Sumiko Saulson's Blog, page 15
November 10, 2019
Smiling Woman – Horror Short by Alex Magaña
IMDB Link: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11218374/
Synopsis: On a late night at an empty train station, a lone traveler is terrorized by a creepy smiling woman.
CREW
Writer. Director. DP. Editor – Alex Magaña
1st AD. Sound Mixer. Grip – Jonathan Romero
CAST
Girl – Ariel Fullinwider
Smiling Woman – Merlynda Sol
Social Media Links:
November 8, 2019
Let’s use the Bay View to save the world and build it better
*** Feel free to share far and wide ***
[image error] Please help support the San Francisco BayView
Amidst the calamitous chaos that has become the new normal in our world, heroes are emerging. While a few have money and privilege they are willing to use and share, the strongest were forged in the fires of poverty, oppression and exclusion.
You’ll meet those heroes among Bay View readers and writers; some of you will meet one every time you look in the mirror. Bold, brave, brilliant writers point the way to a future worth our struggle and sacrifice.
Unlike any other newspaper anywhere, the Bay View enables and inspires collective resolution of the problems that plague us even by those who are locked down tight, forbidden nearly all means of communication. Unlike any other newspaper anywhere, the Bay View functions as a network for freedom fighters.
Extraordinary journalism in a newspaper that functions as a network for freedom fighters is worth saving, both in print and online – don’t you agree? It’s a triumphant feeling for Dr. Ratcliff and me every time we put out a paper. We expect that in the November paper you’ll find words and pictures that quicken your mind, warm your heart and gird you for action.
But the paper you pick up for free costs a lot to produce, a whopping $7,000 each month just for printing, distribution and mailing. Why are we still printing the Bay View when many other papers have stopped printing and are publishing only online? Because our core readers live in the hood or in prison with little or no internet access.
Many of us are living at survival level with nothing at all to spare. Some folks on this list, though, may be willing and able to pitch in enough to add up to the $3,000 we need in the next few days to finish paying for the November paper.
Every day we hear from one of you that you’re closing in on a source of major funding – that benefactor we’ve been seeking, whether a group or an individual with very deep pockets. We are confident the funding will come, enabling the Bay View to outlive the Ratcliffs, so we’re thinking big, imagining ways to use the Bay View to save the world and build it better.
Please, everyone, stay on board so we can celebrate together when that day comes, when we can afford to hire a real staff and make big waves. And right now, to help us cover some outstanding checks, use the Donate button at https://sfbayview.com/donate/ or simply call 415-671-0789. Or send your check or money order to SF Bay View, 4917 Third St., San Francisco CA 94124-2309.
Volunteers needed: 1) An accountant or bookkeeper familiar with QuickBooks Online and 2) as many of you as possible promoting your favorite stories from https://sfbayview.com/ on your favorite social media platforms.
Indulge in some recent stories and discover new ones every day at sfbayview.com …
Diversity talk highlights anti-Blackness and Black erasure within the LGBTQIA+ community Denial of anti-Blackness is an everyday occupation in the LGBTQIA+ community and in San Francisco specifically, making this conversation long overdue.
The never-ending earthquake called Homelessness: Preparing for an emergency when your life is an ongoing emergency We are always getting prepared for the emergency we are already living in, and it’s made so much harder by this ongoing criminalization and violence called “sweeps.”
In Texas, environmental racism is in our FACE “The struggle to restore the soil and the struggle to create a just social order have up to now been carried on mostly as parallel political movements, without much mutual awareness.”
Holding San Francisco accountable on SFPD’s inadequate DOJ COPS progress and process “Despite three reports studying Black people in regard to racism in 55 years, Black San Franciscans are worse off than ever before.”
Activists across the world deliver South Carolina prisoners’ demands to United Nations South Carolina’s prison system has reached a breaking point, and right now it is breaking the minds, bodies and spirits of human beings.
The Barbara Lee and Elihu Harris Lecture Series presents Anna Mwalagho’s ‘Never Thought I Was Black Till I Came to America’ Immigration can be a form of erasure. The quicker the newcomer sheds her identity, the sooner she is accepted.
Donald in the Donbass, Biden in the crossfire “Zelensky is desperate to end the war. His electoral landslide was the result of this promise, and his anti-corruption theme, which is related. His presidency – even his life – depends on it,” says Princeton and NYU Professor Emeritus Stephen F. Cohen. So why did Zelensky want another $400 million worth of military aid that could only escalate the war?
Presidential candidates engage with formerly incarcerated organizers at historic forum on criminal justice issues On Monday, Oct. 28, Democratic presidential candidates fielded questions from formerly incarcerated people for the first time during a nationally-broadcast forum.
Sam Jordan’s, San Francisco’s oldest Black-owned bar, to close after 60 years in business “The spaces the Black community had carved out, the restaurants we’d established, the communities we’d become a part of, were all fading out.”
Long live the greatest threat to the internal security of the US, the Black Panther Party! On this 50th anniversary of the Black Panthers’ Free Breakfast Program, let us meditate on the incredible legacy of the original Black Panther Party. Although this is a plea for help and a call to action, this piece is also a dedication.
*****
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Mary RatcliffSF Bay View(415) 671-0789https://sfbayview.com/
October 13, 2019
Please Stop Asking Marginalized People To Defend Our Own Oppression.
I am very angry right now. People who act against marginalized people the way Dave Chappelle acted against transwomen, ask for a free fucking pass. Cops need a pass like a hug from Devonte Hart, a 12 year old child. Then your system lets him down and he ends up dead.
[image error]The kind of uplifting images of Devonte’s family that the press and public loved didn’t hold up to scrutiny. The constant media attention probably contributed to driving his unstable mother over the edge. People made them famous but no one helped these kids.
Now Daphe Dorman is dead.
She was an up-and-coming comedian who might have liked to make some progress in her own career. Instead, she became the punchline of a real-life Dave Chappelle joke when he outed her laughter at his transphobic routine. He made her life all about how other women and transfolk were overly sensitive.
[image error]Daphne Dornan, a transactivist and comedianne, left behind a young daughter. David Chappelle threw her into the limelight as a prop in defense of his own transphobic show, casting her into disgrace with her own community, which she apologized to in a suicide post.
Why do you keep hounding marginalized people and pressuring us to commit acts of self-denigration, against our own self-interest? Acts of minstrelsy and coonery? To debase and humiliate ourselves in front of our communities so you can be let off the hook for your bigotry? Why the hell are Judge Tammy Kemp and Botham Jean’s brother Brandt Jean hugging his killer, Amber Guyger?
[image error]Brandt Jean, Botham Jean’s younger brother, hugs former Dallas police officer Amber Guyger in court after saying he forgives her for killing his brother. Guyger received a 10-year prison sentence for murder.
Privileged people who should be HELPING the downtrodden instead use marginalized people for feel-good inspiration porn. These feel-good images are all about how marginalized people need to stop complaining and accept our role at the bottom of the totem pole, accepting crumbs of kindness from your table with a giant minstrel show little Black Sambo grin and shuck and jive for your damned approval.
Why do the privileged expect the
marginalized to comfort them?
Why the hell did Dave Chappelle
put Daphne Dorman on front street for laughing at this culturally tone-deaf,
inciting, transphobic and dangerously insensitive comedy routine, knowing
damned well it would put her in the same position as Devonte, Tammy Kemp and
Brandt Jean of looking like a apologist sell-out to her community? What about
his fragile assed ego makes it so he can’t check his fucking cishet male
privilege while 20 Transwomen most of them Black were murdered this year? Why
did he have to pressure this white transwoman into standing up for this
transphobic Black ass until she became suicidal from all the shade she had to
take because his chickenshit ass was hiding behind her?
If he wasn’t hiding behind her with his weak ass, she’s probably be alive right now.
October 4, 2019
Regarding Nina Simone’s Bad Reputation
How it pained me to see my mother
In all her grace and glory
Baited to make her angry
So she could fit into expectation
As long and lithe as Josephine Baker
As tall and muscular as Grace Jones
How you would fetish her anger
A proud black goddess magnificent
Black and magnificent was her nickname
Her bearing and conduct intimidatingly same
With a long black cape and a lovely choker
More gothic than any novel by Bram Stoker
Statuesque and dark skinned like Roxie Roker
She fought to stay whole and so no
Body broke her…
But her fight to stay whole had a price to it
A people saying she was not nice to it
Like Nina Simone, she stood moody, alone
Her mood having no artifice or device to it
My mother bemoaned her choice
A white man married two kids and divorce
My white father stealing her black voice
Black and magnificent was her nickname
She who called herself Krishna
Was one and the same
How hard it is to walk this land
A paler ghost of she…
Who holds her invisible hand
And tries to make her way through,
Win or lose…
And finds herself shod in Mama’s shoes
How thick and wide and fat I am, me
Cast inside your roles of Mammy
Escape we’d love to but, now can we?
I am too old and fat to run away
From the roles in which you have me enslaved
My mom was Krishna, I am Ska
But to your ass I look like Ma
A caricature in an Octavia Spencer movie
A nutcase like Stephen King’s Mr Toomey
I thought I was a horror writer
But it seems
I will only ever be
A sassy black woman meme
Your racism sewed up tight
Tattered at the seams
It holds up your privilege white
Makes black folks wrong
And you always right
Nina Simone is dead
but her bad reputation lives on
Bad for being a domestic violence victim
Who held her head up too long
Looked too strong
And showed too much personal
Pain
In her song
A woman done wrong
But like my Mama
She was Black
So you never see pain
Just drama
September 19, 2019
San Francisco’s War on the Black Community
[image error]37% of the Homeless people in San Francisco are Black. Less than 6% of San Francisco residents are Black. Black people are 7.7 times as likely to be arrested as white people in San Francisco. Saneism, ableism, and allegations of criminal behavior drug use are often used to veil racism where it is present in the removal of African Americans from power, position, and spaces which are White dominated.
San Francisco is getting to be more and more racist and unsafe for Black people. Black people are forced to self-segregate, move to the East Bay and remove ourselves from White Dominated spaces where we are attacked. Black people are being forced to self-segregate to POC only and Black/Mahogany groups and subsets, or move into Black friendly in the East Bay.
Microagressions like parking your body in front of Black people, yawning at them, and other types of bullying are used to remove Black people from white dominated spaces.
N***er-Baiting is the practice of instigating arguments and fights with Black people so that you can prompt an emotional response from them and then accuse them of being Angry, Emotional, Temperamental, Violent or Insane so you can undermine their credibility.
Character assassination campaigns are used to remove Black people from power and from places of authority.
September 18, 2019
A Year of Loss and Rebuilding
Little did we know at the time, a year later, Mom and Jeveon would both be gone.
My mother died January 2019 after a nine and a half year battle with Multiple Myeloma Cancer. My niece’s high school sweetheart Jeveon Washington was murdered at gunpoint in February 2019, a year after his nineteenth birthday. It was about eight months after they broke in June 2019.
This will be our first Halloween, our first Thanksgiving, and our first Christmas without my mother and Jeveon. Sometimes it’s hard to really process how cruel people can be and how callous. The cruelty of those who removed Jeveon from the world. The cruelty of doctors and staff when Mom was dying. The cruelty of friends who made every tiny thing imaginable more important than my mom’s life, her dying, my pain, or me and my family’s needs in the wake of two unimaginable tragedies and the loss of Jeveon’s young life.
Monday night, I told a friend I was alright, just going through some growing pains. The past year has come with a lot of painful lessons about the invisibility of Black pain. for as my mother’s life came to an end, I found I was increasingly expected to don the clothing of the Strong Black Woman, to silently suffer through her final days with no complaint, as my pain was troublesome and a bother to my friends. I, a burden for suffering. I, problematic if I was triggered or troubled by overt and covert signs of racism in the wake of my mother’s suffering at the hands of callous doctors, or my niece’s first love dying of gun violence.
The wounds run deep. #BlackLivesMatter isn’t a cause I support as an ally. Your derogatory comments when you call me a social justices warrior, or you make jokes about me being triggered by racist imagery, or ask me why it didn’t bother me so much before Jeveon and Mom died, hurt. I feel like I am not even a real person to you anymore.
When someone racist tells me he doesn’t believe I am black because I am biracial, I am supposed to suck it up. At every turn, I am supposed to swallow my pain. I am supposed to take the higher ground as others bully me while my mother lay dying, to coddle and shield thin-skinned other who are going through nothing much as my niece only 19 now grieves the loss of a young black many who died at only 19.
I am so glad that I work at San Francisco Bay View Newspaper now and my column #WritingWhileBlack.I wrote two columns so far, here’s my first column. I am so glad that I have the Black Horror Writing and Sci-Fi community, the Afrofuturist Community, the Afrosurrealist community, writer friends like Valjeanne Jeffers, Crystal Connor, Linda D Addison, Nicole Kurtz, Nisi Shawl and community friends like Wanda Kurtcu and Rudi Mwongozi and Hugh E MC and L.M. Kate JohnsTon who validate and know the struggle to be real. Projects like 100+ Black Women in Horror, Scierogenous 2, Black Magic Women, and Black Celebration to keep me sane.
How hard it is for me to bear the weight of this Strong Black Woman mantle you have thrown upon my shoulders in the wake of and in the days since my mother’s death. How hard it is for me to comfort others and tend to their wounds and emotions, making the smallest slight or wounding word or slightest change in the timber of my voice that shows the wound that rests deep in my soul since my mother left this world show.
My tears look like anger to you.
When I am hurt, you are afraid of me and hurt me even more. I look like a monster to you. Just like my mother did. And I thought you were my friends. And it hurts badly.
But I can’t help the way you see black women, how our softest words sound loud to you, how you think we are angry when we are hurt, and how even when you know we are going through something terrible you only think of yourselves and how we owe you deference and servitude.
All that hurts, but I am gonna #StayBlack and honor my mother in every way I can.
September 15, 2019
Black Celebration Collection this Halloween!
I am very excited to be working on a collection of essays, articles and interviews by and with African American authors on the subject of Black representation in horror. The book includes work by Paula D. Ashe, Valjeanne Jeffers, Crystal Connor, Linda D. Addison, James Goodridge, Balogun Ojetade, Nicole Kurtz and myself. The book will be released on October 31. I am setting up the pre-release for it as we speak.
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Here is a list of the essays and interviews in the book as it currently stands:
The State Of Speculative Fiction: Why Race Matters
Genesis – The First Black Horror Writers/Storytellers
An Interview With L.C. Cruell
Black Horror Films Of The 30s And 40s
The Inimitable Tony Todd
Black Creators In Horror Comics
My Life My Horror: On The Dearth Of Black Characters In Horror Movies
Living Among Legends
Black Occultist Rollo Ahmed
Movie Review: Pooka (2018)
Haunted Hickory Hill
Gagool To Akasha: Black Characters In Horror Fiction
A Forgotten Catalysis: Son Of Ingagi
Movie Review: Sorry To Bother You (2018)
Review Of Chesya Burke’s Strange Crimes In Little Africa
Black Herman
Sycorax’s Daughters Stoker Nominated
Sycorax’s Daughters Gives Black Women In Horror A Voice
Fierce. Fearless. Female.
The Sounds Of Horror In Black American Music
Movie Review: Voodoo Black Exorcist
Why Television Needs Damali Richards, L.A. Bank’s Bad Ass Black Vampire Slayer
Horror Blackademic Is A Real Thing
Black Magic Women Highlights Horror By Black Women
Oh, Susannah: How The Dark Tower’s Explores Black Woman Stereotypes
How Wesley Snipes And Blade Saved The Marvel Movie Franchise
Interview With Dr. Kinitra D. Brooks, Horror Scholar
Maman Dragonne
African American Folklore, Magical Realism And Horror In Toni Morrison Novels
Review Of Dawn By Alex Fernandez
Interview With Dawn Filmmaker Alex Fernandez
Sugar Hill: A Blaxploitation Gem
Linda D. Addison Wins HWA Lifetime Achievement Award
Interview With Linda D. Addison
Sister My Sister: An Open Love Letter To Abby And Jenny Mills From Sleepy Hollow
Warmth: An Unforgettable Journey
Review Of Spook Lights: Southern Gothic Horror By Eden Royce
Southern Women’s Influence On The Weird
September 7, 2019
Regarding my resignation from the Kinky Writing Group
[image error]
I’m still processing the whole writer’s group resignation (on my part). I started the group as an author to help aspiring writers, but somewhere along the way, two of the members who have little writing experience and never were published prior to Scry of Lust decided without my permission or consent to change the form of my group from a moderator-led group lead by an experienced instructor, to some sort of flat-file egalitarian group with no leadership or anarchist collective belonging to “everyone” and to use this structure invalidate my personal extensive experience and professional resume,
Then, they proceeded to tone-police me using both gendered and racially oppressive tone policing statements, referring to my issuing of any orders as “dictatorship” and screaming. Other people who witnessed the rehearsal and the performance viewed these characterizations as either completely fabricated or grossly exaggerated. They clearly suggested Angry Black Woman stereotyping and were very sexist and racist characterizations.
I feel very hurt, and since they have decided they want a peer-run writing group I have elected to turn it over to them to run as a peer-lead group, rather than to go along with the fiction that it started as a peer group, and the fiction that I am their peer. I am far more experienced and am not their peer. I do not feel like dealing with the series of personal attacks they have come at me with in order to bring an end to my leadership. So I have opted out entirely. Saneism, sexism, and racism aren’t cool.
I wish them the best of luck in their new peer-lead structure, but it is dishonest and disingenuous to pretend that I am not the founder of aforementioned group. It is dishonest to pretend that I don’t have a great deal more experience in writing, publishing, editing, proofreading, and teaching / workshop creation than the people who have repeatedly challenged me do.
Part of the reason I resigned was to get away from how personal they were getting, as both of them used my arguments with Darcy to impugn my character when the arguments were regular relationship issues and not a big deal and they didn’t need to involve themselves. My relationship with Darcy is way more important than that group and I refuse to put it at risk because a dude is so petty that he wants to attack my love life in order to try to get me out of my role of leadership.
AKA this dude kept complaining that I was “yelling” at Darcy when in reality we were snipping at each other aka arguing and it was very two sided (unlike this other person’s one-sided view of it). Another person complained because I asked Darcy to leave right after the event because we were having a personal argument over something Darcy did during the show. Neither of them should have been using my arguing with my girlfriend to try to undermine me professionally. That’s sexist. Also I have every right to leave the venue personally, and every right to ask my girlfriend to discuss something with me privately outside the venue.
Anyway I have better and more important things to do with my life than to try to teach people who pretend they already know everything, to give then rides, to organize anything for them, or to babysit them while they pretend I am not actually doing anything and act like the agendas, rules, writing exercises, anthology and everything else I was the primary organizer and producer (and often creator) of magically appeared from nowhere.
September 3, 2019
Plague Master Series – Trevor’s Got Trouble At Home
Plague Master S eries – Trevor’s Got Trouble At Home
By H.E. Roulo
[image error]If it wasn’t bad enough that Trevor, the teenage hero of the Plague Master series, is fighting zombies, arguing with a Plague Master, and trying to discover a way to permanently cure the infected, he must also deal with the terrible conditions on his homeworld, Shailon.
Shailon is a backwater in the 5-planet system recently colonized by ships from Earth. Families on the first ship to arrive declared themselves the winners, gave themselves the titles of Founder, and have been lording it over everyone else ever since. Their estates are large, and the general population is forced into cramped towns. Unfortunately, when there is an outbreak of the Regulon Disease, which turns people into mindless undead, the Founders respond by herding the infected into the lower districts and hiring off-world mercenaries to keep them there.
Trevor never had much, and once the zombies arrive he wants to find a way to fight back. He becomes a bait-boy for the mercenaries, and runs through houses to draw out any zombies inside. Eventually, he’s forced to leave Shailon for the Sanctuary Dome where infected are sent until they change. What he discovers, is that despite the dome being filled with rejects from other planets, it is still a better place to be than his homeworld. Not so much once the dome breaks, and zombies i
[image error]
nvade, but he is able to bring the formula for a cure back to his homeworld.
In the second book, Plague Master: Rebel Infection, Trevor is a hero for returning home with an inoculation against the change into a zombie. However, the Founders don’t administer the vaccine equally, and Trevor quickly realizes that conditions aren’t improving. As a hero, he is a threat to the Founders power and revolution is on the horizon.
A new zombie outbreak, the intervention of a Plague Master, and the realization that the long-sought cure is starting to fail all makes Trevor’s life harder than ever. Find out more in Plague Master: Rebel Infection.
Plague Master: Sanctuary Dome is the first book of the Plague Master series. Next up in the planned trilogy is Plague Master: Rebel Infection, releasing September 2019.
PRAISE FOR
PLAGUE MASTER: SANCTUARY DOME
“A perfect mix of classic sci-fi and zombie horror. Once you start, you are hooked!”
-Jake Bible, author of Little Dead Man.
“Sanctuary Dome is fast-paced zombie sci-fi on a prison planet of the dying and the undead.”
-Stephen North, author of Beneath the Mask
Read more excerpts and see behind the scenes of the PLAGUE MASTER trilogy.
Twitter: @hroulo
Facebook: www.facebook.com/heroulo
Blog: www.heatherroulo.com
Author Central: www.amazon.com/author/heatherroulo
Plague Master: Sanctuary Dome (Book 1): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01CKAPXWW
Plague Master: Rebel Infection (Book 2): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07WTQV6M7
August 30, 2019
San Francisco has an anti-Blackness problem
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San Francisco’s Black population reduced by more than 50% to 6.1% from 12.7% between 1980 and 2010. In 2016 the Black population was only 5.7 Comparatively, 13.4% of the National United States population is Black.
37% of San Francisco’s homeless population are Black. My family and I were homeless in San Francisco in late 2005 and early 2006, before we like so many Black families moved out of the City. We moved up to Vallejo, where my brother Scott still lives. My mom moved to Berkeley in 2013 where she lived out the remainder of her life. I have lived in Oakland since 2010. My brother’s older daughter moved back to San Francisco in 2011.
Black people are 7.75 as likely to be arrested in San Francisco as white people. Black women, 5.8% of San Francisco’s female population, represent 45% of the women arrested in that City.
San Francisco’s Police Department has been under investigation for racial profiling repeatedly and is currently the subject of an ACLU suit filed in October 2018 about the racial profiling. (Case No. 3:18-cv-06097)
But most San Franciscans deny the blatant anti-Blackness in that City. A condition that has progressively worsened with the rise of tech concerns.
