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All right, folks, it's here. My memoir, "The Lost Night: A Daughter's Search for the Truth of Her Father's Murder," is out. In the stores. On Powell's. On Amazon.
And in the news. Last Monday I appeared on NBC 11's Bay Area Today. I would have announced it here ahead of time but it was my first TV appearance and I wanted to make sure I did a good job. It went beautifully, which takes the pressure off of another TV appearance I'll be making this weekend. I'd give you the details, but there's always the risk of postponement or cancellation, and I don't want to jinx anything. I can tell you, though, that the half-hour interview I recorded with KALW's "Book Talk" will be airing this Sunday at 6:30 p.m. You can listen at 91.7 FM in the Bay Area, or online at www dot KALW dot org if you live elsewhere.
Also hitting this Sunday are more reviews, and I'll post them here as they become available online. The reviews thus far have been great, as you can read here.
Finally, I'll be giving my first readings next week. The book party on August 4th is very nearly full; if you'd like to attend I recommend RSVPing ASAP to rsvp at thelostnight dot com. But other chances to hear me read from the book abound: On Wednesday, August 3rd, I'll be at A Clean Well Lighted Place for Books; and on Thursday August 11th I'll be at the Ferry Building's Book Passage. I've got appearances elsewhere in California too; for the full schedule, click here.
Thanks for all the good wishes, and for the emails I've gotten from readers who have managed to snag early copies! I'm hearing from all kinds of people, many perfect strangers, that they stayed up until the wee hours of the morning finshing the book and were moved . . . I'm so happy to hear your response.
--Rachel Howard
July 28, 2005 · 12:23 PM · The Lost Night · Comments (0)
Good Company
Elle Magazine has chosen my memoir "The Lost Night" for its online books forum for the month of August:
" [U]nfolds with the urgency of a thriller, for both obvious reasons—the central fact of Howard's life is her father's murder when she was nine—but also because of the author's clear-sighted, propulsive prose . . . What begins as a quest for justice winds up a complex, compulsively readable mediation on the nature of reconciliation, whether it is with your family, your past, or yourself."
The book is in good company with Kim Addonizio's "Little Beauties" and Aimee Bender's "Willfull Creatures." Check out the full write-up here. And look for the book to be onsale in stores by next Tuesday.
July 21, 2005 · 12:50 PM · The Lost Night · Comments (0)
Fall Dance
Memo to the Bay Area dance community: I will be doing the Fall Arts Preview for dance for the San Francisco Chronicle's Pink Section. If you have a dance event coming up that you'd like me to consider, make sure you email the basic info to me at rachel at rachelhoward dot com within the next two weeks. Thanks.
July 19, 2005 · 03:05 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
Excerpted
I'm back from Santa Barbara, and I'm swamped--"The Lost Night's" official pub date is next Monday, and my life has become a giant "to-do" list in anticipation of that date.
Funny that the day I arrive home from Santa Barbara I should receive a copy of Santa Barbara Magazine in my mailbox. It's the August/September issue, and it contains a long excerpt from "The Lost Night," beautifully laid out with photos of me and my father. Editor Wendy Jenson chose to reprint the chapter in which I return home after the murder and refuse to talk to the psychiatrist--or anyone--about what I've seen. Santa Barbara Mag doesn't put their content online, but if you live in Southern California (or elsewhere; I've spotted Santa Barbara Magazine in the Barnes and Noble across the street from Lincoln Center in New York), pick up a copy and check it out.
July 19, 2005 · 11:03 AM · The Lost Night · Comments (0)
Brian Brooks Moving Company
“Piñata”
Summerdance Santa Barbara
Center Stage Theater
July 9, 2005
Nicholas Duran in Brian Brooks Moving Company's "Pinata."
Santa Barbara is a town that knows how to party, so it’s not surprising that Summerdance Santa Barbara executive director Dianne Vapnek imports companies (mostly from New York) that offer equal parts sophistication and fun. Last year, Brooklyn-based Brian Brooks Moving Company brought out “Dance-o-Matic,” a minimalist rhapsody in bubble-gum pink. The group also started creating a new full-evening work, “Piñata,” which received its West Coast debut last weekend during the company’s return to the Center Stage Theater. “Piñata” is a fiesta, to be sure, a suite of rigorous musical structures dressed up in confetti and camp. But in its most striking moments, the silliness becomes just a backdrop for a mesmerizing revelation of order in chaos, like reading an elegant geometric proof rendered on purple construction paper.
The conceit for “Piñata” is the exploration of the full color spectrum as it explodes upon a canvas of white. The floor is white, Roxana Ramseur’s clever pseudo-athletic costumes are white, and the confetti is white as Jo-anne Lee bashes the first piñata of the evening. Brooks is a former dancer with Elizabeth Streb, a lineage that shows in the strenuous physical feats he uses as building blocks. The first third of “Piñata” is set on the floor as the dancers lay in a line, rolling into ab crunches and arching backwards to the chord changes of Cesaria Evora’s exotic music; at the trumpet fanfare, their plank-like bodies launch straight into the air like popcorn kernels on a hot pan. Later, legs and arms spiral upwards as though to pierce the surface of water, an effect reinforced by the dancer’s sundry bathing caps (Alexander Gish’s is a hunter’s hat with flaps over the ears; Weena Pauly’s millinery looks like Mennonite garb). It’s like watching the world’s most musically attentive synchronized swimming routine.
Weena Pauly in Brian Brooks Moving Company's "Pinata."
But at last the five dancers stand, and gradually red and blue and yellow and green enter the picture, and here the seams of Brooks’s packaging begin to strain. There are many lovely and entrancing moments. Pauly introduces blue, jumping into the hands of Duran and Gish, treading her legs and arms as though to push through water as they carry her around the floor. Lee and Duran appear in rooster-like headdresses, moshing with mathematical exactitude to the Scissor Sisters in a red square of light. The company crosses the stage in curiously serene scissor steps, dropping orange paper like breadcrumbs though the forest. And the whole gang stacks up to scoot across the floor on their butts, throwing rainbow-hued fistfuls in Brook’s winking idea of a conga line.
Brooks knows how to stage a laugh: The funniest interlude of the evening sends a choir of piñatas skidding across the stage as they appear to lip-synch Cyndi Lauper’s “True Colors.” But then Lee appears in black, with a baseball bat, to wreak piñata carnage. And after this mock-execution, something far more engrossing than any comedy skit commences.
Brooks lines the dancers across the front of the stage in black flamenco dresses, where they begin to swirl their arms in precise patterns. The music is Ravel’s “Bolero,” and your first instinct is to think Brooks can’t possibly pull this off. But the music continues its slow build, and so do Brooks’ canons and counterpoints and his unexpected new gestures that seem to illuminate all the minute wonders that have come before like a flash of light. And soon enough watching the paths of the dancers’ hands is like watching the paths of planets, like watching some kind of Nova science show where the workings of the universe leave you feeling very small and overwhelmed, and then—bang—it’s over.
Brooks’ dancers are as hypnotizing as his calibrated structures. Lee is the resident ingénue; Duran has the chiseled face of a runway model and a lanky grace, while Gish takes deadpan to the edge of self-parody. Brooks is a bit of a ham, not afraid to exchange a confidential glance with the audience. But Pauly tends to steal the eye. She’s as muscled as an Olympic rower, but glamorous, too; she played the “Bolero” section with the drama of a 1940’s silver screen diva.
And yet that final “Bolero” section would have stood stronger on its own. Like other “Piñata” segments, it was a cosmos unto itself, and the pressure of fitting it into the grand scheme of an extended skit only undermined its mysteries. Brooks seems to realize that the chromatic conceit that served him so well with the pink “Dance-o-Matic” and the green “Acre” is wearing a little thin. Monday night, at a Summerdance open rehearsal, the company showed phrases from his new work-in-progress. The movement was expansive, sweeping, even downright “dancey.” When an audience member asked if he’d “abandoned color,” Brooks said that he wanted to start creating without a design concept this time, to see where the movement leads him. Now that’s a party I want to be there to see.
July 13, 2005 · 11:55 AM · Dance · Comments (0)
The Festivals of Summer
San Francisco's West Wave Dance Festival returns this week. The Chronicle's Pink section had me talk with Heidi Schweiker, one of the standouts from last year's season:
"Heidi Schweiker punches the air with her shoulder, makes a thumbs-up and swings her arm, then takes quick steps backward like a sneaky cartoon character on rewind. The combination intrigues her; she stops and scribbles notes, does the steps again with notebook in hand.
She is 29 years old and working alone in a sunny studio at the San Francisco Dance Center. But it's easy to imagine the 10-year-old girl who once made dances in her living room, furniture pushed to the walls. Schweiker's face is round and doll-like, and her compact figure, though fit, might be described as bubbly. Her focused expression belies the cuteness. She bends in a half-lunge, touches hand to her forehead, lets her other arm slice in front of her chest as though to complete the sign of the cross. Is this movement for its own sake, or a cryptic gesture from some ancient ritual?
Either way, it's one of the most compelling reasons to catch the 14th annual West Wave Dance Festival, which begins this week and fills the rest of July with a sampling of the Bay Area's overwhelming array of dance talent. The festival has long been the mainstay of the summer dance calendar, tiding fans over till fall with works by local luminaries and fresh faces alike, giving new audiences a crash course in our region's panoply of styles.
But the programs have often been hit or miss, with a gem by ODC Dance co- Artistic Director KT Nelson following a formless dud by -- well, let's allow the earnest amateur to remain nameless. Fortunately, Executive Director Joan Lazarus has moved to a more tightly curated format in recent seasons, grouping emerging talents into "One Night Only!" evenings for the adventurous at ODC Theater, and banding proven dancemakers together for longer runs at the much larger Cowell. This year, there's a slate devoted to South Bay choreographers. Brand new, too, is an "All Dance/No Tech" night, with minimal lighting design and a roster of participants vetted by sharp-eyed Circo Zero director Keith Hennessy."
Click here for the full article.
I'm afraid I'll be missing most of the festival, though. I'm down south checking out a different dance fest--the delightful Summerdance Santa Barbara, which this year has recruited three New York groups: Brian Brooks Moving Company, Tamango Urban Tap, and AsZure and Artists. I'm also working intensively on my novel-in-progress, and therefore I'm torn: How much to write about the festival at the expense of moving full-speed ahead with my fiction? Last night's performance of Brian Brooks's "Pinata" was fabulous, a temptation not to work on the novel if ever there was one. I will probably post about "Pinata" tomorrow, but today moving ahead with a long-stalled chapter feels urgent.
July 10, 2005 · 02:46 PM · Dance · Comments (0)
Underlined
"Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case."
--Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
July 08, 2005 · 12:18 AM · Books · Comments (1)
The Majestic Muriel
San Francisco Ballet principal Muriel Maffre is writing a diary that will appear in the Chronicle during the company's tour to Paris. The paper asked me to describe Maffre's career with the company by way of introduction, and so I led with her intention to retire soon, which she has not kept secret:
"The San Francisco Ballet will have a tall order to fill if Muriel Maffre retires next year, and not just because the majestic principal dancer is 5 feet 10 inches. Elegant, intelligent and impossibly long-limbed, this chic Frenchwoman is only one among a clutch of international-caliber stars who have launched the company into ballet's big leagues, but she is irreplaceable."
Click here for the rest of my appreciation, and here for the first of Maffre's dispatches.
July 08, 2005 · 12:11 AM · Dance · Comments (0)
Americans in Paris
Allan Ulrich writes about San Francisco Ballet's trip to Paris (opening today) for the New York Times:
" AMERICAN dancers - an entire company of them - are descending on Paris this week, and while they will perform to Gershwin, it is not for a remake of "An American in Paris."
Instead they will be there for a new three-week festival, Les Étés de la Danse de Paris (Paris Dance Summers), which will be inaugurated with three world premieres on Tuesday by the San Francisco Ballet.
The festival will happen not in a Paris culture palace but outdoors, in the Marais district. As posters in Métro stations have proclaimed for months, the San Francisco Ballet will be the sole attraction at Les Étés de la Danse. As with any outdoor event, weather may be a problem, but the festival's director, Valéry Colin, said: "I will take the risk. Helgi is worth it." "
Click here for the full article.
July 05, 2005 · 10:46 AM · Dance · Comments (0)
Wheeldon Watching
San Francisco Ballet innaugurates a new festival--Les étés de la danse de Paris--next week with world premieres by Paul Taylor, Lar Lubovitch, and Christopher Wheeldon. The Chronicle will be carrying extensive coverage from the scene. In the meantime, they asked me to chat with Christopher Wheeldon as he worked on his new ballet, "Quarternary":
" "Sorry, I'm going to be munching my apple," Christopher Wheeldon says as he bursts into San Francisco Ballet's second-floor studio on a gloomy June afternoon. The British accent lends instant authority, but it's his body language that speaks volumes: purposeful stride, firm handshake.
"An apple a day keeps the block away," he sings with a teasing smile. And just like that, he's back at work, watching principal dancer Gonzalo Garcia hoist Katita Waldo into the air, exclaiming "Whee!" as Garcia spins her and sets her on the floor with a frustrated expression.
"That was late, but right," Wheeldon says, sharp eyes squinting and finger raised to lip. At 32, he could still pass for a dancer himself, with his lean frame and stylish goatee. He walks to the center to demonstrate the next section: a series of quick syncopated steps that grow larger and faster until he is leaping full-out. A sound like ripping Velcro punctures the quiet concentration of the room.
"Delightful," Wheeldon says. "A split in the pants."
Wheeldon has split a lot of pants lately. And if his rehearsal antics aren't quite as outre as those of Mark Morris, no one in the dance world would be surprised to learn that Wheeldon's demeanor is tilting in that direction. Just as Morris emerged in the '80s as the savior of modern dance, Wheeldon has, since 2000, been tagged as the great hope of classical ballet. And he's busy. "
Click here for the full story.
July 01, 2005 · 09:02 AM · Dance · Comments (2)
