#it happens all the time. but when people tell you that creating That Specific Subgenre is futile & a defanging of the baked-in nature of

[cuntylittlesalmon]

i’m finding it really hard to take more media discourse seriously right now because a lot of it tends to be hinder by emotional fragility. the “if something make me feel this type of way (namely the escapist, or the horny) it is inherently above criticism, and any attempts to critique (even if said critique is coming from a place of endearment) is an attack on my morality” stuff.

[romeroandrea]

Preserving the Flow: A Water Conservation Crusade

Definitions

Story: a story told in prose or verse that is either factual or made up with the intention of entertaining or teaching the listener or reader. Is a string of stories we make up, recall, or invent and tell ourselves because we need or want to. Maybe we write stories because we want to know something, need to learn something, or need to find an answer to a question.

Tale: A story is a story, usually with creative embellishments. Stories can be real or fictional, but they usually consist of a narrative, with a beginning and an end, made more interesting and exciting with vivid details.

Science fiction: It is a term used to describe one of the fictional literature subgenres, along with fantasy and horror literature. Fiction focusing on hypothetical future developments in science or technology.

Literature for English - Story

It all starts in the year 2045 exactly in my house. I am 39 years old and I am a doctor in my own clinic. That day my family was not at home. I decided to get ready to go out for sushi dinner and suddenly I hear on the news that the water in the world has run out and that there is a very serious shortage, the water faucets were absolutely dry. My outing to celebrate my birthday had to be called off because everyone was distressed by this situation. 

I was looking forward to sitting watching the news thinking about what I will do now that I have no water, to be specific no one had water, when suddenly in the middle of my living room a portal opens, and turns up to my best friend Sophia. She was my best friend from high school, she loved the piano, but when we graduated, we both split up to accomplish our goals and we haven't seen each other for 20 years. It was definitely her, but she looked so young, it was like she was 17 again. I still remember when we were eating candy and chocolate. She just reached out her hand to me and said “come help me we must sort out this problem, come with me or everything will get worse”. 

I didn't ask anything and I followed her in the doorway, when we crossed I realized that I was rejuvenated because we had returned to the year 2023, so she told me “why she brought me to 2023 in a time machine”.  

She explained to me that the whole problem with the water shortage started in 2023, but we will only see its consequences in 2045. In this case we had to go to school, so I put on my uniform and we headed to school. There we started to make campaigns about saving water, we opened web pages so that more people can learn about this problem and learn how to save water so that the problem of water scarcity does not happen. After all, we managed to make many people aware of water waste and so we concluded our mission. I stood up and walked to Sophia and told her to go back to my house. I returned home and when I saw the news the water problem was gone and everything was back to normal.

References

Guides: Science fiction - Greensburg Campus: What is science fiction? (s. f.). https://pitt.libguides.com/scifi#:~:text=Usually%20futuristic%2C%20science%20fiction%20speculates,consistent%20rules%20and%20structures%2C%20set

Story Definition & Meaning | Dictionary.com. (2020). En Dictionary.com. https://www.dictionary.com/browse/story

Tale - Definition, Meaning & Synonyms. (s. f.). En Vocabulary.com. https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/tale#:~:text=A%20tale%20is%20a%20story,and%20exciting%20with%20vivid%20details.

VIDEO

Creating the AI image was not that difficult, just use the canva tool which allows you to generate images just by typing the situation you want to recreate and it generates the whole scenario.

[newmoonjuno]

Writeblr Intro!

This is not my first foray into writblr but hopefully I wanted to make it stick this time around.

ABOUT ME

You can call me Stella or Stelios. You can use generally he/she/they as far as pronouns, I find I'm not super duper picky.

26.

I'm White/Peruvian.

Typically I use she/they pronouns. However, I am pretty lenient and don't mind any pronouns being used for me.

I am a college graduate, with my degree being Creative Writing with a focus in fiction. Writing has weaved in and out of my life, but telling stories is what I like to do.

I would love to get into editing and publishing. As a bigger dream, I'd love to publish at least one novel. I have also considered going back to school to maybe become a librarian?

My interests also include drawing, and making amvs. I love Pokemon and magical girls.

ABOUT MY WRITING + GOAL

My main goal really is to push myself into writing my originals works and plan - I've sort of fallen since graduating and my ever-changing work schedule. I hope with this I can find like-minded people and get the boost I need.

My preferences of writing would be fantasy and sci-fi - that is the aim of the kinds of stories I want to write. The subgenre will come along in a way that feels right. (This is what happens to me and my brain having so many ideas - characters get made first, the rest comes later.)

I will read fantasy and sci-fi - I don't really know if I have certain or particular things that grasp me that I am aware of. Whatever clicks, I like. I also really enjoy dystopias.

When it comes to writing myself - expect a lot of character dynamics. Parents, siblings. Uhh expect a majority of my main protagonists to be into something art. And a lot of powers or magic.

MY PROJECTS

(Please note the majority of these are still in the early planning / plotting stages so expect a majority of things to change as I process them all. Some are a little more developed than others.)

HALOS AND POPPIES WIP // So this is kind of trying to become my little brainchild project. I have two main protagonists, Salima "Sellie" Wakefield and Orazio Ventura and it involves psychic powers basically. It's all very bare bones but I am making an effort.

-

I do have more ideas - but they are more in the form of characters. I have a lot of character ideas but not stories to put them in, so this above really is trying to be shaped into one. I think as I create more concrete ideas that I am comfortable with, I will make specific posts for such a thing.

I am looking for tumblrs to follow and hopefully we can take on the wonderful and sometimes frustrating world of writing!!

[maxwell-grant]

Excuse Me what is pulp and why is it importan?

Good question! And probably one I should have answered sooner. Time to put on the historian hat for this one.

"Pulp" is a term used mainly to describe forms of storytelling that sprang out or were dominant in 20th century cheap all-fiction American magazines from the 1900s to the 1950s. The pulp magazine began in 1896, when Frank Munsey's Argosy magazine, in order to cut costs, dropped the non-fiction articles and photographs and switched from glossy paper to the much less expensive wood pulp paper, hence the name. The pulp magazines would mainly take off as a distinct market and format in 1904, when Street & Smith learned that Popular Magazine, despite being marketed towards boys, was being consumed by men of all ages, so they increased page count and started putting popular authors on the issues.

It was specifically the 1905 reprint of H.Rider Haggard's Ayesha that not only put Street & Smith on the map as rivals to Argosy, but also inspired other companies to start publishing in the pulp format. Pulps encompassed literally everything that the authors felt like publishing. Westerns, romance, horror, sci-fi, railroad stories, war stories, war aviation stories. Zeppelins had a short-lived subgenre. Celebrities got their own magazines, it was really any genre or format they could pull off, anything they could get away with.

Nowadays, although they came quite late in it's history, the American pulps are most famous for it's "hero pulps", characters like The Shadow and Doc Savage that are viewed as a formative influence on comic book superheroes. The pulp magazines in America lasted until the 1950s, when cumulative factors such as paper shortages, diminishing audience returns and the closing of it's biggest publishers led to it dying off, although in the decades since there's always been publishers calling their magazines pulp. That's the American pulp history.

But pulps are a phenomenon that spans the entire world and has a much bigger history to it, because pulps have become synonymous with cheap fiction magazines and those have a much bigger history. In America, before the pulps, you had the dime novels, the direct predecessors of the pulps, as well as the novelettes. England had it's penny dreadfuls and story papers, and continued publishing pulp-format magazines past the American 1950s, and that's how we got Elric of Melniboné. France and Russia arguably got to it first with it's 1800s coulporters, chapbooks and particularly the feuilletons which lasted all the way to the 20th century and created characters such as Arsene Lupin, Fantomas and The Phantom of the Opera. The Germans published pulp under the name hefteromane. Japan also published pulp magazines both original as well as imported, and the current "light-novel" phenomenon started off as an equivalent of pulp magazines (it's even on the Wikipedia page). China has wuxia, Brazil has cordel, Italy has gialli. There were Indian, Persian, Ethiopian, Canadian, Australian pulps and much more. Look anywhere in the world and you'll find examples of "pulp" happening again and again, under different circumstances and time periods.

Even if we stick to American fiction, it's impossible to state that all pulp heroes must come from the 1900s-1950s pulp magazines, because that forces us to exclude some of the most popular pulp heroes like Indiana Jones, Green Hornet, Rocketeer and The Phantom. Pulp may have once been a term meant to refer to pulp magazines exclusively, but it's morphed and lost structure and it's become the closest thing we have to a general umbrella term that allows us to try and consolidate these under a shared history. It's a lot, as you can see, and it's why several pulp historians that broaden their scope outside of 1930s American fiction have adopted Roland Barthes's definition of pulp as "A Metaphor With No Brakes In It", which is still the closest thing to a true working definition we have.

Why is it important? You tell me. I don't like to stake claims about stuff being "important", everyone's got their own priorities in life. Surely a lot of people would scoff at the idea of old populist fiction published in what was functionally equivalent to toilet paper having any sort of "importance". On the other hand, some people definitely want to talk big about the pulps as a cultural bedrock of fiction, something that's baked into the lifeblood of all fiction as we currently know it. Which it is, mind you, but I don't like to talk about pulp fiction's value being derived mainly from merely the things it inspired.

There is definitely a historical importance to be had in cataloguing them. According to the US's foremost pulp researcher Jess Nevins, 38% of all American pulps no longer exist, and 14% of all American pulps survive in less than five copies. Many libraries have very scant, if any, records on them, many collectors are hard to locate and are uncooperative when it comes to sharing information and letting outsiders view their collections. A lot of them are bound up in legal complications that prevents them from taking off in the public domain, and a lot of them ARE public domain but are completely inacessible as research material. And that's the American pulps, foreign pulps have fared far worse in posterity, with records inaccessible to people unfamiliar with the language or locations, many existing merely in mentions on decades-old records, and hundreds if not thousands of them being completely gone beyond recovery or recall.

Gone, dead, wasted, destroyed. They can't be found in barbershops or warehouse or bookstores, not even in antique stores. Hundreds, thousands of characters, stories and creators, gone. Time and posterity have crushed them to dust, forgotten and ignored by their successors. Unfettered by pretenses of respectability that repressed their glossier counterparts, in packages meant to be destroyed after reading, proudly announcing itself as trash. Things that should have never even lasted as long as they did have died many times now. It's heroes peripherical shapeshifters, nearly all of whom seem dead, quite dead, as dead as fictional characters can possibly be.

But they do not die forever. Many of them have, maybe most of them have, but many of them linger on.

"The strange red flickering of 1930’s fiction seems distant now.  You hold in your hand the product of a time too remote to recall, and feel a slow stir of wonder.  The smell of pulp pages, an illustration, an advertisement, these fragile things mark the slow hammering of time and display what it has done.  About you are today’s machines, today’s shadows.

Outside the window, leaves hang against the sky, as did leaves during the 1930’s.  The sound of voices are no different then than now.  You hold the magazine and feel something quite delicate slipping past. These solid forms surrounding you are all insubstantial. Time’s hammer will also pass across them, leaving little enough behind." - Spider, by Robert Sampson

Many of the things people call dead are just things that have been sleeping for a while or haven't had the chance to be born. Pulp fiction is dead on the page, inert, unless your imagination breathes live to it, and every now and then, one way or another, these characters dig themselves out of dustbins. Maybe it's a brief revival, maybe it's a successful reboot. Maybe they find publishers, or maybe the public domain allows them to find new life. Maybe new creators do interesting things with them, and maybe, just maybe, they live again because some won't shut up about them online. Some curious impulse led you to me, did it not? 

We all have our Frankensteins to obsess over, and these are some of mine. As someone who's lived a life perpetually restless over pursuit of knowledge, pulp has lured me like a moth to flame, because I literally never run out of things to discover within it, I never run out of possibilities. As the years pass and the public domain starts being more and more open to the public, more and more narrative real state is brought forth for writers and artists and creators to play around.

Pulp is the dark matter of fiction, the uncatalogued depths of the ocean, the darkest recesses of space. It's the box of your grandfather's belongings, the treasure you find in an attic, a body part sticking out from an old playground. It's the things that don't work, don't succeed, the things that don't fit, that are out of place. That shouldn't live and succeed, and did so anyway. The things that slither in the cracks, the shadows behind the curtain.

Aren't you interested in peering on what's behind the curtain?

The exquisite workmanship of the head, of a pre-pyramidal age, and the hieroglyphics, symbols of a language that was forgotten when Rome was young–these, Kane sensed, were additions as modern to the antiquity of the staff itself as would be English words carved on the stone monoliths of Stonehenge.

As for the cat-head–looking at it sometimes Kane had a peculiar feeling of alteration; a faint sensing that once the pommel of the staff was carved with a different design. The dust-ancient Egyptian who had carved the head of Bast had merely altered the original figure, and what that figure had been, Kane had never tried to guess.

A close scrutiny of the staff always aroused a disquieting and almost dizzy suggestion of abysses of eons, unprovocative to further speculation. - The Footfalls Within, by Robert E Howard, quoted by Stuart Hopen’s The Mythic American Culture

[loonatism]

WHAT IS THE LOONAVERSE? PART 2 – THE NARRATIVE DEVICES

LOONA is special among K-pop for its immersive storyline. These girls are not just k-pop idols performing a song, they also perform a story and that story is what we call the Loonaverse.

So, what is the Loonaverse? In a few words: The world and story that LOONA inhabits.

Yeah. Duh. But what is it?

Well… it’s complicated.

The Loonaverse is a fictitious story that borrows elements from real science and fantasy to build its world but also uses allegories, metaphors, allusions and other literary devices to tell its story. Our job as spectators (and specifically us theorizers) is to look beyond those devices to understand the message they are trying to send. In this post I’ll attempt to explain the numerous literary devices used to narrate the story of the Loonaverse.

So, these 2 things are LAW:

Each girl has two conflicts: an external one and an internal one.

The LOONAVERSE story is one of fantasy and mystery.

INTERNAL CONFLICT VS EXTRNAL CONFLICT

Or as I like to call it: UNIT vs SOLO

I’ve explained how the girls are trapped in a time loop and how escaping it was their overarching goal. This is the external conflict of the Loonaverse. The progression of this storyline is seen mainly in the Sub-Unit MVs and LOONA MVs but also in some teasers and other videos like Cinema Theory. The conflict is external because: 1) It comes from the outside. 2) The characters not have power against it, at least not at the beginning. 3) The conflict has effect over multiple people.

Also…

Every character has an internal conflict. A personal story. Each girl perceives the world differently and that changes the way they act and interact with each other. It is internal because: 1) It comes from within the person. 2) They themselves may be the cause for the conflict. 3) The conflict has effect on only one person: themselves. This Internal conflict is presented to us in the Solo MVs. Every solo MV is a window to the character’s mind. While the solo MVs are tangentially related to the main external conflict, they mostly focus on the internal conflict of the character.

External and Internal conflicts often mix and interlace each other to create a wider story. We will see how the external conflict fuels the internal conflicts of the girls and how their internal conflicts will shape the way they act towards solving the external conflict.

FANTASY AND MYSTERY

What is fantasy? The genre of fantasy is described as a story based in a world completely separate from our own. It usually features elements or magical/supernatural forces that do not exist on our own world. It is not tied to reality of science.

Wait a minute. You just spent an entire post explaining the science of the Loonaverse. You can’t call it fantasy now. Well yes, yes I can. Since most of the scientific elements I explained are theoretical, unproved in our world but in the world of LOONA they are a reality, a scientific reality. A reality that differs from our own, and thus a fantasy to us. But regardless of that the reason I call the Loonaverse a fantasy is because of the themes it explores.

Fantasy is a broad genre, it is one of the oldest literary genres, being found in old myths. Some of the themes often found in fantasy stories include: tradition vs. change, the individual vs. society, man vs. nature, coming of age, betrayal, epic journeys, etc. All of these themes are very present in the Loonaverse. But I’ll delve into each one as we encounter them.

What is Mystery? The mystery genre is a type of fiction in which a person (usually a detective) solves a crime. The purpose is to solve a puzzle and to create a feeling of resolution with the audience. Some elements of a mystery include: the Crime that needs solving, the use of suspense, use of figures of speech, the detective having inference gaps, the suspects motives are examined in the story, the characters usually get in danger while investigating, plus these:

Red herring. something that misleads or distracts from a relevant or important question and leads the audience to a false answer.

Suspense. Intense feeling that an audience goes through while waiting for the outcome of certain events.

Foreshadowing. A literary device that hints at information that will become relevant later on.

I just though you should know these definitions.

In the Loonaverse, the “crime” is the time loop itself, and the mystery is finding a way to break it. Or so we think. In reality, the “How do we break the loop?” question is solved rather easily. But can we really call this a mystery if the main question is already answered? Yes! It may no be a mystery story for the characters themselves but because BlockBerry uses various mystery genre tropes while telling the story, it is a mystery TO THE AUDIENCE.

That’s right! WE are the detectives!

In a classical mystery, the detective examines all clues, motives, and possible alibis, for each suspect, or in our case, each character. The same way we analyze every MV, every interaction, every possible clue to where and when everything is happening.

The Loonaverse differs from a classic ‘Who done it?’ by establishing that no suspect is actually guilty. The crime IS the loop, but no girl is responsible for it (or so we think). Our job as detectives is not to figure out who is doing this but to explain how and establish an timeline of events that shed a light to what really happened. In that sense, our job resembles more closely a real crime investigation than a mystery novel.

LITERARY DEVICES

There are many literary devices an author can use to tell its story. Too many to cover them all in here, so I’ll focus on the most recurrent ones in the Loonaverse:

Allusion. Referring to a subject matter such as a place, event, or literary work by way of a passing reference.

Archetype. Reference to a concept, a person or an object that has served as a prototype of its kind and is the original idea that has come to be used over and over again.

Faulty Parallelism. the practice placing together similarly structure related phrases, words or clauses but where one fails to follow this parallel structure.

Juxtaposition. The author places a person, concept, place, idea or theme parallel to another

Metaphor. A meaning or identity ascribed to one subject by way of another. One subject is implied to be another so as to draw a comparison between their similarities and shared traits.

Motif. Any element, subject, idea or concept that is constantly present through the entire body of literature.

Symbol. Using an object or action that means something more than its literal meaning, they contain several layers of meaning, often concealed at first sight.

Genre. Classification of a literary work by its form, content, and style.

Some other literary devices worthy of your private investigation are: Negative Capability, Point of View, Doppelgänger, Flashback, Caesura, Stream of Consciousness, Periodic Structure, THEME, Analogy.

About Genre:

Genres are important because they give a story structure. They help an author tell the story in a way that makes it simple for the audience to understand what kind of story is being told. The classic genres of literature are Poetry, Drama and Prose. Some scholars include Fiction and Non-fiction. 

In film there are a variety of accepted genres: Comedy, Tragedy, Horror, Action, Fantasy, Drama, Historical, etc. Plus a bunch of subgenres like Contemporary Fantasy, Spy Film, Slapstick Comedy, Psychological Thriller, etc. What defines a genre is the use of similar techniques and tropes like color, editing, themes, character archetypes, etc. 

I point this out because the Loonaverse uses many genres to tell its story. Sure, the main story is a fantasy/mystery but every MV or Teaser has its own genre (especially the solo MVs). So, when I point out later that Kiss Later is a romantic comedy or that One & Only is a gothic melodrama, this is what I mean.

TLDR:

The Loonaverse is the world and story that LOONA inhabits. It borrows form real life science and fantasy elements to better tell its story. Each girl has an external conflict (escaping the loop) and an internal conflict (portrayed in the solo MVs). Both conflicts interlace to tell the story. The Loonaverse is a story of Fantasy because it takes place in a different world from ours and it is a Mystery because it is told using various mystery tropes. The story uses multiple literary and visual devices to tell it’s story and fuel the mystery.

REMEMBER: This is all my interpretation. My way of comprehending and analyzing the story. You don’t have to agree with everything. I encourage you to form your own theories. Remember: every theory is correct.

After all that you may be wondering what the story even is. And we’ll finally be getting to that. While I have my own interpretation of the timeline, themes and who did what. I think it’s more fun to slowly explore every brick instead of just summarizing it in one (incredibly long) post. I’ll do that much, much, much later. The journey will be just as interesting as the destination. I hope you’re in for the ride.

Let’s get to the real deal: The MVs. I’m going in chronological order so let’s start with girl No. 1!

Next: The bright pink bunny of LOONA: HeeJin’s ViViD.

[lyricwritesprose]

More Dialogue Stuff

This is part of a series about writing.  You can find the first part here.

Okay, so, dialogue.  Again.

If you've ever read Jane Austen, you will know that popular views on how dialogue works have changed a lot.  Back in the day, there wasn't as much emphasis on making dialogue sound natural.  They wanted it to sound good, instead, and had specific ideas about what sounded good.  These days, we're all about sounding natural and will sacrifice smoothness.  Except, of course, that transcribing a conversation as spoken would involve way too much "uh," and "um," and starting over—so the goal is dialogue that sounds real, but isn't.

To that end, a lot of writers these days include “uh,” and “um,” and sentences that break off—but only when they tell us something.  (That thing can be just that the character is inarticulate.  Still.  The point is, it serves a function.)  So, if you have dialogue like this:

“I couldn’t—”  He took a deep, ragged breath.  “I couldn’t.  I just—you were—I couldn’t take it, I couldn’t do anything, you were just gone.  So what was the point?  Of anything?  What was the fucking point?”

The places where the sentence loses its way, the m-dashes (these things: — ), the single curse, all of it is supposed to indicate a character in emotional turmoil, talking about a traumatic event where they thought they lost someone close to them.  This character may talk differently when they are not talking about trauma.

(It is worth noting that m-dashes, ellipses (three dots, like so . . . ), and italics are something that I arguably overuse, as a writer.  Some of this stuff is based on personal preference.  It’s worth thinking about those personal preferences, and what you like in the stories you read.)

Let’s have a cut and then talk about voice.

“Voice” is the distinctive speech patterns of a particular character.  This is something that stands out especially in fanfiction, so I’ll talk about it from a fanfic writer’s perspective.  An example: my current main fandom has a character by the name of Aziraphale.  He happens to be an actual, supernatural angel, but that’s not necessarily important for writing his dialogue.  What is important is that, despite not being born in England (or arguably born at all) he is almost stereotypically English.  He will use silly-sounding phrases like “tickety-boo,” with absolutely no trace of irony.  He tends to speak in an old-fashioned way.  He also speaks in an erudite way, like someone who has been reading books for hundreds of years (he has).  Aziraphale uses phrases like, “dear boy,” and “dear” (more in fanfic than in canon, but then, fanfic tends to be more overtly romantic).  And it is worth noting that Aziraphale presents himself as very gay—opinions on how much he’s doing it deliberately vary within the fandom, but it’s there.

What this means is that there are some things you do, when writing this character, and there are some things that you avoid.  Modern slang, imprecision, local dialects from somewhere that isn’t England (unless you’re writing an AU)—these are things to keep out of this character’s speech.  On the other hand, you can, with care, use long, fussy words like “imprecision” and “erudite” and other things that you might not use for a different character.

If you are doing fanfic, you can get a sense of voice from canon.  Many characters have extremely distinctive voices—for me, the tenth Doctor comes to mind—full of personal quirks and special ways of enunciating and words that he loves to use.  (Sometimes, if it’s a TV or movie franchise, these things are difficult to represent in print.  I have never been satisfied with the phrase “popping the P,” which everyone seems to use for Ten’s distinctive approach to plosive consonants, but I’ve also never seen anyone come up with anything better.)  If you are writing an original story, you’ve got to come up with all this on your own, and depending on your writing style, keeping a cheat sheet might help.

Another thing to remember about dialogue is something I picked up from Russell T. Davies, the person who brought Doctor Who back and wrote a valuable book on writing which I have meant to obtain for some time now.   Davies notes that people don’t often listen to each other on more than a superficial level, or explain what’s really going on with themselves.  You can create a lot of tension with this: a character who is having a breakdown keeps saying things like, “I’m fine,” and you have a situation where the character you want to care for them will be uncertain whether they ought to, or whether they’re welcome, or whether, in fact, the subtext is, “Go away, I don’t want you.”  The moment when that character decides, “Screw it, I am taking care of him anyway, because he needs it,” thus has more dramatic weight.  (If it seems like this particular scenario is heavily draw from the hurt/comfort subgenre of fanfic—you are absolutely right.)  You don’t have to make your characters talk past each other all the time—but you don’t want to make them understand each other all the time, either.  Especially with certain kinds of stories.  If you’re writing an episode in the life of an old married couple, it’s likely that they’ll have at least a few aspects of this “communication” thing hashed out, but if you’re writing a romance where people get together?  The moment when they actually understand what’s going on with the other one may well be your climax, and you don’t want to make things too easy for them.

Which means it’s also important to keep in mind what each character actually means when they say something.  You can conceal it from the reader—probably should, if you’re writing in third person limited, which most people do these days.  But you, as the writer, should have an idea of where they’re coming from.  A character can say, “I’m fine,” and mean I don’t want to talk about it because it bothers me and I don’t want to think about it, or say, “I’m fine,” and mean I am on the edge of a breakdown, or say, “I’m fine,” and mean, you are not actually my friend and I know it, go away.  (Maybe it’s just the genres I read, but I feel like it’s actually fairly rare in fiction for a character to say, “I’m fine,” and mean everything’s okay right now.)

Anyway, that’s all for right now.  Next, by special request: outlining!

If you guys are interested in supporting me in this, I’ve got a ko-fi.

[tlbodine]

The History & Evolution of Home Invasion Horror

Here’s my prediction: In the next couple of years, we’re going to be seeing a sudden surge of home invasion movies hit the market. For many of us, 2020 has been a year of extreme stress compounded by social isolation; venturing outside means being exposed to a deadly plague, after all. 

And while many people have already predicted that we’ll see an influx of pandemic and virus horrors (see my post on those: https://ko-fi.com/post/Pandemic-and-Pandemonium-Sickness-in-Horror-T6T21I201), I actually think a lot of us are going to be processing a different type of fear -- anxiety about what happens when your home, which is supposed to be a literal safe space, gets invaded. Because if you’re not safe in your own house...you’re not safe anywhere. 

Home invasion movies have been around a long time -- arguably as long as film, with 1909′s The Lonely Villa setting down the formula -- and they share many of the same roots as slasher films in the 1970s. But somewhere along the way, they separated off and became their own distinct subgenre with specific tropes, and it’s that separation and the stories that followed it that I want to focus on. 

The Origins of the Home Invasion Movie 

In order to really qualify as a home invasion movie, a film has to meet a few requirements:

The action must be contained entirely (or almost entirely) to a single location, usually a private residence (ie, the home) 

The perpetrator(s) must be humans, not supernatural entities (no ghosts, zombies, or vampires -- that’s a different set of tropes!) 

In most cases, the horror builds during a long siege between the invader and the home-dweller, including scenes of torture, capture, escape, traps, and so forth. 

To an extent, home invasion movies are truth in television. Although home invasions are relatively rare, and most break-ins occur when a family is away (the usual goal being to steal things, not torture and kill people), criminals do sometimes break into people’s homes, and homeowners are sometimes killed by them. 

In the 1960s and 70s, this certainly would have been at the forefront of people’s minds. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood detailed one such crime in lavish detail, and the account was soon turned into a film. Serial killers like the Boston Strangler, BTK Killer and the “Vampire of Sacramento” Richard Chase also made headlines for their murders, which often occurred inside the victim’s home. (Chase, famously, considered unlocked doors to be an invitation, which is one great reason to lock your doors). 

By the 1960s and 70s, too, people were more and more often beginning to live in cities and larger neighborhoods where they did not know their neighbors. Anxieties about being surrounded by strangers (and, let’s face it, racial anxieties rooted in newly-mixed, de-segregated neighborhoods) undoubtedly fueled fears about home invasion. 

Early Roots of the Home Invasion Genre

Home invasion plays a part in several crime thrillers and horror films in the 1950s and 60s, including Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder in 1954, but it’s more of a plot point than a genre. In these films, home invasion is a means to an end rather than a goal unto itself. 

We see some early hints of the home invasion formula show up in Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left in 1972. The film depicts a group of murderous thugs who, after torturing and killing two girls, seek refuge in the victim’s home and plot the deaths of the rest of the family. In 1974, the formula is refined with Bob Clark’s Black Christmas, which shows the one-by-one murder of members of a sorority house and chilling phone calls that come from inside the home. 

Even closer still is I Spit on Your Grave, directed by Meir Zarchi in 1978. Although it’s generally (and rightly) classified as a rape-revenge film, the first half of the movie -- where an author goes to a remote cabin and is targeted and brutally assaulted by a group of men -- hits all the same story beats as the modern home invasion story: isolation, mundane evil, acts of random violence, and protracted torture. 

Slumber Party Massacre, directed by Amy Holden Jones in 1982, also hits on both home invasion and slasher tropes. Although it is primarily a straightforward slasher featuring an escaped killer systematically killing teenagers (with a decidedly phallic weapon), the film also shows its victims teaming up and fighting back -- weaponizing their home against the killer. This becomes an important part of the genre in later years! 

In 1997, Funny Games, directed by Michael Haneke, provides a brutal but self-aware look at the genre. Created primarily as a condemnation of violent media, the film nevertheless succeeds as an unironic addition to the home invasion canon -- from its vulnerable, suffering family to the excruciating tension of its plot to the nihilistic, motive-free criminality of its villains, it may actually be the purest example of the home invasion movie. 

Home Invasions Gone Wrong 

Where things start to get interesting for the home invasion genre is 1991′s The People Under the Stairs, another Wes Craven film. Here the script is flipped: The hero is the would-be robber, breaking and entering into the home of some greedy rich landlords. But this plan swiftly goes sideways when the homeowners turn out to be even worse people than they’d first let on. 

This is, as far as I can tell, the origin of the home-invasion-gone-wrong subgenre, which has gained immense popularity recently -- due, perhaps, to a growing awareness of systemic issues, a differing view of poverty, and a viewership sympathetic to the plight of down-on-their-luck criminals discovering that rich homeowners are, indeed, very bad people. 

Home Invasion Film Explosion of the 2000s 

The home invasion genre really hit the ground running in the 2000s, due perhaps to post-911 anxieties about being attacked on our home turf (and increasing economic uneasiness in a recession-afflicted economy and a growing awareness of the Occupy movement and wealth inequality). We see a whole slew of these films crop up, each bringing a slightly different twist to the formula.

*  It’s also worth noting that the 2000s saw remakes of many well-known films in the genre, including Funny Games and Last House on the Left.  

In 2008, Bryan Bertino directed The Strangers, a straightforward home invasion involving one traumatized couple and three masked villains. By this point, we’re wholly removed from the early crime movie roots; these are not people breaking in for financial gain. Like the killers in Funny Games, the masked strangers lack motive and even identity; they are simply a force of evil, chaotic and senseless. 

The themes of “violence as a senseless, awful thing” are driven further home by Martyrs, another 2008 release, this one from French director Pascal Laugier. A revenge story turned into a home-invasion-gone-wrong, the film is noteworthy for its brutality and blunt nihilism. 

2009′s The Collector, directed by Marcus Dunstan, is another home-invasion-gone-wrong movie. Like Martyrs, it dovetails with the torture porn genre (another popular staple of the 2000s), but it has a lot more fun with it. The film follows a down-on-his-luck thief who breaks into a house only to encounter another home invader set on murdering the family that lives there. The cat-and-mouse games between the two -- which involve numerous traps and convoluted schemes -- are fun to watch (if you like blood and guts). 

In a similar vein, we see You’re Next in 2013, which starts off as a standard home invasion movie but takes a sharp twist when it’s revealed that one of the victims isn’t nearly as helpless as she appears. Director Adam Wingard helps to redefine the concept of “final girl” in this move in a way that has carried forward right into the next decade with no sign of stopping. 

2013 of course also introduced us to The Purge, a horror franchise created by James DeMonaco. If there was ever any doubt as to the economic anxieties at the root of the genre, they should be alleviated now -- The Purge is such a well-known franchise at this point that the term has entered our pop culture lexicon as a shorthand for revolution. 

Don’t Breathe, directed be Fede Alvarez in 2016, is one of the creepiest modern entries into the “failed home invasion” category, and one that (ha ha) breathed some new life into the genre. Much like The People Under the Stairs, it tells the story of some down-on-their-luck criminals getting in over their heads when they target the wrong man. However, there is not the same overt criticism of wealth inequality in this film; it’s a movie more interested in examining and inverting genre tropes than treading new thematic ground. The same is true of Hush that same year. Directed by Mike Flanagan, the film is most noteworthy for its deaf protagonist. 

But lest you start to think the home invasion genre had lost its thematic relevance, 2019 arrived with two hard-hitting, thoughtful films that dip their toes in these tropes: Jordan Peele’s Us and Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, which both tackle themes of privilege in light of home invasion (albeit a nontraditional structure in Parasite -- its inclusion here is admittedly a bit of a stretch, but I think it falls so closely in the tradition of The People Under the Stairs that it deserves a spot on this list). 

What Does the Future Hold? 

I’m no oracle, so I can’t say for certain where the future of the home invasion genre might lead. But I do think we’re going to start seeing more of them in the next few years as a bunch of creative folks start working through our collective trauma. 

Income inequality, racial inequality, political unrest and systemic issues are all at the forefront of our minds (not to mention a deadly virus), and those themes are ripe for the picking in horror. 

I know that Paul Tremblay’s novel The Cabin at the End of the World has been optioned for film, so we might be seeing that soon -- and if so, it might just usher in a fresh wave of apocalypse-flavored home invasion stories. 

Like my content? You can support more of it by dropping me some money in my tip jar: https://www.ko-fi.com/post/Home-Invasion-Stories-A-History-R6R72RV7Y

[globalpattern]

Interview with desert sand feels warm at night

bandcamp | twitter | soundcloud

1. Hi! Can you tell a story about how your project came to life? Were you making music before?

I’ve been making music now for about 9 years and I’ve really never taken it anywhere because I guess I’ve never had any sort of initiative or motivation to do so. I went through multiple phases of making random things but then last year, after discovering vaporwave and listening to many ambient and slushwave artists, I thought I’d give it a go and finally get my stuff out there. And I am so, so glad that I did as it’s been an amazing journey so far and its the thought of everyone listening to my music and appreciating it that really brought it to life.

2. Indeed, that's amazing how quick your stuff was recognized! Besides the music itself, do you think that's because of being part of the community? Or you have some secret of success =)

I can’t say I really have any secrets in regards with the music, apart from trying to be as unique as possible with both my artist name and my style, that grew over time. I do strongly feel that the community has played a huge role in my success, some of the people i have met and the widespread coverage that my music is received on makes the community one of the best to be in. Especially now, after big events like Electronicon, the community has never been more alive. I’m not one for advertising loads, and I think generally the reason I’m known is because of how close everyone is in the community and the good word of mouth that spread about my music which has brought most of my listeners. It still amazes me to this day that despite it being only a year, my following has grown to numbers I would’ve never expected nor imagined. It’s a privilege to be a part of.

3. Speaking of 100% Electronicon, would you perform live if there will be a possibility? Looks like vaporwave is not just "online microgenre" now and community is ready for all kinds of IRL interactions. If yes, what kind of sound could it be?

I would certainly perform live and I’m actually performing at the Aloe City Records concert that is going to take place at some point. Nothing is official yet but it seems very likely that this will happen, which will be exciting. To be honest, I have no idea what it would sound like, I need to play around with my sounds and try and create something super hypnotic yet energetic at the same time! We’ll have to see…

4. Guess it will be your original tunes, not sampled stuff, right? Speaking of which, do you think it's the future of vapor (in general) or your project? Or sampled vapor is not over yet?

Well, I thoroughly enjoy working with samples and really don’t believe that the future needs to be driven by original content. Of course, as people get more comfortable with making music, it is really refreshing to see some original works out there, and I’m looking forward to releasing my next original slushwave album later on in the year. However, all my albums apart from 水に流す and Tomorrow, 2096 are sampled material, and they have all been very well received, and I will continue to make sampled albums as well as the original.

5. Tomorrow, 2096 is quite different from your sound, you also did two gorgeous ambient works for Seikomart, yet looks like slushwave is your primary style, right? Which other styles you'd like to try?

Well, I interchange between ambient and slushwave frequently, even sometimes into nature wave and mallsoft-like areas. I think if I were to try and make a dedicated album to a particular style I would go for mallsoft, with proper mall background noise and taking inspiration from artists like 猫 シ Corp.

6. Speaking of inspiration – what inspires you the most? Are there some things highly necessary, so to say, to make good vaporwave? Like being in love with certain time in the past or something?

I think to be passionate about something, you have to love something or do something regularly. All the music I sample I listen to quite a lot, as well as the many genres associated with my samples and hearing the way these are crafted and the way they affect my emotions really play a huge part in the inspiration for the project. Also, I would recommend listening to other artists who are doing similar things to yourself and think about how you could do that differently. Like with me, I listened to many hours of telepaths to gain a good understanding of elements in his music that made him successful, which I then tweaked and applied uniquely to mine. And it’s at the point where you have something that’s quite different and something that you are proud of, that you get the true inspiration to carry on with the project and really spend a lot of time on it.

7. That's definitely a good insight! And since you mentioned telepath, which albums are your favorites? And besides telepath and vapor in general, what are the three albums you'd take with you on a long trip through the desert?

アンタラ通信 is most definitely my favourite telepath album, also one of the first albums in vaporwave in general. I just love the etherealness and gentle swathes of otherworldly energy that comes through on that album, it’s a trip and a half.

Man, this decision was really hard, but the three albums I would take would be:

- t e l e p a t h テレパシー能力者 - アンタラ通信

- 譚詠麟 – 再見吧!? 浪漫

- killedmyself - Backyard Cemetery: Revisited

8. If someone "outside vaporworld" asks you about music you're doing, how would you describe it? Do you think it's possible (for a complete stranger, so to say) to get involved with the genre now when there are so much history and levels of subgenres in it?

Funny you should ask that as I’ve been asked many times by my non-vapor friends about it. Generally, I just say its a type of experimental music as I don’t really want to waste my energy on explaining it as most of them won’t really care. However, if there were to be a stranger who did care, then I would gladly explain it to them. Whilst the catalogue of releases has grown significantly in recent years, there’s always a place to start, and there’s plenty of subgenre communities to be involved in.

9. That's pretty much same as me trying to explain why we release & listen to cassettes =) Do you collect tapes or vinyl? Are there specific ones any you'd kill to get?

I do have a collection but its nowhere near as substantial as some of the ones I’ve seen. I have a few Japanese ones I’m looking for but they are quite rare and only pop up now and again, but really I’m not particularly looking for anything. If the albums really good, I buy the physical. Simple as that.

10. Do you have a dream album or something which you'd love to do with this or any other projects? Or maybe even a dream of life which you can share? =)

Man, I have no idea what to say to this one. In the way I think about music, I don’t have set goals or set dreams that I aspire for and rather just create with what I’ve got and see what happens, and to be honest I am very proud of all my recent stuff and couldn’t have asked for more support from my fans and followers. I guess if there was ever a dream album with any possibility it would probably be a collab with t e l e p a t h or Brian Eno, and it would be the most chilled album ever.

September 16, 2019

▼ globalpattern.bandcamp.com ▲

[sea-changed]

vermiculated replied to your post: vermiculated replied to your post...

I can't believe I missed this until now! wow! Here I am, here you are, there are books and words between us. wonderful. thank you.

<3 <3 <3

I have to tell you that I read Olivia Waite's new ff and it has exactly this problem. It is as though both heroines are mealy-mouthed and forgettable so that the reader won't be offended by reading a book about women. Their only flaws are caring too much, wanting appropriate twenty-first century style recognition (ahistoricism doesn't bother me but as I was reading it, I thought, @sea-changed​ is going to be livid) and accidentally misunderstanding one another...

also attempted financial abuse. which I mention separately because it added a note of the glass armonica to the music of the spheres. how is ff so inadequate to our desires?

Oh no, this is terribly disappointing to hear; I’d been holding out some amount of hope for this one, though that was probably folly on my part. Why, in a subgenre written by and wholly about women, can the seemingly fairly standard “women are people” concept continually fail to gain ground? I’ll still read this, as it’s waiting for me on my phone and the upcoming semester promises to require mindless stress-reading, but I’ll be extremely irate about it. (I always think I can be magnanimous about ahistoricism in romance novels, which is obviously a lie, but it is good to be known like this.)

re: re: 34, I love the sweeping romantic sentiment because they manage to meet in the middle only when they both understand themselves to be ludicrously devoted. It didn't quite feel like a romance novel, you are correct -- there's a bit of neither fish nor fowl here? I personally feel that the natural second-half plot ought to have been shoring up how Richard and David love one another despite their respective troubled backstories rather than ...

...advancing the political thriller from "A Seditious Affair" and developing a coherent moral world. Which is what novels are oriented toward: why do people do what they do, despite everything? In romance, they do it because they love one another (or they're supposed to) whereas I think more complicated motives such as you discuss are much rarer.

oh, novels!, I say, like I live inside Tony Trollope's vision. I think the book tries to have it both ways and ends up being slightly frustrating for all readers. just write two books, Kimberly! Kimberly is what I call her when I am trying to hector her from afar. dear Kimberly, please have Susan stab Templeton. xo.

“Just write two books” is honestly what it comes down to: it feels like two books, and while I get that the political thriller part allowed David to be David to to requisite degree, after how gracefully it was cleaved to the romance plot in Seditious Affair it felt a bit tacked-on here. And while I’m certainly not opposed to moral ambiguity in my ships, the genre formula seems to require that said ambiguity, if there is any to begin with, be neatly swept under the rug; it’s really the sweeping I have the problem with rather than the ambiguity itself. (Because like, should Richard be fucking his valet? No! That’s a pretty open-and-shut one. Which certainly doesn’t mean I’m opposed to watching it happen, but I’d like fewer bows on my endings, I guess. Did you know Gentleman’s Position was the first book of the series I read, because I thought it had the most interesting-sounding summary? In hindsight this amuses to no end.)

(The accusation that there are similar moral issues and rug-sweeping in Seditious Affair, and that I am simply too starry-eyed over it to complain about them, is potentially quite valid, though because of said stars in said eyes I’m not the one to judge.)

(dear Kimberly, please have Susan stab Templeton --The only way I can see this going down with zero hair torn out of my head, quite honestly.)

re: re: 39, @mysharkwillgoon​ made the unkind (but accurate) observation that this series is always available at our county library because no one likes it. I recognize that I am utterly alone in how much I enjoy this, and am really pleased that you picked it up and felt the requisite feelings. I know you're not a Victorianist by practice or nature, so it's impressive that you returned to this weird book.

HA, I’ve made this same observation (likely about the same library!), which I’ll admit is satisfying to the part of me that thinks everyone should have my taste, though dissatisfying to the equally clamorous part of me that wants to read Seditious Affair for the sixteenth time and has to wait for it on hold. Weird romance seems to be my favorite kind, so I too am glad I returned to it. Not a Victorianist by practice or nature may have to go on my office wall.

A general query: can literary fiction be experimental enough to reach the logical end-point of the genre or are we still pretending that felicity in art is enough? Why must there be meaning in the world? Perhaps I judge the Booker too harshly: it is only a literary competition, it is not an immurement by orange sticker -- yet every book I have wanted to love from the longlist has given me the same depth of emotion that I feel on regarding ...

...a tray of wrapped zucchini at the grocery store: why are we engaging in such resource-intensive craft! (this is not strictly true. I delighted in A Little Life, it was nothing like plastic on vegetables at all.) To continue, is the worst thing that happened to literary fiction the application of irony? I am no supporter of the genuine, the real, the unmanufactured, yet ironic distance can hardly support so much.

It's not a prerequisite. and it looks like smugness more often than it comes off as wit. I read someone recently saying that the problem in Jude the Obscure is "done because we are too menny" which struck me -- a biased Hardy fan -- as missing the point about art: the place where it happens is an artificial one, but it has greater force for that. it's not a bug, it's a feature!

"somewhat poisonous nostalgia" sick burn, I like it.

Speaking of sick burns, “the same depth of emotion that I feel on regarding a tray of wrapped zucchini at the grocery store” has the devastating combination of being both pithy and accurate. I do find myself regularly mystified about what criteria are used to long-list books in general (the Booker being, I think, a particularly frequent and egregious example): it leaves me to wonder whether a) people who judge these things find being left cold and unmoved a virtue in fiction or b) they are led to feel things about writing I find cold and unmoving. (I tend toward the first, though the fact that people have seemingly genuine emotions about Madeline Miller novels would argue strongly for the second.)

The pitting of irony and emotion against one another is, I agree, one of the central failings of the literary genre: Both! Both are good! As you say, being in a constructed hothouse universe is not to be derided (though certainly poked at), and it does not (or at least should not) lessen the emotional validity of the created world. Have faith in your own creations, you dimwits.

I have been thinking all morning about your observation that none of these books are experimental enough: I thought the French were meant to be good at this. Do you think it has to do with our late uneasiness around teenage sexuality, and that writing a sufficently-complicated teenager such that he is entitled to his own sexual preference means that authors no longer sound unique, ...

... but rather like a series of psychology textbooks. Which can be a pleasure (what's UP, Megan Abbott) yet tends to make these books extremely ... putdownable. Thank you for this, there's really nothing better than having a person with exquisite taste on whom one can rely to read books first.

I do think that there is an essential trouble with alienation in YA novels: so many read as false and/or patronizing, because they’re being written to teenagers rather than about teenagers. (Sometimes this is rectified when adult lit writes about teenagers, but mostly it is not, and certainly not in this case. Here again is a case of irony vs. emotion; if you’re not going to give me emotion, you’ve got to be a whole lot better at irony--or in this case more specifically narrative commentary--than this.)

(On the subject of complicated teenagers having sex convincingly, I was recently a fan of Patrick Ness’s Release, which the author describes it as a cross between Mrs. Dalloway and Judy Blume’s Forever; a comment I’ll let stand on its own sizable feet.)

And there is truly nothing better than having someone to dump your own particular long-winded exegeses on, so thank you for that in return.

ps I read Astray and it was so frail! "disappointingly pedestrian" indeed. If I could write like Emma Donoghue, I guess I would labor under the curse that afflicts her plotting.

For being a book that contained so much that I love--an entire collection of extremely specific and well-researched historical settings!--it was so flat. I know Donoghue can write better sentences, I’m at a loss why she chose to not put any in this collection.

[budcrespo767]

My a hundred Very Best Blues Songs Of All Time Our Nice Music Debate

Music career information and an entire listing of music schools. A superb example of this mannequin is the Mother and father Understanding Asian Literacy program, an initiative of peak mother or father bodies ( ACSSO and APC) to promote Asian language training by way of parent advocacy. The marketing campaign recognises that info alone cannot change the tradition of a school and that people must take the initiative to make the case for modifications within the college. The Dad and mom Understanding Asian Literacy undertaking is resourced to supply half-day training to 2-3 mother and father from 75 faculties. Music Australia isn't at present offering coaching on this scale however we're glad to talk to folks who would like assets and assist to become higher advocates. For extra data on this strategy, visit the Mother and father Understanding Asian Literacy web site This strategy could also be related to the varsity P & C (or P & F). Gospel, some may argue, means at least as many alternative things as downtempo," since it's a catch-all for a protracted historical past of non secular music in America, courting again to the 19th century and slavery-era spirituals. Spirituals" could be an example of folks music," in fact, which is a separate bubble floating off in area to the left of the Carta." It does not overlap with gospel, however as an alternative with utility music," a time period no one has ever utilized in the best way Crauwels is using it , which incorporates vaudeville," a few of the hottest music of the start of the 20th century. Music is the unification of vocal with instrumental sounds to create great thing about type, concord, and expression of emotion. Subsequently, individuals often say that No music means no life" as a result of the effect of music in human type is unexplainable! Everybody love listening to music, the one distinction is each soul has its own style, so does the genres of music. Reality be advised, the world would be so soundless and doleful without music. On the other hand, in regards to the various genres of music, Glenn McDonald's index referred to as Each Noise at As soon as" classifies 1,264 micro-genres of music on the planet. Among all, right here is the Record of the 8 world most well-known music genres (in no explicit order).

More typically, a style title will come from a musician's works. Free jazz comes from Ornette Coleman 's 1960 album of the identical name; ditto blue-eyed soul, from the Righteous Brothers' 1963 LP. The mid-60s Jamaican boogie dubbed rocksteady is known as for an 1966 Alton Ellis single , whereas reggae adopted it into Jamaican dancehalls on the heels of the Maytals' Do the Reggay in 1968. Soca is a condensation of Trinidadian artist Lord Shorty 's Soul of Calypso, from 1974, while acid house, initially from Phuture's 1987 single Acid Tracks , has come to imply anything with a yammering, squealing TB-303 on it. It may be argued that the difference between World and Folk music is difficult, harboring a fair amount of overlapping. In essence, World music is up to date music performed and created all around the globe, however falling just quick in influence to turn into fashionable music, for www.goodreads.com instance RaÏ, Afrobeat and Highlife. Nonetheless, these world music genres are often evolutions of much older geographically linked People music. In different words: World music is usually the contemporary evolution of historic Folks music. The polar reverse of The Filth, Get In The Van is a blunt, no-nonsense diary of life on the highway in a punk rock band, specifically Black Flag, the uncompromising LA hardcore unit Rollins fronted from 1981 to 1986. There may be valuable little glamour here, from roadies consuming pet food to band members indulging in 5 minute knee tremblers in piss-drenched alleyways, with violent confrontations with fans, sketchy promoters and energy-crazed cops solely ever just a few days away. As grim as it sounds although, Get In The Van is an undeniably inspirational chronicle, illustrating the facility of music to blow minds and change lives. But if you happen to ever dream of changing into a rock n' roll star, read this primary. Electronic Dance Music is a compilation of digital music subgenres which can be supposed for crowds of dancers, including disco music, synthpop, techo, home music, trance music, drum and bass, dubstep, lure, hardstyle and extra. With such a variety of sounds, it would appear unattainable that all of this might, on the identical time, be categorized as EDM, however these subgenres have developed over the course of the last few decades, informing and transforming out of a progressive dance tradition. While you hear EDM at present, it is a a lot completely different expertise than what listeners of electronic dance music would have heard within the 1970's, '80's, ‘ninety's, or even early 2000's, and its progression as a recognizable genre can be mapped out by understanding when its subgenres had been popularized as types of dance music. Second, another have a look at the "simplistic" explanations: It's true that the music industry has all the time sought to make the artists into a controllable commodity they will sell not solely to the public however to other businesses. The business is focused on the underside line and so they do want a successful formula. Rock groups (from the 1960s on) have traditionally been a counter-culture and anti-corporate power in our society. From the Rolling Stones to Led Zeppelin to Rush, the rock artists wanted success but not on the expense of compromising their art. They got into the music as a result of they love the music and the Album-Oriented-Radio rock artist appeared as a result of singles took an excessive amount of of their consideration away from playing and writing the music they really cared about. In secondary normal music classes, music educators have the opportunity to bridge the gap between the music college students' experiences in class and the music they interact with outside of school. In keeping with Williams, nontraditional music college students have musical lives outdoors of faculty however select to not participate in conventional ensembles. In this article, I explore three educating strategies that can be utilized to interact students with widespread music. These methods are by means of finding out music genres, studying music producers, and listening to popular songs to tell apart if a track is a remake, cowl, sample, remix, or an original song. Music has been performed, written, www.audio-transcoder.com and enjoyed for as long as we have records to determine. World culture is filled with more sorts of music than any one particular person might hope to listen to in a single lifetime. Western artwork music consists of the household of music composed by educated, virtuosic Europeans primarily for the enjoyment of the upper courses or to be used in church providers. Folks music consists of communally composed conventional music that represents the musical vernacular of a particular ethnic group or area. Widespread music could be understood to be any music that is mass produced and supposed for industrial functions. Whereas these three classes to not neatly outline all types of music, they can function a useful starting point for understanding musical types, sorts, and historical past.

[aion-rsa]

James Wan Horror Movies Ranked

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James Wan has a new horror movie out this weekend, and it’s been far too long since we’ve been able to write that. As one of the singular genre filmmakers of his generation, Wan managed to launch three successful and pop culture defining horror franchises in less than a decade between Saw (2004), Insidious (2010), and The Conjuring (2013). And yet, the Australian director hasn’t stepped foot in a spooky house since 2016’s The Conjuring 2. Moving on to bigger and (maybe?) better things in Furious 7 and Aquaman, Wan’s new status as a blockbuster director caused many fans to wonder if his days in dark shadows were done. 

Which is why this weekend’s Malignant is such an inviting proposition. Five years after walking away from personally helming Ed and Lorraine Warren’s on-screen adventures, Wan’s returned to his roots with an original horror movie that’s not part of any franchise. What a novel concept. To celebrate this change of fortune, the editors at Den of Geek have put their heads together and voted, coming up with a definitive ranking of Wan’s horror movies. You can trust us.

7. Malignant

Sometimes it takes a while to get back into the swing of things. While Wan deserves credit for championing an original idea in the modern world of sequels, prequels, and spinoffs—he even turned down helming The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It for this!—daring gambles don’t always payoff for everyone. Which might be a polite way of saying that for some of us (although not all), Malignant is a disappointment.

Built entirely around a plot twist we’re not going to spoil here, Wan’s Malignant takes the familiar concept of a protagonist (Annabelle Wallis) being wrongfully accused for supernatural crimes, and turns it on its head. The actual twist however has left folks divided. Some applaud how bold it is while others of us found it fairly underwhelming, and lacking a satisfying subtext or cohesiveness to make it worthwhile. We’re all in agreement though, it’s a stylish bit of eye candy… and that Wan’s done better before. – David Crow

6. Insidious: Chapter 2

As the second installment of Wan and frequent collaborator Leigh Whannell’s Insidious franchise, there was a lot of anticipation over how this horror sequel would follow-up on the cliffhanger ending to the first film. If you don’t recall—and here there be spoilers, by the by—that movie ended on the shocking revelation that Patrick Wilson’s repressed and mild mannered father, Josh, had become possessed by a ghost which has been chasing him since childhood. Worse, this spirit caused him to kill Lin Shaye’s delightfully kooky Elise! (Don’t worry, her soul gets better.) What will happen next to the poor Lambert family?

Read more

Movies

13 Best Blumhouse Horror Movies Ranked

By David Crow and 3 others

Movies

Insidious: Is The Further Real?

By Tony Sokol

Something a lot more rote, as it turns out. This is not to say that Insidious: Chapter 2 is a bad movie; it’s simply a much lesser one than what came before. From the film doubling down on a monster not nearly as intriguing as the Lipstick Demon from the first film to the picture failing to expand on the strange astral plane of the Further in a meaningful way, Chapter 2 is just a tad underwhelming—a horror follow-up going through the motions. Still, it allows Wilson to play secretly evil, so that’s fun! – DC

5. Dead Silence

Dead Silence was DOA in theaters and critically panned when it debuted in 2007, yet after the movie became available as a home release it scraped together a small audience that was mostly composed of very specific genre fans: those who are just plain shit scared of ventriloquist dummies! Directed and written by the horror dream team of Wan and Whannell, Dead Silence stars True Blood’s Ryan Kwanten as Jamie Ashen, a young widower who slumps back to his hometown looking for answers following his wife’s ‘death by dummy.’ Dogging him on his quest is New Kid Donnie Wahlberg in a wild, scene-stealing performance as a detective who seemingly can’t stop preening his facial hair.

The mythical boogeywoman of the piece is Mary Shaw, a ventriloquist who was once lynched in the town after a performance went awry and a child later died by mysterious circumstances. Jamie’s family were an essential part of her lynching, and now Mary is on the warpath from beyond the grave.

Dead Silence is incredibly silly, but an important step in Wan’s directing career. Throughout the film he plays with the kind of masterful sound design and jump scares that he eventually refined down to a sublime craft. Just like one of Mary Shaw’s dolls, all the parts are there but the movie is only possessed by a little soul that doesn’t do too much damage to your nerves. – Kirsten Howard

4. Saw

The movie that made Wan a household name (at least among movie nerds and horror hounds), Saw became the biggest horror franchise of the 2000s and launched a grim new subgenre of exploitation that’s been derisively (if fairly) dubbed “torture porn” ever since. It’s therefore easy to forget Wan’s original Saw really isn’t one of those movies. Oh, people are tortured on-screen in this gnarly nightmare. And it is very horrific, to be sure.

Yet unlike the many subsequent Saw sequels that came later, plus copycats like the Hostel franchise, Saw doesn’t take perverse pleasure in its characters’ suffering or imagine the villain as some kind of antihero. Jigsaw was originally a chilling serial killer in the David Fincher mold, and his original film had a surprisingly minimal amount of gore. Most of the picture is really about the dreadful suspense of anticipation as we wait for something horrible to happen when two men wake up inside a dilapidated industrial bathroom and are told they need to saw off their own feet to survive.

In truth, if this same exact script (minus the grisly flashback sequences) was presented a one-act Off-Broadway play in 2004, it would’ve likely been hailed as edgy and boundary-pushing art. Instead we got a horror classic that spawned a memorable, if ultimately trashy, B-horror franchise after Wan and co-writer Whannell left the series following the first outing. Fair trade. – DC 

3. Insidious

Back in 2010 when Insidious was released, Blumhouse hadn’t yet become the horror behemoth it is today. So low budget but glossy horrors starring talented household names weren’t the norm. It wasn’t just these attributes that made Insidious a breakout which still holds up a decade later, however. It’s the fact that the movie is undeniably scary. It may use certain jump scare tactics at times but boy, do they work. Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne star as a couple whose son is capable of astral projection, which has taken him into the nightmarish world of the Further and caused demonic figures to haunt the family. 

The first half of the movie will have you leaping out of your seat. The second half though is more of a comedy, marked by the arrival of psychic Elise (Lin Shaye) and her sidekicks, Tucker (Angus Sampson) and Specs (Leigh Whannell, who also wrote the screenplay). Made for just $1.5 million, Insidious is good-looking and distinctive, with scenes in the Further sharing an aesthetic with Dead Silence, and a mythology that clearly had legs. To date three sequels have been made, with a fourth confirmed last year. – Rosie Fletcher

2. The Conjuring 2

As a horror sequel done right, Wan’s follow-up to the biggest horror movie of his career felt like a palate cleanser for the director. After helming the successful but tragically troubled production of Furious 7, Wan returned to his roots and delivered a fiendishly designed thrill ride. In The Conjuring 2, we again follow Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga’s fictionalized takes on Ed and Lorraine Warren, this time to London as they investigate the infamous “Enfield Poltergeist” (spoiler alert: it’s a demon).

Once again Ed and Lorraine play the good samaritans and help a young family in desperate need, and Wan still keeps it wildly entertaining and suspenseful, if not necessarily fresh. But as important as his gliding camera set-ups and ability to create new iconic images of evil out of seeming whole cloth—hello, there demon Nun!—it’s the humanity in both of Wan’s Conjuring films which elevate them above the rest of their franchise. Never mind the ghosts; the scene of Wilson crooning Elvis Presley to some beleaguered children is the stuff of movie magic. – DC

1. The Conjuring

James Wan couldn’t have picked better subjects for his paranormal investigation franchise than Ed and Lorraine Warren, the controversial demonologists who left behind countless diaries and recorded accounts of demonic possession, haunted houses, and other supernatural events they claim to have witnessed over their decades-spanning careers. They even opened a museum full of spooky artifacts in the back of their Connecticut home. This is a couple who enjoyed digging into the occult, and with The Conjuring, Wan showed just how much he loved telling stories about the Warrens. 

Read more

Movies

The Conjuring Timeline Explained: From The Nun to The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It

By Daniel Kurland

Movies

How The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It Embraces Satanic Panic

By David Crow

The first film covers one of the Warrens’ most famous cases, the Perron family haunting, with more than a few embellishments thrown in for an effective ghost story. In the real-life account and the movie, Roger and Carolyn Perron (Ron Livingston and Lili Taylor) are haunted by an antagonistic spirit that wants their newly-purchased 18th-century farmhouse in Rhode Island all to itself. That’s where the Warrens come in to investigate the strange occurrences, like the smell of rotting flesh in the basement.

The chemistry between Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga, who bring the Warrens to life, is one of the movie’s greatest strengths, establishing one of the franchise’s most important themes: that love can defeat any evil. It’s their devotion to each other, and their will to help others in need, that allows them to overcome any supernatural obstacles in these movies. (It’s why the sequels spend so much time threatening to tear them apart.) More than the creepy set pieces—like a possessed Carolyn in the crawl space *shudder*—and the “based on a true story” tagline, it’s the Warrens as characters that people keep showing up for, and the first Conjuring cleverly sells their love story to an audience just expecting jump scares and demons. – John Saavedra

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[ayemreyzel13]

When I read module 1, I learned that Literature is simply defined as an "art of words". It is also a reflection of humanity and helps us to understand each other. Literature helps us to enhance our expression and our form of writing.

Literature has 4 major parts of literary genres. These 4 major parts are Drama, Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry.

Drama is a part of the four literary genres that are performed on stage, in film, or front of many people. It is also considered a unique and distinctive genre of literature. Based on the module that I read last time, there are four distinct types of drama. A Comedy is a type of drama that has an intention to make the audience laughed by sharing their own experience and sometimes is based on real life. A Tragedy is a type of drama that will give you so much pain because of the suffering of the characters and also the death of the characters. This type of drama has a rare happy ending. A Melodrama is a dramatic piece that has exaggerated characters and it is also has intended to appeal to the emotion of the audience. And lastly, a Musical Drama is a story that combines songs, spoken dialogue, acting, and dance.

Fiction - Based on my understanding, fiction refers to a literary work that comes from the author's imagination. It has 14 different forms. A Literary Fiction pertains to literary works with artistic value and literary merit. A mystery is solved by detectives who solve the case using a few hints. A thriller has a mysterious and suspenseful plot. Horror creates a horrifying scene and has a theme of death, demons, evil spirits, the afterlife, and even dread itself are among the topic. Historical fiction is a literary genre that transports readers to another time and places the story takes place in the past. Romance is about relationships and romantic love between two people. Western has a common character like cowboys, outlaws, and settlers of the American Old West. A bildungsroman highlights the transition of the character from youth into adulthood. Speculative fiction can be explored in infinite possibilities beyond the human imagination. Science Fiction focuses on time travel, space exploration, and societies of the future. Fantasy includes fictional characters and settings, as well as mythology and folklore themes, and can appeal to any age. Dystopian fiction depicts a world that is worse than our own. Magical realism portrays a real-world with added magical elements. Realist literature shows a universe that is quite close to ours, with all of the elements created as faithfully as possible, just as they do in real life. Fiction has many subgenres so I'll give some examples, these are; short story, novel, myth, legend, and fable.

Nonfiction is a true-to-life story, it is based on true events, facts, but written creatively, they are making it as enjoyable to read as fiction. The genre of literary nonfiction, also known as creative nonfiction, is broad enough to include diaries/journals, memoirs, and speeches. A Diaries and journals both contain records of experiences by their writer. A memoir is an author’s narrative of his or her experiences, highlight what the writer has witnessed, and talks about how one remembers one's own life. And lastly, Speeches defines as the communication or expression of thoughts in spoken words.

When I read Poetry, I learned that poetry is sharing of experiences, telling of a story, or the expression of feelings or ideas through the use of language in a specific way. Poetry has two types of broad approaches that we can use, the first one is a Narrative poem, which tells a story with an orientation, complication, crisis, and so on; and the second one is the lyric poem which conveys an experience, or ideas, thoughts or feelings about a subject without necessarily having ‘something happens.’ There are so many types of poetic forms. These are the Acrostic, Ballad, Chant, Cinquain, Comic Verse, Diamante, Elegy, Epic, Epigram, Epitaph, Free Verse, Haiku, Light Verse, Limerick, Lyric, Narrative, Nonsense Verse, Nursery Rhyme, Ode, Riddle, Song Lyric, Sonnet, Tanka, and Villanelle.

So, because of this topic, I gained a lot of knowledge, and it helps me more to understand the literary genres. I thought it was a short meaning but, when I go deeper I was amazed because this is so interesting even it can consume more time when you read. But it is worth it.

[anagamitofotografia]

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Scenes from The Searchers (1956), starring John Wayne and set during the Texas-Indian Wars. The film is considered one of the most influential Westerns ever made.  

“It just so happens we be Texicans,” says Mrs. Jorgensen, an older woman wearing her blond hair in a tight bun, to rough-and-tumble cowboy Ethan Edwards in the 1956 film The Searchers. Mrs. Jorgensen, played by Olive Carey, and Edwards, played by John Wayne, sit on a porch facing the settling dusk sky, alone in a landscape that is empty as far as the eye can see: a sweeping desert vista painted with bright orange Technicolor. Set in 1868, the film lays out a particular telling of Texas history, one in which the land isn’t a fine or good place yet. But, with the help of white settlers willing to sacrifice everything, it’s a place where civilization will take root. Nearly 90 years after the events depicted in the film, audiences would come to theaters and celebrate those sacrifices. 

“A Texican is nothing but a human man way out on a limb, this year and next. Maybe for 100 more. But I don’t think it’ll be forever,” Mrs. Jorgensen goes on. “Someday this country’s going to be a fine, good place to be. Maybe it needs our bones in the ground before that time can come.” 

There’s a subtext in these lines that destabilizes the Western’s moral center, a politeness deployed by Jorgensen that keeps her from naming what the main characters in the film see as their real enemies: Indians. 

In the film, the Comanche chief, Scar, has killed the Jorgensens’ son and Edwards’ family, and abducted his niece. Edwards and the rest of Company A of the Texas Rangers must find her. Their quest takes them across the most treacherous stretches of desert, a visually rich landscape that’s both glorious in its beauty and perilous given the presence of Comanche and other Indigenous people. In the world of the Western, brutality is banal, the dramatic landscape a backdrop for danger where innocent pioneers forge a civilization in the heart of darkness.

The themes of the Western are embodied by figures like Edwards: As a Texas Ranger, he represents the heroism of no-holds-barred policing that justifies conquest and colonization. While the real Texas Rangers’ history of extreme violence against communities of color is well-documented, in the film version, these frontier figures, like the Texas Rangers in The Searchers or in the long-running television show The Lone Ranger, have always been portrayed as sympathetic characters. Edwards is a cowboy with both a libertarian, “frontier justice” vigilante ethic and a badge that puts the law on his side, and stories in the Western are understood to be about the arc of justice: where the handsome, idealized male protagonist sets things right in a lawless, uncivilized land. 

The Western has long been built on myths that both obscure and promote a history of racism, imperialism, toxic masculinity, and violent colonialism. For Westerns set in Texas, histories of slavery and dispossession are even more deeply buried. Yet the genre endures. Through period dramas and contemporary neo-Westerns, Hollywood continues to churn out films about the West. Even with contemporary pressures, the Western refuses to transform from a medium tied to profoundly conservative, nation-building narratives to one that’s truly capable of centering those long victimized and villainized: Indigenous, Latinx, Black, and women characters. Rooted in a country of contested visions, and a deep-seated tradition of denial, no film genre remains as quintessentially American, and Texan, as the Western, and none is quite so difficult to change.

*

With origins in the dime and pulp novels of the late 19th century, the Western first took to the big screen in the silent film era. The Great Train Robbery, a 1903 short, was perhaps the genre’s first celluloid hit, but 1939’s Stagecoach, starring Wayne, ushered in a new era of critical attention, as well as huge commercial success. Chronicling the perilous journey of a group of strangers riding together through dangerous Apache territory in a horse-drawn carriage, Stagecoach is widely considered to be one of the greatest and most influential Westerns of all time. It propelled Wayne to stardom.

During the genre’s golden age of the 1950s, more Westerns were produced than films of any other genre. Later in the 1960s, the heroic cowboy character—like Edwards in The Searchers—grew more complex and morally ambiguous. Known as “revisionist Westerns,” the films of this era looked back at cinematic and character traditions with a more critical eye. For example, director Sam Peckinpah, known for The Wild Bunch (1969), interrogated corruption and violence in society, while subgenres like spaghetti Westerns, named because most were directed by Italians, eschewed classic conventions by playing up the dramatics through extra gunfighting and new musical styles and creating narratives outside of the historical context. Think Clint Eastwood’s The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966).

The Great Train Robbery (1903), a short silent film, was perhaps the first iconic Western.

In the wake of the anti-war movement and the return of the last U.S. combat forces from Vietnam in 1973, Westerns began to decline, replaced by sci-fi action films like Star Wars (1977). But in the 1990s, they saw a bit of rebirth, with Kevin Costner’s revisionist Western epic Dances With Wolves (1990) and Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992) winning Best Picture at the Academy Awards. And today, directors like the Coen brothers (No Country for Old Men, True Grit) and Taylor Sheridan (Hell or High Water, Wind River, Sicario) are keeping the genre alive with neo-Westerns set in modern times.

Still, the Old West looms large, says cultural critic and historian Richard Slotkin. Today’s Western filmmakers know they are part of a tradition and take the task seriously, even the irreverent ones like Quentin Tarantino. Tarantino called Django Unchained (2012) a spaghetti Western and, at the same time, “a Southern.” Tarantino knows that the genre, like much of American film, is about violence, and specifically racialized violence: The film, set in Texas, Tennessee, and Mississippi, flips the script by putting the gun in the hand of a freed slave. 

Slotkin has written a series of books that examine the myth of the frontier and says that stories set there are drawn from history, which gives them the authority of being history. “A myth is an imaginative way of playing with a problem and trying to figure out where you draw lines, and when it’s right to draw lines,” he says. But the way history is made into mythology is all about who’s telling the story. 

Slotkin’s work purports that the logic of westward expansion is, when boiled down to its basic components, “regeneration through violence.” Put simply: Kill or die. The very premise of the settling of the West is genocide. Settler colonialism functions this way; the elimination of Native people is its foundation. It’s impossible to talk about the history of the American West and of Texas without talking about violent displacement and expropriation. 

“The Western dug its own hole,” says Adam Piron, a film programmer at the Sundance Indigenous Institute and a member of the Kiowa and Mohawk tribes. In his view, the perspectives of Indigenous people will always be difficult to express through a form tied to the myth of the frontier. Indigenous filmmakers working in Hollywood who seek to dismantle these representations, Piron says, often end up “cleaning somebody else’s mess … And you spend a lot of time explaining yourself, justifying why you’re telling this story.”

While the Western presents a highly manufactured, racist, and imperialist version of U.S. history, in Texas, the myth of exceptionalism is particularly glorified, perpetuating the belief that Texas cowboys, settlers, and lawmen are more independent, macho, and free than anywhere else. Texas was an especially large slave state, yet African Americans almost never appear in Texas-based Westerns, a further denial of histories. In The Searchers, Edwards’ commitment to the white supremacist values of the South is even stronger than it is to the state of Texas, but we aren’t meant to linger on it. When asked to make an oath to the Texas Rangers, he replies: “I figure a man’s only good for one oath at a time. I took mine to the Confederate States of America.” The Civil War scarcely comes up again.

The Texas Ranger is a key figure in the universe of the Western, even if Ranger characters have fraught relationships to their jobs, and the Ranger’s proliferation as an icon serves the dominant Texas myth. More than 300 movies and television series have featured a Texas Ranger. Before Chuck Norris’ role in the TV series Walker, Texas Ranger (1993-2001), the most famous on-screen Ranger was the titular character of The Lone Ranger (1949-1957). Tonto, his Potawatomi sidekick, helps the Lone Ranger fight crime in early settled Texas. 

Meanwhile, the Ranger’s job throughout Texas history has included acting as a slave catcher and executioner of Native Americans. The group’s reign of terror lasted well into the 20th century in Mexican American communities, with Rangers committing a number of lynchings and helping to dispossess Mexican landowners. Yet period dramas like The Highwaymen (2019), about the Texas Rangers who stopped Bonnie and Clyde, and this year’s ill-advised reboot of Walker, Texas Ranger on the CW continue to valorize the renowned law enforcement agency. There is no neo-Western that casts the Texas Ranger in a role that more closely resembles the organization’s true history: as a villain.

The Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men (2007) ushered in the era of neo-Westerns set in modern times.

Ushered in by No Country for Old Men (2007), also set in Texas, the era of neo-Westerns has delivered films that take place in a modern, overdeveloped, contested West. Screenwriter Taylor Sheridan’s projects attempt to address racialized issues around land and violence, but they sometimes fall into the same traps as older, revisionist Westerns—the non-white characters he seeks to uplift remain on the films’ peripheries. In Wind River (2017), the case of a young Indigenous woman who is raped and murdered is solved valiantly by action star Jeremy Renner and a young, white FBI agent played by Elizabeth Olsen. Sheridan’s attempt to call attention to the epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women still renders Indigenous women almost entirely invisible behind the images of white saviors.

There are directors who are challenging the white male gaze of the West, such as Chloé Zhao, whose recent film Nomadland dominated the 2021 Academy Award nominations. In 2017, Zhao’s film The Rider centered on a Lakota cowboy, a work nested in a larger cultural movement in the late 2010s that highlighted the untold histories of Native cowboys, Black cowboys, and vaqueros, historically Mexican cowboys whose ranching practices are the foundation of the U.S. cowboy tradition. And Concrete Cowboy, directed by Ricky Staub and released on Netflix in April, depicts a Black urban horse riding club in Philadelphia. In taking back the mythology of the cowboy, a Texas centerpiece and symbol, perhaps a new subgenre of the Western is forming.

Despite new iterations, the Western has not been transformed. Still a profoundly patriotic genre, the Western is most often remembered for its classics, which helped fortify the historical narrative that regeneration through violence was necessary for the forging of a nation. In Texas, the claim made by Mrs. Jorgensen in The Searchers remains a deeply internalized one: The history of Texas is that of a land infused with danger, a land that required brave defenders, and a land whose future demanded death to prosper. 

In Westerns set in the present day, it feels as if the Wild West has been settled but not tamed. Americans still haven’t learned how to live peacefully on the land, respect Indigenous people, or altogether break out of destructive patterns of domination. The genre isn’t where most people look for depictions of liberation and inclusion in Texas. Still, like Texas, the Western is a contested terrain with an unclear future. John Wayne’s old-fashioned values are just one way to be; the Western is just one way of telling our story.   

This article was first provided on this site.

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[annstage]

Interview s Devin K. Grayson

Stává se vám, že při čtení komiksu byste se rádi autora na něco zeptali? Šance jsou, že si sednete a najdete společnou řeč. Jak jinak, když jsme nakonec všichni fanoušci. Dostaly jsme možnost vyzpovídat Devin K. Grayson, autorku mnohá komiksů, které určitě znáte a máte rádi. V krátkém rozhovoru, který nám ochotně poskytla se dozvíte více o tom, jak si zachovává přehled v časových linkách během psaní nebo, co si myslí o zobrazování skupinových menšin v pop kultuře. Rozhovor jsme nechaly v původním anglickém jazyce.

CZ: Devin se ke komiksům dostala po zhlédnutí animovaného Batmana, který na začátku 90. let běžel v televizi. Následně se v komiksovém obchodě začala více zajímat o svého jmenovce Dicka Graysona, známého též jako Nightwinga. Práci pro DC dostala po ustavičném volání a zasílání svých děl. Potom už následoval zájem o psaní o členech Batman rodiny, o Nightwingovi a je autorkou dalších již světově známých titulů. Devin je otevřeně bisexuálkou.

Mezi její nejznámější tituly patří Nightwing, Gotham Knights, Vampirella, Nightwing - Huntress, JLA/Titans, User, The Titans a další

EN: Devin got to comics after watching Batman: The Animated Series in early 90s. Following that event she went to explore to her local comics store to find more about Dick Grayson who she shares the last name with. After bombarding DC company and calling them to see her works, she finally got the position of a writer for this huge publisher. She enjoys writing about the Batman family, Nightwing and many other notable characters in comics. Devin is also openly bisexual.

Her notable works include: Nightwing, Gotham Knights, Vampirella, Nightwing - Huntress, JLA/Titans, User, The Titans and more

Timelines. What was your way of dealing with confusing comics continuity? And especially within the Bat-verse? I hope this isn’t disappointing, but to honest I no longer follow DC continuity at all.  In the past I’ve compared leaving a comic series to breaking up with a lover; you hope they’re doing well, but you don’t really feel the need to check up on the details of their continued existence without you. ;-p When I was actively working in Gotham, though, I relied on a combination of extensive background reading, informal updates from friends (about what they were reading) and colleagues (about what they were writing), and sheer force of will. By sheer force of will I mean that to write in the Batman universe -or in any established fictional realm, really -you need to have a clear vision of the world and the characters moving through it. And that means that if you have to, you ignore anything that doesn’t fit into your vision. My preferred method of working on franchise characters is to do what I like to call a deep dive. Before I start writing, I read everything about them I can get my hands on, including academic analysis and summaries. Inevitably, I’ll find something that grabs me - with Batman it was his relationship with the first Robin, the idea that he was as driven and dark and scary as he was, but was also raising a kid. For the Doctor Strange novel I wrote, I started completely cold (I’d never read a Doctor Strange comic when I first got the assignment) but the first thing that grabbed me was the death of his sister. The few times I’ve worked with Superman I spent a lot of time thinking about how he was raised as a farmer. Whatever it is, I let it carry me further into the character’s world and/or psyche and I try to explore facets of it as I write about them. At that point, I’m pulling on previous continuity, but I’m also creating my own, new continuity. Comic readers tend to favor really tight continuity, but you have to remember that you get that at a cost. Every creator comes to the table with their own ideas about the characters and their own references and their own stories, and the more you make them toe the line, the less you’re making use of their uniqueness.  When I started working for the Bat-office, there were several different Bat-books, each with a slightly different take. Batman was for superhero stories, Detective was more mystery/noir , Legends featured contained stories that could fall anywhere in the history of Gotham, Chronicles was more of an anthology and testing ground for newer talent, and when I started Gotham Knights, my explicit intent was to have it highlight the relationships in the primary Bat-family.  To some extent, those books all existed in unique fictional universes, until we deliberately brought them together for crossover events. I mention this because I worry that superhero comics have a tendency to become overly homogenized when everyone has to adhere to a strict continuity.  No matter how great any given writer is, do we really want ALL the comics coming out of any given publisher to feature his language, ideas and storylines? The stories you hear about Batman - all of them - are legends.  Some may be spot on, some may be less than true, but the great thing about fiction is that, unlike reality, it isn’t actually necessary or useful for all of us to agree on what happened. Alternate takes are welcome, which is one of the reasons I’ve always championed fanfic. tl;dr: I learn it. And then I ignore it. ;-p

Can you remember writing some scene or part of a story and being beyond excited of how it is turning out to be? Do you usually anticipate reader’s reactions for something particular that you wrote? Okay, two separate questions here. First: yes, absolutely. A secret about writers is that behind closed doors, most of us suspect we’re talentless frauds and that at any minute someone is going to notice that we’re literally just making stuff up. But at the same time, most of us have a few moments every week, or a few lines in every project, where we stop, grin, and think, “damn, I’m good.” I am probably not supposed to share that secret, and I apologize to my colleagues for doing so, but the thing is…writing is magic. You can study all the craft of it, learn all the structure and all the tools (as you should) and still, there’s a point where you feel like you’re just listening and writing down a story that is coming to you from somewhere else. And when it’s good, it’s such an amazing feeling. It leaves you a little bit in awe. Specifically, the two things I remember are 1) having to stop and catch my breath the first time I wrote the word “Batmobile” in a script I was getting paid for and 2) the first time I saw the art come in for USER, and characters that had previously existed only in my head had suddenly been brought to life by John Bolton and Sean Phillips. Those were both very exciting moments. As for anticipating the reaction of readers; no, I don’t do that. I don’t even really think about the readers when I’m writing beyond, perhaps, the artist (who I want to keep engaged) or editor (who I want to keep happy). I think it would be a little paralyzing - not to mention futile - to try to guess how people will react. You don’t even really know who’s reading it, honestly, which is one of the reasons why it’s really nice to meet readers at conventions. But I’ve always suspected that the best writing comes from writing to and for one specific person - usually a colleague or loved one.

What would you tell to those saying comics are not a real or serious literature and shame it readers for needing to “have pictures to understand the plot”? Unfortunately it is still a case of misunderstanding. Well, first of all, I try to make a distinction between superhero comics, the publishing subgenre, and comics, the medium. Superhero comics are not, if we’re being honest, always serious literature. But comics as a medium is an amazingly complex and diverse form of story-telling that supports everything from newspaper comic strips to literary fiction graphic novels. It’s particularly remarkable for being the most collaborative form of story creation and story consumption available, relying on multiple creators for its inception and relying on readers to actively simulate time, motion and sometimes even events out of the spaces between panels. The best book I’ve ever read on the topic - and one that could make even a hardcore cynic reevaluate their understanding of what “comics” is - is Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. There are also so many amazing graphic novels out there, from Spiegelman’s Maus to Chabouté’s Alone. Unless it’s not comics they have an issue with so much as superheroes, in which case you can talk to them about contemporary mythology and the power of allegorical story-telling. You’re right, though, that it’s a very misunderstood corner of publishing. I don’t often have people try to tell me it’s not literature, but I can’t count the number of people who have learned what I do for a living and assumed I have a lot of material I can share with their child. The idea that comics are for kids is a throwback to 1950s American marketing. As I’m sure you and your followers know, comics haven’t really been for kids in over five decades. I still haven’t shown my ten-year-old my Batman or Nightwing work and don’t plan to for some time. The last thing I’ll say on the subject is that sometimes people have to be taught how to read the art in a comic. I think people unfamiliar with comics assume that the pictures in the panels are just literal representations of the words, which is rarely the case. Comic fans are actually quite accomplished readers who know how to invest in long stories, detect subtle tensions between artistic and linguistic storytelling, actively participate in moving narratives forward and, of course, engage with huge, complex fictional universes.

Do you feel like there is not enough representation of bisexual heroes/superheroes in comics and pop-culture? We know Diana Prince is bisexual and she never got a canonical girlfriend. Yes, I agree. The LGBTQA population, as a whole, is grossly underrepresented, along with non-heteronormative relationships and non-gender binary individuals. Just this morning, actually, I was told I couldn’t go forward with a storyline exploring a canonically confirmed asexual character joining an asexual support group, because the publisher wanted to play “that angle” down. As someone who is openly bisexual, this distresses me, but not half so much as the appalling underrepresentation of people of color and women, especially considering that both groups each make up more than half the population. As the recent phenomenal success of both the Wonder Woman and Black Panther movies demonstrate, the world is more than ready to embrace corrections to these imbalances, but the people (oh, who am I kidding? Read: white men) who run the engines of pop culture - not to mention literary culture, history, and advertising - are incredibly averse to change. It’s so, so important to see yourself reflected in your own culture, but the presence and participation of women and people of color, not to mention bisexuals, is so deeply biased it’s difficult to fully comprehend the multiple levels of exclusion. It’s hard for me to even talk about this these days because I don’t know where to start. The relentless use of female characters to stimulate growth in male characters? The complete absence of female internal lives in so much of literature? How about just pure invisibility? I remember watching TV one evening and noticing - all at once and with a shock that I’d never seen it before - what I call the gender ratio. The world, according to movies and television shows, consists of one female for every three males. There are exceptions to this, but watch how often it’s true. And of course, it’s even worse for people of color, who tend to appear at about a one to nine white people ratio. Now walk outside. Is that what you see? Of course not, not even close! But we’re so used to the culture we’ve been fed that we hardly notice anything’s amiss when we look at entire fictional landscapes almost wholly devoid of women and POC. What do you think that does to our psyches? To our sense of fitting in in the world? To our sense of, and compassion for, one another? The dearth of bisexual superheroes strikes me as a wasted opportunity to explore organic and complex ranges in human sexuality - great story-fodder, that! - and I hope it changes. But not all superhero stories have to deal with the sex lives of the characters. Every single one of them, though, has to confront both the gender and race of the characters portrayed, and holy f--- do we have a long way to go there.

We were delighted to see the #VisibleWoman going around Twitter earlier this year. Did it prove itself to be useful? What you do you think about this way of using social media to make a statement and make it work? This plays directly into what I was just talking about. It’s so weird to think about, but we are so often literally invisible - in fiction especially, but in the real world, too. As a writer, I spend a lot of time summoning and then editing the default story ideas that come from my subconscious, and once I began to be aware of the issues we’ve been discussing, I was dismayed by how deeply all of that background misogyny had lodged itself - it’s an issue I’m still exploring and excavating today. I grew up hearing people say that women were important and should be treated fairly, but I saw so few of them. They were absent or scarce in most movies and TV shows, whittled down to a small subgroup in literary fiction writing, hard to find in the music world, almost never part of political news or history lessons…I can’t even imagine how different my internal world would be if I’d been exposed to a more balanced cultural tally. So, yes - I do think the hashtag was useful, both as a marketing tool (my single tagged tweet garnered me over three hundred new followers and is now pinned to the top of my account) and as a huge, warm searchlight picking accomplished females out of the crowd. Just being reminded that there are women working in comics and games and STEM and business and politics is enormously helpful. Having a platform available to connect with and support them is that much more powerful. I do have concerns about social media, some quite grave. But #VisibleWoman stands as an example of best possible usage.

And finally, do you keep in touch with your high school or college teachers who taught you English or Writing? Do you think they know you have became a successful author and would they be proud of you? Great question! My answer is multi-tiered because those people - mentors - change and evolve over time. So the short answer is no, I’m not still in touch with any of my high school or college teachers and I doubt they’ve kept track of me. I went to three different high schools and so didn’t form strong attachments to many teachers - the one exception was a Social Living teacher at Berkeley High, Nancy Rubin, who I did stay in touch with for many years after I graduated. She didn’t teach me to write - though she did encourage us all to keep daily journals, which can be a gateway drug to compulsive writing - but she was that special teacher who saw all her students as individuals and honestly cared about our opinions and our struggles and our lives. I was actually still in touch with her when she published her first book - Ask Me if I Care, Voices from an American High School - and I was very proud of her! I’m sure she’d enjoy hearing about my crazy career, but she was proud of all of us, even then, just for being. I didn’t make a strong connection with my college writing teacher, the novelist Mona Simpson, but was crazy about my post-collegiate writing instructor, the novelist Brian Bouldrey, who was still part of my life when I first broke into comics and was enormously tickled by it. Now that you’ve got me thinking about him again, I think I’ll try to track him down again and send him a copy of my Doctor Strange novel. xD In comics, I have three main mentors and I’m still in touch with all of them and know that they’re proud of and happy for me. Overall, the professional comics community is very supportive and full of hard-working people who care about the medium, the characters, the readers, and each other. Thank  you for these great questions and for you interest in my work!

Thank you, Devin! It was a pleasure and we are grateful for your amazing and detailed answers, and of course for your time :)

Rozhovor původně publikovaný na blogu Comics Holky

[mineofilms]

Call It Heavy Metal Noise

I just listened to the new EVANESCENCE last week. The album is called “The Bitter Truth.” It’s not bad. It’s more than I expected from them and/or her. She is a great singer, but I am not sure if her vocals work for “really, heavy” music over the alternative pop metal she has been doing. I really had not listened to the band since they broke out in 2004.

“Part of Me” is a great song and in tone the album is a little bit heavier than the band’s previous works. Like, if you take what she was doing back in the day and compare it to now, it is much more heavier a record. So, I would say less pop and more rock, but it’s still very tamed down by today’s “Heavy” Metal Standards. It’s not Jinjer. No one is Jinjer…

However, this got me to thinking about music, metal and classifications. We call these Genres and Subgenres. If you all have not seen “A Headbanger’s Journey.” I recommend you all see it. It’s great. A little dated by today’s standards as metal had grown so much and changed in the past 10-15 years that it is hard to have conversations about what has/is happening to metal since the turn of the century…

It’s a tough thing to label what is really Heavy Metal and what is Pop/Rock. I am stickler for labeling bands in the correct subgenre of Heavy Metal. It’s all “Heavy Metal” and Pop/Rock is a subgenre of the main genre of Heavy Metal. This perspective is if you are the Metalhead and are creating an outline and/or timeline of bands in Heavy Metal and what Subgenre of Heavy Metal you believe they belong in.

This is completely objective. It’s all opinion based, but there are some rules for saying a band is this style or another style. Criteria is really the only way someone can say this is that and that is this, within Heavy Metal labeling.

Take Nu Metal as an example. What is Nu Metal? The easy answer is Nü Metal is Rap Metal… Well, that is a very incomplete definition, but to someone that doesn’t know metal all that well or at all that would be an “alright” answer; I’ll except it... A better definition of Nu Metal is, taken from Wiki: (sometimes stylized as nü-metal) is a subgenre of alternative metal that combines elements of heavy metal music with elements of other music genres such as hip hop, alternative rock, funk, industrial, and grunge.

This definition actually works for me, accept it is missing one very important part of the conversation about criteria. That is time period. Nü Metal isn’t just all those things in the Wiki take, it is also talking about a specific time period from 1993-2003. Now this doesn’t mean that some bands weren’t doing Nü Metal’ish / Fusion Rock based material before 1993. Red Hot Chili Peppers and Faith No More had all sorts of stuff in their music that could include them in the Nü Metal subgenre, also what about Stuck Mojo? Hip/Hop and Hardcore, yeah, they were doing it too.

However, for the most part, most would say 1993 is a fair estimate for a start date as to when you started seeing bands that would be later labeled as Nü Metal started to show up. However, by 2003 the style was in decline and you had a lot of bands from the subgenre either flat out change their sound or packed it in as a band and went onto do other things. Like father all those babies they made on the road, backstage and on the bus…

Now, Nü Metal was still doing things after 2003, but was actually anyone listening to these bands anymore? All the bands that had one or two LPs come out, had a few singles on the radio and were/are still actively touring bands… Yeah, those bands… Did anyone even notice them still around or gone for that matter? I think not.

Flaw, 12 Stones, hell, even Finger Eleven? Anyone screaming for new records from these bands? If so, then Nü Metal is still around, its not, and hasn’t been for a long while now. Post-Nü Metal for me started around 2005…

This is sort of important as some of the bands we listen to today were not even out yet and there has been a resurgence in the style. However, I cannot call it Nü Metal as Nü Metal also has the time period as part of the criteria. I am calling this Nü Wave Metal, but it’s all objective. Call it whatever you want to, but if you get into a conversation about this topic with someone that is very passionate about Heavy Metal Culture, they might embarrass you and take your girl or guy. Now, that’s metal hahhahahah….

Some examples of subgenres:

Metallica… From Genre.Fandom.com; Metallica is considered: Thrash Metal, Progressive Metal, Hard Rock, Alternative Metal. They can be put into other categories, but for the sake of not giving anyone a headache we will just stick with this. It should be noted that a lot of Metallica’s labeling changes from album to album. It is widely argued that Metallica’s 1st 4 LPs were straight up Thrash while everything after “…And Justice For All” is not Thrash Metal. I tend to agree… To me, though, Metallica is still a Heavy Metal band.

Another Example is Lamb of God. Taken from Google; Lamb of God is considered: New Wave of American Heavy Metal, Groove Metal, Death Metal, Thrash Metal, Metalcore, Black Metal, Melodic Death Metal, Grindcore, Alternative Metal, Speed Metal…

For me, Google can be hit or miss. They got 2 right out of gates. I agree that Lamb of God is “New Wave of American Heavy Metal” and “Groove Metal.” Personally, the others are a stretch. I guess they fit there, but if I have to look up bands of a specific subgenre and I am left scratching my head then I do not include said band in the labeling.

Like I said, this is completely up to you, but use some logic and critical thinking when you do it. These are my rules… What are yours??? Sometimes it is easy. Limp Bizkit is easy to call Nü Metal like Anthrax is to Thrash Metal.

One of my favorite bands as of late is Winds Of Plague, formed in 2002. They use a lot of different elements, but came out in 2002. Do we call them Nü Metal? I am sure people did, especially back in those days. In those days the band sounded more like a Hardcore band over a Nü Metal band, but that was what was happening then.

If you were heavy, metal, and came out during that latter Nü Metal years, you were called Nü Metal. I absolutely do not agree with that, but I understand the logistics of it. I was dying a little bit inside when I was reading music people calling “Shinedown” a Nü Metal band? Wait, what???

Winds Of Plague is considered Metalcore, Hardcore, Deathcore, Death Metal, Symphonic Metal, Melodic Death Metal, Avant-garde Metal, Symphonic Black Metal.

Some other bands I love… All labeling from Google… I agree with some, but not all. I do not know how they handle this, but I am not really feeling some of these secondary, third and fourth choices.

As I Lay Dying - Metalcore, Thrash Metal, Melodic Death Metal, Christian Metal, Melodic Metalcore, Christian Hardcore, Swedecore…

Dream Theater - Rock, Progressive Rock, Progressive Metal, Hard Rock …

Machine Head - New Wave of American Heavy Metal, Thrash Metal, Death Metal, Nü Metal, Groove Metal, Metalcore, Progressive Metal, Alternative Metal, Speed Metal …

Pantera - Rock, Thrash Metal, Power Metal, Hard Rock, Glam Metal, Groove Metal, Traditional Heavy Metal, Speed Metal, Sludge Metal, Southern Rock, New Wave of American Heavy Metal…

Scar Symmerty - Melodic Death Metal, Progressive Metal, Power Metal, Death Metal, Black Metal…

Sevendust - Hard Rock, Nü Metal, Alternative Rock, Alternative Metal, Post-Grunge, Industrial Metal…

Twelve Foot Ninja - Experimental Metal, Djent, Alternative Metal, Jazz Fusion, Acoustic Music, Experimental Rock, Avant-garde Metal, Funk Metal, Dub…

I get most people do not want to label their music like that. However, Heavy Metal is a family of music genres that is in a class all by itself. The numbers differ, but you can have as many as 75 different Subgenres of Heavy Metal.

While writing this I could only find 54. Again this is all objective. People make them up every few years. There is a subgenre called Nintendocore and all it is people creating music which sounds like the music on the old NES gaming console. Why this is a thing I couldn’t tell you. Some people want to feel important I guess. We live in a very confused INTERNET fueled culture these days.

This isn’t a blog about human behavior in relation to Heavy Metal and 8-bit soundtracks. Now, if someone told me August Burns Red’s cover of the Legend of Zelda theme was Nintendocore and I didn’t already know what Nintendocore was then I could agree that this song is Nintendocore. It isn’t, but again how are you or I associate Heavy Metal music to other Heavy Metal music is opinion based. Most agree that a subgenre has its own rules, but bands flip flop and/or are interchangeable more than the Politicians of this country do.

It’s all just objective perspective… Some will say Pop/Rock is whatever Rock song/album/band is popular. I only agree with that a little bit.

I say POP/ROCK has 3 main criteria that work together, but are also mutually exclusive;

1) As a form of music that one cannot put a label on, specifically.

2) Has different elements from other musical genres.

3) Happens to be a popular song/songs.

So POP/ROCK is more like a label given to bands/artists that do not fit in a “specific” subgenre. I actually call this “Fusion.” Now, more or less this is talking about how Metalheads may think of it. This by no means is a judgement and/or based on any fact. There are no facts in music. It’s all objective. I do not deny. I am a snob when it comes to this, I am…

I was into Trance back in the day, Paul Oakenfold. I like Dubstep style music too. Dubstep is literally Heavy Metal with electronical instrumentation. There are a lot of similarities. Plus, you are seeing a lot of dubstep style sampling used in more extreme metal these days. The subgenre of Metalcore has a lot of these elements; Asking Alexandria, Attila, Skip The Foreplay, I See Stars, Capture the Crown, Make Me Famous. It was big in the latter 2000s and early 2010s… I still see this trying to push through to the front of Heavy Metal, but bands like Asking Alexandria and Attila no longer sound like what they were when they first started getting big. Asking Alexandria is basically a Pop band now and Attila would rather do Porn videos and be a marketing machine on Twitter than writing great Metalcore music. Things have changed… Not just with those bands, but bands in general.

The whole industry has shifted since the Pandemic started, but there was a lot of evidence that the typical Garage Band Journey of starting from nothing and becoming a house hold name was in decline.

When I took over logistics for the band I manage now after the first 3 or 4 months I was open to a lot. Once we started pulling local band grind of driving across the state for no money, no fans, which means no merch sales, means no money.

Now, locally we are good with that. We’ll play shows like that, here, but not 2 to 3 hours away in 3 beat up vehicles, cramming 10 people into a shitty hotel room, gas, booze, food, child care, scheduling conflicts. Before we know it we are pulling monies out of the band fund just to play a show.

We do not pay to play, especially in front of no people accept the other bands and their girlfriends. Jammin’ in 7-8 bands in a small ass bar with little to NO PAY, but the bar made their money that night. That isn’t a show that is band practice… There is one exception and that is when opening for a national.

Bands are on YouTube now, doing streams, covers, different takes of songs. Content is being streamed now more than ever and if bands are not willing to change with that dynamic then they are behind the times.

Being a garage band and playing shitty bars for no money and expecting record executives to be there to sign the band, well, that doesn’t exist anymore. It hasn’t in a long time actually.

The music is changing too… It’s all about tuning down, low tones and 8-string guitars, sometimes 2 of them.  Now, older school guitar players will fight this and call it cookie cutter and/or basic, but the metal community has accepted this is the direction styles are moving metal forward.

Vocally you have people like; Tatiana Shmayluk of JINJER. Probably the hottest vocalist on the market next to Alex Terrible of Slaughter to Prevail. Tatiana is the best of both worlds with a soft voice and a scream that will make any metalhead smile wider than the Joker…

She can scream like a man, clean, but yet also pull off Gwen Stefani harmonics without all the synth bull crap. She does this with little to no effects and absolutely no Autotune. A lot of metal singers cannot go from scream to melody on a dime, but she can and it’s amazing. Also this is a great example of what 8-string tuned down guitars sound like with someone that can actually sing along with screaming. That is why Jinjer is doing so well right now. Rumor has it they are playing Janus Live in December in Saint Petersburg, Florida…

What Alex Terrible is doing/using is called “false vocal gutturals” and many of metal singers have damaged their vocal cords, seriously and permanently, trying to sing like this incorrectly. It took him 12 years of being coached and practicing for him to be able to do this the way he does and not damage his vocal cords. What is amazing about this is he does this with no added digital effects. Maybe some eq’n and your standard clean up filters, but nothing is added here to make him sound like this. It’s all him. He also sells these crazy demon masks that are always sold out and he will do hip/hop covers using only his false vocal cord gutturals. (Very entertaining)…

Closing…

All I am doing with this BLOG, and a really long one, is to show the difference between some of the labeling styles between popular Heavy Metal Subgenres. Just imagine if Lady Gaga did a real Heavy Metal record? Using her dance/pop style with an 8-string tuned down guitars, inverse bass drops, keyboards, LP turntable scratches, false vocal cord singing over just making a rock version of a pop artist.

That would be a very interesting sound I would love to hear. Now if Lady Gaga just did her normal sound with just some “rock” guitars that is exactly what someone would do if they said they wanted to go Metal, but truly do not know what metal is. Like the IG model that wears an Iron Maiden shirt but cannot name one single song of the band.

That isn’t new or pushing the elements. I get it, but whenever I hear a pop/rap artist take a stab at Heavy Metal they tend to show they do not know what Heavy Metal is. The only artist I have heard consistently over the years that can do it is Ice Tea’s “Body Count.” All black rap people making real, Heavy Metal records. And they are good… That’s what I am talking about… That’s love… That’s coming together…

I can just see some hotshot Producer saying “let’s do a metal song,” but it’s not metal, it’s barely rock, but Producer dude doesn’t know what real metal is nowadays. Metallica BLACK wouldn’t be called Thrash Metal nowadays, even Disturbed to me really isn’t “Heavy” Metal. So if you are not sure how heavy you have to be to be called “Heavy” Metal… Well, tune it down…

The Heavy Metal community is a huge group of people that come from all sort of backgrounds, places, colors, sexes, creeds, tastes, but we all tend to LOVE HEAVY METAL and that brings us all together. Man. I can really go and find wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy more examples of Metalheads being people with huge caring hearts than the latter.

Call It Heavy Metal Noise by David-Angelo Mineo 5/11/2021 2,806 Words

[comicsholky-blog]

Interview s Devin K. Grayson

Stává se vám, že při čtení komiksu byste se rádi autora na něco zeptali? Šance jsou, že si sednete a najdete společnou řeč. Jak jinak, když jsme nakonec všichni fanoušci. Dostaly jsme možnost vyzpovídat Devin K. Grayson, autorku mnohá komiksů, které určitě znáte a máte rádi. V krátkém rozhovoru, který nám ochotně poskytla se dozvíte více o tom, jak si zachovává přehled v časových linkách během psaní nebo, co si myslí o zobrazování skupinových menšin v pop kultuře. Rozhovor jsme nechaly v původním anglickém jazyce.

CZ: Devin se ke komiksům dostala po zhlédnutí animovaného Batmana, který na začátku 90. let běžel v televizi. Následně se v komiksovém obchodě začala více zajímat o svého jmenovce Dicka Graysona, známého též jako Nightwinga. Práci pro DC dostala po ustavičném volání a zasílání svých děl. Potom už následoval zájem o psaní o členech Batman rodiny, o Nightwingovi a je autorkou dalších již světově známých titulů. Devin je otevřeně bisexuálkou.

Mezi její nejznámější tituly patří Nightwing, Gotham Knights, Vampirella, Nightwing - Huntress, JLA/Titans, User, The Titans a další

EN: Devin got to comics after watching Batman: The Animated Series in early 90s. Following that event she went to explore to her local comics store to find more about Dick Grayson who she shares the last name with. After bombarding DC company and calling them to see her works, she finally got the position of a writer for this huge publisher. She enjoys writing about the Batman family, Nightwing and many other notable characters in comics. Devin is also openly bisexual.

Her notable works include: Nightwing, Gotham Knights, Vampirella, Nightwing - Huntress, JLA/Titans, User, The Titans and more

Timelines. What was your way of dealing with confusing comics continuity? And especially within the Bat-verse?  I hope this isn’t disappointing, but to honest I no longer follow DC continuity at all.  In the past I’ve compared leaving a comic series to breaking up with a lover; you hope they’re doing well, but you don’t really feel the need to check up on the details of their continued existence without you. ;-p When I was actively working in Gotham, though, I relied on a combination of extensive background reading, informal updates from friends (about what they were reading) and colleagues (about what they were writing), and sheer force of will. By sheer force of will I mean that to write in the Batman universe -or in any established fictional realm, really -you need to have a clear vision of the world and the characters moving through it. And that means that if you have to, you ignore anything that doesn’t fit into your vision. My preferred method of working on franchise characters is to do what I like to call a deep dive. Before I start writing, I read everything about them I can get my hands on, including academic analysis and summaries. Inevitably, I’ll find something that grabs me - with Batman it was his relationship with the first Robin, the idea that he was as driven and dark and scary as he was, but was also raising a kid. For the Doctor Strange novel I wrote, I started completely cold (I’d never read a Doctor Strange comic when I first got the assignment) but the first thing that grabbed me was the death of his sister. The few times I’ve worked with Superman I spent a lot of time thinking about how he was raised as a farmer. Whatever it is, I let it carry me further into the character’s world and/or psyche and I try to explore facets of it as I write about them. At that point, I’m pulling on previous continuity, but I’m also creating my own, new continuity. Comic readers tend to favor really tight continuity, but you have to remember that you get that at a cost. Every creator comes to the table with their own ideas about the characters and their own references and their own stories, and the more you make them toe the line, the less you’re making use of their uniqueness.  When I started working for the Bat-office, there were several different Bat-books, each with a slightly different take. Batman was for superhero stories, Detective was more mystery/noir , Legends featured contained stories that could fall anywhere in the history of Gotham, Chronicles was more of an anthology and testing ground for newer talent, and when I started Gotham Knights, my explicit intent was to have it highlight the relationships in the primary Bat-family.  To some extent, those books all existed in unique fictional universes, until we deliberately brought them together for crossover events. I mention this because I worry that superhero comics have a tendency to become overly homogenized when everyone has to adhere to a strict continuity.  No matter how great any given writer is, do we really want ALL the comics coming out of any given publisher to feature his language, ideas and storylines? The stories you hear about Batman - all of them - are legends.  Some may be spot on, some may be less than true, but the great thing about fiction is that, unlike reality, it isn’t actually necessary or useful for all of us to agree on what happened. Alternate takes are welcome, which is one of the reasons I’ve always championed fanfic. tl;dr: I learn it. And then I ignore it. ;-p

Can you remember writing some scene or part of a story and being beyond excited of how it is turning out to be? Do you usually anticipate reader’s reactions for something particular that you wrote? Okay, two separate questions here. First: yes, absolutely. A secret about writers is that behind closed doors, most of us suspect we’re talentless frauds and that at any minute someone is going to notice that we’re literally just making stuff up. But at the same time, most of us have a few moments every week, or a few lines in every project, where we stop, grin, and think, “damn, I’m good.” I am probably not supposed to share that secret, and I apologize to my colleagues for doing so, but the thing is…writing is magic. You can study all the craft of it, learn all the structure and all the tools (as you should) and still, there’s a point where you feel like you’re just listening and writing down a story that is coming to you from somewhere else. And when it’s good, it’s such an amazing feeling. It leaves you a little bit in awe. Specifically, the two things I remember are 1) having to stop and catch my breath the first time I wrote the word “Batmobile” in a script I was getting paid for and 2) the first time I saw the art come in for USER, and characters that had previously existed only in my head had suddenly been brought to life by John Bolton and Sean Phillips. Those were both very exciting moments. As for anticipating the reaction of readers; no, I don’t do that. I don’t even really think about the readers when I’m writing beyond, perhaps, the artist (who I want to keep engaged) or editor (who I want to keep happy). I think it would be a little paralyzing - not to mention futile - to try to guess how people will react. You don’t even really know who’s reading it, honestly, which is one of the reasons why it’s really nice to meet readers at conventions. But I’ve always suspected that the best writing comes from writing to and for one specific person - usually a colleague or loved one.

What would you tell to those saying comics are not a real or serious literature and shame it readers for needing to “have pictures to understand the plot”? Unfortunately it is still a case of misunderstanding. Well, first of all, I try to make a distinction between superhero comics, the publishing subgenre, and comics, the medium. Superhero comics are not, if we’re being honest, always serious literature. But comics as a medium is an amazingly complex and diverse form of story-telling that supports everything from newspaper comic strips to literary fiction graphic novels. It’s particularly remarkable for being the most collaborative form of story creation and story consumption available, relying on multiple creators for its inception and relying on readers to actively simulate time, motion and sometimes even events out of the spaces between panels. The best book I’ve ever read on the topic - and one that could make even a hardcore cynic reevaluate their understanding of what “comics” is - is Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. There are also so many amazing graphic novels out there, from Spiegelman’s Maus to Chabouté’s Alone. Unless it’s not comics they have an issue with so much as superheroes, in which case you can talk to them about contemporary mythology and the power of allegorical story-telling. You’re right, though, that it’s a very misunderstood corner of publishing. I don’t often have people try to tell me it’s not literature, but I can’t count the number of people who have learned what I do for a living and assumed I have a lot of material I can share with their child. The idea that comics are for kids is a throwback to 1950s American marketing. As I’m sure you and your followers know, comics haven’t really been for kids in over five decades. I still haven’t shown my ten-year-old my Batman or Nightwing work and don’t plan to for some time. The last thing I’ll say on the subject is that sometimes people have to be taught how to read the art in a comic. I think people unfamiliar with comics assume that the pictures in the panels are just literal representations of the words, which is rarely the case. Comic fans are actually quite accomplished readers who know how to invest in long stories, detect subtle tensions between artistic and linguistic storytelling, actively participate in moving narratives forward and, of course, engage with huge, complex fictional universes.

Do you feel like there is not enough representation of bisexual heroes/superheroes in comics and pop-culture? We know Diana Prince is bisexual and she never got a canonical girlfriend. Yes, I agree. The LGBTQA population, as a whole, is grossly underrepresented, along with non-heteronormative relationships and non-gender binary individuals. Just this morning, actually, I was told I couldn’t go forward with a storyline exploring a canonically confirmed asexual character joining an asexual support group, because the publisher wanted to play “that angle” down. As someone who is openly bisexual, this distresses me, but not half so much as the appalling underrepresentation of people of color and women, especially considering that both groups each make up more than half the population. As the recent phenomenal success of both the Wonder Woman and Black Panther movies demonstrate, the world is more than ready to embrace corrections to these imbalances, but the people (oh, who am I kidding? Read: white men) who run the engines of pop culture - not to mention literary culture, history, and advertising - are incredibly averse to change. It’s so, so important to see yourself reflected in your own culture, but the presence and participation of women and people of color, not to mention bisexuals, is so deeply biased it’s difficult to fully comprehend the multiple levels of exclusion. It’s hard for me to even talk about this these days because I don’t know where to start. The relentless use of female characters to stimulate growth in male characters? The complete absence of female internal lives in so much of literature? How about just pure invisibility? I remember watching TV one evening and noticing - all at once and with a shock that I’d never seen it before - what I call the gender ratio. The world, according to movies and television shows, consists of one female for every three males. There are exceptions to this, but watch how often it’s true. And of course, it’s even worse for people of color, who tend to appear at about a one to nine white people ratio. Now walk outside. Is that what you see? Of course not, not even close! But we’re so used to the culture we’ve been fed that we hardly notice anything’s amiss when we look at entire fictional landscapes almost wholly devoid of women and POC. What do you think that does to our psyches? To our sense of fitting in in the world? To our sense of, and compassion for, one another? The dearth of bisexual superheroes strikes me as a wasted opportunity to explore organic and complex ranges in human sexuality - great story-fodder, that! - and I hope it changes. But not all superhero stories have to deal with the sex lives of the characters. Every single one of them, though, has to confront both the gender and race of the characters portrayed, and holy f--- do we have a long way to go there.

We were delighted to see the #VisibleWoman going around Twitter earlier this year. Did it prove itself to be useful? What you do you think about this way of using social media to make a statement and make it work? This plays directly into what I was just talking about. It’s so weird to think about, but we are so often literally invisible - in fiction especially, but in the real world, too. As a writer, I spend a lot of time summoning and then editing the default story ideas that come from my subconscious, and once I began to be aware of the issues we’ve been discussing, I was dismayed by how deeply all of that background misogyny had lodged itself - it’s an issue I’m still exploring and excavating today. I grew up hearing people say that women were important and should be treated fairly, but I saw so few of them. They were absent or scarce in most movies and TV shows, whittled down to a small subgroup in literary fiction writing, hard to find in the music world, almost never part of political news or history lessons…I can’t even imagine how different my internal world would be if I’d been exposed to a more balanced cultural tally. So, yes - I do think the hashtag was useful, both as a marketing tool (my single tagged tweet garnered me over three hundred new followers and is now pinned to the top of my account) and as a huge, warm searchlight picking accomplished females out of the crowd. Just being reminded that there are women working in comics and games and STEM and business and politics is enormously helpful. Having a platform available to connect with and support them is that much more powerful. I do have concerns about social media, some quite grave. But #VisibleWoman stands as an example of best possible usage.

And finally, do you keep in touch with your high school or college teachers who taught you English or Writing? Do you think they know you have became a successful author and would they be proud of you? Great question! My answer is multi-tiered because those people - mentors - change and evolve over time. So the short answer is no, I’m not still in touch with any of my high school or college teachers and I doubt they’ve kept track of me. I went to three different high schools and so didn’t form strong attachments to many teachers - the one exception was a Social Living teacher at Berkeley High, Nancy Rubin, who I did stay in touch with for many years after I graduated. She didn’t teach me to write - though she did encourage us all to keep daily journals, which can be a gateway drug to compulsive writing - but she was that special teacher who saw all her students as individuals and honestly cared about our opinions and our struggles and our lives. I was actually still in touch with her when she published her first book - Ask Me if I Care, Voices from an American High School - and I was very proud of her! I’m sure she’d enjoy hearing about my crazy career, but she was proud of all of us, even then, just for being. I didn’t make a strong connection with my college writing teacher, the novelist Mona Simpson, but was crazy about my post-collegiate writing instructor, the novelist Brian Bouldrey, who was still part of my life when I first broke into comics and was enormously tickled by it. Now that you’ve got me thinking about him again, I think I’ll try to track him down again and send him a copy of my Doctor Strange novel. xD In comics, I have three main mentors and I’m still in touch with all of them and know that they’re proud of and happy for me. Overall, the professional comics community is very supportive and full of hard-working people who care about the medium, the characters, the readers, and each other. Thank  you for these great questions and for you interest in my work!

Thank you, Devin! It was a pleasure and we are grateful for your amazing and detailed answers, and of course for your time :)

A i my velice děkujeme a doufáme, že jste si interview užili stejně jako my!

- Kara