k. terumi shorb

Foreign Exposure: The Social Climber Abroad

admin — Mon, 28 May 2007 12:57:00 +0000

Lauren Mechling and Laura Moser’s third book in the Social Climber series finds the 10th grade heroine, Miriam “Mimi” Schulman, spending a summer in Europe, continuing her high school journalistic exploits. The popularity of the series is evident in the relatable characters. Complete with excerpts from email correspondence, the “realness” of the characters mixed with the glamour of the narrative makes an excellent foray into youths’ pleasure reading.

The plot takes the reader through Mimi’s summer travels. First, she goes to Berlin to partake in a dysfunctional relationship with her professor mother and her mother’s boyfriend. After undergoing nanny hell taking care of two eight-year-old twin boys, who are allergic to everything under the sun, Mimi flees Berlin by herself (and unbeknownst to her mother) to a safe haven of a high school friend named Lily staying in London. There, Mimi interns at a gossip magazine, thanks to Lily’s rich and powerful connections. Through a series of mishaps, boy attraction and moral dilemmas, Mimi manages to run away from some problems while resolving others.

An easy read and generally well-written, I recommend this book with some caveats. First, the dialogue of all British characters is often stilted and awkward. Although it is written from an American perspective, the awkwardness can be distracting at some points. Second, from a feminist perspective the story does little to address ideas of empowerment, solidarity or accountability. As part of a young adult a genre, I understand the book’s aim to create a glamorous yet believable plot. At the same time, most of the character development and plot turns focus on Mimi’s relationships with boys. Even though most of the book takes place in Europe, it begins and ends with her contemplations about the boys and men that surround her at home. This makes me wonder, why did Mimi need to take a trip to Europe? While Mimi’s flight from Berlin was an impressive feat of youthful female independence, “girl power” even, the jet-set, upper-crust context just reinforces the notion that the only way for girls to pursue their dreams is through men and money.

I wish I could recommend this book more enthusiastically, since there are many elements of it that are charming and likeable. However, it does very little to stretch or challenge the young adult genre for young women, and comes across as superficial overall. While I can understand its appeal to teenage girls, parents and librarians might have to supplement it with more empowering and complex fare.

Written by: k. terumi shorb, May 28th 2007

Throws Like a Girl Rocks! (2/8-2/24/2007)

admin — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 01:53:00 +0000

By Rude Mechanicals

Austin, Texas

The Austin Rude Mechanicals (or Rude Mechs) presented its fourth “Throws Like a Girl” (TLAG) series this year from February 8-24 at the Austin Off Center. Originally produced in conjunction with the University of Texas Theater and Dance Department, Rude Mechs has made the TLAG series a fixture in Austin’s theater scene since 2000. Designed to showcase stellar women performance artists with the likes of Carmelita Tropicana and Peggy Shaw, the TLAG series for this year focused on performance artists who straddle the genres of performance art, theater and music: lesbian rock legend of Two Nice Girls, Gretchen Phillips; author of Godspeed and Tribe 8 front wo/man, Lynnee Breedlove; and formerly of queercore band Bitch and Animal (“Drag King Bar,” anyone?), Bitch.

TLAG offered a strong formal consistency while also presenting diverse stylistic material. The three performances all drew from first person accounts, as solo shows often do. They also shared a common lineage—all converging at the Michigan Womyn’s one time or another. But the performative structures and lineage is where the similarities end.

While Phillips’s “Don’t Stop Believing” had a casual, conversational style using rock, gospel and country as musical influences, Breedlove’s “One Freak Show: Less Rock, More Hilarity” was more of a standup routine with punk and hip-hop music solos mixed in. Still Bitch’s “Bitch” drew from tap dancing, classical violin performance, and a sound that revealed Bitch’s strong affiliation with Ani DiFranco’s Righteous Babe Records label.

Phillips’s Austin fame delivered quite handsomely to a standing-room-only house. Phillips began her show telling the audience that the show is about “Sex and My Parents” and then proceeded to play a cover of Britney Spears’s “Baby One More Time”—much to the delight of the sing-along audience. Interspersing comical anecdotes about, yes, sex and her parents, with covers and Phillips favorites such as “Swimming Pool” and “Reluctant Butch.” Phillips’s performance style, while informal, is disarmingly vulnerable—something that probably helped catapult her and her old band, Two Nice Girls, to queer music sainthood.

Breedlove’s performance did continue along the agit-prop queerpunk vain that Tribe 8 became known for. When discussing the politics of “passing” as male, Breedlove narrated strategies of bathroom politics, culminating in hir urinating into a bucket using a small contraption stowed in hir pocket. S/he also shared the many ways of chest binding, where s/he managed to show us hir bare chest multiple times. Despite Breedlove covering what seemed to be overly done trans-boy/butch/genderqueer topics, hir sidesplitting humor and acute narrative style shed new light on these subjects.

Bitch was a surprise, perhaps because her performance persona is not “bitchy” at all. She discussed ideas of childhood, violence, and the fact that she spent most of her early years almost legally blind—before someone had the wisdom to buy her a pair of glasses. Particularly interesting was Bitch’s portrayals of her British mother, which showed her performative virtuosity. When Bitch would enact a solo dialogue with her “mother,” not only was her British accent spot on, but also her body language and facial mannerisms evoked Julie Andrews in Victor/Victoria.

Overall, TLAG delivered yet another excellent series, highlighting what seems to be a developing trend of rock/pop/punk and theatrical genres blending and blurring into each other. Any of the performers would be a treat to see, but presented as a series, it was truly a force with which to reckoned.

Written by: k. terumi shorb, April 12th 2007

Uncoded Woman

admin — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 14:10:00 +0000

By Anne-Marie Oomen

Milkweed Editions

Anne-Marie Oomen’s first book of poetry, Uncoded Woman, is a narrative collection centering around a displaced Southern woman finding meaning and direction in a resort town on Lake Michigan.

The “uncoding” in the title refers to a persistent theme throughout the book. The prologue very simply defines the International Code of Signals—the maritime form of communication that involves flags and pennants with shapes. Each poem title is given in both its code signal form as well as its internationally recognized meaning. While a somewhat esoteric pretext for the poems that follow, we are thrust into the life of Bead and her boyfriend/husband, Barn, who fish, hunt, curse and steal as means of survival.

Bead’s voice is strong, yet vulnerable. Although unclear what, it is evident that she is running from something, finding inadequate but needed respite in a town usually overrun with tourists. Throughout the narrative, Oomen reveals glimmers of Bead’s past: death, flight, her yearning for Southern food and customs, her perpetual fear of water, possible sexual violation and definite violence.

As with most poetry, the text is extremely dense, with a myriad of metaphors, both sacred and secular. It shows a kind of Dorothy Allison imagery mixed with a Rita Dove skill for richness and brevity. The references to the “codes” are no novelty or hook; they pull each story together, and it is abundantly clear how each imagined communiqué relates to the “down home” nature of the text. Oomen exercises an immense restraint in depicting her characters and scenery where a lesser poet would have been tempted to fall back onto stereotypes or predictable tropes. It reads earthy and vernacular, yet the verse is nothing short of virtuosic.

In fact, the virtuosity itself was both the most enjoyable and most distracting aspect of the book. At certain points, the soul of the story becomes overly subdued in the beauty of the language. While it is clear that Oomen attempts to convey the inner conflict of Bead’s life, somehow ending the book with a question seems to take away from the immense strength and drive to survive that the reader is invited to witness throughout. I cannot help but wonder whether Oomen was over-strategizing at this point, trying not to come off as too pushy or trite.

Regardless of this small critique, the book is a strong piece of poetry that I would recommend to anyone searching for an excellent portrait of a Southern/Midwest woman trying to survive.

Written by: k. terumi shorb, March 24th 2007