Alexandra Kingsley Edwards

March 29, 2013
Section: films, podcasts, television
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TFL Podcast Episode 9: A spunky heroine with a boy’s name

Alex and Josh discuss the hullabaloo surrounding the Veronica Mars kickstarter and the upcoming SyFy channel “transmedia experience,” Defiance. They also throw out some fresh rhymes for Lee Van Cleef movies, Battlestar Galactica, Deadwood, Justified and Chan-wook Park’s American debut, Stoker. Then they get super arthouse and shit with Alex’s take on Devyn Waitt’s Not Waving But Drowning and the Athens-Austin indie The Taiwan Oyster. There’s so much jaw-flappin’ in this pint sized episode that you’ll swear there’s a frakkin’ helicopter about to take off.

Listen at TFL.

March 13, 2013
Section: Athens, films
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Recent theatrical treats

Bless the indie cinema. Smack in the middle of the late winter wasteland that is the multiplex, our local theatre offered up a few days of programming that fed my need to actually see something worthwhile.

Athens’s new art/music/tech festival, Athens Slingshot, presented a curated collection of short films that explored ethnography and soundscapes. It was simultaneously fortunate and unfortunate that they ran the best one first: a documentary clip of Indonesia’s Jogja Hip Hop Foundation driving up Mount Merapi, discussing the devastation that followed the active volcano’s eruption in 2010, and then performing in a small village. Hip hop crosses all language barriers, as far as I’m concerned, and watching the set be accompanied by traditional two-dimensional puppets, swaying and dancing to the music, got me thinking about technology and the uncontainable spread of culture it can activate. It’s all too often a one-way radio, a loudspeaker blaring our fixations to the world, and I wish more often than not that we’d shut up and listen to other cultures talking back. Docs like this do some of that work, and I hope we see more of them—and of the Jogja Hip Hop Foundation—in the future.

After this short, though, some incomprehensible arthouse drivel set to an ambient soundtrack made almost entirely of blaring horns. I try not to be curmudgeonly, but there’s only so much a girl can take. I left before my ears could be assaulted further.

But I was back again the very next day, still rocking my festival wristband for a few bucks off the one-time-only screening of The Taiwan Oyster, a micro-budget indie made by a couple of Athens boys and shown last year at SXSW. The movie is a heist film meets existential roadtrip inspired by the director’s time in Taiwan (he was there for the 1999 earthquake) and Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. I tend to have very little patience for sad-sack expat white boys with their burdens and whatnot, but the movie only barely romanticizes their experiences, and it was quite obviously made by people who have a deep respect for Taiwan and its culture.

The Taiwanese landscape pairs surprisingly well with the classic country soundtrack, including Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billy Joe” and Delbert McClinton’s inferior but still enjoyable version of “Two More Bottles of Wine” (seriously, no one could outdo Emmylou. Don’t even try). The cinematography was lyrical and dreamy, and it felt guerrilla in the best way possible. This is the kind of indie that makes me want to make more movies—an excellent feeling to have in the midst of the late winter movie blahs.

March 2, 2013
Section: films, podcasts
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TFL Podcast Episode 8: Oscars edition

Alex and Josh return from their unplanned hiatus to discuss who went home with a little man on Oscars night, and who just went home with a little gold statue. It’s an action-packed, lean and mean 53 minutes of cajoling and criticism aimed squarely at the hoity-toity, upper-crust of Hollywood’s Elite (and Seth MacFarlane). Also, unless you are completely unfamiliar with the winners, this episode represents our first ever spoiler-free affair. Finally, you can listen with impunity as we only vaguely describe the plots to some of the most critically lauded films of 2012!

Listen at The Film League.

February 12, 2013
Section: books
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Mark Twain celebrates Mardi Gras

Mardi-Gras is of course a relic of the French and Spanish occupation; but I judge that the religious feature has been pretty well knocked out of it now. Sir Walter has got the advantage of the gentlemen of the cowl and rosary, and he will stay. His medieval business, supplemented by the monsters and the oddities, and the pleasant creatures from fairy-land, is finer to look at than the poor fantastic inventions and performances of the reveling rabble of the priest’s day, and serves quite as well, perhaps, to emphasize the day and admonish men that the grace-line between the worldly season and the holy one is reached.

This Mardi-Gras pageant was the exclusive possession of New Orleans until recently. But now it has spread to Memphis and St. Louis and Baltimore. It has probably reached its limit. It is a thing which could hardly exist in the practical North; would certainly last but a very brief time; as brief a time as it would last in London. For the soul of it is the romantic, not the funny and the grotesque. Take away the romantic mysteries, the kings and knights and big-sounding titles, and Mardi-Gras would die, down there in the South. The very feature that keeps it alive in the South—girly-girly romance—would kill it in the North or in London. Puck and Punch, and the press universal, would fall upon it and make merciless fun of it, and its first exhibition would be also its last.

— Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi

February 4, 2013
Section: my writing, personal, St. Augustine
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At the Bygone Bureau: The Past is a Watery Grave

I could not be more thrilled that the Bygone Bureau not only published my long-in-the-works memoir/personal essay about my hometown, but also commissioned four absolutely gorgeous illustrations to go with it.

Illustration by María Luque.

I was born in a populated ghost town, and it has haunted me ever since. Our histories are myths built on top of legends and then sprinkled with a healthy dose of falsehood.

In a tourist town, no one tells the truth.

St. Augustine, Florida calls itself, proudly, the oldest city under five flags. First the Timucuans gathered there, spreading over the island, across the intracoastal waterway and onto the mainland. Then Ponce de Leon landed in search of the Fountain of Youth. Then the French; Menendez and his Spanish missionaries; the Jesuits; the English; the Franciscans; and on and on it goes.

It is a coastal city with an international past, not unlike New Orleans. Our buildings are the same two-story, balconied Spanish affairs. But in place of trading vessels, we had pirates; in place of jazz and Creole culture, we had Henry Flagler and hotels full of the passionless elite.

Now our ghosts hover thickly. They dampen the night air like so many thunderstorms just out of reach. From the dead Native Americans in the Castillo de San Marcos to the yellow fever victims buried in the Huguenot Cemetery, every path and point in the city has a deathly history. Even the Ghost Hunters team will tell you our lighthouse has a shadow person — they caught it on camera.

I grew up on an island teeming with history, in a family that denies the past ever existed. In the absence of family photographs and stories, I have invented them.

Continue reading at the Bygone Bureau.

February 4, 2013
Section: academic, books
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Teaching fandom: Pastiche and fanfic in the Shadows Over Baker Street

A collection of notes and links for my class about literature and fandom. If you’d like more information or a cleaner version of anything I mention here, please let me know!

“A Study In Emerald” [pdf] and “The Terror from Bohemia” [on AO3]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadows_Over_Baker_Street

briefly summarize the plot of each story
what genre(s) are we dealing with here?
what elements from ACD and Lovecraft do these pieces build on? do they utilize kernals, holes, contradictions, silences, or potentials (Jenkins’s terms)?
what similarities do you see? what differences?
what effects do the changes have on the fictional world? on you as a reader?

[A note on discussion: I like to identify a few really broad questions to get the students thinking, then follow where they lead. Thus, my notes seem really basic—but in the classroom, I let them decide how in depth they want to talk, and about what points. For instance, my class did a lot with the Restorationists in “Emerald” and what we might call them in our world (anarchists, freedom fighters, terrorists, vigilantes, etc).]

First paper prompt: pick one piece of source material and one pastiche, fanfic, or adaptation. Across the two, identify one specific change and analyze it. How does it change meaning in the second story?

February 3, 2013
Section: academic, books
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Teaching fandom: Lovecraft and Cthulhu

[image source]

A collection of notes and links for my class about literature and fandom. If you’d like more information or a cleaner version of anything I mention here, please let me know!

“The Call of Cthulhu” [pdf]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cthulhu
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theosophy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclopean_masonry

playlist: http://8tracks.com/larryniven/raising-cthulhu
art: http://barrettblank.deviantart.com/art/Cthulhu-40045455
film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHuY2wXTd0o

Cthulhu bas-relief
Ardois-Bonnot’s Dream Landscape

Discussion questions:

genres: gothic fiction, supernatural horror, cosmic horror
box of papers & manuscripts w/ names & dates – similar to ACD & his newspaper clippings, real place names, etc.
many art objects mentioned: bas-relief, painting, Legrasse’s stone statuette
writing we can’t read, materials we can’t recognize, secret books, “wrong” geometry – what effect do these have?
systems of power (police, universities) encountering mysterious horror – how do they react?
why is the monster in New Orleans described as white (instead of another color)?
rationalism vs. horror
the monster on the island is green. why green?

February 2, 2013
Section: books, podcasts, television
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LBD Friday

At the end of our biggest and craziest week on The Lizzie Bennet Diaries to date, Bernie Su, Margaret Dunlap, and I got together to hangout and answer fan questions.

January 26, 2013
Section: academic, books
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Teaching fandom: Sherlock Holmes

A collection of notes and links for my class about literature and fandom. These are kind of messy, so I apologize in advance. If you’d like more information or a cleaner version of anything I mention here, please let me know!

…

The Complete Sherlock Holmes [pdf] (for page number reference)

Suggested reading: Michael Chabon, “Fan Fictions: On Sherlock Holmes”

Read the rest of this entry »

January 20, 2013
Section: Athens, personal
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Letters from a Southern State II

It has been months since I took the dog out for a long walk—so I dress and get him on the leash and we go. I always forget that we live next door to the river, until I cross the busy road and start walking that way. I forgot as well that it rained for days and days here—the Oconee is swelling her banks, rushing faster than I have ever seen her. The water under the bridge on College Ave. is brown and quick. The trees are thin and bare. Monkey and I walk down the hill to the trail—the sun is out but the air has a bite to it. The grass isn’t dead, at least not brown, but bleached out nearly white. The sky is bleached too and the trees are shaky little sticks pointed all upwards.

The river smells of sewage where the trail nears its banks. It is not pleasant. The brown water—not murky but chalky, clay brown, has flooded the dip in the trail a mile north of our house. I see a path around, on the side of a hill, and we crash through scant vines and brambles, thick leaves and slippery Georgia clay. We take our time, feet and paws slipping on the incline, thorns snagging sweatshirt and fur. Monkey runs recklessly into the water but I am trying to keep my feet dry. We make it around and back to the pavement, round the bend that leads through the cavern-like granite outcroppings, only to find another flood spot. This one, we can’t get around. Monkey splashes and skips through the edges of the water—but he wants to head back. We do. The path around the flood is a different world in this direction, different challenges and tough spots. We make it, not even that muddy, though I have thorns stuck in my jeans that itch and itch, all the way home.