#the reality of having psychologically complex characters in a narrative is that they will resemble real people from your life

[theshadowsingersraven]

I had this drafted around elaingate, and now that my fever has finally broken, I can piece together my thoughts on the absurdity that is this fandom and the rhys week tamlin and rhys' sister piece debacle. Because, of course, no one has learned anything from elaingate to now, and it's time to wake up and smell the coffee.

If there's one thing about this fanbase that I've noticed so far, it's that people will accidentally tell you exactly who they are in the most embarrassing way possible. What's the main takeaway in the overlap of the rhys week drama and elaingate?

Art, purity culture, and "victimhood." And people deciding who does and doesn't get to fall under the latter.

The thing that I appreciate about elaingate (and I guess Rhysgate??) happening is that it outs the people in this fanbase who don't see art that doesn't cater to them as having same rights as the art they do like/are comfortable with to be celebrated and appreciated in a community event about a character.

It outs people who only care about "protecting survivors" if their trauma conveniently matches what SJM believes to be abuse or trauma. It outs people as having the same performative inclinations of "protecting victims" as pro forced-birth/anti-choice pundits do. Rhysand’s sister, a nameless character, is the perfect "victim" to create an upheaval about because, like Elain, no one actually has to sacrifice anything or do any difficult self-reflection because fictional characters will never ask anything of you.

Remember this quote from Pastor David Barnhart? It's pretty relevant.

"The unborn are a convenient group of people to advocate for. They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; they don’t resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don’t ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they don’t need money, education, or childcare; unlike aliens, they don’t bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn. You can love the unborn and advocate for them without substantially challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege without re-imagining social structures, apologizing, or making reparations to anyone. They are, in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love Jesus, but actually dislike people who breathe. Prisoners? Immigrants? The sick? The poor? Widows? Orphans? All the groups that are specifically mentioned in the Bible? They all get thrown under the bus for the unborn."

Rhys' sister and Elain are the perfect vehicle for people to feel like they're "morally just" for "protecting" from...Tamlin. And people creating specific dynamics between these fictional characters, too, I guess. Because they're evil or whatever, I suppose.

"But, Raven!" I'm sure some of you are already scrambling to say. "There are real people in this fandom triggered by Tamlin, and they were hurt! They were so upset/disgusted that they left the fandom because people cared more about fictional ships than their triggers/feelings!"

And I'm going to hold your hand while I say this as a fellow survivor of DV.

No one is responsible for my triggers and caring for my own mental health other than me. And that applies to everyone else in this fanbase, too.

It's my responsibility to curate my online experience as much as possible to my own needs. This space is voluntary to be a part of, and if I no longer feel as though it's conducive to my mental health overall, then yeah, it's probably best for me to leave. Same with everyone else who felt like they shouldn't be in this fandom space because of the elaingate upheaval.

If people rightfully pointing out that this fanbase is extremely conservative and aligned with purity culture and morality policing to the point where art is policed in relation to celebrating a character during their own week is too much for someone because of the narrative around one of the characters involved...then yeah, it sounds like this isn't a good environment for them anyhow.

There's no judgment to be passed on the side rightfully saying this fandom is fucked up, whether or not people are ready to hear that. People saying art that features Tamlin in relation to another character event still has a right to be celebrated so long as that character in the event is depicted has no bearing on whatever real person Tamlin represents to the people that were triggered.

There's only so many ways people can actually be realistically protected from content that triggers them, and tagging is the most consistent way to do so. If the protection of tagging triggering content somehow still isn't enough for people when they might happen upon art depicting a character for one day out of a one-week period maybe is also still too potentially triggering for them, then maybe being in a fandom space isn't the best for their overall mental health and stepping away from it isn't a bad thing.

(And that's all without getting into why its totally fair for peoppe to question how true that ""stance"" of "protecting survivors" actually is when the Elain Week event's tagging system is consistently ignored and not used to actually protect survivors from triggering content. It's interesting how people spent more time angry at people who were adamant about the right to celebrate art instead of the event itself for not having a remotely thorough tagging system. How are you "protecting survivors" from triggering content, including yourself as the event runner, without tagging anything from character names to triggering content/events someone might view? Let's not forget how wide-spread triggers are, too. People have trigger warnings for content involving eyes or spiders due to phobias, not just events that they might have personally experienced, like violence.)

Back to the main point, however.

Issues like these out people as not understanding that creativity means bending the rules of canon however you want, because these are characters, not real people. But real people are making this art, and its value and worthiness of being celebrated is not up to anyone's personal discretion (including event runners) even in situations of discomfort.

It's a shame that the first upheaval happened regarding Elain since she's rarely appreciated outside of her ships anyway, but this Hell-hole of a fandom has had this coming for a while now. This is an absurdly conservative, rigid-to-canon, puritannical fandom, and unfortunately, Elain Week was the match that started this fire.

As a writer, I'm always going to have a hard stance on this because appreciating and celebrating art does not end where my personal likes and comforts do. Appreciation does not look the same for everyone, and just because it's not how you would personally celebrate a character does not mean it stops being appreciation or celebration. Your preferences are not and never will be the end-all-be-all of artistic appreciation in a fandom space. If you don’t see that, the block button is right there, and I've been using it very liberally.

You either stand for all of fandom integrity and creative works, or you don't deserve to be in this space. And I will very happily remove you from my space here since, as far as I'm concerned, you don't deserve to be in mine, either.

[cyokie]

Jack Vessalius as a Symbol for Depression

Ever since I first read PandoraHearts, I have interpreted Jack Vessalius as at least a partial symbolic representation of depression, especially in his relationship with Oz. 

(Skip to “keep reading” to go straight to the analysis; this beginning portion is little more than a disclaimer.)

Jack is a complex, fascinating character, and it is precisely due to this that I believe any number of interpretations regarding him contain merit. Whether you view Jack as an abuser, a manifestation of mental illness, or an extraordinarily-written character that does not require a figurative understanding to be interesting, I think this is valid. 

I am saying this first and foremost because I want to be clear: this is not a persuasive essay. I am not trying to change anybody’s minds about liking or disliking Jack Vessalius, nor am I trying to devalue any other interpretations of this extremely nuanced character. Some points may be a bit vague and connections disjointed, though I attempted to minimize this. Any discussion of mental illness and abuse is based on either my personal experiences or those of people I know. I do not intend to offend anybody. 

This post is simply the product of years of disorganized yet in-depth thoughts about this concept. I hope some of you will be interested.

Major spoilers for the entire manga below the cut. Manga panels are from the Fallen Syndicate fan translation. This...is going to get very long.

Emotional Abuse

Jack exists within Oz’s mind. When these two interact, it almost always occurs within Oz’s head, providing every conversation with an inherently emotional and symbolic element. 

Jack initially appears to Oz as an unknown but crucial figure. Whether he is trustworthy or even harmful remains to be seen, but his input is necessary. He is the only insight Oz has into his lost memories; he knows something Oz does not. Oz is suffering an identity crisis, realizing he has endured something he does not completely understand, something that could potentially change his entire life once he does understand it. And yet, this mysterious voice within his head understands it.  

This desperation makes it almost irrelevant whether Jack is credible, whether his advice is well-intentioned. Normally a rather cynical and distrusting young man, Oz follows Jack from the beginning despite wanting answers. He does indeed receive answers, but they are perhaps not quite what he bargained for, in more ways than one.

Once Jack’s true nature is revealed, the extent to which he has used Oz’s memories and emotions against him becomes apparent. Jack does present Oz with new insights into his experiences, but he only ever provides Oz with enough information to convince him to act a certain way. He never willingly gives a fair, all-encompassing portrayal of an event from Oz’s past. He manipulates Oz’s perceptions of his memories to fit a particular emotional narrative, one that is inevitably perplexing and demeaning to Oz. 

This bears a resemblance to the way depression warps how we view past events. When we look back at our experiences, we don’t see the entire picture--though we are convinced that we may. We see a skewed version of an incident that actually occurred. Perhaps this incident proves little to nothing about ourselves in reality, but viewed through the lens of depression, everything about it seems to scream that we are useless. And it is nearly impossible to try and perceive these events any differently, because when depression overtakes our minds, this perspective appears to be the only one through which it is possible to examine any of our pasts. 

By the time Jack’s intentions have been exposed, he is also explicitly emotionally abusive towards Oz. It is easy to recognize Jack’s statements as not only psychologically damaging, but disturbingly similar to what we hear in our own heads when suffering depression. Think about these assertions without the very literal plot elements that support them: Jack declares Oz less than human, insists that nobody loves him, and claims that he has no future because the only thing he’s good for is hurting those around him. He convinces Oz that he is useless, hopeless, and worthless. 

Jack drills these ideas into Oz’s head when he is at his most vulnerable. This is when Oz breaks down and becomes convinced that all of Jack’s statements are true. He is not who he thought he was; he never has been, and so his life is meaningless. 

This is arguably when Oz reaches his all-time emotional low. While it was already addressed that he had been struggling intensely with his mental health and was probably suicidal, up to this point, he always retained some level of self-preservation (however slight). Now, he silently accepts that the world would be better off without him and offers no physical or emotional resistance to his own execution. Jack’s words worm their way into his heart and corrupt his self-image to the point where his only reaction to Oswald’s sword swinging towards him is a blank, unflinching stare. 

Trauma Response

It’s not uncommon for Jack to manifest during catastrophic moments--that is, whenever a situation triggers (or comes close to triggering) overwhelming memories of Oz’s trauma. When Oz is losing control over his emotional and physical faculties, Jack often encourages him to make the trigger disappear using the quickest and easiest method available. Unsurprisingly, this method generally takes advantage of Oz’s extraordinary powers. In other words, the “tactic” Jack advises Oz to use is simply mindless destruction.

In the second half of the manga, Oz is at his least emotionally stable. It is not a coincidence that this is also the point during which Jack gains the ability to completely hijack Oz’s body. This development allows Jack to commit impulsive acts of aggression through Oz, while Oz himself retains little to no control.

Jack overwhelms Oz with unnecessary flashbacks to traumatic events and makes an excess of harmful connections between past and present circumstances. Oz’s panicked, distressed responses to this are tools he uses to further coax Oz into acting in a self-destructive manner. These tendencies may not only connect Jack to the concept of depression, but the concept of post-traumatic stress disorder as well. 

Identity Crisis

Although Jack is introduced extremely early in the manga, one of the story’s main mysteries is the exact nature of his connection to Oz. This relationship shifts several times, especially with regards to who is “in control” and who is the true “owner” of the physical body. 

Once it becomes public knowledge that Jack is “within” Oz, the identity of the former overcomes the identity of the latter in the eyes of the general populace. Figures who never before gave Oz a second glance begin to pay incredibly close attention to him; many directly address him through his connection to Jack rather than as a separate entity. 

Oz is deeply troubled by the way others ignore him in favor of an aspect of his identity that he feels does not truly represent him--an aspect of his identity that is at least partially out of his control. However, he is also relatively resigned to being judged in this manner. He lacks knowledge of how to change this circumstance because even he does not truly understand the extent to which he and Jack are connected. 

It is true that at this point in the story, Jack is practically worshipped. His destructive actions and devastatingly selfish nature have not yet been exposed. Because of this, Oz as Jack’s “vessel” is typically viewed through a positive lens. Still, this situation reflects how people with depression are sometimes reduced to nothing more than a mental illness by their peers. Because others do not understand (and mental illness is stigmatized), they start to see us as “different” in some indefinable but undeniable way, and our existence becomes that particular part of ourselves in their eyes. 

As time passes, the line between Jack and Oz becomes more and more blurred. Questions are raised about whether they are the same person or, on the contrary, whether they are similar at all. At what is arguably the climax of the manga, Jack declares that Oz’s body is, was, and will always be his possession; he claims that in reality, there is no “Oz,” only “Jack.” 

This thought haunts Oz intensely and sends him into a rapid downward spiral. Like the sentiments expressed near the end of the “emotional abuse” section of this analysis, the idea that Oz’s body belongs to Jack is backed up by rigid, literal plot elements. However, if we view this emotional catastrophe using a symbolic perspective, it is a representation of yet another common struggle endured by those with depression.

We come to ask ourselves who we really are. Was there truly a time when we weren’t “like this?” Could we truly escape this misery in the future? Who would we be if we were to stop feeling this way? Do we even exist without depression? Does Oz even exist without Jack?

Visual Symbolism

It is a classic literary device to represent hope through light and despair through darkness. The manga is rife with this exact type of symbolism, utilizing it to describe how the Abyss has changed throughout time, Break’s dwindling eyesight, and the oscillating emotional states of various characters. 

As I stated previously, Jack and Oz interact almost exclusively within the latter’s mind. The landscape drawn in the background of these conversations initially possesses a watery, clear appearance. However, as it becomes increasingly clear that Jack’s presence is deeply damaging to Oz’s psyche, this same landscape becomes overwhelmingly tainted by dark, ink-like shadows. 

Closer examination reveals that this “pollution” originates directly from Jack--and it reaches its peak once Jack’s intentions have been fully disclosed. Not only is Oz’s mind visibly corrupted by darkness, but Jack himself appears as an almost inhuman figure composed of these shadows. 

There is another level of visual symbolism as well--namely, the fact that Jack becomes increasingly physically aggressive and disrespectful towards Oz. In the first half of the manga, he primarily speaks to Oz from a distance, occasionally reaching out a hand in his direction. This is clearly not so in the second half of the manga, at which point Oz begins to defy his influence and it becomes vital that he subjugate him as quickly as possible.

By this time, Jack is almost always seen either restraining or caressing Oz. Even in the latter situation, when his touches are lingering and vaguely affectionate, they are possessive and constraining. In other words, though they appear different on the surface, both actions are ultimately methods of forcing Oz’s submission. It can be said that this represents his desire to gain complete control over all aspects of Oz’s being, as well as his total lack of respect for Oz’s physical and emotional autonomy.

It can be argued that both of these aspects of symbolism reach their pinnacle even before this point. Oz realizes his own worth when Oscar says he loves him and reveals that his greatest desire is for him to be happy. When Oz is at last able to grasp that he is loved and there is hope within his life, Jack immediately reaches out to grab him. And in one of the manga’s subtlest but most poignant moments, his hand crumbles to dust upon touching Oz. 

What follows is an extremely impactful display of Oz’s character development. He recalls Jack’s previous statements declaring his achievements worthless, denouncing the love he received from others as fake, and degrading his worth. Then he furiously rejects all of them, thrusting out a hand to push Jack away from him and consuming Jack in an explosion of light. 

The conclusion to be drawn from this is that Jack essentially lives off Oz’s misery. When Oz understands and is able to accept that he is not worthless, Jack is suddenly rendered utterly powerless. 

The manga culminates in a scene that coincides with this symbolism. This late into the story, Oz has succeeded in transcending Jack’s influence almost entirely, but Jack is not quite ready to let go. Though they stand together within a void, glimmers of light linger around Oz--despite everything, his life has come to be surrounded by hope and love. 

As Oz floats towards the path of light above, Jack reaches out and takes hold of his wrist. But his grip is feeble and hesitant, representing how little control he truly holds over Oz at this point. Perhaps attempting to provoke guilt or regret, Jack asks Oz if he is certain that he is prepared to move on without him, but Oz has grown too much to succumb to this manipulation. 

Without delay, Oz replies that there is no reason for him to stay, and Jack finally releases him. He escapes into the light--into a world full of people who care about him, into a life where he is happy to be alive. 

[ucflibrary]

The national celebration of African American History was started by Carter G. Woodson, a Harvard-trained historian and the founder of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, and first celebrated as a weeklong event in February of 1926. After a half century of overwhelming popularity, the event was expanded to a full month in 1976 by President Gerald Ford.

Here at UCF Libraries we believe that knowledge empowers everyone in our community and that recognizing past inequities is the only way to prevent their continuation. This is why our February Featured Bookshelf suggestions range from celebrating outstanding African Americans to works illuminating the effects of systemic racism in our country. We are proud to present our top staff suggested books in honor of Black History Month 2021.

Click on the link below to see the full list, descriptions, and catalog links for the Black History Month titles suggested by UCF Library employees. These books plus many, many more are also on display on the main floor of the John C. Hitt Library near the Research & Information Desk.

 A Black Women’s History of the United States by Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross In centering Black women's stories, two award-winning historians seek both to empower African American women and to show their allies that Black women's unique ability to make their own communities while combatting centuries of oppression is an essential component in our continued resistance to systemic racism and sexism. Berry and Gross prioritize many voices: enslaved women, freedwomen, religious leaders, artists, queer women, activists, and women who lived outside the law. The result is a starting point for exploring Black women's history and a testament to the beauty, richness, rhythm, tragedy, heartbreak, rage, and enduring love that abounds in the spirit of Black women in communities throughout the nation. Suggested by Sandy Avila, Research & Information Services

 A Bound Woman is a Dangerous Thing: the incarceration of African American women from Harriet Tubman to Sandra Bland by DaMaris B. Hill For black American women, the experience of being bound has taken many forms: from the bondage of slavery to the Reconstruction-era criminalization of women; from the brutal constraints of Jim Crow to our own era's prison industrial complex, where between 1980 and 2014, the number of incarcerated women increased by 700%. For those women who lived and died resisting the dehumanization of confinement--physical, social, intellectual--the threat of being bound was real, constant, and lethal. From Harriet Tubman to Assata Shakur, Ida B. Wells to Sandra Bland and Black Lives Matter, black women freedom fighters have braved violence, scorn, despair, and isolation in order to lodge their protests. DaMaris Hill honors their experiences with at times harrowing, at times hopeful responses to her heroes, illustrated with black-and-white photographs throughout. Suggested by Megan Haught, Student Learning & Engagement/Research & Information Services

 Be Free or Die: the amazing story of Robert Smalls' escape from slavery to Union hero by Cate Lineberry Cate Lineberry's compelling narrative illuminates Robert Smalls’ amazing journey from slave to Union hero and ultimately United States Congressman. This captivating tale of a valuable figure in American history gives fascinating insight into the country's first efforts to help newly freed slaves while also illustrating the many struggles and achievements of African Americans during the Civil War. Suggested by Dawn Tripp, Research & Information Services

 Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self by Danielle Evans Fearless, funny, and ultimately tender, Evans's stories offer a bold new perspective on the experience of being young and African-American or mixed-race in modern-day America. Suggested by Sara Duff, Acquisitions & Collections

 Black Fatigue: how racism erodes the mind, body, and spirit by Mary-Frances Winters This is the first book to define and explore Black fatigue, the intergenerational impact of systemic racism on the physical and psychological health of Black people--and explain why and how society needs to collectively do more to combat its pernicious effects. Suggested by Glen Samuels, Circulation

 Deacon King Kong by James McBride From James McBride comes a wise and witty novel about what happens to the witnesses of a shooting. In September 1969, a fumbling, cranky old church deacon known as Sportcoat shuffles into the courtyard of the Cause Houses housing project in south Brooklyn, pulls a .45 from his pocket, and in front of everybody shoots the project's drug dealer at point-blank range. McBride brings to vivid life the people affected by the shooting: the victim, the African-American and Latinx residents who witnessed it, the white neighbors, the local cops assigned to investigate, the members of the Five Ends Baptist Church where Sportcoat was deacon, the neighborhood's Italian mobsters, and Sportcoat himself. As the story deepens, it becomes clear that the lives of the characters--caught in the tumultuous swirl of 1960s New York--overlap in unexpected ways. When the truth does emerge, McBride shows us that not all secrets are meant to be hidden, that the best way to grow is to face change without fear, and that the seeds of love lie in hope and compassion. Suggested by Sara Duff, Acquisitions & Collections

 Different Strokes: Serena, Venus, and the unfinished Black tennis revolution by Cecil Harris Harris chronicles the rise of the Williams sisters, as well as other champions of color, closely examining how African Americans are collectively faring in tennis, on the court and off. Despite the success of the Williams sisters and the election of former pro player Katrina Adams as the U.S. Tennis Association’s first black president, top black players still receive racist messages via social media and sometimes in public. The reality is that while significant progress has been made in the sport, much work remains before anything resembling equality is achieved. Suggested by Megan Haught, Student Learning & Engagement/Research & Information Services

 His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the power of hope by Jon Meacham John Lewis, who at age twenty-five marched in Selma and was beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, is a visionary and a man of faith. Using intimate interviews with Lewis and his family and deep research into the history of the civil rights movement, Meacham writes of how the activist and leader was inspired by the Bible, his mother's unbreakable spirit, his sharecropper father's tireless ambition, and his teachers in nonviolence, Reverend James Lawson and Martin Luther King, Jr. A believer in hope above all else, Lewis learned from a young age that nonviolence was not only a tactic but a philosophy, a biblical imperative, and a transforming reality. Integral to Lewis's commitment to bettering the nation was his faith in humanity and in God, and an unshakable belief in the power of hope. Meacham calls Lewis as important to the founding of a modern and multiethnic twentieth- and twenty-first century America as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and Samuel Adams were to the initial creation of the nation-state in the eighteenth century. Suggested by Richard Harrison, Research & Information Services

 Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick by Zora Neale Hurston An outstanding collection of stories about love and migration, gender and class, racism and sexism that proudly reflect African American folk culture. Brought together for the first time in one volume, they include eight of Hurston’s “lost” Harlem stories, which were found in forgotten periodicals and archives. These stories challenge conceptions of Hurston as an author of rural fiction and include gems that flash with her biting, satiric humor, as well as more serious tales reflective of the cultural currents of Hurston’s world. Suggested by Sandy Avila, Research & Information Services

 Race, Sports, and Education: improving opportunities and outcomes for black male college athletes by John N. Singer Through his analysis of the system and his attention to student views and experiences, Singer crafts a valuable, nuanced account and points in the direction of reforms that would significantly improve the educational opportunities and experiences of these athletes. At a time when collegiate sports have attained unmistakable institutional value and generated unprecedented financial returns-all while largely failing the educational needs of its athletes-this book offers a clear, detailed vision of the current situation and suggestions for a more equitable way forward. Suggested by Megan Haught, Student Learning & Engagement/Research & Information Services

 Real Life by Brandon Taylor A novel of rare emotional power that excavates the social intricacies of a late-summer weekend -- and a lifetime of buried pain. Almost everything about Wallace, an introverted African-American transplant from Alabama, is at odds with the lakeside Midwestern university town where he is working toward a biochem degree. For reasons of self-preservation, Wallace has enforced a wary distance even within his own circle of friends -- some dating each other, some dating women, some feigning straightness. But a series of confrontations with colleagues, and an unexpected encounter with a young straight man, conspire to fracture his defenses, while revealing hidden currents of resentment and desire that threaten the equilibrium of their community. Suggested by Sara Duff, Acquisitions & Collections

 Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde In this charged collection of fifteen essays and speeches, Lorde takes on sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and class, and propounds social difference as a vehicle for action and change. Her prose is incisive, unflinching, and lyrical, reflecting struggle but ultimately offering messages of hope. Suggested by Emily Horne, Rosen Library

 The Privileged Poor: how elite colleges are failing disadvantaged students by Abraham Jack College presidents and deans of admission have opened their doors--and their coffers--to support a more diverse student body. But is it enough just to let them in? Anthony Jack reveals that the struggles of less privileged students continue long after they've arrived on campus. In their first weeks they quickly learn that admission does not mean acceptance. In this bracing and necessary book, Jack documents how university policies and cultures can exacerbate preexisting inequalities, and reveals why these policies hit some students harder than others. Jack provides concrete advice to help schools reduce these hidden disadvantages--advice we cannot afford to ignore. Suggested by Peggy Nuhn, UCF Connect Libraries

 The Sun Does Shine: how I found life and freedom on death row by Anthony Ray Hinton, with Lara Love Hardin In 1985, Anthony Ray Hinton was arrested and charged with two counts of capital murder in Alabama. Stunned, confused, and only twenty-nine years old, Hinton knew that it was a case of mistaken identity and believed that the truth would prove his innocence and ultimately set him free. But with no money and a different system of justice for a poor black man in the South, Hinton was sentenced to death by electrocution. He spent his first three years on Death Row at Holman State Prison in agonizing silence, full of despair and anger toward all those who had sent an innocent man to his death. But as Hinton realized and accepted his fate, he resolved not only to survive, but find a way to live on Death Row. For the next twenty-seven years he was a beacon, transforming not only his own spirit, but those of his fellow inmates, fifty-four of whom were executed mere feet from his cell. With the help of civil rights attorney and author Bryan Stevenson, Hinton won his release in 2015. Suggested by Lily Dubach, UCF Connect Libraries

 This is Major: notes on Diana Ross, dark girls, and being dope by Shayla Lawson Shayla Lawson is major. You don't know who she is, yet, but that's okay. She is on a mission to move black girls like herself from best supporting actress to a starring roles in the major narrative. With a unique mix of personal stories, pop culture observations, and insights into politics and history, Lawson sheds light on the many ways black femininity has influenced mainstream culture. Timely, enlightening, and wickedly sharp, Lawson shows how major black women and girls really are. Suggested by Glen Samuels, Circulation

 We Want Our Bodies Back by Jessica Care Moore Over the past two decades, Jessica Care Moore has become a cultural force as a poet, performer, publisher, activist, and critic. Reflecting her transcendent electric voice, this searing poetry collection is filled with moving, original stanzas that speak to both Black women’s creative and intellectual power, and express the pain, sadness, and anger of those who suffer constant scrutiny because of their gender and race. Fierce and passionate, she argues that Black women spend their lives building a physical and emotional shelter to protect themselves from misogyny, criminalization, hatred, stereotypes, sexual assault, objectification, patriarchy, and death threats. Suggested by Sara Duff, Acquisitions & Collections

[doshmanziari]

Aldrich and the Desacralization of Dark Souls 3

Aldrich, the obsessive-consumptive cannibal saint, is one of Dark Souls 3′s most interesting figures when one sees his actions and inferred character as representing a prominent facet of humanity’s spiritual position at the time of the game’s setting. If we look at Dark Souls 3′s landscape as an assemblage of symbolics, and compare it to Dark Souls’ arrangement, we see that an inversion has occurred: the zenith is the human domain of the High Wall of Lothric, and the nadir is Irithyll/Anor Londo, once the apical sunlit land of the gods, now chilled, darkened, and sunken. And yet, even if Anor Londo only ever represented the power of a pantheonic institution, its ruination and darkness here is a much more troubling scenario; because at the “zenith” we find only stasis or stagnation, a reflection of the psychology of prince Lothric himself who has selfishly fended off fate through elusion and inactivity (if we note the series’ pattern of things being what one makes of them (i.e., reality is what one believes it to be), we may wonder if Lothric’s lameness was not self-willed¹). On the broadest scale approaching metatexuality, we see too that Dark Souls 3 is the series at its most complex and diffuse, with the collective mono-myth responsible for the Age of Fire now distant, separate, very nearly nonexistent.

For an example of this, let us look to the swamp around Farron Keep, where we must put out three flame-beacons corresponding to the Witch of Izalith, Nito, and Gwyn’s deific family. This sequence is an initiatory rite of passage, but, rather than entering into a mystery for contact with the numinous, we perform willful ignorance for mere tribalism (to witness it, anyway). For it is only through this symbolic act of un-remembering -- the nullification of the sustaining flame of myth, the obscuring of its principal actors -- that we are granted access to the Keep proper, and then to the Abyss Watchers, a clan of warriors who represent, to an extreme, “mass-mindedness”: directionless, hollow zombies who do not even remember the name of the knight they model themselves upon. All that matters here is the Clan, where insular, infinite warfare is mistaken for life-sustaining meaning (I’d make special note of the fact that the Abyss Watchers all resemble one another; the violence done to another is, in truth, violence done to the self: self-oppression misinterpreted as empowerment). As César Daly wrote, “To neglect history, to neglect memory, that which is owed by our ancestors, is then to deny oneself; it is to begin suicide.” The great abundance of such details makes it all the more startling when Shira, in the Ringed City, says to us, “Speak thee the name of God” (i.e., Gwyn).

No one can seem to agree on what exactly constitutes or delineates the Age of Fire or the Age of Dark, but Dark Souls’ Serpent Kaathe refers to the latter as "the age of men.” Given the evidence, it is difficult to not see Dark Souls 3 as marking the beginning of such an age, or at least the transition between the two. But what liberties has it brought? They are, I think, the pseudo-liberties of a desacralized world. Narratives have become aimless, attempts are made to plug up voids without examining root causes, and the self cannot be harnessed for purposeful actualization. If we seek a demonstration of the latter, think of our first major combative encounter in the game with Iudex Gundyr, whose body, midway through the fight, unleashes a chaotic mass of black, writhing forms uniformly termed the Pus of Man. The Pus of Man reappears during our initial exploration of the High Wall of Lothric, this time out of a couple of standard Hollows. Once the Pus of Man has emerged and is aware of us, any semblance of the host’s self-control is usurped by total destructive instability.

In our own bodies, pus is the result of infection, and its treatment is its release from an abscess; but the Pus of Man, thus released, does not allow for healing, because its internal causes, a symptom of a shared spiritual crisis, have gone unchecked for too long, and so it assumes complete control. It is, on one level, a coup by the id, which Freud describes as “...a chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations. ...It is filled with energy reaching it from the instincts, but it has no organization, produces no collective will, but only a striving to bring about the satisfaction of the instinctual needs subject to the observance of the pleasure principle.” It would also not be inappropriate here to look to the concept of humorism, wherein humans’ personalities are regulated by vital body fluids, and where we find (within the most popular, four-component model) “black bile”, a secretion whose associated qualities are coldness and dryness and whose effect is melancholia: “a mental condition characterized by extreme depression, bodily complaints, and sometimes hallucinations and delusions.”

The Cathedral of the Deep is representative of the same crisis, but diverges in the shape of its consequence. If the Pus of Man recalls Manus, whose “humanity went wild”, and signifies degradation with “seething excitations”, then the Cathedral of the Deep -- a religion and a site -- signifies degradation with stagnation. Inside the Cathedral, we find that its nave and south transept is thick with liquidized decay, the perimeters encrusted by mounds of corpses. These are the matter-of-fact results of both mortification of the flesh (done by flagellation) and Aldrich’s cannibalism, prior to his relocation. What’s relevant here is the material stasis. Richard Pilbeam, in his video “The Bastard’s Curse”, compares aspects of the Deep faith to those of Shinto, placing specific emphasis on the cleansing properties of water. He notes: “Water will wash away impurity, but only if the water remains in motion.”² The motion of the water is the motion of a dynamic, reciprocal spirituality. Our own bloodflow requires circulation.

All of this talk of the body, ruptures, and liquid brings us back to Aldrich, the Devourer of Gods. Despite his title, the only god we are explicitly aware of Aldrich having consumed is Gwyndolin; but the sheer extent of rotting flesh and bones (some, no doubt, of mortals) in Aldrich’s current habitat, the appropriated chancel of the great Anor Londo cathedral, is evidence of innumerable, unseen feasts. Inspecting the soul of Aldrich, we are told that when he “...ruminated on the fading of the fire, it inspired visions of a coming age of the deep sea. He knew the path would be arduous, but he had no fear. He would devour the gods himself.” It again behooves us to approach the matter in terms of symbolics, poetic substitutions, and understand this envisioned age as a radically desacralized state of being, one where the Age of Fire has been permanently entombed, replaced by a humanity misled by vacuous obsessions which is then itself overcome by what those profanities manifested. “In time, those dedicated to sealing away the horrors of the Deep succumbed to their very power,” the description for a robe worn by deacons of the Cathedral of the Deep reads. “It seems that neither tending to the flame, nor the faith, could save them.”

Aldrich, as a deiphagous agent (although perhaps not godly to begin with himself), of course has deicidal associations.³ Most pertinent would be the filicide of the Titan Cronus, who devoured his children in fear of his prophesied deposition. We are told that Aldrich “had no fear”, but this is, I think, an ironic statement. In the same way that we may compulsively eat in order to fill an emotional-existential void, Aldrich feeds to fill the void of Dark Souls 3 which has, as M. Christine Boyer writes in reference to modernity, “[closed] off any meaningful access to the past.” Yet his murderous feasting prepares himself and the world for another void: that of the “age of the deep sea” (to be slightly literal for a moment: what, on Earth, is more akin to a void than the ocean’s depths?). At the Ringed City we observe resonances of this behavior in the locusts, who primarily inhabit the dim mire at the city’s bases (the resemblance to Oolacile’s predicament is unmistakable), and “were meant to beckon men to the dark with sermons, but most of [which] are unable to think past their own stomachs.”

We should also recognize that Aldrich did not act alone. He “had the desire to share with others his joy of imbibing the final shudders of life while luxuriating in his victim's screams.” Recall that certain deacons of the Deep are bloated, including the deceased Archdeacon McDonnell. These are ministers who have oftener partaken of feasts. So here is also a distortion of that communal principle wherein participants ingest the deity/deities and affirm life through its nearness to death. This ingestion recalls the older meaning of “embody”: “a soul or spirit invested with a physical form.” George Hersey writes, of the ancient Greeks and their sacrificial rituals, “Whatever form the victim or offering took, once it was [...] full of the god, [...] the divinity became too immense, too terrible, to be contained. It was necessary to break apart the offering. Yet even after death -- perhaps especially after it -- the animal’s carcass, the god’s container, was steeped in his presence. This is why the worshipers ate parts of it: the act was not just feasting, but communion. The worshipers’ own bodies combined with parts of the victim’s to express the fact that the god had entered them. The victim’s body parts were in fact ‘reconstructed’ now in a different way, by uniting the bodies of the worshipers.”⁴

There is no concern for any of these vitalizing affirmations with Aldrich and his followers. Indeed, we see that Aldrich himself has become “too immense, too terrible, to be contained” (just like those aforementioned “horrors of the Deep”), and so his body is coagulated hemorrhage. Constructive concepts such as selflessness, spirit, metousiosis are nullified, as the consumptive process, one of intense sadism, functions as its own end. Aldrich is both terribly and mundanely a narcissistic parasite. During our fight with him, he will burrow into the refuse of the arena to temporarily escape -- a tactic that is emblematic of his self-regressing psychology, where nothing matters except gorging, sleeping, and surrounding oneself with a playpen of mud to dive into and thus hide from the world. Remember, now, that Aldrich was canonized as a Lord and remains one. Hawkwood, a former member of Farron’s Undead Legion and a resident of Firelink Shrine, wryly and accurately comments that this was “...Not for virtue, but for might.” And when we venerate sheer might, we venerate persecution.

From this perspective, I think it is not an accident of phrasing when the description for human dregs, an object sometimes released by slain Deep devotees, says that they, once having sunk to the “lowest depths imaginable, [...] become the shackles that bind this world.” To bind something can mean to unify it, to adhere components together and provide a sort of structure; but this is done with shackles, items associated with repression and enslavement. It is another echoing of that “self-oppression misinterpreted as empowerment” (or, analogously, freedom). There may be no better conclusion to this essay than to remark upon Aldrich’s death at our ends. As the battle progresses, Aldrich’s body becomes enkindled, speckled by embers, to the extent that any zone he occupies catches on fire. This is not so different from Yhorm or the remaining Abyss Watcher; after all, they are Lords of Cinder too. But I believe that, for Aldrich, this can be read relative to the sacrificial ritual which ended with roasting specified parts of the animal and then eating them. Thus, when we kill Aldrich, even if we cannot adopt and atone for the sins of his actions, we can at least break that insatiable cycle and consign his body to the purifying fire -- so that we may, finally, take and imbibe his soul.

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¹ Dark Souls 2 quickly presents us with an example of this when a handmaid gives us a featureless human effigy and says, “Take a closer look... Who do you think it’s supposed to be? Think back, deep into your past. Yes, it’s an effigy of you.” Consider also the case of Miracles, which are not instructions but stories. Once read, they turn real -- fiction tangibly weaponized.

² See: Misogi and kegare. The concept of the sacred grotto is apposite, too, if we imagine that the latter-christened Cathedral of the Deep neighbors one. In Heavenly Caves, Naomi Miller writes, “Fascination with the grotto is rooted in the story of creation. While understood as a source of life and as a sacred spring in the classical world, in the Old Testament the grotto is often equated with the void and hence with chaos -- the formlessness that precedes the beginning. [...] ...within the Temple in Jerusalem, beneath the Stone of Foundation in the Dome of the Rock, was a cave known as the Well of Souls. This fountain of perennial water within the Temple may well allude to the cisterns and reservoirs known to be under the Holy Rock, but it also has metaphysical significance and refers to the mouth of the abyss identified with the subterranean torrent located at the earth’s center, from whence the rivers of Paradise went forth to water the four corners of the world...”

³ An example of deicide which is often not thought of as such is that of Christ, who, in his self-sacrifice as the human avatar of God, clears the way for a radically new covenant.

⁴ Walter Burket, in his book Homo Necans, posits that such sacrifices “were much later reenactments of primal ritual murders in which a god-king was killed and consumed.”

[syzygyzip]

His Cage pt. 2: Wheel of Fortune

This essay may be read on its own, but it is a follow-up to another essay which psychoanalyzes the figure of Holy Knight Hodrick, a character from Dark Souls 3. In this section, the method and purpose of Dark Souls analysis comes under investigation, catalyzed by other images from Hodrick’s environment.

Hodrick as meta-critique of Freudian psycho-interpretation

Dark Souls 3 is known for its skillful, self-reflexive commentary; this game is keenly aware of the subculture that surrounds it. That in mind, what are we to make of the relatively blatant symbolic suggestiveness of Hodrick and the Greatwood? Perhaps their on-the-nose imagery is a reaction to analysis of previous Dark Souls games: the castration narrative is often cited in symbolic interpretation of Dark Souls 1, and the birth canal-esque passage of Dark Souls 2’s tutorial area is a classic introduction for people that play around with interpreting Dark Souls psychologically. And surely those myths and images are semi-intentional, relevant, and illuminating, but they are by no means the place to stop. This lore video points out how the vertebrae shackles collected by Mound-Makers resemble inkblots, the old psychoanalytic tool etched into the cultural memory as an image of Freudianism. One “reads out” of the inkblot the contents of their own unconscious. The understanding of projection, and the compensatory nature of the unconscious was one of the most significant discoveries at the dawn of psychology. Dark Souls could symbolize the principle of this discovery in a number of ways, but it is very intentional with its images, so when it decides to show us an inkblot in particular, the historical context is helpful. It’s an old and simple technique, which traces only the broad strokes of the analysand’s complexes. Likewise, Hodrick, the Greatwood, and Mound-Makers provide the interpreter with the rudiments for symbolic exploration of Dark Soul environments. 

Though this area is introductory, it is – like any part of the unconscious – inexhaustible in its depth and generous in its mutability. Consider the amorality of the Mound-Makers. Are they good or evil? Vicious or tender? Sustainers of maya or karmic accelerationists? There is so much room for the player to read into this allegiance a preferred moral perspective, at least partially determined by the general attitude the player keeps in regards to the slaughter of enemies. For the totally “unimmersed,” Dark Souls is a game and a game only, to be played, poked, prodded, to be mastered and speedran, and in that case of course any covenant is merely functional, there to surround and present a mechanic. For that player, the Mound-Makers are truly amoral. But for those who roleplay, who make at least some of their choices based on the imagined ethics of their avatar (despite extremely scarce moral responses from the game itself!), the issue is a little more complicated. Those who are simply in the habit of asking themselves, “Do I want to ally myself with this person’s values?” will not find an easy answer. On the surface, the covenant is abhorrently nihilistic, but a seasoned player may come away with a different take. So in this way the Mound-Makers, like the inkblot, are a measure of a player(/-character)’s feeling-involvement, which is itself born out of the player’s interpretational attitude.

When analyzing an object in a video game, always take into account the method by which it is encountered! Though the route to all this Freudian material in the Undead Settlement is a little arcane, it needs to be. The cryptic riddle about “Nana”, the obscure side-streets: these are there to make the player feel as though they are uncovering something secret. The obscurity is baked-in to make obvious that this material is repressed.

Though the riddle is strange, it is spoken aloud to the player, which is actually quite a telegraph by Dark Souls standards. The handiness of this secret is also metaphorically descriptive of this level of interpretation. If one stops at the purely Freudian: the mother, the father, the phallus, then they will project that schematic onto every available target. They will see reality as nothing more than a circus of oral fixations and castration dramas. If this stage of psychoanalysis is not passed through, it is nothing more than another cage to be carried around. It is the most rudimentary place to get stuck in the engagement with the unconscious.

The Armory of Symbols

What are we to make of the fact that the treasure of this area is the transposing kiln? This round thing, this simple, Arthurian symbol of the Self? It is both representative of the totality, and a totally profane and reductive simplification. I’ll explain what I mean by that.

On the one hand it is a true grail, because it has the capacity to turn the game’s hardest challenges into new tools. This is a fantastic life lesson, fundamental and perennially true. It is the pure gift of interpretation. It is said that the Buddha, in his realization that there is nothing outside of Nirvana, thereby saw that even the most torturous experiences of life, and the most unforgiving realms of Hell, were not apart from Nirvana, and that seeing them in this way thereby rectified this subjective experience of being in Hell. Once it was rephrased as Nirvana, it was always Nirvana, because all the suffering was born out of false views. Anyway, that is a very lofty height of interpretation, but one can see the boundlessness of the tool. That when the true cosmic appropriateness of an instance of suffering is groked, it is changed. On the other hand, transposition is a cheap parlor trick. It changes the essence of a boss into a weapon. It really only does one thing. Some of these weapons are useful, and most are flashy. It is almost mandatory for these weapons and spells to have a unique gimmick. So most of the time they convey to the wielder some unique flavor, some specific characteristic to consider, but even collecting such interpretations as these is merely a “building a collection.” Pinning down butterflies into a glass case. It is really no different than stockpiling corpses as Hodrick does. This device encourages the player to keep fighting, collecting, stacking bodies, finding new and interesting ways to kill people.

And ultimately, the same is true of collecting symbolism. Stockpiling a collection of unused weapons is no more or less a perversion that keeping a catalogue of archetypes for its own sake. The psychological interpretation of Hodrick, the Greatwood, and their unsightly tableau is relatively simple and straight-forward because it is meant to provide the player-interpreter with an introduction to the technique. The “game” of symbolic analysis is pointless if you spend your time taking potshots.

Wheel of Fate

Understanding the symbolism of the Mother through the eyes of Hodrick may be relatively simple, but the Undead Settlement also provides us with a more complex and transpersonal variation of the birth motif, localized at the far edge of town, hidden in a valley below. There we find catacombs tunneled into the rock, reminding us of the community of villagers who labor all day burying their dead. The Great Mother is thereby invoked, in her role which deteriorates form, which composts. The bodies decay, return to the Earth, and nourish new life. We see the skeletons sprouting branches in this dank place.

Also in the catacombs there are the dual figures of Irina the saint and a statue of Velka, goddess of sin, both of whom sit abandoned. The juxtaposition of these two sacred feminine figures is symbolically dense and deserves its own essay, but I mention it here as an echo of Kristeva’s philosophy that we passed by earlier: that of the child’s necessary bifurcation of the Mother into sublime and abject.

Velka alone is highly useful here, amplifying the Great Mother motif to a vast and cosmic context. Velka is a notoriously elusive figure in Dark Souls: she is never seen, rarely spoken of, her motivations are unknown, her ontological status unconfirmed, her objects and attributes seem to contradict each other. Nevertheless she is a crucial if not essential force in the world, and her presence can be inferred for those with eyes to see.

The main Velkan element that should be addressed here is her association with Karma, which is perhaps her principle attribute. From the beginning of DS1, she is introduced as governess of ethics, law, and equity. She explicitly oversees sin, guilt, and retribution. What practices are promoted through this governance? Mechanically, there are primarily two: keeping track of invasion penalties (in DS1) and resetting the world. If you incur penalty as an invader, the Blades of the Dark Moon will find you and punish you. So Velka prolongs and complicates PvP dynamics.

Resetting the world is an effect Velka provides that suggests forgiveness. If you aggro an NPC, and wish to get on good terms with them again, Velka allows that condition. In this way too, Velka is prolonging interpersonal relationships, but it is the relief of debt rather than the accruing of debt. Velka keeps the cycle going, she is like a keeper of the wheel that turns the age. In Dark Souls 1 a statue associated with Velka turns with the cranking of a wheel, in a room full of bonewheel skeletons. In Dark Souls 3, a similar statue turns with the cranking of a wheel in a room full of flies. In both cases, the wheel is hidden in a wet chamber behind an illusory wall. This suggests that behind the façade of the world, there is a primal place from which time is manipulated (though in this case it is but a single “tick” of the clock, an off-to-on switch which causes a fixed rotation).

Does Karma cause the rise and fall of the great ages? Is the distribution of karma the grease that turns the wheel of the world? It does seem to be that desire is what sustains the age of fire. Consider the enemies in the place where the wheel turns: bonewheels, who cling to their instruments of torture, to their suffering; flies, who bury themselves in a mountain of rotted food, a symbol of greed.

The skeletons who throw themselves into combat, and the flies which gorge on their rotting piles: either is a handy metaphor for Hodrick. His lust for the battlefield is another way of keeping himself stuck on the wheel of Samsara, collecting those shackles, representing the Velkan attachments of karma. Velka’s totem, the Raven, is found in flocks on a ravaged cliff in the settlement, among a wealth of corpses to be looted. The Raven is “associated with the fall of Spirit into that which is impure and enjoys carnage […] To raven is to plunder. This is what the word means. To have a ravenous appetite suggests greed and lust and insatiable desires.”(Valborg) Ravens keep the circus of suffering going!

Grist for the Mill

Velka is a bleak goddess, associated with “lifehunt”, the capacity to drain the essence of life, dreaded even by the gods. For this reason one of her attributes is the scythe, so she is something of a reaper figure. But we have seen she is also life-giver and sustainer, through her arbitrage of karma. This ambivalent nature is expressed by the Raven, which is a solar bird yet dyed deep black, who is cruel and enjoys carnage, yet in many myths is associated with the bringing of light and the creation of a new world.

The raven flies to and fro between the solar orb of eternal life and the dying eyes of man in time. He mercilessly pecks away at the delusions formed like veils over the cornea's shield until he penetrates to the darkness of the pupil's cavity and releases the invisible light within. (Valborg)

If the goal of Dark Souls is the realization of the Dark Soul -- the unique potential of the human being -- then perhaps Velka and her karmic processes are meant to midwife that birth as well. Could all the weight of karma, the pain of enduring a body, the cruelty of life’s entropic march … could it all be in service of birthing the Anthropos? It would explain why the Lords of Dark Souls are so antagonist to the Ashen One -- in Gnosticism and Buddhism the makers, the deities, are said to envy the actualized human being. And to be fair, the theme of surviving hardship and loss is central in Dark Souls’ reputation, and something to which countless players can attest, on practical or psychological levels (eg: “Dark Souls Helped Me Overcome Depression”).

Identity Riddles

I am the one who is disgraced and the great one. Give heed to my poverty and my wealth. Do not be arrogant to me when I am cast out upon the earth, and you will find me in those that are to come. And do not look upon me on the dung-heap nor go and leave me cast out, and you will find me in the kingdoms. And do not look upon me when I am cast out among those who are disgraced and in the least places, nor laugh at me. And do not cast me out among those who are slain in violence.

But I, I am compassionate and I am cruel. Be on your guard!

Do not hate my obedience and do not love my self-control. In my weakness, do not forsake me, and do not be afraid of my power.

-- excerpt from The Thunder, Perfect Intellect ca. 100-230

The abject Mother sits at the edge of the symbolic order, in fact it is her abjection that positions the boundaries of that order, yet it itself does not accept boundary. “Abjection preserves what existed in the archaism of pre-objectal relationship, in the immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from another body in order to be” (Kristeva 10), referring to birth and symbolized by the Hodrick and Greatwood scene, but beyond that it also refers to the Dark Souls creation myth: the archaism in that case being the undifferentiated fog of arch-trees and everlasting dragons in the Age of Ancients. For there to be matter and objects, psyche (dragons etc) must be born into time. Once psyche has materialized itself upon the wheel of time, it cannot exist in immediate, gestalt totality – it moves and changes, expressing its fullness over aeons through its becomings. But everything must be accounted for; Karma only brings what is due. The mystery of how psyche is refined by its extension into matter will likely stay with us until the “end” of time. But with common sense we can suppose that the condition of duration allows things to be taken apart and put back together, and that at least in our mundane lives that process frequently brings about some freshness in the object. But neither the meaning nor mechanics of the larger karmic process can be groked, just as Velka and the Mother are archetypes who inherently escape the fixidity of signification. The ultimate force of taking things apart, entropy – symbolized again by the raven and its desecration of corpses – is something that has been deeply culturally villainized, and it usually takes a second to stop and consider how the diffusion of matter engenders the condition for new forms to grow.

[Ravens] tell of the renewal of the world in terms of the past which is yet to be. The unwanted Truth is told and its insatiable desire to express itself may produce terror and loathing in one who is not prepared to give up all to its insistent glare.

This is keeping with Kristeva’s view of the abject as the eruption of the Real into consciousness. Aside from their role in pecking open an aperture of light, crows have another specific job in the renewal of the world, as described in a number of myths: measuring the size and extent of that world, flying in “progressively longer intervals in order to estimate and report on the increasing size of the emerging earth.” The extremes of incarnation, the edges beyond which dwells the abject, are scoped out in order to create the blueprint; the raven brings knowledge of the schematics.

Interpreting by Attention

And what about our own schematics? We’ve thrown away our tools – the colorful cast of characters transposed into weapons of interpretation – but perhaps it’s time to pick them up again. We cast them off because we didn’t want to fix the Dark Souls myth through explanation. Archetypes cannot be superimposed, prefab, onto a tableaux of psychological symbols. Interpretation is rather the act of elaboration: flying, as the raven does, around and around a widening and changing arena, reporting back continually new understandings of what is appropriate.

The meaning of a game is determined by what a player thinks and feels while they play it. What decisions they make, what their attention lingers on. The game is the inkblot. There are special times when the game insists upon a subject, like a film: for instance, when the crank is turned and the Velka statue rotates. But such a sequence has a different meaning in games than it does in film, because of its context: it anchors a player to a single necessary and unchanging action in the context of a world that is typically responding to their decisions with nigh-unrepeatable novelty. The fixedness of the cinematic exposes the malleability of the rest of the game. “Velka” is an approximation, an aggregate; she is not the same goddess in each playthrough, the scope and the flavor of her influence is always changing – but it is always reflecting the actions of the player.

So how then, can we arrive at a judgment regarding Hodrick? We can’t, because again, each player’s experience of him is different. Earlier I implied that Hodrick is clinging to the world, out of horror and alienation in regards to the Mother figure, and that his killing spree is only building his attachments, keeping him fixed to the wheel of incarnation. So what is the difference between his wild manslaughter, and Velka’s own penchant for carnage and lifedrain? Only the intent:

The transformation of relationship can come about through a genuine understanding of the difference between murder and sacrifice. Both kill or suppress energy, but the motives behind them are quite different. Murder is rooted in ego needs for power and domination. Sacrifice is rooted in the ego’s surrender to the guidance of the Self in order to transform destructive, although perhaps comfortable, energy patterns into the creative flow of life. (Woodman 33)

But see, it is only the inner experience of the act that has authority. In my view, Hodrick’s actions are clearly ego-driven, but another player with different exposure to this character could come away with a different impression. And the archetype speaks through the individual encounter itself, not through lore videos, essays, or any other metatext. This is a crucial function of video games that bears repeating and is rarely addressed. Games commonly use the act of killing as a metaphor for the transformation of relationship (the very notion of EXP hinges on that). The unconscious is receptive to these mutations regardless, but the nature of the effect is dependent on the conscious attitude of the player.

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror. Columbia University Press, 1980.

Layton, Bentley, ed. The Gnostic Scriptures. Yale University Press, 1995.

Valborg, Helen. The Raven. Theosophy Trust, 2013.

Woodman, Marion. The Ravaged Bridegroom: Masculinity in Women. Inner City Books, 1990.

[pathfindersemail]

Goodbye “Andromeda”

The following is a letter I wrote shortly after the Montreal Comic Con 2017 Bioware Panel. I sat on it for a while, but with recent news regarding the fate of Mass Effect: Andromeda, I felt it was pertinent to share this letter.

To the global family who created Mass Effect Andromeda,

I still remember my first ever experience playing a video game. It was a hot December in 1997, and I was still living in Manila, Philippines. We had a small boxy TV with a (maybe) 10-inch screen. That screen gave a pixelated display of my haphazard attempts at killing monsters with the business end of my rocket launcher. Doom was released years prior on the SNES, but it was a completely new thing for me. Me, a (at the time) 5-year old girl, mercilessly conquering over demons, monsters, and other nightmarish things. Macabre as it was, it was the beginnings of my thirst for adventure and of my need to be the hero of my own story.

Since then, I have played many games. I have been an assassin, a brooding teenage rebel trying to save the world, a ninja, a samurai, a street fighter, a car thief, a weird dude with a bandana caught in a plot too complex for my childish mind (not naming names, Metal Gear), a widower trapped in his own psychological nightmare, a well-endowed archeologist, an extremely taciturn physicist, a sith lord, a keyblade master saving worlds... I have been all these lives, personas, and characters. Yet in those myriad experiences, I felt something (for the lack of a better term) missing. 

I have since passed the years never really being able to point a finger at it. The sense of a void always came stumbling back after I had finished a game. I tasted power, fulfillment, and the close of a journey only to have it dissipate as a story that never really was mine. 

Fast forward years later to the fortuitous year of 2016, when Bioware offered its newest Game of the Year title for a generous discount. It was Dragon Age Inquisition. By then I was twenty-four years old, at the cusp of graduating with a Masters, and suffering from the nagging malaise of a rather bleak election year in the United States. I needed an escape, and seeing as how video games had so steadfastly provided that escape, I took the bait and played what would become the most important game in my life.

This letter is supposed to be about your 2017 title, Mass Effect: Andromeda, so I’ll keep this part brief. 

Inquisition was the first game where I was able to make someone who looked like me. Me: a stocky, 5′3 Filipino Chinese Japanese girl with unruly black hair, dull brown eyes, and a face rounder than a baby. Though many other titles before have offered character creators, they either failed to look “realistic” or ended up looking garishly alien. Inquisition’s robust CC made it possible for me to create a protagonist who could not only reflect a woman who resembled me (and people who shared my identity) onto an HD screen. She could also reflect choices, agency, and strength that are rarely afforded to what scant representation Southeast Asians have. I watched my inquisitor grow from reluctant, cloistered heroine to a capable leader who acted with both compassion and courage.

By the time my Inquisitor disbanded the inquisition and joined what would be the lost annals of Thedosian heroes, I inevitably returned to the real word. I was expecting that same, familiar void I felt whenever I finished a game. Yet it didn’t happened. Instead, I fell. I fell so hard for the universe. I couldn’t stop thinking about my characters’ companions, the friendships she made, the relationships she forged, and the love she has earned. I wrote, for one of my Master’s seminars, several papers (which my professors read with glee, might I add) about the resonances of Dragon Age’s in-universe permutations of tragedy and systemic oppression. I wrote about the importance of being able to interact and decide the conclusion of a narrative; to be able to weave a different kind of tale through games where the player could very much inform the tone and setting of a story. 

I raved about the game; I joined online communities to keep raving about it; and I produced what content I could to share with these fellow fans from all over the world. I didn’t just play a persona or a character; I played someone who represented what I felt was good about who I was; who acted with a conscientious awareness of what conquering and ruling meant for someone of a previously colonized peoples. It was liberating.

Shortly after my plunge into Inquisition’s fan community, a friend recommended that I try Mass Effect. Since I have already waxed poetic about DAI, I will also keep this very brief. I played all three games shortly after I graduated from my Masters in the winter of 2016. Within a span of a week, I cried, melted, died, reanimated, and cried again. Shepard’s story was complete and whole, and I felt that her accomplishments amplified what i felt about my Inquisition protagonist (especially since the demographic “Asian” had more meaning in this game than it did in a fantasy universe). As you might expect, I waited impatiently and obsessively for Mass Effect: Andromeda, during which time I wondered how on Earth could I have survived the wait had I been a fan all along.

There are many things I could say about my experience playing Andromeda, but I feel I should share with you the most important one.

Thank you.

Thank you for letting me create a beautiful, Filipina hero, who would pave the way for a new galaxy. Thank you for being the game developer who - after nearly 20 years of gaming experience - let me see myself reflected fully, accurately, and beautifully at the forefront of a compelling and epic story. Unlike the previous Bioware games I mentioned, my Ryder (her name is Sarianna :)) was allowed to be young, foolish, and happy. She didn’t constantly bear the yoke of border disputes and religious office as my Inquisitor did. Like Shepard, she was allowed moments of respite and impulsiveness - perhaps even more so than the older protagonist with whom the original trilogy graced us. As a woman who barely saw myself and my identity represented in media, I had a protagonist I could admire, respect, and contribute to the world (no matter how unnoticed she will be in future years).

One of my favorite moments in the game was the penultimate and high stakes scene of the Ryder twin (a Filipino version of Scott) fighting his way with just a pathetic pistol in hand to save his sister. Tears were brimming in my eyes when SAM offered a heartfelt apology at the sacrifice they were forced to make. “I’m sorry Scott,” he said. 

And the loving brother could only say, “I am too, SAM” before hitting that button with resolve.

It was a profound and poignant moment about family; about heroes of color who would do anything for each other; and about the fear of losing someone important to you. The fact that characters who represented Filipinos were able to call the shots, exercise agency, and bear the responsibility of leadership gave me so much pride. 

My other favorite moment was a romance scene: the drinks Ryder shared with Reyes Vidal on rooftop. It was an emotionally intense moment where two people were able to share in their vulnerability. Do you know how important it is for Latinx players to be able to see a bisexual Latino express the need for recognition, affection, and friendship? The scene broke my heart into a million pieces, because frailty can be a powerful thing and yet it is so often denied to Latino men, whom the media has wronged with constant portrayals of stereotypes of machismo and violence. Reyes was a phenomenal character, and I have to thank your writer Courtney Woods by name for making him possible. 

I also cried when the game ended, because I soon returned to that familiar yet now alienating reality where movies, music, and (for the most part) video games didn’t represent anyone with whom I identified. I cried, because my friends and I realized that virtually no one else is letting you wear your race, gender, and sexuality with pride and joy. I cried, because I realized that video games weren’t only cathartic works of fiction wherein I can project my fantasies. They were also fulfillments of personhood. It was you, Bioware, family who made that possible.

Now it goes without saying that nobody and nothing is perfect, and yet the rather disproportionate amount of harsh criticism and backlash the game received was... upsetting to say the least. For one, I felt like society as a whole was rejecting not only the finished product of the game but the potentialities and possibilities latent in such a product. I can’t speak of the technological feats Andromeda was able to accomplish (JUMP JETS ARE LEGENDARY YOU SHOULD BE PROUD!), but I can speak for the fact that Bioware is one of the few developers who proudly held up its fans as the driving force and motivation of their success. Andromeda is a beautiful game, and its predecessors were all masterpieces not only for their technical and artistic achievements but for their social and cultural significance. 

When my friend and I left the Bioware panel in the Montreal 2017 comic con, we immediately found our way to a bar in rue Sainte Catherine, where we reveled in the excitement of having seen the people responsible for our joy and passion. Over drinks, I lamented the wasted opportunity of not thanking you personally, so I do it now under the cover anonymity. I do it with words, because I like to think I am better at writing than I am speaking. I do it so I can express to you the indelible mark you left on my life. You gave me a hero who looked like me, and in turn I bonded with others from all over the world who felt that same happiness and gratitude. Yet we also spoke of our hopes: we hoped that people will take Bioware’s direction to further improve representation; to include people of color, people from the LGBT community, and other identities in the creative process. In the field of literary criticism, we often judge a work based on its ability to stage and engage with different audiences across geographic and temporal distances. The Mass Effect franchise was one such formidable work.

Suddenly those twenty years of gaming beforehand folded into a meaningless blur. None of them could ever fill the void of never seeing myself reflected in media. And, as sad it is to say with the recent news of Andromeda’s definitive end, I am not likely to encounter another. 

Thank you from the bottom of my heart,

L------ (aka @pathfindersemail)

[crossgrossgrass]

Week 3 - FAD Topics/ Questions

Topics:

Abstract Art

Perception

Art Fundamentals

Questions:

How does human perception work?

What is composition?

Abstract art - why do we like it?

Is perception entirely intuitive or there is a mechanism/algorithm behind?

Is it possible to create good artwork strictly following already existing art rules?

Why artists deliberately break them?

How do these rules work in new forms of media? Are they still relevant?

Is there something that goes beyond perceptual limits?

We will be able to answer some of these questions by turning to Neuroaesthetics - a scientific discipline situated at the junction of neurobiology, art, and psychology. The study of beauty perception began in the 90s, the largest contribution to which belongs to one of the main proponents of the mirror neurons theory Vilayanur Ramachandran.

 In his opinion, the work of mirror neurons is directly related to art. By themselves, they represent a special class of nerve cells that connect the obtaining visual information with a motor reaction. Surprisingly, mirror neurons are activated not only when an action is performed by their host, but also when it is performed by other individuals. This sort of brain imitation is the key to empathy (as well as learning).

So this works when we observe paintings or watch films. For example, the cruel narrative depicted by  Caravaggio causes anxiety and horror, not only because of the visual or conceptual content but because the viewer puts himself in the place of the characters.

                                       Judith Beheading Holofernes (1598-1599) – Caravaggio

However, what happens when an art piece does not include an object to empathize with? What happens when the viewer is faced with abstract work? In the first case, perception is touched on an emotional level, but it is unlikely that a composition compiled of colored figures will make us cry or laugh. Here, it’s rather about the inner “like-dislike”, “pleasant or not really”. So what influences our sense of aesthetic?

In his book “The Tell-Tale Brain”(2010), Ramachandran articulated nine neuroaesthetic principles:

1) Peak shift principle; 2) Grouping; 3) Contrast; 4) Isolation; 5) Perceptual problem solving; 6) Symmetry; 7) The generic viewpoint; 8) Order; 9) Visual metaphors.

Peak shift principle

According to the professor, art always implies some exaggeration of reality. The principle of peak shift means that our brain is pleased when the pivotal image properties are expressed vividly. The most striking example of how this is used in art is caricature. 

The key to understanding why we react so violently to exaggerated stimuli can be found in animal behavior. Silver gull chicks which are grown in captivity, without the participation of their parents, willingly associate the latter with yellow tweezers with a red speck, similar to a beak. And even more: if we replace these tweezers by a yellow stick with three red stripes, the chicks start to reacting even more actively, although such a tool does not resemble the beak of a silver gull at all. The fact is that every chick is evolutionarily prepared for a reaction to a beak with a red spot, and the stronger its features are, the more enthusiasm it causes. According to the researcher, the receptive fields of neurons apparently adhere to the following rule: the “beakier” the beak (the longer the shape, the redder the red), the better.

So we can assume that such artists as Picasso or Kandinsky found something that equal to these three red stripes for seagulls: “They are tapping into the figural primitives of our perceptual grammar and creating ultranormal stimuli that more powerfully excite certain visual neurons in our brains as opposed to realistic-looking images. This is the essence of abstract art.”

Grouping

When our brain manages to highlight a clear figure or object from a complex background, it brings us some aesthetic pleasure. The brain likes to solve puzzles and that becomes a core basis of visual arts. An example of this may be such a technique as pointillism and George Seurat's "A Sunday on La Grande Jatte" in particular. The painting itself is quite large (2 x 3m), so from a close distance, we see nothing but a myriad of unrelated spots. But as soon as we move away from the painting, the brain begins to extract the meaning from this chaos; and gradually all the fragments are getting grouped in the correct order, forming a unified image.

Isolation 

Why do primeval drawings of buffaloes look much more expressive and give even more ideas about the animal than a realistic shoot from National Geographic? Why Egon Schiele's sketch of a nude body impress us much more than a photograph of woman?

The answer lies in that we have a limited amount of attention. In photographs, attention is distributed between the texture of the skin, shades of grass, glares, and so on and so forth. Insignificant information overloads the picture and distracts attention from the essence. At the same time, the artist selects one parameter, one idea, and focuses on it, removing all unnecessary additional details.

[gamerszone2019-blog]

Control Review - An Action-Packed Paranormal Portal

New Post has been published on https://gamerszone.tn/control-review-an-action-packed-paranormal-portal/

Control Review - An Action-Packed Paranormal Portal

When you’re so used to games that ease you in, the confronting nature of Control is immediately compelling. There’s plenty of time to get to know characters, study the environment, and gradually pick up new mechanics and skills, but Control’s sinister atmosphere is impactful, sending a rush of questions through your head from the moment you press start.

Who is Jesse Faden? Why does she seem both lost and found on her first day as director at the Federal Bureau of Control? How can she possibly maintain her composure in the face of the haunting ethereal and material distortions that have overtaken the bureau? You may only have some answers to these questions by the time the credits roll. While being vague or opaque could be viewed as a flaw in other games, obfuscation is part of what makes Control so spellbinding. Impressively, the mysteries grip ever tighter as you navigate the bureau’s headquarters in search of answers. Knowledge is power, but it frequently opens doors to possibilities you never knew existed–doors that are better left shut, so far as Jesse and surviving FBC members are concerned.

If you’ve played past works from Remedy Games, you will instantly recognize the studio’s footprint. Control’s story plays with grim truths and strange themes. Everything is a serious matter, except when it isn’t and a dark sense of humor creeps in to offer a momentary respite–which, yes, includes plenty of FMV shorts. The combat system is designed for you to be equal parts agile and destructive, bearing a notable resemblance to the studio’s Microsoft-exclusive, Quantum Break. Combat aside, that game felt like a step removed from what Remedy does best. Control feels like Remedy has found its footing again.

There is one major aspect that is decidedly new for Remedy: Control is non-linear, built in the vein of a metroidvania and filled with reasons to retrace your steps over time. This approach is largely handled well, though if there’s any aspect of Control that feels lacking it’s the handling of the map. It’s an unreliable tool presented in a top-down fashion that often feels like more trouble than it’s worth. Multi-level areas overlap with one another (you can’t isolate them, or zoom in for a closer look) and it’s practically impossible to track specific locations you have or have not visited. Broad areas can be tracked, sure, but not, say, a single meeting room in the executive branch.

This would be a major issue if not for two things: The signage in the world is surprisingly helpful, and ultimately, Control makes wandering the halls of “The Oldest House” a consistent pleasure. If you aren’t in awe of the architecture, you’re probably getting your kicks from a battle that pops up when you least expected it.

Referring to the FBC headquarters as a house is a bit misleading, though you’ll grow to understand how in time. In practical terms, it is a massive multi-story facility that screams government, with angular interiors formed in stone and metal, with minimal flourish. It has the outward appearance of an orderly place of process, which, while true, undersells the reality therein, or the lack thereof.

The dance between fact and fiction is at the heart of Control’s setting and a fascinating narrative that unravels in Jesse’s mind through a series of inner monologues and psychic projections. There are exchanges between characters that move certain elements forward, but so much of Control hinges on Jesse’s discoveries and her interpretations of their meaning. Even though you’re clued into her thoughts, there’s an underlying element that Jesse fails to explain because, to her, it’s matter-of-fact. Whatever it is has always been a part of her, creating a gap of understanding that you, for the most part, can only hope to fill in with your own inferences. There’s a constant desire to know more, yet to also maintain distance from the truth in order to preserve the mystery. It’s to Control’s credit that it effortlessly facilitates this exchange.

If it’s otherworldly, if it seems to defy explanation, odds are the FBC is running tests to discover the underlying cause and contain the consequences from the outside world. Deep within the guts of the house lie experiments and studies that dig into paranormal disturbances, the collective subconscious, and alternate dimensions. The FBC posits that entities from beyond our realm have used objects of power–archetypical things that we know and take for granted–as gateways into our world. After years of the FBC gathering these strange objects for study, the house has become an amplified conduit for a force known as The Hiss, which can reshape and move matter. The source of this power, a dimension known as the Astral Plane, has crept into the bureau, and some far-off corridors bear its telltale monochromatic, geometric motif. Occasionally, you will get pulled into this strange world to undergo skill trials, but your visits are always short, which helps preserve the mystique in the long run.

Back in the “real” world, lowly agents and high-ranking FBC enforcers have been corrupted en masse. Many float harmlessly in mid-air, chanting strange mantras in boardrooms, hallways, and research facilities. Generally, if there’s headroom, there are floaters. The more aggressive of the bunch pop into existence before your eyes as you explore the bureau. They, like Jesse, fight with a mix of guns and telekinetic powers. They are generally fun adversaries, and battles are punctuated by some incredible special effects. Furniture and small props are whipped into a frenzy when you hurl a desk from a cubicle and into a group of enemies. Sparks and colorful plumes of energy fill the air when a nearby explosion cuts through the incandescent trails left behind by the hiss.

There are only a few unique enemies or bosses to speak of, but by and large the AI, in conjunction with a great variety of architectural layouts, makes every fight feel engaging. Whether a simple encounter or a complex assault, you have to approach combat with a juggling act in mind, shifting between expending ammunition and psychic energy when one or the other is depleted. You also have to learn how to defend against and recover from harm. The only way to heal in combat is to pick up essence dropped by fallen enemies, which often requires you to throw yourself into the fray while also protecting yourself from further damage.

New powers come with story milestones, but weapon forms are crafted from collectible materials. Their stats, and Jesse’s, increase with the application of randomized ranked mods dropped by enemies and found in hidden containment chests. You will likely come across hundreds of mods, but because you can only hold and use a limited amount, you will end up dismantling most of them to make space in your inventory. Mods can make a tangible difference, especially once you start to find high-ranking ones, but they can’t make up for a lack of skill or understanding of Jesse’s tools during the game’s greatest tests.

Control is a great-looking game in general, from the overall art design to the technical execution, but combat is a notable standout in that regard. While the experience on PC can be tuned to run at a consistently smooth frame rate, the PS4 version (playing on a PS4 Pro with supersampling enabled) can exhibit stuttering when fights are at their most chaotic–no issues were spotted with the Xbox One version. This, thankfully, is an uncommon occurrence, but it definitely clues you in to how taxing the special effects and real-time physics are.

With a fair amount of extracurricular exploration, it took me about 15 hours to get to the end of Control’s campaign. Though I watched the credits roll, there are still plenty of side quests for me to tackle. Jesse isn’t the only sane person in the bureau after all, and the handful of key NPCs that populate each sector have co-workers gone missing or projects left abandoned that might put the bureau at future risk. They not only give you more reason to spend time in Jesse’s shoes, but the supporting cast is great across the board, brought to life with excellent voice acting and top-notch character design. They aren’t deep characters and your conversations never go very far, but I’m more than willing to help them in their time of need, if only to see what quirky or oddball thing they say when I return.

One of my favorite aspects of Control, now that I’ve got room to breathe, is spending quality time with its collectible texts and videos. I’ve managed to read most of the in-game materials while pushing through main missions and tackling optional pursuits, but there are so many fascinating threads to pull on that it’s easy to imagine new possibilities lying in wait; if only I studied the evidence a little closer, or considered a new angle, maybe the missing pieces of Jesse’s story would come into view. These tidbits can be educational, disturbing, and at times wildly entertaining, and they have inspired me to look deeper into topics like Jungian psychology.

It’s not often that a game invades my thoughts the way Control has. I’m at the point where I want to consume every last thing it has to offer. And if I’m honest, it also makes me want to go back and replay Remedy’s past games, too. Sure, it’s a faulty metroidvania in some respects, but there are so many exceptional qualities afoot that Control handily deflects any momentary ire. I can’t wait to take part in discussions about the game, to see what others have figured out, and to better understand where it all fits into Jesse’s story.

Source : Gamesport

[fairypilled]

I have the irresistible compulsion to make literary allusions - A psychological horror story

So, I have been thinking about it, and while at best it has been vaguely implied by the uncanny interactions some of you have had with me or worse still those who know me....”Know me”.....*proceeds to know me*, I have an absolute infatuation with the dynamics of storytelling to the point where against my knowledge but not my will I interact with the world and seek to change to things in my own life into something resembling a narrative. Protagonists, good vs. Evil, metaphors, and fan service galore. And....people somewhat notice that. I pride myself on being at the very least ambiguously interesting, and I thrive on being a spectacle. I live for performance, for every moment to be filled with drama and meaning, for a every moment to be infinity complex and at the same time so utterly a simple as only a chapter of a story can be. One direction, one story, one hero on a quest against the universe itself. I think, in a way, this may be connected to another little character detail I have, namely OCD. 

Now, understand I mean this entirely in my own personal context, and I am great at internalizing things, so I have been told, but I guess to help cope I romanticize my OCD tendencies. At least in my own experience, OCD makes seemingly random things suddenly have immense importance, and things out of place be inherently evil or impure. While this can be quite the bother, at the same time, it forces you to constantly justify these obsessions to yourself, invent stories, and over come them in your own terms. I am so accustomed to fantasy and things slightly ajar from the reality other people inhabit that its almost just the way I see things at this point. I think it might of helped me to accept who I am, and to see a beauty in the chaos I so often find myself surrounded in with no possible way to convey it to other people. To believe that the world loves stories, loves giving things purpose, and above all else, loves those who embrace the Story and reject the insidious tendrils of nihilism or acceptance of the mundane. 

God this sounds pretentious, a sign of great things....I don’t know, also a good sign 

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: Celebrating Intersectionality in the Futuristic Netflix Series ‘Sense8’

all images via sense8.tumblr.com

There is a lot of sex in Netflix drama Sense8’s Christmas special — orgiastic, multiracial, multigender, transnational, GIF-worthy sex. There is also a lot of conflict: verbal sparring, blazing guns, martial arts mayhem, fistfights, and psychological battles. Somewhere between making intersectional love and making interpersonal war lies the basic tension of this show’s Season 2 premiere.

Sense8, a product of the Wachowski siblings and J. Michael Straczynski, launched last year with a simple premise: eight good-looking 30-somethings, born at the exact same moment on the exact same day, are psychically connected, even as they live radically different lives. Season 1 showed us just how powerful they could be — and how that power threatened a mysterious organization run by Whispers, who tries desperately to control others. Season 2 picks up with its two-hour Christmas Special, as the eight protagonists, known as “sensates” in the show, come to terms with their new reality. Many of them are being hunted for different reasons, and one is already imprisoned.

The premiere comes at a time of rising nationalism around the world and an increasing awareness of global digital surveillance and propaganda networks on the internet. As anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ, and isolationist policies sweep a growing number of nations, Sense8 takes us into a microcosm of a world these policies react against. The show features a number of queer characters, including Nomi Marks, a trans hacker played by rising star Jamie Clayton, and Lito Rodriguez, a (formerly closeted) gay action star played by Miguel Ángel Silvestre, best known for his roles in Pedro Almodóvar films. Half the characters come from Asia (Seoul and Mumbai), Africa (Nairobi), and Latin America (Mexico City). The others come from major Western cities: San Francisco, Chicago, London, Berlin.

As author Claire Light has rightly pointed out, not all of these characters are depicted equally. Indeed, those hailing from nonwestern countries come across quite a bit flatter — at some points in Season 1, while Icelandic Riley and American Will had a complex love affair and gorgeous trek through Iceland, it seemed like Korean Sun Bak existed solely to help the others do cool kick-ass moves, and Kenyan Capheus helped with car mechanics. It is too early to say if Season 2 will adequately address this critique, but the fact that the sensates were coming together to support Sun Bak’s quest for freedom and Lito’s rocky coming-out process suggests it might. And as we look to the world’s political climate at the beginning of 2017, the concept of queer, global interconnectedness imbues the series with a greater sense of urgency.

The show’s creators are no doubt aware of this. Season 1’s earliest episodes featured Nomi and her girlfriend Amanita motorbiking triumphantly in San Francisco’s Dyke March; by Season 2, Nomi is on the run from an FBI agent who bears a striking resemblance to Agent Smith from The Matrix. After coming out bravely, Lito decides to face the consequences — and they are brutal. Meanwhile, Whispers pursues Will and Riley relentlessly, toying especially with Will’s emotions when he is unable to return home to Chicago for the holidays. Somewhere in the midst of all this, the sensates manage to have a dance party and another orgy, but the overall mood is much darker.

The Matrix, the Wachowski film that propelled the directors to fame, is relevant here. The movie, which depicts a cyberpunk future, made waves in the late 1990s just as the internet was taking hold in popular culture. It featured the moment of awakening that comes with plugging in — an emotion familiar to many who used the internet at that time. Neo, the film’s protagonist, faced a critical moment when he realized he was not alone and then learned to transcend the bounds of the society he was born into. The ever-present surveillance state took this as a grave threat, and they nearly succeeded in destroying him. Ultimately, however, his power came from himself.

Sense8 is The Matrix for the 2010s. While not overtly about technology or the internet, its opening sequence plays like a Flickr reel or Twitter Trending Topics list, showing many walks of life on the planet today. Told through the allegory of psychic connection, it is a show about the internet and airplanes and global communities unbounded by geography and even language and culture. Now that nearly half the world has access to the internet, and now that we see just how not-alone we are, we have the potential to connect deeply with people all across the globe. Some do, and, like the eight sensates, this connection makes them more powerful, more empathic, more aware of their interconnectedness. Many don’t.

all gifs via sense8.tumblr.com

Like The Matrix, Sense8 wraps its worldview in stylish cinematography and uneven dialogue that creates an aesthetic and narrative experience for our times. After the optimism of the early internet, we now face grave uncertainty. In 1999, Neo transcended the threat of Agent Smith because he learned to believe he was “The One”: He alone could save humanity, with only moderate help from others. In 2016, the Wachowskis seem to be thinking more intersectionally. As Season 2’s premiere makes clear, the queer, global, multigender sensates face a mysterious transnational conglomerate. They will only find a way forward if they are able to work together.

Sense8 is now available on Netflix.

The post Celebrating Intersectionality in the Futuristic Netflix Series ‘Sense8’ appeared first on Hyperallergic.

from Hyperallergic http://ift.tt/2lE1Zgx via IFTTT

[caveartfair]

A New Chapter from the Exhibition Series That Launched Some of the Most Famous Artists of Color

Texas Isaiah, My Name Is My Name I, 2016. Courtesy of the artist.

The Studio Museum in Harlem’s director and chief curator, Thelma Golden, organized the groundbreaking exhibition “Freestyle” in 2001, her second year in the post. At the time, she didn’t anticipate that it would evolve into a series that has both shaped conversations around art made by individuals of African descent over the past two decades, and helped to springboard numerous artists to national (and international) visibility.

Among those who have featured in what is now affectionately known as the “F” series—later exhibitions included “Frequency” (2005–06), “Flow” (2008), and “Fore” (2012–13)—are Mark Bradford, Rashid Johnson, Mickalene Thomas, Nick Cave, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Otobong Nkanga, Firelei Báez, and Jacolby Satterwhite.

Now in its fifth incarnation, the F series brings us “Fictions,” an exhibition whose title could not speak more directly to our fraught political climate, but whose display of work by 19 emerging black artists living and working across 11 American states feels optimistic and rich in personal perspectives.

Installation shot of Genevieve Gaignard's work in "Fictions" at the Studio Museum. Courtesy of the Studio Museum.

“We don’t approach these shows with a theme in mind,” says Associate Curator Connie H. Choi, who spent the past year visiting artists and organizing “Fictions” with her colleague Hallie Ringle. “But what we did find in doing these studio visits was that certain themes were coming up over and over again —artists that are engaging in alternate narratives and creating spaces to live their truths.”

One such space is Kentucky-born and Florida-raised artist Allison Janae Hamilton’s Foresta (2017), an installation composed of objects related to the American South. Horse manes hang from the ceiling, seemingly dismembered from model ponies whose taxidermy-like heads protrude from the wall; tambourines, mounted nearby, are overlaid with a projection of gently rippling water; and a approximation of a wooded forest barely conceals a series of fencing masks, lined up like stand-ins for human faces.

The latter is intended to invoke the historical use of the woods as a place of refuge for enslaved peoples in the 19th-century South, to hide, or to hold meetings of secret societies. Together, the components of the installation form a surreal, immersive, and unsettling environment, a psychological space where things are slightly twisted and awry, but one that also offers sanctuary and an imaginative prospect of escape.

Paul Stephen Benjamin, God Bless America (installation view), 2016. Courtesy of the artist.

The realities of the external world are again filtered through a poetic lens in Paul Stephen Benjamin’s standout work, God Bless America (2016), in which piles of television monitors display pulsating red and blue lights—evoking the flashing lights of police sirens—accompanied by a rhythmic thump akin to the beating of a heart, and footage of Aretha Franklin singing “God Bless America.”

The active monitors give off heat, and that combined with a heartbeat is powerfully moving in its evocation of a live body. Fused with Franklin’s tender, warbling tribute to America, it conjures a complex, bittersweet emotion toward a country whose history and present are so deeply shaped by racism.  

“‘Fictions’ is about alternative narratives, but it’s also about the way these artists are preventing their narratives from becoming fictionalized,” says Assistant Curator Hallie Ringle. And indeed, Texas Isaiah’s photographs, which depict himself along with other queer or non-binary black sitters, cast off stereotypes, insisting on the interiority of their subjects. In several of the elegantly composed portraits, subjects are shown in intimate settings or vulnerable moments, their faces partially obscured or cast in shadow in a way that seems to refuse viewers’ expectations; they hold agency, challenging onlookers’ ability to fully know them.  

Installation view of "Fictions" at the Studio Museum. Courtesy of the Studio Museum.

Genevieve Gaignard also turns cultural narratives and archetypes on their heads in her site-specific installation, a living room of ambiguous location and decade. Containing a pink armchair, grandfather clock, and bird cage, among other objects, it suggests the domestic interior of an elderly white Southern woman, perhaps, but is complicated by Gaignard’s staged self-portraits hanging over wallpaper, in which the artist assumes characters that play with her mixed-race identity.

Gaignard subtly triggers and negates signifiers of gender, class, and race—toying with both the viewers’ urge to define the occupant of this unknown space, and the assumptions about identity that any such definition relies on. Her most pointedly brilliant addition to the room: three female figurines, Disney princess tschotskes in which she has replaced white skin with black. One of them, dressed in a fairytale yellow dress, embroiders a miniature version of David Hammons’s African-American Flag (1990), the original of which hangs outside the Studio Museum, its stars and stripes infused with the green and black of the pan-African movement.

Deborah Roberts, The Bearer, 2017. Courtesy of the artist and First Gansevoort, New York. Photo by Philip Rogers.

Deborah Roberts, It's All Good, 2017. Courtesy of the artist and Fort Gansevoort, New York. Photo by Philip Rogers.

Elsewhere, Sable Elyse Smith and Sherrill Roland confront and subvert the narratives that uphold the country’s Prison Industrial Complex through their own personal experiences of the system. Smith adapts photographs of American prison inmates and their families, sometimes blurring subjects’ faces, sometimes overlaying them with images relating to her own father’s incarceration. Displayed at the center of wide, engulfing black-suede frames, the images comment on the distorting lens of the prison system and the isolation of inmates.

Roland, who was wrongfully convicted of a crime in 2013 and spent 10 months in a jail cell, presents documentation from his performances for “The Jumpsuit Project,” in which he appears in universities, museums, and public spaces dressed in an inmate’s orange jumpsuit, sharing his story of racial profiling with members of the public. He’ll also perform several times throughout the run of the show, appearing in a booth in Harlem’s historic Apollo Theater and taking questions from visitors.

Other artists in the show use sound as a medium to abstractly amplify their own voices. Nikita Alexeev’s BIG BAD PICKUP (2017), a generic metal shelving unit housing two guitars, a handful of  towels, and some upholstery foam, is a sort of machinist surrogate for the artist’s body. Every few minutes the guitars emit a whirring growl, like an engine revving up.

Sherrill Roland, Jumpsuit Project: Brooklyn Public Library (performance view), 2017. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Gregg Richards.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about the power of rock and roll,” Gale says. “I was listening to PJ Harvey’s new album recently, and sort of having a profound experience, thinking: This is what I’ve been wanting, some outlet for the state of the world. I want to make noise and have some kind of self-expression, but I’m not quite sure what the channel is. I also want to feel safe, not in danger—so there are bath towels in the piece that are sound-baffling.”

Michael Demps’s installation resembles a skeletal space ship: a giant, living crystal suspended within a diamond-shaped metal frame, producing an electronically generated reverberation. The crystal, which suggests an obelisk resting on its side and is composed of salt, wax, and other organic materials, will evolve over time depending on the humidity levels in the room. The frame is hooked up to a series of transducers that absorb surrounding sound and channel it into the metal, causing it to vibrate.  

The piece, Choi says, developed from Demps’s interest in chakras, and the idea of finding one’s own balance and well-being. It’s placed alongside Amy Sherald’s peaceful, transporting portrait paintings, The Boy With No Past (2014) and The Make Believer (Monet’s Garden) (2016)—which show anonymous figures in environments that seem to be mental projections, dislocated from any concrete reality. Demps and Sherald both speak to the promise of creating oneself, incubating in one’s own interior world.

Installation view of works by Sable Elyse Smith and Nikita Gale. Courtesy of the Studio Museum.  

At first glance, Maya Stovall’s Untitled A (2017)—the first and last work visitors see upon entering or exiting the main galleries—might be dismissed as a mere Instagram moment. Crystals hang from the ceiling and mirrors line the walls of a narrow space, endlessly reflecting viewers back at themselves. But here, in the larger context of “Fictions,” the installation is pointed and reflexive, resolutely throwing the question of one’s narrative, the story of one’s self, back at the audience.

In a media environment where alternative facts are rife, and a common perception of reality is becoming increasingly nebulous, “Fictions” is about the stories, of self and other, true and false, that define our world. But it doesn’t let viewers off the hook: Confronting an infinity of mirror images as they exit the museum, they are prompted to reflect on their own position, their own reality—and to find solid ground amid the numerous distorting lenses that surround us.

—Tess Thackara

from Artsy News

[peaceniksandbolsheviks]

Reflection V: Fanon (Ch. 1-2)

Frantz Fanon and his book The Wretched of the Earth have been one of the most frequently cited authorities on the subject of violence, alongside Georges Sorel’s Reflections on Violence. Like Sorel, his perspective is rather controversial: both King and Arendt, coming from proximately negative positions towards violence, decry the popularity of Fanon’s work amongst radical circles in the 1960s while also acknowledging the power of his prose and psychiatric insights. This reflection will focus on Fanon’s parallels with and connections to King, Arendt, and Benjamin, as well as what lessons might be derived from his work for a world living under globalized capitalism or oppressed populations living in a non-colonial nation.

Despite the continued resonance of Fanon’s work, it is grounded in specificity: the time, which saw multiple liberation movements and wars for independence across Latin America, East Asia, and Africa, and the place, situated not on all countries or all oppressed peoples, but specifically those who have been colonized. This makes it difficult to extract lessons for contexts that fall outside Fanon’s purview; he acknowledges this when he points out that capitalist or “Western” countries require mediators or “confusion-mongers” like priests and businessmen to mitigate the frustrations and alienation of their exploited populations (Fanon, 4). These subtle tactics are far less popular in the colonies, where the state relies on “pure violence…rifle butts and napalm” in founding the colonial regime (4). Yet in drawing links to other authors on the subjects of violence (as well as nonviolence, racism, religion, and national consciousness), one can derive some useful lessons for contemporary political circumstances.

Fanon frequently points out that the whole colonial regime was constructed upon violence, and now that violence is to be turned back upon it in a radical assertion of equality or transcendence. This claim bears strong resemblance to Walter Benjamin’s discussion of mythical violence as law-establishing and divine violence as law-destroying. Likewise, Fanon and Benjamin have a similar interest in capitalism’s dependence on violence. Yet they depart in the sense that Benjamin would likely consider Fanon’s emphasis on nationalism and national consciousness as just another part of the historical cycle which he describes: a constant replication of law through mythical violence, which nationalism relies upon most glaringly. To be fair, Fanon seems to see this as an issue as well, worrying about the potential political and economic problems that could arise in liberated former colonies due to underdevelopment and abandonment by the resentful ousted colonizers. Hence, a lesson from Fanon: the state (or law) and violence, and capitalism and violence, are deeply linked on a systemic level. Furthermore, the use of violence is again conditional: the establishment of a colonial regime through bloody force, and the subsequent long-standing exploitation and psychological warfare, are the historical reasons for unleashing violence by the colonized subject.

Arendt criticizes Fanon, as well as characters like Sorel, Sartre, and Nietzsche, for interpreting the use of violence in biological terms, linking violence, physiology, and the affirmation of life all together. Her abhorrence is understandable, considering this is a common pillar of historical fascism. That view is one possible interpretation of Fanon’s lengthy discussion of the three main outlets that colonized subjects express their aggression through: through “collective suicide” by brutalizing other colonized subjects, through myths that distract from the colonist as the enemy, and through dance-rituals that allow for the excising of the aggressive tension that has been ingrained upon them. But it is important to note that Fanon follows by pointing out that they abandon these myths for reality, demonstrating his materialist and Marxist influences. Certainly, Fanon uses biological or physiological language, and that may be a subject for reasonable critique – but he was, after all, a psychiatrist. Yet in his account the colonized is not inherently aggressive, and struggle is not a fundamental component of life. Everyday existence is not warfare in some kind of state of nature. It is only warfare due to the material conditions and psychological damage that colonialism imposes upon its subjects. Violence, for Fanon, is the outlet through which a human being that has long been denied their humanity, and who has been educated solely in the language of force, can express it. This ties into Arendt’s view of violence as an instrument, though it may be a more abstract instrument than she would like: violence, to Fanon, can liberate a colonized person both on a practical and psychological level, and is not merely a “weapon of reform” but has the potential for undermining an entire imperial system. The individual end is attained in the most immediate way, in Fanon’s description.

The King/Fanon relationship is perhaps the most fascinating because the two rely on astonishingly similar language (allowing for the translation of Fanon, naturally) in defense of their polar opposite tactics. Each speak of how their respective tactics bring to light a tension – for King, in the society, for Fanon, in the individual. Similarly, both talk of the liberatory power of their strategies, the psychological ramifications of racism and separation, and the problem of the inferiority complex in the racialized subject. Finally, both fall back on a certain level of martyrdom: King, through the emphasis on Christian suffering, and Fanon, through the idea of the collectively guided guerilla war in which one may not live to see the national freedom that is fought for, but attains or asserts the individual freedom in the act of violence against the colonizer. In the articulation of their tactics, both suggest that violence will be done to the revolutionary/protesting actors, and that this will only serve to further their cause. King lays his and other bodies down to highlight injustice, while Fanon suggests that the inevitable disproportionate brutality of colonialists as a response to insurgent violence will unify the nation due to the “pendulum of terror and counterterror”.

Yet there is an obvious disconnect between the two. King, commenting on Fanon, suggests that his endorsement of violence relies on European values despite supposedly wanting to transcend Europe, while Fanon, commenting on the “mediators” of nonviolence, accuses them of embracing a colonial construction that avoids the necessary work of revolutionary warfare (24). By their own accounts, both seek to transcend the European-American legacy. Fanon goes so far as to suggest that Western/European values are to be “vomit[ed] up” by the colonized subject when they assert their own humanity, while King seems more rooted in the American experiment and liberal values than he might wish to admit. The aforementioned Fanon passage raises another interesting issue regarding nonviolence and violence as practical means. Fanon ascertains that nonviolence advocates “are convinced violent methods are ineffective. For them, there can be no doubt, any attempt to smash colonial oppression by force is an act of despair, a suicidal act…They are losers from the start”. The brutality of this argument notwithstanding, this ties into one of the critiques of King from last week. His choice to emphasize nonviolence as a practical strategy as well as a moral principle requires that violence be ineffective in his narrative, despite the arguably ahistorical nature of such a claim. Of course, the circumstances and conditions differ between the two authors – King was writing as a minority who wanted to avoid further suffering, while Fanon was writing as an outsider commentating on a locale (Algeria) in which the oppressed outnumbered the oppressors locally, despite not outgunning them.

With all these connections in mind, the question lingers: what use is Fanon to us, living under global capitalism, living with perpetual warfare, living during the rise of right-populism and resurrected fascisms? There are the broad implications that parallel Arendt, Benjamin, and King: the importance of understanding your tactic, the consideration of violence or nonviolence as instruments towards some ends, the roles that law and economics play in these issues. The more specific derivations are trickier but might include Fanon’s psychological insights into oppression, which cannot be neatly transplanted to all forms but can be compared or modified in some way, the consideration of violence not simply as a means but as a political tactic in a way that Arendt and Benjamin left partly unaddressed, and the idea that there are certain systems that can only be responded to with violence. When Fanon says that colonialism is not reasonable, and only really responds to violence, he touches a nerve that is currently running through much of the West as it tries to come to grips with a staggered liberalism and resurgent fascism.

[jkachinsky-criticalpractice]

Final Essay

The 2013 movie Ender’s Game is an adaptation of Orson Scott Card’s 1991 novel of the same name, which in turn is an update of the 1985 version. It brings a new focus to the issues of distance and simulation endemic to an era of drone warfare. From there it delves deeper into the mindsets of enemy combatants, seeking the reasons why people make war, and finds a complex of mirrored monstrosity and ignorance. Finally, the Christian morality carried over from the original book firmly condemns war on the grounds that all nations, however different, are essentially comprised of persons capable of living in universal harmony- but in doing so, avoids both a pragmatic, materialist analysis of conflict and a true moral condemnation of the actors. Ender’s Game is a meditation on the psychology of modern war, which shades, in Orson Scott Card’s typical style, into a morality play; one that paradoxically reveals the futility of rendering moral judgment in a post-modern, post-monster world.

           The movie begins, appropriately, with a group of children playing a game. Ender faces off against another boy in a simulated dogfight, each holding and manipulating a tablet in a way that closely resembles children playing video games on a smartphone, tablet, or other modern platform. Also familiar is the content of the game, in isolation and in context. The idea of a video game where the player pilots a spaceship with the goal of destroying an opponent’s ship is not at all new to us, despite lacking the technology to do so in real life. On the other hand, in the context of the narrative, the simulation is no longer a science fiction game but a realistic war game, another common genre. Later, in battle school, the battles between armies less resemble video games and more resemble sports. Correspondently, the relationship between gameplay and a real battle or war becomes more abstract and less explicit. Instead of spaceships interacting via complex simulations of astrophysics and rocket science in a realistic outer space environment, the children play something closer to zero gravity laser tag.

Ender’s Game adds weight to these games by making them practical training for future military officers instead of idle entertainment. This hearkens on one level to frequent criticisms of violent video games, including or especially war games, as gateways to real violent behavior in the future, as well as to stereotypes of sports enthusiasts as violent individuals who use simulated violence to supplement or substitute for the real thing. On another level, it makes an interesting point about how a culture of war games is used to condition young people for military service. The comparison between the operation of a drone to kill people at a distance and the mode of play in a recreational flight simulator or fighting game has been made many times in recent years. And by the end of the movie, we discover that the simulated violence of command school- the final series of simulations meant to test the skills of the team of graduates- was not only a gateway to real violence, but was in itself real violence. Throughout command school, the viewer is given hints that the games Ender is playing against Mazer Rackham are not only games- most memorably, his scolding about the loss of too many ships in a failed match. Another point where simulation blurs with reality is in the mind game. This game was already designed to reflect the player’s real emotional state, and in the end we find it had been coopted as a tool of communication between Ender and the Formic queen- two real people, as opposed to one real person and a generated construct. The game shows him a real place instead of a fantasy world, and eventually he uses his memory of the simulated queen to discover a real Formic egg. But before that, when Ender discovers that the simulated battles have been real the whole time, he is adamant that he would never use the tactics he used to win battles that he thought were games in an actual war.

However, is this statement of moral outrage really credible? We know that Ender, on two prior occasions, responded to an attack by severely, or possibly even fatally, injuring his opponent. In one case, he explicitly stated that the reason was to pre-empt future attacks, the same reason commonly cited for initiating a second Formic War. Ender’s Game could easily be a story about the cruel necessity of evil during war. Yet the narrative takes pains to avoid casting humanity in general, including Colonel Graff and Mazer Rackham, and especially Ender, as monsters. The movie is careful to show each party’s motive and justification for the things they do, however morally questionable.

The key reason for war, then, according to the movie, is fear. Humanity fears a second invasion, and so attacks preemptively. Ender fears further attacks from his bullies, so he fights to incapacitate rather than just escape. The Formics, it is implied, fought the first war because of a fear of death due to lack of water. These fears breed ruthlessness- ruthlessness that the narrative condemns, except in Ender’s case. The Formics are from the beginning presented as an enemy that was gloriously defeated due to their invasion, and the other characters are treated at various points to shows of moral outrage or fits of self-recrimination. And while Ender plainly feels guilt for the things he does, there is always another character there to reassure him; to articulate his reasons and explain to both him and the audience why he was justified. Why does the movie insist that Ender is more ethical than other war-makers? Why is he permitted to finally condemn the Formic genocide? What is the moral difference between his violence and the violence of the International Fleet?

Ender himself tells us the difference in his words to Valentine: “I've won because I've always understood the way my enemy thinks… I think it's impossible to truly understand someone and not love them the way they love themselves. But in that moment… I destroy them.” This issue of true understanding, we find, is actually the root of Ender’s criticism after the destruction of the Formic homeworld. “If I’d known it was real,” he says, “I would have… watched them! What were they thinking?” He doesn’t offer a different strategic course that he would have taken- another, more ethical way to win or prevent future aggression. The first thing he would have done differently was understand his opponent better, and thereby be sure that there was no course other than war. We see him do this at other times, seeking to placate his bullies however he can before resorting to physical fighting. To the narrative, this justifies his war-making. On the face of it, this is a coherent moral point- some actions can be considered ethical courses if, but only if, they are a last resort to prevent a worse outcome.

This idea also forms the foundation of Ender’s Game’s overarching themes about understanding as a moral signifier. Ender’s perfect understanding, and thereby perfect love, make him both the most effective warrior and the most moral character in the movie. Other characters, less moral and less adept than Ender, fail because of their ignorance, and how it leads them to war. The bullies do not understand that Ender will genuinely avoid threatening their status and prestige, so they attack him. The adults do not understand the Formics, so they attack them in order to prevent another invasion. They do not understand the children they train, so they are forced to put them through cruel tests in order to be sure of their usefulness to the war effort. And though this is not explicitly confirmed or denied in the movie, a reader of the novel would tend to carry over the idea that the Formics, having a hive mind, did not understand that killing individual humans was destroying fully sentient beings as opposed to drones. In each case, ignorance leads to wrong, destructive, even monstrous actions. And the other side of it, is that ignorance permitted these actions because it also permitted the dehumanization of those harmed- ignorance led each of these human war-makers to wonder if, and then to fear that, their opponent was a monster who could and would at any moment destroy them or their way of life. Ender, then, is superior not because he necessarily refuses to go as far, or do the same things- in fact, it’s heavily implied that in the right circumstances, he might- but because he would act from a place of love and understanding as opposed to ignorance. He could never see his opponents as monsters, as he uses his understanding of them to destroy them, and, in an unusual corollary, this understanding also means that that destruction cannot make him a monster. And at last, the movie drives the point home by making the only act of war which he will not be justified in (and thus will be made truly monstrous by) the only act of war which he undertakes out of ignorance- not knowing that the simulated battles he fought were real.

The issue with this, of course, is that wars are not actually fought due to ignorance and fear. The Christian injunction to love our neighbor (or rather, our enemy) as ourselves has little power to truly prevent war- in the world of Ender’s Game, perfect understanding between combatants would have been enough to prevent genocide. In the real world, most people understand on some level that, in the immortal words of Smedley Butler, war is a racket. The issues of monstrosity, ignorance, and fear that the movie raises are very much present in the psychology of individual soldiers and citizens of the nations at war, as well as in the propaganda used to raise popular support- but wars do not start because of popular support or fears. They start because of a desire on the part of the powerful for more power or resources, and if the populace cannot be convinced to participate by fears of an unknown monstrous opponent, they can be forced by things like a military draft.

Ender’s Game is a movie that insists that anyone we truly understand, we cannot see as a monster. It insists that we understand the real thoughts, feelings, and motives of those who make war. And it tells us that those war-makers, if taken out of their ignorance, would mutually agree that all sentient beings, however different, should not be monsters to each other. But this refusal to make the war-makers genuinely unsympathetic prevents these ideas from carrying over into praxis. Ender is able to incapacitate his bullies despite his empathy for them, but his guilt over this is at times debilitating. Likewise, how can we confidently act against those who make war, or otherwise do evil, if we must also understand and love them perfectly? It’s easy to say that mutual understanding would solve the problem, but we do not live in a world of mutual understanding, or a world where ignorance is truly the primary cause for conflict. That is the practical problem at the center of postmodern relativism- the problem of making and acting on judgments when no judgment can be objective. And how can we act on a subjective judgment when we must also acknowledge our enemies as subjects? This is the question that Ender’s Game raises, but cannot, like so much contemporary media, offer a satisfactory answer.

[syzygyzip]

The Hollow Circle of the Painted World

The essay that follows is a symbolic analysis of the Painted World of Ariamis from Dark Souls. It examines the level as it was originally phrased, and so does not address any of the elaboration found in the sequels. The interpretations given here borrow from gnosticism, theosophy, and Jungian psychology. If you would like a guided tour of this area, I highly recommend the holistic playthrough offered by epicnamebro in his From the Dark let’s play. The relevant section begins here.

It’s a shame that Dark Souls could not have kept its original title, Dark Ring, slang in British for butthole. The ring is the thesis of Dark Souls: it is seen in the constant death and resurrection of the player, in the design of the levels which loop back on themselves, and in the elliptical nature of the main narrative – it’s one of very few videogames that has a diegetic explanation for NG+. There is also the circumambulation around enemies, which is a common technique for most players. The player traces a circle around the enemy, the subject, and looks for an opening. This dance is how we come to understand whoever we’re revolving around – how we find their tells and learn their movements. But the other rings of the game, the narrative and structural loops, are vacant at their centers. The circle is only given shape by its empty middle. Where are the lords? They’ve gone. Even if we find the Lord of lords, Gwyn, and dance our circle around him, he becomes like any other enemy. This is only the image of a lord, then, and it is empty.

When that illusion is dispelled, and the player chooses to kindle the first flame, or to ignore it, they enter into a new cycle. The transcendent, which cannot be known, is the center axis. The wheel, for all its spokes, must be empty at the center to turn. The wheel of Samsara turns endlessly. Samsara means “wandering” or “world” and refers to the cycle of reincarnation. Being branded with the darksign – which resembles a burning ring – affords us the ability to choose to die, and marks the player as undead. The game also tells us that being thus branded is a curse, and that someone has rounded us up and put us in prison (that is where the game begins, in the cell). But it could just as well be said that being branded is what allows us to recognize that we are have been in prison all the while. We’ve been caught in the prison of the senses, of the illusion of the world, the trap of endless reincarnation called Samsara.

How the Painting is Framed

There is a level that may only be accessed if the player has traced a certain circle in their playthrough: the Painted World of Ariamis. The portal to Ariamis is found in the City of the Gods, Anor Londo, largely uninhabited, with its heavenly spires hoist miles above Lordran, extending to every horizon and bathed in perpetual twilight. In the largest and grandest chamber we find the Painting. This room is otherwise empty except for the painted guardians, veiled members of an arcane order whose purpose has been lost to time. Without having obtained a special object, the Peculiar Doll, the painting is functionless. The Painted World of Ariamis is a reflection. When the chosen undead looks upon it, it is so compelling that they lose themselves in it. They become ensnared by the world and can’t escape. To even enter the Painted World, the undead must already have demonstrated an introspective attitude: you must be holding a doll that is  found upon one’s return to the first room in the game. By this act the chosen undead withdraws to their point of origin. The original emancipation from this room at the start of the game is just one of several oblique references to the act of birth in Dark Souls. The reconciliation with the circumstances of one’s birth is a key part of individuation. If the undead is not self-reflexively curious in this way, the doll is not produced in the game and the painting has no effect.

So with the right attitude in place, when the player looks upon the painting, what do they find in it? What does the painting reflect? At one level, the painting is a synecdochal reflection of the entire game: Ariamis is a remake of the first area designed for Dark Souls. Because of this primacy, it demonstrates most of the series’ features and trademarks Like the full game that surrounds it, Ariamis is a loop pretending to be a line: it is a straight and narrow map that nevertheless terminates at its origin by some invisible process (when the player is released back in front of the painting). The ring reverberates visually in Ariamis -- in the round phalanx of enemies and the coliseum areas -- but also thematically in its self-recursive passages, the integral concept of Dark Souls level design. The Souls series is also known for its detail-oriented environmental storytelling, and the Painted World likewise provides an elevation of that principle. The placement of each object, enemy, and character contributes to the definition of the world and its narrative. More particularly, Ariamis introduces many gameplay series staples -- wicked entrapments poised at the site of a conspicuous treasure, and the punishing of the player for a monotone approach to all situations, to name but two examples.

The Painted World is Dark Souls within Dark Souls. If the player is playing “by the rules” of Dark Souls, if they are proceeding through the game cautiously, slowly, inquisitively, then they find the doll which grants entry into the Painted World. By embodying the Dark Souls ethos, by reflecting Dark Souls to itself, the player is then drawn in to a concentration of that ethos.

Games as Painted Worlds

Beyond expressing the essence of Dark Souls in a single area, the Painted World is also a reasonable metaphor for video games as a whole. Any game into which we project a large portion of our attention will draw us inside – this is immersion. Like Mario in Peach’s castle, we inhabit the object of observation. These worlds are of course not natural, they are “painted” by the developers. Ariamis flags itself off-the-bat as idiomatic of video games. This area has a highly emphasized “title screen” – the landscape overview which would be appropriate as an opening menu or NES-era boxart. As we know, Ariamis is first seen as a painting within a game: the painting depicts a bridge leading into a snowy environment. This picture is then physically entered by the body of the player-character (who is of course the mediating vehicle of the player’s will). Inside the painting, the sight is the same: the bridge and the landscape – but now there is depth to the environment, and the player-character is present. This is a highly symbolic moment, as the game presents you with the same visual information, but changes the method of looking. The painting gains a dimension by the player’s investment in it.

At the point of this title page, and throughout the level, Ariamis very much resembles Castlevania. Castlevania is something like a symbol of pure gaming, and is known to have inspired the quintessential genre of metroidvania, of which Dark Souls is a part. All of the crucial elements are here in the microcosm of Ariamis: switches, sidequests, minibosses, treasure, and blocked passages that are returned to later. The experience contains the complete trajectory typical of such a game, from the early instructional areas, followed by challenges of increasing complexity, abrupt blockages to force a backtrack, and a culminating encounter in a small room at the arbitrary end of the world.

The player is told through item descriptions that Ariamis is host to things which do not belong in Lordran. Games themselves provide a similar service: a repository for unprocessed emotions, fantasies, experiments. As anyone who has played an MMO can attest, people are not quite themselves when inhabiting a game. Through their decision-making and playstyle the player constructs a persona that is lived out by the player-character. Because the game is self-contained, it is often used as a space to act out traits that are considered unpalatable to the conscious mind of the player. Could Priscilla and the other inhabitants of the Painted World provide a similar function for the higher beings of Lordran?

Entry into this level is, as previously stated, totally optional and mostly hidden. So what is gained from participation? Treasure? New challenges? Unique aesthetic content? All of this is true, and each contributes to a deeper definition of the meaning and function of the broader subject. Just as the painting literally gains a dimension from being entered, that which is retrieved from the painting (objects, lore, experiences, memories) gives new dimension to the surrounding world of Dark Souls. But as we have seen, the transformation of the painting from inert game object, to an immersive experience only occurs with the right attitude. Von Franz, in talking about our own mundane reality, writes that “This world if observed from the outside, presents itself as ‘material’; if it is observed by introspection, it is ‘psychic.’ In itself, it is probably neither material nor psychic, but altogether transcendent.”[1] On one level, The Painted World is an object that tells the story of the extension of psyche into matter (and thus into time) in order to refine and reflect itself.

The Mirror of the Mind

How is consciousness refined by extending itself into matter? Well, one way to look at it is to imagine participation in time as another kind of circumambulation. By projecting into the game of time, an otherwise eternal ideal can live out a transient manifestation. By projecting into a multitude of forms, it can be lived out in various permutations and perspectives. The painting itself is a still object that is then lived out by playing through the level. By moving about the vantage points along the wheel’s edge, the center gains new definition; it is renewed in its Self-conception. “The wheel of the good Law moves swiftly on. It grinds by night and day. The worthless husks it drives from out the golden grain, the refuse from the flour. The hand of Karma guides the wheel; the revolutions mark the beatings of the Karmic heart.”[2] 

The Dragons were everlasting until the first flame was lit, and discrepancy was introduced into the world. This discrepancy and the separation it engenders are extremely painful, and yet the dancing light and shadow of the flame also creates new perspectives. Existence comes to know itself in increasing clarity. A hint for this is given by the clams that surround the remaining Everlasting Dragon at the psychic center of Lordran: these clams enfold human skulls, refining them into twinkling titanite, as space-time enfolds and polishes the projected Self. When psyche “externalizes” itself as matter in time, it negotiates and tempers itself. This parallels the function of someone who gazes into a painting or plays a video game; though the object of observation is external, the observer is changed internally by their projection into the object. Consider the testimonies of Dark Souls players (and other gamers) who have accidentally found emotional alleviation through gaming, or have used gaming deliberately as a modality of psychic mediation.

Wandering Through the Level

From the first steps in Ariamis, the motif of samsara is apparent. Foremost, the area is suffused with the presence of Velka, goddess of sin. Though she is never seen in the game, she still presides over guilt, punishment, and retribution. In short: she is the goddess of karma, the cosmic scythe, the separation of husks from grain by the great wheel. Throughout the level we find bodies of hollows affixed to stakes; it is like they are pinned to the earth. Though apparently dead and inert, they still bleed when cut, as if cursed to remain perpetually embodied. All the feminine crows, which presumably feed on the bodies, are Velka’s totem. There are also a number of items scattered around that relate to Velka, and inform us that she is a “rogue diety.” We already know that the Painted World is where aberrations are stowed away; perhaps Velka too is somehow confined to this place, or that she herself is Ariamis.

Other symbols of the transience of matter abound. Most undead are bloated with disease. The phalanx are hardly recognizable as human; thoroughly convinced of the reality of this world, they have dissolved their individuality and given themselves over to massmindedness. They seem to be protecting the statue, or the central atrium, without really knowing why. Further along we see the great decaying dragon. Dragons are of course meant to be everlasting, but when they find reflection in the painting – when they seek externalization within time – they too are subject to sickness and age.

The Bonewheel Room

Behind the church there is an inconspicuous well. The player climbs down this well to find themselves in narrow strone passages filled with bonewheel skeletons and false walls. These are the same walls we find in Sen’s Fortress, an area which is a metaphor for the limitations of matter – only by overcoming those limitations is the player granted entry into the firmament. Just as with some of the walls in the fortress, the Sen’s style walls in these passages are illusory, creating false, arbitrary confinements. The boundaries of matter, of the physical body are but one restriction of incarnation. The bonewheel skeletons, riding around on instruments of torture, are another emblem of the dark souls thesis: symbols of samsara. They cling to their instruments of torture just as people cling to their sufferings and thus remain trapped within Earth.

In the corner of the room, there is a corpse being lit by the sun through a crack in the ceiling. It appears he has fallen through the roof, and is now a lone body on the wet floor. It is another image of birth. Near to the body, there is a wheel to turn, and that contraption moves the statue of the Madonna, a mother of stone. In a rare cinematic moment, the stature turns to face the camera, and then the shot switches to over its shoulder as it gazes toward a slowly opening gate that leads to the exit of Ariamis. So here, entrenched in the lowest point of the Painted World, a traumatic image of birth is recovered, and with it the means by which to move the wheel, and by its movement an edifice of Mother/mater turns to face the direction of release. What a beautiful moment! It is a microcosm within a microcosm. If we follow the statue’s gaze, we come to the central encounter of the world.

Crossbreed Priscilla

Mostly because of her unconfirmed parentage, Priscilla is a major source of speculation in Dark Souls lore. She is known to be half-dragon, an aberration, and was thus sealed in the painted world. But why should she have been sealed? And how was this hybrid being produced?

In Gnostic belief, Sophia, divine wisdom, is imprisoned within matter. The damsel in distress trope can be seen as allegorical of this structure, and is ubiquitous in video game stories. If the maiden is an image of Sophia, then the guarding beast (dragon, tyrant, Bowser) can be seen as the malevolent demiurge – the architect of the ordeal. We are told that Priscilla is imprisoned within the Painted World, and expect her to behave like the Sophic damsel in all the other stories. But Priscilla is a crossbreed: she is both dragon and maiden. She is the only boss in the game who verbally gives you the option to avoid fighting. She rules the only area that can be “completed” without conquering its master. Though she too is guarded by a fearsome dragon, it is a decrepit one who poses no real threat to the player. It is an outmoded form, and the true dragon is Priscilla herself.

The Gnostic cosmology describes the demiurge as an antagonistic force that constructed the world and which endeavors to curb the higher development of human beings. It proclaims that this adversary came into being when Sophia, an emanation of God, desired to know her source. Her attempt to know the unknowable produced her own captor: the demiurge. If the painted world is meant to reflect the world it contains, maybe the image of Priscilla conveys a very difficult psychic fact: that what is meant to be retrieved within the world, whether that is divine wisdom or psychic wholeness, is contiguous with the very trap which ensnares humanity in this dramatic, endless recursion. It is well known that Priscilla was originally meant to be the central heroine of Dark Souls, taking a role similar to that of the firekeepers – who, like Sophia, are identified with the anima, the inner divine spark. But Priscilla is a much more ambivalent figure. She asks the player to leave, insisting that the inhabitants of the painted world are peaceful and kind. She is interested in sustaining this world, and the fact that she holds the “Lifescythe,” identifies her with the demiurge.

To add another spice to the stew, it’s worth considering that Sophia is associated with the Virgin Mary, who the statue in the center of the map resembles. This association is partially because the contact of Sophia by the individual is said to be redemptive of the gross material world. This identification supports her protection of the miserable and hostile denizens of Ariamis. Okay, so then if Priscilla is purely Sophic, then how is the demiurge constellated? Perhaps we should return to the figure of Velka, who seems embodied in the world and its laws. Ariamis contains Priscilla as the Madonna cradles her child, or the architecture of the demiurge surrounds its divine spark. A number of fan theories hypothesize Velka as mother of Priscilla, and it certainly fits symbolically. Is Velka, absent from the world of Dark Souls, the invisible axis around which the wheel of fate spins?

The collective imagination has become somewhat distanced from the generative properties of disorder. To many, the term entropy has become an epithet, synonymous with evil. Matter decays and degrades, but that disintegration creates the fertile ground to incubate new forms. To go throughout the world finding nothing but grotesque egg-sack bearers, and deteriorating phalanx drones is a very negative attitude. If the Painted World is a reflection of the larger world, it is here distorted. Perhaps it is warped by an inordinately harsh view of matter, fate, and time. Velka is functioning through these processes, but she herself is not present. “If a god is forgotten, it means that some aspects of collective consciousness are so much in the foreground that others are ignored to a great extent.”[3] The forces which are shaping the Age of Fire are identified in the opening cinematic, Velka’s influence is felt most predominantly only in this tucked away world. We can suppose that a healthier alignment to Velka -- a greater conscious appreciation of her function -- would produce a less dire interpretation of her kingdom.

Skeleton’s Clinging

Something sustains the Painted World, just as something sustains the eternal return of the chosen undead in their pilgrimage to link the fire. Something keeps the cycle going. Well, if the bonewheels gives us any clue, it is the clinging. And the phalanx clings round the lifeless stone idol. We hold on to our attachments to the illusion of the world. We cling to our emotions and affects, as Priscilla clung to her Peculiar Doll, which drew her into Ariamis. For all we know, maybe it was the clinging that created Ariamis. To take it further, maybe it was this act of attachment created all of Lordran, with Ariamis as its origin. There is something brainlike about the chamber that contains the painting. Carl Jung, in a self-described “highly speculative” pondering, wrote that

It might be that psyche should be understood as unextended intensity and not a body moving with time. […] In light of this view the brain might be a transformer station, in which the relatively infinite tension or intensity of the psyche proper is transformed into perceptible frequencies or extensions. […] The archetypal world is ‘eternal,’ i.e. outside time, and it is everywhere as there is no space under archetypal conditions. [4]

Anor Londo is the home of the Gods, and takes care to protect this painting. Perhaps Priscilla, in her fixation on the doll, partitioned herself into a high degree of externalization, producing the painted world, the surrounding metaphorical representation of Anor Londo, and the greater environs of the land of Lordran, which are now traversable by the undead. She is “half” everlasting dragon, perhaps this is because her other half is now identified in matter. And we, the chosen undead, come to identify ourselves within Lordran too. Certainly it is our attachment to our own character that keeps us playing Dark Souls! There would be no point to wandering about the world if we couldn’t participate in the game’s rich mechanics.

At the beginning of this essay I mentioned how the circumambulation around an enemy is an important technique in Dark Souls combat. Well of course there is more to it than that. The primary key to victory in Dark Souls is actually distance management: the movement toward and away from the opponent. Understanding the swings of the swords and hammers, the range of soul arrows and lightning bolts, and adjusting your position accordingly. Dark Souls encourages the same approach to its subject matter. You may draw as near as you like to it from any side. Like all great art, Souls lore feels so rich because it can adapt to whoever is engaging with it. It is your personal relationship to the game that determines its center, its essence, and its meaning can be found at any point around the circle.

1. Von Franz, Marie-Louise. Psyche and Matter. Shambala Publications, 1988.

2. Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna. Voice of the Silence. Theosophical University Press, 1992.

3. Von Franz, Marie-Louise. Feminine in Fairy Tales, the. Spring Publications, 1988.

4. Jung, Carl. Letter to John R. Smythies, 19 February 1952. Letters, vol. 2 p. 45f.

[sheridanh0pe]

The Skin I Live In, and Almodovar’s Secrets

With few empowering, complex roles for women in Hollywood movies, Pedro Almodovar’s female-centric films provide a cathartic meditation on womanhood through his stories of gender performance and transformation. The depth of his female protagonists extend further than what critics have said are gay and transgendered men masquerading as women (a textbook example being Holly Golightly in Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s). Such suspicions are valid given Almodovar’s drag queen inspired flamboyant and troubled divas that physically resemble famous leading ladies, and the needs of these women to exorcise a past trauma that haunts them and unsettles their identity. The mother in this story Marilia is a subtle nod to Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire. In The Skin I Live In, the film title and tragedy that befalls the unassuming Vincente (who has been transfigured into a woman, Vera) centers on the trauma of gender not being a choice and the resulting entrapment, struggle, and later on healing. The designing principle behind Almodovar’s stories is based on a character who encounters loss and betrayal in a malevolent world and who must also overcome the estrangement of her mother and the mother’s failed attempts to protect her children. Fathers are largely absent and unnecessarily in the family unit but the mother’s return and acceptance is crucial to the main character’s ability to move on.

The Skin I Live In is a Pygmalion story of chauvinistic Vincente, whose assault on the mad doctor’s daughter Norma leads to his kidnapping and sexual reassignment surgery (becoming Vera). Almodovar treats the skin as a parallel motif for clothing, both being sculptural elements that define gender and sex. Vincente previously worked in a dress shop with his mother. The mad doctor, Robert, is a gifted plastic surgeon. In her claustrophobic madness, Robert’s daughter could not stand fitted clothing and it was her wayward removal of her clothes in the gardens after a party that provoked Vincente’s assault. In addition to the body stocking that protects Vera’s skin, Vera works with sculptures that pay homage to Louise Bourgeois’s fabric portrait-heads and body sculptures. Still mourning, unhealed after his wife’s disfigurement from a fiery car crash and subsequent suicide, the mad doctor atones by creating an artificial layer of skin on Vera that is burn proof and also recreates his dead wife’s face on Vera.

Together by Louise Bourgeois

The Toilet of Venus by Diego Velazquez

Melodramas are moral tales of good and bad but The Skin I Live In is certainly not so simple.  Almodovar takes his main characters through a Kafkaesque labyrinth deviating from gender and sexual norms (e.g. nuns, prostitutes, transvestites, Chinatown mother-daughter familial ties, etc). His characters suffer psychological brutality, physical deformation, power struggles, and isolation, ultimately returning full circle to a state of equilibrium with the family (often all women) after a life-changing experience of transgressive and destructive love. Borrowing tropes from Hitchcock, as his films often do, The Skin I Live in plays on mothers and their strained relationships (i.e., Marilia as the servant mother reunited with the criminally-insane brothers Robert and Zeca); disorders of paranoia, claustrophobia and voyeurism that heighten the suspense through restricting actions to a single setting (i.e., Robert’s home clinic in which Vera is held hostage in a room equipped with video surveillance cameras); and a possessive love of beautiful women and their sexuality (i.e., Robert’s obsession with his unfaithful, dead wife through Vera’s body).

Like Shakespeare’s use of the father’s ghost in Hamlet, ghosts and mysterious deaths drive the character actions. The surreal quality of Volver, Talk to Her, and The Skin I Live In comes from these women having close ties to death like Salvador Dali paintings, which often depict sexuality, death, disembodiment, metamorphosis, and nightmares overlapping reality. Almodovar weaves in masterpieces of art, providing a backdrop of sophisticated and beautiful artwork that reflects the chaotic emotional realities of his characters, where story meets style. Zeca’s tiger suit and body modifications and his assault on Vera pay homage to a Dali painting. Zeca’s assault provides the rising action that leads to Robert’s killing of his own brother in revenge and Vera later bedding Robert.

Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening by Salvador Dali

In the tragic aftermath, Marilia cleans up the blood-stained sheets from her dead son Zeca. Almodovar’s signature use of bold red colors in bloodied fabrics, fruits, costumes, décor, and other props throughout his oeuvre is a tribute to the powerful relationship mothers have with life and death, which is why the mothers reveal the big family secrets affecting all of the characters. After Zeca’s death, Marilia breaks the history of Robert’s madness to Vera and the woman Vera has been made to resemble.

Almodovar’s meditations on love as a destructive and healing force are built off of the inciting incident (found in the family secret kept by the mother) that led to the current state of disequilibrium, paralysis, and chaos. The secret is a transgressive love affair that scatters the family unit, which the characters must resolve and overcome to reunite and reaffirmed the bonds of family that come with feeding all of their stories into the narrative thread. Almodovar’s movies are exciting because they don’t start off with the inciting incident in linear chronological order but instead the characters work backwards towards a single event or memory that is explored at progressively deeper levels as they come back together.

https://vimeo.com/167873646

Short Visual Essay on Almodovar’s Obsession with Red

The prevalence of red objects as an expression of passion and pain reinforces the catharsis of the characters’ self-revelations. As a film structured around the woman’s worldview and natural reactions to crisis, feelings of need and desire are powerful drivers in the hero’s journey and the telling of stories and secrets inspire dramatic actions of escape, murder, bravery, love, and reunion.

Vera’s weakness and obstacle is her captivity by a love-possessed man (like Lena in Broken Embraces and Marina in Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!) and Vera’s body taken out of her control (such as Alicia in Talk to Her). Almodovar toys with the idea of Stockholm Syndrome in some of his films, which has the audience guessing if Vera will love Robert back. Finding solace and inner strength in yoga during her 6 years in captivity, Vera exploits her newfound sexuality to seduce, kill and escape from her captor and his servant mother. Almodovar often stages women in deep contemplation under the warmth of a sunlit window, as inspired by Edward Hopper’s Morning Sun painting, symbolizing a woman’s need for warmth in isolation and freedom outside of the home. The film ends with Vera reunited with her mother and a lesbian friend she previously slighted, ready to tell her story.

Morning Sun by Edward Hopper

[nofomoartworld]

Bad at Sports Sunday Comics with Matthew Thurber

By Max Morris

I was first made aware of Matt Thurber’s work when the first issue of 1-800-MICE showed up at Quimby’s bookstore in Chicago. The style of screwball antics conflated with surrealist political drama (one plot point features an immortal bluegrass-star vampire streaking through space, and his apocalyptic approach toward the earth) was of immediate interest, and I recall being surprised that the heady brew of strange plot devices actually moved toward a climax. Today we present some selection from Art Comic, Thurber’s ongoing serial, and I was pleased get a chance to ask him a few questions on his work.

    Max Morris: Back in 2014, you wrote this article for The Comics Journal Website , “Letter to a Young Cartoonist”, that stirred some controversy at the time. A bulk of the article dealt with the ramifications of posting comics work on Tumblr and Social Media, among other issues of challengers to the new generation of comics artists. This was in a time when that felt like the primary way to see new work being made by current creators. A little under 3 years after you posted that article, a lot has changed.  Looking back at this article, what words do you have to say to the young cartoonist today?

Matthew Thurber: I feel more than ever that printed media contains autonomous power that is almost magical. All internet publication is embedded in and framed by another corporation. With print, as soon as it flies off the press it belongs, like the land, to “you and me”. The disturbing thing about social media is they change the terms of publication from one of total freedom, to one where you are being allowed to express yourself. Because they grant it… they can take it away. Social media echo chambers are destructive: look at what they have helped to do in terms of ripping our country in half, replacing everything with a simulation of reality. Is that what you mean by “a lot is changed”? We’re opting into 1984 because it feels good. It’s so seductive to feel like you’ve done something in pseudo-reality.  We need to learn to live without the internet, to distribute artifacts in physical space, to know how to talk to each other again. It is so much more meaningful and beautiful.  And guess what??? I’m part of the problem because I’m on INSTAGRAM (@mtshelves)! What a miserable hypocritical worm!!!! And the worst part is….I LOVE it! I love the ego pampering attention and the immediacy despite my complete conviction that it sucks!

MM: In your current ongoing serial Art Comic (which we are previewing in this article) you satirize High Art and all of its follies- your earlier work 1-800-MICE and Infomaniacs could be seen a parody of culture at large, but Art Comic seems to have a specific focus on the world of fine arts- what inspired this move?

MT: I didn’t know what I wanted to say exactly at first. It’s taking shape. I’m interested in how the art world functions as an industry steered by wealth and not by philosophy or ideas, despite the mythology that it is an idealistic pursuit, and how no one talks about the meaning of money in art or how that is never seen as the subject matter or part of the content of art. You’re just supposed to go to these gallery shows and ignore the context. The myths are stronger than the reality.

People wouldn’t go to art school otherwise the definition of art as wealth dovetails with the acceptance of craft as being obsolete, or in an outsourcing of craft or technique to make objects for the artist-manager-boss. Technical skill is replaced by verbal or conceptual dexterity, or of a performance of self, or just by the existence of celebrity.  So that, and what the role of schools are in this, and what the role of narrative art and illustration is in all this. And how changes in the art scene reflect the overall development and gentrification of New York, since I moved here in 1996.

So Cooper Union gave up on its mission of providing free tuition in 2014 and I started to make a story based on my own experiences mixed with these absurd paranoid premises. Like that there was actually a conspiracy of artists to repress their students and that Matthew Barney’s Cremaster was taken away from him and became a symbolic representation of a real estate transaction.

Additionally to working as a cartoonist, you have worked as a multimedia artist in theater, performance, and other mediums. Do you feel that affects your work as a cartoonist, and vice-versa?

Yes… in a way it’s all the same energy. Increasingly it seems impossible to think of just doing comics. I’m dying to make an animated film- I just have to get this comic done first. I like to experiment and learning different techniques is part of my process, I guess, maybe even more important than the subject in a way.

I just worked with a group of 8 volunteer non-professional actors, and such, to perform what was basically a dance piece called “Terpinwoe”. We had one rehearsal and that was it, and the performance was great. The theater stuff started as an idea to do a puppet show called Mrs. William Horsley.  But the idea of puppetry evolved into a general idea of ‘modeled experience’. Now Mrs. William Horsley has turned into a human puppet show, with actors. It’s more fun than being in any band!

But I think for me, the narrative impulse is behind everything. It’s always a kind of illustration of a story or something resembling a story. The idea of depiction. I would love to make comics that were more abstract, like dance pieces, maybe that’s what Yokoyama does, or Milt Gross. And after something happens like this theater piece I ricochet back into wanting to read and draw quietly and maybe that’s good. But I don’t know why more “Artists” don’t work in comics and why cartoonists get so settled into their medium. I think that is changing a lot actually. Any form is for any artist. I believe in “Amateur Enthusiasm”.

Much of your work utilizes psychedelia, visionary imagery, and absurdity- you also seem to enjoy intertwining plots and complex character development. When structuring a narrative, how do you consider resolving these two seemingly opposing themes?

I don’t know if I consider these tendencies resolved and that’s OK. That’s why novels exist, to embrace contradictions. I like very unexplained and strong imagery, like in dreams. Also, I like beautiful and complicated structures and plots. My favorite artworks are when you get both at once, like how “Mulholland Drive” messed with the logical side of your brain, but through the use of really subconscious imagery. Or Harry Stephen Keeler, whose crime stories are logical to the point where it makes no sense at all. Or Daniel Pinkwater, who somehow balances absurdity and very warm and human characters, or Raymond Roussel whose writing is all an attempt to make connections with the totally random subconscious imagery generated by word-play.

I worry about my characters not having any psychological depth. I wonder about emotional manipulation to get across my ideas. Is it even ethical? Elaine May is good at it- see “A New Leaf”. But if you try to do that it usually looks disgusting in the way that Hollywood movies make you want to vomit with their stupid emotional manipulation. I love ridiculous melodrama, or silent films where stuff just happens and humans are reduced to sacks of flour to be thrown around.

I guess that I think making a graphic novel is one way of keeping many unresolved, inconsistent elements together in suspension as in a soup where there are chunks of this and that floating in different shapes and sizes.

To order Art Comic, head to http://ift.tt/1UbRQOz. You can also find Matthew’s site at http://ift.tt/WuN0Vf.

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