By Christopher Cruz
QuailBellMagazine.com

As a married 24 year old guy, the way that I think about Valentine's Day tends to be different than how my friends do. Friends usually respond in one of two ways. The first response generally comes from those who aren't in relationships. They treat the holiday with contempt, scoffing at the day's commercial nature. That is fair, I suppose. Valentine's Day, like most holidays, has been tainted by businesses vying for our dollars. And the truth is, Valentine's Day tries to remind those with nobody that they need someone, and that is a farce.

But my other friends, usually those with significant others, treat the holiday with veneration. It is the holiday for determining a relationship. It may be a good night or a bad night. If one unit of the couple decides that this holiday is important, and the other doesn't, then the one who doesn't might spend time in the doghouse. 

But the truth is, no Valentine's Day outing will make your relationship better. No outing will save your relationship.

By Ghia Vitale
QuailBellMagazine.com

Keep in mind that Roman pagans threw festivals that were a lot more like BDSM festivals than anything remotely family-friendly by modern standards. Lupercalia's shenanigans make 50 Shades of Grey  look like vanilla extract. So clearly, bringing back the Lupercalia festival is the cure for all of this mediocre madness. I think that if we examine our roots, people will finally understand that, as modern people, we deserve better than 50 shades of NO WAY.

Roses and chocolates? No, honey; whips and animal sacrifices. 

By Charles M. Fraser
QuailBellMagazine.com

revolutionary zeal. “Yes, yes,” he answered firmly. “Most definitely.” Stepping back to his podium, he likely caught my eyes bugging at the thought: you really just said that! And it was, of course, mentioned the idealism backfired. But that precise moment stood out and remained my direction even two decades after the Cold War’s symbolic, if not literal, end. Two decades late? Indeed.

By Alex Carrigan
QuailBellMagazine.com

In many ways, being an actor and being a superhero are the same thing. There’s a public demand for your service, you have to completely assume a role different from who you are, you are judged on your ability to perform, you are forced to keep your public and private life separate, and there’s always a chance that you will fail greatly and people can suffer because of that. The giant robot can destroy the city, or your poor box-office returns will cost people their jobs. Either way, it’s a path that can lead to greatness or failure, and the burden is placed on the hero in question.

Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman is about a movie in which the superhero is an actor, but this time, what’s at stake is not just his livelihood and the livelihood of those around him, but also his own sanity and his own sense of importance. It’s about Riggan Thomson (Michael Keaton), an actor who is starring in a Broadway play he directed and adapted from the Raymond Carver story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” Riggan was most known for playing the titular superhero in the first three Birdman movies in the 90’s, and now that he’s pushing 60, the play is his chance to reclaim his glory and prove what he is capable of.

This is not an easy task. The film follows the days leading up to the play’s grand premiere, with several preview shows suggesting that the play can be a wild success or an unmitigated disaster. A crazy method actor (Edward Norton) is brought in to fill a part, and in his attempts to be truly in character he gets drunk on stage and nearly rapes his co-star (Naomi Watts). Riggan’s daughter, Sam (Emma Stone), acts as his assistant, trying to bounce back after a stint in rehab. She comes to represent the mistakes and choices Riggan made in life, and his failure as a father is shown in how she tries to function as an adult.

By Joanna C. of Luna Luna
QuailBellMagazine.com

Seriously, as a society, how do we let the exploitation of children exist? Beauty pageants are very unlike child modeling and acting, where the projects are typically age-appropriate–pageants on the other hand, misrepresent sexuality in overtly pedophiliac ways. While it boggles my mind that parents not only condone these contests, but participate in them, it is even worse for our society to allow it.

Beauty pageants, at their most obvious and innocent, set children up for low self esteem and skewed body images. If they lose, which are most of the participants, they will feel unattractive and unwanted. Children, intrinsically, are too young to understand and quantify rejection, especially rejection based on their self-image, which has barely developed to begin with. The premise of these contests is to sexually parade around little girls–with hair and makeup applied as though they are twenty-one-years-old. The real question is: who wants to see little girls dressed as adults, and why? Since the girls are too young to truly give consent, how can this possibly be legal?

For children, how can they truly understand the attire is merely fantasy, and not real? How could they possibly deduce that superficial beauty is not as important as developing your inner personality, when they are being paraded on a stage? At Psychology Today, Martina M. Cartwright, a professor at the University of Arizona, stated “that it’s not uncommon for teens who used to be in pageants to develop eating disorders and have body image problems.”

By Fay Funk
QuailBellMagazine.com

By Gypsy Mack
QuailBellMagazine.com

“Simplicity, patience, compassion.
These three are your greatest treasures.
Simple in actions and thoughts, you return to the source of being.
Patient with both friends and enemies,
you accord with the way things are.
Compassionate toward yourself,
you reconcile all beings in the world.” 
- Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

It could be said that simplicity in action is the way to wisdom. When one is not caught up in a frenzy of possessions and things to do, one can reflect, self-reflect, and attempt to find a sense of calm in regular life. 

I find simplicity in everyday actions, actions that may not be immediately recognized as meditations. When I think of meditation, I see myself sitting cross-legged in front of my small altar, back straightened and eyes almost closed with a stick of incense burning below a painted statue of Lakshmi. I don't think of the little things I do that have the same effect on my mind that meditation has.

A little more than a week ago, I found that I had accidentally slipped into a sort of meditational state. I was spreading layers and layers of Mod Podge over collaged necklace pendants I had made, and I suddenly realized that the repetitive and simplistic action had made my mind free of almost all thoughts. Of course, when I realized this, I stopped being in that meditational and calm state, and I started thinking. But what I was thinking was if that felt like meditation, then perhaps many other regular things in my life were disguised meditations, too. 

By Gretchen Gales
QuailBellMagazine.com

Valentine's Day is devoted to the cootie covered, mono-carrying vermin couples and the people that hate them. While lovers frolic their way to fancy restaurants and exchange overpriced chocolate, others must wallow in single-dom. Tradition dictates that those without a significant other must cry themselves a pity party on the couch, watching reruns of Full House or some other heartfelt 80s or 90s show.  And as much as I love Full House,  you can cry over the beauty of John Stamos any day. Instead, start a fun new tradition with a lifelong friend.

Like mine for example. I've been single most of my life, and though that is not the case at the moment, I am still loyal to my true Valentine, Sarah. We met in 2006 as classmates in chorus, but got to know each other at a friend's Halloween party. We braced the chaos of Busch Gardens after being abandoned by our chaperon so she could ride the new coaster. We fumbled through puberty and became exceptionally hot as a result. We essentially live at each other's houses. Ten years of friendship, and decades more to come.

But this tradition started sophomore year of high school. We were more than likely sitting around, moaning that we couldn't get dates and everyone else could. We were two eligible bachelorettes that were much more entertaining than most girlfriends...at least in our own mind. Now, I don't remember how we got the idea, but if I had to guess, it went something like this:

By Alex Carrigan
QuailBellMagazine.com

I can’t remember the last time I went to a movie and liked it so much it made me mad. I think it was good that I left this movie upset about what was shown in the film because it meant that the film worked for me. Artistically, the film was flawless. People were really upset that director Ava DuVernay was snubbed at the Academy Awards, and I am now one of those people. The style of the film was incredible, with some really good shots and mise-en-scene. Several scenes of King and his supporters were bathed in a mix of shadow and yellow light, showing the troubling places they reside but also the warmth, love, and support that could be found as well.

There were also some expertly staged moments as well. One particular shot I loved was one with King and Johnson having an argument in the Oval Office with a portrait of George Washington between the two men. It’s a sign of how one president crusaded for liberty and how another is being called to do the same. There’s also a moment where King and company are in jail and the source of light is behind King. King’s face is almost entirely in shadow, but we’re able to make out enough of his features, suggesting that he’s still a present figure even though the bigoted law enforcement of Selma has put him away.

By Jody Rathgeb
QuailBellMagazine.com

Editor's Note: Here's a tip—read the author's short story, "Slave Hands," first.

You might think that a story like “Slave Hands” began with a real-life little kid, a personal experience or at least some schoolyard talk. But it didn’t. It started in two different bars and with two grown island men.

The first was Clifford Gardiner, owner of the hotel on North Caicos where I used to stay before we built a house there. In those early days of my visits, I wanted to learn more of the island history than tourists are given. I had been to Wade’s Green, the ruins of an American Loyalist plantation, and asked Clifford to tell me more about it.

“Nothing to tell. They grew cotton, and when the crop failed, they left.” Clifford had been born on North, but either he didn’t know or didn’t care about his own island’s history.

Several years later, I was in a South Caicos bar talking with some local guys, because that’s what you do when you miss the plane to North and are stranded overnight. I asked one man his last name, because that’s also what you do in a Turks and Caicos bar...find out which of his cousins you know or whose family on North has a branch on South.

Oddly, he didn’t want to tell me his surname. I pushed. “No, no,” he said. I’d been drinking enough to push more, and joked that maybe it was Hitler?

He looked at me seriously. “Kinda like that,” he said. “It’s Stubbs.”

I was baffled. There are lots of Stubbses in the islands. So he explained to me that if you are black and named Stubbs, it means your people were the slaves of one of the Stubbs brothers, the white plantation owners of the 1700s. The man was ashamed to admit that he was descended from slaves.

Many years later, those bar conversations would create my fictional Joseph Stubbs, 10 years old and embarrassed by the girl he loves because of his big hands. Even as I wrote him, I was prodding the poor kid. “C’mon, Jospeh. This is your history. Own it. Not with anger, but with pride and class.”

#Real #Unreal #History #HistoricalFiction #BlackHistory #AfricanAmerican #AmericanHistory #BlackFolklore #Memory

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