everyday art culture & Magic
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Wicked Cool and Fighting BackBy Rachel Rivenbark  Photo Courtesy of U.S. Girls Website Sometimes in life, there are people and groups that you will have the great fortune of encountering who have this seemingly undefinable, magnetic energy about them. This is particularly applicable in the music industry, where blood and tears and loss and ecstasy intertwine and breathe life into otherwise unnameable emotion... Falling under the wicked cool musical genre of experimental pop, U.S. Girls is one such group.
Founded in 2007 by Illinois native Meghan Remy (born Meghan Ann Uremovich), U.S. Girls has risen to stardom through their beautifully surreal, deep-cutting performances that just earlier this year earned them a spot at Coachella, where they positively shone. And just earlier this week, I was extremely fortunate to get the opportunity to interview the esteemed Ms. Remy herself, about both the formation of U.S. Girls and her upcoming plans for the group.
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Reflecting On A Comic, Almost A Decade Later Sometimes it takes so long to complete a creative project that you wonder if it will come into the world full of cobwebs. I wrote the script for Bus 900 while studying at a summer writers and artists workshop my university held at the Glasgow School of Art in Scotland. The year was 2010 and I was 21 years old. I had recently founded Quail Bell Magazine and spent much of my study abroad experience envisioning where to take it. At that point, I didn’t have much to show for it, except for a simple live website with a few stories, poems, and illustrations published on it. During that time, I was visiting haunted castles, volunteering for a nonprofit theater, and immersing myself in Scottish literature and art. I remember late nights spent reading, writing, drawing, and editing video. There was also plenty of goofy GChatting with my then-boyfriend (now husband!) and the person engaged to my brother-in-law back then. The Geneva-based fiancée was restless because she had no friends in her study abroad group and wanted to talk to someone in the same time zone. In the exploitative way many of us writers are guilty of, I used her for more than one character study. I don’t know what she’s up to now, but I recognize her in some of my characters when I read my old stories. To be clear, Bus 900 is not one of them.
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Quail Bell News: Poet Emily Paskevics Makes Mesmerizing Video To Celebrate Poetry Acceptance8/28/2019 Peach-Skull-Hunger
By The Editors
Imagine our surprise and delight when poet Emily Paskevics recently made this Instagram video to commemorate her 2018 Quail Bell Magazine publication:
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There Is A Reason I Make Masks Art by Steven Warrick For the longest time, I have wrestled with the concept of being "not enough." They are words that have seemed to follow me.
They have escaped the mouths of ex-lovers in parting, employers in layoffs, would-be friends in vanishing, people considering my career as an artist, designer, performer, whatever, and of course anything financial. And it bothers me most because they are words that describe a person who isn't trying or incomplete somehow. Who is lazy, careless, or daft, or pathetically and hopelessly lame. That ain't me. I don't wonder what the status quo is for being enough anymore. It no longer seems relevant. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
One Magical Moment It was a scorching August afternoon in Long Island the day I met Quail Bell senior editor and writer, Ghia Vitale, at her home. We had been discussing doing a photo shoot for months. The day had finally arrived and Ghia had ordered a vibrant red ensemble just in time. I also had an exciting offering. At the last minute before leaving my Brooklyn apartment, I scoped the hall closet and grabbed a box I'd never opened. It contained a unicorn inflatable I had probably bought three years ago. Though I vowed to use it in a photo shoot, I had yet to follow through on that promise. Watching Ghia as she applied her red eyeshadow and Miranda Sings lipstick to match, I knew that was about to change.
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An Entire Occult Journey On Paper
By Ghia Vitale
Photo Credit: Amazon
Reading …and the willow smiled by Jacob Moses lets you peek into a neighboring dimension that’s made of poetry. The poetry in this book primarily focuses on spirituality and the occult, so it’s a perfect read for anyone who’s into mysticism.
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Quail Bell Fledgling As JailbirdBy The Editors  Our founding editor Christine Sloan Stoddard is going to perform at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.! Here's what she recently wrote in a Facebook event page created for the show:
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Applause For ClapBy Ghia Vitale  Photo Credit: YouTube Clap is a short film that’s written and directed by Allison Raskin. As reflected by the video’s namesake, STI destigmatization is central to the plot. As such, I think this film provides realistic representation that serves as a helpful step towards destigmatizing STIs.
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A Letter To The Guy Who Just Friended Me On Facebook Dear Wannabe Writer Published Two Poems on Blogspot Three Years Ago,
We've never met, but we've known each other on Facebook for all of five minutes. You friended me and immediately sent me a request to like your author page. I foolishly accepted your Facebook request because of our mutual friends (like, literally hundreds) and, ugh, popular social media promotion adages. More friends, more likes, amirite? The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
The Humble Reflections of a Kitchen WitchBy Rachel Rivenbark  One of the earliest memories I have… is bread.
That’s it. Just bread. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
Indie Folk Goes Back to BasicsBy Ryan Brunt  Courtesy of Bandcamp and Emily Sprague Artistic consistency can be a double-edged sword; while we often applaud artists who can deliver quality albums time and time again, and rightly so, when does consistency turn into repetition? When artists have style and approach that they stick to album after album, it can be difficult to keep the songs interesting and engaging. Florist has no such difficulties on their latest full length, Emily Alone. Although they don’t wander far from what made their first two albums so enjoyable, they still elevate their songwriting in meaningful ways.
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And the Crowd RoaredBy Gary Zenker  “Why is there a soccer ball in the shower?” I ask my then-six-year-old son Seth. The soccer ball is a new addition to the usual assortment of action figures and nerf guns. The shower is oversized and can accommodate two people and a few child toys…and apparently, a soccer ball.
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Celebrating GlitteratureBy Ryan Brunt  We’re living in a golden age of the literary magazine. The internet has broken down a lot of the barriers to putting together a publication, and as a result, there are countless new magazines with unique aesthetics and identities. One of the standouts of this new generation of publications is glitterMOB, whose latest issue was released in March. I reached out to editors Emily Present and Peter Cole Freidman to discuss their inspirations and what’s in store for glitterMOB.
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The Last OneBy Vivian Rachelle  Joseph Lombardi, S.J., killed me by electrocution accidentally, but more importantly, hypothetically.
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The Real Heart of the South
By Rachel Rivenbark
Strange though the phrasing may sound, it was a deliberate choice which led to my stating that the three books I am about to present ought to be “experienced” rather than simply “read.” Although all three of them make for very interesting casual reading for the idle foodie looking for something to fill the time, they can also very much be defined as three books which any serious southern food enthusiast ought to read and take to heart.
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On Owning ShameBy Christine Sloan Stoddard Editor's Note: This piece originally appeared on the AngelHousePress website.  In 2017, I wrote a chapbook about a woman who, as a coping mechanism, mythologized the story behind her ear deformity. As a little girl, she imagined she was a mermaid and called her ear a “clam ear.” This naming act became a means of empowering herself and accepting her body as it was. In 2018, Amanda Earl was kind enough to choose my manuscript for publication. The result was The Tale of the Clam Ear (AngelHousePress, Ottawa, 2018).
More than a year later, Jan Conn reviewed the chapbook for Arc Poetry Magazine. In July 2019, Amanda forwarded me the advance review via email. The subject was “A Rare Review-The Tale of the Clam Ear.” This piqued my interest. But my heart didn’t dance for long because Amanda’s terse email ended with this line: “It's not awful, just ableist, methinks.” Never read the reviews, right? Well, I couldn’t help myself. I braced myself as I opened the attachment. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
Sorry/Not Sorry I'm sorry for all of the "bad" art I ever made, and will continue to make, since not everything can be a masterpiece. Except not really. I'm not actually sorry. First of all, I'm not sorry just on principle. I apologize too much as it is. Most women and other marginalized people do. We are constantly made to feel smaller and less than, and, dammit, I want to take up space. If I take up space by making "bad" art—shitty poems and shitty videos and shitty comics—so be it. I won't back down from occupying the space I deserve. I won't back down from speaking up.
White men get to make what they make. Whether they toil away in obscurity or get the fame and fortune they feel they deserve, they still get to do it. I want to do it, too. And I want to do it without being grilled about when I'm "giving up" on art and having a baby, what my husband does for a living to "support" my art habit (always the implication), or being compared to other female artists simply because they are female. Women artists are not interchangeable. "All women's art is the same." Not true. What is true across the board? Our right to exist. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
I Don’t Get It Either: Why Now is the Time for Radical Change By Joanna Patzig  “I don’t understand why anybody goes to all the trouble of running for president of the United
States just to talk about what we really can’t do and shouldn’t fight for. I don’t get it.” - Senator Elizabeth Warren, the Second Democratic Debate of 2019 There were a lot of quotable moments in the last round of debates, and probably more succinct ones than the one above. But this moment stuck with me as a representation of the arresting struggle between political strategy and important political discourse. For context, Senator Warren was responding to former congressman John Delaney’s criticism of her economic positions. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
Netflix Sci-Fi Film Explores Morality in Technology and MoreBy Rachel Rivenbark  Netflix The role of artificial intelligence in society and how it plays into either the flourishing or destroying of humanity is a topic which seemingly countless sci-fi films have attempted to broach. Everything from The Bicentennial Man to I, Robot to Chappie to the blood-curdling Terminator franchise takes a different approach to this basic everlasting question: what does it take, and what does it mean to be human? I’ve always loved these kinds of movies for the ethical dilemmas they present, but their biggest flaw has often been for their outcomes to be predictable, in one direction or the other. Viewers often know early in the movies who to trust, and which side to root for - that of robotkind, or humankind. I was extremely delighted, however, to note that director Grant Sputore’s new sci-fi film I Am Mother manages to not only make the list of these robo-classics, but also to circumvent this fatal flaw of immediate predictability.
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A Poetry Reading Isn't A Crucifixion We should go to poetry readings to enjoy poetry, celebrate living poets, and support those poets by buying books when we are interested (and financially able.) But some poets make this hard. Very hard. Thus, we, fellow poets and/or the poor audience members, suffer. We didn't sign up for an hour or two of torture, but that's what we get.
Here are four signs a poet is being a jerk at a reading: The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
WHYDIN’ WITH BIDEN: A Late Ridin’ with Biden Introduction By Christopher Sloce  Photo by The Center for American Progress Doug Henwood, economic journalist and host of the Left Business Observer, has been asked by a few people if he would do a follow-up on his book on Hilary Clinton’s run for presidency (My Turn). He made a very good point: “He’s dull and third-rate. Hillary is a smart and substantial character, an enemy one can respect. Biden is a waste of protoplasm.”
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On Empathy and Liking the Problematic ArtBy Mari Pack  I’ve been known to like problematic art. Pretty much any book by Hemingway. Rihanna’s “Love on the Brain.” Disney’s The Aristocats. Most recently, I’ve fallen in love with a series of comic books by Bill Willingham called FABLES, which follows the adventures of mostly European–but also European-written, non-Europeans like Mowgli from Kipling’s The Jungle Book–fable creatures. Many members of the beloved Western cannon–Snow White, Prince Charming, even the Big Bad Wolf–are refugees from their fairytale Homelands, now under the control of the Adversary and his Empire.
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Embrace Your Unique Chapbook Timeline! I have a secret: Nobody fucking cares how many chapbooks you publish. That may sound harsh. Hear me out. I'm not saying that your chapbook (or plural, should you be so industrious and so lucky) doesn't matter. It does. But it's the work itself that counts. Take pride in producing quality work that honors your voice, values, and aesthetics. It takes dedication. Then do your manuscript a favor and think carefully about the press that should put it out into the world. That also takes dedication.
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