On Thursday the 25th of February, I’m going to head up to Kelowna to extemporize about the Olympics and athletics and also read a chunk from The Man Game. The artist and writer, based in Kelowna, Portia Priegert, wrote a profile for the local paper. The Kelowna Daily Courier hasn’t had a chance to post it online yet, so Portia scanned a copy of it and sent it to me. I’ll post it here, because I love the look of this scan, which came to me looking more like an artwork than a news item.
It’s also Freedom to Read Week. These days with the Olympics on TV and on the streets around me, I hardly have any freedom or free time to read. In fact, when I go downtown to see the crowds and celebrations at Robson Square I notice more folks shopping at Chapters than at HMV. There’s a ton of other crazy strange things to notice about Vancouver during the Olympics that are worth sharing with an Interior BC crowd.
The Man Game comes in third on a National Post list of Canadian novels of the decade. Although, in my mind, I’ve graciously switched positions with Chester Brown for his Louis Riel graphic novel, which I think is among my very very favorite books of the past ten years; that, and Sheila Heti’s stories are in number one, and a few other books have switched spots as well, etc.
considering my fortunes, over coffee, in Vancouver, 2010…
Wow, such fine news this week — The Man Game is up for the 2009 Vancouver Book Award alongside esteemed writers Meredith Quartermain and Gabor Maté. They tell us the winner on November 3rd at an afternoon event with the mayor at City Hall.
Allison Schulnik is interviewed in the latest issue of Border Crossings, a magazine I love to write for, and this caused me to blow my mind, seeing her paintings, and then visiting her site and seeing her animation Hobo Clown. It’s definitely worth a view.
Also, there’s rumours floating around that The Man Game has been nominated for a nice award, but I can’t find any links to prove it. Just putting that out there…
Very excited to be reading at the Whistler Writers festival this fall. I’ll be reading from The Man Game and listening excitedly to words from Annabel Lyon’s upcoming novel!
One of the best bedroom dancers coming out of the West Coast, Lunice can dance like a cylon — EXACTLY to the jittery beat — Lazer Sword’s post-Dilla dance music production is some of the best in the US. Lazer Sword has plenty of mixes and tracks available if you Google hard enough, and my god, all vids by Lunice are worth watching for sure. His body can do the impossible, he is a genius with the joints. Don’t know what the dance style is called. I think I heard Sascha Frere Jones call the music style Lazer Bass.
One of the most popular dance crazes coming out of the Philadelphia club scene is called the Wu-Tang. Funnily, the Shaolin footwork isn’t matched with a Staten Island MC, but instead ATL’s Lil Jon’s werewolf howl: “Wut wut wut wut wut wut wut!!!” Here’s some KILLIN’ IT examples of how the move is done (watch for the props in the Wu-wing arm-styles):
Here’s some totally PUMPED little girls doing a Wu-Tang battle contest–AMAZING!!
I love Baltimore Club. B’more Bounce. So far as I can tell, this is the most positive house music scene in America, the best production, the wildest most playful DJ style of any city anywhere, best samples, finest dance steps (best names for moves, eg: Wu-Tang): seriously rockin’ off.
Amazing wobbly cellphone vid of Tha Pope rocking some juke moves between classes. Tha Pope was a true original, and from all the footage I’ve watched, he was the footwork master.
as 14FREEMATTHALE88 comments on YouTube:
This nigga was a known nigga from Morse To Lawrence too bad that shit happened to him GDN till the end and beyond…RIP a Real B.B. I.C.G. nigga…from ya folkks on farwell
Out of Detroit, another style of footwork called Jit. Same breakneck BPM as juke dancing out of Chicago, Detroit is always a little more electronic, but both cities are total hybrid genius zones with DJs dropping techno-house-electro-gangsta-fuckery of inimitable groove. Here’s how Jit’s done:
Here’s an amazing example of what’s coming off the streets of Chicago lately, the dance styles and music production is all homegrown to fit the local vibe. Juke dancing is what it’s called, and basically it’s a lot of ninjaquick footwork on a bunch of different slice&dice moves, all done to juke house music on the curb.
Thanks to National Post’s maverick arts journalist and literary critic Mark Medley who picked The Man Game as one of his top books for 2008, and then sat down with his esteemed colleagues for a lively roundtable discussion about the year’s books, podcasted here.
Thanks to Michael Hingston at See Magazine in Edmonton for doing this phone interview with me. He called and woke me up while I was staying drinking at the Banff Centre, so I had to do this interview Lennon-Ono style!
The Writer Gets Captured By The Game
First Novels don’t get more dense, ambitious, or engrossing than Lee Henderson’s The Man Game Published December 4, 2008 byMichael Hingston in Books • Comments (0)
THE MAN GAME
By Lee Henderson. Viking Canada. 518 pp. $32.
*****
Hollywood legend has it that Alien was sold on the strength of a one-line pitch: “Jaws in space.” It’s easy to imagine The Man Game, the huge and wondrous debut novel from Lee Henderson, being sold in similar style: “Deadwood in Vancouver.”
Like the now-cancelled HBO show, Henderson’s book is chock full of wily prostitutes, take-no-shit bartenders, waves of Chinese immigrants sent up from San Francisco, and generally fuzzy notions of law and history. Both are also beautifully written, with unlikely amounts of poetry scattered amidst waves and waves of cursing. Instead of drunk, violent cowboys, however,The Man Game has drunk, violent lumberjacks. Instead of spurs, they wear flannel.
Written over nine years, Henderson’s book recounts the imagined history of the “man game” — a sport that’s part Greco-Roman wrestling, part ballroom dancing, part bar brawl — which takes the young Canadian city by storm in 1886. The cast balloons into the dozens, but at the centre are Molly Erwagen and her paralyzed husband Sammy, who arrive in Vancouver just as a massive forest fire threatens to swallow the city whole.
An ex-vaudeville performer and current housewife, Molly senses a business opportunity in the working-class loggers, who have no entertainment available to them aside from the usual opium, whiskey, and prostitutes. Behind her husband’s back, she recruits and trains two disgraced lumberjacks as the game’s first players, and together they set out to bring some culture to the barbaric west.
SEE recently woke Henderson up while on a retreat as part of the Calgary Writers’ Festival. He spoke to us over the telephone. He didn’t get out of bed.
SEE Magazine: The Man Game is set in late 19th-century Vancouver, amidst anti-Chinese riots and the great fire of 1886, which nearly destroyed the city the same year it was incorporated. How much of this history did you know before starting the book?
The Man Game: Lee Henderson Interview
by Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer
Lee Henderson’s debut novel, The Man Game, is a romp and a face-off in olde Vancouver. There is racism, there is opium, there are pretty entrepreneurs, a paraplegic (train stunt), saloons, brothels, and, yes, lumberjacks. There are fist-fights, bravado and dance routines; there is (discretion is advised here) a great deal of nudity. There is, in short, nothing like The Man Game. Your Fall book season will truly be incomplete without having read it.
Award winning author Lee Henderson and Bookninja’s Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer wrestled into the book and around it in this interview. Please enjoy.
* * *
Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer: I read The Man Game manically, over a few days. And these were my gut responses as I read: What the? Wha-? Is Lee Henderson mad? Where did this all come from?
So, I guess: What the? Wha-? Are you mad? Where did this book come from?
Lee Henderson: The culture of woodsmen, day labourers, stevedores, fisherman, and miners in the 1800s was rough. To write convincingly about that pioneering scene, I wanted to use language that was good for readers today. So I dialed my ear to those voices in contemporary Vancouver — listening to the guys argue and fight on the scaffolding as they reclad the leaky condo I was renting, transcribing bar fights as they escalated, talking with the longshoremen and misfits who aspired to be professional wrestlers, hanging out with anarchist punks and noise musicians…I was listening for the sounds of early Vancouver in today’s city. I discovered it was all around me.
Anger is a part of this book because it is human. Hate is a part of this book, too. These are awfully difficult emotions to write about, but I had to be responsible to the dark history of Vancouver, and so I had to write about anger in detail, anger and hate and fear caused our race riots.
e that was good for readers today. So I dialed my ear to those voices in contemporary Vancouver — listening to the guys argue and fight on the scaffolding as they reclad the leaky condo I was renting, transcribing bar fights as they escalated, talking with the longshoremen and misfits who aspired to be professional wrestlers, hanging out with anarchist punks and noise musicians…I was listening for the sounds of early Vancouver in today’s city. I discovered it was all around me.