Hello! My name's Sen (She/Her) and I make comics! If you want to check out Dark Science, my queer cyberpunk series that's sort of "Metropolis + Ghost in the Shell + Discworld", you can read the whole thing here!
Scientist Kimiko Ross has a problem: her moneyâs gone and a bank exploded her house. With no place else to go, she travels to Nephilopolis,
I'm not bailing on Tumblr just yet, but social media is inherently volatile and if you want to reliably find my work, I suggest bookmarking my website and subscribing to my RSS feed!
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Happy Pride Month! My name's Alita Diaz, aka "Sen," and I'm what scientists call a "Lesbian"! You can read my very queer cyberpunk adventure comic Dark Science for free on the internet or get it in book form in my store!
Also I forget to mention that my comic Dark Science is at most PG-13. There's no profanity or anything beyond a Star Wars level of violence, lots of kids read it!
Honestly the most fun character relationship for me to write is Kim and Melchior. It's kind of evolved into a sibling dynamic where they have a fundamental need to antagonize one another 24/7, but will still back each other up when things get nuts.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
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The thing is. I would eat the grapes. I would eat the pomegranate seeds. I would eat the Turkish delights. It doesnât matter what the stakes are if you put a little plate of snacks out in front of me Iâll eat them.
If you sent me to an evil fantasy realm and told me that if I ate anything I would die a painful terrible death then set a charcuterie board down in front of me that would be it for me. Like it wouldnât even be like a torturous internal struggle to not eat the cheese. I wouldnât even need to be that hungry.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
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đłď¸âđPRIDE ARTIST SPOTLIGHTđłď¸âđ
TODAY, WE BRING YOU A PRIDE ARTIST SPOTLIGHT: SENNA DIAZ!!! Sen is one of our amazing artists here at TopatoCo, and she identifies as a lesbian! Let's go lesbians, let's go!!!!!!! âď¸ â¨
~~~
⨠She is the creator of the comic series Dresden Codak, known for lavishly illustrated stories like Dungeons & Discourse, Lantern Season, and Caveman Science Fiction. She is also the creator of the comic Dark Science, the ongoing cyberpunk epic about lesbian cyborgs solving cosmic mysteries and overthrowing capitalism. And yes, all of these are available to read online at her website dresdencodak.com !! â¨
đ¤If you find yourself wanting to get a slice of that sweet cyberpunk pie, then we HIGHLY recommend you check out the pre-order for Senâs new Dark Science book! You can find it at dark-science-volume-1.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders đ¤
đYou can support Sen and her Very Cool and Very Epic art on Patreon.com/dresdencodak to ensure that she continues to create these comics, and for her to continue posting them for free (everyone say thank you)!! Plus, there are secrets if you support her on Patreon. What kinds of secrets? Weâll never tell.đ
đYou can also support her by checking out her wares on her TopatoCo storefront at topa.to/dresdencodak, and of COURSE you should read her comics at her website. You can find her on Bluesky, Tumblr, and Instagram all under the same username, @dresdencodak !!đ
Thank you again for everyone who came out to the Dark Science vol 1: City of Giants launch party! I am legitimately overwhelmed with the support and enthusiasm of my ding dang readers, and after I've regained my strength in the next 10,000 years or so, maybe I'll see you all again!
-Sen
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
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âIn September 1947 I disembarked in Haiti, for an eight-month stay, with eighteen motley pieces of luggage; seven of these consisted of 16-millimeter motion-picture equipment (three cameras, tripods, raw film stock, etc.), of which three were related to sound recording for a film, and three contained equipment for still photography. Among my papers I carried a certificate of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for âcreative work in the field of motion picturesâ (as distinguished from documentary film projects), which was a reward for the stubborn effort that had been involved in creating, producing and successfully distributing four previous films with purely private and limited means and in the face of a cinema tradition completely dominated by the commercial film industry on the one hand and the documentary film on the other. Also among my papers was a carefully conceived plan for a film in which Haitian dance, as purely a dance form, would be combined (in montage principle) with various non-Haitian elements. I recite all these facts because they are evidence of a concrete, defined film project undertaken by one who was acknowledged as a resolute and even stubbornly willful individual.â
This is how filmmaker, dancer, scholar, journalist, and poet Maya Deren opens her 1953 book Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti. Deren made multiple trips to the island between 1947 and 1954, shooting 18,000 feet of film. The 50-minute documentary film cobbled together from that 18,000 feetâan ethnographic film with a simplistic, didactic presentationâis puzzling. Why was Deren, best known for her avant-garde films, doing ethnographic work in the first place? And how could a poetic, experimental filmmaker like Deren create something so unimaginative? To answer the former, letâs rewind to the beginning of the decade to an especially formative period of Derenâs life.
Katherine Dunham and Eleanora Deren
At the beginning of the 1940s, Deren, then still known as Eleanora, was with the Katherine Dunham Company acting as secretary, editorial assistant, and companion to Dunham. After finishing a successful run on Broadway with Cabin in the Sky, the Company took the show on a North-American tour. All the while, the industrious Dunham was finishing up her dissertation on Haitian dance and rituals. Dunham had made her first excursion to Haiti shortly after the end of U.S. occupation, kicking off a life-long commitment to researching and practicing Haitian Voudoun. Eventually Dunham became both a Haitian citizen and a Mambo (Voudoun priestess).
Katherine Dunham was an artist, a dancer, and a scholar of ethnography. As Dunham elaborated in her Haiti memoir, Island Possessed, she discovered early that she didnât have to choose a single, discrete career and continued pursuing both her scholarly and creative loves. She found that these pursuits could/should be intertwinedâeach deeply influencing and enriching the practice of the other. Much of Dunhamâs ethnographic study centered around ritual and dance. The performances she conceived and developed for herself and her Company were inspired and informed by her research into Black-Atlantic cultures. Dunham was a master of synthesis, displaying a sympathetic rhythm to the eminently syncretic religion she studied/practiced.
from Divine Horsemen
In early 1941, Deren reached out to Dunham to offer her services. Though Deren was only 24, she had already begun developing a deep interest in ritual and dance working as a journalist and editorial assistant and had established connections with literary agents and publishers. Deren did a little bit of everything for and with Dunham, even collaborating on a few writing projects. For nine months, as the Company toured, they would work together closely, keeping hours that are exhausting even to read about. Decades later, when interviewed for the biography The Legend of Maya Deren, Dunham recalled their time together lasting two years rather than nine months.
Deren wrote âReligious Possession in Dancingâ (published in Educational Dance)based on second-hand sources in that same nine months. âReligious Possessionâ is limited by its lack of first-hand experience, but it shows early formulations of Derenâs later approachâan interdisciplinary psychological one that would normalize and humanize a cultural group and practice that was (and often still is) demonized and exoticized. Obviously, Deren wished to travel to Haiti to do first-hand research in this vein but WWII had reached Americaâs doorstep, and Deren was unable to arrange the trip.
In my view, this high-energy, productive period taught Deren as much about the nature of being a participant-observer in anthropological work as it did about being a polymath. A lesson that would soon pay off for Deren.
Becoming Maya Deren
Still with the Company, settled for the time in Los Angeles, Deren met Moravian-American cinematographer and filmmaker Alexander âSashaâ Hammid. The two married and Deren abruptly left the Company. Dunham dancer Talley Beatty (who would later appear in Derenâs film A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945)) recalled it being the âscandal of the seasonâ since Sasha had previously been seeing another member of the Company, Dorothy Gray.
The fallout of Derenâs unceremonious departure from the company suggests one factor in the under-representation of Dunham in the discourse on Deren. That is that the complex feelings tied to the womenâs estrangement may have deterred Deren from talking about Dunham directly while building up her public image as a filmmaker.[1] According to Hammid, communication between the two women became sporadic after Deren quit. Surprisingly, Deren doesnât even mention Dunham in Divine Horsemen![2]
from Divine Horsemen
Now settled in California, the next phase of Derenâs creative life began. Derenâs relationship with Hammid and their friendship with experimental filmmaker Oskar Fischinger became her entree into independent filmmaking.
Reflecting back on this period in 1954, Deren described it as:
â...like finally finding the glove that fits. When I was writing poetry, I had, constantly, to transcribe my essentially visual imagesâalways of movements, incidents, eventsâinto verbal form. In motion pictures, I no longer had to translate. Fortunately, this is the way my mind works, and I could move directly from my imagination onto film.â
With this new avenue for intellectual and creative exploration opened, Deren took on the moniker Maya. Though she may have re-christened herself, Derenâs films reflect a distinct continuity with the ideas that had already been simmering in her keen mind. In film, Deren found her ideal outlet for investigating ritual and movement, the constructions of illusions and reality, and how they manifest and intertwine across cultures. Filmmaking provided a means for devoted examination into how time and space are constructed or deconstructed by movement. Deren had, like Dunham, found a formula for synthesizing an integrated artistic and scholarly life.
That said, this synthesizing of ideas isnât just present in Derenâs filmmaking, but also in her writing on film and on Voudoun. Researching for this article led me to recognize this echo:
Derenâs interest in Haiti was not shaken while she built her reputation as an independent filmmaker. As Deren mentioned in the introduction quoted above, that very reputation is what landed her the Guggenheim fellowship the mid-1940s. The terms of the fellowship were based on the expectation of a film but, once Deren had settled into her research on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, those plans changed. As she put it in Divine Horsemen:
âI had begun as an artist, as one who would manipulate the elements of a reality into a work of art in the image of my creative integrity; I end by recording, as humbly and accurately as I can, the logics of a reality which had forced me to recognize its integrity, and to abandon my manipulations.â
The depth and richness of Derenâs experiences in Haiti and her practice of Voudoun there led her to set aside the planned film project. Deren opted to write a book instead with the encouragement of Joseph Campbell. Derenâs express purpose in Divine Horsemen was to humanize and de-exoticize Haiti, Haitians, and Voudoun. Deren set a goal to make Voudoun seem as common-sensical to her readers as it is to its practitioners. In my own estimation, Deren does a remarkable job of that, and Horsemen has remained influential.
from Divine Horsemen
Deren also arranged her sound recordings into a record, which was released around the same time as Horsemen. Even if an ethnographic monograph and an album of music were unexpected products of Derenâs Haitian work, they still represent the culmination of a decade of work in dance, journalism, ethnography, filmmaking, and poetry.
Taking all that into account, now youâre probably still wondering how we ended up with a movie. To answer that question, letâs jump forward by about two decades.
Teiji and Cherel Itoâs Divine Horsemen
Though Deren stated in Divine Horsemen that she had abandoned the idea of making a film, she carefully saved and notated all the film materials and sound recordings that she had made.
Years after Derenâs untimely death, her third husband, musician Teiji Ito, and his wife, film editor Cherel Ito, decided to take the footage, held by Anthology Film Archives, and edit it into a finished film. Using some of the material from Derenâs book, they constructed a rote ethnographic documentary with a âvoice-of-godâ narrator, which added simple context to the ceremonies and dances presented. They also added a soundtrack of music from the sound recordings made on Derenâs trips.
Divine Horsemen is sometimes presented as a Deren film, but, basically, it is as much, if not more, the Itosâ film. Unfortunately, this misrepresentation runs contrary to Derenâs attitudes toward filmmaking as an art, which places editing on equal terms with shooting. More importantly, it overshadows and obfuscates the compelling nature and humane motives of Derenâs work in the book.
The film does not attempt to recreate many meaningful aspects of Derenâs book, instead focusing on basic informational content. While the ceremonies shown are not overtly sensationalized, the pairing of âvoice-of-godâ narration with the images does little to make Voudoun or its practitioners seem less exotic or strange to a Western viewer. Additionally, thereâs little to no poetry to the narration, movement, or editing of the film to reflect the beauty, intellect, or humour of Haitian cultureâall aspects Deren emphasized in her writing.
One potentially significant point that carries over from the book is the use of the limited footage Deren shot of the Rara and Mardi Gras festivities to compare dancing for ritual purposes with dancing for amusement/performance. It suggests contrast but, the film does not execute it effectively. In fact, Iâve seen reactions to the film that fully misinterpret this point, indicating that the Itosâ presentation lacked clarity.
from Divine Horsemen
On the other hand, as someone who appreciates both Haitian cultural history and Maya Derenâs work, the fact that some of her footage is publicly available in any form is a gift. While I personally know that I can trust the work of Anthology Film Archives, who knows how or if any of that 18,000 feet of footage would have been made accessible if the Itosâ hadnât undertaken this project, ill-advised as it may have been. The footage of legitimate ceremonies[3] from this period is unique and rare. Glimmers of Derenâs insight come through in what she chose to film and how she chose to film it and she had an impressive amount of access.[4]
Derenâs films I typically recommend freely. But, with Divine Horsemen, it should come as no surprise that I donât recommend it without a healthy array of caveats. However, now that youâve read my rant, you have a modicum of context for how Horsemen fits (or doesnât) into Derenâs body of work. Perhaps you now have a better understanding of the influence of Katherine Dunham on Derenâs work, and it might be worth watching/re-watching Derenâs films with a more focused critical eye. For me, learning more about Dunham and reading her writing has certainly changed the way I look at Derenâs experimental films. The hybrid creative/scholarly chain of recitation is present, even though their relationship was estranged and their main modes of expression differed.
All of Derenâs work reflects a conscientious, continuous artistic and intellectual pursuitâif you know where to look for it.
from Divine Horsemen
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Additional content warning: Divine Horsemen includes footage of the use of animals in ritual practices including animal sacrifice. So, thereâs no shame is passing on watching this film if you canât stomach that.
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â Buy me a coffee! â
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Footnotes:
[1] Additionally, there is less documentation of Derenâs life before partnering with Hammid and becoming a filmmaker than after. And, itâs worth noting that many scholarly disciplines tend to favor highlighting the influence of white people (especially white men) on their subjects.
[2] Questioning Derenâs lack of citations to or mentions of Dunham led me to do a bit of digging. Complicated feelings aside, it may in part be due to the fact that Dunhamâs work was not published in monograph form in the U.S. until after Derenâs death. Dances of Haiti, Dunhamâs dissertation, had been published in Mexico in 1947 (before Horsemen) and in France in 1957 (after Horsemen). Also, Dunham does not cite/mention Deren in her work either, including her two memoirs. That said, this research ended up creating a new question: why Deren did cite Zora Neale Hurstonâs book on Haiti, Tell My Horse, which was published in 1938? Now, I havenât read the Hurston book yet. It could be simply a relevance issue. Once I get around to reading it, maybe Iâll come back and revise this note!
[3] In contrast to those performed for tourists.
[4] Note that Voudoun is generally not a closed or secretive practice, especially what happens around the potomitanâexcepting during periods of government suppression of course. Nowadays, you can catch practitioners (and occasionally Mambos and Houngans themselves) live streaming ceremonies. As I was researching this piece I watched a few and it was fascinating to see how much is recognizable based on writing and footage from seven decades ago. Of course plenty of things have changed, since Voudoun is a living, practical religion that doesnât shy away from matching the times in which it is practiced.
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Further Reading:
About Deren/Dunham:
The Legend of Maya Deren: A Documentary Biography, Vol. 1 by VèVè Clark, Millicent Hodson, and Catrina Neiman
âKatherine Dunham and Maya Deren on Ritual, Modernity, and the African Diasporaâ by Ramsay Burt
âCosplay the Classics: Maya Deren in Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)â (by me)
âThe Bodyâs Time: Film, Dance, and Ritual in Maya Derenâs Explorationsâ by Dorota Sajewska
By Deren/Dunham:
âReligious Possession in Dancingâ by Eleanora Deren (reprinted in Vol. 1, Part 1 of Legend of Maya Deren)
An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film by Maya Deren
Dances of Haiti by Katherine Dunham
Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti by Maya Deren
Island Possessed by Katherine Dunham
Essential Deren: Collected Writings on Film by Maya Deren