the tension pointlessly -- and then immediately abandoned.



The opening scene is painful -- as intended. We need to see what a schmuck Zuckerberg is and Jesse Eisenberg makes him completely unsympathetic (while looking like Michael Cera's older cousin). But it creates problems for an audience looking for someone to connect with -- and will look in vain. The nearest we come is Andrew Garfield's Eduardo Saverin, but he becomes a character far too late in the film. Attempts to set up the Winklevoss twins as the opposition fail, too; Syracuse-grad Sorkin's loathing for the privileged Harvard elite is palpable, but ineffective (and I've dealt with the Harvard snootiness on a first hand basis while working there).



It's only with the arrival of Justin Timberlake as Napster creator Sean Parker that the film sparks a little. I admit to having never thought much of Timberlake until his stellar turn on SNL, but he did a lot with a part that was not up to much. A very flawed character, he's nonetheless compelling to watch -- and that's what's missing with Zuckerberg's character. Perhaps it's a flaw of the original model, but this ain't a documentary.



The screenplay is the biggest problem: in addition to the above problems, it also attempts to juggle two lawsuits with the unfolding historical narrative. The lawsuits however are not equal in importance, but set up as if they are. The whole Winklevoss storyline seems to focus primarily on sneering at the old money wealth and privilege (while nonetheless glamorizing it). And so clunky! As soon as Larry Summer's admin talks to the twins about how old the building is and how they need to be careful, you just count the minutes until they break something. Later, when Zuckerberg uncharacteristically asks Eduardo how his girlfriend is and he says she's acting crazy and scaring him, you count the minutes until -- shock! -- she's acting crazy for the first time.



They seem to be using Wall Street greed as a model, when that's not what this story is about; they do realise that Zuckerberg is not motivated by money, but it's clear that while they know what Facebook looks like and they know what the trajectory of the network is -- there's a pointless "dramatic" interweaving of coding at one point as if it were somehow like explaining the Dow Jones ticker -- it's clear none of the key people involved in the film have used Facebook or social media or have the slightest understanding of its significance.



I suppose this is no different than most Hollywood attempts to capitalize on a popular phenomenon. But their contempt for the public and the fact that money seems to be their only motivation blinds them to what's really going on.



To get the taste of this out of our mouths, we headed off to the Filament fest at EMPAC. Oh, how I love this space! But it will get a separate review to avoid the taint of this film. Random words to intrigue you: crows, giant panda, R. Buckminster Fuller, nations, installations, performance, studios, cheese. Intrigued? :-)

October Arrives

September was  busy blur: I'm hoping October will be more relaxed, but if this morning's madness is anything to go by, it won't be. Argh.



The first round of edits on The Mangrove Legacy have been sent off. A load off my mind; the novella "The Big Splash," Kit Marlowe's first publication is scheduled for release Monday, October 11th. Busy woman!



Of course, I have a few things to write under my own name, too. Hope to find time for that soon, although this weekend looks like it will be for filling the empty head up again because I won tickets to EMPAC's Filament Festival which ought to be really fun and exciting. It's an incredible space.



And yes, it's been raining and raining, but I find that soothing (apart from the leak that all the roof work seems not to have solved). Autumn and cool weather -- wonderful.

I am not a Cowgirl; I am not a Quilter

But I guess that doesn't matter.