#unrelievedly

[earlgreytea68]

The timing of "From Now On We Are Enemies" is epic, of course: stuck on a greatest hits compilation when it looks like your band is over, broken up, done, boom.

The lyrics of "From Now On We Are Enemies" are some of Pete's most brutally sardonic lyrics, like, I know they are this is a song about Amadeus but I NEVER LISTEN TO WHAT THEY SAY lol and I believe them that Pete wanted a song that felt like Amadeus (and it does, just the use of that slightly archaic word "rejoice" helps to set that scene) but it is very hard to read "A composer but never composed / singing the symphonies of the overdosed" as being about Amadeus, like the composer who sings is...Patrick. It's just Patrick. That's the composer who sings the symphonies of the overdosed. IT'S SO SPOT-ON hahaha which his lyrics almost never are so very on-the-nose that it's almost like they HAD to say it was about Amadeus. And there are so many enduring Pete themes in the lyrics, in ways that feels so unrelievedly harsh: Nobody will ever remember me (think, e.g., the end of "Flu Game"), I was just a kid and too young for all of this (think, e.g., "the kid was alright but it went to his head"), "a downward spiral, just a pirouette" (think, e.g., "I'm every cliche but I simply do it best"). (And, of course, "fall to your knees," which...that's all over Pete's lyrics lol I won't get into all that right now.)

So anyway, there's the lyrics and the timing, knowing that a song with those lyrics showed up just as he was losing his band: I only want what I can't have, over and over and over again throughout the song. But then:

The title. Just the title of this song. It's just so delicious. What a Pete Wentz move. Because on its surface, it's, like, devastating. To title a song with these lyrics and that timing feels like a gut punch, like stealing your breath away with the painful tragedy of it all. "From now on, WE are enemies." But. BUT. The line in the movie is said to God. The enemy is God. It's just so layered, that Pete was never saying his band was the enemy, the enemy was the stuff outside of their control.

And now, in the year 2023, Patrick can sing this song -- this particular song with this title and these lyrics and that timing -- and he can sing his heart out over I only want what I can't have, and you know what? None of it is true anymore. They overcame all of the forces outside of their control and here they are, on stage together, rejoicing.

Surely falling to their knees will shortly follow lol

[dduane]

In the digital art dep't...

Doing some work comparing renders in Daz Studio's (newer) version 4.21 to the older 4.15, which is where most of my rendering work has happened for the last couple/few years.

But also something else: starting to experiment with skin tone work on the main Middle Kingdoms characters... which I've been putting off because it's been incredibly complex and fiddly (and easy to screw up.). Then I ran across a new Daz-based tool which speeds this business up considerably.

(Adding a cut here because this goes on a little about subjects most people won't need cluttering up their dashes. Warning: contains volumetric- and non-volumetric-handling versions of Daz, character skin color work, complex (and complexion) lighting issues, image comparisons, and the local iteration of the These Two Idiots trope seen up close.

My attention right now is on the main characters, who come in a wide range of shades only casually referred to in the main-sequence books and the interstitial works. And among the core group—the human-born ones, anyway—there's significant variation. Herewiss, being northeast Darthene, is palest. Freelorn, being midlands Arlene with some Steldene ancestry, is darker. Segnbora, coming of people from the southeastern Darthene region along the Steldene border, is darkest of the human three of the Five.

All thee were details that had to go incorrectly depicted until now... because though I had the characters' faces and bodies pretty much sorted out, the skins were all, well, too damn unrelievedly white. And attempting to tweak that without sufficiently sophisticated tools (or enough understanding...) can cause real problems and a lot of lost time.

Now, though, with better tools I can start putting that situation right. Early attempts are inevitably going to be a bit spotty (I only got this tool over the weekend...). But the first few renders have been promising.

Compare this initial render of the Pride Month package "cover..."

to this one (after initial skinwork), which more closely mirrors the reality I see in my head:

(Over on the left, Tom's a bit pale in that run... but never mind. I'll sort him out shortly with the rest of the Young Wizards characters. Sunspark's human skin tone, meanwhile, can be expected to change without notice... especially when they've just seen a look they liked and want to try on.)

The difficulty with the above image is that for various reasons (like hiding the incomplete nature of the city behind them...) the lighting's from either a spring or autumn sunset, and therefore too warm for good clear comparisons. So as another early-stages test I took the version of Freelorn from the above image and repositioned him in one where the lighting was a lot better... at least when rendering in DSv4.15. Here's the "Short King" image from a year or two ago, before the skinchange...

...for comparison to the one I did this afternoon. (Since I was importing it from the laptop to the desktop machine running 4.21, there are some slight changes in camera position and lighting. Oh, and a different set of clothes for Herewiss.)

If the difference looks really subtle at the moment, that's okay. Lorn should be darker than this: Dusty's correctly a bit paler than last time. But it's a start. Further passes will get closer to what I'm after.

...So re-rendered versions of images on the MK website and elsewhere will start turning up with skin tones properly represented. (All this being secondary to cleaning out some of the 30K+ render files that have built up in the machine over the last ten years, and building a new tagging and indexing system for the ones that get kept. Whoopee. But it's gotta be done.)

Meanwhile, back to work on actual writing...

ETA: Meanwhile, no point in getting so caught up in image quality that you forget to move the camera around. Just look at these two idiots. :)

[byneddiedingo]

Tim Roth and Edward Furlong in Little Odessa (James Gray, 1994)

Cast: Tim Roth, Edward Furlong, Moira Kelly, Vanessa Redgrave, Maximilian Schell, Paul Guilfoyle, Natalya Andrejchenko, David Vadim. Screenplay: James Gray. Cinematography: Tom Richmond. Production design: Kevin Thompson. Film editing: Dorian Harris. 

James Gray's debut film, Little Odessa, is a chilly movie about a dysfunctional family, set in wintry Brighton Beach, the Brooklyn neighborhood adjacent to Coney Island. Gray uses the seasonally shut down amusement park and boardwalk as a correlative for the frozen lives of the Shapira family, for which a reviving spring will never arrive. The film won more favor from European critics, winning an award at the Venice Film Festival and praise from director Claude Chabrol, than it did from Americans, who have less taste for grimness. And Little Odessa is almost unrelievedly grim in its account of what happens when the older son, Joshua, returns to the home where his mother, Irina (Vanessa Redgrave), is dying of cancer. He hates his father, Arkady (Maximilian Schell), who is having an affair with a younger woman while tending to Irina in her final days. Joshua feels close, however, to his teenage brother, Reuben (Edward Furlong), who dutifully helps his father run a small newsstand and look after his mother, but he has secretly stopped going to school, hiding the letters to his parents from the school in his sock drawer. Joshua is a hitman for the Russian mob. He has avoided returning home, but he can't refuse an order to rub out an Iranian jeweler with a store located in Brighton Beach. There are violent consequences not only for Joshua's target but also for his own family. The Shapira family is not so poetic and articulate as the Tyrones of Long Day's Journey Into Night (Sidney Lumet, 1962) but they have a similar lacerating candor that gives actors free rein to perform. And it's mostly the performances that justify spending 98 minutes with them (as compared to the nearly three hours we spend with the Tyrones in Lumet's film). Redgrave, as always, is a marvel, all fragility and grit and love for her family, and Furlong demonstrates the kind of promise as an actor that his personal problems have never allowed him to fulfill. I think Schell is somewhat miscast as the father, who gets the blame for what has happened to his sons, but he gives the role substance if not the undertones of selfishness and desperation that it needs. The real star is Roth, an undervalued actor who always performs to the mark and beyond. Gray's screenplay is a touch too melodramatic, especially in the final confrontation of Joshua and his father, but with the help of Tom Richmond's cinematography and Kevin Thompson's production design, he maintains the oppressive mood and gloomy milieu effectively.  

[wordsonly]

Meat mallet

This most glorious matinee

A morning picture show

Slicing 90 minutes of dog-eared,

over-emotional dependence

Into her diarised hopes and obligations.

A white room

Queen sized

Away from any dependable choices

With elusive qualities

That wield the authority to persuade.

The beginning of wonder

Where laughter and love making melt time

Dissolve all fearful stories

Always though,

The cliffhanger end,

Blasts from the past

Heavy in her distrust

Rolling on a hot bed

A characterisation shaped through

sweat and mud.

It is she who has taught me how to love.

There is no place for inappropriate fears

For anecdotes of privacy

Extending across the grand furniture of marriage.

You already know the truth.

Tours of crypts await, in the service of rats.

So the lover,

Hurridly collecting smiles and laughter from the bare floor.

Leaves only bags of sugar.

Emptied

Grim faced and unrelievedly serious

Peeled segments

Separated and collapsing

Chrushed then, to pulp

Pour out the swelling acidic flood

Boiling love to a stiff red goo.

Take Cohen’s testimony.

Primitive thinking

The exhaustible sauce of pure truth, turned

The genre switch

Lost to the scum,

The pump and violence.

The anti- female.

Splattering chopped offal and jam

To snuff

Out.

Painting all love for her,

To red.

(I’m not delighted by these

explanations and translations

This new paragraph of externalised anxieties.

‘Do you want to meet someone with the same hopes, ambitions and interests as yourself?’

To shuffle and

Stumble and

Slur.

A falling.

The panache of playboy sex and drunkenness;

Rental free

Giving you, the user,

The chance to bypass

All the congested channels!

To connect quickly-

To store all death in an electric memory.)

She,

Without make up

Without approximations

Stark naked

but for her expensive sunglasses

And the

Hammer in hand.

Her breasts pressed to your heart

Whispers

‘Fuck you,

Very much.’

Yes.

Fuck you, fuck you

For everything

and nothing.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"Today the lieutenant of the guards assigned me to a regular job: assistant floor clerk on the second floor. It's one of the "cushy" jobs here, I gather, and I have been moved downstairs again into D-4, known as "politicians' row." It's a dormitory, but much smaller than the others, and is inhabited by the clerks, who are generally the more privileged characters around here. Larry Templin, another CO [conscientious objector], is the "chief clerk," and my OPA bank-teller friend is the other assistant. Larry and Bob Brooks and I are apparently the only COs in here right now, though others have left their marks in terms of protests, strikes, and a huge mural in the dining-room that was painted by a CO artist.

...

So far I have not written much about the physical set-up of this place [the New York Federal Detention Headquarters]. Originally, I am told, it was a city garage. It has the bare bleakness of a garage, which was not relieved by the addition of cells.

The first floor is taken up by the boiler-room, the laundry (which is the "industry" here, doing work for various government institutions in the city), the visiting-room, and the dining-room and kitchen.The second floor has the offices, dispensary, clothing-room and isolation cell (known as the "hole" or "brig") in one section, and cells and dormitories in the other. The third floor has cells and dormitories, the little room that is the library, and a small auditorium.

Physically the place is unrelievedly depressing. A blower system ventilates it these scorching days by spilling terrific blasts of air on a few spots, leaving the rest virtually untouched. Cells and dormitories alike have no walls other than the steel bars; there is, of course, no privacy whatever at any time, and there is also not a single minute of real quiet. There must be three hundred or more men here, and the place is not supposed to have more than half that number.

We get up at six, have breakfast a half-hour later, lunch at eleven, supper at four. At nine-thirty lights go out, but the noise continues almost unabated until well after midnight. Every two hours during the day the gong rings for count. All doors are locked, and the prisoners stand in line wherever they happen to be while the guards count them. Each section then phones its total to the lieutenant in his office; if everyone is accounted for, the gong rings twice, but if the totals do not agree it rings only once, and a recount is in order.

Last night two recounts still left one man missing and there was a great scurrying hither and yon for two hours or more, with the guards periodically coming around to count us again, obviously unwilling to believe that one of us would deliberately try to get away. Eventually they found a youngish fellow who had squeezed himself in between a ventilator pipe and the ceiling, apparently in the far-fetched hope that he could escape through the ventilating system. There is a story going around that the guards beat him up, but so far I have not been able to confirm it.

Met Bill Mason today, the young Negro prisoner whom Bayard Rustin met a few months ago when he was here. He is a powerful, well-built chap, pleasant and likable. He seemed a little reserved, though he spoke warmly of Bayard. I am impressed by his courage and equanimity; he has been here thirty months, which must be a world's record of some sort. He is obviously popular: as we walked slowly along man after man, black and white, called greetings to him.

West Street is used to hold prisoners who are awaiting trial, men who have been sentenced and are awaiting shipment to a regular prison, and men who have sentences of three months or less, which they serve right here. All are federal prisoners, of course, and include dope addicts (junkies) and peddlers, OPA violators, Mann Act offenders (transporting a female interstate for immoral purposes) ; all kinds of interstate criminals, from confidence men to hijackers; bootleggers; Army and Navy impersonators, and a large number of draft dodgers, along with a cellful of German-American "Bundists." Aside from the COs, these last are the intellectual "class" of the place, and, unlike the COs, are inclined to hold themselves disdainfully aloof from the common herd. One of them, a physician, is the Captain's clerk, which is about the top inmate job here and includes a good bit of ordering the other inmates around, while another is his assistant, under whose directions we floor clerks operate. Comical, in a way."

- Alfred Hassler, Diary of a Self-Made Convict. Foreword by Harry Elmer Barnes. Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1954 (written 1944-1945), p. 15-17.

[davidpwilson2564]

Bloglet

Monday, October 23, 2023

Once again talk to Larry the Super. The plumber he contacted has stood me up. We will try again. Will try to get someone else. I head out to run numerous errands. I see that my local Duane Reade is closing in November. Damn. This must be because of all the shoplifting. My guess. Many drug stores are closing their doors.

Later: The Texas Rangers are in the World Series, for the first time. Much joy down there. Funny, they won over the other Texas team, the Astros, to get there.

Still no Speaker of the House. The Republican party in great disarray. Clowns.

The dream of being late to a performance again. Only this time it's a specific occasion. It's "Swan Lake."

Tuesday, October 24, 2023

Still waiting to hear from Larry the Super. Can't watch much of the news. It is so unrelievedly awful. Try to read a bit. Look at my music for tomorrow's rehearsal. Do the crossword.

Later: Errands. The usual.

Trump is in more hot water re the Georgia case (thus far three have flipped), and here in N Y, with his exaggerated financials.

I see people from long ago in the neighborhood. Often it is impossible to put a name with a face, I saw the guitar teacher I worked with in Syosset (one of these days I will try to list all of the schools where I taught). I recognized him, no trouble there. His limp gave him away. But had it not been for that I wouldn't have known him. We are all getting so old! (And sometimes there is a gaping hole where someone's name should be.)

[tangiblejournal56]

8/14/11

My occasional run-ins with the Caveman grow more & more surreal, as though he was a joke being played on me by faces I cannot see.  Yesterday he showed me his “poetry,” unrelievedly awful, kept importantly in a black portfolio in his backpack.  I skimmed over them quickly, wanting to yell at him that words have meaning, they require attention, care.  Instead I mumbled “interesting,” the most benign adjective I could spit out.  Unable to be cruel, yet I could not bring myself to encourage such a waste of paper.  My coldness, another anecdote to bring home to Jacob.  We all must have someone to feel superior to, it seems.  I am no better.

I am over my delusions that Jacob may hold any feelings stronger than friendly endearment toward me.  I was reading signs that weren’t there, gestures hollow that my loneliness attempted to breathe life into.  With Josh out of town last night I played about with Jacob, drinking whiskey, smoking pot, trying to put a haze between my thoughts & myself.  We went swimming, we laid on my bed watching a bootleg of the latest Harry Potter film (of Jacob’s interest, not my own).  On the living room floor we wrestled, I was smothering him with a pillow, as I enjoy doing, being silly to make him laugh, “Pay attention to me Jacob!  I want attention!”  I was sitting atop his splayed body & I could feel his erection smacking against my ass through the thin material of his pajama bottoms, & suddenly he thrust me off of him, “I don’t want to be strangled anymore,” keeping a casual tone.  I pouted at him, “It’s not fun without you,” & he looked at me, “Strangle yourself,” his phrasing ripe with innuendo.  It was then that I got it.  If there is a real attraction there he does not want to feel it.  So familiar with that situation I let it go.  Who am I to insist on anything better?

Alone, I went to my bed, “strangling myself,” & as he does when my loneliness gets the best of me, Ryan popped up in my head.  Not strictly the sexual moments I sometimes revisit for these purposes, but a whole series of memories like snapshots zipping through my mind, razor-sharp & dangerous.  His head on my lap as I read to him from House of Incest & the legends of the greek gods.  Him sitting on my lap in the arcade at Double Dave’s.  In the cabin at Wildlife Ridge, the blanket concealing our sex as the others flitted in & out of the cabin.  Slow dancing alone in our apartment to Toussaint McCall.  Coming home to tell me he’d gotten hard just thinking of me at work & had to hide his erection.  Making out like two teenagers for hours on our tiny couch.  These memories like very sharp knives slicing into every part of me, & I the girl mad as birds, crying & masturbating alone in the dark.  This city is no good for me any longer.  I used to feel myself growing here like a tree, adding new limbs & leaves for every new experience.  Now however there is only stagnation, a putrid rot on the surface of every day, & I am haunted by Ryan’s ghost everywhere I go.  I am not strong, I am too weak to fight the soft decay of my limbs, my mind.  I sink each day further into misery, & even Josh & Jacob cannot pull me out of it.  I hide this self from them, I am not their responsibility & I have no desire to make them feel bad that I cannot be happy here.  I relate all of this only to Max, who probably tires of hearing it, as he seems to be doing alright since I left.  No more injured ankles, slowing down his drunken revelries.  I fear somewhat dramatically that I may never be happy, anywhere, again.  Not with the whisper of the happiness I’d found with Ryan hanging over me.  Over four years have passed since I met him.  Over two since I’ve last seen him.  When does it end?  Why can’t I get past this?  Thom told me he’d always found Ryan to be pretentious, & that bothered me, even now.  I could tell he was only trying to help, to stretch for a flaw to make Ryan seem undesirable, but pretentiousness was never a presence in Ryan’s character.  He was accepting & curious of all lifestyles & traits, he always wanted to know how others live.  Perhaps that’s why it’s so hard to rebound, because I honestly cannot say he is a bad or even unlikeable person.  Even Thom liked him, despite his opinion now.  He is funny & clever & charismatic, no prejudices.  He’s intelligent & outgoing, inventive, sarcastic, has a way of making you feel important, all of his attention on you & you alone like the sun’s rays pouring golden upon your form.  Loving & romantic & sexy, those heavy-lidded chocolate eyes the ultimate aphrodisiac, the half-smile & low, lazy voice when we’d make love like gods, all morning, all afternoon, into the evenings.  Pulling up the blankets, the pillows, pretending he was searching for something, “Where are your flaws, I can’t find them!”  Laughing, he’d collapse next to me, his head on my chest, his arms around me tight as he could.  The fire burning in me for those moments, that undiluted flow of love.  Something I’d never known even existed, didn’t even know what was there to long for.  I was lucky, when would a girl like me ever be loved like that?  Should I wish that it had never happened, so that I may still be blissfully ignorant of that attention?  But I cannot, even now knowing how short-lived his love is, how easily he can give into the next girl who comes along.  This does not make it any less genuine, or make what we had any less real.  I cannot even hate him for it, he simply gives all of himself in any relationship, he lives fully in life.  How can he do this again & again amazes me, as just the one time it exhausted me, physically, mentally.  I am unable to pour myself into every person I am with, I’d perish from the strain.  He & Max are the only two men I’ve ever fully loved, without question, & Ryan is the only person I’ve given myself to.  Handed over the keys & trusted him not to throw them away.  Instead we threw each other away, burned through decades of love & experience in less than two years.  I miss it, yes, but often I miss him, just him, his own self as a fact, so easy to enjoy life with.  The way I miss Shawn, or Thom, someone to find fun in anything.  He was not only capable of easing my blues, he chased them off like he’d waged war.  A war I suppose he lost.  Both of us.

[sbnkalny]

Can you help us practice Social Distancing™ with your Botly Ways™?

I want you to help us do promotion on your tumblr is one of the two of you think you can get hurt that way?

[taraross-1787]

This Day in History: JFK & PT-109

On this day in 1943 a small boat under the command of Lt. (j.g.) John F. Kennedy is rammed by a Japanese destroyer. Kennedy would come home a war hero, but the incident has not been without controversy. Did Kennedy’s decisions put his PT-109 in danger? Was he a hero or should he have been court-martialed? What about other heroes aboard the vessel? Why have they been forgotten? On the night of August 1-2, Kennedy’s boat was one of 15 PTs sent to patrol the Blackett Strait in the Solomon Islands. They were looking for the “Tokyo Express,” a Japanese supply convoy that ran through the area. The mission was going badly. PTs fired upon the Japanese destroyers, but to no avail. Some PTs ran out of torpedoes and left. Kennedy’s boat was among those that remained behind. They were waiting for the Japanese convoy to return, then they would try again. Understanding what followed, a JFK library archivist writes, requires remembering “that it was dark—deeply, unrelievedly dark. . . . [The disorienting effect] of a moonless, starless night on the ocean should not be underestimated.” At about 2:30 a.m., the Japanese destroyer Amagiri arrived. The story continues here: https://www.taraross.com/post/tdih-pt-109 

[dk-thrive]

whether we cast ourselves as hero, victim, black hat, or all three

Here are some key attributes of the voice in my head. I suspect they will sound familiar...The voice is unrelievedly self-involved. We are all the stars of our own movies, whether we cast ourselves as hero, victim, black hat, or all three. True, we can get temporarily sucked into other people’s stories, but often as a means of comparing ourselves to them. Everything ultimately gets subordinated to the one plotline that matters: the Story of Me.

— Dan Harris, from "Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics: A 10% Happier How-to Book" (Harmony, December 26, 2017)

[septembersung]

I’ve been cramming novels the last few days. I read the first two Temeraire books by Naomi Novik, His Majesty’s Dragon and Throne of Jade. I liked both of them well enough, though the second one bored me immensely in lots of places (but that wasn’t really its fault), but it was startling to realize that my program of progressive re-sensitizing to the sin that is taken for granted by society at large is working. There’s a few parts/plots that keep me from embracing them wholeheartedly that I don’t think many people would see as problems, or at least not “big” problems. But... they really are.

Today I read The Mass of Brother Michel, which was a shock to the system. I am a worm and no man, indeed. I have wasted my life. The book is beautiful like a kick in the teeth of the soul is beautiful. It also reminded me I need to finish Come Rack! Come Rope!. 

I started the sequel to The Book of the Dun Cow, The Book of Sorrows, but had to quit because it was so unrelievedly depressing and dark I couldn’t take it in my current state of mind.

[worklabournewsresearch]

Men at Work

‘Notions of American masculinity have long drawn on a shallow pool of tropes, most of which we tend to associate with fictionalizations of the frontier: the lonesome swagger of John Wayne, the gruff reticence of the cowboy. But up until the end of the nineteenth century, the ideal of American masculinity was far more communal. The historian E. Anthony Rotundo has observed that the masculinity of the colonial era wasn’t defined by chest-thumping machismo or brawny, entrepreneurial pluck, but was measured instead by a man’s willingness to forfeit his time and resources for the betterment of his community. Hardly was this a matter of ‘emotional intelligence.’ Rather, his duties were fulfilled through “publick usefulness.” Often this led to nascent forms of mutual aid, because in a world where ‘creditors were neighbors and kinsmen were clients, a man’s failure at work was never a private concern.’ Meanwhile, those men who saddled up and lit out for the territories were roundly condemned as ‘frontier wastrels,’ as the historian Vernon Louis Parrington called them, princes of thoughtlessness who pursued their own agendas and roamed the country as they pleased.”

“Yet the rise of industrialization and the birth of modern capitalism rewarded precisely those attributes that colonial communities were prone to denigrate: aggression, guile, and an overwhelming will to power. Even when men failed to thrive in the marketplace, they nevertheless succumbed to its sanctioned forms of masculinity. The feminist scholar Joseph Pleck notes that during the Great Depression men no longer had access to the sorts of external achievements that once granted them a stabilizing dose of virility—wartime brawn or financial independence—so they deferred instead to psychological or behavioral attributes to restore their sense of identity. Lacerated by the dehumanizing conditions of the factory, male workers typically responded with a cocksure ‘hardhat culture,’ as the writer Pankaj Mishra calls it, whereby heavy drinking, coarse language, and prurience became tokens of masculinity, a conception that Mishra believes has ‘reached deep into blue-collar workplaces during the decades-long reign of neoliberalism.’”

Of course, it’s breathtakingly naïve to think that therapy alone would be enough to redress the larger systemic forces behind a problem like toxic masculinity. But this hasn’t stopped a whole plethora of personalized remedies from getting pitched to men as a tonic—a new membership with CrossFit, a cathartic jaunt to Burning Man, a weekend retreat in the woods to recover his “deep masculine.” ‘Popular accounts of the male crisis and male confusion,’[Susan] Faludi {author of Backlash] writes,

‘are unrelievedly a historical. The conditions under which men live are ignored and men themselves are reduced to a perennial Everyman . . . How would men’s problems be perceived, though, if we were to consider men as the subjects of the world, not just its authors?’”

Harper’s Magazine, November 2019: “Men at Work: Is there a masculine cure for toxic masculinity?” by Barrett Swanson

[readingsweetblueflowers]

Two characters in search of an actor

I previously wrote about the patriarch of the Sugimoto clan, a man notable for the lack of attention paid to him in Sweet Blue Flowers. In my last post on the Fujigaya production of Rokumeikan I consider two more men notable for their absence in the manga, Hisao and Count Kageyama.

Hisao at least rates a mention in the manga: Pages 94-95 of omnibus volume 3  show Akiko (played by Akira) mentioning that he is in danger (though it omits telling us exactly why), and the girl playing Hisao is subsequently called to the stage, after which the narration explains that he is Asako’s estranged son. But we are left ignorant of who played Hisao, and are not made privy to any of his dialog.

With Count Kageyama the erasure is (almost) complete. Like Hisao, his actor is never identified and we never hear his words. Unlike Hisao he is not referenced at all in the manga, either by his name or by his role in the story.

As with Yasuko’s father we may ask, why might this be? As in that case, the simple answer is that they are peripheral to the story Shimura is telling. They are men, and Sweet Blue Flowers is a story about girls becoming women, specifically women who love women. With Hisao we have the additional factor that he is explicitly identified as Akiko’s lover, and it would detract from the story of Akira’s and Fumi’s tentatively blossoming love to have another girl play a love interest opposite Akira.

But as with Yasuko’s father we can also explore this absence further, starting with Hisao. Hisao is a type familiar from both Mishima’s other works and from Japanese history: the young hothead, whose discontents and violent tendencies alternately affront and are exploited by the Japanese (male) establishment.

Hisao’s resentment at his father’s treatment of him first leads him to contemplate assassinating Kiyohara. Persuaded to desist only by the intervention of his newly-revealed mother, Asako, he lets himself be goaded again into resentment and action by Kageyama’s words and scheming, only to rebel against Kageyama as well by deliberately mis-aiming his shot at Kiyohara, subsequently getting himself killed by Kiyohara’s return fire.

I think the term “toxic masculinity” gets overused a lot, but if it applies to anything it applies to Hisao’s actions in this play. Hisao has a chance to turn from the path he was taking, to leave Japan with Akiko and make a new life with her, but he throws it all away to engage in a self-destructive act that in his own mind means a great deal but in the grand scheme of things makes no difference whatsoever, other than to bring pain to his mother, father, and lover.

This offers another reason why Hisao is downplayed in the manga: to audiences familiar with the play he is by his omission highlighted as a negative role model, especially for young girls like Akira and Fumi, and especially for a story like Sweet Blue Flowers. In older class S works suicide (for that is what Hisao’s actions amount to) might be the end game for some, frustrated in their inability to escape the strictures of society, but it has no place in the world of Sweet Blue Flowers.

Its message would rather be that of Asako to Akiko after she learns of Hisao’s death and despairs of life: “You can’t say any such weak-hearted thing. You must by all means try to live.” Or in other words: “Don’t be Hisao.”

What then of Count Kageyama? As I implied above, he is the Voldemort of the Rokumeikan production portrayed in Sweet Blue Flowers, “he-who-must-not-be-named”. But unlike Voldemort Kageyama is seemingly successful in his role as the Big Bad: when his original plan to employ Hisao goes awry he discovers what Asako has done and arranges a new scheme to achieve his aim. He successfully plays on Hisao’s sense of masculinity to persuade him to resume his plan of assassinating Kiyohara—a plan that even if seemingly unsuccessful eliminates Kiyohara as a political force (as Kiyohara himself notes)—and then (it is strongly implied) has Kiyohara killed to finish the job that Hisao could not. In plain terms he wins, and everyone else—Asako, Akiko, Hisao, and Kiyohara—loses.

I should note here that Kageyama is not portrayed in the play as a unrelievedly evil villain: He is jealous of Asako’s relationship with Kiyohara, and apparently yearns to have what they have with each other—“I was jealous of that indescribable trust that exists between you and Kiyohara”—even as he scoffs at the possibilities of love and trust between two people: “It is an absurd thing. Human beings can’t make pledges or trust each other unconditionally as you and Kiyohara have done. ... That sort of thing should never exist in our human world.”

But whatever his feelings, his actions are contemptible, and Asako calls him out for it in the climax of act 4: “Please do not talk about love and human beings any more. Those words are unclean. When they come out of your mouth, they are repellent. You are clean as ice only when you totally isolate yourself from human emotions. Please do not bring in love and humane feelings with your sticky hands. This is unlike you.”

As it happens this is the only time Kageyama appears in Sweet Blue Flowers even indirectly, as Kyoko rehearses this speech on pages 104-105 of omnibus volume 3. (I have used Hiroaki Sato’s translation here instead of the one in the manga because I think it better conveys the sense of what Asako is saying.) Midway through Kyoko stops, lost in thought, until prompted by another person—perhaps the anonymous girl playing Kageyama, whom we glimpse only from behind.

What was Kyoko thinking? Earlier in the manga she thought to herself, “Did dad fall for a woman like Asako?” Is she implicitly comparing her father to Kageyama?

And what of herself? Whatever ardor Ko felt before seems to have cooled, replaced with frustration at Kyoko’s behavior towards him—and perhaps also a jealousy born of whatever he might know or guess of Kyoko’s feelings toward Yasuko. In turn Kyoko’s renewed desire to get married reeks of desperation and a desire to escape her family situation, as Ko points out to her.

Perhaps Kyoko stopped to think that what happened to Asako and to her mother might one day happen to herself: that she and Ko might enter into a marriage with at least some lingering feelings of love and affection, only to have it all end in cruelty and coldness. Kyoko could not save her mother (“I couldn’t stop her from breaking”); if it ever came to that, could she save herself?

[byneddiedingo]

Melissa Leo and Benicio Del Toro in 21 Grams (Alejandro G. Iñárritu, 2003) Cast: Sean Penn, Naomi Watts, Benicio Del Toro, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Danny Huston, Melissa Leo, John Rubinstein, Clea DuVall, Eddie Marsan, Denis O’Hare. Screenplay: Screenplay: Guillermo Arriaga. Cinematography: Rodrigo Prieto. Production design: Brigitte Broch. Film editing: Stephen Mirrione. Music: Gustavo Santaolalla.  An egg is an egg no matter how you scramble it. You can whip it into a meringue or a soufflé or an omelet, but it still retains its eggness. The same thing is true of melodrama: There's no disguising its improbabilities and coincidences, its short cuts around motive and characterization, its intent to surprise and shock. Not that there's anything wrong with melodrama. Some of Shakespeare's tragedies, are grounded on it. It's just that you have to approach it without pretension, which is the chief failing of Alejandro G. Iñárritu's 21 Grams. The melodramatic premise is this: The recipient of a heart transplant falls in love with the donor's widow, who then persuades him to try to kill the man who killed her husband. But Iñárritu takes screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga's premise and scrambles it, using non-linear narrative devices -- flashbacks and flashforwards -- and casting an unrelievedly dark tone over it. The title refers to the study by a Massachusetts physician in 1907 that tried to weigh the human soul: He devised a sort of death-bed scales, which would register any loss of weight at the moment a patient died, thereby demonstrating to his satisfaction -- if not to the medical and scientific communities -- that the weight of the soul was approximately three-quarters of an ounce, or 21 grams. I suspect that Arriaga and Iñárritu meant the allusion to this bit of nonsense metaphorically, but it doesn't come off that way. Iñarritu is one of our most celebrated contemporary directors, with back-to-back Oscars for Birdman (2014) and The Revenant (2015) to prove it, but here he gets caught up in narrative gimmicks that prevent him from delivering a completely satisfying film. The performances of Sean Penn, Naomi Watts, Benicio Del Toro, and Melissa Leo are as fine as their reputations suggest they would be. The narrative tricks are done with great skill, especially with the aid of cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, who uses color to make each of the narrative segments distinct from the others, so that when the film cuts from one to another, the viewer feels better oriented. And there's no denying the emotional impact of the film as a whole. It could hardly be otherwise, given the pain suffered by the protagonists: Cristina (Watts), who lost her husband and her two little girls; Jack (Del Toro), the ex-con who accidentally killed them and believes that it was all because Jesus wanted it to happen; and Paul (Penn), who finds his chance at a new life marred by knowledge that it was at the expense of other people's happiness. But in the end, all of this suffering is off-loaded onto us without any compensatory feeling of having been enlightened by it.

[poeticque]

A spirituality at once exalted and unrelievedly somber. Nothing useful can come from this practice.

Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips, in Intimacies. 

[hobbsdrake]

Understanding the various forces associated with the Home Loan.

The current paper is a step towards understanding the various strengths associated with home loan portfolios and co-operative studies related to home loans. About this, secondly, data are viewed. The shown basic variability of arc currencies is after the draw household expenses. Interest rates play an important role. paperwork, declining profits. awareness among potential customers, the poor do not receive budget assistance, government housing policy planning, quality of service. speed of service delivery and the use of programs should be commensurate with the economic situation of borrowers, use of unrelievedly, distribution. and in any way. as long as the original work is well distributed.