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.
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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.
Thanks to Bryn Evans at FFWD magazine in Calgary for the cool write-up on the book. Linked there, and copy-pasted here for the archives.
Real men wear pink tights and makeup
Henderson tackles the games men played in gritty old-time Vancouver Published October 9, 2008 byBryn Evans in Books • Comments (0)
Lee Henderson’s debut novel, The Man Game, opens in Vancouver in 1886, a dirty, bawdy city full of smoke and filth. Enter Molly Erwagen, a performer who has spent most of her life in the circus, recently transposed from out East with her paralyzed husband Samuel. Having nothing else to do but look after him, she finds her attention drifting to two lumberjacks, Litz and Pisk. They’re immersed in the underground “man game,” a brutal, poetic form of wrestling, where men strip naked and pulverize each other. She finds in them the same sense of desperation she feels and is drawn into their world of performative violence.
The Globe and Mail posted an audio clip of a reading I did at the International Festival of Authors in Toronto. You have to kind of scroll down the Globe’s page of readings to find it, and there’s plenty more amazing authors’ readings to distract a person from the short 7min thing I did. I read on Wednesday, October 29 with the other amazing nominees for the Writers Trust Award.
Thanks to the inimitable Ben “big heart” Hart for the thoughtful piece on the book forTyee. I’ll copy-paste it here, but be sure to check out the Tyee’s site, it’s full of awesome.
November 5, 2008“We were in search of a history we were sure to mistreat. As if a city would ever store its proudest moments in this dipping cellar. As if we could floss a story from all this mealy worthless scrap.” So says Kat, the narrator of Lee Henderson’s first novel The Man Game, as he digs through old newspapers and photographs, testimony from another time.
The Man Game exists in two places at once — past and present-day Vancouver. In the present, Kat and Minna, the woman he desperately loves, follow the hush-hush of rumour to a neighbourhood on the east side of the city, a place utterly foreign to them. “A long-nosed boy sat in a corner of the yard beside a tree,” Kat says, describing the place, “one hand inside a black silk top hat, no pants on. That kind of neighbourhood. Poor magic.” Kat and Minna trail a crowd to the backyard of a sinking house. There, they witness two men engaged in a kind of burlesque — a wrestling match, a man game that marries brutal force and artful choreography. After the game, Kat and Minna befriend the players. They are ushered into the house and then shown to the basement. It is here they discover a story as big and as confounding as the city and all its incarnations. Read the rest of this entry »
This week, Lee Henderson’s first novel, The Man Game, was shortlisted for the Rogers Writers’ Trust fiction prize, and deservedly so. It is a sprawling, brilliant, playful, heartbreaking, and eminently wise book that considers its world with unusual bravery and purpose. It’s easily one of the very best books I’ve read this year. I caught up with Lee Henderson last month, while he was in Toronto for the launch.
* * * * *
This is your first novel, but unlike many first books it’s not obviously autobiographical. How did your ideas come together?
I think it still is autobiographical, but more symbolic autobiography. I’ve always been doing drawings, and I always thought it was somehow irreverent to draw naked men, and I’d be in writing classes and you’re supposed to write critiques on people’s stories or poems, and I’d just be drawing little naked men for them. It seemed counterintuitive at the time, so I’m always looking for how to draw stories out of very small obsessions like that. I knew that if it was going to take nine years, at least I’d be entertained while I worked on it. And I just tried to take this idea of the man game and basically use it to craft a book that could talk about the historical novel as a genre within literature, as well as something much more contemporary, integrating and absorbing the information and narrative structures of video games, for instance. I was thinking of this idea of combat or competition as a structural cog to keep the book going. And I was also frustrated by some of the CanLit books—the historical novels—which I felt were too committed to a fidelity of the time, trying to match the era word for word. It’s kind of a parlour trick. Not that I don’t love a lot of the straight historical fiction that’s done, but that’s why I wanted to write a historical novel: it’s a Canadian form in a lot of ways.
It’s the Canadian form. What Canadian books were important to you in this? I kept thinking of Tay John.
Philip Marchand, Weekend Post Published: Saturday, October 04, 2008
Great swatches of Canadian literature are occupied by a collective phenomenon I call phantom characters.
These are fictional human beings who don’t really emerge from the narrative, or assume rounded dimensions. They’re like individual blanks accompanied by a set of instructions from the author to the reader, on what to make of them. These semi-human personalities often have a mysteriously soulful presence and display extreme, but somehow poetically appropriate, behaviour.
Jane Urquhart and Michael Ondaatje love this sort of character, and now Vancouverbased author Lee Henderson, in his debut novel, The Man Game (Viking Canada, $32), joins their company. Numberone phantom character in the novel, set mostly in 1886 Vancouver, but intertwined with a narrative of the present-day city, is 17-year-old Molly Erwagen, married to Sammy Erwagen, quadriplegic bookkeeper to a Vancouver sawmill manager. Her green eyes, “flecked by a saffron cascade of fallen flames,” and her “moonlit” beauty have a preternatural effect on men, who view her as a “goddess.” One besotted male claims, “She’s how we know God exists.” Another man, in her presence, feels like “a peer to God.”
Why exactly they feel this way we don’t know. It must have something to do with that saffron cascade. This arbitrariness becomes a problem in the works of Urquhart and Ondaatje because sooner or later their phantom characters find themselves in a conventional narrative, but at least The Man Game, from start to finish, is an assay into the “unknown weird,” as one character puts it. Anything goes. Case in point is the “man game” of the novel’s title, an invention of Molly’s. The game is a rarefied form of pro-wrestling between two naked men — the nudity keeps the game “honest” — a combination of martial arts, dancing and acrobatics.
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.
The 
