Serving the LGBT communities since 1971
36 • BAY AREA REPORTER • February 2-8, 2012
▼
Books >>
Telling tales by Gregg Shapiro
intimacy, yet I had the freedom to make them very different kinds of people, in looks and personalities. I am estranged from my own brother, so I guess I was exploring what it would be like to be close to a brother.
L
ongtime San Francisco resident and winner of the Northern California Book Award for Fiction for Ivan and Misha (TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern), gay writer Michael Alenyikov knows how to tell a story. Ivan and Misha, a fictional work of connected stories about twin brothers, is a compelling read. I spoke with Alenyikov earlier this year. Gregg Shapiro: Which story in Ivan and Misha came first, and what made you want to write more stories about these characters? Michael Alenyikov: It began as a stand-alone story about Russian twin brothers and their father. It seemed I was done with them and moved on to another story about a gay UN Peacekeeper in East Timor. An editor in NYC saw the seven stories I’d written and suggested I write more stories focusing on secondary characters. I don’t like being told what to write, and for a year I worked on another project. My agent would check in to remind me how much that editor liked what we call “the phone booth story,” and I realized that he wasn’t dictating what stories to write, just suggesting which characters to write about. I started a story about their father and his oddcouple friendship with a neighbor. I was excited to learn my characters had much more life to them than I’d realized, and with each story I learned more about them. How much of Michael Alenyikov is in Ivan and Misha? A friend of mine said that if all
<<
Sundance 2012 From page 30
daughter from his ex-wife. Writer/ director So Yong Kim cites a wisp of memory about a solitary childhood visit by a mysterious stranger she later learned was her Dad. The New York Times’ Manohla Dargis says Dano’s “twitching and preening like a bottom-drawer Robert Plant [gives] the film solidity and a jolt of energy.” Red Hook Summer Director Spike Lee insists this is not a sequel to his explosive 1991 summer-rage drama Do the Right Thing, but the buzz has Lee back to his old prickly rabble-rousing cinema as an African-
<<
Ivan and Misha author Michael Alenyikov: ‘I felt a connection.’
of me was in a wet washcloth and it was wrung out, it would be Ivan and Misha. That said, there’s very little that’s directly autobiographical except for one character who is based closely on a friend of mine. But I did live in the East Village as an adult, and Brooklyn, and I did drive a cab in Boston; and after my mother’s death, I grew up with a single father and a younger brother, as did Ivan and Misha. Ivan and Misha: why twins and not simply brothers? In retrospect, I think writing about fraternal twins was a way to heighten the intimacy between siblings. Twins, almost by definition, have to be very close and enmeshed in each other’s lives. As fraternal twins, they both had that heightened
American kid trades his childhood comfort zone in Hotlanta for an equally warm but decidedly weirder slice of Brooklyn. Simon Killer Mysterious Skin’s “battered boy” Brady Corbet reveals more of his thespian dark side in a recent college grad’s descent into a Parisian bourgeois sewer. Arbitrage Nicholas Jarecki takes on the global financial crisis in a drama that has Richard Gere as an aging hedge-fund manager whose slippery business practices are about to unravel big time. The House I Live In Meanwhile, brother Eugene Jarecki argues that America’s “War on Drugs” has squandered enormous resources,
There have been studies on gay twins and the odds of one or both being homosexual. Why did you choose to make Ivan and Misha gay? When I first began to write fiction, I wanted to create gay characters and find my own distinctive way to make them unabashedly gay but not like anyone else’s gay characters. The title story is told by Misha, so inevitably he was going to be gay; Ivan’s sexuality is ambiguous in the title story. It wasn’t until I wrote the story “Whirling Dervish” from Ivan’s point of view that I grappled with his sexuality and he emerged as bisexual. Ivan will have sex with almost anyone who captures his imagination. The book has some taboo elements: incest and HIV transmission. Oh, you noticed that! The incest was much harder to write about. It was never my plan. But I let the characters lead me, and they led me to a place I didn’t want to go. I stopped working on the book for several months to avoid going there.
But I tried to do the best I could to not make it sensationalized, to be sure that it would seem an inevitable outgrowth of the story. As to HIV transmission and unsafe sex, that was easier to write about. HIV, safe sex, unsafe sex, all the choices and consequences have been in the background of every gay man’s life since the early 1980s. Even when we don’t actively think about it, we are thinking about it. So even if you write a story set in the age of AIDS and you don’t mention it, its absence is a presence. It would be like setting a novel during WWII and not mentioning the war.
Scene from filmmaker Spike Lee’s Red Hook Summer.
J before I read your Just b book, I read Rebecca M Makkai’s debut novel The Borrowers, which also f features Russian/Jewish i immigrants making their w in America while way a attempting to erase the p of their homeland. past I come from a family that to no stories about that told p past. Three grandparents d before I was born. They died w all from towns outside were o Kiev. The one grandparent of I knew, my mother’s mother, n never spoke of the past. S She’d come to the U.S. at 14 w with her sister, leaving her m mother and siblings behind. M father was as taciturn My as they come. None of my au or uncles spoke of the aunts pa Yet I felt a connection to past. R Russia and the Russian Jewish ex experience there. There’s a w wonderful book, Passage to Ararat by Michael Arlen. His father was a survivor of the Armenian genocide, but he knew nothing about that history until his father died and he tracked down his father’s friends. What he learned is how there’s a degree to which people feel they deserve the punishment meted out to them, and when safe in another country they want very much not to pass that on to their children. That requires burying the past. When I wrote about Ivan and Misha’s father Louie/Lyov, it gave me a chance to explore what he knows and remembers vividly of his life in the Soviet Union, and how little he will tell his sons.▼
produced over 45 million arrests, and put a huge contingent of African American men behind bars, only to discover that street drugs are more available and of a purer quality than ever before. Winner of the Grand Jury Award for Best US Doc. The Invisible War Director Kirby Dick received the Audience Award for Best US Doc for a film that investigates the epidemic of sexual assault in the American military against soldiers of all genders. Predisposed Jesse Eisenberg and Melissa Leo star in a mother/son meltdown. Jesse plays a talented pianist facing a crucial audition, while needing a timeout from Mom.▼
Onegin From page 25
less. Onegin then impulsively acts out his compulsive need to charm, goes on to flirt with her sister Olga at the party, wins her fancy, thus driving Olga’s fiancé mad with jealousy, who grows furious and challenges him to fight. Oh, and Lensky is Onegin’s best friend, and it was he who introduced Onegin to the family. And in the duel, Onegin kills him. The story was first told by Alexander Pushkin, the first great genius of Russian literature, in a series of poems published serially in magazines in the 1820s; in all, there are about 400 sonnet-like stanzas, which many Russians have literally learned by heart. Nabokov’s translation has two whole volumes of notes. When Tchaikovsky came to make an opera of it, he identified with both Onegin and with Tatiana, since he had yearnings like hers (though they were for young men), and he had had young women throw themselves at him; indeed, he agreed to marry one, and then nearly killed himself trying to get out of the suffocating relationship. The tremendous things in this ballet all flow from these tensions.
Erik Tomasson
Erik Tomasson
San Francisco Ballet’s Gennadi Nedvigin and Clara Blanco in choreographer John Cranko’s Onegin.
San Francisco Ballet’s Maria Kochetkova and Pascal Molat in choreographer John Cranko’s Onegin.
Cranko turned letters and speeches brilliantly into pas de deux. Tatiana’s letter to Onegin, Cranko turned into a dream-vision where he steps through a mirror into her life and sweeps her off her feet. The lifts are breathtaking – he throws her overhead, over his back, then lays her down gently on the floor, as if he had the strength of a vampire and the tenderness of a lover. Again and again, he rings changes on these unbelievable lifts (which require partnering skills of unsurpassed community of intention). They are an objective
classicist, as an elegy for himself; he knows he is doomed, like Wilfred Owen. Vitor Luiz gave tremendous depth to Onegin’s alienation. All paths are blocked for him. He has no way out. He’s not just a cad. He has seen a ghost. His spirit may have died with Napoleon and the last hopes of the French Revolution; what he’s lost it’s impossible to say, but when he returns from exile and finds Tatiana married and happy, and suddenly feels some emotion, Luis made us feel it was the first time in a long time that he’d felt
correlative for young love. It’s no accident that choreography like this – the pirouette that turns into a caress, the leap that ends in racking sobs – developed in the 1960s, during the era of flower power. Cranko had already made a glorious Romeo and Juliet; had he lived (he died in a freak allergic-reaction accident), what would he have made? What we do have is these duets, and some equally wonderful solos; Lensky’s long lamentation before the duel was gloriously danced by Gennadi Nedvigin, our finest
anything except guilt and remorse. Maria Kochetkova soars through the lifts of the first act, she suffers in the second, she becomes very powerful in the last. As of this writing, I have seen only one cast. There were four, and each is likely to have danced in a different way. Our Olga, Clara Blanco, was promoted within SFB to soloist that night. The next day’s Olga, Dores Andre, was also promoted to soloist on the spot. Clearly, this ballet is in our future, and we can look forward to seeing them grow into these roles.▼