This year’s Bram Stoker Awards Preliminary Ballot was released last week, celebrating the best of 2009 in horror literature as recognized by the Horror Writers Association. Congrats to San Antonio’s own Joe McKinney who has two of his works on the list. QUARANTINED is a preliminary selection in the category of Superior Achievement in a Novel and his story “Plague Dogs” is a preliminary selection in the category of Superior Achievement in Short Fiction. According to the Horror Writers Association’s website, its members “will vote to choose final nominees from this list, and then vote again to determine winners. Winning titles will be announced at the World Horror Convention, March 25-28 2010, in Brighton, England.” Note that the Preliminary Ballot is NOT an official Stoker nomination, but merely the preliminary round before nomination, sometimes known as a “long list”. McKinney says, “I couldn’t be happier. There’s some stout competition this year, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed.”
Dora Peña - Director of "Dream Healing" showing Sunday at Cinefestival '10
Dora Peña is a San Antonio-based filmmaker and this weekend, her feature film Dream Healing will close the 32nd annual Cinefestival Latino Film Festival at the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center Sunday February 7th at 2:00 pm. Dream Healing stars Gabi Walker, Jesse Borrego, Evie A. Armstrong and Bleu Wenzel. In advance of the screening, we put the questions to Peña to find out more about the project.
What is “Dream Healing”?
Dream Healing is my first feature film. It’s a metaphysical thriller about a girl named Clara (which means ‘clear’ in Spanish) who can give insomniacs the best sleep of their life. Clara is being exploited by her aunt until a couple of new neighbors move in down the street. It’s a coming of age story that also deals with things like sexual/child abuse, divorce, and relationships.
What was the genesis of the script?
The story was inspired by an article about insomnia that really interested me because I’m often an insomniac. There were also different things that came up in the news over the years that I wrote the story that show up in the film, like the war, San Antonio’s battle with high child abuse rates. My friend did a stint as a social worker and that gave me Jesse Borrego’s character as a burnt out social worker turned high school counselor.
One of the fondest memories of my childhood is all 8 of us in my parents bed listening to my dad tell a story then falling asleep on their bed. So I inherited the storytelling from my daddy who (aside from my husband) is still the first person I run story ideas by when writing. I started writing as early as I can remember.
You shot entirely in San Antonio. Why is that?
For convenience, we live here and have our family here, the support from our family with babysitting was something we knew we could count on if we shot here. I love the city and its diversity – for my first short I was able to use a southside neighborhood as Los Angeles so I knew the right locations were here we just had to find them.
We shot in four houses of the King William neighborhood. We also used SaySi and a skatepark scene that never made it into the film.
The Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center, one of the nation’s premier Latino arts institutions, presents the 32nd Annual CineFestival en San Antonio. This is the oldest running international festival in North America featuring Chicano/Latino/indigenous film subjects and you can enjoy it all at San Antonio’s historic Guadalupe Theater.
The four-day event, which kicks off Thursday, February 4, 2010, features screenings, workshops, panel discussions, networking opportunities, gala celebrations. There are a couple of films of note for Mission Unknown readers.
Director Dora Peña presents Dream Healing on Sunday February 7th at 2:00 PM. This feature-length film is the story of a clairvoyant girl, Clara (Gabi Walker), whose ability to heal insomniacs is being exploited by her greedy aunt Marta (Evie A. Armstrong). When a recently divorced father (Jesse Borrego) and son Omar (Bleu Wenzel) move in next door, Clara and Omar spawn a friendship that causes events beyond their control to set in motion, revealing a dark secret within the community.
Directors Dora Peña, Gabriel Luna, and Sam Lerma will be in attendance for a post-screening Q&A session. We will have an interview with Peña tomorrow on Missions Unknown.
Saturday’s free screenings include the Student Showcase which presents 16 short films featuring new works from SAY Si, Cinema North East, Film School of San Antonio, the Mustang Cinema Club, and the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center’s Cine en El Barrio program.
Four Animation and Live Action films created by Film School of San Antonio (FSSA) students have been chosen for the screening at the 2010 Cinefestival in San Antonio. Last year, FSSA Animation, “Beijing Bear”, by Nephtali Valdez captured the Best Student Film award, and according to Russ Ansley, FSSA animation instructor, “we stand a good chance of doing it again this year.”
Check after the jump for more on these exciting student shorts.
POLYSICS (with Hyperbubble) at the White Rabbit - Friday February 5th. Doors open at 7:00.
The White Rabbit is the place to be Friday night for an incredible sonic art event. San Antonio’s power synthpop duo Hyperbubble will be on tap with the release of their new CD Candy Apple daydreams. They will be followed by Japan’s incomparable technicolor pogo punk masters POLYSICS. The band, named after the Korg Polysix synthesizer, creates a high-energy synthetic punk sound that harkens back to American new wave bands like DEVO and The Tubes and Japanese bands like P-Model and Yellow Magic Orchestra. POLYSICS members frequently wear matching jumpsuits and new wave glasses during their exuberant performances.
Legend has it that POLYSICS founder Hiroyuki Hayashi, while a high school student in 1997, saw a video of a DEVO live show and was inspired to form a band in a similar vein. While the band is on the road in the U.S., we put the questions to POLYSICS frontman Hayashi to find out what makes the band rock and why San Antonio SF/Fantasy fans need to be there.
I first heard about POLYSICS because I’m a big DEVO fan. Can you share with us what it was about DEVO that so inspired POLYSICS?
First of all, it was their looks. Well, not only looks; when I saw the quintet in yellow jumpsuits playing punk like broken robots, I thought this was it. I knew this was the music I wanted to do. Of course I had been a rock ‘n’ roll fan, but I hadn’t been able to find the style I wanted to do. But when I saw DEVO, I knew this was the style I wanted to do and went on to listen to a lot of their music. I learned from DEVO that rock ‘n’ roll is not just about the looks, but also about doing music that no one else does. So they have been a big influence to me.
What other music would you cite as influential to the POLYSICS sound?
Of course DEVO has had a tremendous influence on us and they taught us that being different matters the most. So they are our biggest influence, but besides them, these bands I’m naming are exceptional as well: Kraftwerk, Talking Heads, New Order, Gang Of four… and B-52’s… those are the new wave bands. And there are the Ramones, The Damned, and Yes… and noise bands such as Throbbing Gristle and Ministry. These bands go the high road in their respective fields, but they do the music only they can do, which influenced us a lot. I like one-of-a-kind music. I don’t want to categorize my favorite style, but we want to be a one-of-a-kind band as well.
San Antonio art star Jason Limon debuted a dynamite new batch of original artwork and prints yesterday. Guest artist Nathan Limon is also featured in this month’s offerings. The work is selling lightning-fast, as many of the pieces sold within the first hour of online sales. Limon says, “I started doing this in January, and I’m looking to do it every month… producing new, small originals that are affordable.” His February art sale runs through February 22. Check it out before they’re all gone. And if they are, the good news is he’ll likely have more originals for sale on March 1st.
This month, he’ll also have work appearing in the gallery show “Seven-Year Itch” in Berlin, Germany at Strychnin Gallery, beginning February 12.
The Overtime Theater presents an onstage homage to comic-book romance. Adapted from actual romance comics from the 1960’s and early ’70’s, Sob Choke Love! 3D!will stage live versions of these classic, sappy stories in their full glory. The stories are acted out verbatim, comic book panel by panel, with all of the dialogue that scintillated then and disturbs now. The past two incarnations of Sob Choke Love! have been selected as “one of the best shows of 2008 and 2009″ (San AntonioExpress-News) and called “strange and hilarious” (UTSA Paisano). This year, Sob Choke Love! 3D! will include two short stories and one long-form romance told, Rashomon-style, from three different perspectives. The ensemble cast includes Matthew Arch, Sophia Bolles, Lilly Canaria, Cary Farrow, Matthew Sinclair, Theresa Ronquillo, and Lucy Villanueva. Sob Choke Love! 3D! is directed by Kathleen Lovejoy and Sophia Bolles.
Showtimes are 8 pm Thursdays-Saturdays starting February 12th. Two Sunday shows are scheduled for Feb. 14 (a special 8 pm Valentine’s Day Show with champagne and chocolate reception – $30/couple) and Feb. 21 (3 pm). Ticket prices are $12 general admission, and $9 for teachers, students, seniors 65+ and SATCO members. The Overtime is downtown in the Blue Star Arts Complex at 1414 S. Alamo St., Suite 103.
San Antonio’s HYPERBUBBLE plays catchy synth pop that mixes kitsch, retrofuturism and pop art in a chrome blender and sets the contents jiggling to a hypnotic robo-rhythm. It’s fun stuff: catchy, quirky and maybe even a little subversive.
Beyond their love for analog synths, husband-wife duo Jeff and Jess bring the geek appeal with lyrics that offer quirky takes on SF tropes from cyborgs and clones to ray guns and erotic surveillance.
With a new CD, Candy Apple Daydreams, ready for release and a show coming up on Friday, Feb. 5, they seemed an obvious choice for a Missions Unknown interview.
Hyperbubble open for Japanese SF-pop band POLYSICS at the WHITE RABBIT (2410 N Saint Marys St, San Antonio, 78212). Doors open at 7:00 PM. Cost is $12 / $14. For more info: (210) 737-2221. Look for a POLYSICS interview on Missions Unknown the day of the show.
Your upcoming show is the release party for your new CD, Candy Apple Daydreams. Tell us about it. How’s it different from previous Hyperbubble disks? How’s it the same?
Jeff: Candy Apple Daydreams is a rainbow-flavored candy-coated concept album about Hyperbubble and our adventures on the planet Earth. It’s constructed like a symphony, but each track still works by itself as a pop song. It’s a much more ambitious album than the previous two, and it’s also more confidently delivered. We performed the songs live for half a year before recording the vocals, so when it was time to lay’em down in the studio, it was like, “Bam!” You’ll hear stuff that reminds you of some of your favorites from our first two albums. The songs are still fast and fun and catchy, but this one also totally takes off in new directions, like the tricky drums on “Teddy Bear Crime Wave,” and “Moogzilla vs Korgatron,” which sounds like Wendy Carlos playing lazer tag with Motorhead.
Jared Diamond, professor of geography at UCLA, will present the Trinity University DeCoursey Lecture for the 2009-2010 academic year at 7:30 p.m. Monday, Feb. 1, in Laurie Auditorium. The title of his talk is Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. His presentation is free and open to the public.
The ruined cities, temples, and statues of history’s great, vanished societies (Easter Island, the Anasazi, the Lowland Maya, Angkor Wat, Great Zimbabwe, and many more) are the birthplace of endless romantic mysteries. But these disappearances offer more than idle conjecture: the social collapses were due in part to the types of environmental problems that beset us today.
Yet many societies facing similar problems do not collapse. What makes certain societies especially vulnerable? Why didn’t their leaders perceive and solve their environmental problems? What can we learn from their fates, and what can we do differently today to help us avoid their fates?
Professor Diamond earned his A.B. from Harvard College and doctorate in physiology and membrane biophysics from the University of Cambridge. He began his scientific career as professor of physiology at UCLA Medical School and later expanded into evolutionary biology and geography and became professor of geography at UCLA, his current position. He has been elected to the National Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. Among Professor Diamond’s many awards are the National Medal of Science, the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, Japan’s Cosmos Prize, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, and the Lewis Thomas Prize honoring the Scientist as Poet, presented by the Rockefeller University. He has published more than 200 articles in Discover, Natural History, Nature, and Geo magazines. His book Guns, Germs, and Steel, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
Doors to Laurie Auditorium will open at 6:45 p.m. on the evening of the lecture. The lecture series is made possible by a gift from the late Gen. Elbert DeCoursey and Mrs. DeCoursey of San Antonio. For more information, contact Trinity’s department of Academic Affairs at (210) 999-8201.
This short film was the winner of the December San Antonio 48 Hour Film Experience. Team Live Wire drew the soap opera genre and then presented the delightful Saint Passions Landing. While writing their new soap opera, the writers get sidetracked in their imaginations.
Saint Passions Landing was written and directed by Mark Cantu. The language may be strong for your workplace.
Check after the jump for more on Dr. Malcolm the Magical Gynecologist and the trailer to Live Wire’s new super hero comedy premiering in February…
First up is Sensational Invasion, in which we meet Mr. Sensational. On his Internet radio chat show, Mr. Sensational starts the debate over which is stronger, Aliens or Zombies? This film was created by Grande Cinema Productions and stars Alex Rodriguez as Mr. Sensational.
Hey, Bostonians: Anyone have any fave Italian restaurants (or other) near Faneuil Hall? Preferably that take reservations? 8 hours ago
@DaveMcKean Yup. Didn't mind as a kid, but as an adult, unwanted voiceovers = giant pet peeve. Suspect US audiences worse about it than UK. 8 hours ago
@clmerle Thx. Only 3. The 2 Lester Del Rey collections & now this Al Reynolds book. The latter is tied to my Boskone GoH stint this weekend. 12 hours ago
NESFA Press unveils a new Alastair Reynolds short story collection. Cover art by me. http://tinyurl.com/ye77h6l12 hours ago
The 
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