tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-87209588276692767212024-03-13T15:47:06.999-07:00Plot ShieldThoughts, words and pop cultural trash from our correspondent in Japandotdashhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06270663921267987965noreply@blogger.comBlogger72125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8720958827669276721.post-57382383385899685162016-01-12T04:00:00.004-08:002017-01-11T03:14:30.602-08:00How I learned to love David Bowie<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">My first thought when I read that David Bowie had died echoed Metternich’s apocryphal response to the death of Talleyrand: “And what did he mean by that?”</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">My second was that the whole production and release of his new album, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Blackstar</i>, and the preceding singles and videos had been an elaborate piece of theatre designed to frame his death in the most dramatic and climactic way possible. Bravo, sir.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Creeping in behind these two thoughts was a gradual, sickening realisation that I was truly, genuinely in pain at the news.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The social media tributes that inevitably gush forth upon the death of a well-known musician always make me feel a little uncomfortable. I will sometimes give a little online salute to an artist who had an effect on me, and I certainly don’t wish ill of anyone else who does the same. Everyone experiences music in their own way and who am I to judge their feelings for an artist invalid, but at the same time, the very individuality of that experience is what can make the collective expression of grief at these moments feel so strange and jarring with me.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Music exists at a strange nexus between individual and collective experience, which often manifests itself in a sort of tribalism. You seek something that speaks to you personally, but at the same time, this process of identification grants you membership of a group or tribe, which then further channels your sense of identification towards certain kinds of artists.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">When people say they aren’t influenced by this kind of stuff and just “like what they like”, it is usually because the tribe they are members of is so dominant that they rarely encounter its edges except as a curiosity they are easily able to ignore, dismiss or compartmentalise.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">David Bowie confuses all those boundaries. He is (I still cannot think of him in the past tense: his presence fills everything right now) an artist who inabits so many worlds and has touched so many people in so many ways that the possibility of some kind of universal collective experience feels completely impossible to me.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Nick Currie (aka Momus) in <a href="http://mrstsk.tumblr.com/post/137085985233">his moving reaction to the news</a> described Bowie’s death as “our Diana moment”, but who is “us”? For Currie, Bowie was the flash of light that illuminated grim 1970s Britain, the “best and only friend” for a generation of misshapes and misfits. To me growing up in the ‘90s, the misshapes were just another clique I wasn’t cool enough to hang out with; meanwhile Bowie was an elder statesman of classic rock, and everyone loved him, even as they tried to pretend his more recent work didn’t exist.</span></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">To the Britpop generation I was growing up in, the ‘80s had ruined Bowie, and his contemporary work was a musical mid-life crisis: an interesting but misguided attempt to reclaim his edge. Still, the height of the era, when the NME polled musicians on their greatest influences, Bowie came top, towering over The Beatles, Stones, Dylan.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">And it made sense. No one after about 1970 ever made any interesting music under the primary influence of The Beatles or Stones, but nearly all my favourite bands growing up had Bowie deeply embedded in their DNA – Blur, Super Furry Animals and Pulp of course, not to mention the sweaty glam swagger of the defiantly un-Britpop but nonetheless contemporary Earl Brutus.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Like many kids my age, I’d grown up with <i>Let’s Dance</i> on my parents’ turntable, and the film <i>Labyrinth</i> on the TV. This wasn’t such a bad way to encounter him really, but it was through these British ‘90s bands that I started investigating his albums in earnest.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Honestly, I didn’t get it. I couldn’t identify with the freaky personas he adopted, growing up in an era when being a gender-bending alien pop superstar was normal to the point of being banal for the UK charts. I liked <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ziggy Stardust</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Diamond Dogs</i> fine, but they never clicked with me. They were better than other classic rock, but they were still classic rock, and like Led Zeppelin, The Who or Jimi Hendrix, I wasn’t quite able to find my own way in. I could take the bus tour with all the other tourists, but I had too limited a map of my own identity to be able to navigate my way; I lacked the tools to unlock my own individual path in. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Heroes</i>, meanwhile, was just plain terrifying: a cold, scratchy, metallic panic attack of an album built around a single elegaic rock anthem. It intrigued me, but I rarely had the courage to listen to it: it was too much too soon.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Bowie went onto the backburner. When I moved to Japan, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ziggy</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Diamond Dogs</i> came with me just in case I needed them, while <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Heroes</i> stayed at home. I didn’t buy any others for a long time.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">In the meantime, however, I’d fallen deeply in love with postpunk bands like Wire, The Teardrop Explodes and XTC, and my experiences in the dark, smoky live halls of Tokyo had brought me face to face with what felt at the time like impossibly uncompromising and avant-garde bands such as Nisennenmondai, Saladabar, Panicsmile and bands I started working with myself through my own label, like Hyacca – some of which made Bowie’s most experimental records sound ridiculously timid (and these bands were themselves by no means extreme by the standards of the scene). It wasn’t always music that translated well to record, but those experiences in a live environment worked quickly, training my ears and body to respond to sounds far removed from the pop and rock conventions I’d been used to.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Part of that is the Stockholm Syndrome of being in a dark room with no easy escape, forced to experience horrible sounds at oppressive volume – you start to find pop appeal in even the tiniest crumbs the artists decide to cast your way. That doesn’t mean that those crumbs are any less real though, and a realisation grew in me that music was at its most magical an experience when the process was collaborative: where the musician did not simply provide a service to the audience, but actually demanded some work of them too.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Those experiences in the Japanese experimental underground, those hours upon hours watching bands and their audiences in this subtle psychic courtship, also taught me to look inside the music, cracking open the case and looking at the gears and springs inside. I don’t mean this in a strictly technical sense – I’m every bit the non-musician I was when I started – so much as in how I analysed and related to the creative process. Why did they put this bit here, and why did they repeat that bit? Why is he making the guitar go <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">skronk</i> instead if <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">squeeeee</i>?</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The artists I liked from the punk era were mostly ones who made music simple enough that the gears and springs were easily visible. Even if their lyrics were impossibly opaque, Wire’s music in particular was an open toolkit, with the creative decisions laid out for anyone with a passing acquaintance with punk and rock’n’roll to see. This was music that even as it seemed to push you away with its confrontational rejection of pop appeal, simultaneously invited you to poke around in its most intimate internal workings. Writing about music helped too, of course, forcing me to engage with music on the level of the creative intentions behind it as well as simply whether I liked it or not. Together, British postpunk, Japanese avant-garde rock and my own music writing helped give me a new way of thinking about music, with this attempt to engage with the process at its core.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">It was around this time that I found my way back into Bowie with a vengeance, and the album that finally cracked him for me was <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Aladdin Sane</i>.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The opening track, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Watch That Man</i>, is a pretty straightforward Rolling Stones strut. Bowie was always a better Jagger than Jagger ever was though – both more masculine and faggier all at once, a freewheeling sexuality allowing his lyrics to travel to more fantastical places for their lack of grounding in what, for all his transgressiveness by ‘60s standards, remained Mick Jagger’s standard meat-and-two-veg. So far, so Ziggy, except for the moment a few minutes in where the beat starts to break down and the honky tonk piano strays from its clomping chords and begins to wander hither and thither all over the final section of the song.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">It was only in the next song, the album’s title track, that I really started to understand what this meant. The way it combined the metronomic, repetitive bassline (borrowed from The Kinks' <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkBvsBpgGbo">Tired of Waiting for You</a></i>) with freeform jazz piano that took the meanderings that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Watch That Man</i> had hinted at as a starting point to leap completely out of the world of anything I understood as conventional rock music. The wailing sax in the background brought back to mind the farting hamster sounds I had mocked as a teenager on the track <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Neukölln</i> from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Heroes</i>, an album I was now starting to regret leaving behind.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB">Panic in Detroit</span></i><span lang="EN-GB"> was a masterpiece that was both a magnificent rock song and like absolutely nothing I had ever heard, and where Bowie had bettered Jagger on <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Watch That Man</i>, he slayed him stone cold dead on his spiky, proto-new wave cover of The Stones’ <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Let’s Spend The Night Together</i>.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">At around this time, I was playing with my friend Grant in a band called Rizla Deutsch. Grant was at a similar stage in his own journey into Bowie (in his case working backwards from <i>Scary Monsters</i>), and hanging out with him we gave each other elaborate sales pitches for the opposing ends of of the '70s (<a href="http://grantmcgaheran.tumblr.com/post/137205468237/bowiethoughts">read Grant's own reminiscences here</a>). It became clear that I needed to reacquaint myself with those late ’70s albums that had previously felt if not exactly intimidating, at least fairly inessential, and now that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Aladdin Sane</i> had given me the key, I suddenly found myself able to explore them with a new freedom. Suddenly, songs like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Golden Years</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sound and Vision</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“Heroes”</i> felt less like rare successes on otherwise inadequate albums than like poppy excursions from the real business of the record, like when Wire would casually toss a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Mannequin</i> or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Outdoor Miner</i> onto one of their albums just to show how easily they could do proper pop songs if they wanted to.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">It was these albums, with their deconstructions of pop and rock song structures, with their willingness to show you a glimpse inside the process, that finally gave me a joy I could call my own with David Bowie’s music – that I was able to find something that felt like it had been made just for me. And then once in, I began to find in the quirks and flourishes those same patterns, the same mind at work in his other albums. Music that I had before found merely great now felt personal.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The way Bowie’s now-final album, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Blackstar</i>, came together, choreographed to first cryptically announce his death and then to serve as both his headstone and resurrection, hit me harder than I could have ever expected.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">While I had finally found my own way into his music, I knew I had to share him with so many other people, all loving his work in their own ways, many of whom hated his weird Berlin records as arty and inaccessible, or considered their experimentalism juvenile and pretentious, or lamented his exploitation of more genuinely innovative German musicians of the period. People who loved him for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ziggy</i>, for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Let’s Dance</i>, for his late-‘60s hippy folk albums, his plastic soul, for his ‘90s industrial albums, his Davey Jones mod records, they all have a claim on him.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Part of his importance as an artist was the way he forces listeners out of their comfort zones if they want to stick with him. To be a fan, you have to be openminded enough to listen to and find enjoyment in all kinds of stuff. At the same time, though, there’s always going to be one album, one period, one act in his theatre that feels like home for you.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">If there is one thing the news of David Bowie’s death has really taught me, it’s that my favourite album of his is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Heroes</i>. It’s a naive album in many ways – an avant-garde work by someone clumsily coming to terms with the tools of avant-garde music – but this is its appeal to me. Songs like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Joe The Lion</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Blackout</i>, which I found impossibly claustrophobic as a teenager, now fizz with energy for me, the way the vocals run ramshackle over the song, Bowie himself mimicking with his voice the freeform piano that woke me up to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Aladdin Sane</i>, the songs constantly seeming on the verge of total collapse. The sax on <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Neukölln</i> still sounds ridiculous to me, but now it feels impressive in its fuck-you audacity.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB">“Heroes”</span></i><span lang="EN-GB"> itself is the only song that doesn’t really feel belongs to me. I’ve stood outside the Hansa Tonstudio building where it was recorded, and looked across at where the Wall would have run, and I can’t see the entwined lovers, feel their passionate, desperate moment. I can’t step inside the song and fully feel the cold edge of reality: instead I feel a soft, velvet-coated anthem to vague and intangible sentiments. It’s a great song and one I’m happy to enjoy together with the world, but somewhere inside me I know it’s too perfect, too creamy: I can’t see the gears.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The sudden appearance of the ten-minute <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Blackstar</i> in November of last year should have given me warning of what was to come: it blew apart all my expectations and left me feeling lightheaded for the rest of the day. Sure, it wasn’t really as original as all that – Bowie was never an innovator so much as a very imaginative thief – but that couldn’t diminish the thrill I felt on hearing it. It’s a track that would have impressed me coming from anyone, but coming from Bowie it felt like a special gift just for me: a belated first experience of what I imagine every week must have felt like back in the ’70s; a tour round some of the finest moments of the years 1976-79 that importantly retained the same restless urge to keep stepping forward onto new ground. I had never expected a new David Bowie song would have the power to affect me in such a way.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">One of the most incisive critiques of Bowie’s work I’ve ever read came from one of his biggest fans, Nick Currie/Momus. Not having the exact phrase to hand, I hope you’ll forgive me paraphrasing, but the essential point I took was that Bowie’s instincts were at heart pretty conservative, and that he only really flirted with the avant-garde when his back was up against the wall, faced with the choice between change and irrelevance. The tension between those two urges – Bowie’s career is a constant balancing act between the individual and the collective experience for himself just as much as for his audience – is part of what makes him such an exciting artist, but ever since reading Momus’ remarks, I’ve always kept a curious eye on the circumstances surrounding any of Bowie’s turns into the leftfield.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">That he chose to take one of those left turns so decisively with his final album feels significant. He didn’t want to be remembered with a contented, crowdpleasing, commercial sounding coda. Many took <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Next Day</i> as a sign of him coming to terms with his past and legacy, but <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Blackstar</i> returns to some of the claustrophobia and panic of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Heroes</i>, without the sweetener of the torch song title track.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I delayed buying the full album on its day of release and it’s a decision I will always regret, because I’ll now never have had the experience of listening to it free from the knowledge of what it portends. What would I trade just to have that experience of listening to it through in a state of innocence? Three days’ worth of memories? Easily.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">But here it is, and it is what it is. I’m listening to the last album David Bowie will ever make, and I’m devastated. But at the same time, I’m selfishly elated. He made an album for me, and he did it in my lifetime. Not only that, but he made it his farewell to the world – his bid for resurrection and immortality – and disappointed thousands of people in the process. A little part of me glories in that: I feel chosen.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Of course David Bowie left us with an embarrassment of riches by which to remember him, and my social media timelines have been swamped with tributes of all kinds, from all kinds of people, all kinds of fans. I don’t know that I agree with Momus about this being the “Diana moment” for all the misshapes – there are too many Bowies, too many ways to remember him, and even if we pool our cathartic tributes across all our Facebook walls, we will still be alone. At the end of this 3,000-word essay, neither you nor I will not be any less alone.</span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Yesterday as I sat watching the tributes crawl past the screen in front of me, still trying to come to terms with the fact that I even had the capacity to be left this stunned and bereft by the death of a 69-year-old pop singer, I got a text from a friend suggesting we go out to karaoke. Singing along to a couple of dozen parping midi versions of his hits with a small group of friends felt right in the end – a balance of the individual and collective experience that filled a need I didn’t know I’d had.</span></span><br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="300" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/fEWhOSmrj6Y" width="400"></iframe>dotdashhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06270663921267987965noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8720958827669276721.post-20502068121410986562015-01-08T00:12:00.000-08:002015-01-08T00:20:26.026-08:00Legend of Korra: Final thoughts<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Part way through season three <a href="http://plotshield.blogspot.jp/2014/08/legend-of-korra-perils-of-making.html">I made a few observations about Legend of Korra and its approach to thefantasy genre</a>, and now it has come to an end I think there are a few
things that can be added to my earlier post.</div>
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WARNING: Lots of spoilers in here, so don't read this if you get upset by that sort of thing.</div>
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Firstly, my ambivalence regarding the
superficiality of its facade of Asianness remains. The conclusion of
<i>Legend of Korra</i>, where it wraps up and clarifies its ideological
universe shows that the framework of values in which it operates is a
fundamentally American one. That aside, the way it unfolds over the
course of the four seasons and how they all fit together is
nonetheless an interesting one and really quite good.</div>
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Accepting that the unspoken assumption
of the show is that pursuing any kind of belief to its extremes is
dangerous (probably true, but not very exciting), the way it plays
out that drama through its often selfish, self-obsessed, occasionally
oafishly unaware, but nonetheless fiery and courageous heroine comes
together very satisfyingly. Korra's supposed teacher Tenzin is
himself flawed, myopic, conservative, and often preoccupied with his
own problems and interests, and in fact it is her opponents who take
the form of a series of dark mentors.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
While the original <i>The Last Airbender</i>
series themed each season around one of the elements, <i>Korra</i> takes
more abstract themes. The theme running through season one is the
conflict between equality and privilege; a political reading of
season two could interpret it as dealing in an abstract way with
secularism and religious extremism, and/or on a more spiritual level
as the disconnection between the physical and spiritual worlds;
season three explicitly deals with anarchism versus an entrenched and
corrupt monarchy; while season four places a rise of nationalistic
fascism in the power vacuum. Korra's education is carried out through
a series of traumatic apprenticeships to these teachers, with Amon
and Hiroshi representing an extreme extension of equality, Unalaq
spirituality, Zaheer freedom, and Kuvira order.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
This doesn't completely overcome the
limitations of the show's adherence to a fairly conventional liberal
American worldview. However, where the show is interesting is that in
a way all of these villains are right, and through learning from them
and adopting the changes they represent, Korra proves herself a good
student even where the teachers are “bad”. Another strength of
the show is how, with the exception of the two-dimensional Unalaq,
the villains all retain some of our sympathies (Henry Rollins' Zaheer
especially – who wouldn't love that guy?)</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
While in the world itself it is the
problems <i>Legend of Korra</i> raises rather than its solutions that are
the most interesting, really it's within the character of Korra
herself that the show makes all this work in the end, and how the
scars of each of these encounters visibly carry over from one season
to another. Korra doesn't allow us to celebrate the defeats of these
villains; she doesn't allow us to feel that “our” side somehow
won; she internalises every struggle and by the end of the series she
looks exhausted.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Much of this also has to do with the
bitterly personal nature of her final struggle with Kuvira. While
fans may have gone giddy with delight at all the <i>Evangelion</i> and <i>Akira</i>
references that accompanied the end of the series, it was the way the
personal stories were resolved that was Legend of Korra's greatest
triumph. Kuvira, Korra's final opponent, is constantly depicted,
sometimes more explicitly than others, as a mirror for herself:
another young woman struggling against the chaos of a world that
never seems to straighten up and fly right.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The show handles romance with a
refreshingly unsentimental disinterest. Bataar's love for Kuvira
crashes against the rocks quite movingly. Given a choice between her
lover and her ambitions, the momentary and seemingly genuine pain
that crosses Kuvira's face makes the ruthlessness and lack of
hesitation in her choice all the more chilling – she is not an
unfeeling two-dimensional monster: she is a fully realised human who
can both experience and overcome pain. Leavening this is the way Zhu
Li's rather touching devotion gradually wears down Varrick, which
while played mostly for laughs, nevertheless depicts love as a
struggle that often seems barely worth the meagre reward.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The strongest bonds the show depicts
tend not to be romantic though. Utterly crushed and broken by
Kuvira's choice, Bataar finds himself in the dubious comfort of his
dysfunctional family with a long, hard road of fence-mending ahead of
him but at least with an unconditional love at its core. The most
open and unambiguous declaration of love is expressed between
brothers Bolin and Mako as the latter prepares to do something
suitably suicidal and heroic.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The love triangle set up in season one
between Korra, Mako and Asami resolves itself far more ambiguously.
The fumbling teenage angst between these three had gradually
dissipated as the series went on and escalating catastrophes of
global significance made their petty jealousies seem pretty
inconsequential. In a sequence partly mirroring the end of <i>Return of
the Jedi</i>, Korra drifts away from the victory celebrations and is
approached by Mako who declares he will always “have her back”,
implicitly confirming them as friends and comrades rather than
lovers. Korra then encounters Asami, and a seemingly more minor
interaction between them from earlier in the series takes on greater
significance when Korra apologises for the pain she caused Asami by
her disappearance. This bursting to the surface of a largely
suppressed source of pain between the two reveals a depth of feeling
between them that hadn't been overt before and they end the series by
going off together.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I haven't been following other online
discussions of the series, and I've read nothing about the series
ending, but I can imagine that it raised eyebrows and caused some
debate. I think it's important and again to the show's credit that it
doesn't outright say anything about Korra and Asami's relationship
here, letting the viewers draw their own conclusions. Based on the
way other relationships are treated, it seems clear to me that the
writers of <i>Legend of Korra</i> believe the depth and devotion of one's
love is more important than its nature, romantic or otherwise, and
it's easy to read Korra and Asami as a reflection of that: friends
and family are the strongest bonds, and those are the bonds that are
most poignantly reinforced by the final episode.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
However, the visual depiction of this
final moment is nonetheless unambiguously romantic, with the pair's
physical proximity and body language shimmering with sexual tension
as they walk off into the light of the spirit world. This is the
cinematic language of two people who are going to fuck each other
senseless the moment the scene fades. The show is obviously nodding
to the possibility of a romance, while at the same time holding back
from saying so outright, I think not so much out of coyness (there's
really no ambiguity about the visual language employed) as out of the
show's refusal to hold up romantic relationships of any kind as the
most important thing – the depth and strength of Korra and Asami's
bond is what it wants to emphasise first and foremost, rather than
the nature of their sexuality.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
This again comes back to the question
of values and the conversation that <i>Legend of Korra</i> is having with
itself. It's a broadly American debate, touching on many of the big
political struggles the country has found itself embroiled in over
the past hundred years or so, and which still inform the national
debate. Even the show's attitude towards love is an American
conversation, as the country gradually awakens from Disney's spell –
in fact there are clear parallels between <i>Legend of Korra</i> and Disney's own <i>Frozen</i>
in the way they de-sentimentalise romance and place it back
into a broader context of what love means – and begins to come to
terms with same-sex relationships.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
That's not to say that these aren't a
valuable conversation to be having, and <i>Legend of Korra</i>, despite its
“yellow-wash” over what are essentially American concerns,
explores the issues raised within its moral universe with depth,
sensitivity, and a generally open mind. Perhaps as time goes by,
these contemporary concerns will age the show in ways that aren't
flattering, but I'm still pretty much convinced that it will be
remembered as one of the greatest children's TV shows ever made, and
mostly deservedly so. As a vision of another world, it is only a very
qualified success, but as an exploration of an important corner of
the one we're actually in, it's an unqualified triumph.</div>
dotdashhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06270663921267987965noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8720958827669276721.post-81611847164326428022014-11-05T00:24:00.001-08:002014-11-05T00:28:29.227-08:00Shooting at Japanese women with bamboo rifles<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">There's a lot of outrage on social media (and real media) about a certain "dating coach" and his let's call it unorthodox approach to seducing the ladies. I'm not going to link to his stuff here because you've probably already seen it and I don't want to bomb the guy with any more free publicity than I already have (not that I think anyone who would be interested in anything I write about on my blog would be at all the sort of person who would get anything useful from one of his seminars).</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">However, if you haven't had the joy of watching him at work, his advice for winning the hearts of Japanese women is basically to shout "Pikachu!" at them, then grab their heads and shove them into his crotch. At the end of the video, you see him doing it to a few clearly very embarrassed girls while bystanders look on with uncomfortable expressions.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Now obviously ordinary, non-sociopathic people are pretty much universally outraged by this how-to guide to sexual harrassment bordering on physical violence, but I want to talk here about something slightly different.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">The most striking thing about the "dating advice" this gentleman dispenses is how useless it is in its ostensible function. You're not going to pick up anyone by grabbing random girls with your big meaty hands and forcing them to smell your sweaty balls, you're just informing them that you're an asshole. There may be specific social environments where the group's general familiarity with each other has led to a sort of general lowering of inhibitions and a shared understanding at play that something like that is funny and silly, but fundamentally it's just not effective dating advice.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">The "dating coach" knows this, and so, if they're honest with themselves, do the fawning acolytes you can see hanging on his every word in the video. So what is it really about?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">If you look at the reaction of the attendees in the seminar, their main reaction is laughter. They're like an audience at a comedy club, listening to a standup deliver racist and sexist one-liners and anecdotes that one after the other reinforce their most shameful prejudices and reassure them that they aren't alone. These guys probably aren't going to go to Tokyo and start thrusting their crotches into girls' faces: what they are getting instead is a cathartic validation of their own potency. They might laugh about it and make half-hearted plans to visit Tokyo together, high on the thrilling possibility that they could impose themselves thus on the supine Oriental ladies of Japan, but most of them will return to their lives of nagging self-doubt and making spiteful threats to women on the internet.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Even Mr. Dating Coach probably doesn't really take that approach. He's probably tried it just enough to know he can get away with it, but in the clips on the video, he's clearly doing it for the benefit of whoever's holding the camera. Those clips are demonstrations of his ability to impose his will on the female species, but I'm going to stick my neck out here and suggest that he has never got laid using that method.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">No, what it is is a sort of ritual of male power, Mr. Dating Coach acting as a sort of priest, conducting a congregation of men who share a nagging sense of their own declining status. Together, they act out this pantomime of male dominance and female submission, like cargo cultists performing military drills with bamboo rifles in the hope of summoning back the airdrops that have long passed them by -- they are not there to learn but to experience fleeting reassurance of a status of respect and dominance that they feel they deserve but have never thought to earn.</span>dotdashhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06270663921267987965noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8720958827669276721.post-10612659037811114962014-08-03T21:26:00.000-07:002014-08-03T21:35:42.592-07:00Legend of Korra: the perils of making fantasy "relatable"<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">There are a lot of reasons to really
love <i>Legend of Korra</i>. Compared to the anime it takes so much of its
inspiration from, its fight sequences are really nicely handled, with
a balletic wuxia film style that few Japanese anime have ever even
attempted to match. Its avoidance of moé character tropes in favour
of a female lead who is strong, muscular, independent and beautiful,
with a female supporting cast who are all treated as human beings
rather than doll-like objects of male fantasy, is also a refreshing
change after a lot of time spent in the otaku hell of most anime of
the past 10-15 (20?) years. Legend of Korra, like <i>Avatar: The Last
Airbender</i> before it, is also refreshing compared to a lot of American
TV for its basis in non-European culture and ethnicity.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">And yet is it really?</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">There are a lot of visual signifiers of
Asian culture, and the show obviously has a lot of fun with them in
its pagoda skyscrapers and junk battleships, but in those things what
we're really seeing is the familiar trappings of Western (in this
case American) civilisation done up in the exotic embroidery of the
Orient. Where it comes across most strikingly, however, is in the
characters themselves. Yes, Korra, Mako, Bolin etc. appear Asian, but
they speak and behave just like contemporary American teenagers.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The world of <i>Legend of Korra</i> also
adheres to a very American sense of history's march. There are
monarchies and empires, but the show expects us to understand that a
presidential republican democracy in the American model is the only
natural and just progression. Other models of governance exist to be
taught that they are wrong.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Even the problems with democracy
reflect the common straw-man complaints Americans have of the system
in that it is sometimes subject to the capricious whims of the crowd
– in essence that democracy is too responsive to the wishes of its
people, a bit like going into a job interview and saying, “My main
fault is that I sometimes work too hard.”</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Now I'm being a bit unfair here, I
know. That the show even deals with the issues of governance and
flaws in democracy at all is a sign of its thoughtfulness, and it's
ridiculous to expect a kids' show to suddenly turn into <i>The Thick of
It</i> or <i>Veep</i>, but it's worth recognising just how limited a range of
views it expects from its viewers. At heart, <i>Legend of Korra</i> isn't
really doing much more than reflecting back at its audience the core
values their own society professes.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Of course given my earlier comments on
<i>Legend of Korra</i>'s representation of women, in a way I'm praising it
out of one corner of my mouth and criticising its broadly American
political ideology out of the other, despite both being reflections
of the same thing: the show's adherence to Western, broadly liberal values. Look at international gender equality rankings and China's
lingering ideological remnants of Communist equality mean that it
tends to do OK (but not brilliantly), while patriarchal capitalist
oligarchies like Korea and Japan prop up the bottom of the table
alongside places like Qatar and Kuwait. Would we really want a kids'
show that accurately reflected the gender inequality that's rife in
so much of Asia?</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I think there are two points here.
Firstly, that such social constructs needn't be a barrier to creating
strong, believable characters. Characters can live in a very
conservative society and by good writing that shows them as rounded
human beings in their interactions with those rules, we can still
sympathise with them and root for them. The problem is when we simply
assume a set of values in our viewers and lazily broadcast those
values back at them.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Inherent in this is the misconceived
idea that in making narrative art, it should always be “relatable”.
Why should we as the audience expect to be able to relate everything
back to our own lives? The human capacity for empathy and imagination
is an incredibly powerful tool that allows us to step into the shoes
of people with quite different lives to us and understand them and
their struggles. This is also an idea at the core of the fantasy
genre, which exists to do precisely that. <i>Legend of Korra</i> is a fantasy
drama and by cleaving so closely to behaviour, language and values
familiar to American teens, it fails to credit its audience with the
imagination to empathise with anything more than an Orientalised
version of themselves.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Once again, <i>Legend of Korra</i> is in the
fantasy genre. It doesn't need to painstakingly recreate the Asian
cultures that it draws its aesthetic influence from any more than it
should be simply recycling contemporary American culture. It has a
free rein to pick and mix from all over the place or just simply
invent stuff of its own out of the ether. Fantasy can employ satire
to reflect back elements of its reader's own culture, but it is never
a straight reflection: rather it is a funfair hall-of-mirrors
distortion that in its very absurdity shows up the foibles and
pretensions of its target.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Yeah, I get it, there are commercial
reasons why anything more complex than what it already is would have
difficulty getting made, and audiences are trained these days to
expect their TV sets to behave like little more than a mirror. Sure.
You're right. But on a literary level, what <i>Legend of Korra</i> does is
still limited and fails to fulfil the fantasy genre's remit of taking
its audience to a truly different place, denying us the joy of
exploring a new world with its own rules by simply transplanting our
own.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It's still an enjoyable show, and well
worth watching. Similarly, Japanese anime is often every bit as
ideological in its own, often rather more unpleasant and disturbing
way. Just read this as a plaintive, selfish cry from a fan and an
admirer for a greater degree of anthropological rigour in my animated
TV fantasy drama.</span></div>
dotdashhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06270663921267987965noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8720958827669276721.post-81355304306222485302014-06-22T21:36:00.003-07:002014-06-22T22:06:30.484-07:00Artists and the machines of death: The Wind Rises (2013) and The First of the Few (1942)<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Hayao Miyazaki's <i>The
Wind Rises</i> was pitched as the director's final film, and as such has
an extra weight of expectation attached to it, as if it should not
only match up to the rest of his celebrated oeuvre, but also somehow
act as a coda, a definitive statement, a portrait of the man as an
artist. It tells the heavily fictionalised tale of Japanese aircraft
designer Jiro Horikoshi, creator of the legendary Second World War
fighter the Mitsubishi A6M “Zero”, and given Miyazaki's love of
flying machines of all kinds, it's easy to see it as a metaphor for
the man himself.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="225" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/PhHoCnRg1Yw" width="400"></iframe>
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In watching <i>The Wind
Rises</i>, I decided to take it in as a double feature with another film
about an aviation designer, the British wartime drama <i>The First of
the Few</i>, which told the story of Reginald J Mitchell, the designer of
the Supermarine Spitfire. Between the two films, there are a number
of interesting points of comparison relating to their portrayals of
the engineer as artist, of the creator who makes machines of
destruction, and of relationships and obsession.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="300" mozallowfullscreen="true" src="https://archive.org/embed/TheFirstOfTheFew" webkitallowfullscreen="true" width="400"></iframe>
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Both films make it
explicit that they regard their protagonists as artists, somehow
above mere engineers, and they do this partly through portraying
Horikoshi and Mitchell's interests in and appropriation of natural
forms. Horikoshi's admiration of the elegant curve of a herring bone
that he picks out of his lunch isn't of any real practical use, since
the curve of a wing for maximum aerodynamic efficiency is a matter of
mathematics, but his appreciation of this natural form tells us that
he is not just an engineer: he is a man of inspiration, who searches
not just for engineering efficiency but also for elegance.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Similarly, when we
first meet Mitchell in <i>The First of the Few</i>, he is birdwatching
during a seaside picnic with his wife. The circumstances of both
Mitchell's and Horikoshi's moments of inspiration come during moments
away from work, but both find their attention drawn from their food
and companions by the power of sublime nature. In Mitchell's case,
the focal point of his inspiration lies in the simple elegance of the
bird's form which he seeks to emulate in contrast to the ungainly
network of struts and wires that make up most aircraft of the early
1920s.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">One big difference
between the films is in the relative weight placed on dreams and
reality. Horikoshi is portrayed as a dreamer and <i>The Wind Rises</i>
frequently disappears without warning into his (and by extension
Miyazaki's) fantasies. The First of the Few, however, explicitly
anchors itself in reality. This contrast is exemplified by the
opening scenes of the respective films.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i>The Wind Rises</i> opens
with a dream of the young Horikoshi taking to the skies in a homemade
flyer, soaring over the peaceful countryside of early Taisho period
Japan, only for the peace and purity of his airborne antics to be
shattered by the arrival of a vast, German airship (Japan was
Britain's ally during the First World War and fought against Germany,
although this also foreshadows other aspects of the film) and a fleet
of idiosyncratic flying bombs.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i><br /></i></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i>The First of the Few</i>, on the other
hand, rubs your face in reality. It begins right in the thick of The
Battle of Britain, with newsreel footage of German conquests, genuine
footage of German bomber squadrons over southeast England, and the
words of Hitler, Goebbels, Goering, Lord Haw Haw and Churchill. The
acting of the extras who trade quips and banter between sorties may
seem unnaturally awkward and stilted, but that's largely because many
of them were genuine RAF pilots who had been drafted into the film
for propaganda purposes.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">And that's a core
difference between the films. Made in 1942, right in the middle of
the war, <i>The First of the Few</i> is essentially a propaganda film, while
<i>The Wind Rises</i> is divorced from the most immediate implications of
the war by nearly seventy years. <i>The Wind Rises</i> has an ambiguous
relationship with the war, reflecting the work of a director who
hates war but loves its machinery, and Miyazaki feeds that attitude
into his central character. Horikoshi experiences the destruction of
Tokyo firsthand near the beginning of the film, as the Great Kanto
Earthquake hits in a terrifying scene just as his train is
approaching Tokyo, and this is a clear foreshadowing of the
destruction from the air that is to be visited upon Tokyo from the
kind of machines he is set on creating. Later on, Horikoshi's
befriends German dissident Castorp, who warns him of the destructive
path Germany and Japan have set themselves on, and Horikoshi must
wrestle with his love for his art and the knowledge of the ends to
which his work is being put. He does this primarily by doubling down
on his work, immersing himself in it to such an extent that he
doesn't even think about the war. Basically, he decides that art
supersedes all other concerns.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i>The First of the
Few</i> is, in a way, by its very nature far more honest and direct in
how it confronts the issue of war, but it deals with the same
conflict between art and the destructive purposes to which this
particular art is put. Rather than have Mitchell wrestle with it as a
moral dilemma, however, the film is divided into two parts, each
reflecting a different side of aviation technology. The first part
deals with the Schneider Trophy and how Mitchell's Supermarine S5 and
S6 designs first won and then permanently retained the trophy. The
romance of the high speed air race is something Miyazaki had touched
upon previously in <i>Porco Rosso</i>, which references the Schneider Trophy
and in the name of American pilot Donald Curtis references the same
Curtiss R3C biplane that is shown in <i>The First of the Few</i> beating
Mitchell's prototype Supermarine S4 to the 1925 trophy. The second
part of the film kicks off with Mitchell's visit to Germany to see
one of Hitler's glider clubs. His awe at the purity of the German
gliders, so close to his own vision of birdlike simplicity, soon
gives way to the realisation of the Nazis' ambitions for their own
military airforce, and like any true patriot, he is from then on
fully invested in making machines of war.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Part of this
reflects the circumstances and timing of each film's creation, but it
also reflects the contrasting natures of each country's involvement
in the war. Britain could easily justify its military air programme
as the island itself was under immediate threat. The Spitfire was a
short range, land-based interceptor, designed to shoot down enemy
bombers attacking the homeland and their escorts. The Zero, on the
other hand, was a carrier-based fighter, whose role included
escorting bombers and projecting Japanese power far overseas, while
Japan's own role in the war was offensive before any need for defence
of the homeland came into play. Miyazaki acknowledges this when
Horikoshi is inspecting a new bomber aircraft built by his friend
Kiro Honjo and asks who it's going to be used on. Honjo rattles off a
list of countries including America, China, Britain and the
Netherlands that makes it abundantly clear that Japan's intentions
lie in expansion. The differing circumstances are also reflected in the differing attitudes of the respective establishments to money. While Horikoshi's Japan labours in poverty during the Depression, the expansionist government pours money into the aviation industry; meanwhile Mitchell's Britain, still war-weary after the trials of 1914-18, is unwilling to fund new aircraft development during such straitened times.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It is interesting
that in both films a trip by the protagonist to Germany proves
an important turning point for the characters. For Mitchell, his it
is what resolves him to invest himself fully into making machines of
war. True to the film's propaganda origins, the Germans are portrayed
as arrogant and megalomaniacal, making use of all the contemporary
stereotypes that still to some degree form the core of British
prejudices towards our Teutonic cousins. Significantly, the
practical, unsentimental Germans also gently mock Mitchell's romantic
notions of the poetry of flight as being essentially British
sentimentality. In <i>The Wind Rises</i>, Horikoshi and Honjo's visit to the
Junkers production facility in Dessau demonstrates the junior status
the Germans consider Japan to hold in their partnership, and the two
Japanese engineers are constantly being barred from inspection of
certain pieces of technology. The only place where <i>The Wind Rises</i>
could be called explicitly patriotic is where Horikoshi and Honjo are
forced to assert themselves against the arrogant Germans, again
reinforcing the film's conflicted attitude towards its protagonist's
work and what it represented.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Another interesting
moment from the scene at the Junkers yard comes when Horikoshi is
involved in a fracas with a German guard over his wishes to more
closely inspect one of the new all-metal aircraft. In that moment,
the elderly Hugo Junkers himself intervenes on Horikoshi's side. This
moment of solidarity from a fellow artist is given greater
significance later on, when Castorp reveals that Junkers is not on
good terms with the Nazis (he was a socialist and a pacifist who
hated the Nazis and ended his days under house arrest). A much bigger
relationship with a fellow aircraft designer is the friendship that
Horikoshi strikes up in his dreams with Giovanni Battista Caproni.
Caproni was prone to plenty of errors and failed experiments himself,
and his bizarre Ca.60 Noviplano makes a brief appearance in one of
the dream sequences, wobbling and warping as it flies. Caproni takes
on the role of a sort of spirit guide, representing unfettered
creativity, the dream of aviation as a peaceful technology, as well
as the compromises an artist must make to pursue his dreams.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In <i>The First of the
Few</i>, there is no fellow designer or engineer with a comparably large
role, but again during the visit to Germany, Mitchell encounters one
of his opposite numbers in the form of Willy Messerschmitt, designer
of the Messerschmitt Bf 109, the plane which would be the Spitfire's
primary opponent during the Battle of Britain. Mitchell and
Messerschmitt's encounter is terse and brief, but lasts long enough
to give the enduring impression of two opponents sizing each other up
in advance of a fight. Other than that moment, Mitchell's only
encounters with his contemporaries are in his encounters with the
likes of Robert McLean and Henry Royce, both of whom are allies, who
assist Mitchell in creating his masterwork.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Mitchell's primary
confidant is his test pilot, the debonair ladies' man Geoffrey Crisp,
whose role can perhaps best be explained by the need for a sizeable
role for the eminently bankable David Niven. Nevertheless, Mitchell's
wife Diana also plays a key role in supporting her husbands dreams
while at the same time keeping him grounded. Diana is portrayed as an
archetypal domestic goddess and dutiful wife, willing to sacrifice
her own happiness for the sake of her husband's dreams. In one
poignant moment, as she begs her sick husband to stop his work and go
away with her, he confronts her directly with the idea that the
looming war and the work he is doing is “more important than us”.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">While Mitchell and
Diana are presented from the start as a fully-formed couple,
Horikoshi's relationship with Naoko is shown from their first awkward
meetings, gradually blossoming through their courtship at a rural
holiday retreat, and their eventual marriage. Like Diana, Naoko is
self-sacrificing to a fault, eventually leaving for the mountains to
avoid distracting Horikoshi from his work.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Both films follow
the traditional pattern of studies in artistic obsession by
interweaving the artist's passion for his work with the notion of
death. The sacrifices the women make for their men are also
harbingers of death, symbolising the victory of art and its eternal
legacy over life in the present and now. In Naoko's case it is her
own death from tuberculosis, while in Diana's case, it is resigning
herself to Mitchell's own self-destruction via an unnamed disease
(the real RJ Mitchell died of cancer, although for dramatic reasons
this is not stated in the film, in order to keep the possibility of
his recovery open).</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Also, in both films
this relationship between obsession and death takes on a mystical
significance. In <i>The Wind Rises</i>, the wind itself takes on a
metaphorical role, with Horikoshi and Naoko's meetings always
accompanied by strong gusts of wind. It is the appearance of one of
these gusts as he watches the successful test flight of his new plane
that tells Horikoshi that Naoko has died. In <i>The First of the Few</i>, it
is Diana who is present to see the Spitfire's test flight while the
now very unwell Mitchell watches it fly over him in his garden. After the
flight, Diana returns with the news and leaves him to rest in the garden, surrounded (perhaps significantly) by birdsong, and as
she enters the house, she is struck by a similar psychic realisation
of a life passing from this world.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">These
mystically-inflected moments of death link back to the mystical
nature of the inspiration that Horikoshi and Mitchell themselves are
portrayed as having discovered at the start of their stories. Just as
the word inspire, to breathe in, can also mean breathing in the life
of creativity, so its opposite, expire, can also mean death. In each
case, a life must be traded for the creation of a work of art.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i>While The Wind Rises</i>
is an antiwar film that appears conflicted in its love for its
subject matter, <i>The First of the Few</i> has no time for pacifism and is
unambiguous about the necessity of war. Still, both films make a
point of contrasting their artist-heroes with the warmongering Nazis,
in the British film's case quite explicitly, while in the Japanese
film's case more subtly, using Horikoshi's encounter with the Germans
to define Japanese national pride against an enemy everyone can agree
on. It's tempting to see this as an adoption by Miyazaki of the
postwar Allied consensus of who World War II's goodies and baddies
were, but it also serves to draw attention to the confused and
troubled nature of Japan's involvement in the war, as a partner to a
regime that saw Asians as inherently racially inferior. While <i>The
First of the Few </i>is a propaganda film and <i>The Wind Rises</i> is
essentially a personal work that could be seen in some ways as a
partially cloaked autobiography by Miyazaki, they both follow certain
generic patterns of the obsessive artist subgenre, and both are films
about men who sacrifice their marriages, albeit ultimately with their
women's active consent and support, in their obsessive pursuit of
creating machines of destruction. In the end, Mitchell sacrifices his
life with Diana for the Greater National Good, while Horikoshi
sacrifices his life with Naoko for something far more abstract and
intangible. Miyazaki attempts in the final scenes to show some sort
of cosmic balance between the horror of the war's destruction and the
beauty of the planes that Horikoshi built. The First of the Few ends
where it began, in the midst of the war with the RAF pilots fighting
for their lives in Mitchell's planes.</span>dotdashhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06270663921267987965noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8720958827669276721.post-6876039500710042912014-06-17T02:22:00.003-07:002014-06-17T04:38:41.959-07:00My troubled relationship with Joss Whedon<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I have a problem with Joss Whedon.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I find his work pretty much universally enjoyable, ranging from at worst (early episodes of <i>Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.</i>) acceptable timewasting visual chewing gum to at best (<i>Firefly</i>, the whimsical and experimental bits of <i>Buffy The Vampire Slayer</i>) genuinely impressive, eye-opening television, but there's always something nagging at me.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I think part of it is simply that he's so established and has such a large body of work that his interests and habits now show up too easily. Characters behave in the ways they do because they are Joss Whedon characters, not because they are themselves. In that sense, Whedon -- like other writers with easily recognisable sets of tropes and concerns, for example Haruki Murakami to name but one) is a victim of his own success.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Another part of it is his insistence on working with a big network like Fox, where every idea he has must live or die on its ability to capture a sizeable mainstream audience. It was this environment that guaranteed <i>Dollhouse </i>would fail before it had even begun. The idea was just too weird, and Whedon's attempts to appease the network feel like they hobbled the show and prevented it from doing justice to its own concept.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Whedon's treatment of female characters is one of the most talked-about features of his work. A lot of this comes from a feminist perspective and rightly so, but it's also clear that Whedon is not a feminist in the full-on theoretical/ideological/political sense of the word. Whedon's feminism comes across as more like the video gamer who prefers to play <i>Mass Effect</i> as the female Shepherd, or the anime fan who got a kick out of the way Priss could casually blow off the advances of Leon McNichol before crushing the skulls of some rogue boomers in <i>Bubblegum Crisis</i>. Joss Whedon's feminism feels like that of a nerd who finds it easier to identify with female comicbook characters than the butch masculinity of male heroic archetypes. A lot of other fans, both male and female, feel as he does, and the way he recognised that and persuaded the network to take a chance on it with Buffy shouldn't be underestimated.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Watching Joss Whedon's shows from a feminist perspective can sometimes make uncomfortable viewing though, both for good reasons and bad. His women get brutally beaten about, often by men much larger and more physically threatening than they are. His shows invite us to be entertained by this, and that should make anyone pause for a moment. In any real life situation, that man punching that woman in the face that hard, would be an act of sickening violence and the reinforcement of a deeply troubling power dynamic. In the context of <i>Buffy</i>, <i>Dollhouse </i>or <i>S.H.I.E.L.D.</i>, however, the point we need to take away from it is that in the world he is showing us, where women have the power to take on men in their own traditionally action and violence-orientated roles, the flipside of that is women must take as well as dish out the beatings. Every time you see Buffy, Echo or Agent May (or indeed Black Widow as written by Whedon in <i>Avengers</i>) take a boot in the gut or a fist in the side of the head, and every time they shake it off and come back with a leg sweep and a spin-kick of their own, they are asserting their equality with, and as heroes this really means superiority to, their male counterparts. This isn't the kind of feminism many people want, and certainly not a sort of feminism that has a great deal of relevance in most people's daily lives, but in the limited milieu of Joss Whedon's comicbook-inspired action universe, it's at least consistent. It's an environment where the highest virtue is badassery, and the women are the baddest-ass there is.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The way Whedon treats sex is one that seems to have evolved, and he seems to have taken onboard criticisms that emerged in response to <i>Buffy</i>. He admitted himself that Willow's coming out as a lesbian proved so popular a move that there was no way he and his team would have been able to have her just announce, "Hey guys, I'm cured!" It's very easy for writers to say that values, ideology and "political correctness" shouldn't be allowed to impinge on narrative, but what political correctness really means in its best sense is to question why you are choosing to say one thing rather than another. Often, ostensibly positive portrayals of homosexual characters in dramas still resolve themselves along the arc of a tragedy, and that's what Whedon did to much criticism with the Willow-Tara storyline. Sensitive as the portrayal was, Tara was still "punished" for being a lesbian. Whedon obviously didn't intend it to play out like that -- he was just playing the standard comicbook card of killing off the love interest of a central character to give a narrative boost to the story -- but the rarity of lesbian characters on TV gave extra significance to Tara's role, and her demise was consequently freighted with far more significance than Whedon had intended. He seemed to recognise this as a mistake and took measures to make it good later.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Another criticism of <i>Buffy </i>was the way that the sexual agency of female characters often seems to be punished with tragedy. Buffy having sex with Angel in the second season precipitates a string of tragedies, and throughout the show, sex is shown to be a perilous adventure for girls. Again, it's doubtful Whedon had any particular anti-feminist agenda here. <i>Buffy </i>was a show as much about being a teenager as it was about monsters and demons, and the mystical significance sex takes on is a metaphor Whedon uses for the fear and confusion surrounding sex when you are a teenager. He also perhaps less consciously locks into a tradition of vampire stories as religious metaphors that paint sex as explicitly sinful. I don't think he really intends this to be the primary message, and the way the religious aspects of the story are treated elsewhere reinforces my belief -- the cross has no particular significance beyond its power as an anti-vampire superweapon, and holy water is bottled and branded like it was Perrier or something -- but it's a tradition that Buffy nonetheless falls into at points. Anya/Anyanka partly rectifies this by being a female character with a strong sense of sexual agency, although she is denied a happy ending. Faith is a more complex proposition, who goes through plenty of her own ups and downs over the course of the series. More significantly, as time has gone by, characters such as Zoe and Inara in Firefly, and May in <i>S.H.I.E.L.D.</i> have presented women who, whatever else we might say about their characterisation, are completely in control of their own sexuality.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">What Whedon is very good at doing is anticipating a cliché, leading the audience down the road towards it, and then diverting it at the last minute. You can see this in the <i>Firefly </i>episode <i>The Train Job</i> where Mal leads the audience along the traditional track of the merciful hero before kicking Russian gangster Niska's man-skinning henchman Crow (a reference to Murakami's <i>The Windup Bird Chronicle</i> there?) into Firefly's engine intake. It's a surprise and by showing both that Whedon is aware of the trope and willing to subvert it, he winks to the audience that he's on their side. It also allows him to get away with letting Mal act as the traditional merciful hero for most of the rest of the series simply by showing us that he's willing to break with the trope once on a relatively minor character. Another example is in <i>Avengers </i>where Black Widow's interrogation of Loki follows the path of the hero whose personal demons are easily exploited by an unscrupulous villain before turning the tables and revealing that she was manipulating him (as had been foreshadowed in her first appearance in the film). And by nodding to and then subverting this cliché, it again allows Whedon to then go ahead and have Loki's plan work out more or less flawlessly anyway.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">And this is perhaps one of Whedon's problems, and one that relates back to his position working in network TV and Hollywood rather than blue-chip grownup channels like HBO: for all his awareness of conventions and clichés, he still remains tied to them. Many of the things that made <i>Buffy </i>seem so ahead of its time were tricks that disguised an essentially fairly conventionally structured teen drama, albeit one characterised by some incredibly good writing in places, apt to fly off in all sorts of exciting diversions in form, and comparatively bloodthirsty in its attitude to killing off main characters. In <i>S.H.I.E.L.D.</i> those same habits are at play and seem far more dated.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The way Whedon characters often suddenly and unexpectedly reverse their personalities for the sake of a surprising twist (Boyd in <i>Dollhouse </i>was one of the silliest examples of this, which is ironic in a show that's almost entirely <i>about</i> people's personalities being changed and edited) reveals a writer who sometimes puts keeping one step ahead of the fans before narrative consistency and plausibility. Whedon also has a compulsive need to explain everything, where leaving it unexplained might make for a more satisfying experience. The way the film <i>Serenity </i>wrapped up the mystery of the reavers was anticlimactic, and the awakening of River as a ninja ass-kicking superweapon made her less interesting as a character than when she was this unexplained, potentially perilous enigma. These little writerly habits nag at me.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But at the same time, watching a Joss Whedon show satisfies me in a way few other things do. There's an easygoing drive to the storytelling, and the way he delights in showing you the nuts and bolts of the narrative, while often making him like he's being a bit cleverer than he really is, lends a reassuring air that he's fighting the same fight as us fellow nerds. More importantly perhaps, there's an air of attainability in what he writes. Read Thomas Pynchon or watch <i>The Wire</i> and you're just constantly being blown away by how rich, layered, intelligent and downright brilliant the work is. Watch a Joss Whedon show and you think, "This is good, but it's also within reach: I could do this!" This might sound like rather faint praise, but in a way, it's still further testament to Whedon's ability to show his fans a vaseline-lensed, rose-tinted vision of themselves, not in the characters and situations but in the behind-the-scenes machinery that creates and controls them.</span>dotdashhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06270663921267987965noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8720958827669276721.post-55150804439732474902014-03-17T04:17:00.004-07:002014-03-17T04:18:15.728-07:00Kill Your Sempai 2<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">As part of an event I sometimes organise with my friends Gotal and Ralouf from the band Lo-shi, I did a set of illustrations under the title Kill Your Sempai 2 (there was a part 1 a couple of years ago). Most of the models were just taken from album covers and photo shoots from old Japanese pop stars and models, although there's one of my friend Ayako in there somewhere too. The text is just stuff I was thinking about at the time: satirical cheap shots mostly.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">It's a Guided By Voices song title, but a wonderful phrase regardless.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglc7Ay0AkR9e8w3I6v4uG5GSzb30ITclG77ewwh7wQmQ4ANA4hn_3y_N4YhlYzLcZ1Cid6detnO-uVGYBaYjVPhVcF1PxSY3VMxbKM0wZkp7YO6TKRxOfjao_mcSsK5NMDiZHed-w-YHY/s1600/kysii-3x.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglc7Ay0AkR9e8w3I6v4uG5GSzb30ITclG77ewwh7wQmQ4ANA4hn_3y_N4YhlYzLcZ1Cid6detnO-uVGYBaYjVPhVcF1PxSY3VMxbKM0wZkp7YO6TKRxOfjao_mcSsK5NMDiZHed-w-YHY/s1600/kysii-3x.jpg" height="320" width="239" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">The life of a writer these days -- fuck you, Huffington Post. Also, not sure what happened to the right strap of her bikini.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">Physical goods for virtual currency.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLmlVNoXvSi0qB_SdRZST8QBWjglzuqBKMczImrm2IgnzOb6rIoiWEtFMLTiJ1xeoVBeNeynv-un-5Qml-M6vHj_SbKH81qW1CtUaLW1yE6PHcm2Fpw4fPiG5BN7a-rdEV9DW76q8dXLo/s1600/kysii-5x.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLmlVNoXvSi0qB_SdRZST8QBWjglzuqBKMczImrm2IgnzOb6rIoiWEtFMLTiJ1xeoVBeNeynv-un-5Qml-M6vHj_SbKH81qW1CtUaLW1yE6PHcm2Fpw4fPiG5BN7a-rdEV9DW76q8dXLo/s1600/kysii-5x.jpg" height="320" width="239" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">Bastards.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheBN2PAwRTIbvjhyBu-6xcCLDX_RgmCDFfDUR5ItKzSfTlq9Bm_JOI5IQj73bWORk59tgpSh0OSG6fzTVeAhcMkdqsgOEANPyTZKwCKgUTkxeMbIcoL61c8nAgEVCzUsA4_CWPECV8g-I/s1600/kysii-6x.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheBN2PAwRTIbvjhyBu-6xcCLDX_RgmCDFfDUR5ItKzSfTlq9Bm_JOI5IQj73bWORk59tgpSh0OSG6fzTVeAhcMkdqsgOEANPyTZKwCKgUTkxeMbIcoL61c8nAgEVCzUsA4_CWPECV8g-I/s1600/kysii-6x.jpg" height="320" width="239" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">AKB48 general manager Tomonobu Togasaki's excuse after being caught at a love hotel with a teenage prostitute.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsQm4Z295hdBxlao3t3Du6iAEzFpmM1Cuj4mhPyDFTmyDp0M_uuHnuShY9zuP8Xw7gourIQ6tYsOkpaDn0FP1Fn1hZw3h8NCUd1RNr6RSU7S8fPvyBV-xs6bx5ktfTVJ5carr3YsC7Mx4/s1600/kysii-7x.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsQm4Z295hdBxlao3t3Du6iAEzFpmM1Cuj4mhPyDFTmyDp0M_uuHnuShY9zuP8Xw7gourIQ6tYsOkpaDn0FP1Fn1hZw3h8NCUd1RNr6RSU7S8fPvyBV-xs6bx5ktfTVJ5carr3YsC7Mx4/s1600/kysii-7x.jpg" height="320" width="239" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">The hard right, nationalist former military general <i>is</i> very popular with the youth of today. Although this girl looks like something from the 80s.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhktBFUx4-9VBhZfHwB3AChvvNrSv9-zzfm0_kB9sBbefbFTpqcB-KIiegCKAe_g8NbPbfAnptfwGTSYkjxqSuJRV6wjpNiJuhxfSkvywugpMAkgRWnFRTPgXSfPZmaFMGDJcHM5qWaxjs/s1600/kysii-1x.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhktBFUx4-9VBhZfHwB3AChvvNrSv9-zzfm0_kB9sBbefbFTpqcB-KIiegCKAe_g8NbPbfAnptfwGTSYkjxqSuJRV6wjpNiJuhxfSkvywugpMAkgRWnFRTPgXSfPZmaFMGDJcHM5qWaxjs/s1600/kysii-1x.jpg" height="320" width="239" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">It's the look of disdain on her face that does it for me.</span></div>
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dotdashhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06270663921267987965noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8720958827669276721.post-765286438075246282014-01-16T17:32:00.001-08:002015-12-13T22:43:16.471-08:00The Japan Society for Artificial Intelligence and its "gynoid" servantgirl<br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Some quarters of the Japanese and overseas media got themselves into a flap recently over the Japan Society for Artificial Intelligence's decision to spice up their rather dry in-house journal with an illustration rather than the usual raw text adorning the cover. Let's have a look at the illustration in question first and see if you can work out what the problem is:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEix2TBcd_vBDnUaTYRTgRH2u7LVF9m2UNYX6ejp7ISO7aJovZq0oWfZtHdB0Fs18-PyHFzGxVEJOSyn8VJtz_8BtFuc_CGQ1LwI2NG1fSysACcE2SY7lB21uX0fcViXTuifPaK4OTApKO0/s1600/aiservantgirl.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEix2TBcd_vBDnUaTYRTgRH2u7LVF9m2UNYX6ejp7ISO7aJovZq0oWfZtHdB0Fs18-PyHFzGxVEJOSyn8VJtz_8BtFuc_CGQ1LwI2NG1fSysACcE2SY7lB21uX0fcViXTuifPaK4OTApKO0/s1600/aiservantgirl.jpg" width="230" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">It's an android servant girl with a typically manga-esque sweet, gentle expression, holding a broom in one hand and a book in the other, with a cable plugged into her back. The core issue behind the outcry is the cleaning robot = woman equation that the image seems to suggest, although the fact that it's in the form of a pretty girl with a subservient, submissive expression is a subsidiary but related issue that to some brings to mind a sort of dubious Stepford Wives male/female power dynamic.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">First up, let's make clear that the illustration was drawn by a woman. Some people think this is significant, although I'm not so sure. Women are just as capable of expressing and embodying regressive ideas, something to which anyone like me who grew up in Thatcher's Britain should be able to testify. Nevertheless, that fact should be a warning against reading this debate on too much of a superficial level. We're dealing with embedded assumptions here, not something that can be claimed or dismissed without a bit of unravelling.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">So let's take a look again at the picture and think a little about what it represents. The interior decor of the room suggests a rural cottage and this is combined with the faintly retro garb the android girl is wearing and the old fashioned broom (not to mention the fact that she's reading a book, which when you think about it would be a pretty pointless activity for an AI brain that could download and digest a book in a matter of seconds) to evoke without directly depicting times past. She is a modern equivalent of the domestic servants of times past, with the man-machine interface replacing the class relationships that lay behind master-servant interactions of the past.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">But she's not simply carrying out her function like a robot, she's reading a book, an action symbolic of (if not always synonymous with) learning. She is upgrading her functions independently, and just as education has been posited as a springboard to transcending class boundaries, the image holds out promise of the android girl becoming more than simply a machine.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Now this is an interesting set of signifiers the image is sending off, and I'd hazard that this was the artist's original intention with the work. People dismissing it as a work of straightforward sexism are not giving the artist credit for her ideas and imposing a probably unintended set of meanings on it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">However, that's not the end of the story, much as I suspect a lot of people would like it to be. Look again at the girl's face. She may be demonstrating an independent capacity and willingness to learn and transcend her base functions, but there's nothing overtly threatening in it; her gaze remains blank and inscrutable. There may be some specific intention behind this, but given what a common trope it is in manga and anime depictions of femininity, chances are that the main rationale behind it is simply "because kawaii". This goes for the clothing and decor as well to a certain extent, it builds towards constructing the girl as a fetishistic object of desire, or to put it in otaku terms, it's <i>moé</i>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Viewed through that prism, we can see how the image has internalised a great deal of the unthinking assumptions of the manga/anime world, most of which are socially and culturally conservative, especially in their depiction of women. There is no reason why the android needed to be depicted as an attractive young girl, but it wasn't a simple coin toss that could have gone wither way: there is no alternative universe where someone with a background in manga/anime fandom <i>wouldn't</i> have depicted a cleaning android as a young woman (a man would have been a butler).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The blank expression suggests a passive nature in contrast with the independent mindedness suggested by the book. In another context, this could set the book as a subversive item, undermining her submissive programming, but in the context of the <i>moé</i>, where (usually feminine) weakness is the key to unlocking fetishistic desire, it's more a statement of, "Aww, it's trying to learn, bless its little cotton socks!"</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">So context is the problem. In the context of anime or manga, where those sorts of assumptions go unchallenged, this image would be a very effective one. However, in a wider media context, those assumptions can't be relied on. Another Japanese artist, Sputniko! (her exclamation mark, not mine), whose life's work also deals with the interactions between technology and our daily lives, describes the image as, "a gynoid robot with hollow eyes" and noted that, "A black cleaning robot featured on the cover of a US academic journal would cause an uproar."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The reaction to Sputniko!'s comments on Twitter was highly abusive from some, and the anger generated by her criticism suggests that the image does indeed touch on issues of patriarchy and privilege, as well as providing yet more evidence, if any were needed, of the rage with which many people respond to statements that make them question why they are attracted to things that they like. Japan not being a nation that tends to equip its people well for such deconstruction of the semiotics of art and pop cultural images, many people here have responded with bafflement that something so self-evidently cute could ever be a bad thing, and it's hard to say whether that makes the issue less or more of a problem.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Another aspect of context is that the illustration appeared in the context of an academic journal, and it's clear that lots of the criticism from within academic circles has centred not on the gender issues so much as the appropriateness of using a comicbook style illustration on what is supposed to be a serious magazine. It's depressing in a way that even criticism of the work has to come from another side of Japanese conservatism, but in any case, it's important to note what other factors are in play. The poppification of science and academia includes a whole world of discussion all by itself.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">So the illustration is an interesting one that I think successfully fills its remit of depicting an issue at the core of AI research and development in an attractive if rather limited way. It does have problematic gender issues though, which are issues inherent in manga and anime culture and reveal a wider problem in the way gender stereotypes are enforced through repetition in aspects of the media, leading to their unquestioning acceptance by many, including perhaps by the artist herself. The fact that the miniature storm over its publication happened at all is really reflective of the problems caused when otaku-dominated images (with their raft of <i>moé</i> signifiers) collide with a world from outside their closed circle of signs and signifiers.</span>dotdashhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06270663921267987965noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8720958827669276721.post-22395993751979036512014-01-16T01:28:00.002-08:002014-01-16T04:23:33.064-08:00Ikumi Yoshimatsu, talent agency "stalking" and women's rights<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">One of the big Japan stories in the English language media lately has been the case of Ikumi Yoshimatsu, the beauty queen who has taken the rare step of going public about a campaign of intimidation by Genichi Taniguchi, an executive of the talent agency K-Dash after she chose not to sign up with his company. Investigative journalist <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/12/18/japan-s-miss-international-takes-on-mob-backed-entertainment-complex.html">Jake Adelstein summarises the story very nicely here</a>, but the specific complaints are <a href="http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2013/12/11/national/celebrity-stands-up-to-talent-agency-stalker/#.UteaQRZYz78">detailed by Yoshimatsu as</a>:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">“Today I filed criminal charges against Genichi Taniguchi, a Japanese talent agency executive, who in December of last year grabbed me, forced his way into my dressing room and tried to abduct me. Since then, he has intimidated my family, sent private detectives to my home, tried to extort money from me and my company, slandered me in the press and has made threatening calls to my family, sponsors and business associates.”</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Typically with these kinds of stories, the Japanese media has afforded it zero coverage. The main reason for that is that K-Dash is affiliated with the all-powerful talent agency octopus Burning Production, a company widely understood as an affiliate of the Yamaguchi-gumi yakuza syndicate and detailed as such in leaked police documents. News media in Japan rarely ever deals with scandals involving powerful talent agencies like Burning or Johnny & Associates for fear of being blacklisted from access to the bankable stars those agencies control.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Nevertheless, it's been reported widely in English language media, and Yoshimatsu herself has <a href="https://www.change.org/petitions/stalker-zero-end-the-japanese-culture-of-silence-toward-crimes-against-women">established a petition on change.org</a> urging the Japanese government to revise the law to provide better protection for women against such harassment.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It's interesting that so much of the coverage, including the way Yoshimatsu herself frames the issue, centres around the idea of stalking and crimes against women.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Now the image we usually associate with stalking is of the lone weirdo harassing a woman he has a romantic obsession with, which is obviously a very different sort of case to the Taniguchi/Yoshimatsu case. The most obvious issue here is of the gangsterish business practices of the thugs who run still heavily yakuza-influenced talent agency system and the way the rest of the entertainment industry kowtows to them, collaborating in the blacklisting of performers who step out of line. This informal blacklisting can be seen in the way the female singer Ami Suzuki and the male rock band Glay were effectively erased from the entertainment world in the early 2000s after breaking from their former management companies, so it's not a practice that exclusively targets women.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">However, there are I think good reasons why this way of framing Yoshimatsu's case makes sense.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Firstly, the international media has no context by which it can relate to the ins and outs of the Japanese entertainment industry. Readers would get that it's unfair, but it doesn't touch them and their lives. The issue of crimes against women is far more effective as an emotional hook to reel people into the story and give them a way of relating it to their own lives and experiences. Given the supine Japanese media's willful blindness to the thuggish, bullying behaviour of talent agencies, using foreign language media to shame the establishment into enforcing changes is an alternative way of putting the case (albeit one that I think overestimates the capacity of the Japanese media and entertainment worlds to experience shame) and one which is most effectively done by framing it in a way that international readers will best be able to relate to.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Secondly, there <i>is</i> a problem in Japan of inadequate protection of women from stalking and harassment, and relating this potentially high profile story to that issue both gives it more immediacy and also could do a lot of good by way of provoking much needed action. The case of Rie Miyoshi, <a href="http://ajw.asahi.com/article/behind_news/social_affairs/AJ201211150011">stabbed to death by her ex-boyfriend Hideto Kozutsumi in 2011</a> after the police refused to accept that a thousand threatening emails could constitute stalking is a particularly horrific example of the feeble levels of protection offered to women. Even if Yoshimatsu's case is clearly being driven by a different set of circumstances, relating it to the issue of protection of women could be a more effective way of getting action and might result in an outcome that would benefit not only Yoshimatsu herself but many other women throughout Japan.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Lastly, Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, despite being an evil warmongering, proto-fascist piece of shit, has officially at least stated publicly that improving women's position in society is a priority to him. His wife, Akie Abe, has come out in Yoshimatsu's support, so it makes sense that if any action is going to occur, pushing the women's rights angle again seems like the most effective course of action.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The truth is that yakuza involvement in the entertainment industry is simply an issue too few people care about, and the talent agencies' hold over public discourse is too great for any headway on that angle to be possible. As an entertainment journalist, and as a human being who hates thugs and bullies, that is a source of much frustration to me, but on this at least, Ikumi Yoshimatsu appears to be a smart operator, so good luck to her and let's hope she makes progress where so many others have failed.</span></div>
dotdashhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06270663921267987965noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8720958827669276721.post-74251484624831620742013-05-13T04:25:00.000-07:002013-05-13T04:35:35.915-07:00Context is not a myth: Stewart Lee's "Carpet Remnant World", Tim Maughan's "Havana Augmented" and notions of society<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I've been talking a lot recently about the values that writers impose on the stories they tell and what effect that has on the story, and I realise that part of my obsession with this idea comes not from narrative fiction but from stand-up comedy. Exploring the notion of idealised societies and how we behave in collective groups is a theme that runs through Stewart Lee's Carpet Remnant World, a two hour comedy routine in which Lee, in character, attempts to tackle a serious issue but serially fails to develop the idea in a coherent way because he's constantly being distracted by the day to day problems of touring and looking after a small child (no clips, you need to watch the whole thing for it to make any sense at all).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But idealised notions of society are what writers in the realm of speculative fiction are all dealing with. What makes these visions utopian or dystopian is how humans collectively behave within those societies. In Carpet Remnant World, Lee gives us a few examples taken from the news, juxtaposing the hysterical, vengeance-fuelled celebrations of some Americans on the death of Osama Bin Laden with some observations on the religious rules of islamic societies. He roves around British prime minister David Cameron's idea of the "big society", the degeneration of the postwar social fabric under Thatcher (via the framing devide of an imaginary Scooby Doo movie), the shifting nature of development and regeneration of urban spaces, the effects of social media, in particular Twitter, and then finally, the more fantastical and abstract ideas represented by the titular "Carpet Remnant World". Within a lot of this are the questions what does this society or social structure stand for, and what does our behaviour within that social space say about us and how well we uphold those supposed values?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The problem with some of <a href="http://plotshield.blogspot.jp/2013/05/king-arthur-300-and-freedom.html">these films and stories like 300 and King Arthur</a> that I've been talking about recently is that the values are pasted on, out of context and there is an internal contradiction between the stated values (i.e. freedom) and the behaviour we're actually presented with (often despotic) when a more interesting story would be to look at what you actually have and show us a bit about why those people are willing to fight for it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">A good example of a story that grapples with this is the story Havana Augmented by British writer Tim Maughan. The story is set in a Cuba that is even more than now a socialist island in a sea of free market capitalism. Freedom is still an issue here, as it is in the two other stories that accompany it in the Paintwork collection, but the implications of that freedom are more clearly explored. The kind of freedom Maughan is interested in manifests itself in the ownership of public space, something the kids in Havana Augmented engage with with their AR robot street battle games (and which the characters of Paintwork deal with via street art -- the other story, Paparazzi, looks at the romanticisation of medieval fantasy and reminds the reader of whose backs the freedoms of the privileged few are built on). Rather than simply being a battle against the communist establishment for the kids' right to, y'know, have fun'n'that, Maughan instead looks at how commercial entities exploit kids like his heroes in ways that are damaging to the wider fabric of society. Crucially, the protagonists of Havana Augmented reach the culmination of their arc not by embracing some nebulous notion of freedom, but by thinking in tune with their environment -- not just by their local knowledge of the battlefield, but by thinking like Cubans, protecting their shared values against an invading ideology that comes wrapped in the flag of liberty but promises only a new kind of subjugation.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In a larger and less benign scale, Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl pulls off a similar trick of getting int the mindset of a different culture and making decisions they make that run contrary to our own established way of thinking seem internally consistent and understandable. Having the larger canvas of a full novel to work with, he's able to draw more fully on the environmental and political world in which his characters live in order to sculpt their actions and reactions.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">As I've said before, it's thrilling to be able to read something and see a person act in a completely alien way to your own way of thinking, yet at the same time have that decision completely logical. Speculative fiction is all about this kind of thing, but you see it just as much in contemporary drama that deals with cultures that you are unfamiliar with. The Wire is an excellent drama for a number of reasons, but one of them is that it presents you with characters behaving in horrendous ways but every one of them is scrupulously logical, and more often than not, David Simon & co. have a parallel example of the same logic in play in a different, perhaps more familiar arena. The viewer is never let off the hook.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Where foreign drama doesn't work, something similar is often at play. I often found myself baffled by the behaviour of characters in the Hong Kong films I used to watch as a teenager, because they were acting according to Chinese cultural conventions that had no traction in the West. Chinese audiences were clearly expected to understand this as natural, but the film gave me no context to understand it. The scriptwriter wasn't making allowances for outsiders, and looking back, this made me doubly conscious of the way American films presuppose American values without giving them context, especially given that American cultural products are made with the expectation of international consumption (something Asian works often aren't). Waving the word "freedom" in people's faces without giving them an idea of what that freedom is meant to mean is just as nonsensical as waving Japan-centric notions like <i>honne & tatemae</i> in someone's face and expecting them to get it immediately.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It's not impossible though. All cultures understand freedom, although they might have different notions of what it means, and the contrast between one's true feelings and the face you wear in public is far from unique to Japan. Cultural notions are often slippery, but there are usually ways into them if contextualised sensitively.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">This idea of sensitivity is one that Stewart Lee returns to at the end of Carpet Remnant World. Given that he has spent the whole of his two hour show deliberately sabotaging his own attempts to discuss the concepts of idealised societies, he indirectly (and probably unintentionally -- Lee would perhaps shy away from such a trite observation) makes the point that all societies are imperfect, and his failure to discuss it in a coherent way is simply an echo of that. Against a utopian cityscape composed of rolled carpets of varying sizes, he delivers the line: <i>"a ragbag of seemingly disparate and unrelated items, people, concepts, things, can, if stitched together in the correct order with an degree of sensitivity, give the impression of being a satisfying whole."</i> And in a way, what Lee has done with his comedy show is the same as what a good speculative fiction writer would do. He's taken no concept for granted, he's broken down every idea into its constituent parts and left you with no room for lazy assumptions, and at the same time, by showing us the "Carpet Remnant World" in which his character lives, he's made sure that this arrogant, neurotic comedian living in fear of his own death (or worse, irrelevance) now not only makes sense to us but commands our sympathy.</span>dotdashhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06270663921267987965noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8720958827669276721.post-65496831120775914182013-05-12T23:09:00.000-07:002013-05-12T23:09:53.122-07:00King Arthur, 300, and freedom<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Last night I watched two terrible films that were both interesting in a similar way. Zack Snyder's adaptation of popular reactionary bigot Frank Miller's comic book 300 was an objectively horrible film, but managed to turn out the better of the two by virtue of its sheer stylised, exaggerated grotesqueness and audacity. The trees made of dead bodies, the utterly ridiculous depiction of Persian emperor Xerxes as a towering, growly voiced, extravagantly pierced monster, the way the Spartan soldiers insist on doing all their fighting in their pants, the better to show off their immaculately sculpted pecs, all these aspects place the film in a realm beyond any need for even the illusion of reality. The claustrophobic chromakey backdrops and humourless, pretentious, childish dialogue are no better for being in such a context, but at least they have a context. They fit into some sort of overarching framework of poor artistic decisions and are piece with the flawed whole.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">What's interesting about 300 is the way the conflict is constantly pitched as one between freedom and tyranny, with King Leonidas and the Spartans depicted as defenders of liberty and Xerxes and the Persians as dusky invaders. However, loudly and frequently as the Spartans may claim freedom as their goal, the image of freedom Frank Miller creates looks suspiciously like fascism. The Spartans are a military people, with the structure of the army the only social unit depicted as pure. The political machinations of democracy or something like it (Sparta was an oligarchy, strictly speaking) in the form of Dominic "Detective McNulty" West's Theron, a character absent from Miller's original comic, is shown as irreparably corrupt, in a way that only the swift justice of the blade can cleanse. In many ways, the Sparta of 300 is very similar to the militaristic world of Starship Troopers, with citizenship conferred as a reward for military service and women taking a more active role in society. However, where a master satirist like Paul Verhoeven was able to turn Robert Heinlein's moral world on its head, a screen stylist like Zack Snyder can only polish Miller's essentially fascist tale into a shinier, more crystalline form of its own fascism.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">This is where Frank Miller probably deserves to be given a bit of leeway, because while he's clearly a reactionary bigot, he's not an outright nazi. He's aware of the contradiction between the fascism inherent in Spartan society and the notion (advanced by Diodorus) that they were defending freedom, and like any good writer, he finds that contradiction interesting. Unfortunately, while Frank Miller is an excellent artist, he isn't a good writer. He's a little boy whose love of bold moral generalisations and heroic posturing overwhelms his ability to explore moral ambiguities, and the movie production only simplifies it further.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The 2004 film King Arthur comes from the stable of producer Jerry Bruckheimer, a man whose cinematic oeuvre has never knowingly overcomplicated an idea where slam-the-audience-in-the-face-with-an-iron simplicity is an available option, and like 300, it's a horrible film with something strangely out of place to say about freedom.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Again there's an appalling script, which serves to undermine the efforts of most of the cast -- Clive Owen as Arthur is particularly hamstrung by the quality of the lines he's expected to deliver, although Stellan Skarsgard as the psychotic, racist leader of the Saxon invaders steals the film. The infantile script does serve one function though, which is that also like 300, it underlines the simplistic message of freedom that the film wants to push. In fact, even more so than 300, it underlines the message, scratches it out in bold and highlights it in fluorescent marker pen. Arthur's men are fighting for their own freedom from their indenture to the Roman army, and as the film progresses, Arthur comes to see his fight as one for the freedom of all Britons from both the departing Roman occupiers and the invading Saxon hordes.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Another similarity with 300 is the depiction of Kiera Knightley's Guinevere, like Lena Headey's Queen Gorgo, as a strong, active woman, willing to fight for her land. In Hollywood nowadays, women can't be damsels in distress, and the Celts and Picts seem to have had their fair share of warrior queens from which her role could be mined. In fact, the historical accuracy of the story is one point where King Arthur gives a fair shake. The setting of the story around Hadrian's Wall may not have been accurate -- the location of the Battle of Badon Hill is unknown and has been identified with anywhere from Scotland to Bath -- but the general situation described by the film, featuring conflict between Romano-Celts, Picts and Saxons is more or less as it happened, and if any Arthur figure ever really did exist, it's in this world that he probably would have lived.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Also, here, as in 300, the notion of freedom is delivered directly through the dialogue, as if speaking directly to the audience, without context, and without any notion of what this freedom actually entails. Arthur is a soldier of an occupying military power, and his devotion to the teachings of Pelagius aside, the Roman Empire was hardly an upstanding model of freedom (a point, to be fair, that the film tries to make further down the line, but it's nevertheless hard to imagine how Arthur could be surprised by this revelation). The Saxons are defeated and Arthur, a military commander, is simply declared king of the Britons, so what is this freedom that is being spoken of? Freedom to be ruled by one king rather than another? What King Arthur is really about is nationalism, another relatively modern idea that the filmmakers have decided to pin on the Arthur legend.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In both films, there's something terribly jarring about hearing the language of Western notions of freedom in the mouths of people who would likely have seen those notions in very different terms, if they had understood them at all. The way that both films are so direct in how they articulate these ideas of freedom and liberty is also interesting. The contemporary Western concept of liberty is delivered as something so natural to these people that no possible disagreement is even considered except from the mouths of tyrants. It seems like a neurotic response from Hollywood to the shaken certainties post-9/11 of America's role as a beacon of liberty, or maybe the malaise goes back even further, to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the loss of the tyrannical "evil empire" of the Soviet Union for America to define itself against. In either case, it's hard to see a Hollywood film of the 1950s delivering such a stern lecture on freedom to its viewers. Epics like Spartacus, Ben Hur and El Cid (I nearly added the explicitly propagandist 1944 Henry V to this list, although it benefitted from having a scriptwriter of rather higher calibre) all dealt with similar conflicts, but didn't feel the same need to shout their message into the audience's faces. For all its historical inaccuracies, Hollywood used to know how to have fun.</span><br />
dotdashhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06270663921267987965noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8720958827669276721.post-87397756081227121472013-05-02T01:33:00.000-07:002013-05-02T01:42:56.772-07:00Abenomics and the nuclear debate<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">When the nuclear power plant in Fukushima started to go into meltdown after the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami, something strange started to happen to people. Men and women who had never before in their life thought about nuclear power except in the wooliest of terms (and I count myself among them) suddenly became experts, scouring the news media, Wikipedia, and whatever they could find on Google for information, and words like microsievert, bequerel and caesium 137 entered the daily vocabulary of millions of people looking for something to explain the crisis, reassure them, or simply justify their reaction.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It didn't really help though, and rather than illuminating the discourse, these words, facts, and often non-facts, became weapons in a dispute between people whose positions as proponents or opponents of nuclear power were already fixed. Here in Japan, it took on a more personal dimension, as a person's fear or faith became an identifying mark, a litmus test providing a window into a person's moral character, science as a set of dueling swords to be wielded in support of the most emotional, unscientific motivations.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">And with the recently elected Liberal Democratic Party's economic policy, we're seeing a similar, if less widespread thing. Like the nuclear crisis, the post-2008 global economic crisis has started to make experts of all sorts of people for similar reasons, as they seek explanation or just to bolster their emotional prejudices. It may not be as dramatic as a nuclear meltdown, but terms like quantitative easing, expansionary austerity, and liquidity trap, with which few people pre-crisis would have had more than a passing familiarity, became far more commonplace.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In Japan, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's sweeping changes to the nation's economic policy, encapsulated in the ugly and misleading compound term "Abenomics" have acted as a lightning rod for comment in a similar way to the nuclear crisis. <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/04/29/us-japan-economy-detractors-idUSBRE93S0XW20130429?irpc=932">An article from Reuters on April 29th</a> collected a number of criticisms, ranging from the wise-sounding but ultimately meaningless statement that <i>"there are no simple solutions or shortcuts" </i>to the utterly bizarre remarks by former finance minister Kaoru Yosano that,<i> "Since ancient Greece and Rome, most policies that excited people ended in failure. The fact that people are pleased and in a festive mood seems to prove this policy won't work."</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">One of the catchiest soundbites to come out of the article was Yuuki Sakurai of Fukoku Capital Management's claim that Bank of Japan policy was like <i>"shooting a sparrow with a cannon."</i> It's a nice image, and again it sounds wise, although comparing an economic slump now more than twenty years long with a sparrow might seem to some to rather underestimate the scale of the actions required to deal with Japan's economic woes. In a way though, as with the nuclear power argument, its the debate over Abenomics that is what's really trying to hit a sparrow with a cannon.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">There are apparently some claiming that it's the magic bullet to solve all Japan's economic problems (I have yet to see any evidence that this is anything other than a straw man used by critics, although it's probably fair to say that within the LDP, there will be party shills willing to parrot this line) and there are certainly many who seem implacably opposed to Abenomics in its entirety, and its within these arguments that the scalpel rather than the cannon needs to be employed.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">First, what does Abenomics promise? Well, primarily, it seems to be a plan by the bank of Japan to target higher inflation rates and expand the monetary base, combined with promises of greater public investment. In theory, and economists like Martin Wolf at The Financial Times and Paul Krugman at The New York Times have been calling for policies like these for a long time, this combination of higher inflation and greater public investment, if sustained credibly, should be able to stimulate demand put the economy back on a growth track without resulting in catastrophic hyperinflation or Greece-style debt disaster. There's nothing intrinsically new in it, since the policies basically conform to the Keynsian IS-LM economic model that has been a pretty accurate predictor of economic events since the crisis (and this is why I say "Abenomics" is a misnomer), but it's certainly a big step by a major economy in the current climate.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">So what doesn't it promise? Well, for a start, inflation targeting can only work if investors trust the Bank of Japan to continue its expansionary monetary policy until growth is well underway, something previous BOJ chairmen have consistently failed to do. Despite current chairman Kuroda's insistence that he will do what takes, it might fail if people simply don't believe him. Also, the policy has nothing to say about how the fiscal stimulus will be targeted. It's widely suspected that Abe's government will use it like a bribe to bolster their position in key electoral areas, and to put money in the pockets of their friends. In macroeconomic terms, this shouldn't matter to the overall economy, but individually, region by region, worker by worker, this is important. Also, there are issues like the increase in sales tax, which may stimulate consumption in the short run, but which is a regressive tax that will hurt the poor more than the well-off. And then there's the vague sounding promises of "structural reform," which is so often a buzzword for relaxing environmental regulations and limiting employment rights, especially in view of the recent praise Abe has heaped on Margaret Thatcher.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Abenomics also has nothing to say on the biggest problem facing Japan's economy, namely the growing shortage of Japanese. Without a sudden boost to the birthrate (not going to happen) or a more relaxed attitude to immigration, the Japanese economy is on a long term relative downward trend. More can be done to maximise the participation of women in the workplace, something that all parties claim to support, but concrete action on which is rarely forthcoming, but in the end, immigration is the elephant in the room.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Just as the nuclear debate turned into a binary for or against slanging match, leading to important discussions of the extent and enforcement of safety regulations, the unhealthy way energy companies, government and media are intertwined, and Japan's commitment to the longer term fight against global warming being lost, discussion of Abenomics is so often depressingly black and white, obscuring the real issues surrounding its execution and longer term economic policy.</span>dotdashhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06270663921267987965noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8720958827669276721.post-7531922152817022342013-04-29T02:04:00.000-07:002013-04-30T22:55:17.154-07:00A guide to Akihabara<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I wrote an article for MTV 81 about Akihabara the other week and <a href="http://www.mtv81.com/features/specials/tokyo-scenes-akihabaras-electric-town/">you can check it out here</a>. It's not an exhaustive investigation since it's really aimed just at new visitors, and it's not really a critical analysis in any way since it's written for MTV, but it might be useful to some people. I'm hoping to make it part of a longer series of articles about the local scenes of various other parts of Tokyo, with pieces to follow on places like Harajuku, Shibuya, Shinjuku, Koenji and Shimokitazawa.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Also, if you want an alternative to the focus on Akihabara, <a href="http://www.otakuusamagazine.com/Newsletter/News1/Nakano_Broadway_A_Primer_5085.aspx">this fine piece</a> by <a href="http://www.colonydrop.com/index.php?blog=1">Colony Drop</a>'s own Sean O'Mara for Otaku USA is a super introduction to rival otaku culture spot Nakano Broadway.</span>dotdashhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06270663921267987965noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8720958827669276721.post-80234063874454953852013-04-29T01:50:00.001-07:002013-04-29T01:51:42.582-07:00Bad economics, anime and fantasy<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Alright, so anime isn't the first place most people would think of turning for plausible economic narratives, but recent world events have triggered off a half-forgotten memory in me and got me thinking about anime anyway.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The issue I have in mind is the debate over the amount of US debt held by China and the extent to which this makes America China's bitch. The correct answer is (1) China has bought quite a lot of US debt, but the majority of it is still held domestically, i.e. the US is mostly in debt to itself, (2) It gives China no influence whatsoever over the US because China needs that US$ denominated debt to maintain its own export-driven competitiveness, and (3) Even if China decided to take a hit to its own economy just to spite the Americans, someone else would just pick up the slack -- </span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">US debt yields are actually running in negative figures once adjusted for inflation due to the huge demand for government bonds in the face of</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> uncertainty-plagued private sector investment scene</span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">. Basically, if China sold off all its US debt, it would no effect on the US economy except to raise the value of the RMB against the dollar, making Chinese exports less competitive and giving a small boost to the US economy.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">OK, so that aside, why the relevance to anime? Well what this situation describes is precisely the moment when the plot of the 1998-99 mecha series Gasaraki stopped making any sense. Japan also holds a lot of US debt, and part of the plot of Gasaraki centred round an old Japanese <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoshio_Kodama">Yoshio Kodama</a> style figure, who stands up to the big bad Americans by threatening to sell off Japan's US debt. There then follows a rather cheesy scene where the Americans say that would hurt Japan too, and then the old guy claims that Japan's national character would save it, while America would descend into chaos, to which the American reluctantly agrees.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It's pure nationalist fantasy, but more than that, it's economic nonsense. Despite the slightly different circumstances (America is in a liquidity trap now, which explains the high demand for government bonds), it still makes no economic sense. Even if no one else wanted it, the Fed could simply buy up the debt, and as long as America had control of its own currency, it could just (inflation allowing) print more money to pay for it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">There is a historical precedent for debt being used as leverage over another government's policy though, but it's one going in the other direction, where the US threatened a large sell-off of British and French debt in response to the Suez Crisis, forcing a military withdrawal. The circumstances were very different in the case of the Suez Crisis though, for example Britain was still relatively recently out of the Second World War and was far more reliant on imports, which would have been devastated by a sudden devaluation of Sterling.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">OK, so I'm a bit of a nerd about this, but in issues of economics and politics, I can't help sometimes being fussy about how these things work. When I play roleplaying games and every time I walk from one town to an other, I'm beset every dozen steps or so by increasingly fierce and violent beasts, I wonder how the economy can survive under such a serious threat to trade. I don't understand why the economy of Middle Earth isn't completely under the control of the eagles, since their ability to travel swiftly, even carrying large cargoes of goods, between the mining regions of the northeast, the agricultural regions of the west and the whatever-it-is-Gondor-produces region of the southeast would surely make them the wealthiest and most politically influential power in the world, especially given the well documented difficulties in traversing the Misty Mountains. Spice & Wolf would have been perfect for me, if only it had just got rid of the wolf aspect and simply been a documentary about medieval trade in a fictional universe.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I suppose the problem I had with Gasaraki, a show which otherwise made an admirable attempt to deal with sensitive political issues in a mature, balanced way, was that it transparently used nonsense economics to further a nationalist agenda, whereas your usual, run-of-the-mill fantasy or sci-fi simply ignores economics because it's primarily interested in telling an escapist adventure.</span></div>
dotdashhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06270663921267987965noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8720958827669276721.post-39471971738348093532012-12-30T19:35:00.000-08:002012-12-30T20:33:11.716-08:00Debating the "comfort women" issue in Japan<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Over the past couple of days Twitter has been abuzz with debate over the recurring issue of "comfort women" -- the predominantly Korean women coerced into prostitution by the Japanese army during the Second World War -- and their claims for acknowledgement and compensation. This time round, <a href="https://twitter.com/HirokoTabuchi">Hiroko Tabuchi</a> of The New York Times was on hand to provide translations of some of the arguments against the women's claims and their comments reveal part of the uglier side of Japan -- the part that those of us involved in one way or another with trying to give Japanese culture a boost always find thoroughly dispiriting.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Before I get into the arguments, though, a warning. I use terms like "morality" and "national conscience" in here, which I'm not entirely comfortable with and which I usually approach with extreme caution in other people's writing. However, for want of better words, I'm forced to use the inadequate tools with which my vocabulary has provided me in the hope that I don't lose too much in terms of clarity.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">First, I'm not going to debate the fundamental facts. There are <a href="http://www.awf.or.jp/e1/facts-00.html">primary documents available to peruse on this site</a>, and if someone still wants to just flat-out deny that anything happened… well, if someone really doesn't want to believe something, they'll always find a way of not believing it. This blog is predicated on the reality that forced sexual slavery carried out on behalf of the Japanese army did occur. That's my position, that's the position of most reputable historians from what I can gather, and that's the position of the firsthand data so take it or leave it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">What I'm going to focus on instead is some of the arguments that fly forth from the denialist side whenever this issue or similar ones relating to war crimes, even painstakingly documented ones, come up. There are obvious similarities with Holocaust denial, Turkish denial of the Armenian genocide, and all manner of other crimes.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Because people in many countries are in some degree of denial about atrocities in their own past -- Britain and France have ugly colonial legacies and America has its own violent horrors in its westward expansion -- and taking a look at the arguments made in these various cases it's clear that the process of denial takes similar paths.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">One of the most common arguments is precisely that: the fact that many countries have done horrible things in their pasts. There are three parts to this dynamic.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">1. It's an argument that seeks to mute the impact of a crime by spreading the blame. It doesn't seek to legitimise the act so much as muddy the waters, to give the impression that in "other times" things were different and to give the impression of a moral grey area. By making the issue appear too morally complex, most people will either back off, or…</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">2. It forces critics from overseas onto the defensive. <i>"But what about YOUR COUNTRY? What about what YOU did?"</i> goes the cry. This argument forces the opponent to either admit moral equivalence or go on the defensive, thus evening out the field of battle as it were. This sort of argument is known as "whataboutery" and was first coined (I believe) due to the constant use of these "what about…" arguments in debates over sectarian violence in Northern Ireland.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">3. It implies that their country and their country alone is being unfairly victimised. <i>"Why are WE being picked on when other countries also did bad things? Why are you not picking on THEM for what THEY did?"</i> This argument attempts to usurp the mantle of victimhood from the actual victims of the crimes, as well as subtly implying an agenda that seeks to attack the speaker's own country for unspecified but probably nefarious reasons.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">All of these points are attempts to divert the argument away from any discussion of the actual events and the evidence and testimonies of the victims, and the answer to all three of these points is basically always going to be a variant on,<i> "Yeah, but we're not talking about what those countries did,"</i> followed by a repeated assertion of the actual issue under discussion.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">There are also a couple of specific arguments particular to Japan and the comfort women issue that I've seen come up.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">One is that the South Korean government is just using it as a stick to beat Japan with for political gain, particularly at election time, and that no matter what Japan does, they're never going to back off. This is a tricky argument because on the one hand, it's clearly true, but on the other, it's another attempt at distraction because it really doesn't matter.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It's an argument that only makes sense if you think that the only reason for Japan to acknowledge, apologise to and compensate women who were forced to work as sex slaves for its army would be in order to gain something in return (in the form of increased national good will or whatever) rather than out of any sense of basic justice and morality. Put another way, it shouldn't matter as far as Japan and its own national conscience is concerned that South Korean politicians are using the issue for political gain -- that's Korea's own ethical issue.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Another argument I've heard is that the comfort women were employed by private brothel owners and weren't being run by the military, so as a result, the Japanese government has nothing to apologise for. This legalistic argument is more blatantly desperate and seems designed mostly to satisfy the conscience of the speaker. Perhaps it's an appeal to the neoliberal capitalist in the listener, but it's hard to find anyone else really being convinced by it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In capitalist terms, if the military has a certain level of demand and the supply is limited, the supplier is clearly going to be under enormous pressure to meet that demand. If the military decides to look the other way and not question the legitimacy of the source, the military is a co-conspirator just as any company caught handling illegally-obtained goods would be.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">To take another example, my home town is Bristol in the United Kingdom. Growing up in Bristol, one of the first things I learned about local history was that the city's wealth in the early colonial era was built largely off the back of the slave trade. Initially, corrupt magistrates would manipulate petty criminals into going to the American colonies as indentured servants, taking a cut off the unscrupulous traders' profits as they sold the prisoner's contract to plantation owners across the Atlantic. Later, when demand became too high even for these practices, the trade expanded to the transport of black slaves from Africa. In all these cases, these were private transactions, not government policy, and yet the city of Bristol and the country as a whole were responsible every bit as much as the wealthy businessmen who profited off the slave trade.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It might be fashionable in these post-Wall Street Crash and post-Blackwater days to argue that governments aren't responsible for what happens under their watch, but when they set the rules that allow injustices to occur, they are responsible as if they pulled the trigger or wielded the baton -- or the whip -- themselves.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The most common argument, however, is the one that goes, <i>"It was a long time ago. I didn't do any of these things. Why should we still feel the guilt for these crimes committed by past generations?"</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="color: black;">This brings up the awkward morality of the Old Testament <i>"</i></span><i>visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation"</i>, which I'm going to just lay aside here, partly because the Old Testament is full of crap no one needs to listen to, and secondly because this is a quote from a self-confessed "jealous God" who was probably a bit upset at the time. It's pretty obvious, I think, that we don't need to punish children for their fathers' crimes in <i>every</i> situation.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In the case of the comfort women, there are two points that put this argument on shaky foundations though. The first is that many of these women are still alive now, and who is going to acknowledge, apologise to and compensate them if not the country in whose name their mistreatment was carried out? Secondly, many of the men who carried out this mistreatment, whether directly or indirectly, are still alive, and many of them (and their families) have done very well thank you very much since the end of the war.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It's certainly an argument you can make that as modern Japan didn't commit these crimes, it shouldn't be held responsible for paying. However, I think that as these arguments so frequently find themselves accompanied by denials and diversions of other sorts, the people making them secretly know that if the comfort women's stories are accepted as true, the moral weight of acknowledging and compensating the victims would indeed lie on their shoulders. To play a little whataboutery of my own, one needs only to look at Germany to see a very different approach (the Contingent Refugee Act of 1991, for example, removed many immigration barriers to Jewish people, leading to a large influx of Jewish people from former Soviet states that had previously been ravaged by the Nazis).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Some of this is no doubt down to straightforward, ugly nationalism, but many of the people who come out with these kinds of responses are perfectly ordinary, not particularly politically motivated individuals. I'm inclined to put some of the blame on films like Isao Takahata's traumatic animated feature Grave of the Fireflies -- a very effective, alternately horrifying and beautiful film, but also a deeply manipulative one -- for colouring many Japanese people's image of the war with deep hues of victimhood, focussing attention and images of the war almost entirely on the suffering endured by children and families at home and, along with sanitised schoolbooks, providing little wider sense of the Japan's role in the war as a whole.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">There's also the tendency of those of us from the West to view national trauma as something to be purged through a kind of bleeding of the national conscience. A sort of therapeutic introspection to purify the national soul, whereas Japan perhaps prefers not to hang out its dirty washing in public. It's a different way of dealing with trauma, and one shouldn't be too quick to dismiss it. In this case, however, there are real victims, still living and breathing, and still desperate for acknowledgement.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Worldwide, Japan is one of the countries viewed in the most positive light by foreigners, and attitudes like these are a rare stain on its international image. More importantly though, regardless of how it benefits (if at all) Japan and perceptions of it in the world, it should be a matter of basic decency and sense of justice that this cycle of denial is broken.</span>dotdashhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06270663921267987965noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8720958827669276721.post-76561322011075930562012-12-26T02:16:00.000-08:002012-12-26T11:11:00.334-08:00Ideology, Terror and making fantasy relevant<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">One of the dangers of fantasy or science fiction writing is for the author to imagine an alternative world too much through the filters of the prevailing attitudes of his or her time or social circles.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">For a science fiction writer, it's often necessary to stay in closer touch with the here and now, since much of sci-fi involves extending current trends into the future and developing them to their logical conclusions. The trick there is to recognise how attitudes will differ while making sure that the path by which society got to that place remains visible and relatable to the present day.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Fantasy has a couple of characteristics that make it a bit different. Firstly, it's much more about world building, in that the author doesn't have a set of established historical, geographical and cultural data that readers share and on which he or she can build the story. The fantasy author must build the entire geography, history and set of cultures from scratch (by and large they will pick and choose fragments from history and legend, but they still can't rely on the reader's familiarity with the background). Secondly, fantasy is a fundamentally conservative genre. Settings are largely based on historical or mythical themes, science is primitive or non-existent, society in a fantasy world usually has to deal with different challenges to modern industrial or post-industrial societies.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The result of these two factors means that the social and political world of a fantasy novel would likely be utterly alien to a modern day reader. The values of the people in it would reflect different social priorities and any insertion of the attitudes of the writer's own time will look clumsy at best and utterly shatter the fourth wall at worst. The ending of Philip Pullman's otherwise wonderful His Dark Materials trilogy with its "Republic of Heaven" premise is a classic example of this, because Pullman's own modern day liberal-left sensibilities jar with the alien world(s) he's spent the past several hundred pages constructing.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Obviously that doesn't mean that fantasy can only be written by right wingers. Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series is legendarily awful in large part because he can't let go of his own Randian wingnuttery. Where Pullman perhaps unwittingly allows a glimpse past the curtain, Goodkind places the ideological stage machinery front and centre. Pullman also has the advantage that his fantasy is rooted in a more fluid, technological universe in which social and political change are ideas that are by no means anathema to its existence. It doesn't quite work but it doesn't fail so utterly and completely.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">But if you're writing about an archaic seeming world with a largely rural population, who the fuck is going to care about ideas like liberty, democracy and self-actualisation? Could an ancient or medieval society, even a magical one, even function along those lines outside of the city-state setup? Inserting those values into a fantasy novel is like giving Frodo Baggins a Segway to help him across the Plains of Mordor. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">We have of late been living in a society where those values are taken for granted though, and it's easy for them to slip unquestioned into our literature (and especially our Hollywood-dominated cinema). It also means that the values of the bad guys, which were born out of 19th century antipathy towards despotism, 20th century fears of fascism and communism, and 21st century anxieties about religious fundamentalism, also too often pass unquestioned. In fact Lord of the Rings itself never even bothers to explain what life under the rule of Sauron would be like. He's evil and that's that, just go ahead and imagine your worst nightmares (which at the time basically meant Hitler).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Taking on and providing analogues to real world political and ideological conflicts isn't a bad thing of course. The West's model of liberty and democracy and the sense that the march of these ideals is inevitable and unstoppable is challenged by places like China that have far less interest in democracy and yet seems to be doing very well thank you without it, so there is great value and probably more than a little interest in exploring alternative models of society in order to question and probe our own model. As I mention earlier, those kinds of questions are part of the job description of a science fiction author, and while it's a thornier problem for fantasy authors (given that escape from the real world is pretty much their raison d'etre) it can be done, particularly if the writer is skilled at mining historical sources for relevant but also convincing allegories.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">That isn't often what the writer's looking for though. The writer is usually, whether they realise it or not, looking for a quick fix: a Big Bad that will get the audience on their side. They may think they're being challenging by dealing with an "issue", but they're not really challenging anything, and both the writer and audience are able to feel comfortable in their horror and revulsion. It's easy to look at the systematic murder of groups of people or the ethnic cleansing of populations and say, "No matter what your explanation, that's just wrong." Moral certainties like that are comforting.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Cultural relativism can be understood as an automatic and even necessary response to a world that is becoming more connected, and more and more information and conflicting values are forced to coexist in the media and especially online spheres. Trying to reconcile all those different ways of thinking, sets of values and traditions is going to drive you insane, so it's natural to look for an out: to say, "Oh well, different horses for different courses." It's a kind of tolerance of others' differences, but it's also a distancing mechanism. It's a way of saying, "That's nothing to do with me."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">The flipside of that of course is that pretty much everyone has a line they draw somewhere, where they say, "No, enough is enough. That's just wrong." At some level, your tolerance for other people's differences has to give way because you feel something they do or think has intruded on your own ethical, moral or ideological territory. For some people, for example a religious fundamentalist, this line is drawn widely and they feel very offended and put upon, sometimes to homicidal degrees, by all kinds of things other people do with their lives. But for almost everyone, there are moments where your own values, your own sense of identity, pushes you to intolerance.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">These moments can be interesting for a writer, and the minds of people who do things we find unacceptable are fertile grounds for literature.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Most people who commit atrocities aren't like Sauron. Most people would agree that even the worst crimes against humanity are often committed by people who think they're doing right. What gets less attention is the fact that a lot of horrendous crimes are not only committed in a spirit of righteousness, but they're also quite logical.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Robespierre and Saint-Just were quite rational in their application of the Jacobin Terror and while the period is frowned upon by modern liberals, a look at the history of revolution and counterrevolution in many countries suggests that a period of terror to rigorously instill revolutionary values (Zizek takes it further, adding the idea of "divine violence", although the philosophy isn't as much of a concern to me here as the practical side) is an entirely logical response to the danger of reassertion of the old regime or the creeping return of their remnants through the weakening of revolutionary zeal. Similarly, the murder of the Russian royal family and the destruction of their remains was a logical response to the reality of such figures' symbolic power -- revolutions had failed in Russia before, and the punishments of the perpetrators had been severe. In both cases people did horrible things that nonetheless made perfect sense in terms of the situation in which they occurred and what the people were trying to achieve.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">There is much controversy over the issue, but I'm going to stick my neck out and say that from a moral perspective, it's very difficult to defend Israel's actions in Palestine. Nevertheless, one could argue that from a strictly rational point of view, Israel doesn't go nearly far enough. What kind of Palestinian state could ever emerge from that situation that would be anything other than pathologically hostile to Israel? We may see Palestinians as victims and instinctively sympathise with them but Israel's own history shows us how easily oppressed can become oppressors. In the mind of someone like Benjamin Netenyahu he is not committing crimes, he is Doing What Has To Be Done. A more ruthless man might do more, as America did to its native population without apparently seeming to even notice it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">We live in a world where "terror" has become an evil in itself, a binary opposite of "humanity", but this is a function of our own comfortable lives and society (and one Robespierre and Saint-Just would have disagreed with fundamentally). For us there is no greater evil than the disruption of our peaceful existence. How easily might we slip into a new fascism all of our own if that comfort were threatened? For me, one of the most interesting and valuable avenues that the science fiction or fantasy author can explore is the minds and rationales of the people with whose values and actions we disagree or reject. Not in the sensitive, liberal-minded and relativistic way of "tolerating" them from a distance but to really get inside the heads of those who trespass upon the ideological ground that makes up our identity.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">In this sense, fantasy, so often intellectually the idiot sibling of science fiction, can in fact provide a more subtle, allegorical comment on the world, challenging contemporary assumptions about The Way It Is and taking us ideologically on tangents from the straight lines that science fiction tends to draw into the future. Of course most won't do that, and undoubtedly many writers and fans in the genre are attracted to it precisely for the way it presents us with an established social hierarchy with simplistic and small "c" conservative values.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Even then, however, there is something interesting in showing us the thought processes and logical steps a king goes through in his decision to go to war or levy a tax, and then letting us see the effect that has on the peasant farmer. Does the farmer dream of change? If so, what sort of change can he envisage? As I said before, a modern liberal democracy would probably be low down on the list. Another, better king might be more like it, because this imaginary peasant's sense of the natural order of things would likely be just as limited by his experience as ours is by our own world. Where we usually hold fantasy at a distance like good social relativists -- "it's another place, they live differently there." -- and where bad fantasy writing allows modern ideas to unwelcomely intrude, an alternative model of fantasy literature can induce the reader to examine their own ideas by introducing recognisable problems into the world of the story but having the characters tackle them using a totally different set of ideological tools. Our response -- horror, pathos, amusement, anger, whatever -- is influenced by our consciousness of the gap between what we see or read happening and what our instincts tell us <i>should</i> be happening. Thus the writer is able to address contemporary values or issues by their very absence, sidestepping the awkwardness of inserting them into an arena where they don't necessarily belong.</span>dotdashhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06270663921267987965noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8720958827669276721.post-50660208664550283962012-11-27T06:59:00.000-08:002012-11-27T06:59:50.094-08:00An current overview of anime in JapanI was asked by MTV's new English language site devoted to Japanese music and pop culture to do a feature outlining general trends in anime in Japan to act as a sort of introduction for overseas readers. The site, MTV 81, is primarily designed to promote Japanese culture and everything they publish starts from the point that it's all going to be basically positive, so don't expect to find me ranting and raving about the evils of moé or calling Makoto Shinkai a sentimental faux artistic hack. Anyway, <a href="http://www.mtv81.com/features/specials/the-three-corners-of-modern-j-culture-anime/">it's posted online here</a> if you're interested.<br />
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Also, I started from the assumption that readers are going to have some idea of what I'm talking about since anime is pretty widely known and the kind of person who comes to a Japan-orientated site like MTV 81 is probably going to have at least a fair idea of what to expect from anime. If there are any truly egregious errors, I apologise (yeah, I know "Bakemonogatari" has a typo in it), but I tried to be as fair as I could in my assessment. Of course I'll have left out loads of stuff, and I admit I've been pretty much dead out of anime for the past few years, but I was able to field a lot of pointers from mates Wah from <a href="http://analoghousou.com/">Analog Housou</a>/<a href="http://mistakesofyouth.com/">Mistakes of Youth</a> and especially Matt from <a href="http://www.colonydrop.com/index.php?blog=1">Colony Drop</a> (bearing in mind the obvious biases those sources entail).dotdashhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06270663921267987965noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8720958827669276721.post-52170777851893307042012-11-19T20:47:00.000-08:002012-11-27T07:00:17.602-08:00Resident Evil: Damnation Review<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I wrote a review of the terrible new Resident Evil: Damnation computer animated movie for Otaku USA Magazine and <a href="http://www.otakuusamagazine.com/Newsletter/News1/Resident_Evil_Damnation_review_4794.aspx">you can read it here</a>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">It's great getting paid money to say stuff sucked. I actually quite enjoyed the film, but it's important not to confuse that with it actually being any good. It really was poor, but it was poor in a sort of, "What the fuck is going on?" and "I can't believe they actually thought that would be a good idea!" kind of way.</span></div>
dotdashhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06270663921267987965noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8720958827669276721.post-35425640195996469602012-11-19T20:40:00.002-08:002012-11-19T20:40:49.673-08:00Kill Your Sempai!<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Last week I did a small pop-art exhibition with a friend of mine and produced seven new illustrations. Some of them worked better than others, but in any case, it was a fun thing to be involved in.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFWNuDUtXyte29xrs183iDcqLfbXH_kABBgdFwMYlPhU1hQNB4dEF3UQqrc1Hz-X7N8mCEkDznrXOySv5xlzCtOyzI6Ert6kZeEloFT87fujxSc-xv5fRS5ASoieRmPkTlsb_GhLP67IU/s1600/kys-7p1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFWNuDUtXyte29xrs183iDcqLfbXH_kABBgdFwMYlPhU1hQNB4dEF3UQqrc1Hz-X7N8mCEkDznrXOySv5xlzCtOyzI6Ert6kZeEloFT87fujxSc-xv5fRS5ASoieRmPkTlsb_GhLP67IU/s320/kys-7p1.jpg" width="320" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"All art is pornography."</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">No story behind this one, it just is. It's also probably the worst </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">illustration out of the bunch. It just didn't quite work somehow. My wife says she looks like she has Down Syndrome, which seems a bit mean but now she's said it, I can't get the idea out of my head.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4pB9TznXPkkeoUU-O3IivBRaBWlJJFRpH-ZT8GJE2RcZqHAq-Uw_FDWzJXd5B8HHIWcR9k2fWs9PdmqogsXwwHiC-Fp1JNMTDcnJDv-IUVdDV5qfrLp6K3IfYUJgkylnaUp_2fiatYsc/s1600/kys-6p1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4pB9TznXPkkeoUU-O3IivBRaBWlJJFRpH-ZT8GJE2RcZqHAq-Uw_FDWzJXd5B8HHIWcR9k2fWs9PdmqogsXwwHiC-Fp1JNMTDcnJDv-IUVdDV5qfrLp6K3IfYUJgkylnaUp_2fiatYsc/s320/kys-6p1.jpg" width="210" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; text-align: -webkit-auto;">"My favourite band is more hardcore than your favourite band."</span></span></div>
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Those conversations about music where you end up trapped in a stupid battle of one-upmanship.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYSRB6KY4roP2v8Yo1cjEmR_oSa7XuGJ2Xyo2JMXti65VCf7M7ZdJJyNFlDg7I1BWIuQfSvpjpiHKefggjOvt_mGYLEqMhAh3mhdkphptSdjcy2JLvou52QXl_PTpFy7Z5ufPLoU2R2tQ/s1600/kys-5p1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="229" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYSRB6KY4roP2v8Yo1cjEmR_oSa7XuGJ2Xyo2JMXti65VCf7M7ZdJJyNFlDg7I1BWIuQfSvpjpiHKefggjOvt_mGYLEqMhAh3mhdkphptSdjcy2JLvou52QXl_PTpFy7Z5ufPLoU2R2tQ/s320/kys-5p1.jpg" width="320" /></span></a></div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><div style="text-align: center;">
"Just because I'm drunk, it doesn't mean I want to fuck you."</div>
</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">Date rape. Don't do it.</span> </span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhw5Qvi-WMgIHCgzKgEMNgrKgYoOziTJA9c8Qkx7pD5ET0auOf-Xk9xfDROOf124hqrd85diKNM38Ppi0-HMpeoGHwBM_OH9fv7AE1HHhx0CURINLU3yOMUqApbsyd__Fmim_1W0-tzVD4/s1600/kys-4p1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="224" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhw5Qvi-WMgIHCgzKgEMNgrKgYoOziTJA9c8Qkx7pD5ET0auOf-Xk9xfDROOf124hqrd85diKNM38Ppi0-HMpeoGHwBM_OH9fv7AE1HHhx0CURINLU3yOMUqApbsyd__Fmim_1W0-tzVD4/s320/kys-4p1.jpg" width="320" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> <span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">"Nogizaka46 are our no.1 geopolitical enemy."</span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222;" /><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">I remember Mitt Romney saying something like this about Russia during </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">the U.S. election campaign, which struck me as deliberately </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">constructing a false enemy for his own benefit. This image came from </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">an AKB48 (mass-member idol pop group) coffee commercial and Nogizaka46 </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">are AKB48's "official rivals", despite being produced by the same guy </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">and the money basically flowing to the same place.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7l99zjD5HkRF9mShdMRFB6yxmbT_MbOwTXxG_7Ijt75Xor5N3Wpc7mJp0vWRqKMbpjrG0vWTkBm8SzXqrRrH3Itx_hNZZvScu_OMulI0YBzAxLFrFc4JYBqliXlrgz8SoisNFotX1hYI/s1600/kys-3p1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="231" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7l99zjD5HkRF9mShdMRFB6yxmbT_MbOwTXxG_7Ijt75Xor5N3Wpc7mJp0vWRqKMbpjrG0vWTkBm8SzXqrRrH3Itx_hNZZvScu_OMulI0YBzAxLFrFc4JYBqliXlrgz8SoisNFotX1hYI/s320/kys-3p1.jpg" width="320" /></span></a></div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> <span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">"Guest lists are killing music. Stop! Live theft."</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222;" /><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">Record industry types are constantly bitching and whining about how </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">downloading music is "stealing", but if getting music for free is </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">theft, then every time a music industry shill gets on the guest list, </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">he's stealing music too. The last line is based on the slogan <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhxgo_6P1aw">"No More! </a></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhxgo_6P1aw">Eiga dorobou"</a>, which comes from these stupid commercials you see at </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">the cinema here with a guy with a camcorder for a head warning us not </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">to steal movies.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMLCFWRWSMg65P31JN7OS3n9mAp1eSbQLOYsPtbqo769nLOCOrqTJTfi1NPPBYSW0ndclSgDU1_GEwvCY9P2ZTC-DsJqWOVU4DWUg1hvoLnfSBUs9x4-G5QUYQl_ZUmB-z545eWVnKC0A/s1600/kys-2p1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMLCFWRWSMg65P31JN7OS3n9mAp1eSbQLOYsPtbqo769nLOCOrqTJTfi1NPPBYSW0ndclSgDU1_GEwvCY9P2ZTC-DsJqWOVU4DWUg1hvoLnfSBUs9x4-G5QUYQl_ZUmB-z545eWVnKC0A/s320/kys-2p1.jpg" width="216" /></span></a></div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><div style="text-align: center;">
"I'm sorry for the trouble but I'm going to cause a terrible inconvenience by killing you."</div>
</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222;" /><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">The event title was "Kill Your Sempai!" "Sempai" is a Japanese word </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">for someone who is your elder or senior in college or your job or wherever. They </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">have a sort of master-apprentice role and you nave to use certain </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">polite language when addressing them. So the joke here is that if </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">you're going to kill your sempai, you must make sure you do it using </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">the correct form of respectful language. I thought about giving her a </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">Kalashnikov or something, but I thought this way is more fun since it </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">leaves the intriguing possibility that she's planning to beat the guy </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">to death with a tennis racket.</span> </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaJq802iizL9J5LyH2_GUcsMoPx5-EQIgRJqGtM90TA3bznS0lYWVKEsYmnv7zOmdpe5O4earOpv4ToFOvOgegdMmcLfIY-8nWIH7D1b-SgKNNqcjrRsa9koiQnsGxU8v-rvJMUt8nq1c/s1600/kys-1p1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="229" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaJq802iizL9J5LyH2_GUcsMoPx5-EQIgRJqGtM90TA3bznS0lYWVKEsYmnv7zOmdpe5O4earOpv4ToFOvOgegdMmcLfIY-8nWIH7D1b-SgKNNqcjrRsa9koiQnsGxU8v-rvJMUt8nq1c/s320/kys-1p1.jpg" width="320" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">"The Senkakus are ours."</span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222;" /><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">The question is whose though. The Senkaku Islands are this group of </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">uninhabited rocks that are claimed by Japan and China. It's a really </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">acrimonious political issue, but in this picture, there's an ambiguity </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">over where the girl is from. I actually used the 1970s </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">singer <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwNfXxBPIwY">Agnes Chan</a>, a Hong Kong singer who was phenomenally popular in Japan, as the model for this one, although I guess since </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">she was popular in the 70s, that means she was neither Chinese nor </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">Japanese. Maybe this is actually a comment on British imperialism </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">instead.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #222222;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
Actually, this came from a conversation I had with a student. She said she can't listen to Korean pop anymore because when she sees them dancing on TV, she just knows they're all thinking, "Takeshima (yet another island dispute Japan has, this time with Korea) is ours" while they take Japanese money. I thought this was kind of strange, the idea of such meaningless, bubblegum pop music being tied in with political nationalism, but in a way, both are equally fluffy and inconsequential, so perhaps it's an appropriate connection.</div>
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dotdashhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06270663921267987965noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8720958827669276721.post-89263635331132781872012-10-10T20:35:00.002-07:002012-10-10T20:49:51.966-07:00In Search of Macsen Fallo (Part 4 - Final)<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Part one of the story <a href="http://plotshield.blogspot.jp/2012/10/in-search-of-macsen-fallo-part-1.html">can be found here</a>, part <a href="http://plotshield.blogspot.jp/2012/10/in-search-of-macsen-fallo-part-2.html">two is here</a> and part <a href="http://plotshield.blogspot.jp/2012/10/in-search-of-macsen-fallo-part-3.html">three is here</a>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Ian Martin</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">* * *</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 18px;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">In Search of Macsen Fallo (Part 4 - Final)</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 18px;">by Elin Mynach</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 18px;">12th of Ash, Rigantona 12</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 18px;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 18px;"><i>(...continued)</i></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; letter-spacing: 0px;">In the end, however, it was in the jagged spires and water cathedrals that nature itself has so elegantly hewn in the East that I was able to establish his presence, and for all the infantrymen's tales of Joyahon's vast and majestic terrain, it was from a sailor that I was finally able to pin Macsen Fallo the soldier down to a particular place and time.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The tavern where I met this sailor was less disreputable than some of the places I had been frequenting, perched neatly on the East Bank of the Afon. A wooden deck protruded outwards over the water, allowing drinkers to sit out on a summer's night and watch the sun go down over the river. For those with a sense of smell inured to the river's excesses, it could be rather pleasant.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Carrying no permanent injuries and seemingly none of the ailments of the mind that appear so unfortunately prevalent among those who experienced the war's horrors firsthand, he appeared to suffer primarily from the melancholy of loneliness. Like many returning soldiers, he had come home from the war a changed man, and now only found companionship among those like him, those who had shared his experiences. So he sought them out, exchanging reminiscences of the triumphs, tragedies, heroics and horrors, reliving the war nightly in the company of the only people he could trust to understand. He was willing to open up to me only warily, for I was not a creature of his world. It was as if he saw me as a child or a foreigner, a semi-ignorant intruder, yet in the end one to be reluctantly indulged.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The sailor, Seaman T____, had been an enlisted man serving on the light cruiser IMS Addanc, which in the month of Alder of the year Lir 42 was at sea in the vicinity of the Ivachan Archipelago. As a result, the Addanc was one of the first ships to respond to distress calls during the Pechen Incident.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">For three days after its arrival at Polum, the Addanc changed its position of anchorage, altering its appearance by the construction of phony additional gun turrets and by kindling fires at the base of a false third funnel to mislead Admiral Lupe into believing that he was confronted with a squadron of ships including other, more powerful vessels rather than a lone, lightly armoured patrol ship. Lupe's hesitation and eventual withdrawal made heroes out of the crew of the Addanc just as it led to Lupe's own downfall and suicide. Military historians believe it is this incident that ensured the war with the Lunaeans would catch light in the West rather than the East, and thus it may be seen as the pivot on which the destinies of many thousands of men, women and children turned, the keystone around which our current empire rests. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">This much is the red clay of which legends are moulded, and Seaman T____ took a gruff but nonetheless obvious pleasure in recounting his role. However, nestled in the shadow of the Addanc's famous tale lay a curious series of events that unfolded in the days following the retreat of the unfortunate Admiral Lupe and his squadron.</span></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhv2by0vwcIjbwZ4GZUcGO6EF6bAczPZuQTtdodyfv9KsCABM9ji1cTemgQ1TKt-usf-A6-gr4FGpGg5pOY4nM1SKLZItzK4tB4bsu14oALCgc8WcXhivBff1fef0ABUnOD63s96mMclHA/s1600/fallo4_small.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="229" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhv2by0vwcIjbwZ4GZUcGO6EF6bAczPZuQTtdodyfv9KsCABM9ji1cTemgQ1TKt-usf-A6-gr4FGpGg5pOY4nM1SKLZItzK4tB4bsu14oALCgc8WcXhivBff1fef0ABUnOD63s96mMclHA/s320/fallo4_small.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">IMS Addanc at anchor off the port of Polum during the infamous Pechen Incident. Note the counterfeit third funnel held in place with guy-wires at the rear.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">As a relief fleet arrived to secure the port of Polum, the Addanc was detailed to patrol the islands for the purposes of scouting out any lingering Lunaean military presence and relieving any Sarffi units still besieged. It was a slow process, picking their way between the archipelago's many reefs and islets, the clear skies and calm seas creating in the men a sense of boredom edged with unease and anxiety that at any moment a hail of gunfire may tear forth from some wooded coastline.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">It was during this painstaking duty that the ship took onboard two soldiers of The Duke of Twr Aran's Light Infantry Regiment who claimed to have escaped from the capture of Kovmraz. One of the men gave his name as Macsen and seemed a jovial enough fellow, drinking and joking with the sailors in the mess hall, and yet Seaman T____ believed the pair were concealing something. In his own words:</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>"They were fierce clear that they'd be lodged in the same cabin,"</i> the sailor confided in me, <i>"and they weren't hardly never out of each other's sight. Rumour was that they was a pair of mandrakes, if you know what I mean, but it weren't that. You could see it in their eyes. I know the look of love, and it ain't nothing like that. They looked at each other like card sharps over a game of </i>gwendid<i>, suspicious like."</i></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">His unease about the pair was heightened by a mysterious package, wrapped in a cloth bandage, that Macsen, now confirmed by the Addanc's Captain Parry as Lieutenant Fallo, seemed to keep close by. He once caught Fallo alone in his cabin, carefully looking over the item, but Fallo wrapped it up again before the seaman could glimpse it. Seeing the young sailor's curiosity, Fallo had smiled coldly and said:</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">"This trinket has already cost more than you or I can afford. Forget it if you have any sense."</span></i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">By this time, the two soldiers' secrecy was making many of the crewmen nervous, and one imagines that their disquiet only grew when the captain suddenly announced that the Addanc would, rather than returning to Polum, instead make directly for the distant naval station of Helalma. No explanation was given, but it was widely suspected that their two new guests were somehow responsible.</span></span><br />
<div style="min-height: 16px;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Finally, one night, while Seaman T____ was afflicted with a particularly unpleasant bout of an ailment of the stomach, the details of which he pronounced himself too much of a gentleman to recount in front of a lady like me, he retreated to the ship's deck and was surprised to find the aft lookout position unmanned. Initially thinking to report this neglect of duty with all due speed, he was distracted by movement near the rearmost torpedo tubes.</span></span><br />
<div style="min-height: 16px;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">At first all he could see was a single man working clumsily to unfasten one of the smaller life-rafts from where it was nested, but as he moved closer, he realised that a second man stood nearby, holding a gun in one hand and something he couldn't discern in the other. At the direction of the man with the gun, the first figure dragged the heavy raft towards the stern, then fastened it by rope to the Addanc's rail and let it into the black water. He then motioned the first man to climb in, the man protested at first, but eventually obeyed. After this, the armed man concealed his weapon, approached the rail and began to cut away at the rope, at which Seaman T____ made the decision to flee the scene.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The next day, Fallo was nowhere to be seen, while his companion spent most of the day fortified in his cabin. It was officially announced that Lieutenant Fallo had deserted, stealing one of the life-rafts and absconding during the night. When the men asked the previous night's rear lookout if he had seen anything, he insisted angrily that he had been at his post all night and witnessed nothing.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Seaman T____ claims that he had eventually confessed his tale to the captain himself, stating that:</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">"He just looks at me, like. Eyes on me cold like I'm some cove he ain't never seen before, and says he: 'I must apologise to you,' or some like that, 'but I did not hear a word of what you just said to me. It must be these damned seagulls.' But there weren't no seagulls, and he heard me fine. I didn't say no more to no one after that."</span></i></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">And nor, it appears, did anyone else. The lookout seems to have died in a tavern brawl soon after making landfall, Captain Parry famously went down with the battlecruiser IMS Draig, and of those stationed at Kovmraz who survived the war and the Lunaean prison camps, few could recall much of the confusion that reigned during the incident. As for the identity of Fallo's companion on the Addanc, Seaman T____ was curiously reticent although records and recollections of survivors indicate that Gwydion Brutus, then a Lieutenant Colonel, was head of the battalion stationed in Kovmraz.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Was the other man Brutus? Why had the Addanc changed course so suddenly? What was in the package that Fallo had guarded so jealously? None of these questions I have been able to answer, and indeed, more credible sightings of Fallo himself I have been unable to find.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">That he survived being set adrift, and spent much of the war close to the scene of fighting are evidenced at the very least by his writing. Also, it is strongly suggested by the sailor's tale that whatever had happened to Fallo and his companion among the Ivachan islands seemed to have had a shattering effect on him. How his salvation occurred is another mystery, but it was likely either by a chance encounter with an unsung, unknown hero of a fisherman, or by washing back ashore on a tiny beach, lost in the unmapped inlets of the Ivachan Archipelago.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">I suspect the latter, although I must confess that my judgment is coloured by the mystery and beauty of those islands, whose bleak, windswept clifftops and ridges, dark forests, jagged peaks and rippling lagoons inhabited by terrifying cryptids and their ancient, inscrutable cults, and whose hardy, plain-spoken people seem to me like a mirror of Fallo himself.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">I have travelled the archipelago in search of clues, but found only echoes of his presence. It is possible that a castaway washed ashore and made a nuisance of himself among the strange people of Okte Vrach over a period that appears to coincide with that following Fallo's disappearance, although one must note with sadness that the outbreak of full scale war at around that time led to a glut of stranded sailors of all stripes and creeds.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">No, it is at this point that we must take leave of Macsen Fallo the man and immerse ourselves once more in the brash, crass, charming and rash world of his poison pen. As Fallo himself put it in </span><i>The Cursed Treasure of Yuna Mette</i>:</span><br />
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<i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">What use do we have of the past in this place, in the rotten here and now, scratching for answers and explanations for what happened to us, what we did so wrong that we ended up as we are now and not in a country villa with a dirty puzzle of a countess waiting upstairs while we give the green gown to a kitchen maid in the apple orchard? The past is for heroes and widows: give me a stiff drink, another to chase it down, and a purse full of brass and I'll show you a night, be sure of it. I'll show you a night that would make those toff boys weep with envy and their sisters weep with joy.</span></i><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">It was of course only a matter of time before such a writer was declared <i>harmful to the moral and spiritual health of the Sarffi people</i> and his work banned on these shores. For some time afterwards, new works and bound editions of his earlier stories appeared from an obscure Lunaean publishing house, but as the war faded into the past and diplomatic affairs between our two empires became more cordial, it seems that even our enemies became embarrassed by Fallo's often vulgar satires and had him silenced.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">There are some who believe that Fallo is now dead, perhaps in the torture room of some Lunaean Religious Police gaol -- certainly no new work under his name has come to light in recent years. Others believe that he retired of his own volition, with political changes on Ynys Sarff rendering his work unnecessary, although critics of this theory can point with some justification to certain discrepancies in the dates.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">There are still others who hold more outlandish hypotheses: that Fallo was an alias of the mysterious <i>Glass Marchioness</i> Charlotte Synamon, that he was merely a creation of the Lunaean propaganda ministry, that he has been sighted in Aberafon at a revolutionary meeting, even that he is involved in mythical sects such as the Brotherhood of the Raven. Needless to say, believers in each of these postulations disagree with each other passionately and frequently, with heated discussions in coffee houses of a more radical literary persuasion regularly erupting into violence of one sort or another.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">To speak personally once more, I would venture an alternative theory. As an avid reader of Fallo's work for many years now, I have come to recognise certain stylistic idiosyncrasies -- quirks if you will -- to which he is prone. For example, throughout his body of work, Fallo reveals a preference for direct over reported speech, a fondness for military metaphors, and a recurring theme of the facade, the veil, and the masquerade.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Among the pages of a number of periodicals, including this august journal and its sister publication <i>Clyddyf Cultural Review</i>, I have recognised pieces, both fictional and ostensibly factual, by writers under various names, that bear a striking, albeit more restrained, resemblance to Fallo's own writing. While I concede the likelihood that many of these writers are merely admirers of Fallo's work who have appropriated his style, I shall be charitable and say inadvertently, I propose that it is at least possible that they not are all the work of such people.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Yet perhaps this is simply my own manifestation of the insufferable romanticism that Lunaeans call <i>The Sarffi Disease</i>. Perhaps I have fallen for the too-perfect symmetry that -- having been alternately intrigued, horrified, thrilled and seduced by Fallo's exquisitely crafted barbs, cruel moral conundrums, and, yes, even his rakish manipulation of my emotions -- I should find myself sharing these very pages with this most enigmatic of authors. In this way, it is perhaps appropriate that this story ends where it begins: with me, still in thrall to my seducer, reaching to turn back the veil that only my imagination can reach.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">End.</span></i></span></div>
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dotdashhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06270663921267987965noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8720958827669276721.post-67422671767404078062012-10-08T06:34:00.000-07:002012-10-08T21:30:03.176-07:00In Search of Macsen Fallo (Part 3)<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Part one of the story <a href="http://plotshield.blogspot.jp/2012/10/in-search-of-macsen-fallo-part-1.html">can be found here</a> and <a href="http://plotshield.blogspot.jp/2012/10/in-search-of-macsen-fallo-part-2.html">part two is here</a>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Ian Martin</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 18px;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">In Search of Macsen Fallo (Part 3)</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 18px;">by Elin Mynach</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 18px;">12th of Ash, Rigantona 12</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 18px;"><i>(...continued)</i></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; letter-spacing: 0px;">After some time, the nurse re-entered the room and declared that our interview would soon have to end, so I asked my final question, regarding Fallo's political views. To be frank, I had asked the question only with some trepidation, lest the old gentleman think me an impertinent young woman, but to my surprise, he responded by unleashing a deathly rattling sound from his throat that I eventually deciphered as a laugh. Cledwyn Fallo, at least, had been no more political than he had been a poet.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">While this in itself was perhaps a point of note, the <i>Exegesis</i> was the next piece of the puzzle, and by my continuing good fortune, the old tutor permitted me to bring it back to Caerafon to study at my leisure. Saint Macsen was naturally an important figure in the early Sarffi church, although bulk of his adherents have traditionally been confined to the Eastern Principalities and <i>The Martyrdom of Saint Macsen</i> remains to this day a seldom-read text in the lowlands.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In the popular legend, of course, Saint Macsen was a prince of the East who took arms on behalf of the Goddess against a heathen neighbour, only to be betrayed by his treacherous cousin on the night before the final battle. He is interesting to scholars because he is an unusually early example of what modern religious historians refer to as a Type 3 saint. The Type 1 saints, of course, were primarily sailors, reflecting the Goddess' maritime origins, while the Type 2 saints were largely pilgrims, bringing word of her merciful deeds to the Sarffi hinterland. Type 3 saints were the kings and war leaders who unified Ynys Sarff under one spiritual ruler, if not yet a corporeal one.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The early sections of the story, often known as <i>The Nine Sins of Saint Macsen</i>, deal with the young prince’s rambunctious early life. Among them is the famous tale of how he seduced the beautiful virgin daughter of the Duke of Carreg Aethnen by climbing up the tower in which she had been imprisoned by her jealous father, and escaping his paternal wrath disguised as a chambermaid -- a story that has become a staple of the vulgar musical theatre that flourishes west of the river.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Another popular tale is of the young Macsen's wager with Celyn Quickhand, where he gambled his firstborn child against the famous enchanter's magic box of secrets. Expecting the young prince to select a challenge by strength or skill at arms -- challenges that Celyn, despite his withered frame, always won -- the old wizard was surprised when Macsen instead suggested a game of dice.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Of course, Macsen cheated and won easily, claiming the box and making off before Celyn had time to discover his opponent's trick. Flying into a rage, Celyn summoned an army of phantoms and besieged the prince's castle, where his young bride had just given birth to a baby boy, demanding he be given both box and child lest he tear down the walls stone by stone and rip the child from the mother's dead hands.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">After three days and nights with no word from within, the gates finally opened and Macsen emerged leading twenty women, each bringing with them a child of varying ages. The prince then calmly explained that his firstborn could be any of these children, for he had been slipping it to all of these women at one time or another. When Celyn asked in dismay how he could know which was truly the prince's child, Macsen offered to sell Celyn back his box of secrets in exchange for all the enchanter's lands so that he could ask it himself.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">At this, Celyn flew into another rage, and cursed the box so that the only secret it would ever reveal to the inquisitive soul who opened it would be the manner of their own death.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Some versions go on to tell that at that very moment, the young princess herself, unknowing of what it was, opened the box and learned that she would die through her husband's selfishness and betrayal, whereupon she threw herself from the window of the castle keep in despair.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Of course the latter part of the story of St. Macsen deals with the more familiar tale of how he was visited by the Goddess, who appeared to him on a mountaintop in her winged form -- as was common in many of the Eastern Principalities' traditional tales -- and made him renounce his degenerate ways. After this, so the tale says, Prince Macsen devoted himself to spreading word of the Goddess within both his own lands and eventually the neighbouring principalities, right up until his eventual betrayal and death.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Despite the obvious attraction that the young Prince Macsen's wanton ways might have had for his now namesake, it was at first glance hard to see what attraction this otherwise fairly conventional tale of the sinner redeemed by the love of the Goddess would have had, and it was with this thought in mind that I turned to the dusty old <i>Exegesis</i>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">As I can attest from my own religious instruction, the traditional reading of St. Macsen's story is as a tale of how the love of the Goddess can overcome the wickedness of men and turn them to a life of good deeds, and I must confess that despite myself, I was perhaps a little disappointed that the roguish Cledwyn Fallo could have been so easily influenced by a tale with such a respectable teaching at its heart. However, Alwyn of Argoed's reading of the story proved rather more intriguing.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It is easy to imagine the kind of monk Alwyn was. Argoed was one of Ynys Sarff's foremost brewery monasteries, and is perhaps best known as the home of the notoriously potent Bragawd Fflam pale ale. Monasteries of this caste were famously idiosyncratic in their pronouncements, with many a curious or radical notion lost in the avalanche of competing theories, spared the oppressive scrutiny of Lunaean religious scholars, but also denied the acclaim or infamy that often emerged from the passionate, frequently inflammatory scientific and literary debates of the age.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">And so it was in the permissive and typically intoxicated atmosphere of Argoed, amid the gushing river of religious theories destined to be published, absorbed, mused over, adopted, abandoned and forgotten, that Alwyn decided that St. Macsen had reached his enlightenment <i>through</i> his dissolute behaviour rather than <i>despite</i> it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Alwyn's <i>Exegesis</i> focussed in large part on the <i>Nine Sins</i> part of the story, detailing how by his self-absorption, gorging himself on transient pleasures at the expense of other people, Macsen had purged his mind and soul of the compromises and negotiations that comprise the human world, allowing him to accept enlightenment with a clear heart. To Alwyn's mind, it was this purity that made Macsen such a powerful servant to the Goddess, just as it was the dimming of this purity -- in this case Macsen's sentimental devotion to his cousin and former sword brother -- that was his downfall.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In this way, we can see in the Macsen Fallo that left for the army that day a picture of a young man, fresh from a year of travels, buoyed by a new, mystically inclined bent to his individualistic hedonism.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">And yet this is still not the Macsen Fallo, burning with a mixture of righteous anger and bawdy pub humour, that we know from his stories, so the question we must now ask is what happened? How can we reconcile the man who wrote with such intensity and detail of the powerful and deeply-rooted bonds shared by men, and sometimes of women, with the self-centred philosophy espoused by Alwyn of Argoed? </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">My first instinct was that his family's misfortunes had uncovered in him stronger bonds than he had expected to the ever-tantalising, part-consummated human world, and I determined to seek out what clues I could find of Fallo's military record that might help me learn if and when any such change in his character had occurred.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">This proved difficult. The Ministry of War has never been in the habit of releasing the military records of its servicemen to members of the public, least of all <i>reporters</i>, and therefore I was forced to resort to subterfuge. Though it would be immodest to recount precisely how, let it suffice to say that I learned the records of Lieutenant Cledwyn Fallo had been lost -- or more likely destroyed -- many years previously, after having been requested by Gwydion Brutus himself, by then ennobled as Lord Penllew and sitting in the Senedd as Minister of War. Powerful forces indeed had been roused to concern by the affairs of the man who called himself Macsen Fallo.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Having hit this dead end, the next step in my quest was to search places frequented by war veterans and military hospital out-pensioners in the hope of tracing men who might have served with Fallo.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6jqnWAYEUvQIZ1Hf68DcE_DRzdK91Tw90bUOB4ZHwxtZOhl38vYgaCS32r6GJd4Hd_G84thMnlvmC6AObW3zFKaQpLV_mwjuvj3dfkgBGC1klSacRsq1oLLmhd48WnjGygP8sVhDKPsA/s1600/fallo3_small.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><img border="0" height="216" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6jqnWAYEUvQIZ1Hf68DcE_DRzdK91Tw90bUOB4ZHwxtZOhl38vYgaCS32r6GJd4Hd_G84thMnlvmC6AObW3zFKaQpLV_mwjuvj3dfkgBGC1klSacRsq1oLLmhd48WnjGygP8sVhDKPsA/s320/fallo3_small.JPG" width="320" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">The banks of the Afon are home to numerous drinking establishments of both good and ill repute.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The veterans of the war are a group of men much celebrated in the popular literature and press of our empire, and yet they are paradoxically little seen in the flesh. They have been called the empire's <i>Hidden Heroes</i> by some, although that term itself is guilty of painting its own sordid romantic gloss over the reality of their existence.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Gathering in taverns, doss-houses and black drop dens, there is an underclass of former servicemen haunted and perhaps irreparably damaged by their experiences, whose scars run far deeper than the crippling physical wounds that many still carry -- men who escape their nightmares by retreating into the comforting embrace of the dream pipe or simply annihilate their treacherous minds each night by drowning themselves in <i>gwirod </i>and ale.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">While Ynys Sarff and The High City glared at each other across the sound, down the barrels of our great cannons, these men fought through the dust and mud of distant lands, shedding their blood on foreign soil for the glory of the empire. It would be unfair to say that our island itself was untouched by the years of struggle -- too many of us lost family members, and all of us suffered through the fear and want of those straitened times -- but we can perhaps say that as a people we were <i>insulated</i> from the true reality of the war.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">To walk among the out-pensioners and veterans is to see the characters of <i>Autumn of Blood</i> in their own later years, shattered and broken by the war, their stories discarded, rewritten into heroic tales by journalists, novelists and historians alike. The reality of their existence is an unwelcome intrusion into the fantasy that we tell ourselves and our children, just as Fallo's stories must have been to the politicians and generals on whose behalf these men prosecuted that bloody conflict.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Among these run down dens in the Caerafon's forgotten underbelly I heard many blood-curdling tales of the war; the men to whom I spoke seemed to take a delight in competing with each other to shock me. One man in particular, an artilleryman who had lost a leg and an eye in Joyahon, spoke with tremendous glee of a certain incident whose details I will spare you but which he claims was single handedly responsible for the introduction of the army's current cannon safety guidelines. Another man, a cavalry officer, told through laughter and sobs of how he had commandeered digs in a native village and woken up to find the tendons in his horse's legs had been cut during the night. The soldiers had lined up and bayonetted every man in the village one by one, and when none confessed, they had started on the women. Three of his comrades had taken their own lives in the months that followed, while others had gone on to commit even greater crimes. He himself had put a bullet through the head of his crippled horse. Even before they had left, the surviving villagers had started stripping its flesh for food.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Through hearing the tales of these former soldiers, one curious feature of Fallo's writing came to my attention. It had troubled me for some time how the religious interests of the young up country man could have so thoroughly disappeared from the work of the writer whose work I knew so well, but as these veterans talked, something seemed to click into place.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">While a follower of the Goddess might see them as rather irreligious works, there is perhaps another spiritual presence in Her place. Particularly in Fallo's early works like <i>Autumn of Blood</i> and <i>The Cursed Treasure of Yuna Mette</i>, the ruined temples and monumental statues and structures that litter the Joyahon deserts, jungles and mountains are a constant presence -- ancient eyes watching over the petty, ant-like, scurrying of the human participants. Could it be that what began in Alwyn of Argoed's <i>Exegesis of The Martyrdom of St. Macsen</i> had been transmuted into something else by Fallo's contact with the ancient magic of the West?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>To be continued...</i></span></div>
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dotdashhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06270663921267987965noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8720958827669276721.post-77593829774293537432012-10-04T21:08:00.000-07:002012-10-04T21:15:37.704-07:00In Search of Macsen Fallo (Part 2)<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Part one of the story <a href="http://plotshield.blogspot.jp/2012/10/in-search-of-macsen-fallo-part-1.html">can be found here</a>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Ian Martin</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">* * *</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 18px;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">In Search of Macsen Fallo (Part 2)</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 18px;">by Elin Mynach</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 18px;">12th of Ash, Rigantona 12</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 18px;"><i>(...continued)</i></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; text-align: justify;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; text-align: justify;">But who is Macsen Fallo? In many ways he seems like a character more fictional than any of his literary creations: a masked highwayman who robs the undeserving rich at poison pen-point and fades away into the night like a spectre. Yet behind that mask, there is surely a being of flesh and blood, so what can we know of the man himself? </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">From his writing, we can draw few firm conclusions, yet we can nonetheless make some suppositions. Firstly, it seems that he has a military background, most likely in the infantry. His descriptions of life on the battlefront, of the interactions between men and officers, of the jokes and songs soldiers share, speak of firsthand experience of army life. However, in contrast with <i>Autumn of Blood</i>, Fallo’s naval tale <i>Married to the Sea</i> rings less true. The brutality of life on the waves is depicted in the same visceral detail, but the characters' dialect occasionally slips into the clichés of more traditional maritime adventure serials. It reads like the work of one familiar with the sea, but not himself a navy man.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Another thing we can surmise from Fallo’s writing is that he was originally a man of the educated classes, more likely a commissioned officer than an enlisted man. His politicians and people of quality are often grotesques, but there is usually a seed of truth in his depictions. Moreover, Fallo is multilingual, with an authorial voice that occasionally reveals a weakness for allusions, not only from Sarffi, but also Lunaean, Ivachan and Joyahon literature. Thus, it would be logical to assume that he received some manner of classical education. </span></div>
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">So the man we are looking for is likely to be a commissioned officer in the infantry, possibly serving under Gwydion Brutus during the early years of the war. Reasonably well educated, and a fluent speaker of several languages, it also seems probable that he is a well-travelled gentleman, with some experience of life at sea, although perhaps not himself a sailor.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Of known facts, however, there are few. There are a number of families named Fallo in and around Caerafon, although none willing to claim Macsen as their own. One tempting possible origin for our mysterious author lay in a family of up country Fallos who were declared bankrupt in Lir 35. The father took his own life shortly after, the mother was soon lost to illness while living on the charity of relatives, while the elder son, Eurig, travelled west to go into business and has not been heard of since. The second son, Cledwyn, is of greater interest to us, since it appears that the family purchased a military commission for him even as the debt collectors closed in around them.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">While the name did not match, Cledwyn's age and the time of his entry into the army made me suspicious enough that I took a trip to the former home of the Fallos. The chapel's birth records verified that there was indeed a Cledwyn Fallo born in the parish, who would have been about twenty years old at the time of his commission, and the diviner was able to confirm the fate of the unfortunate Fallo clan. He was unable, however, to provide any further information on the younger son, who it appears was an infrequent visitor to the chapel.</span></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVYcZ70ea383rb20Kw02XcoLsyM5fsF_L9ON8RMt0JWlt4yaTvW-KsTie-Sa2Vzc9gmPU8uqRA1Q2WA-9rXvjfJ_N7S901QzOn-b5AWs15mXZISIGZ0uRtEt-N5V_CNnfTwPF-IIqnZ74/s1600/fallo2_small.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="190" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVYcZ70ea383rb20Kw02XcoLsyM5fsF_L9ON8RMt0JWlt4yaTvW-KsTie-Sa2Vzc9gmPU8uqRA1Q2WA-9rXvjfJ_N7S901QzOn-b5AWs15mXZISIGZ0uRtEt-N5V_CNnfTwPF-IIqnZ74/s320/fallo2_small.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">The up country chapel where Cledwyn Fallo's birth is registered.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Talking to people around the village, I was able to discern from those who remembered the family that Cledwyn had been schooled privately at the family home by an elderly tutor of the Fallo patriarch's acquaintance, and that he had been considered something of a dissolute, with a reputation for drunkenness and philandering.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">It was at this point that I began worrying that I too was drifting into the world of mystery and adventure serials, for I found myself reasoning, like any number of fictional sleuths, that I may find some clues to Fallo's identity among his former lovers, inwardly quoting Inspector Daukyn's famous line, <i>Find the woman, and I shall find the man. Is it not ever the case?</i></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Of course, among the women of an age to have known Cledwyn Fallo, most were now thoroughly respectable ladies of the community, and not of a mind to recount intimacies of past romances to anyone, least of all a <i>reporter</i>, as the villagers insisted on calling me. However, one lady, a childhood sweetheart of sorts, for the sake of whose modesty I shall refer to as Miss Y____, was able to tell me something of the man.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">It appears that Miss Y____ and Cledwyn had courted, perhaps somewhat against the will of their parents. However, while not denying that her former beau had a reputation as something of a rake, the portrait she painted of the man was far from the boorish drunk that other villagers had described. In fact, after some time in conversation, she confided that she had kept in her possession some of his letters and poetry.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Upon hearing this, it may not surprise dear reader to learn that my heart skipped a beat. Far from being part of my work, this was now my quest. I tried not to let my eagerness get ahead of me, and guided Miss Y____ towards her memories of Cledwyn's life outside of their more intimately shared moments. Here, the story was more familiar. He would often take a horse to a nearby town and return only after several days, on some occasions missing items of clothing that he had left with, and on others sporting fresh items he had not had with him upon departure, and at the age of eighteen, he had left Ynys Sarff, announcing with a flourish that he would travel the empire.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Of Cledwyn's travels, Miss Y____ would say little, but it appears that he wrote seldom, and with diminishing frequency as time went by. Her next encounter with him came quite suddenly a year later, when, on a visit to Avonford, she saw him with a group of young men emerging from an ale house, and this again pricked my interest.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">It seems that Miss Y____ called his name twice, both times within easy hearing range, but that he did not respond. Then, in a fit of pique, she called after him once more, <i>Mr. Fallo!</i> Upon hearing this, his companions turned to face her one by one, until eventually Cledwyn had looked at Miss Y____, with what she described to me as the coldest of eyes, as if he were a stranger wearing the mask of her beloved. He had flashed a smile, extended a greeting that pirouetted insolently on the border between cordial and flirtatious, then turned and continued on his way.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">I must confess that at this time, I was convince that I had found the identity of Macsen Fallo. Clearly on his travels, the young Cledwyn had chosen to invent himself anew, beginning with a new name -- a pretension I gather not unknown amongst the young and foolish, including many of my own acquaintance -- and he had been caught in a clumsy predicament by a paramour from his other life. What made this episode so striking, however, was the alarm in Miss Y____'s voice as she re-lived the moment. Something in the look he had given her had filled her with fear. It was more than just a name, she insisted to me: he really was another person.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">In comparison, the letters and poetry were disappointingly inconclusive. Where Macsen Fallo used words like jagged rocks from a slingshot, the young Cledwyn Fallo was at best a poet of mediocre talents, and certainly one unsuited to the composition of romantic verse. Similarly, while his letters occasionally displayed a sharpness of wit when caricaturing mutual acquaintances in the village, they contained none of the controlled, righteous anger of Macsen's satirical grotesques.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">I returned to my inn conflicted, and was preparing to make my journey back to Caerafon, when I encountered the most extraordinary piece of luck. A reply to one of my speculative requests for associates of the Fallo clan arrived informing me that Cledwyn's old tutor, who I had assumed to have passed on long ago, was still alive, living in a cottage not far from the village, and would be amenable to a short interview.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">I was shown in by a plump, fussy nurse, but upon first meeting the old tutor, I admit that I suspected my contact of exaggerating his claims regarding the old gentleman's continued existence this side of the Grey Sea, for he seemed to me quite dead. Nevertheless, his eyes eventually flickered open, a sharp rattle from his throat began to form itself into words, and a slow, painstaking conversation ensued between us.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Cledwyn appeared to have been a gifted, if somewhat inattentive student, lavishing more care and attention on excuses for work not completed than he ever devoted to his actual studies. Where he did not allow himself to become idle was in his reading. I asked the tutor if he would be able to direct me towards works in which the young Cledwyn had shown a particular interest, and the old man was silent for the longest time.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">When I was beginning to suspect once more that he may have passed from this world, he rose from his seat and slowly made his way to the book shelf, returning with an ancient tome, whose title and author had long been lost from the cover to erosion and the elements. Laying it on the table before me, I opened to the title page, and opposite the delicately calligraphied frontispiece were the words<i> An Exegesis of The Martyrdom of Saint Macsen</i>, written by a monk named <i>Alwyn of Argoed</i>.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></span></div>
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">A saint's exegesis seemed a curious choice for a young man of the sort that Cledwyn Fallo appeared to have been, and yet there at last was the name. Cledwyn and Macsen Fallo were surely the same man, yet as Miss Y____ had seen that day in Avonford to her great discomfort, they were also very different men.</span></span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>To be continued...</i></span></span></div>
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dotdashhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06270663921267987965noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8720958827669276721.post-11418376939947024132012-10-03T04:48:00.000-07:002012-10-03T06:03:27.147-07:00In Search of Macsen Fallo (Part 1)<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">This story is in the form of a piece of fake journalism by a non-existent writer about a fictional person from within a fantasy world. It's written as a single eight or nine thousand word piece but I've broken it up into four pieces for the blog. This time I've kept the illustrations as simple, rough, freehand pencil sketches with all the attendant glaring errors in perspective and light sourcing partly for the atmosphere but mostly because I wanted to get it done quickly.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><i>Ian Martin (the actual writer for real)</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">* * *</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">In Search of Macsen Fallo (Part 1)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">by Elin Mynach</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">12th of Ash, Rigantona 12</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">I first encountered the work of Macsen Fallo as a child, and I am rather ashamed to say that it was the more lurid passages of his prose that initially attracted me. And I use the word "attracted" deliberately, because scornful of sentimentality though he may have been, Fallo was a master of seduction, using his rough words to caress, woo and ultimately manipulate his readers. In the end, it was his very success in this craft that may have proven his downfall.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">To many readers of this esteemed journal, it may seem shocking, indeed scandalous, that a girl barely on the cusp of adolescence should have access to such literature -- and as I hope to show, Fallo's work, in addition to its often sensational nature, is literary in more than plainly literal terms -- but you must understand that childhoods like mine are far from the average, albeit still all too common, in this grand, majestic, ever rotting, yet constantly growing hive of a city.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Growing up among the backstreets of the Caerafon slums, I witnessed humanity in its basest, most desperate forms. And yes, I myself was tempted -- I will not be so self-regarding as to say forced -- into certain criminal acts, before I was saved by the merciful grace of our Goddess. It was among these streets that certain pamphlets and serials circulated, telling tales that would scandalise any of our great nation's more refined and civilised households, and it was among these periodicals that the name Macsen Fallo was first spied by my younger self.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">It was a story called <i>Autumn of Blood</i>, and it told the story of an infantry troop based in Joyahon during the war. Caught up in a Lunaean offensive, our own Imperial Army's confused attempts at a counter-offensive, and an unexpectedly early onset of the rainy season, the group initially stumbles from disastrous engagement with the enemy to disease and near starvation in the jungle.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Part of what made it such a remarkable story was that the perennial enemy of such war tales, the accursed, fanatical Lunaean, was barely depicted at all. Indeed, the villain of the piece was the troop's lieutenant, a merchant's son named Gwythyr Brynmor, who continually leads his men on the most daring and dangerous of raids, taking them on forced marches over the most uncompromising terrain, all in service of his own ambitions.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">That Brynmor's character was a transparent yet tremendously unflattering representation of General Gwydion Brutus, later made Earl ap Penllew in recognition of his military accomplishments, was apparent to all. Indeed, an editorial piece in this very journal, from the year Lir 44 makes reference to this very story. For those whose memories do not stretch back that far, I shall quote from it here:</span><br />
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<i><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">...and while none at this periodical would be so ungracious as to question the military achievements of General Brutus, or the glory that he has heaped upon our great empire, still it would be most profoundly unpatriotic of us, were we to allow those achievements to make us blind against the immense human sacrifice with which our nation's glory has been bought.</span></i><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i> While we hear grand pronouncements from our generals about </i>The Glorious Fields of Brankadeh<i>, there are those among the less educated orders who are referring to the same battle as </i>General Brutus' Abbatoir<i>. Indeed, one satire, recently emerged from one of the less reputable printing houses west of the river, presents a most critical counterpoint to the official reports and has found not inconsiderable popularity among the uncouth masses.</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i> This story, called, and I hope my readers will forgive me for recounting the title on these pages, </i>The Autumn of Blood<i>, while undoubtedly a work of treasonous intent, is a clear critick of not only General Brutus' methods, but also his character. While we on the pages of </i>Y Cleddyf<i> deplore such personal attacks on our brave soldiers, it seems to us that the appearance of satires such as these asks questions of the methods by which the military hierarchy is working to achieve victory in this war.</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">The battlefield at Brankadeh showing the results of repeated bombardments. The structures depicted in the background are likely part of the ancient Sul Temple, miraculously undamaged by the cannon shells and fire.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Firstly, I must declare myself very much surprised upon spying reference to Fallo's story as far back as Lir 44. That he wrote and published such a piece with the war still an ongoing concern demonstrates that Fallo was a man possessed of strong convictions, and yet I think the writer of the above editorial misses something of Fallo's intention.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">It is perhaps natural that when we read, we interpret the author's words as though written for us and us alone, and it is my belief that that the <i>Cleddyf </i>editorial falls victim to this error. The writer, an educated man, clearly of good social standing, is shocked by Fallo's words and thus interprets them as an attempt to shock.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Fallo's audience, however, was not primarily composed of members of the educated classes, but of low paid slum dwellers, waifs and strays like myself, where we were lucky enough to be able to read, and members of the rank and file imperial soldiery. This audience was not shocked by the portrayal of Brynmor. On the contrary, we all recognised him, and people like him, as an everyday fixture in our lives: the cruel overseer, the abusive <i>kidsman</i>, the self-serving commanding officer.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">At this point, it is perhaps instructive to return to the story of <i>Autumn of Blood</i> and see where Fallo takes it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Horribly lost after weeks of torments at the hands of the dreaded Lunaean, of disease, and under the ravages of nature, the troop comes upon a hitherto unknown enemy fort. Scouting the enemy's defences, the troop learns that they are less than a day's march from their own front lines, and for the first time in as long as they can remember, the men begin to feel hope. Brynmor, on the other hand, notes that the Lunaean defences are poorly manned and undersupplied, and concocts a plan to take the fort. Of the sixteen or so men remaining, he calculates, perhaps as many as two thirds will survive, and he will be a hero.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The night before the planned attack, one of the men cuts Brynmor's throat with a bayonet. None of the men confesses to the deed, and the story never tells us who was responsible. The Troop Sergeant, a man named Gwilt, leads the men back to Sarffi lines, where chaos reigns.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Their battalion no longer exists in any form that they recognise, having been wiped out and restocked with fresh recruits twice since the troop became lost, and the army itself is a maelstrom of conflicting orders. Gwilt desperately tries to untangle the chain of command, but instead is merely sent from command post to command post, ricocheting from one to the other like a billiard ball. One day, a clerk arrives at the troop's encampment and asks, "Are you Lieutenant Brynmor?" After a moment, Gwilt replies, "Yes."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Uncertain of what to do with this unexpectedly returned troop, and finding itself suddenly embarrassingly overmanned, the new battalion commander gives Gwilt a medal and sends the troop on a new and even more dangerous mission into the jungle, in the hope of losing them once and for all this time. Gwilt, however, has learned from his predecessor's errors, and instead leads the troop on what an educated man of class would no doubt describe as an orgy of looting, pillage and carousing. The story concludes with two soldiers, enlisted men of Gwilt's troop and minor characters throughout, sitting on a ragged hilltop at dusk, alone but for a handful of goats, passing a bottle of wine between them as a battle rages below. The men argue drunkenly over which side is <i>ours</i> and which <i>theirs</i>, and in the end, both turn their backs on the field of war and make their way back to their comrades in a nearby village.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">It is understandable that the <i>Cleddyf </i>editorial neglects to mention this latter portion of the story, for the simple reason that it no doubt defied the writer's ability to analyse. To him it might perhaps have seemed a cautionary tale against the depths to which good men will sink when failed by their leadership. However, to the minds of Fallo's true readers, his message is clear. He is advocating mutiny.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">What appears as no more than wonton debauchery in the eyes of men of education and breeding, is little different to what Caerafon slum folk might experience on the night of the Festival of the Dead. Fallo employs rough language, and does not flinch from depicting violence and brutality among the soldiers -- I have heard accounts of enough rapes and murders, both on the streets of Caerafon and behind the locked bedroom doors of well-to-do families, to know that such things are a reality of life among all classes -- but it is clear that what he is depicting is in general intended to gratify his audience, not warn them.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">As I intimated at the beginning of this piece, it was the more lurid descriptions contained in this story to which I was first attracted. However, let us not be so coy as to deny that we all retain a small weakness for the scandalous, romantic and horrifying. Indeed, the legends of our dear Goddess' Holy Martyrs are rich in events that would have satisfied the most dedicated readers of popular serials of my childhood such as <i>The Dread Pirate Gethin Claw</i>, <i>Adventures of Lightning Cadell</i>, or <i>Diabolical Mysteries of Caer Gwaed</i>. And on this level alone, it must be acknowledged that Macsen Fallo stood out from the above tales as a master of his craft, with an instinctive, almost devilish ability to tap into his readers' basest desires and feelings.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">What made him such an intriguing and, in the eyes of the governing classes at least, dangerous writer, is the way that he employed that craft to publicly tear at the edifices of respect and deference that our nation has built around our generals, our politicians, and even our most exalted imperial family.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Some of his works are more subtle, and indeed circumspect in how they disguise the victims of their satire, and there remains to this day some debate in alternative literary circles as to the real target of <i>The Cursed Treasure of Yuna Mette</i> -- in this writer's opinion Fallo's true masterwork. On the other hand, tales such as <i>The Horned Crown</i> are even in these more tolerant times thrilling in their audacity. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>To be continued...</i></span>dotdashhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06270663921267987965noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8720958827669276721.post-36539420129760059682012-09-27T07:06:00.000-07:002012-09-27T07:16:36.329-07:00The Other Side of the Closet (Part 3 - FINAL)<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">This is the third part of the story, </span><a href="http://plotshield.blogspot.jp/2012/05/other-side-of-closet-part-1.html" style="background-color: white; color: #999999; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; line-height: 18px; text-align: left; text-decoration: none;">part one of which you can read here</a><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px; line-height: 18px;"> and <a href="http://plotshield.blogspot.jp/2012/06/other-side-of-closet-part-2.html">part two is here</a>.</span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;">The Other Side of the Closet (Part 3)</span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Ian Martin</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Aya hid beneath a wide-brimmed sunhat and peered furtively over the tops of her dark glasses as I approached. She looked down the main road in both directions, then grabbed my arm and dragged me down a side street.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">The sun was too bright and my vision blurred with the impact of every footstep I took, but I eventually managed to form words.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">“Where are we going?”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">“You stink of alcohol enough as it is, so it’s best if you keep your mouth shut,” came her terse reply.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">As we threaded our way through the quiet, mostly deserted streets she would occasionally stop and consult a small, hand-drawn map. After a while I realized that we were quite near the apartment. I was just about to ask her again when she stopped outside a house.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">“Here, suck on this for a while so she can’t smell your breath.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Aya handed me a pack of mints. I took a few out and popped them in my mouth as she knocked on the door.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>A lady in her 50s answered. Aya took off her hat and glasses, and smiled warmly.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>“Hello, my name’s Aya Kitagawa and this is my friend Shunsuke Machida. I spoke to you on the phone earlier.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>“Oh yes, from the university. Please come in.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>We took our shoes off and the lady led us into the living room. She served us tea and Aya made some polite remarks about the weather. The TV was on in the background -- the kind of show where minor celebrities try out various recipes and dutifully pronounce each one delicious -- but all my attention was absorbed by the photograph beside it on the cabinet. A teenage girl in a school uniform smiled shyly at the camera; she was a couple of years younger but there was no question about her identity. It was Chiyo.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The lady noticed me looking and broke off.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>“Yes, that’s her. She was in the second grade of high school then. Never really liked having her photo taken.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>She smiled sadly.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">After we left, Aya was silent for a while. She felt bad about lying to Chiyo’s mother and so did I. Despite the dated sounding name she used, Chiyo spoke in a modern dialect, and presumably she had some connection to the apartment she was haunting, so over the past couple of weeks Aya had painstakingly searched out information on every suicide in the last ten years within a couple of kilometers of the apartment. Next she had narrowed them down to the most likely cases, then finally to this house. Then after last night's failure, she had called and told the lady that we were students, which I suppose was still kind of true in her case, and that we were collecting research on social problems among Japanese youth.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The mother had been so keen to help. Her husband was always away, working in Hokkaido, and she was obviously desperately lonely with only the TV to keep her company. She had shown us all the photos that she had of her daughter, and told us in loving detail about her life. How she had once eaten washing up detergent as a child, how she had played Cinderella in a class play when she was ten, how she had driven her parents to distraction with her terrible grades in mathematics, and how proud they had been when she had passed her university entrance exams.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">What she still didn’t know, and what still tortured her, was why, at the age of nineteen, her daughter had jumped from the top of the main campus building and killed herself.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">It was a short, solemn walk to the apartment and as the ugly yellow building appeared round the corner, Aya said goodbye and headed for the station. She didn’t know what to do with what we’d just discovered any more than I did.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Back inside the apartment I sat at the kitchen table, facing the closet, and waited.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Time went by, one hour moved into the next, but nothing happened. Maybe Aya had scared Chiyo off after the showdown last night. No, not Chiyo. I knew her real name now.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Nevertheless, as the sun began to set and the natural light began to dim, the closet door opened slightly and an eye peeked out from behind.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">“Wh- what do you want?”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Her voice was small, with a slight tremble.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">“I think we need to talk,” I said, adding with what I hoped was a friendly smile, “I’ve been waiting for you all afternoon.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">She moved into the kitchen but didn’t sit down.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">“Just because I’m dead, doesn’t mean I don’t have a life,” she replied haughtily.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">I wasn’t sure if she was joking so I didn’t laugh, but she’d pricked my curiosity. Of course there was another place she went when she wasn’t here. Keiichi had hinted at that before.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">“What’s it like in there?” I gestured at the closet, “You know, on the other side.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">She pulled out a chair and slumped down in it, her face suddenly seeming quite childlike beneath the old-fashioned hairstyle and delicately applied makeup.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">“Meetings,” she spat, “Loads of meetings. You don’t have any idea how boring it is.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">A thousand more questions suddenly jumped to mind but I had to force myself to stay focused. I shifted in my chair and fixed my eyes on her.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">“Why do you keep coming back here, Saki?”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">She looked back at me, stunned, for a few moments. The corner of her mouth flickered, as if she was trying to smile, but her eyes were filled with the most unimaginable sadness. I waited for tears to come, but she fought them back with all her strength.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">“Saki...” she tried to laugh, but it came out as an unhappy, strangled, choking sound, “I remember now.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">"The bus was always late," Saki said, her voice unsteady, "I always had to wait."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>I remembered the sight of the bright yellow apartment building as I was walking home, and the smell of frying vegetables that sometimes wafted from the kitchen as I was passing the bus stop outside. Saki went to the sideboard and picked up a knife as she continued talking.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span> "There were always the nicest smells coming from this apartment..."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>I eyed the knife warily, but she just went straight to the fridge and started gathering up vegetables and fruit.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>"We're supposed to put all this behind us when we go in there," she gestured to the closet, "but those smells, waiting for the bus on a chilly winter's day, were the one thing I couldn't forget."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>"So you had to come back."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>She nodded and started chopping the grapes and celery.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Saki talked about the other side only in the vaguest terms because she herself didn't really understand it. The dead do all their thinking and planning in terms longer than we can imagine, but she still had one foot in the world of the living and whatever I asked her about, she would always eventually turn the topic back to food.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>With the knife and the vegetables in her hands, she had regained a little of her composure and I started to see why Keiichi found comfort in her. Saki's mother had vividly described what a gentle child she had been, and listening to her talk I could see what her mother had meant.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>I asked what she was going to do now. She looked at the half-finished salad.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>"Now you've made me remember, it doesn't feel the same coming back here. There are too many things I can't do: I can't even eat this stupid salad."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Saki put down the knife and stood up.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>"Are you going to be alright?" I asked.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>"I'll get used to it," she replied, and walked back towards the closet.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>As she turned her back, I thought of her mother again and the question that had been nagging at my mind came blurting out of my mouth.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>"Why did you kill yourself?"</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Saki gave this a moment's thought and then replied, sadly, "It seemed so important at the time."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>She opened the closet door and left.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">A bit before midnight Keiichi came home. He saw the unfinished salad, saw me still sitting at the kitchen table, and went into his room without speaking.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>A little while afterwards, I went back my own room. As I lay on my futon, staring at the ceiling, my phone buzzed. A message from Keiichi.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span><i>-She's gone, hasn't she?</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>I thought about how I could explain everything using just the tiny screen of my phone, but there was no way.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span><i>-Yes.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>And that was that.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">The next couple of months were pretty bleak. For a few days Keiichi and I just went about our lives, barely speaking, and then one day he too was gone.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>A few more days and all his things followed him. I heard from a friend that he'd gone back to his family's place in Sendai, leaving Aya and I behind like a bad memory. The estate agents panicked a bit and even knocked another few thousand off the rent to persuade me to stay. Paying it all on my own was still difficult though, so I found myself working just a little bit harder and looking into full-time job vacancies just a bit more seriously. I was surprised to find that the harder I worked, the more I found myself enjoying it, but something still didn't feel right. I'd expected to feel guilty for betraying Keiichi, but without knowing why, whenever I thought of him I just found myself getting angry.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>One day a paycheck from a big advertising job came through. I went to a club to celebrate and got talking to a girl called Yuka. I told her that I often got mixed up between Yukas, Yukis and Yukos; she laughed and said that was cute.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>We exchanged phone numbers and left seperately. As I walked home the next morning I wondered whether she'd have gone home with me if I'd asked, but what was the point? I hadn't asked.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The old man in the first floor apartment was there as usual. He didn't say anything this time. Just looked at me and shook his head as if to say, "Stupid boy."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>And I was stupid, I realised. I was angry at Keiichi because he'd taken the easy option. The option of doing what was comfortable and what was easy. The option of disengaging from his life. He'd behaved like me, wasting his life, and so he was stupid too. He and I had always been too similar, and I wanted to tell someone that I wasn't going to make that mistake anymore.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>I picked up my phone and after a couple of rings Aya's voice answered.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>"Shunsuke? What are you doing up at this time? That's not like you."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Her usual edge of sarcasm was there, but she seemed happy to hear from me. It was always like that with her. She could be sharp, even cruel sometimes, but when she was happy you could always tell. You just had to work a bit.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>"Listen, there's something I want to tell you..."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><i>End.</i></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: 11px;"><span id="goog_436940939"></span><span id="goog_436940940"></span></span>dotdashhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06270663921267987965noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8720958827669276721.post-32988413671898259972012-06-29T20:30:00.000-07:002012-09-27T10:10:31.718-07:00The Other Side of the Closet (PART 2)<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This is the second part of the story, <a href="http://plotshield.blogspot.jp/2012/05/other-side-of-closet-part-1.html">part one of which you can read here</a>.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: medium;">The Other Side of the Closet (Part 2)</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">Ian Martin</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small;">Getting rid of the ghost, of course, wasn't straightforward. While Aya flung herself into research about exorcism, Keiichi started stocking up the fridge with all kinds of foodstuffs that neither he nor I would have ever known how to cook. After a few days we started seeing signs of the ghost again.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small;"><span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>It started with salads. Simple Caesar salad gave way to taramosalata with sliced cucumber and carrots, and then more complex cooked dishes such as bouillabaisse or ricotta cheese cannelloni started to appear. She seemed to prefer Mediterranean cuisine. For a week or so she worked like this, carefully avoiding us when we were at home, and going on her culinary excursions while we were out. We'd come home and find them left on the sideboard, and Keiichi soon got into the habit of taking them to work with him for lunch. Then, one night we met her again.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>From the street I could smell gently simmering vegetables and spices drifting from the open kitchen window and when I entered the apartment, sure enough I found her there, cooking and talking to Keiichi. She was wearing the same old-fashioned kimono, and seemed to be making another pasta dish. Her hairstyle was also quite dated, like something from the late Meiji period, but she spoke like a normal, modern Japanese girl. As she heard me come in, she suddenly stopped speaking and spun round. There was a moment where it looked like she might run back into the closet, but Keiichi quickly spoke up.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>"It's okay," he reassured her, before turning to me, "She's not doing any harm."</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>She continued looking at me, not with Aya's cold glare but with something far more fragile and vulnerable. I didn't know what to say so I just let out an annoyed grunt and stomped off into my room. I put on some music so that I wouldn't have to listen to whatever idiotic conversation they were having. It was typical of Keiichi to find a ghost in our apartment and immediately start making friends with her. No, not "her", "it", I corrected myself. The ghost was an "it".</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small;">Later that evening my phone buzzed and there was a message from Keiichi asking if he could come in. I opened the door and he was there in the kitchen, alone with two plates of spaghetti in arrabiata sauce on the table in front of him.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>"Just knock if you want to come in." I told him, and then went back to slumping grumpily on my futon.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>He offered me one of the plates but I refused, so he put it on the floor near my pillow and started tucking into his own food.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>"She says they call her Chiyo over on the other side, but she doesn't think that's her real name," he explained. "The clothes, the hair, the name, they're not really hers. Apparently the dead are pretty conservative when it comes to fashion."</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>"Why are you telling me this?" I snapped back. I couldn't see how he had accepted this creature, this thing, so easily into our lives.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>"Don't you think that's kind of sad though? She doesn't remember anything about her life, not even her real name. She doesn't even know how she died."</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>I could see what he was doing. He was trying to engage my sympathy. No longer just an "it", the ghost now had a name and feelings. I wasn't going to let myself get sucked into this, and I had to somehow make Keiichi understand how stupid he was being.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>"Come on, Keiichi, think about this for a moment. What about Aya? Even she agrees with me!"</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>He looked away from me when I said this and his voice dropped, losing confidence.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>"I don't know what Aya thinks. I never really know."</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small;">Aya let her feelings known clearly enough the next evening when she showed up at our apartment with a priest in tow.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>"This is Father Moran. He has a lot of experience with exorcisms," she explained.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Keiichi looked at them both glumly. Father Moran was an older middle-aged white man, wearing a black shirt and white priest’s collar under a grey sweater. When Aya had said she was researching exorcism, my image had been of a Buddhist monk burning incense, reading religious texts and noisily shaking his staff. Looking at Father Moran, however, a thought struck me and I couldn’t hold back a smile.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Aya had a very strict sense of style and tended to view all things European as inherently superior to their Japanese equivalent. To her, Father Moran had obviously seemed the most chic way of dealing with the ghost. I grinned at him and tried out a few creaky greetings in English, French, Italian, Spanish, and lastly German, but he replied in Japanese.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>"I intend to get directly to the point. Ghosts do not belong among us. They linger here for many reasons, but it all comes down to one thing:” he stated, with businesslike certainty, “an unwillingness to let go of this world and move on to the next.”</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The ceremony itself was pretty similar to how I’d imagined a Buddhist one would be. There was no incense but Father Moran gave each of us a candle to hold. He lit them one by one and Keiichi glared at him as the priest reached into his pocket and used the last candle to light a cigarette. He took a few puffs and started to read from a book that could have been the Bible or could have been Harry Potter for all I could tell.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Time went by. None of us moved and there was no sound except for Father Moran’s monotone voice, reciting the words from his book.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>After a while there was a noise, then movement. The closet door creaked open a crack, then a little more. Slowly fingers, then a lock of hair, then an eye ppoked round the corner. The priest kept on speaking, quickening the pace of his words. Chiyo’s head was now peering around the edge of the closet door, clearly confused about what was going on.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>She stepped out into the kitchen, a look of panic in her eyes. Something seemed to be happening to her, but her body kept on moving towards the centre of the kitchen.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>“Come on, let’s stop this,” exclaimed Keiichi. “She’s obviously terrified!”</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Father Moran upped the pace of his chanting once more. Chiyo dropped to her knees, clasped her hands over her ears and screamed.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>All the lights in the room shattered.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small;">In the darkness, the body of the ghost was tinged with a pale blue glow. She continued to scream, clutching at her face and shaking her head furiously from side to side.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The priest, Father Moran, continued reading from his book. I stole a glance at him and could see small beads of sweat collecting on his brow. In my hands the candle I was holding flickered erratically.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>“That’s enough! I can’t do this!” shouted Keiichi, throwing down his candle, “Look at what this is doing to her. It isn’t right!”</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>My candle flickered again and a saucepan suddenly flew across the kitchen, clattering into the wall on the other side of the room. Then more pieces of kitchenware followed: a frying pan, a wooden spoon, a pot, a coffee mug, a bowl. A plate hurtled towards us and struck Father Moran, shattering against his head and knocking him to the floor.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Keiichi continued pleading, this time at the ghost, Chiyo, begging her to stop. Pots and plates continued hurtling around the room though, apparently at random. Chiyo looked up at Keiichi, her face blank, uncomprehending. She cast her glance across me and then her eyes met Aya's.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Aya returned Chiyo's gaze unflinchingly and the two of them remained locked in that position. I’d been on the receiving end of some of Aya’s stares in the past so I could sympathise with what Chiyo must be going through. Sure enough, the kitchenware gradually stopped moving. Keiichi and I watched in silence as Chiyo started to tremble slightly and what looked like tears began to well in her eyes.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Suddenly, Chiyo stamped her foot in anger and frustration, then ran back through the closet door.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Aya helped Father Moran back up, apologising and asking if he needed anything for his head. He said he was fine but would be grateful if he could borrow her lighter. Keiichi ignored them as they left and Aya threw a vicious glance at the back of his head before slamming the door shut behind her.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Keiichi went to the closet and swung it open. There was nothing inside of course, except for the things we were storing there. He took out the dustpan and brush and started sweeping up the broken glass of the shattered light bulbs. After a while he flung down the dustpan.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>“Shunsuke, let’s get a drink.”</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small;">An old college friend of ours, Takao, was deejaying at a cafe near Akasaka-Mitsuke that night. I still did the occasional job designing flyers for him so I was able to get us on the guest list. At first Keiichi grumbled about just wanting to go to a nearby <i>izakaya</i>, but once we got inside he started to lighten up.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>“It’s like being back at university, isn’t it?” Keiichi said as we entered the room. He was right. We'd fallen in with an arty crowd pretty early on and had spent a lot of time at places like this, listening to bossa nova or 1960s French pop, and watching stylishly dressed girls doing performance art. I looked around. Sure enough, in the corner of the room there were two girls doing finger painting on a huge piece of board. It looked like a picture of two giraffes kissing, but it didn't matter what it was; the girls seemed to be enjoying themselves.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>"What's going on with you and that ghost?" I asked as I returned with our beers. Keiichi sighed.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>"You think I'm crazy for getting so attached to Chiyo, right? I know that."</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>It had been at a party like this that we'd met Aya for the first time. She was majoring in French and she'd translated the lyrics of Francoise Hardy songs for us.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>"I think you're crazy for making Aya so angry."</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>"Come on, Shunsuke, you hate Aya."</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>"Only 'cos she hates me, and that's not the point. She's your girlfriend."</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Keiichi fell silent for a moment and tapped his fingers on the table. He took a small sip of his beer, and then a larger one. Eventually he spoke up.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>"You don't know what it's like. You just go through life at your own pace and do whatever you please, but I just get work pile up on top of more work."</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>"I understa..." I started to say, but he cut me off, raising his voice slightly.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>"And 'cos I'm the new boy, I get to be the butt of all the jokes when we're drinking with clients. They made me drink beer out of a shoe."</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>I started to laugh.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>"Shut up, Shunsuke. Aya just makes it all worse. She's always there at the back of my mind, expecting me to work myself to death, pushing me to do more of everything. I can't deal with it anymore!"</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>We drank in silence for a while after that and I realised that Keiichi really didn't understand Aya at all. Sure, she hated me for being lazy and unreliable, but it wasn't because of work. She was studying for her masters at the moment, as well as juggling two jobs and practicing for her golf tournaments. What Aya cared about was making sure no moment in her life was wasted, and yet here was Keiichi thinking about leaving her for a dead girl.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>After a while Keiichi took a taxi home, muttering something about work the next day. I stayed until morning and staggered home, drunk, early the next day. The old man on the first floor was sitting in his window, listening to the radio as usual. He cast a suspicious glare at me.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>"Any more noise like last night and I'll call the police, understand?"</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>I was woken up by my phone just after midday, with my hangover raging. My head pounding and my mouth feeling like a cat had died in it while I was asleep, I answered.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>"Shunsuke, get up and meet me outside Doutor in twenty minutes."</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Aya hung up.</span></div>
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<i>To be continued...</i></div>
dotdashhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06270663921267987965noreply@blogger.com0