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halloweendailynews · 6 years

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A new Halloween movie is finally upon us, and it was well worth the nine-year wait, as director David Gordon Green and his co-writers Danny McBride and Jeff Fradley have delivered one of the best horror sequels ever made, in a timely story of unresolved trauma and the return of The Bogeyman.

I’ve watched Halloween 2018 three times as of this writing, and I enjoyed it more with each viewing, and so after a few weeks of thinking about it, it’s time to dive in to my full review. In this case, the following does contain quite a few spoilers, because, honestly, you’ve had almost a month to see the film. (If you’re reading this for my recommendation as to whether you should see the film, just know that I highly recommend you go see it right now. …And then come back here and read the following review).

Let’s start with the score, the most visceral link between this new film and director/composer John Carpenter’s 1978 original Halloween. Carpenter’s new score for the 2018 film not only brings updated versions of the classic themes we all know and love, but also channels all of the best parts of other classic Carpenter soundtracks. By the time Daniel Davies’ electric guitar first screams in the film, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up.

The first thing we hear over the studio logos is a dark, intensely foreboding intro. The revisited themes are all familiar but now have a new, relentlessly driving urgency, hurtling viewers toward an epic, inevitable climax.

My favorite track from the 2018 soundtrack, “Prison Montage” creates an atmosphere of complete dread for what’s about to happen, while on screen shots of Michael boarding the bus transporting the patients of Smith’s Grove Sanitarium are intercut with Laurie Strode seeing The Shape for presumably the first time in 40 years from a distance. And there’s the haunting voice of Dr. Loomis (voiced by Colin Mahan), not the voice of Donald Pleasence that we remember, but a more weary and hollow, distorted recording of the Loomis we once knew, absolutely resigned to the fact that “It has to die.”

From the opening credits to Laurie Strode’s eventual reunion with Michael Myers, the film does an amazing job of subverting our horror-ingrained Halloween-obsessed expectations while at the same time paying significant homage to the very tropes that the original Halloween created 40 years ago.

And how can fans not love all of the Easter eggs, so many loving references to the entire Halloween franchise?

P.J. Soles, who starred in Halloween ’78 as Lynda, has a classy off screen cameo as the voice of young Allyson Strode’s unseen high school teacher, and the devil costume worn by Oscar, played by Drew Scheid, is a callback to the she-devil costume memorably worn by Samantha, played by Tamara Glynn, in Halloween 5.

And Laurie Strode’s bedroom, where much of the finale takes place, is itself an exact recreation of the Doyle house bedroom where the first film ends.

We knew from the trailers that the Silver Shamrock masks from Halloween III would make an appearance, and it was indeed amazingly surreal to see, this being the first time that Season of the Witch has been acknowledged in any way since “Mrs. Blankenship” was featured in 1995’s The Curse of Michael Myers (Curse writer Daniel Farrands told me that “Mrs Blakenship” is “Minnie Blankenship” in this interview).

And of course Allyson’s asshole boyfriend Cameron Elam, played by Dylan Arnold, is the son of longtime Haddonfield asshole Lonnie Elam, who bullied poor Tommy Doyle in the first film and was last seen getting scared away from the Myers House by Dr. Loomis.

Those are just a few of the many shout-outs to past Halloween movies that are featured all throughout Halloween 2018, which only enhance the film’s re-watchability.

And speaking of doctors, let’s talk about Dr. Sartain, played by Haluk Bilginer, who we told you would be a new Loomis-like character following Nick Castle’s Q&A in February. I’d still say that Laurie is really the “new Loomis”, but Sartain serves as sort of an abbreviated, extreme version of what these new filmmakers see as likely happening to Dr. Loomis, at least to some level. Loomis was admittedly obsessed with Michael after just 15 years with him, and Sartain is certainly obsessed with him after (presumably) close to 40 years with him.

And while Sartain’s twist is definitely the biggest WTF moment of the film, even that in itself is a bit of an Easter egg too, isn’t it? Halloween is easily the crown jewel of all modern horror franchises, but it has a long history of WTF moments throughout the last four decades, some that have been eventually embraced over the years (Halloween III), and others not so much (The Man in Black), but Sartain’s WTF moment is not really that huge when compared to all of the others. And you have to admit, you did not see that coming. (We were all expecting Ben Tramer Version 2.0, right?)

On repeat viewings, you’ll notice more of how Sartain allows, almost urges, journalists Aaron and Dana to provoke his most notorious patient, and on the eve of his transfer to a new facility where the doctor does not want to think about Michael being. And there’s the odd coincidence that the transfer takes place on the night before Halloween. And you will rightly wonder just how much of what transpires next was part of Sartain’s plans all along.

This is my favorite portrayal of the Laurie Strode character ever put on screen. In a career-defining performance that more than anything honors the legacy of one of the greatest survivors in movie history, Jamie Lee Curtis has never been better. This is a heartbreaking portrait of a woman who has never fully developed into a whole person because of the horrific events that happened to her on Halloween night in 1978. And when it starts happening again, 40 years later, her worst fears, and at the same time a chance at rewriting her own narrative’s ending, are realized.

As Laurie’s granddaughter Allyson, Andi Matichak is very much the modern version of what Laurie was in 1978, instantly likable in her everyday manner, understandably questionable of both sides of her mother and grandmother’s strained relationship, looking beyond the today that her friends live in to try to find her place in a larger picture, very much on the verge of adulthood.

And The Shape? James Jude Courtney’s portrayal does exactly what he told me he did (read our interview here), channeling the space created by Nick Castle in 1978, inhabited by Dick Warlock in 1981 and all the other actors since, to tap into the essence of the simple, focused, violent existence, rather than humanity, of Michael Myers. It’s all there, from the head tilt to the walk, and when fused with Nick Castle’s recorded breathing and cameos behind the mask, it makes for a damn perfect portrayal of The Shape.

Michael has never been deadlier, creatively brutal enough to evoke memories of Rob Zombie-directed kills, and yet silently cunning, the trickster that creatively displayed the dead bodies of Laurie’s friends for her to find in 1978, who enjoys terrorizing his victims as much if not more than actually murdering them. And he’s back to being a random source of tragedy, the kind of tragedy that we see hitting random people every day on the nightly news in real life in 2018.

The subtle yet ever-present social commentary threaded throughout the film is another tribute to Carpenter, but also a testament to the decades old truth that horror always reflects the current fears of the audience.

The new mask, an aged update on the original, created by a team led by Christopher Nelson (read our interview here), Vincent Van Dyke, and Justin Mabry, is haunting, soulful, and creepy as hell.

Over the years, I’m sure the biggest criticism about this film will be that it is essentially a remake of Halloween H20 , which it is, though I’d say it is much more a third version of Halloween II, and in a franchise that has already done this disregarding of previous chapters, it’s yet another choose-your-own-adventure option to take following the first film. No matter where you place it in official canon, it’s undeniable that Halloween 2018 is one of the best sequels in the franchise, and I’d say one of the best sequels, period.

A totally entertaining tribute that honors 40 years of Halloween, Michael Myers is back, and Haddonfield has never felt more like home.

Halloween 2018 is currently in theaters.

[Read our interview with Rhian Rees on the fear and female power of Halloween 2018 here.]

[Read our interview with James Jude Courtney on playing Michael Myers in Halloween 2018 here.]

[Read our interview with Nick Castle on reprising Michael Myers in Halloween 2018 here.]

[Read our interview with Christopher Nelson on making Michael Myers’ mask for Halloween 2018 here.]

I think the new film will ignore everything after Part 1. Laurie is the new Loomis, claiming for 40 years He’s coming back. Then He does.

— Halloween Daily News (@HalloweenDaily) September 17, 2017

For more Halloween news, follow @HalloweenDaily.

'Halloween' 2018 Brings Michael Myers Back Home [Review] A new Halloween movie is finally upon us, and it was well worth the nine-year wait, as director David Gordon Green and his co-writers Danny McBride and Jeff Fradley have delivered one of the best horror sequels ever made, in a timely story of unresolved trauma and the return of The Bogeyman.

#Halloween 2018 #Michael Myers

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aleatoryalarmalligator · 7 years

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Life Story Part 87

I had these two Uncut magazine subscriptions that had interviews with Ray Davies in them about four years apart, and I often times enjoyed looking through them over and over, and reading the articles, sifting through and memorizing each and every interesting detail I could find, every personal story about The Kinks that I could find. Ray and Dave had an older sister named Renee who had died. In and of itself it held little significance that I shared the name of their beloved older sister, and yet it still meant something to me for some reason. I always wanted to cut the pictures out of my dearly beloved magazines, but wouldn't let myself do it. The Kinks had come to Lewiston Idaho of all places at the bitter end of their career. I had scowered through all their tour dates from that year, and as far as I could see, Lewiston Idaho of all places might have been when the Davies brothers had finally had enough of each other – growing so tired of seeing each other that they split up what was left of The Kinks forever to go solo, to silently go about the business of insulting one another to the media in subtle ways – mostly Dave Davies. When I had found out about The Kinks having played a show in Lewiston, I had my father talk to someone who had worked on their lights in town, an they said that Ray and Dave had been livid and furious at one another. It all seemed so weird to me, but I imagine that some if not all of this was extremely idealistic sign seeking. I mean, what could any of it all really mean. It was a personal coincidence to me alone. To the rest of the world, it was just where it happened to end.

I ended up cutting my hair as Ray Davies had his hair back in the late 60's, with the short bangs and the layered short hair. It was kind of a strange short lived English hair style for men in that very specific time in music. It didn't look the same on me. I knew what I was doing. I had looked at his hair for hours in the pictures I had of him, and when I came out having cut my hair precisely as his hair had been, I pretended that I had done it on accident because I didn't want everyone thinking I was a lunatic. And I was, but I kind of wasn't. Unlike Eugene, I had no interest in hooking up with Ray Davies at all as he was/is old enough to be my grandfather and he had been too old for the me in 2011 back in 1978 – unless I could get a time machine and even then I was fairly certain that we weren't compatible, and my affections for Ray Davies didn't really sway me in the direction of wanting to be physically near him or to even talk to him even though I thought he was absolutely beautiful. It's like I wanted to be him, but I wasn't trying to actually be him. I just wanted to be a little bit like him, or maybe I felt like I was a little bit like him, or I identified with something about him only found him to be a master at expressing that something in a way I was not. The specifics on that were blurry.

In order to improve my social skills, I read through the famous book 'How to Win Friends and Influence People'. I read it three times, as the book suggests. I read it despite and because of the chaos that ensued all around me. It was extremely helpful and insightful. It as basic as all get out, but it wasn't wrong about people either. I needed all the help I could get and the information in the book was precisely the kind of stuff I needed to be hearing. I wasn't good at peopling. This people business of making things happen in the world didn't come naturally. I was going to have to work for every morsel of people skills I had. Absolutely nothing came naturally to me. Even saying hi was an enormous question mark in my head.

My mother had started to save the money she made to move out. She had three thousand dollars. One day, we went out for groceries, came back and the three thousand was gone. Roxanne had bust in and stolen it. For the first week and a half after Roxanne had gotten out of her month of time in rehab, she had been enthusiastic, clear minded and ready for a life of sobriety. She was in rainbow land. And then it all came crashing down and she was back to using and every bit as desperate as ever. She came in one day, and I laughed and punched her arm lightly and affectionately, and she had suddenly become hostile. She threatened to throw me to the ground and beat me to a bloody pulp. It was sudden, and I was alarmed. And I knew she was back to using again. She went over to our mom and started telling her how she was going to lay 'that bitch' out – me. My mom looked at her nervously and attempted to explain that it had been a good natured sort of touch, not an attempt at a fist fight, but Roxanne seemed to not comprehend the gesture as being anything less than hostile. And soon enough we had to tell her to leave.

That three thousand dollars was not the first either. Sagen came in and stole the next sixteen hundred my mom saved up three weeks later. It was like the two of them were watching our house. They knew how to get in and out of Wes's. The look on my mom's face was horrifyingly sad when she looked around and suddenly realized that all the money she had been working for was gone. I often times lacked sympathy for much of my mother's outbursts, but this was a sincere and horrifying sadness. She actually began wailing. It felt like nothing was going right for anyone. Between Roxanne and Sagen my mother had essentially lost two months worth of wages. It was all in their arm probably before we even knew the money wasn't there anymore. If we hadn't had food stamps we would have been starving. Later on, Roxanne or Sagen or both, came in and also stole some rare collectors coins that Wes had owned. My mother never told Wes as he never looked at his coin collection – but it had been well over another five hundred lost and we all knew why.

At one point I remember the sink stopped working, and so we had to do the dishes in the handicap shower. It was very difficult. Allison attempted in vain to make friends. The people who she attracted were strange and nothing seemed to stick. She met these twin girls one day who were around her age that lived in our area. Both of them were very friendly, but not particularly bright. Allison remembers going to their house and watching them play with Barbies. Allison didn't play with toys anymore so she just watched and was amiable. What was strange about these girls is that they were very childlike, and also very unabashedly trying to get pregnant and make babies, which they both succeeded in soon enough so I guess good on them? And yet they still played with toys.

At night, Allison, David and I would walk around. We generally slept till the afternoon, or whenever my mother was awake. We hoped to avoid her as much as possible, and on the rare occasion where she had put down her farmville to get some rest, we were all very grateful. We listened to a lot of The Smiths and Joy Division. Properly speaking, we three aren't true goths, but to Lewiston we probably were. And admittedly, David and I in particular do have some level of that aesthetic ingrained in our nature. If I were to go cheap internet quiz on the matter – I would say I was 25% goth, but if post punk is the general term being used superficially we were both 40%. I also liked to think of myself as some kind of Lo-fi subcategory of indie that was folk-punky that encompassed mostly musicians I felt like I could relate to like Kimya Dawson or Jeffrey Lewis (a beloved favorite of mine). And at the same time I sometimes liked to imagine that if 60's baroque pop was a musical movement that had more of a distinct cult following like goth in the eighties, I was a good deal of whatever that as well.

Anyway, in Lewiston I guess we weren't the biggest goths the world had ever seen since there was a rumor going around that there were teenagers pretending to or believing they were vampires who were biting people who walked alone at night. It seemed intriguing so we all went out every night hoping to meet the vampires. For all we knew though, that rumor could have been about us taking our nightly walks, we would never know. We decided to playfully defend our position by pretending that we were a group of The Cramps inspired psychobilly freaks called The Heebie Jeebies. I knew there was something called that already but I never bothered or felt curious enough to discover what that something was. Basically, we were these untouchable psychotic psychobilly freaks who drove around in old punked out hearses, played insane violent car games, messing up anyone who got in our way at night. We stayed up all night and slept all day. We were a gang and there were others. We invented characters. I felt influenced by some of the crazier tunes I had heard of Screamin' Jay Hawkins as well as Reverend Horton Heat and offbeat 60's horror. I liked the demented obscurity of it. We liked to make jokes that we were going to find those vampire kids and mangle them. It was a great way to pass the time as we walked for two hours through Lewiston at night.

One night around one in the morning. David was angry about something, and had just begun to drift. Allison was almost asleep as well. I was still awake, capturing a rare moment for myself in which everyone in the house was more or less asleep – a time at which I have always felt the most safe – when I started hearing the sound of pouring liquid. It sounded incredibly loud in the house. I looked over at a small closet where Allison and I kept most of our belongings and it was now heavily pelting on everything. It smelled terrible. Confused, I woke my mother up. She shouted at me, but I led her to the closet area anyway, and showed her the smelly liquid raining down on everything Allison owned and some things I owned as well. It was coming from the upstairs. My mother immediately got a ghostly disgusted look. Wes apparently had a giant container that held several gallons of urine. It was something that prevented him from having to attempt to get on his toilet which was hard for him. In his sleep he had knocked the container over, and what was raining on our stuff was his days old urine.

My mom was angry at first, and went and cleaned up the mess from the upstairs immediately. Allison had awoken to see that most of her posters and a great deal of her possessions were soaked and beyond repair. On top of everything else my sister had to go through, being kicked out for essentially no reason and so forth, seeing a lot of her stuff destroyed was rather disheartening. I lost a good deal of my paper items as well. I had to throw away some wood furniture. But I kept most of my books where I slept in my coffin so my losses weren't as great. My mother told us she would clean up the mess – since I guess his urine had some kind of disease in it – but after a few days it was clear she was simply refusing to do it. I didn't think Allison, after having lost all of that stuff, should have had to have cleaned it all up by herself, but that is what ended up happening. We weren't exactly mad at Wes. It had been due to his laziness that this had happened, but I could only imagine how embarrassed and gross he felt upstairs. After that night, I grew suspicious and worried about urine rain coming down on me in the night. I tried to cover everything up better.

Sometimes I was beginning to feel like I couldn't take it anymore. I would never get out of this mess. I would never leave. My attempts at self improvement at the end of the day only amounted to me feeling that much more dissatisfied than I would have been had I not tried making the most of myself. I wondered about the darker avenues one could take to leave their family. Sell myself as a slave? Obviously, it was an unappealing thought – not one that I was going to follow through with – but what was it going to fucking take? Sarah-Mae was equally worried. She felt like there should be some kind of law against the way we were living. She talked to her mother about it, and they both were strongly pressuring me to call social services on my mom. I didn't feel quite right about it. While she had been a miserable person to be around, was what she was doing actually illegal? And I already knew it wasn't going to work. Interestingly, Wes was best friends with one of the number one people you talk to concerning social services. It was one of his few friends who seemed to honestly like and care about Wes. And while Sarah was trying to convince me to turn my mom in, she was up there serving this very fellow. He was in our house at that moment. There was no way it would have worked. And I remember feeling this vacant frustration with Sarah's methods of doing things. Ninety percent of the time, she took a very reasonable and pragmatic approach to solving problems. These approaches often times assumed there were no stipulations or psychological costs to the next step. In a lot of ways, it was good for me to listen to her, even when it went against my nature because I knew full and well that I could be my own worst enemy in regards to how I approached my life.

But every once in awhile, Sarah would, with the very best of intentions offer an explanation, a solution, or an assumption that felt redundant and sort of senseless. I wasn't mad at her for this. While it's true, she helped me talk through and work through a lot of my technical issues in life and she was right, I also knew that she wasn't god and couldn't fix my life. I think the disconnect was happening because she couldn't quite balance out being a friend who suffered with me, and being a friend who disconnected from my issues to help me remotely. In order to help me out in a remote sense, she couldn't let herself stand in my shoes. And at times I felt very alone, and misunderstood. Sometimes all I needed was the sense that I wasn't alone. And sometimes in order to solve a deeper seated issue, I felt like for instance with calling social services, it felt like she wasn't reading the situation clearly. Because even when I explained to her that the social service top guy was actually having supper upstairs, she almost had this remote sense that I should call him anyway, even though he knew us all by name already. I tried to explain that it didn't make sense, and she gave me this answer of 'well, you never know unless you try'. Allison, David and all knew that trying would be a bad idea, so that was never tried.

David was getting pretty terrible again. The stressful living situation was getting to him – bringing out his mental instability. I tried everything in my power not to fight with him, but he would emotionally attack us all. His fights with my mother got so bad – involving him going and breaking Wes's things and threatening to do worse, that she ended up calling the police on him. He was yelling and the entire scene was horrifying. Allison and I were afraid to leave the house. We sat on our beds fearfully and quietly crying. When the police officer came to the house, David was frenzically pacing around. If we so much as looked at him he would come up to us like he was going to hurt us. I remember the officer walking down the dingy little steps into the basement. David had retired to his bed area. It seemed strange to see a police officer in the basement, he was very out of place.

He started talking to David, telling him what happens to kids like him who refuse to go to school, who are violent and aggressive. For the most part he was telling David a specific kind of truth, but I felt there was an insensitive assholish aspect to this officer. What he essentially was telling us was 'adults are always right, your parents are always right, the world is a fair place and our misfortunes were brought upon us by ourselves'. David in many respects was at times someone who I had emotional difficulty feeling openly warm towards. I loved him to death, but you couldn't let yourself get hurt and you always knew that in the end he would hurt you and himself. But it seemed unjust to me to simply think that David was obstinately choosing this for himself, like he had ordered his emotional state out of a magazine arbitrarily as some kind of meddlesome fun. It was clear that he was miserable and looking at David like he was no victim seemed empty and rude. It was that same kind of attitude that had always prevented me from wanting to seek out help when I had needed it. If you live in a home and society that feels you deserve the bad things that are happening to you, then you internalize those bad things and it's sometimes easier for you to become cognitively dissonant and accept it.

I was relieved that the cop was there, as for the moment it had at least shut David down. I can't say I liked this cop much. He then started looking around the room and telling David how lucky all three of us were to live in this tiny room. Even my mother, who prided herself as some kind of tireless martyr was confused. While it was true that we had a fair amount of movies, books, stacks of albums and posters and pictures all over our wall, the idea that we were living well was a joke. I was personally offended. How could you look at Allison's stained pad on the floor, with no sheet and think of her as lucky? Would he seriously subject his children to this disaster? Or himself? I thought not. It seemed like an additional slap to face for all of us.

Sarah was having personal issues at home. I look back and I think some of her fixation on helping me might have been due to the strain of not knowing how to end her relationship. She didn't ever seem to look forward to going home. She seemed almost like Alex's mother sometimes. They didn't talk all that much either. They still seemed connected but there didn't seem to be a lot there. And Sarah didn't talk about him all that much. Neither one of them were the types to explode or fight out loud. What happened instead between them was almost an unspoken truce of resentment and indifference that translated into an empty form of polite acceptance of one another, that to me seemed almost worse than fighting. But maybe it was just that bad. There was so little passion between them, their relationship was so much like stale soda at this point that even fighting would have meant more than they shared. Or maybe they had simply both betrayed one another. Not in any theatrical display of abandonment or betrayal, but they had given up on their relationship but didn't want to talk about it, and so they continued to live with one another, both too proud and uncertain of their futures to know what else to do. I couldn't help but feel in retrospect, that they would be better off cheating on one another. It would have been more honest at least.

Then Sarah started telling me stuff. She had found three bottles of cough syrup in the back of the pick up that they had been given to drive from her mother. Alex had famously abused cough syrup when Sarah first knew him, but he had by all accounts quit for her. Now with this discovery that he had chugged three bottles of syrup, new questions sprang up. At first Alex denied that the bottles were his or that he had anything to do with it, but then he accepted that he was caught and told her it had just been that one time – no harm no foul. Sarah was embarrassed to tell me about it all – but she finally relented and let me know. She seemed disappointed. She was afraid I would see her relationship as a failure. She was afraid of the idea that her years spent with Alex had been a mistake. She didn't know what to do with him, but she felt weak without him.

And then soon after, she opened her piggy bank by her desk and found forty dollars missing. She was very upset about that. They quarreled. Alex felt that Sarah was obsessed with money. Sarah made it seem like money in her approach to the situation, but I knew Sarah, and the truth of the matter was she felt disrespected and she didn't trust Alex. Being mad at Alex at this point gave her an avenue to channel her distaste for being with him. She wasn't attracted to him. She didn't even seem to care if they spent any time with one another. She clearly was over him, but neither one felt like they could end it. So a fight about this stolen forty dollars was the first push towards the end.

I remember talking to Sarah about it outside of my mother's house. She drove out to Lewiston and we went out to a restaurant to discuss it. Then she talked more about it with me out by the curb. The sky was gray. We were leaning on her car. She didn't want me to tell anyone that Alex had stolen from her, or that she had found the cough syrup bottles, so I kept her secret. I didn't want to be the manipulative friend who always tries to encourage their friends to end their relationships and go single. But I knew that she wanted to hear it. In the end, she decided not to. Her reasons weren't all too romantic. She felt like she knew Alex too well to let him go. She felt like he was a nicer person than her in certain ways she wasn't giving him credit for. She felt like she might be able to force herself to be in love with him again if she could just try harder. And she was afraid that if she wanted to be a musician, her skills were not enough. Alex and her still hadn't done anything serious music wise, but it was true that Alex was skilled. He could play three or four instruments, and he had written songs that were half decent. Could she really let go of someone that talented? And most importantly, the basement still needed remodeling. They couldn't just leave her mother's basement without finishing it.

I tried to explain to her that all the things she saw in him that she didn't want to let go of, she could still maintain as a friend. They could move away from one another, and Alex and her, with the friendship they still had, could still play music. It's uncommon but not unheard of for exes to play music or work together. She could still visit him. But his life would be his life and her life would be hers. She didn't like the idea, and didn't want to make a decision. She was too afraid of what that might mean for her. She had been with Alex for six years, and the prospect of standing alone (though I would argue she was already doing that), caused existential dread.

David's outbursts were getting worse. All of us felt we were walking on egg shells. And there was nowhere to go. The best I could do was hide behind my pile of books, and hope to not make eye contact. My sympathetic nervous system was not given breaks. And the same amount of daydreaming involved with keeping myself sane was also the same amount of daydreaming that would require I give up on my physical self entirely. So I would lay in bed, and I could not entirely let myself shut down to ignore him. I felt like an animal trapped in a corner, even when it wasn't aimed at me – and it often wasn't. It was aimed randomly at everyone, but generally it was my mother who fought with him the most. Usually it involved trying to get David to go to school. He was pushing things. It started feeling like something very violent and brutal was going to happen.

One morning, my mom was trying to tell David to go to school. By my assessment, she wasn't being unreasonable, yet. She told David to do something he didn't want to do, and suddenly he had become vicious and anything could happen. Allison had gone to school already, so it was my mother, myself and David down there. There was this awkward silence and we all knew that David was about to explode. I was rapidly trying to calibrate myself to this outburst that I knew was coming. My blood was flowing, I was having troubles breathing. I kept reminding myself to stay out of it by any means necessary. I tried to remind myself that I was in control of myself.

He started screaming at my mother, calling her a cunt and a whore and completely dehumanizing her. It felt murderous and sick. I couldn't take it anymore. It was too much like my father had made me feel. I stepped up and started telling David to knock it off, that our mother had only been polite to him and his reaction was insane. I said this calmly at first. I had tricked myself momentarily to believe I was not mad. I had jumped in, I think, assuming that I could maintain a calm face, and David could freak out and only get the mirror in his face as it had no reaction on me. But then he turned this argument entirely at me. He began calling me fat, worthless. I arrogantly tried to deflect these statements. I had only lost three pounds in that entire month and I was feeling pretty bad about it. And as I stood there taking his insults, I realized too late that my skin was too thin for this.

As he continued to call me a fat cunt, I suddenly felt this rise in me – this need to destroy what was hurting me. There was nothing else around us. Only him – or some version of him that I hated with every element of my being, and me. I felt like I was going to die if I didn't fight for my life. The sound went out of my ears. The next thing I know I was on top of him punching him repeatedly in the face as hard as I could. I couldn't stop, holding his head down to continue punching him. I didn't intend on stopping. I intended to punch until there was nothing left. Distantly, I could hear my mother crying and begging me to stop. It distracted me, and she pleaded with me 'RENEE, HE'S MY SON!!' This hit me for a moment. I looked down at David's swollen face. It's one of the most horrible pitiful sights I have ever seen in my life. His eyes were empty and almost dead with pain. I'd never seen anything quite like it. He was accepting these punches. It was spiraling down into something deep inside of him. He wasn't fighting back. I had destroyed something. I was breaking him, I was beating some creature full of shame. He wasn't just the enemy. He was the little boy I had helped raise. I probably punched him thirty times before I stopped. I stopped, realizing what I had done, and I ran out of the house. I never wanted to go back again.

In the moment, I had felt powerful. It's an ugly thing to grasp, that breaking of boundaries, that reclaiming of something for myself that I had never had before. I had felt this sense of justice and liberation and power that nothing had ever made me feel. Maybe psychologically I wasn't just punching him. Maybe I had been punching everyone in my life who had ever knocked me down spanning from early childhood. I had always been such a meek person on the receiving end of life. What he reduced it all to, and what he made me feel was a condensed conduit to all those feelings of being victimized and weak. And I don't remember deciding to punch him. If I had made the decision, I never would have chosen to do something like that to David.. I knew lived in the same shit world that I did, only he had less armor than me. He couldn't recede into the day world quite like I could. He had no savior in his life or friend like I did Sarah. The world was a dark and insecure place. And reality was ugly. He had been horrible to me, Allison and my mother – I won't deny that he was a monster at times, but he was also someone I loved and knew to have an enormous heart. He was very young, and nobody had cared enough to see him truly, or understand. And I had probably made the world so much more shittier for him, perhaps permanently. I had betrayed and broken some fundamental boundary. I had probably broken his heart.

The feeling of power of course abandoned me as soon as I found myself walking around down the dirty side roads of Lewiston. My hand hurt. I hadn't prepared my fist to become a weapon, and I had broken a few of my fingers in the process. My arm was swollen and throbbing. There was this inexplicable smell of suffering all around me. It had all happened so fast. One second I had been thinking of other things, the next I was trying to kill someone with my hands. Cars drove by and were indifferent. I felt myself feeling lost, and panicked, hideous. Reality seemed heightened and yet faded. And here I thought life had been getting better – here I thought I had been an instrument of self improvement. Here I was 'winning friends and influencing people'. Passerby passengers gawked at me as I cried. I probably looked crazy. Sarah didn't work that day, else I would have walked to her work and waited for her to get off. I was alone, and this was the world that I was trapped in. And I had done something now that I could never take back. And I was alone in that decision.

I did eventually come back. I opened the screen door and slipped through, hoping to see my mother first. David was in his bed. I detected no life from him, though there was that now familiar strange feeling of deep suffering I couldn't put a name to. The corner he slept in seemed darker than normal, as if he were sucking the light out of it. I had created a black hole. My mother looked at me from her laptop. Her eyes were accusing, and yet besides themselves. I don't remember what I said to her. By this point, perhaps we were beyond words. She wasn't mad at me. She was disassociating. It was too much. She was lost deeply in the electronic drug of her laptop. I tip toed to the other side of the bedroom, David on one end, I on the other. I let the black emptiness sink into me as I lay down in my book coffin. Allison came home, and I could hear my mother whispering to her what had happened. Eventually, I talked to Allison in the upstairs bathroom. David was still laying in bed. He laid there for the most part for several days, not speaking. Even in his silence, I felt like he was a different person.

We weren't on speaking terms after that. I generally tried to make even more space for him than I had already, letting him go on the few trips to the store with our mother. I had to come to terms with what had happened. It felt hard for me to blame myself the way I would generally. I couldn't remember the moment between standing there angry and suddenly being well into the act of attacking him. Had I remembered that moment, I would have been able to capture the exact emotion that spurred it on, to analyze it, make myself better from it. But all I could do was look back at the entire spectacle of violence, and realize what I was capable of – as an animal that wasn't in my keep. I didn't want to think about it, but it gave me this awakened realization that I could kill if I had to. I didn't want to glorify this realization. I didn't think it made me tough, or cool. It made me feel sick. I felt isolated. It was hard to own up to. But I knew myself better from the incident, all the while I knew myself less from it.

I was distracted though by something else as well. I woke up one Thursday morning from an emotional dream. In the dream, my father was going to kill himself. He was suffering. I could feel that suffering in my skin when I woke up. It felt real somehow, like a conversation I had truly had with him. I couldn't even say it was abstract. I knew there was something. I told my mom about it, and she suggested that I call him. I waited a day, anxious about giving into something I told myself I wasn't going to do. But then I began taking a different perspective. My father was not someone I was close to. He had indeed killed our connection in some way. Of course, deep in my psyche he would always live, there would always be that version of him in my thoughts somewhere, helping me through life and pushing me backwards at time. But I also knew from that point of our final fight had been something final. He wouldn't be able to reach me emotionally.

But then he was also a human being with a life, even if he wasn't my dad. I could find in myself, the empathy to check up on him, not as a daughter or a friend, but as a self aware fellow human being who had some sense that there was something wrong. I didn't want him to die. I had the power to do either one - I could not call, hope for the best (or the worst), and see what happened. Some part of me felt it would be more convenient for me to not make the call. If he died, then that would be the poetry and tragedy of his existence. I could appreciate that from a literary perspective. His physical death perhaps could solidify where I stood with him emotionally. But that was selfish and I knew it. Not everything was about me. Even if we never spoke to one another ever again, his life was his before I was born, and he deserved to continue to have that life with or without me in it.

So pushed myself and I made the call. When he answered the phone he sounded shaken, and panicked. The conversation didn't make too much sense. He asked if he could see me so we could talk. I agreed to meet with him at bike path by the river that evening. The sun was setting when I got there. The air was cold and brisk. My father got out of his truck like a wounded man. His color was off. He was shaky and struggling to come up with words. He looked around him suspiciously, as though he suspected he was being followed. I stood there observing all of this with a detached confusion. We began walking down the path, and he started talking about how 'they' were back again. I realized he was talking about the police/FBI or whathaveyou from the years before. I was confused. He hadn't done anything illegal in years. Hadn't we gotten rid of the evidence? What was this about?

After we had left him, he had fallen apart, spiraling into some kind of vague paranoid certainty that it was all over for him. The police were back – they were following him. He whispered these things to me, as he believe that it was possible the police had bugged the trees we walked besides. I had to eventually convince him that I hadn't gotten a hold of the police personally, something he had decided was true. He asked me over and over, looking into my eyes with this fearful blank look, had the police gotten to me? Had they? I was baffled and told him no. I knew he was too far gone into this nightmare to be reached, but I offhandedly tried my best to ask the sort of questions that might wipe away some of the vague certainties he had.

We went back to the house. He picked up Allison. I had convinced Allison that going with him might be a good idea, since he might be able to pay for her to get some new clothes. So she went with us. We stopped by Arby's. There was a man eating by himself two seats down. My father was convinced this man was an FBI agent. Randomly, I tried to lighten the conversation by talking to Allison about unrelated subject matter. This entire thing was unpleasant, but I was going to try to make the best of it. I wasn't going to let my father's madness get to me. I wasn't going to let myself get too sympathetic. But I was going to try to stop him from doing anything stupid, and in order to be that person I needed to be a good actor for the cause. Randomly, as Allison and I were eating our food, he would hush us – even though we weren't making any remarks that would arouse suspicion. And how could we? We had done nothing wrong.

Somehow, my father pressured us to going back to Kendrick with him. I didn't want to. I so didn't want to. That town as dead to me – I had emotionally cut ties with that side of my life - forever. I hadn't been back there since the fight. Every nook of that town held some bitter sweet, bitter more than sweet memory of a bygone time in my youth. It was all tainted and stained by a consuming emptiness that cut to the heart of something inside me. It was over for me now and I was a new person. Going back to Kendrick was an unpleasant reminder of my roots. It made me feel the loss of things I couldn't quite imagine or explain. It had only been two months, but I had changed so much in that time.

Inside the house, nothing had changed since the day we left. I was aghast to find that the pumpkin that we had in the middle of the living room had been left to rot for two months. It smelled horrible. The house was freezing. It was already night time. It was twenty-thirty or so degrees in there. We could see our breath. How was he living in this dungeon? Absently, we were informed that the beloved neighbor cat, Tux, had died that year. She had been a family member to us – even when my own cat Nim was still there I preferred Tux, and her death only further cemented the end of an era in Kendrick. Allison and I once again, tried to make the best of it. He whispered and told us we weren't allowed to talk in the house at all. This made absolutely no sense. He said we could only talk outside. It a very cold very dark night, in the teens. I shivered and my skin started to burn when we went out there. We walked towards the roaring river. Still, my father insisted on whispering. He told me that 'they' had done something to his body. He had woken in the night to someone walking around his house, and the sound of some electronic crackling all around him, like the air had turned electric. His bones and skin were weak. He had stood up out of bed, and suddenly a green luminous light had passed slowly through the house, as if to scan it like an X-ray. He had thrown up.

Then he told us that police had followed him to his job, and when he got back to his vehicle, he had found powder on the door and all over the inside of the dashboard. And he then explained that he had befriended some guy at work, who he had told something to, and this man was part of it. This guy used to work for law enforcement and was looking to get back in. I was taken aback by it all. One part of me held into account that perhaps the investigating had started again. If that was the case however, they would have found nothing. There was no evidence and we hadn't done anything wrong. Even if there were some loose links in the situation, if they had enough evidence to convict my father for anything, I knew they wouldn't have wasted time. And what kind of technology could that even have been? Were there radiated X-rays that they could use to scan the insides of homes?

My father's eyes were swirly globes of fear. He also started talking about death, in a very abstract way, and then in a more immediate way. About how we had left him, and how he had nothing left. It was all over. He admitted that he was going to commit suicide that Monday. Had I not called him, he would do that. He had his gun ready, as well as a suicide note. He couldn't live this way. I walked composed and listened, Allison following suit. He kept looking around, sometimes stopping to say 'Do you hear that??!?', but of course I couldn't. And if I had heard something it would more than likely have been an animal. Nobody was going to sit out by the river in this kind of weather.

For about ten minutes, Allison and I were frightened that my father was going to kill us. It's not that he was threatening us directly. But his abstract way of talking about death and about us, the way he seemed to want to break our boundaries we had set up and cling to us like a wild frenzied animal hell bent on dragging us down to hell with him. For the first ten minutes of that walk, I had this painful realization that this walk could be the last walk we ever too, perhaps he had schizophrenia, and the voices told him to kill us? What if he had thought it was me all along who had called 'them'. What if he thought I was an imposture? At this point, anything was possible. I had long given up my preconceived notions for what would come next. Allison looked fearfully in my eyes, and later told me she felt the same way. I could picture us so well, both of our bodies frozen by the river, heads both bashed in by rocks. It would not have been a murder out of vengeance or rage. It would have been some aspect of my father's obscure suicide. Something more symbolic to his state of mind – a testament to how afraid he was to lose us. Perhaps a mercy killing.

We didn't die that night. And I came to believe that his madness was an external delusion manifested from his sheer inability to accept anything about himself. Perhaps the case had been reopened. It was hard for me to know for certain, and I guess I never will know. It doesn't matter though because there was no evidence that could be used, and there never would be. And lastly, maybe when this inner paradigm shift had happened, maybe it wasn't just me. Maybe it had affected everyone around me. And my father was too sensitive and weak to comprehend it and it had driven him insane? All of these were theories I held. I had no idea if they held any merit. Reality was getting fuzzier and fuzzier. It was hard work grasping for facts, and it was even harder to grasp for wisdom in the madness.

PART 86 - https://tinyurl.com/y8fcu787

PART 85 - https://tinyurl.com/y73j3s9z

PART 84 - https://tinyurl.com/y8chr6hw

PART 83 - https://tinyurl.com/yasrxfkj

PART 82 - https://tinyurl.com/y9wvecz3

PART 81 - https://tinyurl.com/yc7bm62r

My Life Story in Chapters, PARTS 1-80 (this link below will lead you to a list of all the chapters i have written thus far).

http://aleatoryalarmalligator.tumblr.com/post/168782771574/life-story-sections-1-8

#text #writing #life story

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dianamjackson · 4 years

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Dance (2020)

“What you can’t have with a man, you’ll experience onstage, ten times as intensely! Ten times? A hundred! Sublimated… As if I were making love with God? That’s right, you can dance everything, understand almost everything through music. Go on, get dressed!” ~ Birmant & Oubrerie, 2019, Isadora. And so went the lines that made me buy this book. It’s a brilliant graphic novel by Julie Birmant and illustrated by Clément Oubrerie about Isadora Duncan, the mother of modern dance. I was led to this book. I wasn’t even going to enter the bookshop but something compelled me. In the music section, which is where I usually go, I was looking for the dance section. I finally found it (it was tiny), and the name ‘Isadora’ in red letters on the spine so compelled me that I couldn’t stop staring at it. My other favourite line is when she’s in a cafe nursing a beer, having just turned down Loie Fuller’s offer to join the latter’s dance troupe: “Whom to share this strange feeling with, of Greek temples without sky or infinity?” Indeed, whom to share my view of life with. Story of my life. I called my website a lover’s dance because I consider all my activities dancing and I’m a lover. I love a lot of things, including love itself. I’ve always been that way; a floaty-headed romantic. I only ever draw pictures when I’m in love with my subject, I only ever record music when I felt compelled, and I only ever write when I have something to say. I have never been a Puritan when it comes to my arts. This “inspiration finds you at work” thing — please. In the past fifteen years I’ve recalled exactly two instances of boredom, each lasting about five minutes. I am always inspired and so there is always something to do. (Actually, Michael said something fascinating about “writer’s block” that I never forgot. He said that merely uttering the phrase creates writer’s block, because you ‘speak things into existence.’ He is absolutely right. I’d heard of this phenomenon but, as I’m always inspired, had never experienced it myself. Furthermore, I knew that acknowledging the concept would create it. I don’t know how I knew that, but I did. In art and design classes people talked about “fear of the blank page.” I had no idea what they were on about; to me a blank page was the most exciting thing ever. I guess these are the “ordinary people” Michael laments. One downside of being perpetually inspired and creatively active is that many people can’t relate to you. But more on that later.) I’d always loved the idea of dancing but was far too self conscious to ever do it in front of anyone. I was even too embarrassed to dance alone. But my love and fascination grew until it became stronger than the fear, and I started dancing. Now, I can’t help it. Before I encountered Michael (September of 2018) I was planning on going to clubs just to dance. But the problem with clubs is that people often go there to pick up, there’s not enough room and sometimes the music is bad or too loud or the sound is poorly balanced. There are so many problems with clubs. A fascinating thing about dancers, the really good ones, is that they do everything in a dancerly way. The way you do anything is the way you do everything, said Tom Waits. For me, all movement is an opportunity for dancing — whether walking to a door, typing on a keyboard, playing guitar or just sitting in a chair. When Miles Davis was going to clubs with Clark Terry to check out the musicians, he said that they could tell whether a guy could play by the way he was standing. I’m fascinated by the act of moving. I love creating graceful movements with my body — movements that look as beautiful as pictures. Dancing is a freer, more dynamic and more exciting way for me to draw. As I say in my Gold Dance commentary video, each frame is a painting — that’s thousands of paintings in a single short film! Far more than I could ever hope to produce as paintings in my lifetime. Not that quantity is so important; it’s just that there are so many poses I’d want to paint. With dancing, I can do them all, and quickly. There’s a kind of ‘move lightly’ principle at work in me — an economy of movement and contact. Some people are really profligate in the way they move; I can accomplish the same task in far fewer movements and with less contact. Michael has this economy too, I’ve noticed. Strangely enough, our tentativeness of contact is combined with a strong sensory desire for and enjoyment of contact. The tentativeness comes from being highly sensitive: watch any highly sensitive child among non-sensitive children and they will be the last to try or approach anything. This is obvious in footage of Michael playing in the snow with his brothers, aged about 6. His brothers are furiously playing in the snow and M is way off to the side, observing and not getting involved. The sensory sensitivity is evidenced by the way we touch things: watch the way Michael touches anything. When he strokes kids’ heads, he uses his whole hand, lovingly. This is exactly how I do it too. He’s enjoying the sensation of the kid’s hair and warm head on his whole hand, and it calms them both. We do the same thing with animals. There’s a fascinating video of M aged about 19 combing a little boy’s hair at a party. I love seeing the way he combs the boy’s hair: gently but deftly and swiftly, just like his dancing. There are no girls at the party; all the other boys are showing off or cracking jokes and M is in the back holding the little boy on his hip like a mother, not really participating in the revelry, just focusing on the kid. Idiots will infer sexual indecency, but it’s not. It’s because we’re highly sensitive, sensory types, and M is a very feminine and therefore maternal person. When we’re sitting down I’ve noticed we minimise the degree to which our bodies are in contact with other things. A characteristic pose will be one leg resting horizontally on the other knee (to stretch it out), but the contact between the ankle and the knee will be minimal; the whole pose is balanced and looks elegant. It’s like we’re always posing, always seeking a balanced stance; like our entire existence is an aesthetic project (it is). Along with economy is grace — whenever we move, we’re dancing. Everything is an opportunity for dancing — whether we’re actually dancing, or just picking up a cup. It does betray a real joy in being alive, in being in a body. What a beautiful privilege to live like this, when all movement is exciting.

I touched on the “leg thing” in my piece My Guy (2020) in Dance notes (www.aloversdance.com). I first noticed M doing this in a picture sitting at a table reading a book. His left leg is completely stretched out resting on a chair, while his right is bent normally. I’d done this for years without ever thinking about it or asking why I do it. I’m doing it right now, as I write this. Upon reflection, I think it might be related to the discharge of energy. We both have a lot of tension in our bodies — he probably has more — and stretching the body out in space is a way to dissipate this energy. Dr Christiane Northrup says that the body has a crystalline grid that discharges energy when we stretch. No wonder stretching feels so good. When I was little I was obsessed with cats (and still kinda am). I watched their movements very closely, obsessively studied pictures of them in cat books and drew them endlessly. I emulated their movements — the way they climbed, hunted, batted with their paws, licked milk from a bowl and walked on their tip toes. I scared people all the time because I’d walk up behind them without making a sound. I loved wearing socks, and still do. In my music film Moles (2020) I am dancing in sparkly socks on a table top. I loved climbing trees as a kid; M says this is one of his favourite things to do. If I were an animal, I’d be a cat. Maybe a lioness or a black panther. Michael would be a deer, I think. He really likes deers, and looks like one with his thin frame, thick neck and gigantic eyes. A cross between a deer, a cat and a praying mantis. He does have a weird reptilian thing with his pet boa constrictor and enjoyed scaring girls (and Quincy Jones!) with his pet snakes. I’ve never liked snakes; I think they’re gross. I’ve had many nightmares containing snakes. So that’s one thing we don’t have in common. So we both have a lot of bodily tension, which is largely responsible for our body rhythm, as I call it — the characteristic rhythm with which we do everything we do from singing to talking to writing to dancing. I’m fascinated by the way tension builds up. This became abundantly clear one day on the tram unable to stretch my leg out because there wasn’t enough room. It built up so much that I actually got angry. Certain activities build tension, and others dissipate it. Concentrating on a difficult problem using beta brain waves builds tension, while meditation using alpha brain waves eases it. Certain types of music create tension, other types ease it. Movement of any kind also eases tension. The Buddhists say that all movement is dukkha or suffering. But where would this suffering have originated? In the case of highly sensitive people growing up in largely non-sensitive households, their subjective experience of growing up in that household is considerably more traumatic than for the non-sensitives. For me, growing up in my house was like a daily war zone. No doubt Michael felt the same growing up in his house. All that trauma is registered by our cells, determines our gene expression and ingrains certain pathways that we carry into adulthood. We then have to live in ways that alleviate all this accrued suffering. It seems to me that we’re always in fight-or-flight mode because of that early conditioning; we’ve a constant vigilance. This is stressful for the body, so we find ways to calm ourselves through fiddling, dancing, avoiding stimulation and taking depressant drugs. I’m quite sure that Michael would not dance the way he did if it weren’t for his childhood experiences of trauma. Dancing is self-expression, and a person dances the way they do because of who they are and the experiences they’ve had. And, much of it depends on the music, I find. (As for dancing without music, as M did in BoW, I’m not sure what to make of that as yet.) I think of high sensitivity as having a ‘more porous’ body than non-sensitive people, so things ‘infect’ the sensitive person more strongly. Intense, hard music makes us dance hard and intense; soft, beautiful music creates soft and beautiful movements. I came across a great article by Lubov Fadeeva, a flamenco dancer. He describes Michael’s dancing accurately and intriguingly, and emphasises the importance of individuality in artistic creativity: “He dances in the flow of free creation. It should be noted that even the moves he performs on stage over and over again are not mechanically repeated like a stuck record. No, he can continue any of his dances by free improvisation at any moment. And it never looks out of sync with his personal style; instead, it opens new facets of his fathomless inner creator. This is what no impersonator can do. Only the creator of the dance can update and renew his dance naturally and improvise freely, and still be himself. No one else can plunge into his sacrament. This is his personal domain, just like every person has his or her own body and his or her own place on Earth.” How marvellous. “When Michael Jackson hit the stage, he danced in ecstasy. And it’s obvious to the spectator. All the best dancers and musicians enter a peculiar state of mind when they create. Art in its highest form is impossible without the ability to work with the subconscious, and without using altered states of awareness and intuition. Without this, it’s not art but simply cheap craft.” TBC Read more of my work at www.aloversdance.com

#essay #dance #dancing #spiritual #michaeljackson #isadoraduncan #dianaszabo #art #artist #music #love #spirituality #rhythm

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jeninthebooks · 7 years

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I was having trouble thinking of a way to start this post. The thing is, that last weekend was so, so special to me, and I didn’t want to sell it as less than it was. I guess I will start by saying that prior to going to Portland, I thought that my weekend would consist of me barely seeing my host family & taking a lot of Lifts.

That was not the case AT ALL. I began to realize that my trip was going to be different, when I was at the gate for my Southwest Airlines flight. I don’t know how familiar you are with Southwest, but I had never been on a flight with them before. The only reason I was this time, is because Emily had arranged my flight for me. Let me just say that it was life-changing.

From the minute I got to my gate, I was inspired. There was free WiFi & a stand for you to charge your phone (this helped me with my Thirteen Reasons Why binge). There were also these interesting columns, that I would come to learn were for organizing yourselves in a queue to board the plane. WHAT?? YOU DON’T HAVE TO STRUGGLE THROUGH A MASS OF PEOPLE TO BOARD?? CRAZINESS. I will say that I started to worry when I heard the announcer say that there were no assigned seats… I freaked looking at my boarding pass like something was wrong. I found articles, that basically told me that my seat, was a terrible one to have (end of the B group).

My fears were set aside, when I was able to find a seat at the front of the plane, between two women. I didn’t have to sit by a creepy dude (sorry to all the non-creepy dudes out there, but this is an actual fear I have. I am also sure there are many creepy ladies as well.), and was near the font, so I could get off the plane quickly. Also, let me just go back to the airline hosts for a second- outside of the plane (while you are waiting to board) and on the plane itself. They are amazing human beings! They are funny and put you at ease, real quick! They don’t seem to hate their jobs, and genuinely seem to like people. Even if they don’t, they are incredible actors.

I was also able to find a spot for my carry-on easily. THEN, when it came to the end of the C-group, there was a gentleman, who found a spot at the very front for his body, but didn’t see a place for his carry-on AT FIRST. Amazingly, he was able to switch some other’s bags into different containers (which nobody seemed to mind) and was able to fit his in, in three moves. No joke, EVERYBODY cheered for him. When the plane landed, he helped everyone in the vicinity, locate and hand them their bags. Way to go, stranger! Needless to say, this was an amazing experience. I really didn’t mean to write 4 paragraphs, on Southwest, and maybeeee this should have been a YELP review, but it was such a great opening to my weekend and needed to be shared. Everyone worked together and although, it was a bit of organized chaos, it was so so great to see such kind people willing to help each other out. It was like being on that plane created an instant bond-comparable to what Emily Arrow does, every time she brings people together.

Smooth transition, am I right?? :) Emily surrounds herself with the best people. I always knew that, but somehow, it wasn’t really ingrained in my brain, as it was when I entered Zoey Abbott’s home. Let me start by saying that the only Lift I took the entire weekend was to get to Zoey’s home. For those of you who don’t know Zoey, she is a soon to be published illustrator, who also worked with Emily on Little Red Sled!

The minute I stepped into Zoey’s home, she was in host-mode. I also want to say, that i had LATE flight. I didn’t get to her house until a little after midnight. I was expecting to be shown to wherever I was sleeping and maybe see her in the morning? NO. Zoey wanted to know how my trip was, if I wanted wine (which she doesn’t even drink), water, if I wanted to look at picture books…it went on and on. She was incredibly funny and so lovely to talk to. I also probably bored her to death with my Kevin Henkes story. I am not trying to diss on LA hosts, but it was so enlightening to see how pumped Zoey was to host and how she didn’t seem to care what time it was. I don’t think that would have happened where I live and I was so grateful.

The next morning, after sleeping in my OWN ROOM, I was treated to a homemade breakfast! I got to meet her adorable and intelligent kids and their awesome dog Carrots. After, Zoey drove her daughter, illustrator Alison Farrell (look for her book, Cycle City in 2018!), her son and I to an amazing little restaurant called, Por Que No? If you need a recommendation on what to eat there, I had their fresh jamaica, and a Bryan’s Bowl with carne asada and chips. It was so delicious! I also loved that they had equality and “welcoming of all” signs posted everywhere. Furthermore, the thing that I keep telling everyone, when they ask me about my trip is that, they had an umbrella stand that said something to the beat of, “borrow an umbrella while you wait in line”. That still blows my mind. In LA, those umbrellas definitely would have been stolen. It’s a sad fact, but it’s the truth. We have a Little Free Library outside of Vroman’s and within the first couple months of it’s existence, someone had vandalized it. The umbrella stand was just something that showed me a huge contrast between Portland and home.

After getting to see Emily & her life mate, Alex (for the first time in months) and meeting all these wonderful new friends (Kate Berube, Karyn Lewis, Diane Adams & her sister, Danielle Davis & Deborah Hocking), we headed to Green Bean Books, which is a treasure in itself. Here is a photo of most of us, outside the store!

& here is a photo of some of us inside the store, with bookseller extraordinaire, Earl & author, Ashlyn Anstee!

We were tasked with the job of finding a book that best represented ourselves. I wish I could remember what everyone picked…the ones that I do remember, included: Hug Machine, The Lost House, Happy Dreamer, I Don’t Like Koala, This is Sadie, Love Is, Lyle Lyle Crocodile, and Chester’s Way.

Then we got a chance to discuss them all, in Green Bean Books’ wonderful patio. Here are some of the wonders I encountered while out there:

I just loved that everywhere you looked, there was something beautiful to behold. Also, Earl is an amazing bookseller. There were times, I felt like I was being put to shame because of all the new books he has managed to read! He definitely knows what he is talking about. If you are ever in Portland, I hope you get a chance to talk books with him!

I would also like to take a moment to mention that all of the awesome authors that joined in this weekend, all have super cool books out, or will be out shortly. Please see the following works of genius:

Kate Berube (inspired the Hannah & Sugar song)-My Little Half-Moon, out May 2nd! She also has the books, Hannah & Sugar & The Summer Nick Taught His Cats to Read

Danielle Davis-Zinnia and Bees, a middle grade novel, out August 1st!

Alison Farrell-Cycle City in 2018. It’s too early for info/art for it yet, but follow her on insta to *hopefully* see some in the future!

Ashlyn Anstee (inspired the No, No, Gnome! & Are We There, Yeti? songs)-Are We There, Yeti? and No, No, Gnome!, are available for purchase now!

Deborah Hocking-The Great Henry Hopendower, out June 6th! She also has the non fiction book, Build, Beaver, Build! available for purchase now!

Diane Adams (inspired the Two Hands to Love You, and Love Is, songs!)-Two Hands to Love You, Love Is and many more!

Zoey Abbott Wagner (inspired the Little Red Sled song)-Twindergarten, out June 20th & Oregon Reads Aloud, available now!

We also got to go to a lot of other cool food places during the weekend, including Pip’s Original Doughnuts (I would recommend their “The Dirty Wu”), Random Order Coffeehouse & Bakery (where I had the best chocolate cream pie) and Fire on the Mountain (in which I tried their El Jefe Challenge and failed miserably).

Do you see my little book and pencil, that I got from Green Bean Books in the photo above??

& NOW, ON TO THE REASON WE ALL CAME TO PORTLAND:

Emily’s Manager Oahn & Karin put together an incredible launch for her 2nd album, Storytime Singalong Vol. 2! Here they are below:

If their faces look sad, it’s because Emily is saying the most wonderful things about them on the other side of this photo!! #TeamArrow is a force to be reckoned with.

The launch was held at the Freemont Theatre and was just a perfect venue! Karin did so well with her choice! I’m going to try my best to explain, why this event meant so much to so many, including myself. Personally, I am so proud of Emily. She is only a little older than myself, and yet has created her own genre of music, her own business, is following her dreams and recently bought her own house. Seeing her perform her second album at the Freemont, was just the icing on the cake. I think everyone was a little teary at some point during the day. A lot of the authors present, had worked with Emily at some point and were hearing their songs live in front of a crazy big crowd. You can see it for yourself here:

It was so crazy, that at one point there didn’t seem to be a clear pathway. If you haven’t checked out Emily’s second album, it has some wonderful songs on it. They are:

Anything Can Be A Song

Explorers of the Wild Song

Hannah and Sugar Song

Be A Friend Song

Nana in the City Song

We Are Enough Song

No, No Gnome Song

I Love You Already Song

Don’t Hide Your Magic Song

Two Hands to Love You Song

And you can buy it now!

I know this post is incredibly LONG and that it seems like all I am saying is that PORTLAND IS AWESOME, EMILY IS AWESOME and ALL THESE AUTHORS AND PEOPLE ARE AWESOME. Let me tell you, THAT IS EXACTLY what I was trying to say. I just had so many words that I wanted to get out, in order to say exactly that. Could this have been edited? Probably. But hey, this is my blog. I want to thank you so much for reading and I hope that you get to hear these songs, read these books and visit this amazing city. I loved every second that I was there and with these people and won’t forget it or them. <3

Love,

Jen in the Bookstore

**A special shout out again to Zoey for hosting me, Oahn and Karin for arranging this whole thing, Emily for getting me there, and Zoey and Deborah for making sure I only had to take 1 Lift the entire weekend. **

Jen in the Bookstore Goes to Portland; How Southwest Airlines, an Emily Arrow Album Launch & a Bunch of Kind Portlanders Made My Weekend I was having trouble thinking of a way to start this post. The thing is, that last weekend was so, so special to me, and I didn't want to sell it as less than it was.

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