Jawbreaker - Incomplete

Great song. There's a fuzzy sound to the recording that works for this style of music.

"Fortunately, there are pleasures and joys, great and small, that help make our ineluctable daily dose of human suffering go down a little easier." -anonymous

http://dartagnanbaltimore.bandcamp.com/



Rad new band from Baltimore. Saw them with Spraynard last week. Brothers in bands rock.

Anger by Thich Nhat Hanh (2001)

On page 40, Thich Nhat Hanh describes three statements one can make to the one that one is angry with:

1. "'Darling, I suffer. I am angry. I want you to know it.'"

2. "'Darling, I am doing my best. I am taking good care of my anger. For me and for you also. I don't want to explode, to destroy myself and destroy you. I am doing my best. I am putting into practice what I have learned from my teacher, from my sangha.'" The author writes, "This [sincere expression of] faithfulness will inspire respect and confidence in the other party."

3. "'Darling, I need your help.'" Hanh writes, "This is a very strong statement, because usually when you're angry, you have the tendency to say, 'I don't need you.'"

Jesus may have expressed a similar sentiment when he said, "Love thine enemy as your self."

Dalai Lama: "The first drawback of anger is that it destroys your inner peace; the second is that it distorts your view of reality. If you think about this and come to understand that anger is really unhelpful, that it is only destructive, you can begin to distance yourself from anger."

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Watching the movie, "Radically Simple".

http://radicalsimplicity.org/jim_merkel.html

Things I am doing to try to help conserve our environment:

1. Avoiding animal-derived food products except honey. Growing plants for food is much more efficient than growing animals for food.

2. Avoiding purchase / consumption of bottled beverages (i.e. soda, energy drinks, single serve teas, etc.). This saves a lot of packaging and the resources that go to creating it.

3. I get a lot of junk mail. Professional magazines that I never read. Credit card offers. Both at my home and at my office. All the energy that goes into preparing and transporting this mail is just wasted resources. Currently, I am trying to reduce it using https://www.paperkarma.com/.


Things I do that are probably harmful for the environment that I could change:
1. Drink coffee daily, at least in the morning. Coffee can only come from long distances away and so takes a lot of resources to get from where it is grown to me here in North America.

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Tip: You can lift weights for the duration of a song. Say, "Rebel Girl" by Bikini Kill, at two minutes and forty-three seconds. It's still worthwhile for the health value.

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I thought this was pretty rad. I went out (i.e. emusic.com) and bought Tanya Davis' first two LPs. They're pretty cool, too. NEXT

Liked this image for some reason...

found here: http://backtotheworld.net/2010/12/17/friday-pictures-tim-barber/.

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Clumsy Carl - Notes on Good-Bye by Yoshihiro Tatsumi (Drawn & Quarterly 2010)

Yoshihiro Tatsumi, Good-Bye (Drawn & Quarterly: 2010)

I showed up at Atomic Books tonight (Thursday) only to see Benn and Rachel locking up the darkened store. It says Wednesday right on the Atomic Books Reading Club Facebook page.  Wednesday night, I was sitting home alone, re-reading the stories in the book, tapping notes into my netbook, eager to attend the meeting having taken the time beforehand to reflect on this reading experience. Oh, Clumsy Carl, you've done it again.

I am a novice to this genre of literary comics-style short stories.  The first story, "Hell", has a film noir quality to it. It depicts the unpleasant truth that atrocity destroys the wicked as well as the innocent. 

There is a bit more traditional interiority in Tatsumi’s characters versus those of Adrian Tomine in the latter’s Summer Blonde, which we read last month. Perhaps it is the voice of the narrator, or the use of thought bubbles or the depiction of his nightmares (e.g., in “Hell,” the burned mother and son like something out of Day of the Dead, the statue of the hitman/son murdering the mother).  We see the conflicting phases of the wartime photographer’s moods as he feels horror, grief, shame, pride, shock, shame, grim resolution, desolation. It felt a bit odd to me, culturally, at the end, that he still felt shame at committing murder, even though when he did so he was certain the victim was wicked. There was a slight question in my mind that maybe the man who had blackmailed him was not really the son. Still, the blackmailer was wicked.

In the next story,  “Just a Man” we a see a theme developing with the mostly male, mostly impotent, protagonists of these stories. In “Hell” the photographer described himself as " wandering through hell like a zombie" (41). In "Just a Man" the dejected retiree businessman describes himself as a “walking corpse” (51). Yet within this milieu of death-in-life the lead character still shows a range of emotions. He feels dejection at retirement, the virility of desire, shame, disgust with his wife, disgust with himself, bitterness. The ending is strange, with him pissing on the cannon, a desecration of what for him was a symbol of virility, courage, glory, a purposeful life.

"Sky Burial" had a gothic horror feel to it (a la "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe). A young man is haunted by the thought of buzzards devouring his corpse. Everywhere he goes, he sees them circling in the sky. Again, there is the theme of death-in-life. They are circling because he is already dead, or because he feels that way, though he is still walking around. He hides from buzzards in a dive bar during the day. He breaks up with his girlfriend because he is too depressed to feel love. He is so checked-out of reality he doesn’t even notice the stench of a corpse, dead for three months, in the room next to his. After this grisly discovery, the other men move out of the rooming house. He is left alone in the vacant house and it is shown falling apart, gradually being taken over by weeds and stray animals. Interestingly, it is the artwork here that gives a sense that the young man actually starts to feel at ease in this environment. I think this was my favorite story in the collection, actually. But maybe this is just because I am a fan of gothic horror.

In "The Rash," a man living alone in the countryside struggles with a rash that comes and goes over his entire body. Again, I may be missing some cultural experience in interpreting the story’s central symbol, a mushroom, which seems to suggest both the prospect of suicide (because it is poisonous) and penile eroticism. I didn't quite get what the end scene depicted.  Did he place that mushroom on the young woman’s bed? Was it an old symbolic communication of sexual desire?

"Woman in the Mirror": Slightly different feel to this one. The boy who was a cross-dresser turns out to be a happy family man (or so we are shown). It has in common with the other stories an anxiety on the part of the main character over his inability to live up to the cultural imperatives of manhood.

"Night Falls Again": This one is interesting mainly because there's no real plot. It just follows around a nameless impotent pornhound for a little while. His aspect with the glasses and bowl haircut kind of reminds me of Willam T. Vollmann's author photos.

"Life is so Sad": "This is so sad...why are you women like this...?" (164). The woman are somewhat unflatteringly portrayed in these stories as either unattainable young princesses or castrating bitches: greedy old wives and prostitutes (“let's milk those creeps dry again tonight” (155))). The heroine of “Life Is So Sad” seems to be an exception. We are given a glimpse into the mind of the unattainable young princess and the shit she has to put up with, with the impotent old man that usually leads the stories taking a secondary role.    

In an interview I saw on Youtube, Tatsumi said when he wrote the story 70% of the work was done. This is an interesting view into the process. One wonders how the act of creating the artwork influences the subsequent revision of the story, if at all.

I liked the use of ellipses in the speech bubbles to indicate when a character was rendered speechless by another’s speech or action.

I wondered how these stories could be commercial. Yes, there are aspects of film noir, gothic horror, and pornography, but in general they are not at all like the flights of fantasy, adventure, or horror one usually associates with comic books. One wonders how the author made a living writing/drawing these in the 1970s in Japan, a time before what I consider to be the development of “literary” comic books in the West (e.g., those of Art Spiegelman).

The stories have in common a sense that life after the war, after the atomic bombs, though externally "back to normal" with crowded streets, prostitution, gambling, etc. was really a zombified normal - with the characters always returning to a state of bitter, empty, impotent perseverance (contemplating suicide but too cowardly or weak to undertake it).

All in all, it was a very interesting reading experience, but it doesn’t rank among my favorites.