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Dress Fierce, Not OffensiveIt’s time for the costume hunting to begin! Halloween is that special holiday when you get to be someone or something else, and for people who identify as women that usually means you get to be a sexy someone or something else. Sexy Snow White. Sexy Skunk. Sexy Industrial Stapler. But with sites like TakeBackHalloween.org, the holiday is slowly transforming into something like an intellectual fashion parade. That is an outrageous exaggeration, but it’s spurring on costumes born of on ingenuity and substance rather than leg and cleavage. Now, I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with leg or cleavage. Goodness knows, I’ve dressed as my fair share of Sexy Witches and usually not even on Halloween. But I’m delighted that more costume options are made available for women, because a stroll down the women’s costume aisle would make you think that “leg and cleavage” were the only directions that the manufacturers were given. By “available,” I mean there are sites that offer ideas, templates, and suggestions to make your own clever costume, because if you’re expecting to find Susan B. Anthony, Frida Kahlo, Hypatia, and Harriet Tubman costumes in a store, you will be sorely disappointed. Personally, I never felt sexier than when I was Frida Kahlo in a gorgeous vintage turquoise Mexican wedding dress with roses in my hair. Frida was a powerful, talented person who owned all her features with such raw beauty, and it was lovely to embody that for an evening when the veil between the living and the dead is the thinnest. At the party, everyone knew who I was, mainly because I exaggerated the brow with charcoal like her famed self-portraits. The party I attended was a house party with my MFA colleagues. The nerd factor was high, the costumes were all smart, creative, or funny: a paint-splattered sheet became Jackson Pollock’s ghost, Lindsay Bluth appeared in her “SLUT’ tank-top and skirt, one went as the Steampunk Movement with gears with moving parts sewn onto his black suit, Audrey Hepburn fraternized with Amelia Earhart, and Gulliver from Gulliver’s Travels was decorated with plastic Lilliputian army men hanging from the shirt and trousers. In this delightful environment, my costume was at home. But when I sent a childhood friend a Halloween selfie, the first thing he said was, “EW. THE HAIR.” He was referring to the unibrow, of course. And I was violently reminded that most people, even people I love, are stringently in favor of the bizarre, unrealistic, and hairless beauty standards that rule. My first reaction was unbridled rage. How dare he shame me? But I know that wasn’t his intention. It was a deep-seated standard of beauty long ago internalized burbling up. Luckily, my friend is awesome and I get a kick out of making people question beauty, gender, and sexuality conventions, but if I were a more sensitive girl and less-prone to arguing passionately with dear friends over text, then I might have whipped out the baby wipes and gone as a Sexy Bed Sheet.
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The Green Condition By Deniz Ataman QuailBellMagazine.com The Green Condition is a lyrical collage composed of raccoons, metal-casting, Roman history, Seattle, and the trials and tribulations of moving. Though Colen dives into these distinct and metaphoric images in a stream of conscious-style, she ties them together through the narrator’s revealing one-liners: Once I know what to listen for, I hear it all the time. The Green Condition evokes the lush, overgrown arboreal environment that is the Pacific Northwest. At the same time, it evokes the loneliness that comes when a new job absorbs a significant other. The narrator has no choice but to observe her (his?) new surroundings. When she leaves I put her toothbrush in my mouth. I hold it here two hours. Comparisons of Seattle and Rome further evoke the narrator's loyalty to nostalgia. Unlike Rome, Seattle stands, and continues growing. Does the narrator hope for the fall of Seattle where the couple can return to their old life? At one point we had a symbiosis. An understanding of how a life should look. Enter the raccoons and metal-casting the narrator continues dissecting during these lonely days. Colen weaves these vastly different images together in a way that reveals a the narrator’s resolve in this new environment: scavenging to survive and building a thick skin despite a dissolvable core. In the green condition there must be adequate strength for handling. I am most interested in the bronze sculpture of the wolf, and the core that was made to hold it. The core that was designed to come apart in the end once the casting metal had cooled, held shape. Was it the move? The raccoons? The longing for a fading love? The casting of a new shell to survive? We won’t know—but through these images, though at first glance appear irrelevant, Colen deconstructs them in a way that inspires readers to find symbolism and meaning in the most uncharted manner. Elizabeth J. Colen is the author of the poetry collections Money for Sunsets (Steel Toe Books, 2010) and Waiting Up for the End of the World: Conspiracies (Jaded Ibis Press, 2012), as well as flash fiction collection Dear Mother Monster, Dear Daughter Mistake (Rose Metal Press, 2011). She lives in Seattle. #Real #BookReview #TheGreenCondition #ElizabethColen #Seattle #Imagery #Metaphors #Poetry #Literature #Literary Visit our shop and subscribe. Sponsor us. Submit and become a contributor. Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
How Meta Is This?One of the great thing about zine festivals is that they help inspire people to make their own 'zines. On Saturday, The Quail Bell Crew decided to make a zine while selling our, well, other 'zines at Richmond Zine Fest. Taking a blank 'zine from a lesson on 'zine-making, Quail Bell art director Kristen Rebelo and staff film reviewer Alex Carrigan (with the help of Alex's brother, Sam) used the event to fill a 'zine. Throughout the day, they filled the pages of the 'zine however they saw fit. They would write down quotes they heard, doodle whenever bored, and invited people who visited the table to add their own contributions to the 'zine. What follows are the pages that were filled in, showing the zaniness that came from Richmond Zine Fest: The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
My Life as a Non-threat By Anonymous QuailBellMagazine.com One of the key things to cultivating compassion for others is understanding the positions of privilege each of us may or may not have. Privilege is culturally relevant, so one privilege may not mean much in one place, but in another, it may give you an advantage. In the U.S.A., being male is a privilege. Having white skin is a privilege. And coming from a middle-class background is yet another privilege. Safe to say, I grew up in one of the most privileged positions one can in the West.
But I was not aware of my privilege for many years. As a person with privilege, the toughest thing to wrap your head around is where that privilege ends and begins, mainly because you never get to experience not having it. So it becomes easy to believe that your struggles and situational outcomes are the same as other people's. But if these people you are thinking of do not have the same level of privilege as you, both the obstacles and outcomes can be very different. When I learned about my own privileges, my whole world view changed. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
Tulpas Gone Wild As I’m sure you’ve all heard, Slender Man is the subject of the public eye’s glares due to the recent killings that he allegedly inspired. For those who aren’t in the know: Slender Man made his existential debut in 2009 on the Something Awful forum. His mythos is a folkloric creation of the users’ combined creative efforts, but his real parentage is traced back to Eric Knudson. He Photoshopped this willowy, tendril-armed, humanoid monster into a picture of children on a playground. From thereon, Knudson spawned a notorious meme whose reputation has since far exceeded his seemingly humble roots.
Always dressed for the occasion in a fancy suit, Slender Man enjoys traveling through unseen dimensions to peruse our physical world for humans to terrorize and maim. His victims develop a psychological condition known as “slender sickness” which causes them to exhibit symptoms of psychosis or plain paranoia, as far as any comparatively sane onlookers are concerned. When he’s had his fill of terror, he abducts them, banishing them to his personal Slender-verse that may or may not be located in the woods of Wisconsin. The Slender Man mythos has evolved from a collaborative, so his abilities and tendencies are always subject to change, much like the varied versions of urban myths that evolve from a locale’s folklore. For someone whose face doesn’t show up in photographs, he is sure getting a lot of publicity. He has been amassing a cult following ever since he was born. While most Slender-lovers are simply intrigued by him, two girls in middle school cited their devotion to him as their inspiration to attempt murder. Anissa Weier and Morgan Geyser intended to murder their friend as a sacrificial demonstration to express their dedication to Slender Man. If the mission was a success, they would become “proxies” to do his bidding. If everything was to go according to plan, the killers would have refuge in Slender Man’s alleged mansion in the faraway Nicolet National Forest. Weier even brought a picture of her family as a keepsake to preserve her memory of them. Much like human predators of the physical realm, this also totally aligns with Slender Man’s tendency to groom children and gain their trust in order to exploit them in the most efficient way. An anonymous mother also claimed that her daughter attempted to stab her whilst under Slender Man’s “influence.” The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
Sewage Horrors for William Henry Harrison? All presidents are to be pitied in one way or another, but perhaps the most tragic of them all is our utterly forgettable ninth president, William Henry Harrison. He ascended to the presidency in a relatively undiscussed era between the (dare-we-say) exciting early years of the nation and the turmoil of the Civil War. And—more importantly—he served for only one month before dying in 1841. All that fundraising, campaigning, slogan-ing (ever heard of "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too"?), debating, mud-throwing and mud-receiving, for one lousy month? What an unlucky soul.
It’s long been believed that poor Harrison died from pneumonia resulting from his exceedingly long Inaugural Address delivered in freezing, rainy weather. After said fundraising, campaigning, baby-kissing, etc. Harrison wanted to relish in his victory—and wanted to look dapper while doing it!—thus forgoing a coat, hat, or gloves. But an author of medical diagnoses, Philip Mackowiak, and colleague Jane McHugh have revealed a new theory, and it isn’t pretty. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
San Fran, My Mistress It was late 2012. Brooklyn, New York.
“You do realize you’re talking about the city like you’re stuck in an abusive relationship, right?” remarked an out-of-state pal in a late night Skype call. That was the first time anyone had ever pointed that out to me. I have to say, he had a point. There I was, curled under a single blanket in my windowless middle-bedroom in a railroad-style apartment in the “Broadway Triangle”—for simplicity’s sake we’ll call it the edge of Bed-Stuy. I was munching on stale Duane Reade clearance snacks with gloved hands. Gloved, of course, because the heater had yet to kick in despite it being November. At least I had wifi—not just any old WiFi, but a connection strong enough to sustain a video chat. Lucky me. My friend pressed on, “and by that I mean you’ve made the city itself the abusive spouse.” Again, he had a point. All the warning signs were there, too: from the overwhelming sense of being taken advantage of and disrespected to being repeatedly won over and reeled back in by the slightest ghosts of hope. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
The Many Faces of Lynch's Ladies As I said in my review of David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, I wouldn't be able to stop thinking about this movie for a while. I find that to be the case whenever I am reminded about it and other films of Lynch's. There's always that feeling one gets after watching his films that there's something missing, and the viewer needs to spend time thinking carefully about what in the film is making it difficult to think about anything else. Recently, my brother was one of those people. He sent me a message on Facebook, asking me why Lynch tended to use hair color to show the differences and similarities between the women in his movies.
That spurred a Facebook lecture that lasted about twenty minutes, but did leave me with one notable impression that I hadn't thought about a lot in Lynch's films: hair color is an element Lynch tends to default to when he wants to make a statement about the women in his films. Now, this sort of thing isn't exactly new to David Lynch; there's been plenty of fictional media that has used contrasting hair color as tools to identify the characters, particularly female characters. What's interesting is to think how Lynch uses something that is centuries old and how he applies it to his films. Traditionally, the use of hair color to identify character traits with women has been fairly traditional. Many cultures would use the same kind of dichotomy for how women with light hair are compared to women with dark hair. For the most part, it fits with the Madonna/Whore complex, where one hair color signifies purity and goodness and the other represents promiscuity and badness. Considering dark hair tends to be a more dominant trait, lighter hair colors such as blonde and red tend to be seen as more exotic to some cultures, while white hair comes to represent wisdom and knowledge. The Breadcrumbs widget will appear here on the published site.
As Temperatures Drop, Textures Rise Producers/Stylists: Amy Gatewood, Shannon Minor, Lindsey Story Photographer: Amy Gatewood Model: Tracy Chau QuailBellMagazine.com With crisp autumn fresh air breezes, layers of cozy sweaters, kimonos and other flowy outerwear pieces provide warmth and style for the fall season. Neutrals, greens and blues mix and match well together, and as autumn temperatures lower, it is a great time to play around with different textured fabrics. Bundle up; go for an exploratory, neighborhood walk, all while experimenting with color and layers for beautiful fall days to come. |
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