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Sealedplay1: a trashy sword-slashing trap playlist

upcoming + orchestral playlist + 

make them dirtier

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The year is 1,821 AL. The sun rises over the vast land of Fuduo, ruled by clans descended from the original Twelve Heroes. We open within the safe walls of Aeon Academy, established at Heushi Holy Temple in Fuduo’s mountainous heart. It is here that the young talents of the continent enroll to sharpen their minds and hone their bodies to become the leaders of a new tomorrow—leaders equipped to handle their collapsing world of today.

Unsealed

[unsealed]

The year is 1,821 AL. The sun rises over the vast land of Fuduo, ruled by clans descended from the original Twelve Heroes. We open within the safe walls of Aeon Academy, established at Heushi Holy Temple in Fuduo’s mountainous heart. It is here that the young talents of the continent enroll to sharpen their minds and hone their bodies to become the leaders of a new tomorrow—leaders equipped to handle their collapsing world of today.

Unsealed

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ゴールデンカムイ

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篠倉ぞん

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十二国記

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CA

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IF

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GK

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TH

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Morning Conversation

Rocío’s brother Carlos came back today. I wasn't worried but Rocío was, or at least she seemed to be. Maybe Rocío was worried for her mom, rather, because her mother was worried about Carlos. They hadn’t heard from him for a week. They thought he might be in prison, they wondered if he was dead. The boy he went with, Ely's brother, came back saying the officers chased them after the truck they were traveling in crashed. The boy was caught. Carlos, however, ran into the bush.

“Thank God he came back,” I say to Rocío. “I was worried about him. Last night I went to sleep thinking about him, you know what I mean, not thinking like that,”—we both laugh—“but thinking oh I hope Carlos is OK.”

“I understand,” she tells me. “I know what you mean. I also went to bed hoping he was alright.”

“Although I wasn't really worried. I mean not really worried about him; you know what I mean? He's so smart, Carlos, he has done this so many times. It's hard to imagine him being caught.”

“I know, but they did tell us he was in prison.”

“Who told you this?”

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Had I been created? Did I own myself? What did names like “God," “paradise,” and “eternal” mean?

I sensed that the religious language held what I had first heard in poetry: a whisper that said eternity was at play in the everyday, like when I was younger and would lie in the grass looking at contrails, or when I’d been in love, or done a jump shot on the basketball court and for a moment we’d all been hanging in the light, weightless, before death... or like when I would wake up from a dream, sweaty and feeling that I’d touched another dimension of existence, that I’d left the Underworld, staggered to the door, and collapsed in bed.

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Question?

Answer!

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Alhambra

I saw him on the subway. He was sitting across the aisle, a man my age, West African, dressed in clothes that reminded me of glossy paper—they were made of a stiff, waxed fabric so white it was incandescent in the vibrating darkness of the subway car. He was talking to the friend sitting next to him, his cap pulled low over his brow. He just came from the mosque, he said. He went there every so often to help with vacuuming and stuff.

It was a few years into the new millennium. I was in Stockholm for a job and had met up with a buddy afterward. We’d played PlayStation all night and now I was on my way to the place where I was staying. The lights seemed to tumble through the tunnel. I felt the way I always did during this time of my life, a time marked by death—my best friend had passed away from cancer and others in my circles had died from overdoses or in police cells. Life felt terribly depopulated. Neutron-bomb lights were tumbling in the emptiness outside the car and they seemed to be x-raying the people around me, like I could see the skeletons underneath their skin. But when my eyes landed on the guy talking about vacuuming a mosque I couldn’t stop staring. It was like he came from a planet that still had meaning.

I wanted to cross over to his side.

Swap bodies or something. Lives.

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The Rivals

When Floristella catches sight of Pianon on the Red House veranda—the side that overlooks Madame Rose Rakotomalala’s jackfruit tree—he gives a martial bellow, charges down the garden path, and attacks his neighbor with a walking stick. And though the two old Italian men, both well over seventy, are ludicrous combatants—Floristella, a diabetic, is ponderously fat, while tall Pianon is skeletal from annual bouts of malaria, so that their skirmish suggests a clash between Falstaff and Ichabod Crane—their energy and passion run high, and no one who witnesses the incident feels inclined to laugh.

The owners of the Red House, Senna and his wife, Shay, have left Madagascar and are back home in Italy at the time, but there are plenty of witnesses to give them, later, a detailed report of the fight between their resident accountant and their old friend and next-door neighbor. There is Madame Rose, their neighbor on the opposite side and their chief informant. There are the gardeners and maids from the Red House, including the formidable head housekeeper, Bertine la Grande. There are several Antandroy market women heading up the beach bearing baskets of vegetables on their heads. There is a boy driving a herd of zebu up the side path from their morning bath in the sea. There is an oyster vender in a straw pillbox hat.

The maids and gardeners rush to separate the struggling old vazaha while other people stop and stare, but with a notable lack of astonishment. Everybody up and down Finoana Beach knows the history of the trouble and the name of the woman behind it.

Not long ago, the combatants were close friends. Pianon and Floristella: both Italians who have been in Madagascar since the early years of independence, both men of dignity and substance, as much as they can be in that libertine island atmosphere where foreigners’ souls can rot as quickly as a bunch of soft-skinned bananas. Both speak fluent Malagasy, highland and coastal dialects. They’ve been on Naratrany long enough for the islanders to have christened them with fondly mocking nicknames. Pianon is Valiha, the word for a tall thin twanging bamboo musical instrument, and Floristella is Sakav, meaning, simply, “food.”

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True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care—with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world.

David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

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The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.

David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life