We’ve moved!

Further updates (as well as all past content) can now be found at alexandrakingsley.com.  Please update your feeds!

Sad news: Venus Zine’s print version is no more

Venus Zine's Winter 2010 issue will be its last

I got some really sad news today: Venus Zine will no longer publish its print version.

The website will stay up and continue to publish new content, but the magazine will no longer appear on newsstands.

This breaks my heart.  Venus Zine has been the go-to source for celebrating women in the arts and media.  Their articles and interviews have been intelligent, fun, and informative. They made me feel like the newsstand was a place where I was represented: as a woman, as a feminist, and as a lady who supports other lady projects.

More than that, Venus Zine was a creative home for me at a time when I was just starting out as a feature writer and blogger.  Back in 2005, they published my first article ever — an interview with comics creator Brian Wood — and for the next 3 1/2 years, they let me write about what I love.  A chance encounter with another Venus Zine writer at a Northern State show led me to reviewing music, something I fell in love with and have continued to do ever since.

Print media is truly losing one of the best and smartest magazines for women in Venus Zine.  And while I consider myself and all the other readers lucky that the first-class web content will continue, nothing will fill the print version-shaped hole in my heart.

Sherlock Love

Photo by bcostin, via Flickr.

BN Review has a nice write up of recent BBC wonder, Sherlock.  This was by far the favorite television event of 2010 in Skinny House; not only did I see it early (and uncut) through nefarious means, I forced the rest of the household to watch it on successive Sunday evenings as it aired on Masterpiece Mystery.  So it’s lovely to see the show getting a little highbrow love:

Sherlock, in which Cumberbatch stars, is a loving if heavily re-engineered adaptation of the well-known adventures of Holmes and Watson, which time-shifts its central pair a hundred years forward without so much as a backward glance at Victorian frippery, steampunked or otherwise. Instead, Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat’s creation for the BBC and Masterpiece Mystery! remixes Conan Doyle’s detective stories for the era of GPS smartphones and CSI-style forensic labs. The tone is one of darkly deadpan comedy: a good many of the classic exchanges between the swift-thinking detective and his clay-footed friend John Watson (still a war-veteran doctor) are recast to milk laughs out of Martin Freeman’s mingled wonder and rue over his fate as a sidekick to a pale-skinned Byronic scarecrow who sports manners only slightly more acceptable than those of Hugh Laurie’s Dr. Gregory House.

They also recommend five books related to the great detective, at least one of which is going on my must-read-over-the-holidays list.  Arthur Conan Doyle has been getting a lot of love on the site lately; my favorite columnist, Michael Dirda, recently featured an NYRB release of some of his non-Sherlock stories.

Alas, the bookshelf pictured above is not mine.  If it were, that would mean I’d be busy reading Les Klinger’s annotated collection of the stories.  (I keep meaning to ask for it for Christmas and forgetting, which is probably for the best, considering the amount of time I’d like to invest in pouring over them.  But Klinger does have a few pieces of writing up on his site for perusal and general time-spending.)  However, you can see me and good friend Ally at 221B Baker Street a few years ago.  That was the day I convinced Ally of Holmes and Watson’s true and undying love for each other—over 2 years before Guy Ritchie got the same idea.

Next year should bring us more Sherlock, as Mark Gatiss tweeted a little while ago (and possibly/probably a sequel to the big budget version as well).  It’s a good time for Baker Street, and I couldn’t be happier about it.

Further Holmesian amusements:

Fox Film Corporation has a 1927 newsreel of Conan Doyle discussing Holmes, as well as spiritualism; the British Library has an audio clip of Conan Doyle from their British Writers series.

Hocus Pocus was really formative for me

"Hallowe'en." Vintage holiday postcard, late 19th-early 20th century. The New York Public Library, Mid-Manhattan Picture Collection.

Halloween is among my favorite holidays, and not because I love to dress up.  I have a deep and abiding passion for the monstrous, the creepy, and the outright terrifying.  Nothing makes me happier than to spend October curled up with the scariest books and movies I can find.

Previous years’ favorites have included Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” this true life account of a night in a haunted house from Southern Literary Messenger, “Some Zombie Contingency Plans” and “The Wrong Grave” by Kelly Link, John Polidori’s “The Vampyre,” Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian, silly/sublime tv show The Vampire Diaries, Neil Gaiman’s “Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Secret House of the Night of Dread Desire” and The Graveyard Book, and Guillermo del Toro’s tremendous film El Espinazo del Diablo, just to choose a few.

It’s been rough trying to squeeze in a month’s worth of horror between classes and work, but I’ve still managed to dip into a few things.  So what am I loving this year?

The Wolfman, which is an enjoyable remake of the 1941 original that deposits all of our contemporary quirks and weirdnesses on the Victorian setting. I liked it primarily because I always like stories in which the supernatural gets all up in your science and rationality and sends it straight to hell.

Edith Wharton’s After Holbein.  Okay, I’m not done reading this yet, but Wharton is big around Skinny House these days, so we’re including it.

The Halloween episode of Community, quite possibly my new favorite episode of the show. Star Trek + zombies = forever win.

(And I will tell you what I did not love: Jennifer’s Body.  I was ready for the feminist horror to film to end all horror films, a complete revolution in the genre, and the positing of ultimate female power, finally, at last.  Instead I got a lurid display of female jealousy and the same old chicks-are-totally-crazy bullshit.  Serious disappointment, to say the least.)

And now that we’ve carved pumpkins and gotten a taste of serious autumn chill, we’re ready for trick-or-treaters and then the rapid descent into winter depression.

But first!  I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention All Hallows Read, a new tradition in the making, in which we all give each other spooky books on or around October 31.  I gave my mom The Graveyard Book this year, but as it’s my signed first edition, I’ll be asking for it back.  Still, I think this could be much fun in the years to come.  (Don’t know if you could tell, but I can never get enough of sharing scary books.)

Happy Halloween, y’all!

Fan culture and the transformation of everything

If there’s one thing grad students are known to have, it’s heaps of spare time just lying around.

Yeah, right.

But every single moment not spent nose-deep in book after endless book should be, I believe, spent doing something else just as worthwhile.  (Okay, sometimes those worthwhile things are, like, watching Gossip Girl until 2 a.m.  But still.)

In the past couple of months, I’ve gotten involved in something I’m deeply passionate about, but something I don’t talk about a lot on here.  It’s called the Organization for Transformative Works, and I think it’s kind of a big deal.

The Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) is a nonprofit organization established by fans to serve the interests of fans by providing access to and preserving the history of fanworks and fan culture in its myriad forms.

Fandom has been a direct part of my life for over 10 years (and even longer when you account my childhood amongst Trekkies), though I may not talk about it a lot.  It has provided me with hours of entertainment, support when I needed it, a chance to do some good in the world, and a ton of wonderful friends around the world.

Right now, though, it’s time to give back.  The OTW does what they do out of love, but it does not happen inexpensively.  Servers cost money, legal reform costs money, publishing academic work costs money.  Many of us donate our time to the OTW — which, I can tell you, is a fun and mutually beneficial experience — but time alone can’t make the organization run.

So if you’ve ever experienced the sheer joy of fandom, or created a fanwork, or enjoyed a fanwork, or if you believe in open access to intellectual property in the spirit of transformation, think about donating a few dollars.  We’ve got a lot more battles to fight, a lot more projects to create, and a lot more fun to share with the fannish world.

Goodbye to the Whale Wall (& Other Atlanta Stories)

Checking my Google Reader for the first time in months brought some sad news: the Whale Wall will soon be no more.

The girls at Pecanne Log, my all-time favorite Atlanta blog, have a posted a nice little tribute.  They’re right that the mural was kind of crappy and weird, but so were most of my favorite things about Atlanta.

The Whale Wall is one of those things I saw once and then could never seem to find again, convincing me that I’d made it up on some overly-hot summer night.  I don’t generally do a lot of hallucinating while riding my bike, but you know how the memory makes strange things seem stranger.

The parking garage the mural used to adorn had some of the coolest ramps to ride — tight corkscrews spanning several stories — and there really was one sweaty summer evening where we rode up and down them till we nearly puked.  Getting up to the top is fun, but I was so dizzy I nearly took a spill off the side.  Imagine if the Whale Wall was the last thing you saw before you died.  Getting down again the correct way was much harder since we had to fight the downhill momentum, keep to the tight turns, and not stop pedaling, then thread the needle between giant concrete pillars with our heads still spinning.

I don’t think I managed to find my way back to the Whale Wall once in the intervening 5 years, until exploring downtown this summer.  That was the day we learned about the Hustler’s 10 Commandments, What the Chicken?, and the awesomeness of mixing giant beers at the CNN Center with running in the fountain at Centennial Olympic Park.

Brief thoughts

You want to be a better writer?  Blog for an editor who began before blogs were invented.

I’ve never revised so much in my life.  It’s amazing.

Sadly, most of what I’m writing are internal documents that I can’t share.  But trust me, they’re good.

New blogging project

The start of school means the start of my new job as the Library Outreach and Publications Intern for Falvey Memorial Library at Villanova University.  Part of my job — a teeny, teeny part — is blogging for the library on events and sundry other topics.  We host a lot of cool things in Falvey (including a graphic novel event that I get to help organize!), and I’m lucky in that I get to speak to our lecturers and learn all sorts of neat things in the process.

As I’ve done in the past, I’ll be posting links and excerpts from my articles here.

Weeplaces: ATL style

So you may or may not know that I’m moving from my adopted hometown of Atlanta to Philadelphia in about 3 days.  It’s kind of scary, but it’s also rather thought-provoking.

I’ve spent a lot of time in the past few weeks thinking about how we experience cities (and trying to experience as much of this one as I can before I go).  I love a good map, I love to look at patterns of travel, and I love making records of things.  Those are the reasons I find Weeplaces so neat.

By linking your Foursquare account to Weeplaces, you can create a dynamic map of your checkins, complete with neighborhood information and an animated run through of the history of your visits.

My Weeplaces page tells me a lot about how I experience my city, and a whole, whole lot about Atlanta itself.  Most of my checkins are centered around where I live and work.  I visit a lot of the “hip” neighborhoods in town, and tend to go to many venues in each of those neighborhoods (though not necessarily on the same days).  I almost never check in on the south side of town, and definitely never to the west — these tend to be more economically depressed areas with fewer bars and restaurants that I would hang out in.

It’s neat to see how close certain venues are — when you drive to places and are forced to take certain routes (traffic in Home Park, ugh), things feel much farther away.  In Atlanta especially, with its long, winding roads and indirect travel routes, we experience the distance between places as a process of travel, rather than from a bird’s-eye view.

As far as the suburbs go, I’ve hit a few places outside the perimeter, mostly when visiting friends who live outside the city.  I’ve also done some hiking and swimming OTP — I remember those times distinctly just from looking at the dots on the map.

I’ve only been using Foursquare regularly since March (when I got a smartphone), and haven’t really had a chance to travel significant distances in that time.  I’ve only been out of the state once, to buy fireworks just over the state line in Alabama.  That check isn’t the furthest out I’ve been from my “home base” though; the furthest was actually when I attended my friends’ wedding in the North Georgia mountains.

…

My epic moving roadtrip starts Saturday, and I’m excited to add all those checkins and map my progress along I-85 and I-95.  After that, I’ll be exploring a whole new city, and watching those patterns emerge.

When geeks throw the party

Excerpts from Nate’s birthday party last night:

The post-it notes started out kind.