0 com

Summer Reads: The Goodtime Girl by Tess Fragoulis

Tess Fragoulis
The Goodtime Girl
Cormorant Books

In The Goodtime Girl, Tess Fragoulis spins a tale set in the 1920s featuring Kivelli Fotiathi, the daughter of a wealthy family living in Smyrna, now part of Turkey. Determined to decide her own destiny, Kivelli turns down a number of wealthy suitors introduced by her father, but her life is torn asunder when the Turks seize control of Smyrna and set the town ablaze. Kivelli’s life mirrors the fate of many Greeks who survived the Great Fire of Smyrna in 1922, later finding themselves penniless refugees and largely unwanted by Greek mainlanders.

The options available to a young unmarried woman are limited, and Kivelli finds herself cleaning a brothel for a madam in Piraeus, an Athens slum. When it is revealed she can sing, she becomes a performer for hashish-smoking manghes (gangsters) in a local tavern. Her modest income allows Kivelli to repay the madam and buy her freedom, but life in the underworld is difficult to negotiate for anyone, let alone a young woman.

Kivella sings rembetiko or the Greek blues, the music of a subculture, with themes of drink, drugs, crime, prostitution and violence.  A native of Crete, Fragoulis has said that the story came to her when she heard rembetiko on the radio for the first time. Initially the music of the underclass, rembetiko later gained popularity among the working and lower middle classes.

Kivelli’s talent unexpectedly opens doors for the singer, and soon she finds herself recording songs written by Marianthi, a songwriter who becomes both Kivelli’s friend and rival. Just as her fortunes change, Kivelli meets a handsome bad boy and ends up in a love triangle, realistically rendered by Fragoulis.

Knowledge of the Great Fire of Smyrna is key to understanding the order of the book. While the mention of Smyrna and the 1920s will be enough for some readers to understand the sequence of events, a few may be confused by Kivelli’s sudden change in social standing, from her wealthy life in Smyrna in one chapter to subsisting in a brothel in Piraeus in the next. Although Kivelli’s resolve to forget her past is consistent throughout the book, her ability to suppress all thoughts of the tragedy until chapter 24 borders on the superhuman. But this is a minor point. The focus of the story is not her dramatic fall in status, but her survival as a singer in a drug-infested underworld where there is no room for weakness.

The Goodtime Girl is infused with music. Lines taken from songs open each chapter and give a clear indication of the sordid clientele that populate Kivelli’s world. Fragoulis’s descriptions are rich and evocative, if occasionally over the top, and a deliciously dark  humour permeates the story. “The Cucumber ruffled Spiros’s hair and apologized to Kivelli, not because he’d shot her lover but because blood had spattered her dress.”

Although there was a lack of closure among the characters at the end, The Goodtime Girl is a satisfying read. There’s a beautiful film noir feel to this tale, and it comes with a welcome twist: the story is seen through the eyes of a strong woman, an entertainer, and the only woman apart from prostitutes allowed into this sleazy world. Her observations in no way aggrandize the murderers and thugs in her presence, but paint them exactly as they are, with all their strengths and vulnerabilities.

If you can’t afford a trip to Greece this summer, The Goodtime Girl is the next best thing. Escape guaranteed.

This review was cross-posted at Rover Arts Uncovered.

Other reviews:
Summer Reads: One Good Hustle by Billie Livingston
Summer Reads: Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
Ru by Kim Thuy
Fifty Shades of Grey 
The Blue Dragon by Robert Lepage and Marie Michaud
The Return by Dany Laferrière
Something Fierce: Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter
Interview with Carmen Aguirre, Chilean Resistance Fighter
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
The Antagonist by Lynn Coady
Irma Voth by Miriam Toews
Dogs at the Perimeter by Madeleine Thien
Incendiary by Chris Cleave
Winter's Bone by Daniel Woodrell 
The Girl Without Anyone by Kelli Deeth

.



Read more »
0 com

Interview With the Host of CBC's Fear Itself, Christy Ann Conlin


Christy Ann Conlin, Photo by Bruce Dienes
Christy Ann Conlin is the host of the CBC's Fear Itself, a 10-part series investigating our deepest darkest fears. As you will see, our host finds fear inspiring. In her own writing, she challenges her own terrors and creates frightening scenarios for the pleasure of others. 


Conlin is the bestselling author of Heave, the story of a young woman coming to terms with her alcoholism, which masks an even deeper scarier secret. She also penned the horror novella Dead Time, based loosely on the notorious murder of a 15-year-old by another teen in order to prove his love for his girlfriend, the alleged mastermind of the crime.


No one can deny that fear governs our lives, dictating our actions and deciding our words. Yet, we shell out money for books and films to experience that adrenaline-pumping sensation. On the surface what frightens us appears simple, but in reality it is very complex. 


The CBC series has jumped into these murky waters to examine the fear of the ocean (episode 1), how we overcome fear (episode 2), the fear of getting caught (episode 3), how first responders and their families deal with fear (episode 4) and why a fiction writer and horror filmmaker create fear in episode 5.


Christy Ann has agreed to answer a few questions about the program and her own personal discoveries along the way.


HL: As any parent can attest, we live with fear every day, some rational and some irrational. And we are all just seconds away from a fight or flight response. How has fear impacted your own life, and overall what have you learned from your investigation?

CA: Well, I am a fear ridden person, ha ha, so fear has always been at the heart of my life, as I talk about in the opening show, "An Ocean of Fear." I jokingly call myself a "connoisseur of fear" but I'm also serious about this. My life has been about overcoming many fears. I can't stand saying I didn't try because I was afraid. It's my biggest fear, the fear of giving up. And in my creative writing I am always exploring fear, how characters lives are riddled with it, seeing how they respond to it. In Heave and my short fiction, it was more a quirky look at fear and sorrow. In my last novel, Dead Time, I moved into full blown horror, both personally and in the story. So fear was very interesting to me, in terms of motivation, and as a human experience.

Overall, the experience has left me with this startling respect for fear, not just as a human experience of keeping us safe (or as a limitation) but of fear as being this completely entwined partner of courage. Not to sound hokey, but where there is light there is shadow, and where there is shadow there is light...for all of us.

HL: Would you tell us about how you approached investigating fear?

CA: When we came up with the idea for Fear Itself I had some ideas about fear and its role in our lives, and so did the producer, Kent Hoffman, and so the show was very much about an exploration of our ideas,  what we didn't know and what we hoped we would discover. We wanted to peek in the back door at fear, look at it in unexpected and surprising ways. We sure do that in "Fear of Getting Caught," the third episode. And "Fear of the Dark," our last episode to air on August 27th. That episode is mind blowing for me, the unexpected approach we took.

HL: What have you learned about our shared fears and our reactions to it?

CA: We knew that there are many shared and common fears and doing the interviews really confirmed that. But what I learned from doing the interviews is that fear is not just a solitary experience that isolates us but it is a very common experience that can actually unite people. Of course, there is a very individual aspect to fear but realizing how we face so many of the same fears is very humanizing. "Childhood Fears," the August 6th show, is a great example of this.

It was also surprising at how many other names people have for fear, how often they dance around it, rather than call it by name. And that men and women often respond to fear in different ways, for different reasons. The episode
"Fear and Violence," which will be broadcast on August 20th, is one show where we look closely at this. 

HL: In "Creating Fear" (episode 5), author Andrew Pyper talks about feeling "rattled" when he’s written something frightening, and this, he says, is a good feeling because it means he’s on the right track to scaring the bejezus out of his readers. What is the most unsettling that you have had to write and what were the physical manifestations of this fear?

CA: The most unsettling things I've written about in fiction are physical violence and sexual coercion. In Heave I felt queasy writing the sex scene that lies at the heart of the novel. When I write I see the story unfold in my head and it’s always disturbing to see/feel the characters suffer. In Dead Time, I had to write a very violent murder scene. I say “had to” because the book turns on this moment, a twist in it, and so showing it was critical to the structure. I knew the morning when I was going to write it and I couldn’t even think it through. I made a cup of coffee and then sat down and let the character, Isabella, show me. I felt ill writing it. She’s very young and so it was horrible to even contemplate this happening. You have to imagine what it is like to inflict violence, in very specific detail, so I dreaded this part of the writing. The editor said the book reads with an unrelenting menace. Imagine having that sort of character in your head for months – horror! Perhaps it’s my Quaker background. I like peace. I was relieved to have it done and then it was like a bad memory than fear.

HL: In episode 5, you also speak to a blogger who maintained Scare Yourself Everyday, a blog in which he challenged a new fear every day for a year. He said that he felt much more confident after taking on his fears. In what other ways do you think that we can benefit from challenging our fears?
CA: Well, I think when we take on our fears we live outside our comfy box, and we are forever changed by this. We don’t look at things in the same way ever again. And I think we discover how courageous we are when we challenge fears. But challenging fears does not always mean we overcome them. Fear is also a unifying force. There is great power in knowing someone else stood and faced the monster.

HL: What can we expect to hear in the coming five weeks on Fear Itself?

CA: We have some fascinating shows coming up. In addition to the episodes I've already mentioned, next week we will be exploring "Working With Horror and Art: The Creations," and in week eight, we will be looking at something that most of us are afraid of in the "Fear of Death."

HL: It looks like you have plenty of research to spin a tale that will really scare your readers. Do you have any projects in the works?

CA: Yup, so much in the works it's scary! A sampling: I am working on the final draft of my novel,
Listening for the Island, a ghost story that links to my first novel, Heave, through the character of Fancy Mosher. It will be published by Doubleday. My short story, "The Diplomat," will be published in Douglas Glover's wonderful Numero Cinq Magazine. I have a new YA novel under way as well, Meadowsweet, a dark dystopian tale. And I'm busy working as an online creative writing instructor for The University of Toronto. Just listing off all of this makes me want to have a nap on the beach, augggh!

HL: It sounds like your plate is full indeed. We wish you all the best and look forward to the next five episodes of the CBC's Fear Itself. Thanks for your time.

If you have missed any of the first five Fear Itself episodes you can download the podcasts, or listen to them on the CBC site. To date, my personal favourites have been "The Fear of Getting Caught," which examines instances of highly destructive alcohol, drug and gambling addictions, and the stigma attached to suffering from bipolar disorder. Another episode that will get your blood pumping is "Fear and First Responders."


Other posts on Christy Ann Conlin:




.


 



Read more »
0 com

Zoofest: My Pregnant Brother and Entrance With Charge

Both these shows were presented as part of Montreal's Zoofest, an alternative arts festival meant to push the limits.

My Pregnant Brother by Johanna Nutter
 
Forget what you saw on Oprah. Thomas Beatie was not the first pregnant man. In fact, it was Joanna Nutter’s transgendered brother, James, who had that honour. In this innovative one-woman show, Nutter tells the true story of her hapless hippie mother, her younger sister, and their precarious lives growing up on the Main.

Our narrator is the strong one in the family and just when she decides to abdicate her caretaking role, her sister declares that she is a man and has her breasts removed. Nutter is forced not only to deal with this dramatic change, fumbling and stumbling with pronouns and introductions, but also must deal with her transgender brother’s emotional issues and, finally, her mother and brother’s estrangement.

With simple chalk lines, Nutter creates the Plateau’s grid of streets, complete with the mountain and cross on a chalkboard backdrop. The actor adds details and streets to her map as the story of her brother’s gender transition and pregnancy unfolds. Nutter weaves a touching tale with evocative detail to help the audience visualize the street corners she describes.

In addition to shedding light on some of the emotional issues a transgendered individual might face, the story also explores the feelings of family members.  Nutter delivers a humorous and poignant performance, with the birth of her niece in an East Van hospital as possibly the most beautiful moment. Yet, it is the final roadside tragedy that is by far the most heartrending, reminding the family of just how precious life is, whether in the body of a woman or man.

Johanna Nutter’s courageous one-woman show explores subject-matter that is both original and risky, putting a human face on what is usually relegated to the pages of tabloids. For a unique and entertaining theatre performance, look no further. This is storytelling at its best.

There are two more shows of My Pregnant Brother on Thursday and Friday.


Entrance with Charge – Two Girls Smoke a Cigarette in Only 30 Seconds

Labelled as “performance,” Entrance with Charge puts the spotlight on les Filles Follen, a Spanish duo who “decided to show what they really are: two pretty girls,” according to the Zoofest program. The mission of this festival is to offer “wild adventure and unique experiences,” but comedy is not a given in spite of being affiliated with Just For Laughs.

A nod to cabaret and the cigarette girls of the 1950s, the performance included plenty of cleavage, suggestive dancing, homo-erotic displays and simulated fighting. Obviously trained dancers, les Filles Follen were experimenting with what they could get away with based on their attractiveness. And while it’s true that the audience may have been less tolerant towards a pair of hairy middle-aged men doing the same routine, it might have provided some much needed comic relief.

The Spanish duo’s performance fell short of anything entertaining and instead served up little more than titillation. For a costume change, they pulled in a male member of the audience to help them zip up and recorded it on a web cam for the audience’s amusement. They walked through the audience striking arabesques in short skirts and high heels among the quiet, polite audience at the Café Cléopatra. I yawned a little too audibly when the performers were parading through spectators with cigarette boxes bearing the sign “We Are Pretty,” and then unexpectedly had a member of the duo at our table, attempting to stare me down.

The act was pure provocation, an experiment in which the audience served as guinea pigs. Les Filles Follen performed strictly to pull our strings, and although some people might enjoy paying to take part in their little experiment, I found it empty and artless.

These reviews have been cross-posted at Rover Arts.

Other reviews
Circus: Séquence 8, les 7 doigts de la main
Book: One Good Hustle by Billie Livingston
Book: The Complete Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
Yoga Festival: Relax, Regroup, Refocus


.

Read more »
0 com

Circus: Séquence 8, Les 7 Doigts de la Main


I had no idea what I was in for on Saturday night at the TOHU, the national centre for circus arts training.The decision to see Séquence 8 by Les 7 Doigts de la Main had been my husband’s. As Montreal’s usual six degrees of separation would have it, he had gone to high school with one of the founders. I’d seen a clip of Eric Bates performing his cigar box act in the halls of Radio-Canada, but that was the extent of my exposure to the collective, which celebrated its 10th anniversary this year.

Like many other people living in this city with exacting circus standards, set by none other than the world-renowned Cirque du Soleil, I was expecting a performance with a new take on the traditional circus acts, some vibrant costumes, bright lights, pulsating music, and a slew of flexible acrobats performing death-defying stunts. But the new take this time was subtlety, which produced stunning and unforeseen results. Séquence 8 presented a small troop of eight acrobats casually dressed in muted colours, performing to an indie rock soundtrack with minimal props and a sparse décor. It was a stellar example of less being more.

This brilliant pared-down approach not only reduced all the usual stimuli competing for the audience’s attention, but it also put the focus squarely on the collective’s world-class acrobatics, which left the audience nothing short of gobsmacked. In fact, I can’t recall ever attending any other circus performances where I’d repeatedly heard such a loud chorus of gasps, but it might be because they weren’t drowned out by the music.

Although the best acts may be the subject of fierce debate, my personal favourite was flying man Devin Henderson with his diving through hoops and scaling the Chinese pole. His work seemed so effortless that even when there were flaws they seemed planned to give the audience a little more gut-wrenching angst and a greater thrill when he succeeded in subsequent attempts. A close second was Alexandra Royer on the Russian bar (1min20 video below), and it wasn’t the sheer height or difficulty of her double lay-outs, it was her silent landings on the bar held by porters Eric Bates and Tristan Nielsen. In fact, it was the many small details such as the performers’ choreographed steps and interconnected movements, the sparse sensual lighting and the use of improv and humour that made for an unforgettable evening.

Séquence 8 was an intimate show that exceeded my expectations for a circus performance and made it abundantly clear to me for the first time why circus is considered an art form.

This review was cross-posted at Rover Arts Uncovered.

Sequence 8 was performed as part of the Montréal Complètement Cirque Festival. Les 7 Doigts de la Main, the circus collective whose name refers to its seven founding members, will be returning to the TOHU to perform from October 30 to November 10.




.
Read more »
0 com

Summer Reads: One Good Hustle by Billie Livingston

One Good Hustle
Billie Livingston
Random House Canada

Award-winning author Billie Livingston has once again used her crisp clean prose to deliver another compelling story about an at-risk teen coming to terms with the severe limitations of her once-idolized grifter parents. As in the author’s first novel Going Down Swinging and her collection of short stories, Greedy Little Eyes, there are no silk blouses or cashmere sweaters in One Good Hustle. Livingston spins a humorous gritty tale set in the Vancouver suburb of Burnaby in the mid-80s that is both gripping and realistic.

Sixteen-year-old Samantha Bell (Sammie) leads a precarious life through no fault of her own. The daughter of two small-time hustlers, Sammie leaves home after a number of her mother’s alcohol and drug-induced episodes and ramblings about suicide. The victim of a hustle gone wrong, mother Marlene spirals out of control until Sammie finally seeks refuge at the home of high school friend Jill, whose working-class parents are caring and stable, something that Sammie finds both foreign and comforting. Sammie’s relationship with her own con artist father is equally as troubled, particularly when she is forced to see that he put her in harm’s way for the sake of a heist. Confronting her long-cherished beliefs about her parents, Sammie experiences intense feelings of disappointment, shame, betrayal and hope, a highly vulnerable situation rendered beautifully by Livingston in this coming-of-age novel.

The author has delivered a well-rounded character in Sammie. Still a street-smart teen able to see a potential hustle, which she uses to finance her driver’s ed classes, Sammie nevertheless remains drug and alcohol-free as a means to maintain what little control she has over her own life. She is also determined to finish high school, no small feat given her limited stability and guidance. Sammie’s life is anything but carefree, which Livingston expertly illustrates through the use of her friend Jill as a foil. Average teen Jill goes to bush parties and naively dives into a doomed romance, whereas Sammie finds the prospect of a relationship a highly stressful undertaking, a luxury she simply cannot afford.

Sammie keeps love-interest Drew at arm’s length for fear that his wealthy Christian family will discover the truth about her past. But Sammie has a lot of tracks to cover, which causes further turmoil. When Drew moves too close, Sammie physically strikes out, and this minor incident is what makes One Good Hustle so resoundingly real. As a young woman with few socially acceptable means for venting anger and frustration, Sammie suffers in silence, internalizing her feelings. Her lashing out in the face of mounting stress makes her character all the more credible and gives the reader a well-deserved break from the passive heroine so widely flogged in mainstream media.

Last year, in an interview with Billie Livingston on her YA novella taken from One Good Hustle, I asked her about the origins of Sammie’s character. She told me that in addition to drawing on family members and girls she had gone to school with, Livingston had grown up with many small-time hustler families like the Bells. It is perhaps the author’s first-hand knowledge of this milieu that makes this novel ring so true.

One Good Hustle will remind many of us not only of those dark days when we feared becoming our parents but also of just how trying those teen years can be.  Many young readers will find validation for their own experiences in the book, particularly those who are marginalized and who rarely find anything resembling their own reality on the pages of a novel. Livingston has once again given us a stellar book about people we see every day on the street but rarely ever meet.

This review has been cross-posted at Rover Arts Uncovered.

Other posts on Billie Livingston
Interview with Author Billie Livingston
Review: Going Down Swinging by Billie Livingston
Review: Greedy Little Eyes by Billie Livingston

Other possible books for the beach
Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
Ru by Kim Thuy
Fifty Shades of Grey 
The Blue Dragon by Robert Lepage and Marie Michaud
The Return by Dany Laferrière
Something Fierce: Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter
Interview with Carmen Aguirre, Chilean Resistance Fighter
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
The Antagonist by Lynn Coady
Irma Voth by Miriam Toews
Dogs at the Perimeter by Madeleine Thien
Incendiary by Chris Cleave
Winter's Bone by Daniel Woodrell 
The Girl Without Anyone by Kelli Deeth


.
Read more »
0 com

Summer Reads: Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi

I was recently asked by Rover Arts to write about a classic summer read. The one that immediately came to mind was Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, a graphic novel, my first. After years of disdain for a genre I deemed little more than kid stuff, I relented and quickly discovered how wrong I was...

If you love adventure and have a feisty left-leaning inner core you will love Persepolis.

Here's what I wrote for Rover:

The Complete Persepolis
Marjane Satrapi
Pantheon

Forget all your preconceived notions of Iran, and dive into Persepolis, a gripping graphic memoir of the author’s childhood and adolescence growing up in a middle class family during the Islamic Revolution. The feisty young Marjane not only believes that one day she will become a prophet, but also pretends that she is Che Guevara marching around with her friends. While her left-wing intellectual parents are in the streets of Tehran protesting the Shah, Marjane demands that her father get rid of his Cadillac and that the maid be allowed to eat at the family dinner table.

The Islamic Revolution, however, takes its toll on the Satrapis. Imprisoned family members return to tell tales of torture and murder, while Marjane is forced to attend an Islamic school and don the chador, something that she and her mother protest vehemently until they are attacked in the streets by fundamentalists. The parents fear for their daughter’s safety because of her increasingly vocal opposition to authority, and at 14, Marjane is sent away to school in Austria where she languishes.

Persepolis is my all-time favourite graphic novel, and the one I most often recommend. Not only does it give the reader a detailed portrait of a country sadly known more for its religious fanatics and autocrats than its rich history, but it also lets us see the everyday life of an average person, a girl no less, during the tumultuous times of the Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War. Persepolis piqued my curiosity about Iran and led me to Christiane Bird’s Iranian travelogue Neither East Nor West and Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, two other books I recommend about a country I dream one day of visiting.

Other related reviews

Fifty Shades of Grey, an update
Joyce Carol Oates on her Life and US Politics
Fifty Shades of Grey 
The Blue Dragon by Robert Lepage and Marie Michaud
The Return by Dany Laferrière
Meet Revolutionary Mother 
Something Fierce: Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter
Interview with Carmen Aguirre, Chilean Resistance Fighter
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
The Antagonist by Lynn Coady
Irma Voth by Miriam Toews
Dogs at the Perimeter by Madeleine Thien
Going Down Swinging by Billie Livingston
Incendiary by Chris Cleave
Winter's Bone by Daniel Woodrell 
The Girl Without Anyone by Kelli Deeth


.
Read more »
2 com

Lauren Luke: Make-Up Maven Turns to Activism

Lauren Luke (c)YouTube 
Lauren Luke is a self-taught make-up artist who has made a name for herself on YouTube by uploading tutorials on how to apply cosmetics to get the signature look of celebrities such as Avril Lavigne, Miley Cyrus and Jennifer Lopez. Her own wildly popular YouTube channel has received no fewer than 110 million views and boasts some 440,000 subscribers, making it the most popular in the UK. In addition to penning a weekly beauty column for The Guardian since 2009, Luke has also appeared in Allure, Vanity Fair, The New York Times, Time and Women's Wear Daily. Not bad for a self-starter who is only 30 years old.

But life has not always been easy for Luke. The South Shields native (North Eastern England) grew up poor and was bullied at school because of her size and looks. She has reportedly stated that she is proud of the fact that a woman of her size has garnered so much attention within an industry that has eyes strictly for the ultra thin.

Luke surprised everyone on July 1 when she posted a new tutorial, "How to Look Your Best the Morning After." She appears with a black eye and cuts on her face. She then proceeds to show her viewers how to use concealer to hide the bruises and abrasions after being assaulted by her partner. Luke even instructs viewers to use a scarf or their hair to cover any marks left on their neck.

Although the make-up maven's assault was a fake, Luke has used her precious platform in collaboration with the UK-based Refuge in a bid to raise awareness about domestic violence, more specifically to draw attention to the fact that some 65% of victims of domestic violence keep it hidden. According to the US-based National Organization of Women, 4.8 million women a year in that country are physically and sexually assaulted by intimate partners, yet only 20% seek medical attention for their injuries.

Even though our make-up artist was not the victim of assault in this particular instance, she does say that she was in an abusive relationship and managed to end it before it became violent.

"Back then I knew the whole situation wasn't normal, but I didn't know about the help that is out there. And that is why I wanted to work with Refuge - to get the message out to anyone who may need help and support that it's time to stop covering it up," Luke told The Online Mail.

Refuge is asking for donations of two pounds to represent the two women who are killed every week by their intimate partners. "How to Look Your Best the Morning After" is being shared on Twitter under the hashtag #dontcoveritup, and as of today, the video has been viewed nearly 360,000 times in just three days.

See it for yourself below.




Related posts



Read more »