everyday art culture & Magic
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Spirals Will Never Be The Same For Me
By Ghia Vitale
Photo Credit: Junji Ito
In the spirit of Halloween, I’m reviewing a classic seinen horror manga: Uzumaki by Junji Ito. There are light spoilers ahead, so proceed with caution!
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I Will Never Understand Toni Morrison. That Doesn't Matter
By Gretchen Gales
Painting by Robert McCurdy. Photo taken by Flickr user Cliff.
I was in 11th grade AP English the first time I was introduced to Toni Morrison. We were assigned Jazz as the next class book following The Scarlet Letter and The Great Gatsby. I was most excited to read Jazz out of all of the required reading. The premise captured my attention immediately: a young woman is murdered by the hands of her lover and her corpse is attacked at her own funeral. I’m a big fan of true crime, so I was prepared for the carnage.
It became the only assigned book I never finished. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
WHO WATCHES THE WATCHMEN? NOT ME: A NON-REVIEW OF WATCHMEN OR A POLITICAL SONG FOR DAMON LINDELOF TO SINBy Christopher Sloce  Once upon a time, there was a comic called Watchmen. People act like it created the idea you could write superheroes as people, specifically bad ones. That’s revisionism, and lead to Watchmen getting credited with a tidal wave of dreck it didn’t deserve. What Watchmen was instead was the culmination of an attitude, an attempt to make comic books sit at the big table with other literature by using its natural advantages over other art forms.
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6 Useful Tips For Loving Yourself MoreBy Ghia Vitale  Photo Credit: Pixabay.com If you want to work on loving yourself and don’t know where to start, that’s totally okay. Self-love doesn’t come naturally to everyone. Still, making the effort to love yourself will benefit you more than you think. Here are 6 self-love tips I wish I’d known about earlier that you can use to propel your own self-love journey forward:
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5 Witchy Uses For Dried Rose Petals
By Ghia Vitale
Photo Credit: Pxhere.com
Rose is a highly versatile flower and magickal herb. That’s why there are more ways to use dried rose petals in magick and witchcraft than you think.
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Planting A Sustainable Way Forward
The idea for The Giddings House—a collective operation recycling old and free materials into fruit, vegetable, flower, and herb planters in historic downtown Manassas, Virginia—began earlier this year with a convergence of factors. The first was the glut of wooden furniture on Craigslist Free. You literally had to pay someone to take away your old oak entertainment center. The second was the arrival of Amazon in the Northern Virginia region, signaling rows of new townhomes with postage-stamp yards unfit for growing gardens. And the third was Bill.
Bill showed up on our doorstep around mid-September, talkative but uncertain. He’d been laid off, he said, and his wife was both emotionally and physically abusive. He was a friend of one of our roommates and he was going through a rough spot. He’d just crash with her for a bit if that was okay. It turned out he was a former woodworker. When I wondered aloud whether old bookcases could be converted into indoor planters, Bill walked me through the logistics. He refinished a planter that he then sold to a city boutique for food and gas money. Within a month he was back on his feet and had a steady handyman job. But the idea had been set in motion: Why not provide part-time employment making upcycled planters so apartment-dwellers could grow their own healthy vegetables? The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
Summoning Manuscript MagicBy The Editors  Let's talk about putting together a book of poetry and photography! Learn from a published author/artist and her lovely assistant, Ghia Vitale. Bring materials to workshop. It will be a whirlwind three hours on November 2nd at The Tiny Cupboard in Brooklyn.
Here's a tad more about what "Summoning The Magic From Your Poetry & Photography Manuscript" is all about: The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
A Literary Period Of Love & LyricismBy Rachel Rivenbark  Hello, Professor Eckhardt! Thank you for taking the time to speak with us at Quail Bell Magazine. Now, you’ve been teaching at Virginia Commonwealth University for quite a long time now, nearly fifteen years. As many of our readers know, Quail Bell was founded by author/artist Christine Sloan Stoddard when she was a student at VCU, so we like to stay abreast of how VCU remains a place for creativity and stories. Your time at VCU has been very impressive. To start us off, would you be willing to give readers a bit of information about yourself, and a quick insight into what led you to teaching?
I got to VCU in 2005, so I’ve been on the faculty for 14 years. Lots of things led me to teaching: I like to get in front of people, for instance, but I’m happier when I have a text to discuss once I get there. There were other things as well, though. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
Joker Holds up a Mirror to an Unequal Society
By Julian Drury
Todd Philips’ Joker is, perhaps, one of the most profound films of 2019. It is not a typical cookie cutter comic book movie. The film, while detailing the origin of the most iconic villain of all time, stands on its own as a piece of deep cinematic excellence. Within its two-hour runtime, we are given many themes that deal more with gripping, real world, traumas than with the traditional melee of an MCU or DCEU film. The audience is bombarded with the spiraling gut punches dealing with mental health, social alienation, collapse of self, as well as coping with the crushing reality of the unequal economic order of America.
If you expect this film to be a typical comic book adaptation, then this film may disappoint you. The film transcends the comics, telling a terrifyingly relatable story that anyone in America today can experience in real life. The film focuses on Arthur Fleck, played by Joaquin Phoenix, as he struggles to maintain his mental health in a society that increasingly ignores and mocks him. He suffers from a host of mental ailments, including a condition that causes him to laugh uncontrollably when he feels angered or scared. Laughter embodies pain for Arthur. While Arthur tries to remain stable, society around him picks away at his ability to do so bit by bit. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
Imperial TopazBy Elizabeth Jaeger  “You can’t go to Brazil without me. The Amazon is one place I’d like to go,” Kati, my spouse, looked at me over the lip of her glass as she took a sip of white wine. It was early spring, and though there was a slight chill in the air, we sat outside, unwinding after a day of teaching. I had brought up Brazil because it was that time of the year, the glorious season when I could start anticipating a new trip. Every year I endured the agony of teaching so that I could escape in the summer. And with each adventure, my hunger to explore somewhere new expanded until I felt certain I should never feel full. Traveling was my first love. When we got married, I knew Kati had no interest in backpacking the world. But she also knew better than to expect me to give it up. After all, when she asked me to marry her, my response was, “Yes, but you only get me ten months out of the year.”
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Here, There and Everywhere Many, many years ago, I reviewed a movie for Quail Bell called The Double Life of Veronique. While discussing the oeuvre of Krzysztof Kieslowski, I mentioned a film series he directed called the Three Colors trilogy. While I didn’t go too deep into discussing the films, the first film in the series, Three Colors: Blue, is one of the best movies I have ever seen in my life. Three Colors: Red may be my all-time favorite movie, but Blue was one that still haunts me. The film, which follows a woman who loses her husband and daughter in a car accident and tries to separate herself from all around her to cope with the loss, was a dramatic and dreamlike depiction of the grieving and bereavement process. Through its beautiful cinematography and score, the depiction of Juliette Binoche’s protagonist as she tries and fails to isolate herself in her time of grief really struck a chord with me and remains with me to this day as one of the best depictions of bereavement I have ever seen.
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Coffee Boobs 101By Ghia Vitale  Photo Credit: Maxpixel.net Emojis: Wikimedia Commons & Needpix.com Most people don’t know this, but caffeine can cause breast pain. When that happens, you get a condition that I’ve named “coffee boobs.” No, I’m not a doctor or health professional, but I’m speaking based on personal experience and research related to the subject.
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A Plot Like A Run-On Sentence El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie, which I’m sure you were interested in seeing or have already seen if you clicked on this review, was released some time last week on Netflix.
And it’s pretty bad. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
Not-so-dead, see Now that we’re in spooky season, it’s easy to get caught back up in the culture of horror and horror media. It’d be one thing to let October be the month of pumpkin spice and autumn colors, but a lot of people choose to let themselves go head first into horror, myself included. Having a guilty pleasure love of horror films and a fascination with finding new ones, I was curious to see if I could find a piece of horror fiction unlike anything I normally come across.
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