#James Ensor

[nobrashfestivity]

James Ensor, The Skeleton Painter, 1896

[literaryvein-reblogs]

Writing Notes: Blood Alcohol Level

Blood Alcohol Level Percentage — Behavioral Effects

0.02 to 0.03 — Few obvious effects; slight intensification of mood

0.05 to 0.06 — Feeling of warmth, relaxation, mild sedation; exaggeration of emotion and behavior; slight decrease in reaction time and in fine-muscle coordination; impaired judgment about continued drinking

0.07 to 0.09 — More noticeable speech impairment and disturbance of balance; impaired motor coordination, hearing, and vision; feeling of elation or depression; increased confidence; may not recognize impairment

0.11 to 0.12 — Coordination and balance becoming difficult; distinct impairment of mental faculties and judgment

0.14 to 0.15 — Major impairment of mental and physical control; slurred speech, blurred vision, and lack of motor skills; needs medical evaluation

0.20 — Loss of motor control; must have assistance moving about; mental confusion; needs medical assistance

0.30 — Severe intoxication; minimum conscious control of mind and body; needs hospitalization

0.30 to 0.60 — This level of alcohol has been measured in people who have died of alcohol intoxication

0.40 — Unconsciousness; coma; needs hospitalization; about the LD 50 (the dose at which half of those with this level of intoxication will die)

Source ⚜ Writing Notes & References Writing Notes: Wine-Tasting ⚜ Food Symbolisms ⚜ Words Related to Drinking

[thepapersnail]

James Ensor, Petites Figures Bizarres, 1888, drypoint and etching

[weirdlookindog]

James Ensor (1860-1949) - Death Pursuing Humanity, 1896

[granstromjulius]

James Ensor

[diioonysus]

favorite artists (4/10): james ensor (1860-1949)

[beautiful-belgium]

James Ensor - Town Hall of Audenaerde (1888), Royal Library of Belgium

[thatsbutterbaby]

James Ensor - Menu for Ernest Rousseau, 1896. Etching, paper.

[enchantedbook]

'The King Pest' by James Ensor, 1895

[arsvitaest]

James Ensor (1860-1949), Marine, oil on canvas

[myfriendpokey]

tunnel notes

i wrote some extra little notes and thoughts for the bonus tunnels in anthology of the killer, and then removed them before release; i didn't like the prescriptive feeling of leaving that stuff in the "final package" as if it was something people should feel obligated to engage with. but as of today it's been 30 days since the loader came out, so i figured i'd dump some of them online, for the benefit of whoever is interested in these things.

History: HISTORY IS A NIGHTMARE FROM WHICH I AM TRYING TO AWAKE is one of many famous zingers given to Stephen in Ulysses and I’ve always wondered if it’s especially Irish as a sentiment, Ireland sort of feeling like the “Oops! All Peasants” edition of European history as a whole – same misery, exploitation and death minus the occasional episodes of feudal colour or triumphant empire-building that seem to make the past tolerable for other people, and give them their own sense of demarcated time. But then I’ve never been much good on Irish history, which has always just felt like an interminable, indistinguishable series of massacres and betrayals and missed shots. Was I not paying attention or was this how it was taught in school? Well, it would have fit the style at the time – I was born in 1989, smack at the start of the famous end of history era. The 90s in Ireland meant the peace process and infusion of American capital to our backwards shores, all the more reason to cosign the idea of an abrupt and permanent break with a history notably lacking in the non-depressing or picturesque. All our history textbooks seemed to trail off at the point we’d joined the EEA. And even as this new modernity just started seeming like the monstrous antiquity dressed up in different clothes – hooded prisoners transported to torture sites through Shannon airport, our patchy social infrastructure dismantled by burghers, ghost estates and half-completed monuments scattered around like the ruin theory of value with more leprechaun imagery – there was still a sense that any change was off the table. You didn’t want to drag us back into history, did you? History seemed to have “ended” in the same sense Freddy Krueger did – done away with in ways that none of the grown-ups ever wanted to talk about, and now officially a non-presence, even if all the kids in town were mysteriously disappearing.

--

Art: One reason I wanted to do an episodic series is just to see what would turn up, if any recurring interests would build despite a minimum of planning. One of the themes turned out to be, “art” – or specifically modernist art – and I am curious about why that would be. A recurring tendency in modernism was the idea that only by destroying the world as it currently existed could we clear space for anything better to emerge. Under the cobblestones, the beach! But this was always attended by a kind of fear: that clearing away the old structures would just allow something even worse to emerge, unmasked. Under the cobblestones, more corpses! And that the bleakest tendencies of the period would now run free without even the emptiest symbolic constraints to chafe against. Max Ernst’s painting of the fascist victory in Spain, of a huge, grinning oaf rampaging over the landscape like a kaiju while a miserable birdlike figure remains haplessly grafted to its leg – is titled both “The Angel Of Hearth And Home” and “The Triumph Of Surrealism”. As if to suggest that these are each the same thing, as though a cause of creative liberation worth devoting your life to and an empty cliché of domestic repression had so little light between them as to not even be worth the effort of distinguishing.

Part of the reason works like that make their way into the games in little ways is because I just like them, and go back to thinking about them. But the status of modernism in the 21st century is an odd one; the most tentative and inventive parts got dropped, while the brashest and stupidest aspects curdled into a kind of official state ideology – the idea of “creative destruction”, which just seems to mean a vague sense that it’s punk rock to create ridesharing apps. The monkey’s paw curled and the emptiest version of the modernist credo became something we all have to live with.. and yet I still can’t help but be moved by the source works and the goofy, ridiculous temerity of that wish to transfigure the world. sometimes it feels like only way to keep faith with those ideas is to travesty them, to try returning to them some of that sense of fear and doubt without which they just sound like so many web design agency manifestos. Kept alive in the breast of so many grimacing waxworks, underground.

Another reason to put this stuff in a horror game: to try getting at that feeling in a dream of looking in the eyes of people you know, people you love, and seeing nothing there anymore, seeing them look right past you. An earlier horror game idea I used to think about would have ended with the protagonist being dismembered and eaten by Gertrude Stein.

--

The moral: I’ve seen people express a sense, now, that merely working in the negative is not enough; to just outline what’s bad without also trying to give a vision of the good, some glimpsed utopia to shoot for. For the benefit of these people here is an epilogue. Imagine it’s the future and the long nightmare of prehistory is over; history proper unfolds as the full expression of human powers unhindered by material subjugation. Some students are given an assignment by a professor to investigate the meaning of a term that no longer exists, the meaning of horror. Well, the students do their best: they watch lots of old movies, put on rubber masks, comb through old fragments of the world that was. They’re enjoying themselves and that enjoyment warps the process, they keep drifting into pleasure, unsure what’s meant to be funny and what’s not. They get lost, get confused, lose the thread, famous faces appear under the wrong names, espousing things that are the opposite of whatever they believed. In the end they all have to admit defeat: they hand in their assignment with a note saying that in the new world, we can’t even imagine what horror may have been. The professor reads their findings, nods, and gives them all an F. No moral.

[image source: James Ensor, "The Intrigue"]

[nobrashfestivity]

James Ensor, Fireworks, 1887

[putlestory]

[thepapersnail]

James Ensor, Le Roi Peste, 1895, etching

[oncanvas]

Gestes de nymphes (Gestures of Nymphs), James Ensor, 1926

Oil on canvas 96.9 x 110 cm (38.15 x 43.31 in.)

[portraituresque]

James Ensor - Self portrait