#over their chest and some of the male designs just being fully shirtless or having an open vest maybe(also sometimes a cropped vest)

[long-death-dazai]

It is [Dazai stares up at the ceiling to avoid looking at Chuuya] it almost certainly is [he groans, covering his face with both hands and dragging them down] I’m so sure.

If someone tries to take another one of my knifes today I'm committing fUCKING WAR CRIMES AGAIN SO FUCK OFF

[sidon-reader-support]

Oh how about sidon reacting to a pre op trans male s/o whos dysphoria makes swimming unenjoyable and self esteem super low (but i did just make a surgery appointment so ill be flat chested!! :D)

(Sorry this took so long, like you said, my inbox is quite full so I’m trying to chip away at it. I never delete anything sent to me, it just takes me a little while… ^^; Congratulations on the upcoming surgery though! I hope everything goes well for you!~ Have this as a congratulatory present~ Enjoy!~)

Swimming Dysphoria:

Warnings: Dysphoria, Dysphoric thoughts, Transexual, Low self esteem

Swims Often

- (Like mentioned in a previous post) Sidon likes to go out swimming often as part of his regular Zora lifestyle but also because he finds it very enjoyable and something that he would love to share with you

- And with the tradition between Zora couples, he would take you out so that you can indulge in the activity that is so commonly practiced in his culture

- Of course, he is aware of how you feel about your body and he doesn’t care, but in the kind way where who you are and who you want to be don’t matter because he loves all of you regardless

- Though the idea of wanting to physically change from the gender that you were born with to a different one is a very foreign concept to him

- Sidon would eventually understand that it is a hurdle in your life and he will gladly help you to get through it and become the person that you want to be

- Back to swimming, Sidon suggest it to you because swimming is something that he often does whenever he is feeling overwhelmed and just needs a break from everything around him

- He believes that if you try your hand at swimming you two will discover that it is a wonderful way for you to unwind, forget about the thoughts that haunt you many days, and spend some time with him as well

Doubts And Dysphoria

- While you definitely appreciate Sidon’s efforts to help you, it is always a near constant struggle for you to enjoy even simple things like swimming with your boyfriend

- And it’s because of those haunting thoughts that linger around you nearly every time you catch a glimpse of the body that has never felt quite right to you

- It has never felt like yours

- Even though many people compliment you, Sidon especially, on your looks it doesn’t feel good, you don’t feel like you deserve them especially not when they are about the body that you hate, the one that isn’t yours

- Every day it’s the same struggle when you have to face this strange girl in the mirror and see her get dressed and go about her day while you can only watch and try to make yourself comfortable

- It’s difficult for you to not be able to make the final changes that would get rid of your worries and perhaps let you live the free life of a man that you have always wanted but you make-do with your binder and loose clothes and Sidon is always there to love and support you no matter what

- Which is why it is hard for you to deny his help even though you know from past experience that you will not be able to put yourself in that pool

- So you agree to his plan and on the day when the weather is so nice and your Prince is eagerly leading you toward one of his favorite swimming spots - quiet and away from prying eyes so the two of you will have plenty of privacy - you can only think of how such perfection is wasted on someone like you

- Sidon is the first and only one to dive in but he looks to you almost expectantly waiting for you to remove your clothes, revealing your swimsuit, and then jump in to join him

- But when you only sit on the bank of the river and dip your toes in he seems a little disappointed but this is quickly replaced by concerned confusion seeing the discouraged look on your face

- You don’t want to let your issues interrupt Sidon’s break because of your issues but as always he is determined to get to the root of your problem, dropping everything else in favor of making you feel better

- You always appreciate the effort that Sidon puts into cheering you up but you feel guilty always being the cause of his worries

Narrow Down Issues

- When Sidon does manage to get you to relax and tell him how you are feeling he understands, not completely but enough to know what he needs to ask questions about so he can get the answers

- So he drifts towards you, wrapping his arms around you for some support as the two of you try to get down to all of the little things that bother you and prevent you from getting in the water instead of just a general miserable feeling

- He can’t control your feelings; he can help to calm them so they’re not so intense but physical things that bug you are much easier for him to change or adjust to make you more comfortable

- Privacy is not a problem thanks to the location so being around other people isn’t a problem though you do confess to being a little insecure around Sidon

- The swimsuit is an issue because you have never felt comfortable wearing such form-fitting clothing especially when all of them were designed for a girl to wear, which you are not

- You would gladly wear guy’s swim shorts but that would mean you would be shirtless and you are definitely not ready to do something like that, especially not when your only protection would be your binder

- You don’t want anyone to catch you like that, it would be humiliating and you already bring yourself down enough you don’t need anyone else to say something about you

- You want to step out of your comfort zone and enjoy fun things like swimming with your boyfriend but you just can’t take that first step

Alternatives

- That date ends sooner than expected but a day or two later Sidon asks you to go swimming again but this time he has found ways to work around your insecurities

- The first and most important problem he tackles is your swimsuit which he does by giving you different options of suits that he had specially for you

- There’s a special swimsuit made specifically to fit your body comfortably and cover your chest or there is also different shirts, sleeveless or not, to go with your swim shorts if you don’t want the full body option

- He can’t make you get over your fear of revealing what you’d rather hide but if he can at least make you comfortable wearing something just a little revealing then that is good enough for him

- Sidon won’t even make you get in he water if you’re not comfortable with it, he’d be happy to let you just put on the swimsuit but only dip your toes in

- The Zora is fully willing to give you all the time to adjust to being in the water comfortably so there is no rush for you to get used to anything

- He knows that being comfortable is the first step to helping you so he will do everything he can to make you comfortable with swimming and, in a way, your body

[topmixtrends]

ALBERT LEWIN’S 1945 ADAPTATION of The Picture of Dorian Gray for MGM has been largely forgotten. Though it won an Academy Award for Best Cinematography, Black-and-White, the shots for which it is most remembered are two brief Technicolor inserts showing the eponymous portrait just after it is painted and then, later, once it has aged. The two versions were the work of two different artists: the Portuguese academic painter Henrique Medina painted the first in smooth imitation of 19th-century style. An American from Chicago, Ivan Albright, did the second.

Albright’s picture, which is on display in the Art Institute of Chicago’s small exhibition of his work, insists that Dorian Gray’s eternally youthful appearance was the least important part of his Faustian pact. The portrait is of an old man, but it is even more of a repulsive one, designed to provoke disgust. In the full-length portrait, Dorian stands with his arms by his side in a pose of mock elegance. Next to and behind him are the accoutrements of traditional portraiture: an elegant side table, a wall clock, a carefully hung brocade curtain. Like his clothes, these objects are rendered incomprehensible by decay. His trousers and jacket are full of burns, slashes, and tears, covered with brown and yellow stains. His face, leering and grimacing directly out of the canvas, is splotchy and noticeably encrusted with what looks like leprosy: small raised bumps cut through with deep furrows.

The premise of Dorian Gray — that moral corruption would manifest as physical decay — seems perfectly aligned with Albright’s concerns, which remained remarkably constant throughout his long career, spanning the mid-’20s until his death in 1983. The painting he produced for MGM is of a piece with almost all of his other work, if more vividly colored (Albright used a brighter than usual palette for the painting to show up to full effect in Technicolor) and perhaps less realistic. Though none of his other subjects have the same renown as Wilde’s fictional character, all of Albright’s portraiture contains the same obsessively rendered detail and, above all, the same relentless fascination with how grotesque the human body can be.

¤

The son of a successful landscape painter, Albright trained at the Art Institute of Chicago and first worked as a professional artist during World War I. Stationed in France, he was commissioned to produce sketches of the injured. A small corner of the exhibit in Chicago is devoted to this first entanglement with the morbid, where the centerfold of one of Albright’s sketchbooks is laid flat behind glass; an iPad allows one to view the rest of the pages and zoom in on the anatomical details. The drawings are largely of single wounds: bright red shapes with highlights of yellow and green, set against much more faintly drawn arms, legs, and torsos. Albright’s first official commission supposedly set the course for the rest of his work, but a world of difference lies between the war sketches and his later paintings. The sketches turn parts of human bodies into objects for observation and study. They are direct: objective, difficult to look at, but entirely straightforward. The portraits Albright started to create are also objectifying: they turn the human figure into something alien and bizarre. They are revolting and seductive.

Even from the small selection of portraits on display in Chicago, one initially has the suspicion that Albright’s disgust with humanity may have favorite targets. Fascinated with corruption, degeneration, and the beauty of decay, Albright’s art — in addition to its strong resemblances to contemporaneous European painting, especially neue Sachlichkeit — picks up on themes favored in writing in a line running from Baudelaire through Lautréamont, Huysmans, and perhaps even Wilde. For Albright, as for the earlier 19th-century writers, women seem, at least initially, to be exemplary disgusting objects.

Into the World There Came a Soul Called Ida takes these elements even further. Ida sits in front of a dressing table covered in perfume bottles and makeup jars. Dressed in a short slip and silk shirt, she holds a powder puff in one hand, pressed against her heart, and a hand mirror in the other. Her legs, which almost overwhelm the composition, are an expanse of bright, pale skin. They are swollen, and around the ankles is a network of varicose veins while higher up, heavy cellulite creates strong shadows on her thighs. The insistence on the tools for the creation of feminine beauty seems like an argument that however much powder, perfume, or makeup Ida applies, she will still be fundamentally grotesque.

Albright was hardly unique in his view of women’s bodies. Baudelaire, after all, had described an animal’s carcass (in a poem of the same title) as having its “legs in the air like a lustful woman / who is burning and sweating poisons.” Baudelaire stands as a particularly extreme representative of a tradition of hyperbolic disgust at the body in general and women’s bodies in particular. Note the direction of his metaphor: it not only compares a woman to a prototypically disgusting object, but it also uses women as metaphors for a corpse. Winfried Menninghaus, in the introduction to his 1999 book Disgust, wrote that “[t]his book about disgust is thus, at the same time, a book entirely concerned with the (masculine) imagination of the vetula, of the disgusting old woman.” There are, of course, artists and writers for whom, less ostentatiously than Baudelaire, women are the default choice when one needs an exemplary disgust-object.

This pervasively misogynist perspective seems at first to sum up what is happening in works like Flesh, the 1928 painting that lends its name to the Art Institute’s current show. Its subject, Arline Stanford, is shown head-on, slumped shoulders, wearing a low-cut undershirt that shows a vast expanse of chest and shoulders, puffy and crisscrossed with wrinkles and folds. Her skin is pale, bordering on sallow, rendered by Albright with a muted but kaleidoscopic variety of reds, pinks, yellows, and purples. The face is perhaps the most shocking, covered in the same leprous combination of crust-like scars and deep furrows that Albright would use on Dorian Gray nearly 20 years later. The insistent equivalence between women and the grotesque is only intensified by the fact that a year before Albright painted Arline Stanford in Flesh, he painted her husband Arthur in The Lineman, a relatively calm portrait of an electrician. Arthur is hunched over, arms hanging by his side, bedraggled and depressed, perhaps, but certainly not grotesque or disgusting. Viewing these twin portraits of husband and wife side by side only confirms the suspicion that, even if Albright’s men are hardly heroic figures, women’s bodies are the real objects of his revulsion toward human beings.

Nevertheless, long before he was commissioned to produce the painting for MGM’s Dorian Gray, Albright had turned the full power of his microscopic style onto male subjects, who would become more and more prominent as his career developed. His 1930–’31 And God Created Man in His Own Image (Albright’s titles continued to grow unwieldy over the years) contains the most leprous image next to Dorian Gray’s: heavily wrinkled and completely covered in pustules, scars, lines. For a moment, the complete engulfment of the face by these accretions makes the image appear easier to stomach compared to the more localized eruptions in Flesh and Ida — there is no contrast to “normal” skin. The subject is shirtless; his arms and face are a brownish-red, while the areas of his flesh normally under a shirt are a pale pink-blue. All of it is sagging and wrinkled, with tufts of wiry hairs on his upper arms and chest. This man has, apparently, just taken off his shirt — one sleeve is still attached to his forearm — and the top buttons of his jeans are undone, as though threatening to show more.

Albright might not have managed to decouple bodily disgust from femininity fully. Nevertheless, his disgust is far more expansive than the tradition epitomized by Baudelaire. Indeed, the most striking pieces in the Chicago show are a series of about 20 self-portraits dating from the last two decades of Albright’s life. All are rendered in the same over-detailed, hyper-disgusted style in which he had been working for four decades. In a painting from 1982, the year before his death, Albright depicts himself with his trademark leprous skin, but also with eyes that are at once tiny, deeply sunk, and bloodshot, surrounded by folds of green-yellow skin. His mouth, hanging half open, is chafed red, as is the tip of his nose and the space between his eyebrows.

¤

Viewed while walking by quickly — or indeed, glimpsed a few seconds on screen — all of these pictures are easily digestible, even attractive. The sheer attention Albright paid to detail (which also meant it took him years to finish work) gives the images a baroque complexity; anything that elaborate generates a kind of pleasure. The level of detail in Albright’s execution also demands more prolonged attention, which does not eliminate all pleasure. There is a pleasure, too, in looking at horrible things. Despite his sense of shame, Leontius in Plato’s Republic cannot stop himself from looking at the corpses piled against the walls of Athens. “Fine, you wretches,” he says to his eyes, as a last attempt to disavow his attraction, “fill yourselves up on this lovely sight.” Being in front of many of Albright’s paintings feels similar: they are horrible, but endlessly seductive. Something is improper, perhaps even disrespectful, about them, but always some new detail, another vein, another hair, lump, or sore avails itself to discovery.

Jean Dubuffet, who contributed a brief essay to a catalog of a 1964 retrospective at the Art Institute and the Whitney, took Albright to be a crusader against the Platonic injunction to turn our eyes away:

Rarely, it seems to me, perhaps never, has the platonic and humanistic spirit been opposed with the weight and authority of so devastating a wind. Never has an assault of such force been given to the rationalistic order, to the secular esthetics which rule in our midst and to the metaphysics from which they proceed.

In the same catalog, the curator Frederick Sweet closes his preface by remarking that Albright “does not think that his interests are morbid, nor does he consider himself a realist, but feels that life and death, growth and decay, are all part of existence.” Death exists, of course, but the hope in those lines seems to be that Albright’s portraiture contains, alongside its relentless disgust for the human body, a more redeeming message. Perhaps he is proposing some sort of empathy: that we may age, gain weight, lose or sprout hair, develop leprosy, but that through all of these bodily changes we remain human, and that all of these supposedly disgusting qualities are simply what it means to have a body. As such, they are to be celebrated. If that reading is right, the closest literary antecedent for Albright would not be Baudelaire but Walt Whitman and his celebration of the body: “All attitudes, all the shapeliness, all the belongings of my or your body or of any one’s body, male or female, / The lung-sponges, the stomach-sac, the bowels sweet and clean.”

Dubuffet and Sweet’s sentiment comes to the same point: that Albright’s unwavering attention to the parts of our existence at which we would rather not look forces a confrontation with our embodiment and finitude. Albright’s portraits would seem to offer the visual analogue to the project of anti-disgust advocated most recently and forcefully by the philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who claims Whitman as a primary source of inspiration. This requires a turn away from thinking of ourselves as detached from our bodies, not to submit to the lure of idealization, to confront the limits but also the peculiar joys of being finite human animals.

As good as that sounds, it is not at all clear that this is what Albright is up to. Albright’s portraits do at times seem caught between a Platonist condemnation of the body tout court and an honest reckoning with the inevitability of decay and the inevitable difficulties entailed by having a body. Albright’s own pronouncements from the 1964 catalog must rank as one of the stranger artist statements produced for a major museum:

In this eternal smog-land of ours, if the real truth appeared, it would blind us, it would incinerate us as the sun would blind and incinerate us on close approach. We are shadows of the real but not the real; we live by half-truths and half facts. […] The body is our tomb. Shake the dust from our soul and maybe there lies the answer for without this planetary body, without eyes the light would not hurt, without flesh the pain would not hurt, without legs our motion might accelerate, without endless restrictions our freedom greater, our slavery less, without examples all around us our originality might be different. Without a body we might be men.

Albright seems at turns revolted by and deeply empathetic with his subjects. Yet even if his portraits demand that we look honestly and hold our gaze, bodies seem to be unambiguously bad things for Albright. If his portraits are filled with empathy for his subjects (which they are), his empathy is based on the shared misfortune of being embodied. The problem, of course, is that we cannot get out of our bodies. Plato thought that we could, through suitable intellectual exercise and purification, leave our physical vessels behind and attain pure understanding. Albright, it must be said, knew better. But on the more basic point of whether it would be preferable not to have a body at all, he agrees. Without finding anything but pain and encumbrance in embodiment, how could he not? Whitman and his successors’ celebration of bodies in all their many forms — including the ones usually called disgusting — ultimately requires that there be something redeeming in having a body, like the physical pleasures of food and sex. Even those who turn toward bodies with disgust do not deny that they are sites of genuine pleasure (indeed, part of the reason they are problematic is because they are so pleasurable), even if they also bring inevitable pains. Albright categorically denies this. For him, there are no benefits to having a body: not in the straightforward sense championed by Whitman and not even lurking in the background of disgust, as it does for Baudelaire. Albright’s painting is so unsettling because his vision of bodily corruption is uncompromising. Whatever else it is, it is a decades-long argument that in the end, it would be better not to have a body.

¤

Emilio Comay del Junco is an academic and writer based in New York. He is finishing his PhD in philosophy at the University of Chicago; his academic research focuses on ancient Greek philosophy.

The post More Than a Body: Ivan Albright at the Art Institute of Chicago appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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