Black Cats for October

A few years ago I did a post on black cats for Friday the 13th, which looked at kitties from art and literature. With their traditional connection to bad luck and the fact that they're not as "flashy" as other kittens, it's always a little more nerve-racking than usual giving a black foster kitten back to the shelter for adoption. Since it's the month of black cats appearing in decorations (often with witches), here are some more stellar examples of that much maligned, Halloweeny animal.

Bear

Won't someone give him a cuddle and listen to his poems?

18-year-old Bear is the subject of owner Tom Cox's many books about being a crazy cat man, but he's become so widely known because of cat's best friend: the internet. Photos of the melancholic Bear and the reasons for his sorrow are paired on his hit Why My Cat Is Sad twitter account, which currently has 172k followers. His persistently heartbroken little face just demands you pick him up for a hug and kiss. Fortunately, despite having a rough history, Bear is adored by his family. And understandably, Cox is a black cat advocate.

My cat is sad because life has given him many, many lemons & he cannot use them to make lemonade because he is a cat. pic.twitter.com/PhAVk905EI
— WHY MY CAT IS SAD (@MYSADCAT) September 17, 2014

Isis

Not THAT Isis.

Batman sometimes-villain, sometimes-hero Catwoman is the undisputed queen of the felines. Fans of the classic, stylish Batman: the Animated Series might remember Isis, a sleek black cat who matched Catwoman's sleek black cat costume. Selina Kyle has been portrayed as having different "main" cats over the years (Hecate, for example, in the 1966 Batman movie, aka the best movie of all time), but Isis from the various animated shows is the definitive one for me.

Forget the diamonds, Isis has canned food!

Shorty

Shorty is appalled or stoned.

Half of popular YouTube cat duo Sho Ko, fluffy, cuddly, energetic kitty Shorty is also an advocate for black cats everywhere. (Except when sidelined by her addiction to catnip bananas.)

Cole

Good, 'cause I always need hair ties.

Like Shorty, Cole is the older half of a YouTube kitty pair (Cole & Marmalade). And like Shorty's owner, Cole's owner has a soft spot for black cats. Good news for this formerly tiny rescue!

Salem

...

Like Isis, here's another black cat the intersection of comics and television - and a witch's black cat at that. Salem, the cat of Archie Comics' teenage witch Sabrina, was once a sorcerer who tried to take over the world. His punishment? Being turned into a cat. And then sharing a bed with a teenage girl. Salem reached top popularity on the 90s sitcom, Sabrina, the Teenage Witch, where he was voiced by Nick Bakay and portrayed by both real cats and a terrifying robot cat. Since then he's starred in Sabrina, the Animated Series, made an appearance in gritty smash hit Afterlife with Archie, and has even gotten his own origin comic about his adventures before living the Humbert Humbert dream.



Image Sources:
Vintage cat: The Graphics Fairy
Bear: Bear's twitter
Isis: DC Animated Universe wiki
Isis again: DC Animated Universe wiki
Shorty: Shorty and Kodi's Facebook
Cole: Cole and Marmalade's Facebook
Salem: from Afterlife With Archie #1, illustrated by Francesco Francavilla

Oddly Precious Melancholy: Music and Writing

Nikolai Roerich's backdrop for Rite of Spring.

I don't usually listen to music while writing. Some writers have huge, hugely specific playlists for when they're working. Sometimes they're obvious; sometimes they're counter-intuitive. Bubblegum pop for horror? Metal for young adult angst? I've tried, but I find it distracting. It's fine in the background if I'm in a cafe or other public place, but if I'm writing at home...it just doesn't work for me. I end up making up music videos for the songs in my head. But I say "usually" because music became necessary for a particular project.

In my short story "Oddly Precious Melancholy," out in The Rag #6, the title refers to, among other things, a flavor of contemporary alternative/pop music I've defined loosely and inexpertly. Music that's weird and sweet and introspective. Music that doesn't always seem sure if it's being ironic or earnest with its DIY aesthetic and offbeatness, and yet is delicate and beautiful. The cutesy ennui of a sincere hipster or someone mistaken for one. Music that defined and was listened to by my characters, a group of flippant millennials in timely timeless peril.

I started making a playlist. The first songs were added when I started writing, somewhere around 3-4 years ago (this included Gotye...before it was universally and unambiguously decided that we didn't want to hear "Somebody that I Used to Know" again for at least a decade or so). Other songs got added much later, during the drawn-out editing, submitting, editing, and waiting portion, when I tried to be brave and tell myself that my protagonist, Kimber, would take care of shit. The songs below aren't a complete list, and the order has nothing to with when the songs were added, but it is a kind of thematic soundtrack for my story. This might not be interesting to anyone else, but I thought at the very least I'd share and give credit to the music that got me through this story, from scribbled notes to publication.

Screenshot from The Lumineers' "Ho Hey" video.

Opening

Ho Hey - The Lumineers: anguished and low-energy and plaintive but charming. So, a perfect introduction.

A Change of Days - Smith's Cloud: I know this song because I heard it on a cat video have an encyclopedic knowledge of cool indie music.

Internet Killed the Video Star - The Limousines

Screenshot from Alpine's "Villages" video.

Middle

The Cigarette Duet - Princess Chelsea

Just a Boy - Pikachunes

Villages - Alpine: early on in writing this story I went on a YouTube binge, trying to establish its "sound." It was on this binge that I found Alpine, Pikachunes, and Princess Chelsea.

New Slang - The Shins

Dashboard - Modest Mouse

We Are Young - Fun

Shake it Out - Florence + The Machine

Born to Die - Lana Del Rey

The Gulag Orkestar - Beirut

All These Things That I Have Done - The Killers

Screenshot from Grouplove's "Tongue Tied" video.

Ending

The Rite of Spring, Sacrificial Dance - Stravinsky: breaking from twee alt-rock/pop, here's the finale to Igor Stravinsky's 1913 composition about human sacrifice in ancient Russia. I was properly introduced to this piece in spring 2013 when San Francisco Ballet performed it (despite watching Fantasia a billion times as a kid, it never struck me then - sorry, battling dinosaurs). By the time I saw the ballet, I had finished the story, but this episode kept me inspired through the work that followed. Besides relating thematically, it also has the horrible, breathtaking tension I wanted to emulate.

Tongue Tied - Grouplove

Young Blood - The Naked and Famous





Image sources:
Roerich's Rite of Spring backdrop
All screenshots taken by me from linked videos.

Gale Boetticher's Sing-Along Fun Time

Confession: I can't watch this without tearing up.

Wow. So. Well. Are you vomiting and shaking right now? I have leftover cheesecake and I don't even know if I can eat it. I thought things were tense during last week's shoot-out, but holy shit, that was some laser tag compared to tonight. I don't even...how are we supposed to cope until next week? How are we supposed to process two more episodes?

Deep breaths. Let's relax.

So...how 'bout some comic relief and a reminder of the fun that can co-exist with this show? Sometimes? When things are not horrific? Four of these are even Gale-approved music-and-dance...oh, God, I don't even know if this will make it better or worse.

Breaking Swift

It turns out the turbulent relationship between Walt and Jesse is a perfect fit for the perpetual break-up songs of Taylor Swift, even if Tay-Tay has never (yet) watched a romantic rival choke to death on vomit or SPOILER sent an ex off to be tortured by goddamn neo-nazis. Geezus, I'm never recovering from that. Anyways, taking on the moving setpieces concept of Declan Whitebloom's video for Swift's "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together," Teddie Films chronicles the drama surrounding Walt and Jesse's (then) latest falling-out. Major props to Eddie King for nailing Jesse's stoner voice and to the guy playing Hector for managing to look so darn deadpan throughout.

Breaking Bad: The Middle School Musical

How freakin' charming is this mini-musical by YouTube greats Rhett & Link? With its faux DIY aesthetic and super-talented kids, it looks like Breaking Bad as directed by Wes Anderson. See if you can manage to not start laughing manically during mini Gus Fring's musical number. Oddly, both these first two videos change one small plot point by having Walt not spare Jesse the horror of putting Drew Sharp (aka dirt bike boy) in the acid barrel. I guess when these videos were made, Meth Damon wasn't enough of a breakout to bother parodying. 

Breaking Bad Thanksgiving

Jesse and Walt have a cooking show (apparently shot in a Google kitchen), but instead of Blue Sky, they're making pumpkin pie and turducken. Mark Douglas of Barely Political does the angry "Jesse!" hiss, and of course there's a montage with unexpected music choices and POV shots. And even Fake Jesse gets all the best lines.

Honest Trailer: Breaking Bad

We joke because we love, right? This entry in Screen Junkies' Honest Trailer series is heavy on the honesty, particularly with fans' obsessive behavior (cough) and the show's sometimes uncomfortable racial politics (this was before this half of the season's white power prison gang plot). But seriously, have you seen this show? How about we just watch the pilot? I promise you'll like it.

Joking Bad

And here is Jimmy Fallon's Breaking Bad love letter, a 12+ minute parody set in the cutthroat stand-up world. With painstakingly reproduced shots and Breaking Bad's trademark callbacks ("no end"), this long skit was clearly a labor of love.

Walter White and the Amazing Blue Crystal Meth

But really, who stops at under 13 minutes for a Breaking Bad parody? And doesn't even include musical numbers? A rat, that's who. Low budget and joyous, this hour-long musical by Jackie Johnson and Nadia Osman is a fan magnum opus. And there's a Gale song! There are also interpretive dance murders, a pretty hot Jesse, and terrible bald caps. It's at least 96% pure fun!

Weird Al's Albuquerque

Weird Al Yankovic and Breaking Bad go together. Ok, not really. But Aaron Paul did portray Weird Al in Funny or Die's Weird: The Al Yankovic Story. And then Slacktory went and used Breaking Bad clips to meticulously craft a music video for Weird Al's appropriately weird lengthy ode to Albuquerque. Lydia is the girl of everyone's dreams (especially Todd's).



There. Wasn't that fun? Don't you feel totally better now? Jesse? Jesse?

Jesse, we're paging Captain America and Magneto right now. Then we'll do go-karts.