2011 March Archive - Alexandra Kingsley Edwards

March 29, 2011
Section: books, personal, St. Augustine, visual art
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Florida, dreamland

Philly’s cold winter has turned long and sour, and despite the fact that the calendar tells me it’s spring, the weather tells me I’ve ended up in an ice-cold hell dimension. In protest I recently decided that the South I miss so much can be regained, if only in my head. It involves a lot of americana music on the stereo and a refusal to consciously feel the windchill.

Lucky for me, I just discovered the brilliant Justin Taylor, whose writing about Florida encapsulates everything I love about my home state. His Florida is the South, the beach, and the weirdness of a former roadside attraction state rolled into one.

Take, for example, this passage from his short story, “Amber at the Window in Hurricane Season”:

Cars were rare and there were stars at night. We stood on the porch. On the sidewalk some genius had spraypainted EVERYTHING HERE IS THE BEST THING EVER and nobody from the city ever came to clean it up. I began to believe we were the secret owners of the world and everything in it: our shitty rental home; that one bar on Tenth that we liked; the whole state from the Alabama border over to St. Augustine, down past the Rat Kingdom all the way to Hemingway House and the beaches from which you can practically spit on Cuba. Amber would sleep in your bed, the window open, smelling the early summer and the last of you in the sheets. Hurricane season hadn’t started. Every night was balmy.

The only other thing to do when I miss Florida like this (besides prepare my UF Ph.D. application) is browse the daily pictures at staugustinepics.com.

Traffic Cone Prank Above Flagler by Jak Krumholtz

Traffic Cone Prank Above Flagler. Photo by Jak Krumholtz.

March 29, 2011
Section: notes
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Alabama ghost music

Justin Taylor writes about one of my favorite Southern punk acts, The Pine Hill Haints. (I first saw them in a teahouse in Atlanta, which is a lot like seeing them in a punkhouse in Gainesville.)

March 10, 2011
Section: Atlanta, comic books, visual art
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How I Spent My Spring Break, by Alexandra, age 26

My recent trip to Atlanta was awesome for many, many reasons, but the most unexpected was the superheroes exhibit I managed to take in at the The William Breman Jewish Heritage & Holocaust Museum.

ZAP! POW! BAM! The Superhero: The Golden Age of Comic Books, 1938-1950 is an exhibit that originated at the Breman in 2004. It has been touring the country for the past few years, but recently came back to Atlanta. It was curated by Jerry Robinson, the artist who created the Joker and named Robin, the Boy Wonder, after his own favorite hero, Robin Hood. It is truly a treasure trove of golden age comic book goodness, including original covers, issues, merchandise, films, and more.

Unlike nearly all museum exhibitions, the Breman allows flash photography (I made sure to check first!). This means that, in addition to enjoying the incredible original art and awesome gallery features, I was able to photograph them as well.

I’ve put all the pictures up on my Flickr. They include some of the exhibit placards and explanatory text. Enjoy!

March 9, 2011
Section: books, films
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King Solomon’s Mines, Homosocial Male Bonding, and the Possibilities of Masculine Identity

What a difference a big budget film makes.

Earlier this semester, I Netflixed the classic 1950 film version of King Solomon’s Mines, for an article I was working on for The Film League. I found it fascinating: an imperial English love story set against the backdrop of Africa, using real Africans and footage of real safaris. I also found it problematic in all the usual ways: an imperialist period piece using the legacy of imperialism to gain footage of “exotic” Africans, which in turn could spice up the otherwise ho-hum white, heterosexual love story, which itself uses Africa and Africans as both catalyst and afterthought.

Actually reading the book for my Victorian lit class was quite a different endeavor, even moreso than I initially imagined it would be. For one thing, the love story is totally fabricated. The novel actually follows three men into the wilds of Africa in search one’s lost brother (and the treasure). This isn’t to say that the book doesn’t rehash another white person love story; instead, the “love” is the homosocial bond between the three men, who all represent various points on a spectrum of masculinity. (I kept thinking about the male identity-trinity from Star Trek: The Original Series as reference point.) Haggard rather self-consciously sets the three up as positive masculine role models, each representing several different possible masculine expressions from which his boy readers could choose.

The novel is famously free from any “petticoats,” narrator Allan Quatermain’s metonymically reductive description of white women. Much as been written about the treasure map representing the female body to be penetrated (like Africa), and the terrifying depictions of African female identity. But somehow — and this rarely happens — I find myself much more interested in Haggard’s strange masculinity project, and what it meant for Victorian ideas of manhood, and why on earth this was deemed unsuitable for a blockbuster film adaptation.

I don’t have any answers to those questions or problems, but they’re sticking in my mind, along with several others. Why such vitriol against women? Why reconstitute the family as homosocial male bonding mechanism in the final pages of the novel? And why has this story above so many others stayed in our pop culture consciousness and been replayed over and over again?

March 9, 2011
Section: notes
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OU students peacefully protest anti-gay lecture

I’m touched to read that students at my alma mater, Oglethorpe University, turned out in droves to peacefully show their support for the LGBT community during a school-sponsored lecture against gay marriage.

March 1, 2011
Section: feature articles, NYC
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On The Warriors

I’ve been thinking a lot about New York lately — specifically, Times Square in the late 70s and early 80s. It was a different time. What was once a booming theatre district in the early part of the century had fallen on hard times following the Great Depression. The theatres remained, though they began running more scandalous fare in an effort to attract viewers and stay in business. By the 1970s, Times Square was a den of pornography, with sex shops and go-go bars lining the block, prostitutes and drug dealers on every corner. What is now a scrubbed-clean tourist trap and advertisers’ paradise was once a no man’s land featuring every dark desire humans can imagine.

I couldn’t tell you why it’s been on my mind lately, but I see the Times Square panic everywhere these days: Iris Owens’ stunning book After Claude and Margaret Atwood’s classic The Handmaid’s Tale; Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and Tim Burton’s Batman; Alan Moore’s seminal graphic novel Watchmen; and, of course, our March film, The Warriors.

— at The Film League

Alexandra Kingsley Edwards

Florida, dreamland

Alabama ghost music

How I Spent My Spring Break, by Alexandra, age 26

King Solomon’s Mines, Homosocial Male Bonding, and the Possibilities of Masculine Identity

OU students peacefully protest anti-gay lecture

On The Warriors

Information

Miscellany

Elsewhere

Tunes