I AM SO EXCITED.

"ANOTHER VERY GRITTY DISPLAY HERE": I meant to post this on his actual birthday, March 30, but: Happy birthday, Christopher Bowman. May your afterlife be as lyrical as "Maria" and as uninhibited as "Woolly Bully."

"The Americans never disappoint their American fans...."

SINCE IT'S THE FEAST OF THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION (for two more hours), here's Peggy Fleming, "Ave Maria." (And Nicole Bobek's lovely program from the same event.)

THIS IS BEAUTIFUL. Soulful, well-choreographed, heart-wrenching. I could watch this every day.

CREEPY SKATING FOR HALLOWEEN. Must be seen to be believed.

MOONLIGHT ENCORES: I checked out My Sergei, Ekaterina Gordeeva's memoir of her brief, happy marriage to Sergei Grinkov, because I'd heard that it was a window on to life, marriage, and dating in the late days of the Soviet Union and especially the Soviet sports machine. The book is so focused and so simply, cleanly-written that it doesn't actually illuminate the cultural context as much as I'd hoped, but it's a limpid portrayal of true love and the journey toward adulthood.

It's also quite candid. To take maybe the most obvious example, Gordeeva describes her plans to abort her child. Her mother and her priest basically talk/manipulate her out of it, and Daria becomes her most precious and lasting reminder of Sergei after his death. Ordinarily I would wonder what it must feel like to read that one's mother seriously considered abortion, but Gordeeva's love for her daughter (as a person in her own right, not solely a memento of lost love) shines through so clearly. The message, to the extent that there is one, is not only that children are a blessing but that it's later than you think.

There are also really detailed, lovely descriptions of the emotions behind the programs of Gordeeva and Grinkov's last year. I can't wait to watch or re-watch them with the insight Gordeeva provided.

The theme [Marina Zoueva] had created for us with the Moonlight Sonata was that of man celebrating woman as the mother of all mankind. She said that Sergei should get on his knees before me, because only the woman can give birth, only the woman can give him his children. ...

The beginning of the program was very soft, and we opened our arms to show the audience and judges that we were opening ourselves up to them. We were showing them not a program, but the story of our life. If you listen to the Moonlight Sonata, the music can only represent a man and a woman's life together. It can't mean anything else. It can't mean a season, or a march, or a dance, or a storm, or an animal. It's more, even, than love. Romeo and Juliet, that music was about love. But the Moonlight Sonata is for older people who have experienced real life. It expresses what changes love can bring about in people, how it can make them stronger, make them have more respect for each other. How it can give them the ability to bring a new life into the world.
--Ekaterina Gordeeva, My Sergei: A Love Story

You can watch Gordeeva and Sergei Grinkov do what she considered their best performance of their Moonlight Sonata program here. I also love this Moonlight skate, by the Protopopovs, very much.

I SWAN TO MAN: Some thoughts on the Matthew Bourne Swan Lake, as viewed via Netflix.

First, I loved this. It had a lot of images I want to stow away in my mental Mombi gallery of heads. The look of this production is iconic for a reason! The opening dream sequence replaces the "bright boy called Death" with a mature swan/man, in a little boy's dreams--a really stunning, disturbing, enthralling image. Adulthood, aggression, masculinity, otherworldliness and the sublime are all offered as possible candidates for "the monster at the end of this book," all shifting and iridescently fluid, identified with one another and yet distinguishable.

The intense longing conveyed in the park/lake scenes was especially fine and poignant, and I loved the eye-patched woman in the final "society" scene. I've never seen a traditional Swan Lake, so I don't know to what extent matching the most iconic music to moments in which the lovers are parted or are yearning for one another is typical, but it was really amazing. The plangent, familiar music becomes eldritch when it expresses nightmare rather than dream, liminality rather than immersion.

I was strongly reminded of both the strengths and the weaknesses of Derek Jarman's Edward II. The "looks" of the two productions are similar. The faint hint of misogyny is common to both--though much more prominent in the Bourne show because he has so few roles for women. Both Jarman and Bourne don't present a madonna/whore dichotomy... more of a dictatrix/flapper dichotomy. (Did Margaret Thatcher really do so much psychological damage?) The roles for women in Bourne's Swan Lake are as follows: 1) Maria Motherissueskaya, 2) Ditzie Doritos, 3) Butterfly Ballerinas whose art is cheap and obvious (unlike the subtle work we're watching now!) and 4) Eyepatch of Awesome.

And the sense of thwarted erotic hunger is of course preeminent in both productions. Jarman's work is much better because he chooses to express anger rather than self-pity, and politics rather than pop-psychology. Nonetheless if you are glad you saw his EII you should probably see this show too.

Speaking of pop-psychology, this production was really swilling the cliché. The swans are coming from beneath the bed! He looks at his reflection and drinks from a flask to demonstrate his pain! I'm really conflicted about this, since a) ballet, like opera (like horror, like genre in general), is already stylized and so cliche is always imminent, and
b) I'm pretty sure I fell in love with figure skating in large part because it married actual artistry so completely with vaudeville tawdriness, sawdust and stardust. (Oh, why not, here's more Christopher Bowman.)

So if we're simply mining pop-psych for immediately compelling, intelligible hieroglyphics of melodrama, then I support that 106%. (Not just 100%, because I am beyond reason.) But the Bourne production seemed to me to swing occasionally into self-seriousness, an attempt at actually representing the inner consciousness of a conflicted gay prince, and this I found a bit Oprah-ish or insistent.

And so we return to our sheep (or our feathers)--there are so many sequences of this production which I found amazing. I loved the drunken staggering outside the bar. I loved the pursuing-retreating-captured dynamic after the ball.

But let me end by comparing this disc, unfairly, to two live performances.

First: I don't think I could have really understood this production before I became a fan of the Synetic Theater. Their provocative, intermittently tawdry, undeniably brilliant and idiosyncratic interpretations of classic works through dance helped me develop a modern-dance vocabulary. They were able to show me, as if teaching me sign language, how there is no one-to-one correspondence between dance and Shakespeare and yet a dance troupe can convey all the complexities and ornaments of Antony and Cleopatra. (This month their King Lear opens and I am LITERALLY JOE BIDEN bursting at the seams to see it!) Gestures aren't words, and yet a dance sequence can be a paragraph.

And second... a few days after I saw the Bourne Swan Lake via Netflix, I saw the Mariinsky Ballet (if you remember Reagan then you, like me, may know them best by their Soviet-era name, the Kirov Ballet) perform "Giselle."

Look, I know it's not fair to compare the Mariinsky to anyone. And yet the shocking precision of their movements--despite a radically silly storyline, despite sequences in which the ballerinas had to hop across the stage--the grace and the illusion of effortless gliding were simply unparalleled. They took us into another dimension, another kind of consciousness (I KNOW how foo-foo I sound! I can't think of any other way to put it!), simply through their razor-sharp control. Their technical prowess made them so alien that they didn't have to rely on their interpretation of the story for sublimity.

"NOBODY'S PERFECT": I realize none of you care, but I have spent the past five days watching every Christopher Bowman-related link on YouTube, so I have got to talk to someone about him. Internet to the rescue! Skip this post if you don't care about skating.

What I find most striking is the fact that while he definitely earned his "Bowman the Showman" nickname, and would often interrupt more introspective programs to play to the judges or the audience, he's as much an artist as an entertainer. His programs are often musical, sensitive, lyrical, and poignant. (The song "Maria" from West Side Story makes me want to punch puppies in the face, and yet he made a sublime, romantic purse from this saccharine sow's ear.) He spends a lot of time on his knees on the ice; and where unmusical skaters often try to make flailing arms compensate for random footwork, Bowman's feet and legs are usually where he really matches and carries the music. The replays here emphasize how lovely his jump exits often were, despite his struggles with the triple axel.

The more you watch him, the more you understand why Toller Cranston might have viewed him as a possible kindred soul--despite how horribly that particular coach/skater relationship crashed and burned. Bowman shares with Cranston his uniqueness, his angular positions, his musicality, and his straight-up weirdness. He was never the innovator Cranston was, but his style is unmistakable whether he's "going for Camera Six!" or doing a heartbreaking, introverted program (yeah, I saw the finger-gun; see above re: I don't care if he interrupts himself to be awesome).

In the great "Brian Orser or Brian Boitano?" debate, I'm pretty sure my answer will always be Bowman. I hope he's at peace now.

"Johnny, you're drunk!"

I wasn't drunk, just a cheap date. Galina let loose with a stream of insults, screaming at the top of her lungs about how disrespectful and shameful I was.

"How Russian can you get?" she said before pushing me inside. "Showing up at the ballet drunk, with a whore."
--Johnny Weir, Welcome to My World

I can confidently say that if you think you might want to read this awesome book, you definitely should. I want to rewatch several of his competitive programs now that I've read his thoughts on how they were developed and what it felt like to skate them.

"AVE MARIA."

"AVE MARIA."

AN EDGE IS A PROMISE GOD WON'T MAKE: So you might as well work it like it's going out of business. I try not to inflict figure skating on you people but this is really... look, just try it. It's weird. You'll like it.

HEY, YOU WITH THE STARS IN YOUR EYES: I'll be quick because I know how few of you care! But All That Skate was amazing. Nothing can compare to the immediacy of live skating or the camaraderie of the live skating audience. So here are a few snapshots from a sparkly, incandescent, cheesy, hilarious, sublime evening. I am so grateful to all of these skaters for their performances.

I had heard that Shen & Zhao had pulled out of the LA show. So when the announcer said (something like), "They are the reigning Olympic champions in pairs skating...", I literally gasped. Words are inadequate; I can only say that their first program was one of my favorites, and their second gave me chills. They actually embody the danger in love every time they skate.

Stephane Lambiel and Michelle Kwan were the other showstoppers. Lambiel is just a joy to watch as he does these incomprehensibly brilliant spins, plays to the audience, sings along with his music, and generally looks like he's having the time of his life. The fair is a veritable smorgasbord, orgasbord, orgasbord, to him! (Here's a great Lambiel show program if you want to know what he's like.) I had never really connected with Kwan's skating before, despite acknowledging her prowess, but seeing her do some of the best jumps and spins and spirals in the show made me realize what a trouper she really is. I mean this in absolutely the best way: She was almost as good in ATS:LA2010 as she was in her Olympics exhibition skate back in 2002. Expressive and powerful and clean, every inch the role model Yu-Na Kim loves her as.

Ashley Wagner, and the pairs team of Aliona Savchenko and Robin Szolkowy, were both terrific. I'd never seen them before, and now I know I need to look them up on YouTube. Wagner, especially, skated like she had something to prove, and I respect that a lot.

Johnny Weir, my actual favorite skater in the history of ever, more or less fumbled his second program. He hurt his hip in rehearsal, and it showed. He had noticeably more verve in the group numbers. And you know, Weir on an off night still provides moments of genuine bliss due to his ability to connect with the audience and act. So while this really was an off night for him, it only strengthened my resolve to make sure I can scrape up the cash to see his next show on the East Coast.

(If you want to know why I'm so convinced that I will love the next Weir show I see, here are some links: a vastly better performance of "Poker Face" than the one he showed at ATSLA Day 1; the performance which hooked me on figure skating; his astounding "Swan" program; "Feeling Good," in which he absolutely owns the music and the emotion and the ice; "I Love You, I Hate You," in a performance I entirely love; and a performance to "Bad Romance" which is so awesome that it overcomes both my hatred of his furry lizard costume and my helpless dislike of Lady Gaga. And I would be happy to supply many more links to programs where you can watch Weir push skating forward. You're welcome!)

"CALIFORNIA DREAMING." Probably my favorite performance from one of my favorite skaters. I will be in LA all weekend, with an overnight Sunday/Monday flight home, so expect absolutely no posting until at least Monday night. Not sure what I'll have for you then, but I will try to keep my All That Skate fannishness to a dull roar. Again, do email me if you're in the area and want to have coffee, since it looks like that will be happening, most likely on Sunday afternoon.

DEAL OR NO DEAL: Just finished The Second Mark, Joy Goodwin's terrific book ostensibly about the Salt Lake City Olympics pairs skating scandal. Its actual subjects include, among many other things, the rocky transition from the Soviet Union to the "new Russia"; a brief history of modern China, as told by small children in a cold climate; the ways culture and politics affect our aesthetic judgments; the messiness of skating judging at the best of times; and the ways--good, bad, and very much both at once--in which women understand, accept, and adjust to suffering.

All of this in fluid and unobtrusive prose. I checked it out of the library because it promised background on Xue Shen and Hongbo Zhao, the Chinese pairs champions, but I'd recommend it even to people with no especial interest in figure skating. (But if you want to know why Shen and Zhao are so great, try this, this, and this!)

EVERY DAY IS SELF-PARODY DAY. So far in Decadence and Catholicism we have had three, count 'em three, figure skaters! Two young men for whom various people conceived homoerotic passions, and also Huysmans's hagiography of St. Lydwina, skating's patroness. I don't even know anymore. My life is just a series of bad rhymes at this point.

IT'S ALL IN THE WRISTS. If you want to know what I mean when I use the phrase "la nouvelle Heloise," here's a visual aid. An icon of submission as command, that Mobius strip of self-possession I described in my Inside Catholic column on Abelard and Heloise.

Although its roots are traced back to the ancient world of mythology, the real birth of figure skating occurred in Stuart England.
--James R. Hines, Figure Skating: A History

Oh LOL, of course I would fall for the Restoration-era sport! ...And the one whose motto seems to be, "Girls, Lisa. Boys kiss girls."

(edited to fix quote and tags)

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JOHNNY WEIR. Here, have a planet.

(Do I have any readers who love figure skating? I haven't been posting about it because I have nothing to say other than things like, "Look, another amazing performance from Lucinda Ruh! Is she part-orchid or what?", and similarly unprofessional flailing for various other skaters. But why not email me about your favorite programs etc? I'll post links if you've got 'em.)