dysconymph

[dysconymph]

The Boy and the Heron - Review

There’s a kind of joyous expectation many of us feel towards watching any new Hayao Miyazaki film. A nostalgia for those fairy-tale narratives abound with child-like wonder. This is what I was gearing up for when I went to see The Boy and the Heron - a box of tissues ready to hand. The beginning of the film sets you up perfectly for this. Some of the most beautiful animation pulls at the heartstrings as we see a young boy, our Protagonist Mahito, facing the death of his mother: the rough, drawn out style of the artwork heightens Mahito’s desperation as he runs through crowded Tokyo streets, emphasising the chaos and confusion around him. Moving to the countryside during the second world war, meeting his father’s new wife, the pace of the film drops dramatically. We get a languid, sensual, slow cinema marking the boy’s grief. Moreover, the introduction of the titular heron is done with such mythic grace that one is immediately spell bound by the power and horror of it.

Miyazaki films famously lean into the dual nature of traditional childhood fairy tales. Being at once moving and gentle whilst also leaning into darker topics: death, loneliness, fear, environmental collapse. Despite this common feature, this new Miyazaki film seems to be more mature in pace and style, darker even. The voice of the Heron aping Mahito’s mother, taunting him, is so horrifying I was shaken out of my initial ‘ghibli giddiness’ - falling deeper and deeper into the promise of this new twisted fantasy. However, the rest of the film fails to live up to this promise. 

In a typical hero’s journey, Mahito falls into a fantastical world (the afterlife? The spirit-world? The psyche? Who knows), saturated with a large cast of mind-bending characters. However, none of them are particularly well developed, if at all, and as a result it’s hard to find any emotional claim or hook to the narrative. In other ghibli films, the twisting, oneiric storylines offer us a close examination of the main characters’ fears and anxieties (Spirited Away); their sense of duties (Princess Mononoke); their pleasures (Ponyo) etc. However, in The Boy and the Heron, characters come and go with a light hand, scraping the surface just enough to keep the bizarre story going. Half way through the movie I couldn’t even keep up with what was meant to be going on, what was necessary to the plot and most importantly what was at stake. 

To some degree, in hindsight, this kind of light-handed, floating quality to the film makes sense to the themes of grief and loss. It feels almost as if Miyazaki himself was in some kind of lethargic slumber whilst making the film - unable to connect and ultimately commit to the verisimilitude of the fantasy world he has built. The Boy and the Heron becomes a series of beautifully crafted shots that never fully hit. Events pass the characters by with such little emotional investment that even the climax feels rushed and uncared for. As mentioned, maybe this is the point. The film doesn’t give us any revelation or catharsis, perhaps the most accurate depiction of how we move on from grief, but it also comes off as under-developped and inchoate. You’re constantly waiting for the penny to drop: for the world to fully invite you in and leave you wondering in that ghibli-esque state of awe. 

At the end of the day, a Miyazaki film will always be a masterpiece - even at its worst it rises above the rest. However, I wonder if I’m being dense, if maybe my inability to connect says more about me than the film, if maybe I set myself up to fail by expecting something more. But there was something in the beginning of the film: a dark, horrific splendour, one that I wish had been more consistent in the rest of the film.  

[dysconymph]

Happy Easter: I looked into the void, unfiltered.

Happy Easter: I looked into the void, unfiltered. 

I am not well versed in psychoanalysis, the only thing I know about it is from marginal readings and interactions. But I have heard of this whole lack bollocks and I can’t believe I’ve just experienced it head on. I’ve looked into the belly of the beast and felt, what I’ve felt many times over, a feeling with a clarity never before given to me. What the fuck am I meant to do with this realisation.

I feel more so than ever before the power of that existential, psychological dread. The feeling of lack or void as mentioned in Freudian analysis that haunts and lingers in the body. The veil of fantasy was ripped away, the veil ripped from my eyes and I had to deal with the ‘the hole’. I realised my initial protective act was to eat - my age old friend. It was my initial, unconscious response to the feeling of nothingness. Not just nothingness, but the shock of its appearance. For the void disappears in daily life. Removed from our conscious experience by work, objects, others, fantasies. There are profound moments when it dys-appearance re-appears in horrifying starkness: the truth and reality of the nothingness shows up unbearable and heavy. It is either attended to unconsciously as mentioned above: with work or specific actions. Here the unconscious becomes conscious but non conscious again in the form of habits we don’t even know we’ve built. But the most heart breaking and terrifying question to come out of this is ‘What do I do, in the face of the existential burden, if not fill the gap with whatever crutch I have?’ If it’s not alcohol or cigarettes or food it will be work, or people or something else. What am I meant to do when the table cloth has been removed and we see the world and our experience within it for what it is? What Heidegger would call the anxiety of Dasein. Am I meant to sit in it, learn to live with the discomfort? Befriend the nothing and hope that life becomes better from this stance. Is it just about replacing one bad habit with another habit you deem more productive or less malfunctioned. Instead of eating, smoking or drinking I replace these acts with work. Perhaps I can re-wire myself to be the anxious worker after all. 

Maybe I should start from the beginning. I know now the stark reality of this moment which I’ve realised I’ve experienced over and over again. Only now did I look directly into the eyes of the beast. But where did it come from. It came from the fantasy of the bourgeois family myth - that well observed and cliched Freudian paradigm. It’s Easter Sunday, we are out for family dinner. We know there will be drama and tension but it’s a forced self reflection on these things that add to the fantasy - a faux and imagined sense of control over the uncontrollable feelings. “Don’t worry,” we say, “I know it’s going to be bad, in fact, I will even make comedy and humour out of these experiences so as to acquiesce or temper the effects of these bad feelings, these uncomfortable moments.” But there are slippery, non-conscious realms that even we in all our modern, self-reflective irony cannot defend against. I’m having to take photographs of myself because my mother wants to sign me up for a modelling agency. I’m officially placed in the nexus of my greatest sense of self - the desire to be beautiful, attractive, seen and physically appreciated and my over-whelming fear of rejection - my inability to reach this actualisation. 

(Side note, I want to buy some heets, so I can smoke. However, I’m worried if I smoke I will fill up the gap of this moment and close whatever realisation I’ve had. I won’t be able to be self-reflexive. The moment now will go, I’ve healed whatever truth, whatever dys-appearance of it has occurred and we are firmly back in the fantasy. I’m holding off from this cigarette, I’m staring at it as I write. Keep writing, this is the work. That positive addiction we are trying to accumulate - produce, produce, produce. Don’t stop! The moment you stop you’ll get lazy and bored and you’ll never pick it up again. Don’t forget the lack. The lack, the lack. That’s what started this whole thing. What a wonderful experience to have! It was the sublime beauty and awe and fear all rolled into one. You’re nearly there, there’s nearly some catharsis. You feel better don’t you in your writing. Come on, keep going! You’re nearly home, don’t get distracted, don’t stop. You’ve got your cigarette as reward.)

I had started to feel better about my body. Going to Athens and eating good in the place that started it all. The western ideals of beauty. Granted these ideals have changed but still the driving principle remains. However, this process of looking at the photographs my mother has taken of me to upload to one of the biggest modelling agencies in the world has produced a downward spiral of anxiety and fear and self hatred that has led to the void. It’s not just that though. I feel stupid and ridiculous, foolish for the fact that some part of me is excited or turned on by the possibility of the life as a model - foolish by the fact that I see these photos and hate how I look. I am torn between reality and fantasy. My disordered eating was nothing but another attempt to fill the void that at once helped but was also unable to assuage the initial problem. 

Think again of the cut as described by Eva Hayward. it is at once ecstatic, liberating and freeing whilst also violent, harmful and painful. I got somewhere. I was finally skinny, unattractively so, but that didn’t matter. Even though part of me felt like I had entered the world of beauty accepted by the mainstream, by hegemonic standards, I knew my pass was only based on a very stupid and small action - one that I would have to hold onto for dear life as my only life line into this space. If I let slip, then bang! I would be ugly again and whilst I’d felt disgusting and repulsive my entire life, once I’d tasted from the fruit of that obscene and cruel world of beauty, going back would feel even more destructive, even worse. I wouldn’t be able to live with it, to live with myself. There is no moral ground in healing or dealing with this ultimate existential dread. Ethics and morals is the wise man’s foolish game. There is no such thing has a given good. The cut it not good. Just a necessary act of painful liberation. But liberation in this sense, because it is painful, is not necessarily a 'good'. There is no value to it. In the same way you move your leg experiencing cramp to be free of it's restraint and burden. To move the cramped leg hurts just as much - only this time with the potential of freedom. None of this can be held in regard to a value judgment. There is nothing good or bad (in the ethical not the materialist sense) about starvation. There is only it's immediate context - the desires and needs form which it arises.

(Oh no I’ve bumped into Lily in the living room, we are going to have to talk -  lock yourself in the toilet to finish the flow before you fill the void again. We enjoy the void when we play with it. She’s actually quite a fun place to hang out when you lean in - or lean out through writing.) 

There’s no conclusion to this. The void cannot be spoken about clearly. The only effects are the writing around it I can attempt to produce. I cannot speak to that initial horror. I guess I should at least make some effort to close the chapter. To understand what happened. Everything in my body, my psyche, is trying to stop me from cornering it off, facing it again dead in the eye. To analyse it head on. Alas, I shall try. I had to look at these fucking pictures. I was so comfortable in the little life that had been given to me, built around me. As aforementioned I could control whatever tension might have manifest through quibs, faux martyrdom, and the dramatisation of the event: “oh god nan’s on one!” Blah, blah, blah. But now there was nothing to hold this up. I couldn’t hide anymore. My sister had gone, I was faced with my mother and her new project that consisted of placing my body (a body I have scrutinised for ever but never more so than the last couple of years) at the centre of not only a supposed limelight but my own conscious. I had to look at those fucking pictures and understand what it meant, no what I was “saying” when uploading it to that website. I was claiming a space I desperately wanted (why the past tense, I still want it) but know I can materially never have. And there was nothing. Nothing I could do. The safety net was gone. There was no comfort, no lies, fantasies, narratives. Nothing but the bad feelings. The reality of my own insecurities and inabilities in relation to the wide world. I was faced with the very gap between my fantasy and my reality. That’s the true lack. The unrequited object of desire, the gap between fantasy and reality. I don’t know what’s more embarrassing: the reality of the event or the coming to terms and realisation of the fundamentals of fucking psychoanalysis. 

It’s easy to say it’s all bollocks. And to some degree it is. I don’t fuck with that whole Oedipal bullshit or that mirror stage farce. But Freud wasn’t wrong about that intrinsic moment. The initial fear of having nothing and worse not knowing what to do with it but fill it up. Is this what all that mumbo jumbo, hocus pocus, self-love stuff is all about. Trying to fill the void in the healthiest way possible. If so, I think my cigarettes are just as valid thank you very much. Just as worthy of a lie as your deep breathing exercises, because at the moment, nothing feels like it can really compete against that nothingness. 

In writing about the nothingness I feel it’s pull and force just as strong. What was the point of this diatribe. Who knows. I don’t think it’s answered anything profound. If anything, it’s made me look like a fool. And that’s the problem, to write from existential dread is to see its endless sea and terrain. It touches everything. All I can say is happy Easter, I’ve looked into the hole, unfiltered. I’ve felt its presence as non presence and understood exactly what it was for the first time in my life. I’ve felt my initial response to its creeping appearance and have nothing cathartic in the end but this silly post. This silly text. I spent the rest of the night drinking, smoking, eating - doing all the things my body needed to heal from the threat of those images. The threat of my mother's burden. Perhaps that’s all we have, crutches. But my god, maybe we should just enjoy them for what they are - soggy bits of paper mâchée to fill up the gaps when they arrive, blowing a hole through the walls. 

[dysconymph]

\\ Saul Nash is a London fashion designer and choreographer who merges his two passions in futurist menswear. Working mainly in the field of athleisure, Saul Nash creates a diverse space that puts the power of movement at the forefront. Unlike a lot of other avant-garde fashion, Nash designs clothes that works for the wearer without sacrificing any of the excitement or impact seen in other couture designers.

Nash’s designs feel fully futuristic, moving towards a world that is inclusive and that prioritises freedom and the body’s potential. Looking like something you would see in a science fiction film, Nash utilises bold curved lines, usually in the form of zips, to contour the wearer’s body highlighting it as fluid both in physical movement and in identity. This is what feels most powerful about Nash’s designs: the interwoven narrative of the body’s constant ability to break beyond the static paralleled in the human’s possibility for ever shifting identities and desires. His design’s, which not only accentuate but implore the body’s movement, licence the wearer into a new state of being - one of constant change and metamorphoses and most of all joy.

This joy is felt in the media that follows from his designs - a film for Playcase (directed by FKA Twigs) showcasing their new 2022 collection features a series of dancers performing in Nash’s design in a sparse and industrial background. bare concrete overlaid with coloured lights compliment the bold structures of Nash’s silhouettes and the movement of the dancers, much like the bold lines and zips, fills these sparse spaces, creating a setting full of vigour, potential and passion. The entire project is sleek and soulful all at the same time. It projects the ecstatic and transcendental power of the body and fashion - how the materiality of both can create new spaces and bring forth imagined futures.\\

The Range

Images of S/S runway taken from Saul Nash Website. Source: https://www.saulnash.co.uk/ss22

Brutalism’s use of concrete was part of the movements post-war desire to rebuild a world that was egalitarian and free. The movement saw in the boldness of concrete and its relatively cost effective production endless possibilities for shared social spaces. This egalitarian desire is something that is equally felt in Nash’s work. The use of bold grey silhouettes mirror the brutalists use of concrete particularly in the context in which Nash’s designs are shown. In the promotional videos for his designs we see queer love and desire at the forefront of the stories his designs seek to illustrate and embolden. The grey concrete silhouettes highlight a bold new vision for queer futurity - a liberatory promise.

In this way, I want the space to be reminiscent of brutalist architecture but this time with a twist (or a curve). A new-brutalism that, inspired by the curvature of Nash’s details, break apart the rigidity that concrete can bring harkening back to concrete's potential for flow. The space should mirror the socio-political urge of being bold in ones desire and space-making whilst also being sensitive that these identities are not static but ever in flux - a sensitivity to movement.

Concept idea for front of store - there will be a triptych of these curved landscape prints each with a sculpture mannequin presenting the top designs.

[dysconymph]

Somerset House - Polysonic Worlds: Ritual and Space-Making.

Preface: This is an experiment. Not really a review. Not really an essay. ---- More of a bad attempt at trying to think of art and art spaces differently.

I was wasted. I thought I was good when I left the pub but apparently not. The travel to Somerset House had apparently staved off most of the effects of alcohol and it was only when I sat down in the court yard for a quick breather that it came rushing in. It was a nice drunk. I felt light and open to the world around me. Perfect, I thought, for whatever I was about to witness. 

I made my way into the New Wing of the building, realising I had no real understanding of what I was about to join. Was it a talk, a performance, a more traditional gallery space? I joined a queue outside the River Room and a man came up behind me. “Is this the queue for the Polysonic Worlds exhibition?” He asked. “I think so” I replied. I admitted I had just done the typical British thing of seeing a queue and joining it. He was cute and, as I later discovered, also funny. I fell back on old tricks of self deprecation and confessed I wasn’t really sure “what was going on.”

Icon for Alice Bucknell's New Mystics Project which brings together artists and thinkers to collaborate on how new technology and myth-making can be brought together. Source: https://alicebucknell.com/projects/new-mystics-2021

We entered the room which looked like an abandoned manor house, the whole wing did. It was bare with layers of paint stripped from the walls. It looked like something out of a gothic novel and I was half expecting the lord of the house to enter in a flight of passion. The room was split up by archways. I walked through one to where folded seats where set up, cushions were strewn across the floor and at the front was a DJ deck. The smell of incense immediately hit me. On the whitewashed wall behind the deck a video-game animation was projected. It looked like the waiting room of a sci-fi/fantasy RPG. It showed a Grecian temple, lit up with neon lights that bordered it and was set against the backdrop of sprawling mountains and forests. In the foreground was a camp fire, its flickering flames was the only movement. In my memory I can’t remember whether sound was already present, I wish I could. We sat and waited, like eager initiates to the game, to the ritual. 

Curator Alice Bucknell introduced the scene. She described the performance as part of a series on World-Building and with this event focusing on the potential of sound to make and re-make worlds. She suggested, much like thinkers such as Jean-Luc Nancy and Luce Irigaray, that sound had the potential to renegotiate forms of knowledge which have historically been predicated on the visual: What kind of worlds, bodies and spaces can we inhabit by experimenting with sound? Bucknell also mentioned that the New Worlds projects touched on ideas of ritual and mythologies (the temple and the fire still hovering over us being a clear allusion). I felt myself alight with curiosity. These were all questions and areas of exploration that have interested me but have time and again evaded any clear or coherent understanding. My drunken stupor felt like it was transforming from an inconvenience to a handy tool to aid in whatever journey we were about to depart on. I fear this was not quite true, at least not in the obvious sense.

Bucknell handed the stage over to Lawrence Lek, the creator of the projection we were watching and master of ceremonies for our sonic voyage. Music began as he played with the deck and the projection moved into an Escher like animation that flowed between several video-game landscapes - think Final Fantasy or God of War vibes. I noticed that Lawrence was holding an xbox controller and pushing the joysticks, whether it was to guide the images on the screen or the music was not clear. The music was ambient and meditative and I felt it work its way over my body. My eyes stayed closed a little longer with every blink moving between the transient state between wake and sleep. Every time I came to the screen presented new spaces. Digital animations overlapping with what seemed to be real life footage following the many hallways of the New Wing we were in: bringing together the emergent, hopeful and potential worlds of the future with the present. I worried that my sleepiness meant I wasn’t able to fully grasp the experience, that I couldn’t truly examine the possibilities that the performance was keen to explore. In hindsight, it feels more fitting that I was in such a state. What new or subaltern kinds of knowledge that sound supposedly offers was I able to grasp? What kind of ritual, somatic fervour had I entered? I awoke again to see an animated fox on the wall, traipsing the landscape. A voice-over of a woman speaking another language began. Translations of her speech appeared across the film. It was something about being a guide. Afterwards, during the Q&A, Lawrence discussed the influence of video-game guides on his piece: the tools that games use to lead you across a space or a narrative. He also spoke of the different ways this can occur, whether in the form of an omniscient voice or more subtly as an imbedded character in the story. Despite being a voice-over, the latter felt more akin to the performance. The music, script and visuals were not imposing forces but co-authors of the journey, producing a space whereby the viewer and the performance co-existed and moved together. 

Still from Lawrence's film Nepenthe which was projected on the screen during his set. Taken from the Polysonic World's page on the Somerset House wesbite. Source: https://www.somersethouse.org.uk/whats-on/new-worlds-polysonic-worlds

After Lawrence’s set finished, we moved through another archway into the adjoining room. The guy I met commented on the use of superimposition between digital art and ‘real’ film as summing up the feeling of multiplicity when in that oneiric half-wake state. That feeling when you don’t have a clear sense of time or space. I couldn’t help but laugh at the appropriateness to my current state. The smell of incense was stronger in the second room. Another screen was projected on the wall. Here, we were introduced to Evan Ifekoya whose art examined the healing power of sound. A film began showing a cosmic spiral of amber swirls whilst a narrator introduced the work. The project followed an online meditation workshop that focused on the power of breath. We saw snapshots of the meeting interspersed with a video of a dancer: two forms of ritual. My memory becomes even hazier. I did not feel as if I was watching separate performances/artworks but that I was continuing on a winding dream where disparate elements all merged together. The imagery of Evan’s work felt a lot more precise - that it had more agency and direction in its meaning and that it held more authority in its intermediality. The film stopped and immediately the next piece began. I don’t know whether there was a visual element as I gave up fighting and kept my eyes closed. I followed the narrators voice as it discussed the transformative effects that the frequency 528Hz had on the body, with scientific evidence showing it could effect the body on a cellular level. I let the sounds wash over me and push me further into my delirium. I had moved from watching a screen on the wall to letting the sound weave pictures of ambient light against my closed eyelids. The guides had done their job, the ritual was in process, I was building new worlds but this time from somewhere inside. The narrator nudged us to hum along with them, I wasn’t sure if this was a genuine call to action until, with trepidation, those around me begun to hum along. Suddenly the audience grew in confidence. I felt an immediate sense of joy at the collaboration even though I did not participate myself - at least not in the same way. Where others hummed and added to the chorus, I continued to paint pictures. A sharing of intermedial labour. I awoke again and felt incredibly calm. After the Q&A, the guy and I got up and left. We discussed the pieces briefly and joked how Lawrence’s psychedelic use of the New Wing made our exit feel slightly unreal, that would find ourselves trapped in the never ending hall like something out of Inception, never really aware of where or when we were. We said goodbye and parted ways. I left the New Wing and the old world returned to me, slightly more vibrant than before.