#Meredith Yayanos

[theremina]

Upriver, Hudson Valley, with a Holga

July, 2005

[liminalflares]

Once upon a time, over a decade ago, I listened to a brand new album for the very first time, pressed on luscious blood red vinyl, that sounded — that felt — like it couldn't possibly be new. It felt at once impossibly old and timeless. That album was A Blessed Unrest by The Parlour Trick.

If I myself am a haunted house, those 11 tracks crept into my heart and found a mouldering corridor insufficiently lit by flickering wall sconces, where cracked and peeling damask wallpaper was pulled away to expose a secret door that opened at the protest of long neglected hinges to reveal a steep, narrow, heavily cobwebbed staircase of creaky steps leading deep into the shadowy recesses of my mind. There my ghosts found 11 thoroughly haunted, seemingly boundless, yet somehow safe and intimate spaces to explore... 11 secret worlds wherein the music permeates and enchants everything, and where there were so many other ghosts waiting to be met and known.

I was gobsmacked. I was also not the sort of person to send fan mail, but in that impassioned fever of someone drunk on the magic of new music, I couldn't resist cobbling together a few clumsy lines in effort to express my awe and gratitude for the creation of such an unspeakably beautiful, poignant, and wondrous album.

And looking back... that's how I met @theremina: They responded to my awkward gushing, which must be how it started, right? How we eventually became friends, how they became chosen family, and how today, some-miraculous-how we're collaborating on the Liminal Flares podcast.

And yet... I feel like I've always known Mer, even though I know that isn't and can't possibly be true. It's a funny internal paradox, which is par for the course inside my head. My entire sense of self feels like a paradox. But I digress...

Today is Bandcamp Friday when Bandcamp waves its cut from the sale of music by artists and labels on its marketplace. And The Parlour Trick is haunted chamber music composed, arranged, and performed by multi-instrumentalists Meredith Yayanos and Dan Cantrell. If you haven’t already done so, I encourage you to treat yourself (or someone else!) to one of the most evocative and eerily atmospheric albums I have ever experienced, to say nothing of their other extraordinary aural offerings:

Wandering Room

Mystery Train (original 000 recording)

The Everpresent Tense ( ∞ demo ).

Here's to discovering those secret internal spaces — whatever your personal realms, landscapes, and architecture may be — where our ghosts may safely roam, to explore, to grieve, and to play.

And, if we're really lucky, meeting kindred spirits in the process.

[metalhead-brainrot]

Love the recs. I'm a little out of my element since I'm normally a death metal chode, but I am a big fan of Feminazgul and I'd like to add to the discussion.

So for the uninitiated, Feminazgul is what it sounds like: woman-focused rabm with Tolkien themes. They're part of the Asheville scene* and they fucking rule.

I think Feminazgul are objectively good rabm but I'd recommend them to any instrument-head; Margaret Killjoy has a habit of inventing new ones, usually crafted by herself in accordance with Pagan beliefs. And it's not like I'm an expert, but she's making instruments I haven't even heard of. From the credits on the Awenden/Feminazgul split:

Feminazgul is: Laura Beach: lead vocals Margaret Killjoy: arrangement, synth, hognose psaltery, bowed psaltery, kantele, goblin box, goblin bass, frame drums Meredith Yayanos: additional arrangement, strings, harpy choir, theremin, bells and chimes

If any of those pique your curiosity, I've linked them to Facebook posts** where Margaret goes through how she made them. There's so much going on it's easy to miss that there's theremin in their music too.

And if you're still here, I think it bears mention: if you love women then you should hate the patriarchy. We're all held back by these gender-based power dynamics, but no one is harmed by equality. If you want to leave the patriarchy in the past, then you've gotta tune in to the bands who are calling for a change.

o()xxxx[:::::::::::::::::> o()xxxx[:::::::::::::::::> o()xxxx[:::::::::::::::::>

* Making me jealous for my little sister, who just moved to NC.

** Facebook is fucking gross, it's just the only place I can find these videos.

YO IF YOU WANT BLACK METAL MADE BY TRANS WOMEN CHECK OUT:

Feminazgul

Winter Lantern

Karnstein

Bury Them and Keep Quiet

Feminizer

Everson Poe

Ophelia Drowning

Agriculture

Lust Hag

Sanguine Wounds

Underdark

Wolven Daughter (me)

[chorusfm]

Sleepytime Gorilla Museum – “Salamander In Two Worlds” (Video Premiere)

Today I’m thrilled to bring everyone the latest music video from Sleepytime Gorilla Museum called “Salamander In Two Worlds.” On this dance-filled track that is sure to make you feel something, this band showcases why they’re on the rising acts in the music world. Gooby Herms, the director of the video, says inspiration was found: “In the depths of woods in upstate New York, where the frogs sing their last chorus of the season and whispers of the falling leaves provide the harmony. Amidst this tranquil solitude, we delved into themes of loss and isolation. And dance.” If you’re enjoying the latest single, you can listen to the band’s latest LP Of The Last Human Being that’s currently on all streaming services. I was also able to catch up with this band for a brief interview below. Can you share any anecdotes or behind-the-scenes moments from the making of the song or music video that particularly resonated with you? The video is stunning…can you tell us a little bit about the direction and how the video came about? From Gooby Herms (artist/animator/director): It seems funny in hindsight that the concept for the video was essentially about movement and dance, in the landscape of a woody forest, since we were sitting in the living room of a dancer, in a small house in the middle of the woods. But realistically, I hadn’t planned a single thing when the idea for doing the Salamander video came up. I knew I wanted to do it at some point, but then there we all were! In Shinichi’s (the protagonist in the video) living room shooting some material for another project, we decided to get material for Salamander as well. But I had no idea what to do. We put the song on, and I sat on the floor and just soaked it in. And very abstract ideas involving dance, or at least body movement came to mind. And color, vibrant colors contrasting some silhouetted figure. But as the song played, I was haunted by the melody, and I was overwhelmed with thoughts of loss and despair. I didn’t know the lyrics well enough to know if that even had anything to do with it, it’s just what I felt! So we put Shinichi in front of a black wall and had him dance to the song. It was the best we could do at a moment’s notice, but I’m thankful that we had such an excellent and expressive dancer on hand, who was willing to improvise and just move how he felt in time. By the time I started creating the actual video, I knew the song quite well. It had chapters and a well defined arc that worked very well to plot an emotional journey. So I told the story through color, starting with passive teals, exploring the world further with deep blues, and exploding into reds and yellows. It’s a story of a character who is quite alone, in a massive natural world. And as I kept going, the story unfolded without my conscious agency, it just told itself! As far as the ending goes, I never really felt resolution in the song, it simply persists, and I feel that’s part of the story. Carla Kihlstedt (SGM band member): All of us—both collectively as SGM and as individuals—are a part of a much larger ecosystem of creators, artists, thinkers and collaborators. We all take turns instigating and inspiring each other. When we work with other artists (animators, costume designers, graphic designers, lighting designers, etc), we don’t micromanage what they do or how they do it. They know the limitations and possibilities of their craft better than we ever could. Gooby Herms is an artist and animator whom we have known for years. (We first met him through our mutual friend Meredith Yayanos, who has helped us on many creative and organizational fronts for decades.) Gooby had taken on the task of editing our short pseudo-educational sci-fi comedy film, The Last Human Being: A Critical Assessment, and we were considering having the end credits of the film roll over the song Salamander in Two Worlds. Gooby took that idea and ran with it… ran farther and more gracefully than we ever… https://chorus.fm/features/sleepytime-gorilla-museum-salamander-in-two-worlds-video-premiere/

[libercoven]

“While neither shaman nor doula, my therapist has entered my life for purposes of healing and birth. Since committing to this process, I’m finally starting to make sense of things I never could before. For one hour, at regularly scheduled intervals, we sit, and I mostly talk and she mostly listens while I cautiously reach into myself, pulling out fragment after fragment of memory like shards, holding them up to the light, letting them catch and throw rainbows. I will say ‘Look at this’, and she will say, ‘I see.’ And somehow, that’s some of the most powerful healing magical I’ll ever know.”

Meredith Yayanos, “The Harpy” from Becoming Dangerous: Witchcy Femmes, Queer Conjurers, and Magical Rebels

[suite116]

The Parlour Trick - A Blessed Unrest 

[ghoulnextdoor]

...and when it's all been said and done I'll kiss you with this Mother Tongue.

A war cry for 2018, music from the gaping heart of a monstrous feminist agitator, my favorite shrieking, shameless harpy Meredith Yayanos.

{Art by Paul Komoda)

[therealkatiewest]

I didn't want to make a Kickstarter video because I didn't think anyone watched Kickstarter videos. I WAS SO WRONG. The BECOMING DANGEROUS Kickstarter video has almost 1000 plays. Incredible.

Music by contributor Meredith Yayanos, and animation by Emma Price. So many amazing people contributed video to make this happen and I'm so thankful (full credits at end of video!)

http://becomingdangerous.com

[finishinglinepress]

FLP CHAPBOOK OF THE DAY: A Void and Cloudless Sky by Ricki Cummings

TO ORDER GO TO: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/a-void-and-cloudless-sky-by-ricki-cummings/

Please share/please repost. RESERVE YOUR COPY TODAY

Ricki Cummings is a trans writer currently living in Chicago whose most recent chapbook, Hypersigil, was published in 2019 as a limited release by Midge Books. Their work is upcoming or has been published in Poetry, Vallum, Court Green, Calibanonline, Solstice Literary Magazine, Columbia Poetry Review, and has been shortlisted for Vallum’s Award for Poetry. They received their MFA in Poetry from Columbia College Chicago.

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR A Void and Cloudless Sky by Ricki Cummings

The sky might be void and cloudless in Ricki Cummings’ poems, but don’t mistake its emptiness as a sign of absence. Instead, A Void and Cloudless Sky burns with intelligence and roils with desire. These poems are planted firmly in an hallucinatory theater of the absurd whose conceptual blueprint is one part Samuel Beckett and one part Philip K. Dick: “There was supposed to be a metaphor here / but instead it’s maps and pins / and bits of string and wild hair / and cigarettes and unemployment.”

–Tony Trigilio, author of Proof Something Happened and The Complete Dark Shadows (of My Childhood))

A short and sharp and fast and dense and absolutely gorgeous collection. Alternately breathless and measured, Cummings’ pages bristle with multi-prong puns and genre-obliterating cultural allusions. A Void and Cloudless Skyis packed with highbrow references and lofi phrases that beg to be verbalized, to be invoked. A toothsome shock of poems.

–Meredith Yayanos, co-editor of Coilhouse Magazine, musician

Ricki Cummings’ stunning collection, A Void and Cloudless Sky, is a love affair of language and culture. A striking depiction of the battle of being human. You’ll find Kurt Weill, DC Comics, Derrida, and box wine in a single breath. But the real power lies in its vulnerability. “…The answer / to the question / of what is this poem about / is the body. Always the body.” The body subsists in and out of time—in memory, liminal spaces, and the exposed—until the body, like this collection of poems, creates its own space “ever-present, / unsettling, beautiful.”

–Shannon Elward, author of Third Lung Breathing

#flpauthor #preorder #AwesomeCoverArt #poetry

[madmaryholiday]

hm. it just occurred to me, as i was purchasing a neat spooky cassette tape-based album from a neat, spooky artist named meredith yayanos (sp? no time to look it up rn)

that i don’t know where a tape player might be in this house.

i know i used to use my mother’s old walkman as a teenager, but i haven’t seen it in like a decade, and i know most of our other music players with tape decks have been given away/sold by now.

ah well. i have a couple weeks to figure it out, i guess.

[aion-rsa]

Wave of Sexual Misconduct Accusations Rock Comics Industry

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

CW: Sexual harassment, grooming

This week saw a wave of sexual misconduct allegations against men of varying positions in the comic book industry. The first came from artist Aviva Artzy, followed up by artist and writer Kate Leth, with support from the wife of the late Darwyn Cooke, Marsha Cooke, and convention organizer Andrea Demonakos, accusing Cameron Stewart of grooming underage girls. Grooming is when an older person establishes a relationship with a usually underage one, with the intention of developing a sexual relationship in the future. As a result of this, Stewart, the one time Batgirl co-writer and Seaguy artist, was let go from a previously unannounced DC project and had a variant cover for Image’s Ice Cream Man canceled. 

Later, former Dark Horse editor Brendan Wright was accused by former colleague Bekah Caden of an extended campaign of sexual harassment and stalking. Wright left Dark Horse in 2015, and has been dropped by Starburns Industries Press, as well as an anthology benefit comic for gun violence survivors, and multiple other small press books. 

And finally, Warren Ellis was accused by writer/editor Katie West of using his power and influence to emotionally manipulate women into often sexual relationships, emotionally abusing them, and abandoning them. West was joined by musician Meredith Yayanos, and photographer Jhayne Holmes, who later started cataloguing and providing support to other victims of Ellis. At last count, that group is over 60. Ellis has since been dropped from the Dark Nights: Death Metal anthology he was scheduled to take part in.

Ellis’ response, posted on Twitter and emailed to his newsletter list, is embarrassing in its totality. The idea that the showrunner of Netflix’s Castlevania, a man who has had multiple comics adapted into movies grossing hundreds of millions of dollars, the man whose millennial web forum launched the careers of half of comics, didn’t realize he was famous enough to abuse a power imbalance is insulting to the intelligence he used to demand of his audience. 

What these three separate instances of abuse represent are yet another example of a pattern of toxicity at the intersection of multiple forces at work in comics as a whole: a toxic undercurrent that exists inherent to fandom and the complicity it encourages, and an industry full of informal work arrangements that encourages the rapid downward distribution of exploitation. And with comics at an inflection point, caused by the massive jolt to all the systems of the world by this pandemic summer, it’s worth examining the systemic flaws that enable rampant sexual misconduct to exist as open secrets, unaddressed, for decades, and think about systemic solutions.

Just about everyone who loves comics wants to make them. This isn’t universal; there are some people who enjoy simply spectating in the medium, but if you talk to 100 comics fans, I promise 98 of them are sitting on a pitch for something. Comic conventions are packed with people looking for portfolio reviews; the internet, jammed with people trying to get their scripts looked at. 

While it was in existence, the Warren Ellis Forum was one of the most reliable pipelines for new comics talent. There are good rundowns of the contributions of the WEF to current comics culture from both pre- and post-toppling of this idol, but what neither mentions is that this was an accepted way to break into the business for a brief comics era – not only through the WEF, but through the Bendis boards, and through Mark Millar’s faint echo of the WEF, Millarworld. The internet dramatically expanded the potential audience for comics, and made it easier than ever to put out your own work, but it also combined with the superhero industry’s tendency towards bombastic personalities to channel talent development through a series of larger than life internet personas and the cyber networking events that sprang up around them. These, as is the convention social scene, are full of potential abuse.

One commonality to all of these cases (and not just these cases, but also with Brian Wood and Scott Lobdell and many others) was the access to the industry they dangled to entice women into relationships. That power imbalance is creepy and bordering on toxic from the start, even if there are anecdotes of it working out. There are different ways to solve this problem – using agents to mediate the relationship between publisher and creator, as Kelly Sue DeConnick suggests, would help, though it wouldn’t be a panacea. As would comic companies regularizing the talent scouting and development process. Greater systemic access for new creators closes off one channel that these predators hunt through. If it’s easier to get your break on superhero books through a new talent training school than it is to know somebody who knows somebody, then those intermediate somebodies lose access to impressionable, exploitable fans. 

It’s also time for comics to reexamine the freelance system. The comics industry has a long history of exploiting its workers powered by the freelance system, and an under examined side effect of freelancing is that it absolves companies of responsibility for the actions of what should be their employees. Freelancers occupy a murky area in employment law, particularly when it comes to harassment laws. Some places, like New York City, explicitly cover freelancers under sexual harassment laws. But New York is the exception to the rule. Most freelancers in any industry have no legal protection against the sexual harassment or discrimination that we seem to hear about every other month. It’s long past time for comic publishers to adopt policies to mitigate these problems. 

Finally, a portion of the responsibility for this abuse falls on all of us, the comics community. Time and time again, when one of these harassers is outed, they’re followed by stories about extensive whisper networks warning of the harasser’s behavior, or of victims being ignored, or harassment being downplayed by people in positions of authority. Every time one of these harassers is outed, the accusation is followed by a flood of additional abuse pointed at the victim. And without fail, this additional abuse falls into one of three categories: 

“[barely intelligible bigoted shrieking]”

“I like the opportunity the abuser afforded me in the industry.”

“I like the comics the abuser made.”

The first is a problem with broader civil society and won’t be eliminated until we can collectively toss hatred from acceptable public discourse, and is too big a problem to break down today. The second is a condemnation of the work arrangements common to comics and can be mitigated by the industry offering more opportunities than the abusers. The final one is a problem we should all be working to solve. 

When victims don’t feel safe standing up for themselves through official channels, it’s not just the official channels that have failed those victims. Every member of the community at large has failed those victims, by failing to demand greater accountability of the ones setting and mediating the rules of the community, failing to demand more protection on behalf of their fellow fans and friends and present and future creators. Whisper networks exist because victims aren’t heard and believed. And they perpetuate the problem – you can’t be a part of a whisper network if you’re not connected to the network. They exclude large portions of fans, who eventually may find themselves targeted by these predators. 

This is not on the whisper networks to fix, and none of this should be read as casting a drop of blame on the people working to protect whoever they can in the comics community. Nor should any blame be hung on the victims themselves – “We all should have seen the signs” is a cop out that ignores the complexity of abuse patterns and how abusers manipulate the rules to get away with their abuse. This is on the companies to fix, by ending their support and protection for known abusers. This is on the comics media, to stop promoting and protecting known abusers. This is on cons, to stop platforming abusers and to do what they can to control the social scene that springs up around them. And this is on all of us as fans, to stop putting these people on pedestals. Sometimes a monument needs to be torn down.

The post Wave of Sexual Misconduct Accusations Rock Comics Industry appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Comics – Den of Geek https://ift.tt/31b9y2C

[theremina]

Thanks to 23andMe, I keep finding more blood relatives online. Finally, in middle age, I'm being granted a gift most people take for granted: seeing echoes of my own face in other human beings' faces, hearing cadences of my voice in their speech, watching mannerisms on jittery video files that remind me of my own lifelong "tics" and "strangeness".

In some ways, this has felt incredibly grounding, rooting, satisfying. In other ways, it's gutting. Because every time I reach out to anyone within my immediate family, I am ignored, or worse yet, I am asked to go away and told not to speak to the others.

I get the sense that none of these people want to know me. None of them feel the longing and ache I've carried my whole life, often without even understanding why.

Which... I mean... Fair. How could they possibly understand?

They were not scapegoated and exiled from birth. They were not buried alive.

They were not severed from our shared ancestry.

They are the Kept, and I am not.

Adoption is a life sentence.

Remember that.

[liminalflares]

Did you know that Bram Stoker's Dracula (the 1897 #GothicHorror novel, not the swoonworthy 1992 Coppola film) originally began with a chapter that was cut from the book before it was published?

That lost chapter was posthumously published as a short story entitled "Dracula's Guest." And now you can listen to part 2 of our #GenderInclusive revision of that spine-tingling tale.

As always, use your headphones if you've got 'em! @theremina bedecked this episode in a heady coalescence of hauntingly beautiful fragments of "Mare Desiderii" from A Blessed Unrest by The Parlour Trick⁣⁣. And trust me, you do not want to miss out on the full unsettling and titillating impact of an unexpected piece of correspondence at the very end of our tale.

Listen to the entire episode wherever you prefer to get your podcasts. And while you're there, please take a moment to leave your rating and a review. 🖤🥀

Writing/Editing & Narration by Maika⁣⁣ Music by The Parlour Trick Audio Engineering by Meredith Yayanos Photo by Maika

New episodes every Thursday!

[suzilight]

The Parlour Trick “Half Sick of Shadows” with dancer Rachel Brice Director, Meredith Yayanos 

[gothiccharmschool]

bluesecretia said: 

Please tell me that you have The Parlour Trick’s album A Blessed Unrest. It’s divine  

Do I have A Blessed Unrest? Oh gracious, yes. In multiple formats. And I listen to it at least ... every other week? It’s one of my absolute favorite albums. Meredith  Yayanos is an amazing, fierce harpy, and I was honored to be able to interview her.

[queerstarter]

Ending Fri, October 20, 2017

BECOMING DANGEROUS is a nonfiction book of deeply personal essays by marginalised people using the intersection of feminism, witchcraft, and resistance to summon power and become fearsome in a world that would prefer them afraid. With contributions from twenty witchy femmes, queer conjurers, and magical rebels, BECOMING DANGEROUS is a book of intelligent and challenging essays that will resonate with anyone who’s ever looked for answers outside the typical places.

The latest book from Fiction & Feeling, a new and independent UK publishing company, the book is edited by me, Katie West, and Jasmine Elliott. From ritualistic skincare routines to gardening; from becoming your own higher power to searching for a legendary Scottish warrior woman; from the fashion magick of brujas to cripple-witch city-magic; from shoreline rituals to psychotherapy—this book is for people who know that now is the time, now is the hour, ours is the magic, ours is the power.

[ . . .]

Contributors for this book write for publications like The Guardian and The Paris Review; websites like Autostraddle, The Hoodwitch, VICE, Broadly, and Nylon; and have published books and journal articles with several different publishers.

Some identify as witches; others identify as writers, musicians, or artists. All of them have developed personal rituals to summon their own power and want to share these personal experiences of resistance and survival with you.

Cara Ellison (Embed With Games, Polygon 2015) ▲ Catherine Hernandez  (Scarborough, Arsenal Pulp Press 2017) ▼ Deb Chachra (The Atlantic, The Guardian) ▲ Gabriela Herstik (HelloGiggles, Nylon)  

Jaliessa Sipress (The Hoodwitch) ▲ J.A. Micheline (The Guardian, VICE) ▼ Katelan Foisy(Motherboard, Electric Literature) ▼ Kim Boekbinder (NOISEWITCH album out September 2017)

Larissa Pham (The Paris Review, ELLE.com) ▼ Laura Mandanas (Autostraddle) ▲ Leigh Alexander (The Guardian, Motherboard) ▼ Maranda Elizabeth (LittleRedTarot.com, We Are The Weirdos, 2017)

Marguerite Bennett (Batwoman, Insexts) ▲ Meredith Yayanos (Coilhouse, The Parlour Trick) ▼ merritt k (Total Mood Killer, TigerBee Press 2017) ▲ Mey Rude (trans editor at Autostraddle)  

Sam Maggs (Bioware, IDW) ▲ Sara David (editor at Broadly) ▼ Sim Bajwa (Nasty Women, 404 Ink) ▲ Sophie Saint Thomas (VICE, Cosmopolitan)