Dance dance dance

Crazy day at work today - juggling the usual workload around an event we do each year for journalism students down at Redfern Town Hall. There's always this euphoria that takes over when an event finally finishes. But this time, as we collected used paper cups and packed down tables and stacked up chairs, there was even more than the usual hyper-relief. Because there'd been an overlap in bookings at the hall, and a community line dance group couldn't wait to start practicing their routines until we'd put everything away. So there we were, half joining in to the euro-trance covers of "Summer Holiday" and Steps' classic "5, 6, 7, 8" while a motley crew of Chinese geriatrics, kids in primary school uniforms and Redfern sistas busted out their moves.

There really is nothing more cathartic and rejuvenating than really loud, really bad music after a long day. It's a primal thing I guess - as Mr Darcy would say, "any savage can dance". But let's not scoff. A whole, awesome genre of movies has been founded on the redemptive power of dance. The kind of classics you don't tell anyone you stay home to watch on a Friday night: Centre Stage, Save The Last Dance, Step Up, Step Up IV Fight The Power or whatever the latest sequel was. How easy would it be to write one of those dance movies? You could put together a generic form script that just has multi-choice options on certain elements, throw in a Jamiroquai montage with some costume changes that defy the laws of time and space at the end and BAM you're an auteur.

Here's one you can play along with at home:

(Stella/Svetlana/Shanaynay) is a sweet girl from the (right/wrong) side of the tracks who has latent talent as a (ballet/burlesque/crunk) dancer. Despite grappling with a difficult home life and her (eating disorder/shady dealings with underworld mobsters/mother's drug addiction), she falls in love with a (ladykiller choreographer/suprisingly ripped toilet-cleaner/pimp with a heart of gold) and together they beat the odds to win the local talent quest and (avenge her sister's death/raise money for puppy epilepsy/become the best goddamn dancer in the American ballet).

Shouldn't have had that last glass of chardonnay, should I?! Better finish my work now.....

Dramatic reading of a break-up letter

Oh man. This is amazing. He even brings drama to the typos.

Southern gothic

Must be the week for scaring myself before sleep - tonight with a piece of crime reportage by the incomparable Truman Capote, called "Handcarved Coffins". HC was written in the late 70s and published as part of an anthology called Music for Chameleons.

Years earlier Capote had invented literary journalism, or as he called it, "the non-fiction novel", with In Cold Blood in 1966. As he wrote in the preface to Music for Chameleons:

For several years I had been increasingly drawn toward journalism as an art form in itself. I had two reasons. First, it didn't seem to me that anything truly innovative had occurred in prose writing, or in writing generally, since the 1920s; second, journalism as art was almost virgin terrain, for the simple reason that very few literary artists ever wrote narrative journalism, and when they did, it took the form of travel essays or autobiography.

Looking back on his body of work years later, Capote felt he could have written everything better; that he'd let himself be hemmed in by conventions when a great writer should be able to summon an entire "palette" of writing styles - prose, poetry, reportage - in any single piece.

From a technical point, the greatest difficulty I'd had in writing In Cold Blood was leaving myself completely out of it. Ordinarily, the reporter has to use himself as a character, an eyewitness observer, in order to retain credibility. But I felt that it was essential to the seemingly detached tone of that book that the author should be absent. Actually, in all my reportage, I had tried to keep myself as invisible as possible.

Now, however, I set myself centre stage, and reconstructed, in a severe, minimal manner, commonplace conversations with everyday people: the superintendent of my building, a masseur at the gym, an old school friend, my dentist. After writing hundreds of pages of this simpleminded sort of thing, I eventually developed a style. I had found a framework into which I could assimilate everything I knew about writing. Later, using a modified version of this technique, I wrote a nonfiction short novel (Handcarved Coffins) and a number of short stories.

So "Handcarved Coffins" is a pacy account of a series of murders in "a western state", and the years-long investigation to uncover the truth. Just as Capote described above, he's in the middle of the story - it's written as a transcript of conversations, mostly between Capote and the detective Jake Pepper, but occasionally with other persons of interest. This style itself is interesting because legend has it that Capote never wrote a note nor recorded a second of his interviews. He claimed to have a photographic memory. Whatever the case, the dialogue of HC is taut and dramatic, ominous and gothic as any invented thriller.

The story's name comes from the killer's calling card - small wooden coffins delivered to the victims before they were murdered in intricate, horrible ways. Rattlesnake. Razor-wire decapitation. Poisoning. All deaths with seemingly nothing to tie them together - except the coffins. It's a cracking, creepy story and as with everything Capote wrote, I strongly encourage you to read it!

It was just interesting to come across Capote's own words about pretty much inventing narrative journalism - a concept that's very popular at the moment through the great work of institutions like the Nieman Foundation. We're coming to blows a bit at work over this, as we plan a major journalism conference for later in the year - whether narrative is the truly essential key to the continued value of journalism, or whether it's just a bullshit word that doesn't really mean anything.

Anyway. Need sleep. Things are afoot.

More soundslides...

This could become an addiction...

Luna Park soundslides

It's taken a week and a number of embarassing conversations with my IT guy at work, but I have finally worked out how to embed my first experiment with SoundSlides. It's a little cheesy but I had a lot of fun making it - let me know what you think!

The monster mash

A late night session of old monster and zombie movies may not have been the best idea for combating insomnia. But it did at least somehow remind me of a weird thing my sister and I used to do when we were little. In a bid to scare each other, we'd lock ourselves in a little passageway between the kitchen and the laundry, where it was pitch black and claustrophobic, and sing at the top of our lungs the wonderfully daggy "Monster Mash", which we'd picked up somewhere along the line. Hmm. Like most things that seem scary late at night, I suspect when I look back at this in tomorrow's hard light I'll be rather embarassed....

Phallusy

(With apologies to McSweeney's "Open Letters to People or Entities that are Unlikely to Respond")

Dear Hens' Nights

Look, we're just starting to get to know each other, and you have years of experience on me, so maybe I just need to give you more time. But really, is all the penis stuff necessary? Can we not send women into the institution of marriage without doodle-shaped cocktail garnishes and draping them in flashing sashes like hotwired beauty pageant entrants?

The importance of the penis to our society is not lost on me. The vast majority of the world's architecture, and feats of historial stupidity, bear testament to our phallocentric culture. So do you really need to put me in situations where I'm trying to make conversation with an (awesome) 80-year-old nanna-of-the-bride who's drinking her sangria through a schlong-shaped straw?

The "peppermint pecker" mints were, I grant you, rather cute... and not unwelcome after garlic-laced tapas. But all the pin-the-dick-on-the-dude parlour games, and cream-filled cock sponge cakes are a little tacky, no?

I hope we can still be friends - I know we're going to be bumping into each other pretty regularly for at least the next decade. And hey, I admire a lot of your work. Without you, there would be at least 400% less high pitched squealing in bars on Saturday nights. The novelty veil and male-stripper industries would be destroyed. The world would be robbed of any number of novelties in the shape of penises. And I would never know what it's like to spend much of the wee hours of a Sunday morning wearing a sailor's hat and demanding to be referred to as "El Capitano".

xoxo

Clare