The Neo-Victorian Revolution Of Lady K. G. Silva

I think it is interesting that after my experience with the Gothic that I would move on in my college years onto reading a genre that was much less Romantic in nature. I think part of this change had to do with the fact that while at UCLA I was made to cram British literature and while I enjoy most of it now, at that moment I found it tedious, and needed some sort of escape. This escape came in the form of laser guns, androids, and post-apocalyptic worlds. I became a huge Science Fiction fan and would watch and read anything that had any futuristic elements to it. Since I was a child my dad had fermented in me a love for action movies, but most notably Science Fiction action movies like The Terminator and Aliens, to this day these two are on my top list of favorite films. I loved the ideas of time travel, as well as the contradictions that it created, but I was always very curious of the world that Kyle Reese claimed to come from, dominated by evil cyborgs who threatened to wipe out humanity. It was this idea that drove me to look at movies like The Matrix which also followed a similar idea and presented humanity as having to fight against something they had created. I admired the fact that these stories were metaphors for the self-destructive nature of man, and that they put into question our ability to handle the power that we have obtained in the 21st century. In a similar way Alien and its continuing series made me interested in space and the idea the we were not alone in this universe, but more terrifyingly so that there could be unknown things that could destroy us. The first movie in the Aliens franchise really explores the idea of fear of the

unknown, which to me is very
interesting because it represents the way in which man's nature is to expand and discover without measuring the consequences, but also tells us that at many times we are not prepared to handle the truth of the unknown. All these ideas began to interest me because I did not see them in the books and poems that I was reading at the time that I was studying at UCLA, or at least not in the same form. Nevertheless, to me these ideas didn't have any less importance than the ideas that authors like Shakespeare or Joyce explored and their writings, and in fact I found them more relevant to what was going on in the world than a lot of what Shakespeare had to say.

Later on in my college career I became fascinated by the graphic novel and by writers like Neal Stephenson, William Gibson, Warren Ellis and China Mieville. I came to realize that there were concepts that were not
being explored in my English Literature classes that merited attention
and I sought out to discover these themes and study them. Some of my favorite books now are Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, Perdido Street Station by China Mieville, and Transmetropolitan by Warren Ellis. While all this took place I met a friend who was on the UCLA fencing team along with me who introduced me into costuming. I don't actually remember how it came about but I expressed an interest in going with her to a convention she attended annually with her mother called Costume College, it was there among all the period costumes that I became interested in the idea of sewing. It was also around this time when I attend to my first ever San Diego Comic Con. The combination of the two made me realize that I could bring the two together. In Stephenson's The Diamond Age the world is a futuristic world where Neo-Victorianism rules and when I read this it made me want to live in a world like this. I really love to use my imagination and I love to bring these ideas to life because I like to make my life more colorful and extravagant, you only live once so why not? With these ideas in mind I went on to discover Steampunk, Dieselpunk and Clockpunk, which all fit into my aesthetic, and my love for combining the new with the old. Over a period of a couple of months I taught myself to sew with some help from my friend to bring to life some of my ideas of what a Steampunk outfit would be, it would soon become "my thing," and the costumes I would make for Costume College and San Diego Comic Con would all be in this style. Now that Steampunk is out of my system I look forward to making costumes from movies that I love which are in that vein of Science Fiction. While I love period costumes, just like I love the classics in literature, Science Fiction has maintained a special place in my heart and this is what I truly want to explore in my costuming and my writing. I hope to one day also venture into writing some Science Fiction stories, my hope as a writer is to be versatile, some day I will achieve this.

Tim Burton and the Gothic Allure

I like dark things, anyone who knows me well enough will immediately describe me as being Goth. I have over the years figured out that the meaning of Goth in the pop culture context and the high art context have actually begun to blend for me. I simultaneously love architecture with high arks, stained glass windows, and dark make-up, the feel of reading the Castle of Otranto, and the sound of Nine Inch Nails. To me the idea of Goth encompasses the old frightening castles, Gothic churches, and the paranormal creatures that might reside there, as well as a dark outlook on life, pessimistic and somewhat twisted. I identify with these ideas because I like the idea of living on the fringe, and I like the idea of the unexplainable and mysterious, but also because I've lived a very melancholy and lonely life. Being an only child in my opinion has more disadvantages than perks, at least this has been my experience. I think that part of the reason why I have secluded myself into a dark corner with nothing but a book and my imagination was because since I did not have a sibling to interact with I was not able to learn the proper social interactions of a playground. Over the years after being thrown to the wolves I came to the conclusion that in my case it was probably better to stay hidden away with my ghosts, cob webs and spiders, than to venture out into the complicated world outside of my books. I have always been fascinated by shadows and what could lurk behind them, and what better place to find them than in strange castles, tucked away behind forests and high mountains. Castles are behemoths filled with dark secrets that I wanted to figure out. Gothic fashion is interesting to me because I see it in a way a sort of dress up that sucks you into a fantastical world where vampires, werewolves, and ghosts dwell. I have submerge myself in this Gothic culture in many different senses and it has had an affect on my writing, and the kind of stories I write. However, my love of Gothic culture did not begin with books, but with with Tim Burton.

When I was young I fell in love with Tim Burton's rendition of Batman and his movie Edward Scissorhands. Batman from the cartoons had always been a dark melancholy figure who fought for justice and as someone who was often picked on at school I appreciated what he did, and wished I could do it myself. Tim Burton glamorized Batman even more for me by bringing his dark world to life, a world that was caught between the forties and the modern day. I wanted to live in this world where the old and the new merged, where anything seemed possible. I think that the main attraction for me in Tim Burton films was that he could make me believe that anything could be possible in the world. Despite the fact that his worlds looked cartoonish, even to the special effects standards of his day, his ideas and his characters seemed real, and I could believe in them because I could believe in their stories. It would be difficult to deny that Johnny Depp was probably
my first actor crush as a child. His performance as Edward Scissorhands moved me to the point of tears
because I felt the sadness of the young man he portrayed, who had been left incomplete and abandoned without the love of his creator/father. I didn't ever feel like I lacked love because my parents have always been very nurturing, but I did many times feel the same as he did, as if I had come down from my dark castle to a world I didn't quite understand, where people wanted to use me for their own ends, and where I would only be a piece of entertainment until the novelty of meeting me passed. Tim Burton just seemed to speak to me in my formative years. I fell in love with so many of his characters. For a very long time I dreamed of being Lydia, Winona Ryder's character in Beetlejuice, and I would have to say that it was thanks to characters like her that I began to build my own worlds in my head. From my early childhood I liked the idea of using my imagination and so I created imagery friends with backgrounds and stories to play with. When I was a little girl I could not live in Lydia's dark world, but as I got older I began to put down stories on paper, and to change my attire as well. I began to explore the meaning of the word Goth and became familiar with all its uses and meanings, and took what I could and made it my own.

I always had my nose stuck in a book but I was not familiar with the works of writers like Charlotte Bronte, or Bram Stoker. I soon widened my research of the Gothic to include literature and found Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, as well as those previously mentioned, and from then on I would move on to things like the dark fantasy novels, such as The Tithe by Holly Black, and the tales of Clive Barker. I've never written a ghost story, or a mystery of any sort, but my stories often have a sense of melancholy, and many of my early stories end with tragedy and death. The Gothic mystery of Northanger Abbey  and the "absurdist" worlds of Tim Burton have filled my imagination and to this day they inspire me. One of my goals is to begin to write literature that involves that eerie feel that I get from reading those old Gothic classics, but I would also like to write more modern stories that involved gore, and blood, and vampires, trying to near the pop culture ideal of what Gothic is today. Nevertheless, my ultimate goal is to somehow find the middle ground in writing, like I have in my life style, to write a modern tale of the Gothic that encompasses all the elements of the early Gothic novel, and the quirky creepiness of a Tim Burton film.

"I don't want to play Soccer dad"

I am pretty convinced that when I was born my father was a bit disappointed to discover that I was a girl. My father has been playing soccer for most of his life, and even now at fifty-two he continues to play soccer competitively on various teams. I'm very proud of him, but soccer has been somewhat of a shadow in my life because I refused to be part of this tradition with him. It was not because I was a girl and I found soccer masculine, but because I preferred more Romantic sports. What I mean by that, are sports like archery, fencing, horseback riding, martial arts, anything that had a heroic sort of element to it, that was what I wanted to do. Soccer to me was too mundane and everyday, it did not inspire my imagination and therefore I could not partake in it with as much fervor as my dad did. My interest in these type of activities came from all the fairy tales and heroic stories of knights that I read. 

I had a favorite book, which to this day I still possess, it was already quite old when I got to it, and some of the pages were only loosely hanging onto the binding, but I loved the stories in my fairy tale book. This book was not a book put out by Disney, or by any big author, and it had many fairy tales that had not been made into big movies and it was part of the reason I enjoyed it so much. My favorite stories were always the ones that involved a young boy going off into the woods only to emerge from them a brave young man. In these stories the boys always had to use their cunning to fight off giants, find the way back home, or find treasure, and on the way they had to learn all sorts of handy skills. Many of these young men were hunters and knew
how to use a bow and arrow, and the idea of hunting in the woods fascinated me. However, what always got my attention, especially after seeing movies like El Zorro, or Hook, was sword fighting.  Wielding a sword to me when I was six years old was the coolest thing  I had ever seen, and all I knew was that I wanted to do that too. I still remember having a wide assortment of plastic swords at my disposal when I was a child, and begging my dad to play with me because none of the kids that were my friends were interested in those sorts of games. As I got older my dreams of becoming a swordsman vanished and were put at the back of mind to be taken over by other interests, but I never forgot how much I loved to watch, and read about heroic young men who took on the world with nothing but their horse and their sword. It was not until I was in high school when I was given the opportunity to learn how to fight with swords.


My biology teacher happened to be a fencer in college and when he started out at our school he began a small fencing club. By the time that I had joined, my sophomore year of high school, he had had the club for about 5 or 6 years, with various fencers going on to compete in college. I dedicated all of my free time into the sport and competed in all and every event that I could. I submerged myself in the sport completely. Finally when I was at the end of my junior year in high school my teacher told me he had exhausted all he could teach me and that I had to seek out someone more experienced if I meant to do fencing competitively for years to come. Fencing had taken over my life, to the point where my entire social circle changed,

That's me on the right!! Fencing off with someone from UC Irvine.

and long friendships were broken and replaced. Not many people could understand my fascination with fencing, or why I spent so much time practicing and competing. I then joined one of the biggest clubs in Southern California, Los Angeles International Fencing Center, and was coached by top level fencers, which helped me a lot to sharpen the skills I had learned in that hallway at school where fencing practices were held. I became the captain of my team in high school, and by the end of my last year I was able to take my team to first place in the high school league which had not happened in a very long time. To this day my old coach reminds me that it was the best year he ever had in the club. Now that I am older I don't compete as much because it has become difficult for me to manage the pressure of competition, but I continue to love fencing, and I love to practice and teach people how to fence. I help out and coach at UCLA, where I also fenced on the team for four years, and I enjoy teaching new comers because I want to try and make them feel the same excitement I feel when I think about fencing. Despite the fact that I did not play soccer, my dad has forgiven me, and shares my enthusiasm for fencing. He loves to watch me fence, and cheers me on at every competition. I think even though he might've been disappointed in the beginning that I did not play soccer with him, he is very proud of me and all that I've achieved in my sport. He eggs me on everyday to practice and to keep learning all I can so I can fulfill my childhood dream of becoming a sword master. 

My Beginnings

         HI! This is my first post here on my blog. I have decided that I am going to focus my blog on how literature and movies have affected my interests today. I read a lot as a child and I think the stories that I read really shaped the view of the world that I have now. I lived in a "magical fairy tale kingdom" for a lot of my life as a kid and as an adult it has evolved in me seeking more Romantic aspects in my life. One of these in my interests in sports that are not common, or everyday, like fencing and archery. As I got older and became a pre-teen I geared my interests more into movies but they were always movies that kept in a fantasy world. Some of the movies that were my favorite as a child are movies like Beetlejuice, Batman and Edward Scissorhands. These movies had a Gothic aesthetic to them which also had to do with my love of darker fairy tales and books like Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. When I became a teenager the Gothic aesthetic completely took over my life, but as I got older it took a darker tone and instead of being interested in ghosts and vampires I became interested in Science Fiction and the questions that sci-fi books and movies asked about humanity. Being surrounded by fantasy worlds created in me the desire to bring them to live in my own world which evolved into a want to create my own stories on paper, but also by trying to reproduce fantasy and period costumes.

         Today I have built my life around my favorite imaginary worlds and while I like to think that I don't have head in the clouds all the time, I at least have the certainty that my inner child lives and thrives within me happily. In my blog I will like to explore some of the more significant works of literature and film that have really inspired me through out my life beginning from childhood until now.