Black is the New AP Style

Photo courtesy of Georg Alfare

Before COVID-19 appeared on the world stage and altered daily life as we knew it to be, I was spending a lot of time alone in my home studio writing and recording songs. I was also doing a lot of thinking. During a typical day, I’d often look out at the world around me and see things like unhinged greed, self-interested ego-maniacal vampires in positions of power, outright lying as a way of life, fear mongering and a planet becoming less inhabitable by the day. I didn’t have any solutions for the things I’d witnessed, so instead I’d write songs about them.

Now that we’re living in the era of social-distancing and daily life as we knew it to be has been undeniably altered, I’ve been spending a lot of time alone in my home studio writing and recording songs. I’ve also been doing a lot of thinking. During a typical day, I’ll often look out at the world around me and see things like unhinged greed, self-interested ego-maniacal vampires in positions of power, outright lying as a way of life, fear mongering and a planet that’s becoming less inhabitable by the day. I don’t have any solutions for the things I’m witnessing, so instead I’m writing songs about them. 

What if Wonderland was in peril and Alice was very, very late?

In Disney’s latest A Twisted Tale series, titled Unbirthday, a now- 18-year-old Alice hasn’t visited Wonderland in many years. She prefers to spend her time behind her camera, photographing her favorite shop owners and children playing in the square before returning to her Aunt Vivian’s business to develop the shots.

One day, as she’s developing photos, she notices that she doesn’t see the same images that she originally took. The portrait she took of her neighbor, Mrs. Pogysdunhow, isn’t her neighbor at all. It’s the Queen of Hearts.

The more photos she develops, the more the photos turn out to be Wonderland creatures. There’s something off about the photos too; they aren’t the nonsensical people she met during her first visit. The Mad Hatter looks worried. A spectacle-faced bird appears to be running away from something. Upon looking at her self-portrait, she sees a very different Alice. Wonderland Alice is not only slightly different in appearance but is blindfolded and covered in thick, black blood. Suddenly, the photo moves and Wonderland Alice is screaming. Something terribly wrong has happened, and she must figure out a way back.

Wonderland is nothing near the same as anyone, including Alice, remembers. Its impending doom unsurprisingly stems from the Queen of Hearts wanting to rule far beyond anything she’s done before, and this time she isn’t afraid to kill anyone to get what she wants. It’s no longer “off with their heads”, but complete bloodshed.

Unbirthday is not just an electrifying adult take on Alice in Wonderland but gives the reader a more developed storyline for minor characters. Several side stories get a chance to fully develop before being shown their importance to saving Wonderland. The reader also meets new characters such as Abraham Katz, a barrister who shares the same whimsical outlook on life as Alice.

The characters of Wonderland and Angleland are fighting real world problems, and this storyline might be the most important of all. Similar to today’s climate, the characters of this book encounter xenophobia, political injustice and sexism. Alice learns the importance of standing up for what she believes in and making sure that all voices are heard instead of just the majority.

Alice learns a great deal from her time back in Wonderland, and so does the reader. As this series continues to turn Disney classics into extended adventures, it provides children at heart the chance to learn more about what happened next.

Photo courtesy of Isabella Limeri

Well, we finally made it into the dystopian future we’d all been dreading facing for the last few years. It’s an interesting time to be alive to say the least - feeling as though you’re watching the Great Empire’s collapse before your very eyes, all the while still having to pay bills, wake up to file for the benefits afforded you by your newfound unemployment; making sure you don’t allow your day to day benign tasks to be consumed by a looming sense of helplessness and pointlessness cultivated by a warped reality with no viable fix in sight. In a weird way though, this is…kinda sick.

In the months preceding the COVID-19 invasion, I have to plead guilty to the charge of contentment. I was content with my day job, I was content with sharing a house with a collective of other artists paying for a shared kitchen and bathroom with only one room to call my own, and, most painfully of all, I was content with my artistic output. As someone who has been on stage since the age of eight, it was a new sensation. Burnout coupled with a strange sense of completion - “I’ve done it, I’ve played so many characters, fronted so many bands, toured so many states; whatever happens next is up to fate. I’ve paid my dues and given it what I could” - a point of view I now recognize as not only lazy, but brain-rattlingly arrogant. In December I joined the band LOVEONACID, the brainchild of former Save Face guitarist Philip McGarry, whose music I had worshipped for years and drawn infinite influence from for my endeavors in punk/alternative in recent years. In my eyes this was a pivotal moment - I had earned the respect of established artists, down to their enlisting me for their own projects. What else could success be but the respect of respected peers? I stopped writing. I sang what was presented to me. I was happy, and the effort required of me was minimal. Show up at the studio, nail the song in one or two takes, hang out with the squad and have a good time. It didn’t feel like working at all. It was bliss. Tracking with LOA and our producer, Rob Chiarappa, felt like summer camp - friends coming in and out of the studio every week to track parts with us in a giant converted church right on a lake. If I could feel this way without pushing myself, why bother? My day job is at a theater where I get to see and interact with national acts every weekend and stay close to the action. I can live with that and playing a few shows here and there.

Photo courtesy of Joseph E. Nester

 
Morgan Visconti and Sam Kelser have been friends since childhood, first writing songs together when Visconti’s father, Tony, was operating the formerly named Good Earth Studios in London. They went off to work on other projects before revisiting their material and ultimately forming their latest project, Ready, Steady, Die!.

“I think we reached a level of stability and maturity in our lives, along with having access to our own label and studios, that suddenly made it clear to us that these songs needed to get finished and heard,” they said. “We both worked on so many separate musical projects, as well as with each other, helping other artists that we sometimes forgot how jazzed these songs got us. Once we got back on track, we knew that we both work extremely fast when we’re excited about something.”

Since they wrote songs together at various points over the years, they had accumulated plenty of material. In order to get as much of that material out as possible, they decided to release a trilogy. The first, Pleasure Ride, was released in January and focuses on the beginning of their songwriting career as a duo.

Their songs focus on some part of the human psyche and torment, and explore these areas with equal parts style and cadence. The title track is about how people try and avoid emotion and boredom by abusing stimulants. “Deep” is about when life feels dark while “Dream People” is about feeling mad. “The Know” shares desperation for control. “Woebetide” is what they believe is a message from Mother Nature. They share the common theme of knowing that it isn’t possible to be alright all the time but that there are ways to move forward.

“There really isn't much you can compare to creating and nurturing something that becomes so personal and then releasing it to the world,” they said. “It's very scary because the soul is laid bare, and a piece of your life that you gave blood, sweat and tears to can be dismissed within seconds, especially in this conveyor belt era.”

While Pleasure Ride is the album that best reflects how their influences play into their music, the vision for the rest of the trilogy is quite the opposite. They want their follow-up albums to address the issues they - and the rest of the world - have been facing this past year while exploring different sounds.

“Lyrically, [Kelser]’s sharp insight and wit ties the whole project together but the second album is shaping up to be, musically speaking, both a more vicious and playful side of that equation,” they said. “The third album might be a disco album. We do have some dance songs - we’re not sure yet - but it’ll still come from that dark headspace.”

Author Suzanne Selfors raised her son, Walker Ranson, on the Redwall series by Brian Jacques. They loved the action and adventure that came alongside an animal-centered fantasy book, and knew that they too wanted to write something together that shared those same ideals.

They knew that stories with squirrels, mice, rabbits and foxes had been done plenty of times. They were looking for an animal that had yet to play a large role in children’s literature, and thanks to the many hours Selfor has spent watching videos of wombats, Lola Budge was formed.

Lola Budge is the protagonist of Braver: A Wombat’s Tale, a story about a young wombat who takes on the task of saving her family, her neighbors, and ultimately, the entirety of Tassie Island. Lola is both curious and talkative, which is how she finds herself being delivered a cryptic message - T.B. is ready. It clearly has something to do with everyone in the Northern Forest being kidnapped by a Tassie Devil, a predator that their Queen banished many generations ago. Lola takes it upon herself to travel to the golden city of Dore to find the Queen and save everyone she loves.

Along the way, she makes friends, escapes predators and discovers more about her family than she ever bargained for. When Selfors and Ranson began writing the book, however, they very much made up the story as they went.

“We knew that our young wombat would take part in a grand adventure, we knew she'd be crossing her island, meeting lots of other critters and facing danger,” Selfors said. “Some of the characters came from my brain, some from Walker's. I've written over 30 books for young readers and I never outline. So the story reveals itself to me as I go. That's the fun part.”

This was the first time that Selfors was writing with a partner, and it took them a while to find a happy medium of how they wanted the story to go. Selfors wanted more humor; Ranson wanted to go darker. In the end, Selfors would write a chapter focusing on pacing and dialogue before Ranson would add descriptions and action scenes.

At the end of the story, Lola not only saves the city and her loved ones but gets to play a role in the city’s history. Her story of how she persevered and created a change is placed into a new edition of her favorite book, The Tales of Tassie Island.

The story touches on environmental degradation, empathy, bravery and politics of poverty in a way that gets children to question what is right versus what is happening in the current state of the world. The storyline also gets children excited to turn the page and see what Lola and her friends will do next.

Braver: A Wombat’s Tale gives the children’s fantasy genre a take at modern, impactful storytelling. It combines action and adventure with humanity to bring out the best in each character and each reader.

Photo courtesy of M.E. Photography

COVID-19 has been hard for everybody on both a personal and economic level. As a recording studio co-owner and music producer, I felt it almost instantly in both my pocket and my booking calendar. I lost a lot but gained a lot of spare time, and it would have been silly for me not to put that time to good use, especially when I have a studio at my disposal.

It was during my initial sulking stage of quarantine when some people who are close to me in my life suggested I start writing music again. I hadn’t seriously written music in five or six years and I didn’t have much of a songwriting role in the bands I was in over the last few years, which I really enjoyed. I enjoyed the freedom of just showing up and playing what was written.

I booked out a block at the studio and told myself I was going to write music that I would want to listen to. Music for myself. I had always been obsessed with this notion of creating things that other people would like, but it wasn’t until I had let go of that motivation that I started to really create music that resonated with myself.

I forced myself out of my musical comfort zone by detuning my guitars, throwing heavy gauge strings on them and just trusting my gut. The result was a handful of songs from the heart that feature artists that I admire and respect - all under the umbrella of a new music collective I have coined as LA Solution Center.

Hello!

We are so happy to be a part of this! We hope everyone is staying happy and healthy through these unusual times!

Throughout quarantine we have tried to capitalize on the different aspects of “being a band.” Normally, as with other folks, I’m sure, we would all work during the day and then play music live in the evening. Now, that has obviously changed. We still get together once or twice a week to practice and work on new material, but we have also re-doubled our online efforts (social media promotion, live streaming, modifying our website/online store, updating our merch, etc.). 

In a matter of three months, Hannah Rad took several of her most difficult moments in life and turned them into a meaningful journey. Her YouTube series, Sorry To Keep You Waiting, documents a look into her mental health as she embarks on a solo road trip through California.

While the project from start to finish only took three months, the idea had been in the back of her mind for the better part of two years. She was feeling lost; in fact, she still feels lost. But she said something important about the entire series: she’s loving the journey.

“What it really amounted to was just having a breakdown to have a breakthrough, as how my therapist would put it, and I think is a pretty adequate way of saying it,” she said. “I really had to hit, not rock bottom, but just hit a place where I didn’t want to feel like this anymore and let me turn this into something positive. While the series in itself does tackle some heavy issues, it always comes about with a bit of hope, love, light and positivity because I'm showing that there's still room to be able to proceed and move forward and find the good and positivity and optimism in all situations.”

When it came time to film the series, it was as if the universe got together and guided the parts that she hadn’t totally planned out. The first episode, “Sorry to Keep You Waiting, but I’m Lost”, was filmed at Joshua Tree National Park where at one point she physically got lost. “Sorry to Keep You Waiting, but I Got Laid Off” was filmed at Badwater Basin, known as the lowest elevation point below sea level in North America. Getting laid off was the lowest point in her career as a radio host, DJ and content producer, giving the episode a real unique connection. All seven episodes share a uniquely connected moment that shows her vulnerability but absolutely wasn’t planned.

“I'm floored by the way my subconscious takes over,” she said. “Something in the world or the universe is telling me I’m doing something right.”

Some of those stories were harder to tell than others. Episode three, “Sorry to Keep You Waiting, but I Was Raped” exudes raw, powerful emotions that tug at the heartstrings, but episode four, “Sorry to Keep You Waiting, but I Was Mad”, is the one that she found hardest to film. Here she shares her most unprocessed feelings up until that point and to have those feelings resurface was difficult for her to grasp immediately.

The final episode, “Sorry to Keep You Waiting, but I’m Getting Help”, is where she shares how she came to terms with her journey so far and what has worked for her. She finds clarity in the outdoors; nature, water, fitness. She speaks to a therapist. What works for her might not work for someone else, but it’s important to be willing to embrace any option.

At the end of every episode, she does something very important in her healing process. Her story ends, and she says out loud that she’s leaving it there.

“For me, it was important not only to tell stories from a very vulnerable and honest side of myself, but to also do it in a very beautiful location,” she said. “There's beauty in the process and as painful and brutal as things might seem... Yes, it's heavy stories but there's a lot of triumph over tragedy and so for me it was one of the driving forces behind this series. I'm going to attack some really tough shit but I'm going to do it in a really crazily beautiful location. For me, to leave those feelings there is giving myself over to the process, over to the project, and allowing something to whisk me away into more positivity and optimism about my own journey as well. There's so much good and so much beauty in the world; it's hard and it's heavy to focus on the stuff that we might not find so fun all the time.”

Not only has she started to find clarity in her journey so far, she’s spent this project learning a lot about herself. She knows that she can eradicate self-doubt. She knows that if she has full faith in what she’s doing then she can get out there and commit to it. She knows that she’s come this far and nothing can stop her now.

Hannah Rad knew that now was her time to share these stories. She’s sorry to have kept herself waiting, but she’s here now.