IMMORTAL CHAPTER 12 IS LIVE.

Thansk to hcolleen and osoimaru. Plus an extra happy birthday to blueutopiah, just 'cause.

If you look up the name 'Joseph Stafford Sellars,' you won't find much. An obituary, a sparse link regarding his time as a teacher at MCAD in Minneapolis. But, I can tell you what you won't find.

Joseph Sellars was an artist. He was a lover of music. He adored his son, was kind to his friends. He was my mentor. If I could show you the beautiful work he made, this would be a picture flood the likes of which have never been seen. If I could find a clip of him playing guitar, you'd have music in your ears from here til doomsday. As it happens, I can only tell you about it, and about him.

He worked for Dayton's, which now everyone knows as Macy's, during the 1980s. His artwork graced the hallways and advertisements of Dayton's Minneapolis for well over a decade, everything from shlepping fetishistic high heels to adverting the annual Christmas displays. With an airbrush in his hand, he was something like a God; the work I wish I could show you made you want to step into that high-saturation world and dance with joy. With markers, he created landscapes of such singular beauty that I can't even think of enough words to say that would give them the respect they deserve. A camera in his hands captured moments so fleeting you would wonder if they only existed in another world.

My dad met Joe some couple of years before I was born. They struck up a friendship that I like to think lasted through some of the worst of times for both of them. As a result, I've known him my entire life, from day one until today. When I was a little sprat, he'd come over with his guitar and sing the blues with mom, annoy the shit out of dad (he was the number one expert at that, I like to think I learned something there from him, too) and look over my shoulder as I worked out a violent love affair with crayolas. When my parents divorced, he was at my dad's side, always there to offer a sympathetic ear over some suds and a game.

When I was twelve, Christmas that year, he told me it was time I started learning the art of art. Every week, for hours that seemed to stretch on for years (which, now I wish they had) he'd sit next to me as I struggled with perspective, shading, anatomy, composition... the list goes on. He taught me how to take a pencil and make it do great things. He showed me the shortcuts, the back ways, the long ways the side ways and every which way there is to make something beautiful out of a little graphite and some paper. He told me, when I complained:

"Cass, the thing about art that they never want to tell you is that it's 99% perspiration. All the rest, the 1% inspiration left, that's the easy part."

God, was he ever right. Try as I might in those days to brush such a silly saying off, he was right.

When my dad remarried to a creature of infernal origin, Joe was always there to offer his place when she got to be too much. I've slept on his couch more times than I can remember. I can tell you the layout of his flat from memory. All the artwork on the walls, his beautiful, elusive work, inspired dreams and ambition that I can only ever hope to reach for. He was always there to listen, to offer advice (the real kind of advice, not empty platitudes on how 'things will get better, just you wait' or 'it's not so bad don't worry about it.' Not that bullshit.) And he always had a moment free to help me when I was stuck, whether it be with artwork or homework.

When I was 19 I won a guitar, and he instantly began to teach me to play. I never quite got it, but we stuck with it together, sitting at his place strumming mindless chords while talking about great art, great music, great movies, and great things. Great things. I remember clearly the last day we played together before I left for Texas, sitting and looking out on the North Side of Minneapolis like the lords of all we surveyed, clumsily plunking through Hotel California and wondering where the hell Pixar was going to take us next.

Joseph Sellars, who died yesterday, was a singular dude. Totally bitchrod; absolutely dope; as ye might say, copasetic. Ivey-divey, rock-n-rollin, a tremendous person. I love him, I will always love him, and I will never, ever forget what he has taught me. I want to say more, and there's more I could say, but for now, I just want to remember my friend.

Well, it's come time that I'm going to move to a new place! Every little bit helps in these situations, so I'm having a SALE!

One sketch, any character, person, or creature you like, $10. There are 30 slots open to begin with, and each person who buys a sketch has their name entered to win either a full-color, poster-size image of whatever they like, or any two prints from my gallery, printed on poster-size matte paper and sent to you directly! The more sketches you buy, the better your chance of winning the Big Prize!

Want to help me further my sale? Anyone who features this sale in their journal will get a free watercolor postcard bust image of their choice, to be received after I've moved into my new place :heart:.

For examples of what I mean by sketch, check out these:


Or, just check out my deviantART page!
Slots:

1. MythicPhoenix
2. ThePioden AKA thepioden
3. ThePioden
4. Chrislea AKA spiderlove
5. Butterfly111585
6. Raine (via Email)
7. kyouhana
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How To Order:
Either comment to this journal, note me, or email at tehfawx@gmail.com . All payment must be through paypal.

Please, serious inquiries only. This money will all be sunk into helping me move in November. This is an important move that I can't put off even in the slightest, and every bit I can scrounge up will keep me from going hungry or homeless.

Oh, I forgot to mention. I am shitting myself over how great Kuroshitsuji is. Someone should app characters for me to fawn over at hogwarts_hocus. Especially if it's Grell. <3

Goodbye everyone, Well since no one here wants to hear people's opinions or views, and you must have to know someone who posts alot well not to be hounded everytime you post...then I will take leave of this place. that was a disgusting waste of my inbox. No, you mutated children, crossbreeds between hagfish and a puddle of babboon vomit, just FLAT OUT ASSUMED that I am some drugged-out freak who plays violent video games and names animals after them. Catch you on the flip side, bitches!

_{From here via hcolleen. <3}

Hokay, so.

I'm sure the first question in all your minds is "WHERE THE BALLS HAVE YOU BEEN?" Short answer: Working. Night shift is good but tiring work, and I've been doing little else but working, sleeping and dicking around on Gaia (yeah, still addicted) and hogwarts_hocus. Not much new, really.

Work is good, though I'm starting to get severely homesick for Minneapolis. I don't have much in the way of friends here other than the roomies and a few select individuals, so there's not so much of the fun happening outside of the apartment. I haven't been able to find any replacements (that I can easily get to, anyway) of my old dives back home, which is frustrating. The heat is oppressive, like walking into a goddamn sauna every time I go outside. And it's... I dunno. It doesn't feel really like 'home' here. But, hey. There's always that time of transition, and one learns to deal.

Fic: Immortal chapter 10 is posted! Actually, it's been posted, I was just being a lazy ass and didn't put up the link here. Well, all of you that read it know where to find it anyway, so I suppose doing so would be a rather useless thing. Chapter 11 is coming along nicely, and I've maybe skipped ahead a little and done some later chapter work that's more Kuronue/Kurama heavy. And more with the horrible things happening. OOPS. Also, there is art, but none that anyone will be seeing until the chapter it corresponds to is posted. YOUR HINT: Popular Radiohead song of the 90's. That is all.

Art/Commissions: Being worked on. Photoshop has been beaten into submission, but every so often there is a mutiny. The creative drive comes back in fits and starts, alas, but those of you awaiting artses have to fear only time. And are free to send me angry e-mails.

Huh... not much to report otherwise. hcolleen is writing a fantastic Mello/Kurama fic that makes me neon with envy for her massive skills, atalantapendrag introduced me to I-Doser, which works surprisingly well (for me at least) and... not much else that I can think of off the top of my head.

So, upon gaining more information on the situation at large, I have come up with a shiny new revision of my opinion on the rigamarole surrounding The Thirteenth Child.

This book can, in fact, by virtue of the story context and quotes from the author, be considered viably racist. As such, it is no question that a good number of people will be offended by it.

I am not one of those people. Not because I am white, not because I'm racist or bigoted, but because, racist or not, offensive or not, The Thirteenth Child is a piece of fiction. In fact, it is a piece of speculative fiction, and the point of speculative fiction is to explore what would happen if a significant event altered the course of history.

Speculative fiction can be pretty painful to read, at times. For example, Suzy Charnas' Walk to the End of the World. Nuclear holocaust being blamed on women for the crime of being independent. That's a hard read. Or one of my personal favorites, The Giver, by Lois Lowry. A world without color, where everyone is the same pigmentation, the same build, the same everything. Also very unsettling (especially considering it was required reading when I was a fifth grader.) And now, in The Thirteenth Child, we have a story completely omitting an entire culture, enslaving another (that has already been enslaved in real-world history) and paving the way for a white-supremacist society. Ouch. I get it. You clench when you read that description.

However, I've said this vaguely before and I'm saying this firmly now: This book will not change history as we know it.

It will not change what has happened. Likely, it won't have any significance ten, twenty, a hundred years from now. It is simply another Young Adult speculative fiction book. I see no evidence that the author is trying to sell the idea that the events in her book should have happened. The story as I have gathered isn't even exploring any real consequences or questions. It is the product of what is most likely laziness on the part of the author, who just didn't want to go through all the trouble of worldbuilding.

I don't like that the author is lazy and is certainly guilty of being disrespectful. Like /b/tards posting 9-11 macro pics (or a recent tragedy of your choice) it seems like too much, too soon for the people who identify with the cultures erased and disrespected in the story. There are some bloggers who express disbelief that something like this was allowed to be published. My argument for that is, Twilight was published as well. There are truly great injustices in the literary world, and all we can really do is put in our two cents and hope for the best. I'm hoping that Twilight won't spawn a generation of girls looking for the abusive husband Edward Cullen-type in favor of actual, real men or women they could be with.

But unlike Twilight, where the potential for a legion of Bella Swans in the world is highly likely, fans of The Thirteenth Child will not think, upon reading the book, "Hey, it's the Native American's fault there's no magic in America! We should hate them, because they made it so wooly mammoths and magical plants aren't around for us to enjoy." That is far too great a leap. It is true that the book doesn't give any consideration to the Native American population, but it also - to my knowledge - does not actively demonize them. They are simply not there. And while intellectual genocide is a painful concept to endure, it is better, I think, than the dirty savage stereotype that may very well have been there in place of the magical plants.

That said, it is now open to debate whether it is better to continue to fall into racial stereotypes, or to ignore the race in question. Personally, I'd love to see a speculative fiction story in which the Native Americans were the highly advanced culture, and have the roles of the Natives and the Settlers be reversed. Bonus points if the Settlers are Nordic in origin, even better if they come from anywhere not in Europe or the UK. That, of course, is but a pipe dream, and really not the issue at hand. Neither of the choices the author gave herself were good. Either the continued stereotyping of a culture already being constantly trodden upon and ridiculed (we all remember the crying Indian recycling commercial, I'm sure) when they aren't being outright ignored.

There is no question that The Thirteenth Child will likely go in the 'trite, shallow' pile of books being released today. I said before, there are no deep nor meaningful questions being asked or concepts being explored. No-one here is asking the strength of love over death, whether robots dream of electric sheep, or how correct our perception of the world is. There are no new boundaries being pushed, only old ones being drawn in further. The small excerpt of the story I read here more than cements that. It will not be a rollicking, or even interesting read. I will try out of what little goodness is left in my withered, black heart, to read more and see - after all is said and done - if the book is worth the immense drama that has piled around it, and whether I believe Wrede is guilty of flagrant and willful disrespect, or if she is simply lazy.

I'm likely going to be sensing a communal pause here while some people wonder at how massively different this statement is from my earlier post. I ask, though, would any of you who were not already acquainted with me be here if I didn't look like a jackass? Point of interest: those of you who've commented on the earlier post seem to be doing so because I looked like a stupid, bigoted, bitchy whiner. I pulled the 'racism racists' card and rolled my terrible eyes and gnashed my terrible teeth and achieved fantastic results. Wonderful, eloquent posts. Pouncing. "You are wrong and this is why" comments. Beautiful. I am vindicated in knowing that there are people around now that I can debate with on these subjects who are, for the most part, intelligent and confident in their positions.

You'll notice this post is - like the other - open to anonymous commenting. I love Anons, but I'll say now I'd prefer to know who I'm talking to. Refering to someone as 'Anon A,' 'Anon B' seems so impersonal, and devalues - I think - the statements that anon posters are giving. Own up to what you're saying here. If you are afraid of being judged by your opinions on the matter, why comment at all?

Anyway, it's time for me to go to work. I hope to see comments here in the AM; I'm looking forward to seeing what you all think. Peace!