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depressedoverdrawings · 5 years ago

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Can you hear the tumult of our youth?

KazeKi is the first romance I’ve ever enjoyed, or rather, that I emotionally connected with, as “enjoy” is a funny word choice for a work that made me feel so miserable. Personally, I’ve never enjoyed media that focuses on relationships and love, were they movies, TV, or literature.

But after I discovered KazeKi, I found myself drawn to it, almost involuntarily so. It was as if a spell had been cast. I suppose what superficially drew me in, at first, was the art. It had the charm of retro manga (I absolutely love retro manga/anime looks, IMO they have so much more character than most modern anime and manga), the nostalgic elegance of the idealized upper-class XIX century, and the unrelenting beauty and cuteness of all the boys.

It was mildly surreal and highly entertaining to witness the seed of so many shounen-ai visual tropes: The flower motifs, the flowery poetry, the impossibly pretty boys in dramatic embraces and breathy kisses, the aggressive frenchness of it all. Even it was shocking to me how these elements, instead of striking me as the tired, sappy tropes I saw them as, were now all genuine and beautiful, somehow. Even those silly sparkles around pretty boys seemed fitting. I realized these weren’t tropes back then, but elements of a sincere artistc vision. However, while the art was mesmerizing to me, I came to realize that what drew me in deeper, and kept me anchored to KazeKi, were the themes explored, and the character-based drama, the very stuff I had always avoided.

Without getting far too personal about it, Kaze to Ki no Uta was the first romance that struck something within me, somewhere personal. Now, I certainly have never faced trauma and pain anywhere near to what poor Gilbert and Serge face in their absurdly depressing story, but I definitely wouldn’t call myself emotionally and sexually resolved and healthy, and once upon a time I was a closeted boy in a catholic school, so I guess there’s space for a little bit of self-identification. My coping mechanism to my personal woes had always been to just bottle them up and distract myself with entertainment and art. And that was exactly what I was doing, browsing music on YouTube, when I stumbled upon the KazeKi OVA’s soundtrack.

I found myself listening to this gorgeous arrangement of a Chopin piece, and thought to myself, staring at the angelic figure looking back at me, across the screen: “Gee whilikers, that’s sure is a pretty drawing of a pretty girl”. Then, after reading the comments, I found out that was a boy. As much as the “draw a girl, call it a boy” school of drawing pretty boys makes me groan, I could still feel it, that first hook of interest, stabbing me. As the slideshow enticed me with pictures of Keiko Takemiya’s gorgeous art, I found myself enamoured by it. It was a particular drawing that made KazeKi finally snatch me: that same boy, lounging angelically on some sort of abstract architectural design; in the background, a neoclassical vase flanked by two neoclassical girls, and, above and below, this stunningly beautiful vegetation. So much care, skill, and good taste, concentrated in just one image! I’d have it as a poster, if I could. So, I googled “Kaze to Ki no Uta”, unwittingly throwing myself in a rabbit hole I could not have prepared myself for. Trying to read it was in itself a journey, but, to sum it up: I managed to read it about as well as one can, if they don’t speak japanese and have no access to the spanish and italian translations.

It had been years since I had started feeling emotionally numb. My most extreme displays of emotion came in the form of quiet, teary eyes, reserved for those rare, impactful pieces of art, and those rarer moments of despair-inducing introspection that I couldn’t manage to suppress, but even those lasted little, as I fought to recover my composure. By the end of Kaze to Ki no Uta, I was a sobbing wreck, doing my best (and failing) to contain my ugly crying. Ugly crying, for god’s sake. I was ugly crying, actually sobbing like a kid, because of an yaoi manga. Crying in the shower, even! What kind of weeb had I degenerated into? It hurt. It deeply hurt, in a way I hadn’t been made to hurt in a long, long while. KazeKi had impacted me to the point that I wasn’t just sad, I was scared too, as the waterfall of emotion opened the path for that deeper, personal darkness to come out. And it did.

Now, I admit I’d been a little bit more emotionally fragile than usual right before I read it, due to the effects of the quarantine and the previous consumption of a highly depressing piece of media: Les Amitiés Particulières, which is probably even more depressing than KazeKi as it deals with a much more grounded homophobia-induced tragedy based in real life. Somehow, it didn’t impact me as much as KazeKi, however. Also, it was definitely what influenced my personal YouTube algorithm to recommend me the KazeKi soundtrack, so I wouldn’t know of KazeKi if it weren’t for Amitiés. But even then, it felt unnatural to, well, feel so much. I hadn’t felt this invested in and attached to fictional characters ever since I was a little kid, too young to realize those people in the TV weren’t real. In the following couple of weeks, I was crying over these boys, spending whole days feeling like trash, feeling mild anxiety spikes whenever I remembered about KazeKi, having (even more) difficulty falling asleep, and utterly failing to avoid thinking about my deep-seated intimate issues, all because of these dumb, pretty anime boys. Not even my trusty prayer of “they’re not real people, stop being stupid” worked. In an attempt to stop wallowing in this shounen-ai hell, I decided to consume a whole lot of escapist media while I deliberately avoided any activity related to KazeKi, be it reading the manga, listening to the OVA’s soundtrack, looking at fanart, or even just thinking about it. It “worked” for a month or so, but now I’m back here, wallowing in KazeKi’s painful beauty again, stalking the other seven people in the western world that seem to care about KazeKi, and distilling my thoughts in this bizarre textwall, in an attempt to work it out. If you’re one of those seven people, please don’t refrain from talking to me, if you feel like it! I’ve had just one opportunity to have a conversation about KazeKi, and it was in YouTube comments, for heaven’s sake. I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m this afflicted by KazeKi due to its unrelenting, merciless, cruel beauty. Everything about it is presented in this assembly of pure beauty and lost perfection, this painful nostalgia that is present in its aesthetics of an idealized Europe which lives only in its surviving art, that is present in the story which ultimately tells us of the loss of love, and is present in the fact that the whole story is a broken man’s reverie about the past. Tragedy might make me sad, but tragedy with beauty will destroy me. Bittersweetness is just so more cruel than bitterness. And it was this masterpiece of sadistic bittersweetness that permanently broke something in how I deal with my emotions. Kaze to Ki no Uta touched me deeply, to the point of leaving a permanent impression, I’m afraid. I can count in one hand the pieces of art that have punched my soul in the face like KazeKi did. I am honestly flabbergasted over the effect it had over me. At first I felt embarrassed over being emotionally obliterated by a freaking shounen-ai, but I’ve since come to the conclusion that KazeKi is a work of art, a genuine, sincere work of art, deserving of the title. Now I just hope I’m not alone in being emotionally obliterated by this freaking shounen-ai. After everything they went through, the personal fights, the shaky development of their relationship, the undeserved ostracism at Lacombrade, Auguste’s demonic persecution, the escape; how could it be that Gilbert’s life would end in such a horrible way, and that Serge would be left alone to face the full, unbearable weight of his grief! Why?! Keiko Takemiya, you’re a vile sadist. You’re a genius, too, of course. But you’re a vile sadist.

I knew that a happy ending wasn’t going to happen. The horrible ending was a pretty early spoiler, really. Unfortunately for me, I couldn’t stop myself from reading on anyway, and I couldn’t stop myself from having an inkling of illogical hope. Even if my logical self knew a happy ending wasn’t gonna happen, it couldn’t prepare me for just how tragically their love would end, and how awful it all would feel, once I knew their full story.

It’s all the more bitter because of how close Serge came to saving him, too. Having escaped together to a place where they could’ve built the nearest thing to a normal life a gay couple could have, back then. But in the end, not even Serge’s love could mend Gilbert’s mutilated soul. Those boys deserved so much better, especially Serge. Serge, you sweet angel! You were created to suffer.

KazeKi really is a masterpiece in how it explores its extremely heavy themes and the minds of its characters, and how it flawlessly meshes that with perfect art. There are many moments in KazeKi that haunt me: Serge letting that bird go, Serge’s vision of Gilbert at the Lacombrade grounds, Gilbert running into the carriage, angel wings behind him; Serge laying alone on the bed in Room 17. I cannot look at those pages without tearing up and feeling this horrible feeling in my heart, and this feeling is literal: My heart actually feels heavy and constricted when I think about it, it can’t be healthy. Up until now, I thought “cri evrytiem” was just a meme. KazeKi has woken me up to the fact that bottling up one’s own personal issues will inevitably end with them exploding out, leading to something much, much worse. I am scared by the prospect of facing my personal issues. To me, they are horribly strong, and seem incredibly hard to solve, if they’re even solvable at all. I’m horrified by the prospect of facing them, working to solve them. I’m so scared, that simply thinking about it, right now, gives me this awful weight in my chest, and makes me want to cry, again. But I know now that I have no choice in this matter, as the only alternative is that abyss I dare not speak of, and one cannot return from. Melodramatic? Yes. But I did just read Kaze to Ki no Uta.

Thank you for getting this far, whoever you are.

I’m forever haunted by Serge’s words to his long-gone Gilbert, right at the beginning:

“Gilbert Cocteau, you were the greatest flower to ever bloom in my life. In the faraway dreams of youth, you were a bright red flame, blazing so fiercely… You were the wind that stirred my branches. Can you hear the poem of the wind and trees? Can you hear the tumult of our youth? Oh, there must be others who so remember their own days of youth…”

#kaze to ki no uta #the poem of the wind and trees #rant #shounen ai

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riusugoi · 6 years ago

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Protocols: Duty, Despair and Decentralisation transcript - Matt Dryhurst

https://medium.com/@matdryhurst/protocols-duty-despair-and-decentralisation-transcript-69acac62c8ea No-one is going to pay for music anymore sufficient to keep scenes as we know them going. At least not in the ways many have been used to. So while some artists might make petty change from digital sales through Bandcamp, my assumption is that those figures will dwindle over time as streaming establishes greater supremacy. My assumption is also that whichever streaming platform wins (as all roads lead to monopoly in this current paradigm), the artists that benefit from that streaming platform will be those that most dutifully satisfy the requirements of the streaming platform, which I think is a very different aspiration than satisfying the requirements of feeding healthy international and local music scenes. When Daniel Ek says he wants “one million artists to live from their work”, I think of one million musicians, sitting in flat shares, stocking playlists for people to shower to. Music from nowhere, for no-one in particular. A far cry from a healthy, or interesting, music community that people in attendance today might care about. My other assumption is that Spotify won’t succeed. If I were Google, or Apple, or Amazon, I would look at Spotify’s immense burn rate: “they posted an operating loss of $461 million on revenue of nearly $5 billion last year”, and bide my time. From where I stand, Spotify is spending immense amounts of money to reorder the way music works as we know it. They might well eradicate the traditional label and publishing model, by finding new ways for artists to post directly to their platform, locking them into new forms of agreements over their work that also indemnifies them, or any prospective parent company, from legal action over copyright infringing material that might be hosted on their servers. Soundcloud is trying to do something similar with their new agreements, and in lieu of a viable business model appearing, all I read from that is that these are moves to leave the door open to potential acquisition by a bigger fish I don’t think there will be a streaming competitor to Spotify, or whoever might acquire them. Our best bet is to drastically reconsider the value proposition of music. What do people value and what are they prepared to support? the club music economy is resilient in ways that other scene economies are not. Club music, on the contrary, is very much based on location and loyalty, and is more generalised and functional. People go to dance, and are often less concerned with who is playing than what they are playing. The functional underpinnings of most club music are also compatible with the functional expectations of streaming, as both require a fast and steady stream of somewhat anonymous compositions that transition seamlessly into one another. Music to work to. Music to play to. Seamless. This is all well and good, but again we are left asking, what about those musicians who don’t want to tailor their output to a predetermined function?

One of the significant battles we face at the moment is a war between music from nowhere, and music from somewhere. Music designed for instantaneous engagement, and instantaneous dismissal, and music that communicates with an archive. The role of the critic has been under threat some for time, and will continue to lose influence to algorithmic populism, and the kindof process-hack algorithmic manipulation that makes stars on Instagram and Youtube. Spotify and Apple are already hiring journalists to cover the work they promote on their platform, so we will see more hagiographical journalism feeding that system, and the traditional idea of the critic as arbiter of taste, and gatekeeper of the archive, will continue to be eroded. Other gatekeepers, such as labels and niche festivals, will continue to lose prominence over time unless they radically reconsider their value propositions. The end of history? Nope, but the end of an era for sure. The recent announcement that Conde Nast intends to paywall all of it’s publications, presumably including Pitchfork, by 2020 is interesting news. Exclusivity like this might work for the cream of publications, and also might perhaps trigger a snow ball of similar subscription plays by smaller publications. I like it when people pay for things, and we will see how that experiment plays out, but once paywalled, what we understand as the archive might well end up being housed behind those walls. Better that than disappearing altogether, perhaps. RBMA and Boiler Room have been busy creating maps of culture. Maps are valuable, as they allow for the establishment of trade routes. On the one hand, RBMA and Boiler Room are doing a great job, as their models are predicated on the primacy of the kind of cultures that are under threat by the algorithmic populism of say, a Spotify or a Youtube. Contrary to the hackneyed divisions that linger from the past, there really is no “mainstream” or “underground” in this new economy. Under ad-driven platform capitalism, there are either fertile pathways to sell people stuff, or barren and quantified pathways to sell people stuff. It’s a map. I’ve said a million times, in this economy, unique niches (or unexplored corners) are highly valuable. If you are an artist whose practice speaks to a unique intersection, say based on genre, identity, or personal narrative, then you are an interesting proposition to advertisers, as you are prospectively establishing new territory to sell people stuff. Brands, as patrons, want you to establish new territory on their behalf, and be first to that party. So, for example, if now millions of people have the tools to create good-enough-Jeff-Mills-derivative techno tracks, it only makes sense that the distinguishing logic that someone might use to opt to support producer X over producer Y would heavily focus on tangential narrative elements. So much so that these narrative elements become the main source of value when competing with art of similar formal characteristics. Those tangential elements are perhaps better understood as metadata; equally optimal for growing new audiences and courting the interest of brands looking to achieve visibility in new niche markets. The original indie pioneers did a great service to music, but let’s be real, have left us all an impossible legacy to continue. Record sales = money in the bank = options. Period. Options to say no. Options to do wild, and risky things. Who has those options today? Where would the money come from? So the original indies, as far as I can tell, were predicated on two firm principles: 1.The majors were corrupt, strong armed bad music into the popular spotlight, and ignored radical new developments in music creation and localised scenes that needed to be represented. 2.On the other hand, being independent meant doing what you wanted, however you wanted it, with no-one above you influencing your creative decisions. Self sufficiency basically. People who colluded with brands were considered sell-outs as they had to tame their vision to appeal to a wider audience and secure that funding. I know of more people who cite concerns about the gentrifying effects of transnational cultural institutions spending money across the globe, but lets be honest, indie music scenes of socially mobile young artists were doing just fine at gentrifying neighbourhoods before brand money got involved. So, in the vast vast majority of cases, what is the inconsistency here? Warp, or Dischord, or 4AD, or whatever, aren’t communist enterprises. They aren’t radical free culture enterprises. No. They are and were, for better or worse, entities that made great strides to support the individual visions of unique artists, and helped them to gain prominence in the market for music, and for a period of time symbiotically reaped the rewards from sales of that work. I think that in many ways, the foundational logic of independent music won. Now large portions of the economy are predicated on the promise of individualist independence. Everyone is free to self publish their unique perspective, and hypothetically find an audience for it online. That being said, we hardly live in a utopia as a result.

It is no secret that many of the original indies were founded by the wealthy, or in many cases by middle class entrepreneurs who could afford to dedicate their 20s to a speculative cultural business. Equal ability to publish something means nothing when only those with the ability to fund promotion of the work are discovered. I’ve said it before, there will be an abundance of free culture, and free time, in the slums. Amazon can produce your product cheaper than you can, and strong arm you out of business unless you work with them. Facebook can acquire any competitor before they become dangerous. Pop music can appropriate and spit out your micro-scene before it has any ability to generate its own momentum, or it’s own funds.

In 2019 we all work for Kanye, only some of us figured out how to get paid for it.

So in the absence of the ability to accrue a foundation of wealth and stability for new music, independent artists who gained prominence via the centralised media channels of the 80s and 90s will reign supreme over the long tail of precarious younger artists until the day they choose to call it quits. The gravitational pull of those artists who established the categories by which playlists, and festival line ups, must orient themselves to reach enough people, dictates that most new music emerging needs to flatter the formal and conceptual foundations of those pioneers.

There is going to be a whole lot more music that flatters the impressive legacies of Aphex Twin, Bjork, Timbaland, Missy Elliott, Aaliyah, Jeff Mills etc as those are the kind of petrified shapes of envelope-pushing music from just before when the volcano of Web 2.0 went off 🌋 .Radical musical culture circa-1996 preserved forever, like the ruins of Pompeii - or as I believe Mark Fisher (or Simon Reynolds, or both??) referred to it, a kind of permanent 1990s.

Well on the one hand, the platform monopolies like Spotify and Youtube are going to continually erode your influence with every new person that comes online. Their algorithms will direct traffic away from your priorities, and towards theirs, and to survive in that ecosystem you will need to satisfy their agenda. Doesn’t sound too independent does it? Journalists will have to write more about what Spotify prioritises. Artists will have to make work to satisfy the debased formal requirements of those platforms. Labels will be shoo-ed off like annoying pests that are messing with the platforms long term vision. Really bad, and a great reason to be really angry at that particular logic of culture.

If your previous raison d’être was to support marginal communities, and weird music, you are probably going to end up being out competed by their models. Models that manage to leverage brand money to support those communities will grow and grow in prominence. The thing is, if you are playing exactly the same game, and one entity found a model to support exactly the same thing that you have supported traditionally, but more effectively, then you are probably going to lose that game. It sucks, but that’s what is likely going to happen.

I think the ‘cultural cartography’ model discussed before is quite precarious, as of course they too need for new and diverse things to actually be happening on the ground in order to maintain the model that they have built. Companies dependent on brand money are always a few emails away from being out of favour. State supported festivals are very fragile to that possibility too. As the popular narrative that Spotify is ‘solving the problem’ of music proliferates further, it is going to become increasingly difficult for people to convince brands, or an increasingly conservative state, that these niche pockets of music we might care about are worth the investment. Stat-supported music, if unimpeded, will come into direct conflict with state supported music.

So I actually think it is in everyone’s interests for new models to emerge.

I think some of those models can be complimentary to the institutions we have today, and some can be wholly antagonistic, and ideally we would see both come to prominence in the next few years for the health of scene development across the board.

As I said before, one reason I see things going south for competitors to the brand-aligned organisations is that they are competitive. You solve this problem quite easily by becoming uncompetitive, and doing something they can’t or won’t do.

One thing brands or their intermediaries can’t do, for example, is distribute ownership under a cooperative model. They literally can’t. But there are all kinds of reasons why that might make sense for various different cultural scenes or organisations.

Co-operativising creates loyalty and an alignment of interests between an organisation, festival, artists and audience.

Co-operativising allows for collective strategising towards common objectives. Rather than funds being ingested to the benefit of one artist, in competition with another, those same funds can be channeled into infrastructure that helps everybody and keeps the culture afloat.

So what of decentralization? To explain what decentralisation is, I’m going to borrow from Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin’s model, which is focussed on technical infrastructure but has application beyond that.

He breaks decentralisation into 3 groups:

Architectural (de)centralization — how many physical computers is a system made up of? How many of those computers can it tolerate breaking down at any single time?

Political (de)centralization — how many individuals or organizations ultimately control the computers that the system is made up of?

Logical (de)centralization — do the interfaces and data structures that the system presents and maintains look more like a single monolithic object, or an amorphous swarm? One simple heuristic is: if you cut the system in half, including both providers and users, will both halves continue to fully operate as independent units?

Benefits of decentralisation in the context of music:

1) the network/archive is hard to take down. If Soundcloud fails, what happens to all that music, and the activity around it? If a magazine goes down, what happens to all of that history?

Decentralised, nodal systems like blockchains, or torrent networks, are resilient both architecturally and logically. You can’t cut the head off them. It took the state to take down What.cd for example, such was its resiliency.

Projects like IPFS propose a peer-to-peer immutable web, a web that can never be taken down, fortified by a nodal structure not dissimilar to torrent seeding.

2) regarding political decentralisation, this can be approached by entertaining ideas of common ownership. Rather than a centralised team at Spotify, or Youtube, making decisions that determine how your artwork is distributed, or the logics by which some work is made more visible, and prioritised over other work, politically decentralised networks entertain the possibility of pluralistic and democratic decision making.

3) Decentralised networks, when dealing with an open source code base, also allow for forking. If you don’t the way things work, you are encouraged to take the code and build something that disagrees with it. Over time what this mechanism creates is a healthy competition of ideas, and participant choice.

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