Let's All Meet Up in the Year 2000

What a lovely weekend.  Friday was panicked sewing and dancing and the less said about that really the better.  But Saturday was the Animal Rescue League of Boston/Gorey House Foundation Moonlight Ball.  M and I and several other lovelies wore Gorey-inspired Victorian-esque outfits made by Kambriel and provided atmosphere, and occasional helpfulness where needed.  Anyone who has ever been to the Cyclorama on Tremont Street would not have believed how beautiful it looked.  The walls were lined with tall white panels on which Gorey window frames were projected.  The entrance featured a glowing fountain, curving benches and a giant scrim sort of deal with a Gorey type facade on it.  Gorey artwork was everywhere.  Chandeliers hung from the ironworks that blanket the ceiling; each table featured a candelabra and a centerpiece of roses, mushrooms and hunks of fake ice, which looked far nicer than it sounds.  Comfy armchairs and sofas (curious sofas, perhaps?) abounded.  We were able to eat once everybody was seated and the drinks were flowing.  Usually I am very out of my element when surrounded by rich people, very conscious of being a coal miner's granddaughter, but in my gown I felt like a fabulous alien creature or time traveler.  The fundraiser looked hugely successful, especially since I believe the catering and bar were donated.  There were several dogs present; if you thought the human tickets were expensive at $175, the canine tickets were $5,000 per dog!  But if you are the sort of person who would be making that kind of donation to charity anyway, this would be a very fun way to do it.  There were several moving speeches and stories about dogs and cats, and a lovely movie about the work of the ARL which included a fine sable ferret, prompting cheers from our table.  Since I am not the sort of person who can give that kind of donation to a charity no matter how much I wish I could, it felt very good to be part of the event in some small way.  My spirits still feel lifted today thinking about it.  Thanks very much to Kambriel for giving me that opportunity!

Then Sunday, finally came the Bela Lugosi Birthday Bash.  I've been thinking about that show for so long, it felt odd to have it actually happening.  I have to admit I was feeling a bit odd about doing full on gothic in the Athenian Corner, but as the readings that made up the first half of the show went on, I relaxed.  Some of the readers/writers were quite entertaining and I particularly liked one poem that was a post-mortem entry in Lucy Westenra's diary.  Then it was time to perform!  I arrived on stage and went into my opening pose of an inanimate dolly and waited... and waited... and waited... for my music to start.  I finally had to break my pose before I fell over.  This was just the beginning of sound problems that plagued the show all evening due to a very non-cooperative boombox (one poor woman couldn't dance at all since the boombox simply would not read her CD).  Finally my music played.  I felt like it went all right for the first time performing it.  I had a lot of fun stealing people's souls and stomping on them with my noisy anklet stomps.  I actually use a bunch of khaleegi steps because I can get such a great noise from the anklets with them.  I wonder if there is anybody else in the entire world who has done khaleegi to Siouxsie and the Banshees.  We should start a very exclusive club.  Anyway, it went well enough, and the audience was very receptive to what I was doing.  Some of the writers, not surprisingly, went to ManRay when they were younger, pretty much Siouxsie and the Banshees generation themselves, so they knew exactly where I was coming from and enjoyed it with their own sense of nostalgia.  I closed the show with Voltaire's The Vampire Club, fine except for small costume malfunction of a couple of horse hair tassels jumping ship.  I guess I did not test the belt to any energetic music.  But it's nothing that a little glue applied to some knots won't fix.  I was pretty well paid considering the type of gig it was, so all in all it was a good evening for me.  If Saturday night was all about a group coming together to raise money for a wonderful cause, Sunday night was all about a group exploring their common areas of creativity and making events happen, even when money is tight and the technology won't cooperate.

So I had much fun all weekend dressing up and wearing loads of dramatic makeup.  I don't really miss the days of applying black makeup with a trowel on a daily basis, but it was decidedly fun to live it again for a weekend.  Being older, I have better quality makeup now so I'm sure it looked much nicer now than it did back then ;-)

Another nice fun show at the Middle East last night.  This is very good to have right before the pageant.  Drum solo was somewhat random but I don't think sucked.  Note to self:  no hair tosses if there is a flower in your hair, tangleage ensues.  Audience was lots of fun.  I'm dancing the Sunday of Labor Day weekend and I'm looking forward to staying out and dancing all night after I perform :-)

Picked up Wash Ya Wash 6 from emusic and I have to say I am disappointed so far.  I am hearing a lot of remixing of previously recorded songs into new ones, in ways that don't always work.  There's a song that's almost the same note for note as a Gizira Band song, I think it's just a slightly remixed version of the Gizira Band recording (I've danced to it so I know it pretty well).  Composer Mohammed Ali throws awful synthesizer lines into perfectly nice folkloric songs on an unfortunately predictable basis.  All his compositions sound the same to me anyway, even after working with a couple of them intensively.  A couple of songs are alright, Cocktail Oriental and the balady improvisation.  Drum solo is fine too, but the world does not need more six minute drum solos.  It needs more really excellent three minute drum solos, in my opinion.

So much fun dancing with Walter Sickert and the Army of Broken Toys last night--dancing to live music is the best, whatever the genre.  Tituba, the song I danced to, is just so evocative.  Not sure entirely what it's about but I've got my own images to draw from when I dance to it.  Walter liked what I did so I can't be too far off.  The zills worked out really well and I felt confident with them.  I think they would actually be too loud for the Middle East but they are great for rock shows and would be good for outdoor gigs as well.  It was great to go to a gig, dance early and then be able to hang out and drink beer with my rock and roll friends for the rest of the night.  All-Asia's beer selection has gotten a lot fancier, I quite liked the Bare Knuckles Stout on tap.

A lot of you guys might like the band My Mercy, they're from Providence.  They're something like a more EBM version of Lifestyle, but with a strong Shirley Manson type female singer and crunchier guitars.  Talented bunch of people.  Last night the singer was too sick to sing, so they projected a film against the back wall and played instrumental versions of their songs.  That's actually what has really sold me on them--hearing the songs without a singer made the musicianship and composition really stand out.  Anders likes them a lot, so she books them pretty often in Boston.  Check 'em out!

Today I need to repair my black and silver galabeya, do a full costume run through of my zar, do yoga, shower, finish the laundry that I rather foolishly started, prepare some veggie kabobs and try to make it to the two parties we are invited to today.  One of them is way out in Central Mass so I fear we're only going to make that one.  Maybe it will be cooler out there.  Anyway I have all this stuff to do, so naturally i am poking around emusic.com and writing on LJ.  I really like what I could hear of the new Gogol Bordello album but it requires more downloads than I have at the moment.

Heard that tomorrow's Jane Doe benefit received a plug on the local ABC affiliate--very exciting!  But I suppose that means really I must go do my costuming stuff and run-through.

I think the word has been spread pretty well at this point, but in case any interested parties haven't heard yet, Jason is indeed staying at Liquid.  Nothing bad happened to change his plans, it was mostly just him and his boyfriend rethinking the finances and social scenes involved.  So yay!

I am freshly orange again, as you might guess from my mention of Liquid.  One of the other stylists said of my hair that it was one of the best coloring jobs in all of Boston, which made me and Jason beam with joy.  I had a very relaxing Saturday afternoon at the salon, then went home to do more sewing work on a costume bra.  Bras are more complicated than you would think and eventually I decided to preserve my sanity and scrounge another outfit for Shimmy in the Shadows from stuff I already own.  I think the problem that I was having was that the bra cups I was using are just standard everyday cups, not push up, and I couldn't engineer them into push up.  I have a couple of pairs so I may do some experimenting some day with cutting the cups down and hoisting 'em up.  But for now, I'm happy with what I've worked out, kind of goth folkloric fantasy gypsy.  Doesn't sound much like me, I know, but it's what works for the song.

Saw Daywatch on Saturday night and enjoyed it very much.  I'd forgotten from Nightwatch how clever they were with the subtitles, really working them into what was happening on screen.  Anyway, creative movie, I'd give it four stars as a genre film and three stars in the larger world of film as a whole.  Better than the first one, more tightly plotted.  More Gloom would have been good.

Sunday I slept most of the day away, danced, did yoga and got ready for the Middle East.  I was afraid I'd wiped myself out with too much yoga but I think in actuality I set myself up just right.  Muscles did the things I wanted them to.  I had a great time with my set, and although the Middle East was pretty empty, there was a table of enthusiastic Arab guys out for a night on the town, money showers and dancing and clapping, so the place didn't really feel empty.  I was happy with my khaleegi drum solo as a work in progress--it needs more practice but I like where it's going.  The DJ, who is originally from Yemen, was thrilled :-)  Like everybody else that night, I was asked to dance at a party on Block Island in July, but the money would have to be much better to make all that travel worth it.  It was a good wage, but not when you take six hours of travel time into account.  Plus, the guy's method of finding dancers by standing on a street corner outside the Middle East struck me as a little sketchy, even though he seemed like a decent guy and took pains to introduce himself to M.  The moment did impress on me though, if nothing else came of it, that I've really got to get myself some business cards.

Now I am much less glamorously at work after about five hours of sleep last night.  So far I am staying awake with the aid of Arabic pop and caffeine.  Neck is slightly stiff from khaleegi hair tossing but not too bad.  Good prep for August's zar...

So nice to have another day of relaxation.  Last night's show at the Middle East was a ton of fun, and I had a great time hanging out later.  I really wish I could do it more often.  A bunch of the regulars all said to me how nice it was to see me staying and dancing with everybody, which was touching.  And Najmat telling me and Kinadancer that she was proud of her girls was a high point of not just the night but my week, really.  Pretty much danced til closing and dragged my sweaty self home.  Today I finally slept the long time that I've been needing (I think actually that anxiety over not giving Ronan his morning meds was keeping me from sleeping :-( ), ate breakfast at 3 in the afternoon and did about two hours of yoga, blissfully stretching out all the dancing of the night before.  One hot shower later and I am a happy woman.

When I went out to see the Pirates movie on Saturday, it was actually hard for me to do.  I'm used to spending my Saturday afternoons prepping for whatever shows I've got coming up and doing yoga and I felt guilty for giving that up just to see a movie.  But then I reminded myself that it wasn't just seeing a movie, it was being with friends and engaging with the larger world.  Sunday I went to the other extreme and didn't go to an afternoon cookout because I had a show that night and needed the time for warming up, washing my hair, eating the right things and not a bunch of random stuff, etc.  Either way, there are pluses and minuses.  I still wish I'd had time to practice on Saturday but I do feel good for having gone out.  Balance...

Now to grill stuff and make a drink with rum, ginger, limes and cranberry seltzer.  I am hoping the drink will taste good.  I'll name it the Captain Badriya if it is good and I won't name it anything if it's no good.

breezes coursing through the house, second cup of tea, lovely random music on the mp3 player (though I swear every third song has been by Azam Ali or Niyaz, I think my mp3 player has a crush on her), and above all nothing really to prepare for in the immediate future.  Shortly I will amble over to the used bookstore to trade in some books and pick up some new ones, then I suppose I will do some yoga and some playful no pressure dancing, and the forecast also holds intermittent laundry throughout the day.  This is my version of doing nothing, but I'm happy with that.

Recital show yesterday went all right; I reserve judgment until I see the video.  I made a couple of mistakes that loom very large in my mind.  One thing I was really pleased with though was my zill playing.  My overall feeling after the show was "well, that was good prep for performing the same song next Saturday" as I'm performing it at the Faten Salama workshop show.  Afterwards M and I went to Mr. Sushi for a delicious meal. They've introduced a bunch of new maki, all with baseball names, as I suspect every sushi place in the greater Boston area has done.  I had one called the Triple Maki, which was salmon, tuna and a white fish whose name escapes me with wasabi tobiko--scrumptious!  Next time I go there, I think I will see if they can make the regular tobiko sushi with the wasabi tobiko, that is one of my favorite things.

We watched the movie Slither when we got home, and it was good stupid fun.  It was well paced and actually well filmed, not a second longer than it needed to be, with amusing snappy dialogue.  Nathan Fillion's part seemed designed for him, or maybe they gave him a lot of input on his lines.  Some of the reviews I read when it came out made a big deal about how gross it was, but I would say if you watch a lot of sci fi and horror, it is really rather tame in that regard.  All the gore is clearly fake and the gross stuff is so over the top it's just silly.  Perfect summer night rental.

ok, book time...

( Last night's Battlestar Galactica )

Had a lot of fun dancing last night.  Great crowd (thanks, those of you who were in that crowd!), music I love, plenty of sleep the night before--I felt unstoppable :-)  Tekitoi worked really well for veil and was a definite crowd-pleaser, something to reuse for sure!  I don't hear people using Rachid Taha that often, I should give more of his stuff a listen and see what I can use.  His newest album is a collection of classic Arabic songs; that could have a lot of potential for me, the songs I love with his nightclub-appropriate energy behind them...

Generally, I had a low key weekend but that was just what was needed.  M and I spent a lot of time together, and I got some very satisfying yoga sessions in.  I thought I had lost some flexibility over the last couple of weeks, but I was pleasantly surprised to find myself able to look at the ceiling most comfortably in cobra pose.  We splurged on fancy cheese and fig preserves and rewatched The Peacekeeper Wars on Saturday.  Yes, the weekend was that exciting!

And now it's Monday.  I'm pretty much alone in the office today so I'll be able to catch up on some work at a relaxed pace.  And probably eat too much chocolate while doing so, but something has to make up for the sleep deprivation and keep me awake!

Had a great show at the Middle East last night--felt good about it before, during and after.  I think I am getting the hang of this mental preparation thing, and feeling confident enough about technique (not that there isn't always room for improvement) that I can let the focus be on personality, performance and pizzazz, as a certain local promoter would say.  Great crowd, too, many dancers and it was an unexpected treat to see adarklake  and his lovely lady friend in the audience.

I am really paying for it today, though.  It's relapse time!  I think I had an asthma attack during the night as well; I was too disoriented when it woke me up to think that maybe ventolin would be the right treatment for a closing airway and rising panic, but I walked/staggered/lurched it off until I was sort of breathing again and went back to sleep.  I'm going to dance class tonight because I already paid for it, but I may sit most of it out and just think of it as a lecture and listening class.  I think I was supposed to bring my cane today, but I didn't.  Not sure I could swing it if I had it anyway.

Well, in more positive news I am loving the Monica Richards album more and more with every listen.  Although in some ways it could be a Faith and the Muse album, what with William Faith producing the album and playing on several songs, I can see why it is Monica's solo album because it's really a collection of personal songs about herself, in a way that F&tM songs are not.  It's a very feminist/Gaiaist/spiritualist piece of work from a woman who has lived through a lot and doesn't live passively in the world.  Although musically I think my favorite song is Fell to Regret (featuring kambriel  on violin and Curse on drums :), lyrically I so empathize with Into My Own:

"I am not young
I am not old
I am come into my own"

Such simple words, but in the way she sings them and the way I hear them, so much is conveyed.  Why do we spend our prime longing for our lost youth?  Can we not recognize being a full adult for being the powerful thing that it is?  Special mention also goes to the song Sedna, about a deity for whom I've long had an affinity of my own; Monica duets with Jarboe while a cello brings to mind the stately expanses of the Arctic, all life coming from this woman beneath the sea.  Just gorgeous...  I downloaded the album through eMusic where it seems to be an advance release, but I think I may pick up the actual cd when it comes out, as it has a lovely booklet with artwork and so forth.

Amir Thaleb is so incredibly inspiring--I can't even say how much I enjoyed today's workshop, though I could barely isolate a muscle by the end of the day and I have no idea how I am going to be able to perform my set at the Middle East tomorrow night after a second day of this.  I am sure I will write more about it all later, but I have to take the time now to say--WOW!

Also inspiring were my classmates--it was quite a surprise to walk in there and see Amar Gamal there as a student.  She and Amir go way back, apparently.  Even working on learning things in a class, her dancing was beautiful to watch.  It was kind of good for me to see that even Superstars have to work on learning things and always have more to learn.  The entire class was a dedicated bunch of dancers, no matter what the experience level.  This is really a great workshop experience.

And now, the bath awaits...

Barbaro is doing as well as could be hoped for at the moment; hopefully that will continue.  He has a tremendous amount of metal holding his leg together now, but one danger with that is that all those pins provide multiple potential infection sites.  He ate like, well, a horse after the surgery, which is a good sign about his attitude at least.  All this must be extremely confusing for him, even apart from any pain. 

I was feeling sad enough about Barbaro that I wasn't at all sure how dancing was going to go on Sunday night, but after a wishy-washy start it went well.  I had a blast with the 7/8 drum solo.  I was a little worried the song itself might have been too repetitive, but dancing it for real I could feel and hence interpret the build up.  It's a really interesting rhythm to work with, because it sounds almost like an ayoub but not quite, and you have to think on your feet in order to switch sides, what with the odd number of beats.  Anyway I think people actually liked hearing something a little different from the usual drum solo.  I'll definitely keep it in my repertoire.

Apart from the Preakness, it was a good weekend.  Saturday I took a bunch of paperbacks to the used bookstore, and brought home a bunch of other paperbacks.  Hooray for seemingly infinite store credit!  After the race, M and I had sushi for dinner, and I continued on to a party while he crashed after a long day of recording.  It felt good to go out and see people, and jetsetting around from party to club to party felt very rockstar.

Conversation overheard in the crowded women's room at Toast (said club):

"Oh my god, somebody in here smells so good"
Woman leaping out of the stall she had just entered:  "oh my god, is it me?  I bet it's me!"
First woman:  "Oh my god, it is you!  What is that fragrance?"
Second woman:  "oh my god, it's Paris Hilton"--chorus of exclaimations from all women except me, doing my best to keep a straight face--"I was at the perfume counter and the woman told me to try it and I was like I am so not Paris Hilton but then I tried it and I was like, oh my god I *am* Paris Hilton!  I *am* Paris Hilton!"

I sang my head off at the party, to various karaoke songs and Buffy the Musical.  Felt good, though my throat was less than thrilled with me the next day.  Which I spent doing some intensive spring cleaning--I found a massive kibble stash in the nightstand and that prompted the cleaning frenzy.  Silly weasels.  They "helped" with the sweeping and vacuuming.  Cleaning is much more fun with ferrets involved.  Then yoga (and again, noted positive changes in my body as chiro treatment continues), and dancing, which brings me more or less back to the beginning of this post.  I guess checking on Barbaro was probably the last thing I did before going to sleep at a far too late hour of the evening.