#25 - An Easy Thing

Is there anything easier than a feeling of momentum?

Of creating action plans and seeing them through.

Of seeing achievements lead to opportunities and line up neatly in a months-long line.

Of creating connections between wants and feeding them into each other.

Of discovering finally, finally, how to create time, and when to use it for recuperation as opposed to generation.

Of sleeping and feeling the benefits later.

Of knowing it won’t last but caring less and less.

Of sprinting, racing, flying past the creeping sense that something is very, very wrong.

Wind Breaker Day at Anime Yankii

The good folks at Anime Yankii are hosting nearly the entire main cast of Wind Breaker for an afternoon in anticipation of the second season premiere! I’ll be there with the Bofurin Boys to chat, sign merch, and show off some…gasp…custom prints! If you find yourself in Lewisville on March 8th between 11am - 6pm, this is definitely the place to be. Come say hi!

Miss B at Theatre 3!

We’re back, y’all! Leslie Collins’ original, interactive, musical experience “Miss B’s Very Silly Playland Zirkus” will have a limited run at Theatre Three. There will be dancing, there will be puppets, there will be short documentaries, there will be…a naked polka.

Get tickets here! Four nights only this March - stick around after to experience the improv brilliance of Dry Clean Only!

Recent Gigs

Since my last update, I have provided additional voices for the following projects:

• Ameku M.D.: Doctor Detective, Episodes 5 & 6

• Magic Maker: How to Make Magic in Another World, Episode 7

Featured Role: Sylphid, Headhunted to Another World

So. About Belinda.

In one of my favorite twists in recent memory, Dennosuke Uchimura discovers in the fourth episode of “Headhunted to Another World” that “Belinda” is in reality top-ranking general, bad-ass magical genius, Archmage of Storms Sylphid. Because Sylphid only wants to work on things that interest her, she masquerades as her own executive assistant to shoo away visitors who might bother her during working hours.

Not only is this a great bit, executed to near-maximum effectiveness (I wish the opening theme of the show didn’t spoil the surprise), but Sylphid as herself is a compelling, layered example of a woman in the workforce. She’s capable, beautiful, confident, yes - but she’s also conniving, self-interested, easily irritated, and protective of her time. In the span of one episode we see her stay up all night to create a new magical device, collapse on her couch at the prospect of the new project, and go above the call of duty to create a solution benefiting a community in danger of collapse. As long as she can clearly see how she will benefit, she’ll put her whole heart into a project - and sometimes, rarely, that benefit is the knowledge that she’s made someone’s life better.

It is a delight to give voice to this finicky, mercurial woman, and an honor to share this role with the talented William Ofoegbu, who never fails to make me smile as Sylphid’s besuited alter ego. The season’s second half presents Sylphid with a new challenge. Come join us on the journey only on Crunchyroll!

Consume!

I love anime, man. Growing up, watching cartoons taught me how to tell stories while surpassing reality’s limitations. Watching anime brought me one step further, teaching me that if you are fully committed to your story, your audience will believe in it no matter how many rules you break along the way.

It is near impossible to describe the plot of “Dandadan” without sounding like either a really ambitious 13 year-old or a conspiracy theorist with an art degree, but I like to refer to it as a love story disguised as a sci-fi comedy. It tosses imagery from Japanese folklore, American cryptozoology, and traditional science fiction into a blender and turns the power on high while grounding the viewer in genuine emotion related to alienation, vulnerability, and need for connection. Science SARU’s animation is absolutely gorgeous, placing the story on rickety rails held up by dick jokes and EBM music that hurtle towards an unknown destination.

As a standard, “Dandadan” is a breath of fresh air. At its best, it will leave you breathless.

Performance(s) of the Week

Of course a story as wild as “Dandadan” wouldn’t be nearly as arresting without compelling characters. I love these kids to death.

Abby Trott and AJ Beckles shine in this dub. If you don’t know, the vast majority of ADR projects in the West are recorded piecemeal; actors rarely get to act in a booth together, and when you’re called in to record there’s a high chance that your scene partner hasn’t laid down their dialogue yet. So when you come across a project where the chemistry between two dub actors feels so strong and electric, even though they’ve never said these words to each other in the same space? That’s something special.

A Hard Thing

My freshman year at NYU, my classmates and I were sent on a field trip by our design teacher. Every week we were given a new subject to draw in our sketchbooks - this week we were told to go to the park across the street from the Stonewall Inn and sketch the statues there.

I remember it was a really nice day. That’s about all I remember.

What I remember much better is when we returned to class the next day to share our sketches with each other. Before we did, our teacher had us answer a question privately on a piece of paper: why were these statues built?

I didn’t know.

I don’t remember what I wrote down. Some joke answer, likely. I’d done that a week earlier when I had to make a piece of art inspired by my visit to the Noguchi Museum (a visit that didn’t happen in reality as I had gotten wildly lost in Astoria not once, but twice). Our teacher was not coy about his disdain for those of us who had answered incorrectly.

I wasn’t alone, at least. In a class of 18, maybe three or four wrote down the correct answer: the statues were built to commemorate the flashpoint of the LGBT rights movement in 1969, a riot at the Stonewall Inn. They were created in 1980. They were not installed until 1992 - most sources I looked at cited “public opposition” as the reason why.

Now, all of this information would have been available on the fucking sign next to the statues which I did not bother to read, and this was really the point my design teacher was making - be curious about the world around you and understand why you’re doing things you’re being told to do. But crucially as well, at 18 years old in 2008, I had never heard of the Stonewall Riots. I did not know the storied history of the gay community’s relationship with the police. I did not know, even after learning more, the significant role the transgender community in the West Village and elsewhere played not only during this event but previous events.

I did not know about previous events.

I did not know about the Mattachine Society.

I did not know about the Lavender Scare.

I did not know about the scope of anti-sodomy laws, especially not the ones that had never been removed from the books in certain states.

I did not know. Nobody had told me.

I originally started writing this section in response to transgender erasure on the national parks webpage related to this statue. As of this writing, the “T” in “LGBT” is still missing from the site’s content, despite widespread criticism and at least one well-attended protest. Since then, multiple states have either proposed or successfully passed legislation banning public funds from covering trans-affirming care regardless of the age of the beneficiary. While a national ban on allowing transgender athletes to compete in women’s sports was narrowly quashed this week, the general atmosphere is bleak. The White House’s official stance on the very existence of transgender people is jam-packed with destructive rhetoric in the name of “defending women’s rights”.

If you did not know this is happening, you have been told.

It is a hard thing, to know. But it is the first step to caring.

Hollis Beck is a performer and writer who crafts narratives about queer identity, found families, and people who try very hard. More information can be found on her website.