THE ASSISTANT 2019: SIGNS OF ABUSE

 

Something's wrong within your friend circle, the vibe is off and there are signs of some power struggle. Or maybe it's online; a vacuum of non-information left like a gas signature.

The Assistant (2019) is a movie totally dedicated to the semi-invisible signs left by abuse, in this case, within the film industry. The main character swims through these signs, at the height of the film coming into direct opposition with the source, before returning to normality.

Signs of abuse modeled in the film:

• loud sounds no one will discuss
• misogynisitic jokes/ casually cruel jokes about known persons
  
• exhausted, unhappy people
• confused victims seeking help ineffectually
• the naïve positivity of pre-victims sticking out in context
• people giving up on the possibility of justice 
• direct verbal abuse, and a culture thereof
• threats to destroy people's careers, etc.
• disposability-- a revolving door of people
• new faces being brought in, and the haggard faces of those leaving or on their way out
• things happening where they shouldn't-- typically, sex.

If there exists a pathway for many people to enter, then exit someone's life, this may be a conduit for abuse. Ties of anonymity benefit those who burn through people. And abusers require fresh streams of people constantly.

This is sort of the human condition, too. We are all, mostly, folding new strings of people into our lives, and then watching some of them leave. Abuse, then, may leave patterns visible in the peoples exiting one's life. Outsiders may observe these patterns, subtle, semi-invisible, instinctually perceived...

LUST-BLOGGERY

 I think so often Lust, and by extension, Blogging, is an admission that we feel something, want to love, want to be a part of it.

An admission of desire, a seeming want to compete in a worldwide network of such admissions. To lust is to struggle, (as it is to Blog).

Lust is the desire to participate. To not only join the universal human struggle but to direct it, at least a little. For your direction to matter.

The experience we have culminates in taste. Lust is often the desire to have our tastes be actualized, applied, and viewed. Lust is tied to our desire for family to support us. Lust is a desire for the world to accept us. 

We are on here because of Lust. The desire to be read is Lustful. Publishing absolutely is a seeking of appreciation. Selling yourself as a person with attractive ideas.

This is why there's this glamour-preening network of bloggers, tweeters, facebook-users... Trying to meld themselves into appealing ink. We want to be read, we want to feel the adulation.  

Disco Elysium Review'd

I am constantly battered by ideas and impulses. There is no definitive goal that seems easy to achieve. The more concrete the outcome, the more it competes with a world of outcomes.

The feeling in my life currently is: sedentary body stresses. The thin headache from morning coffee and its aftertaste which I still have from yesterday. 

I finished up Disco Elysium today, it was cathartic. Existential art speaks to my stranded being. It's a video game, and my tenuous roleplay within it led to tenuous outcomes.

This game offers context for everything. This context underwrites and complicates all of your choices. Each story thread usually has deep rewards near the end that you will often get locked out of ever achieving. This tightwaddedness is good for games which use secrets as currency. In many dialogue-path adventure stories, the depth of the threads feels achievable after one playthrough. But Disco Elysium withholds a lot.

It makes you reliant on the game's market-society of actors. They want different compromises or are simply uninterested with you. Dealing with them often implies future losses.

I think having to permanently fail a lot in order to bargain for whatever (petty?) ultimate goal you have in mind is a good place to be for catharsis. I was invited to have troubles and I am happy that I ended up with battle scars, lost pathways, and negotiated victories. That's life!  (Post Written May 16th 2020)

J. Simmon's "House" Review'd

This silent dialogue comic about teenagers exploring abandoned buildings seems to be normal and relatively straightforward, but it's the unexplained details which stick in your mind after you read "House". 

Plenty of small romantic moments get explored by this text with a look or a remark. And then the text moves on. These tangents proceed up to a point.

The result is the feeling of a few distinct characters trapped within the comic itself. Peering around corners, shining a flashlight, inevitably caged. The story of a life lived to the end is the story of the book as you read it. 

But there is also something constrictive about the comic format. Panels baby... and length. The read may be short, but drawing comix is so, so labor intensive.... At the end of "House", as his been noted by many critics... the book itself seems to enclose the characters completely. 

JOSH SIMMONS’S “THE FURRY TRAP” REVIEW’D: HORROR AND INTIMACY

Horror is a form of self-inflicted intimacy, alike taking a hot bath, it creates intimacy and stimulation between you and your senses. 

 

 

October 18th, 2002: “The Ring” is released. I am 10. Although I only witness the film piecemeal through ads, a parody sequence in Scary Movie III, and through a recounting of the film by my dad on a long hike, the horror of the film settles deep within me.

The idea of “The Ring”’s antagonist Samara hiding in my closet tortures me for months. During the day I am beset by childhood social anxiety. At night I could not rest my ear against the pillow without thinking my heartbeat was, somehow, Samara.

 

I had no hope but to wait. Day after day I would attend long lectures by struggling teachers, and night after night I had no reliable peace. I didn’t get out of the school system for years but my escape from Samara happened sooner.

My family kept a library of Stephen King novels, and despite my childhood knowledge that Horror could destroy my nightly peace for weeks, I took those King books for a spin. Surprisingly, they didn’t terrorize me like “The Ring” did.

 

 

I found myself enjoying the often erotic weirdness and terror the King books spewed out. I got acclimated to whatever Samara struck me with; the nightmares slacked off, though I was still cautious that watching a horror movie risked hours and hours of panic... 

 

Sometime around 2015: I attend a book tour for The Furry Trap at The Cyberpunk Apocalypse, an artist-owned residence and performance space. The author of The Furry Trap, Josh Simmons, is there. I opened this particular graphic short-story collection and was appalled.  Grody Not-Safe-For-Life Alt-Comix were something I was familiar with but I had only to read a few panels from The Furry Trap’s “Cockbone” story before I was once again struck with the knowledge that the media in front of me would give me nightmares. I hurriedly stopped reading and left the event.

A similar thing happened when I looked into The 120 Days of Sodom a few years back. In the main public library’s stacks, I flipped through the original translation of 120 Days, read a brief paragraph about feeding a young girl a special diet for the purposes of coprophagia, and I put the book down. I think I can remember consciously repressing what I had just read.

Naked Lunch may have done it, or maybe it was one of my friends. In my late twenties (2016+) I began to actively pour through stories of the worst horrors. Last Podcast on the Left, “Last House on the Left”, “Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom” the movie by Pier Paolo Pasolini, and then The 120 Days Of Sodom by the Marquis De Sade, newly translated and released by Penguin, convinced me fully of the virtues of this kind of thing. John Waters too, I guess. (AND many others -ed)

I began to feel curiously at peace with the shocking themes these films and texts presented. Something about these stories would relieve some great pressure and satisfy some curiosity. Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom in particular got me over several intense fears, of coprophagia, one of them.

It’s after all that, in 2021, I returned to Josh Simmons’s The Furry Trap, and can now say I am compelled, to the point where I can’t stop reading this text every time I start. Some great emotional traumas wrecked on me seemed soothed by the demons therein. Is it sympathy, or what?

WHY EXPLORE THE ID?

A hot bath may be tested with a toe, and we discover whether the water is too hot. Responding to pleasant sensation, we might stick the whole foot, and next, the whole body.

The calming effect of horror is a pleasant sensation that I don’t understand, though I have theories and pop-psychology. It feels as if some self-knowledge is being gained, like the simultaneous testing, and relaxation, in a hot bath. It may be just the nerves, stimulated but safely recalibrating and responding, I am alive, I am alive, I am okay.

There is also the tale of Saint Augustine’s curiosity to consider. One of my professors taught this story to me during a lesson on “the abject”. The abject is whatever’s expelled from the body, taboo’d by society, and so on. Literal shit and watching shit being pushed around qualifies as “the abject”; so too gore, horrid sex stuff, and traumas. 

We are more compelled by “the abject” than we may like to admit. St Augustine, my professor taught me, was walking along one day and when he saw, by the side of the road, the corpse of a plague victim.

Feeling the curiousity inside himself, St. Augustine resisted the urge to look at this corpse. However, he noticed his curiousity rising, to the point where he could not resist. “Look then, damn you!”* were his words as he gave his eyes the sight they desired.

The whirling Id inside of us desires information on the forbidden subjects, perhaps to better sort and munch the many horrific fantasies that flit thru our consciousnesses. Am I assauged by the pages and pages of coprophagia in 120 Days? Something happens, and I don’t really know what, but some “assuaging” must occur, because I feel happier and more self-content, often, after reading such a work.

It may just be pride in readership. Facing up to fears. Anyway, The Furry Trap compells me and I think contains a sensitivity the author has been noted to have. Here’s a quote from an interview with Simmons:

“Simmons has an idiosyncratic approach to horror: on the one hand he often employs a take-no-prisoners harshness, on the other he's slyly, darkly funny, and intersperses many of his stories with moments of beauty and even sensitivity (no seriously, check out his Eisner-nominated ‘Seaside Home’ and tell me it doesn't break your heart a little bit).”

There is some capacity for the shock-abject to induce intimacy, like the intimacy that the Marquis De Sade conjured up in jail, the comfort of the interior zone of his mind. The presence of the Id in that interior zone, wild and crazy, can be comforting to a reader like me, who must, as well, live with their own mInD.

This is what can Explain, if we need to Explain, The Furry Trap’s opening story. A thrumming adolescent’s assault fantasy/nightmare. Horror of sufficent strength can speak to our pasts, the scar tissue of a mind burrowing into itself, raised in recongition to the digestion of something similar. 

my table of dwarven elements

There are three slides.

on the theft of rare books by gregory priore and john schulman

Cw: discussion of suicidality and joe exotic

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/20/us/Carnegie-library-theft-schulman-priore.html Essentially: Gregory Priore managed the rare book room for the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh. Over many years he raided the rare books and fenced them to John Schulman, a local books dealer. 

 The theft was abysmally stupid. Neither the thief nor the fence decided to think about what would happen when the vault was checked. They both relegated themselves to discovery, eventually, and instead just enjoyed the extra income while it lasted.

This reminds me of times I've heard of gambling addicts embezzling entire businesses. Tho Gregory and John's actions weren't attributed to addiction. But there is that same decision to not think, to not hide, to just trade the future for the present, as in such an addict. 

Both of these men came into their jobs everyday for years and either knew they were fucked or suppressed the knowledge that they were fucked.

Greg priore said greed led him. I wonder if it wasn't a specific kind of lust for the books. Valuables .

Treasure.

(Greg and John)

(Joe Exotic of "Tiger King" fame)

treasure = genes = beauty

Joe Exotic was able to bargain the thrill of exotic animals for income. 

These men help us understand something about ourselves, because they show us tales of greed.

Everything that we love is, in an essential way, as base as the greed Greg faced or the brutality Joe showed to people and animals alike. 

Too much desire negates the self... Desire is suicidal, desire is the desire for change, the desire to want something different. These men were essentially not at peace.

Greg, John, Joe-- all Willy Loman's, a-toil, stewing, family men... Can't blame me for relating.

(Fredric March playing Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman)

I'm more like Joe than Greg in my family structure. I live in a pod of young adults. It's nice, I'm lucky. I feel a sense of disquiet.

Travis was one of Joe Exotic's husbands, and he was abused by Joe. Travis accidentally ended his life in a bizarre gun incident. I relate to Travis's ennui. I smoke a lot of weed. I don't intend to hurt myself and I'm not liable to point firearms at myself and at my friends for fun, so I do not think I will meet an end as sudden and stupid. (Nor any kind of end anytime soon God forbid !)

I think Travis loved guns and the sense of power they gave him even as he was trapped in a cult of another man's personality. Note the zoo uniform. 

Perhaps, as Greg Priore donned his uniform (collared shirt, vest, glasses)... A Willy Loman, he also desired the sense of control destruction can give you. Theft, treasure, tigers, family, weed, guns. All can be said to be powers of death (change).

Good ol' Skeleton Farmer.

Death is the harbringer of change. I am blessed to realize that human consciousness cannot be prolonged forever. Someday, the burden will be lifted-- everything must end. 

No hell can outlast death. The toil of years of knowing you'll eventually be caught, get your career ruined, and be imprisoned-- change will end that toil. 

Alternatively, maybe the weight of knowing you were going to be fucked somehow didn't bother Greg and John. Joe, I know, has gravitas. Maybe the book thieves just 'blanked" it.

In any case, guilt or no, their futures were traded away.