Constant Companions Closeup #4: I WISH THAT I COULD FALL
(also on bandcamp and spotify!)
oh thank god I can talk normally again
Welcome back once again!! Today's Constant Companions Closeup is a very personal and beloved song of mine - I Wish That I Could Fall! Also known as The Obligatory Jamie Paige Track 4 GUMI Song genuinely I've done this three albums in a row at this point which means it's officially a pattern
This one has SIGNIFICANTLY more backstory to it than the other songs so far, so get ready for a post with chapters. Chapters!
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~ Chapter 1: But Only Truly Backwards ~
There's a site I lurk and very rarely post on known as Battle of the Bits.
The general premise is that people can host Battles, music-making challenges designed to be completed within a set timeframe, most often only one hour, with restrictions both in format and theme. It's very much chiptune/tracker music centric, but there are formats that are inclusive to all types of gear - notably, the format "allgear"! These are the battles my scant few contributions to the site have mostly ended up in, and while I've never been a regular, I do genuinely credit doing OHBs with making me a better musician.
This was mostly just a couple week stint back in 2018, though, and many factors have kept me from participating more often than just a couple luckily-timed battles here and there - not to mention I took a two-year break from seriously making music at all also starting in 2018. However, one fateful December day last year, I was feeling nostalgic and full of creative energy, and loaded the site back up hoping to find a challenge to contribute to -
Only to discover that there was a whole extended series of autumnal allgear challenges that had wrapped up mere days prior. They had a cutesy name and everything! FALLGEAR! I was aghast! That's my shtick! I'm the autumn bitch!!
Dejected. Despondent. Defeated and desolate. The fates had dangled their red string in front of my face, a pane of glass between us, and I had just smacked into it with such raucous and foolish force I'd broken my nose.
This wouldn't stand. Thus began my own One-Hour Battle against the shifting sands of time itself. It ultimately took two hours, but thankfully, an old and constant companion of mine found me in my hour of need.
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~ Chapter 2: All I Wanna Do ~
These manic bursts of creative energy have historically always been how I've made my music, and to some extent, they still are. These self-imposed time limit challenges have mostly taught me how to make the most of them, and how to summon that energy at will instead of it simply manifesting at its own whim.
Even so, it is incredibly difficult to explain the struggle I have with executive function.
I can think to do something. I can feel the impulse welling up inside me. I can push and pull at my body, trying to fire the appropriate neurons. I can scream bloody murder at myself. I can cry my damn eyes out. Sometimes, none of this is enough to make my body move.
If it was a matter of desire, it would be easy, but wanting something simply isn't enough. There is a great, wide gap between me and the things I want to do, the words I want to say, the people I want to love, and I've built my bridges and flying machines and telephone wires to make that gap smaller but on my worst days all the therapy and mindfulness and medication and agony and longing in the world just isn't enough.
If you also have ADHD, this all might sound familiar to you.
It feels a lot like heartbreak.
I've made my love of the band Prefab Sprout known publicly many times over at this point. Paddy McAloon is maybe my favorite songwriter of all time, and for good reason - I struggle to think of anyone else who can pen such mellifluous and heart-wrenching words with such effortless precision.
I've drowned in that same longing. So, yes, maybe I Wish That I Could Fall is simply my take on Bonny with a pop chorus - But Kelly Clarkson did it with Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and I'll sing my throat raw to both Maps and Since U Been Gone.
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~ Chapter 3: I Would Give My World To You / In Simple Repetition ~
alright lets cut the bullshit and talk about Original Characters. this is why this post is so long
I've only discussed it publicly once or twice, but given that I wrote a whole song about it, it isn't really a secret that most of my leitmotifs and a solid chunk of my past two albums are also about my OCs. "Also" being a key word here - songs like I Wish That I Could Fall and Greatsword / Love as Fire and People Posture Play Pretend ultimately pull substantially more from my own life and experiences than they do from any derangement I may be experiencing over my Guys.
That being said. Some people draw their OCs. Some people make playlists for their OCs. Some people RP their OCs. Some people make massive Scrivener documents of worldbuilding with the goal of assembling a crack team of their incredibly skilled friends in other creative disciplines and making a game or something with their OCs. and for the record I am also that person but that's besides the point.
I assign my OCs little melodies and then shove those melodies down everyone's throats every five seconds in the pop songs I write.
She's a wizard. She's a cat, but also kind of a lizard. She has an airship. She has a hand cannon that shoots spells out of it. She's a felon. She's a wanted criminal. She's a theater major. She's dead, except she isn't. She experienced intense amnesia when she died-but-got-better and forgot who she was beyond the mythos other people thrust upon her so she's been consigned to perpetually playing a part of a goofy genki bastard because the parts of herself that aren't at the forefront scare her to death, except her whole arc is about finding herself again in the midst of a grand political struggle and revolutionary movement she found herself in the center of on account of also being a known felon. She has secret genders. She's the first person to run away to leave the circus.
She's a bird and she's 42 and tired and miserable and scared of losing any more people she loves to war and she bears massive scars and missing limbs as a consequence of getting embroiled in conflict years ago but it's all coming back in full force all of a sudden and her wife (paisley pudge) has this deranged and manic look of almost joy on her face when she fights and she doesn't know what to do with herself. There's a long and winding path she goes down to deal with this and she comes out the other end of it reinvigorated as the most 2008 kind of chuuni like straight up her character inspo sheet has Maka Albarn and Edward Elric on it i'm sorry but she's cringe. She also has secret genders, but mostly known genders.
sorry what were we talking about again. right the song
I Wish That I Could Fall was originally a Kalia song, and it still bears a lot of her and Paisley's motifs. It still is, to some extent, but there is a third piece of this beautiful toxic yuri triangle.
The art above is by my girlfriend, my darling dearest, the person that I've written so much of this with, Nancy - and I will link her Bluesky account but I need to warn you that her account is very much 18+ and explicitly NSFW because she draws a lot of remarkably buxom catgirls for FFXIV players. If that's your sort of thing though do follow her.
The full melody is longer than that but I have to tie this back to the song or it's gonna get dire!
She is simultaneously a terrifying masked force of nature operating as the human embodiment of a fascist empire's supposed might and a deeply bitter and suicidal one-track-minded weapon of a woman who had everything taken from her by said empire and who is hellbent on fashioning one Paisley Pudge into a war hero worthy and capable of committing the necessary acts to see that horrific nation burn to the goddamn ground, killing her in the process. She gets better though and then her paisley and kalia kiss #lesbian style probably
Now I'm going to level with you all and let you know that I don't really know where I've been going with all this beyond finally explaining some of the leitmotif usage in my music and showing you the characters behind them
Um
I love my girlfriend and I love writing bullshit with her and I made this gay longing song that uses a melody associated with her OC because I love her
Longing is a central theme of this album - the album motif is a thesis statement, really! The conflict between what currently Is and what you Want is at the core of basically every song, and IWTICF leans so heavily on said leitmotif because, in my opinion, it is the one song that sums up Constant Companions as a whole the best.
I had originally intended for there to be a secondary motif alongside the melody, in the form of saxophone. I've always been a very big fan of how sax sounds, and the only reason I didn't play saxophone in middle school band was because my parents didn't want to deal with hearing me practice sax 24/7. That being said, they instead let me become a percussionist, which in hindsight makes absolutely zero sense if noise was really their concern so I don't know what was up with that.
Ultimately, the sax motif idea didn't really pan out, but it still exists very prominently in both IWTICF and Cadmium Colors. Whenever I manage to finally properly pre-plan one of my albums before I start working on it, I swear, I'll be unstoppable.
I Wish That I Could Fall is also one of two MVs for the album that were filmed and edited by yours truly! I wanted both IWTICF and Machine Love to have a similar visual style, and the disconnect between the artificial (computer screens, projections) and the tangible (live-action footage) very much felt appropriate for both. There's an inherent longing to me, being on one side of an impassable pane of glass and trying to find connection with what's on the other side.
That being said, it was a pain in the ass to film and an even worse pain in the ass to edit. For some godforsaken reason, I decided to use exclusively Final Cut Pro for all my motion graphics work that would've been far better suited to something like After Effects or aviutil or even Apple Motion, for god's sake. The project files for these are all hundreds of gigabytes large. Please don't be like me.
Anyways, it's maybe a silly point of pride, but I would like to point out - There is no stock footage used in either Machine Love or IWTICF!! Every single bit of live-action footage seen in both MVs was filmed either by me or by someone I directly asked to film it. For years now, I've been filming random moments of travel or motion, and I finally found a use for a bunch of it!
...My next video will hopefully be smaller in scale.
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~ Chapter 5: To Do You Right ~
The art in IWTICF's MV was done by my good friend Bear, aka BEARVAMPS!*
We'd previously worked together for the song 🤼♀️, and he's genuinely one of my favorite artists to work with. He immediately understood the vibe I wanted to go for when I mentioned the MV's theme of repetition, and was shockingly quick with producing it. That being said:
GUMI is not dressed like Sans Undertale she is a bluejay her design is invoking a bluejay I know that she looks like sans with the hoodie and she's even got the one glowing eye thing but she's not supposed to be sans she's a bluejay oh my god it hurts it hurts it hurts
Here's art Bear drew of me while I was having an emotional breakdown over a game of riichi mahjong last night
*I've told a white lie to you for the sake of this post's structure. Truth be told, Bear was not solely responsible for the art in IWTICF's MV! Who is this other mystery artist, and what did they draw, you may ask?
Well, it's my girlfriend Nancy once again!! And she drew the ending shot!!!!
Constant Companions is decidedly GumiTeto propaganda, and I stand by this, but Nancy insists on Gumi and Miku, and who the hell am I to deny her this?
Finally, I'd like to extend my most heartfelt thanks to Marcy Nabors and Marlow Jacobs for jumping into a lake for me. They drove multiple hours on a whim just to jump into a large body of water and film it on camera for my music video. Like genuinely, they just went there, jumped in the lake, and then immediately drove back. I love my friends so fucking much
AND WITH THAT!!! I think that's actually everything!! My word, apologies for how long today's post is. Actually no, no diminishing myself. You're welcome for how long today's post is.
Tomorrow... I may have to delay a day depending on if I get it written in time. But whether it's tomorrow or Saturday, I'll see you back here for Cadmium Colors!!
i feel like we should talk about the classism also portrayed in Nimona
like the whole thing of ballister not being of noble blood, him being a street kid?
ofc there’s the homophobia/transphobia aspect but i haven’t really seen anyone talk about the classism in it
the director literally claims that the start of the “crack in the wall” is the queen giving ballister a chance to prove himself and become a knight
she is fully blaming the prospect of giving non-noble lower class people a chance to become knights as a catalyst for the opportunity for “monsters” to invade or whatever
the queen letting ballister train to be a knight, and her wanting to allow anyone (aka ‘commoners’) to do the same? giving underprivileged people the same opportunities as those that are privileged? and the director finding that so “wrong” or offensive that she literally kills her??
ND Stevenson when presented with an angsty gay blonde-brunette best friend duo who are both brainwashed and manipulated in a military upbringing until one of them starts to question things and realizes their life is a lie but the other believes their best friend betrayed them which results in them becoming mortal enemies who try to kill each other before finally saving the world with the power of love and getting together...
Releasing Nimona on the last day of pride month 2023 was such a great move because it’s a really needed piece of media right now. Lots of countries that legalised gay marriage years ago have been grappling with this rising TERF narrative of “if you’re gay it’s whatever but if you’re trans, non-binary or gender non-conforming in some way you’re a PERVERT! A MONSTER trying to GROOM CHILDREN!” The outrage against simple things like pronouns and drag events, and the movement against gender affirming healthcare have reached a terrifying peaks for contemporary times.
So a kid’s movie set in a fictional country with controlling government officials with personal agendas, with an openly gay couple but also a shape-shifting kid who cannot even be afford to be out is our reality in the US today. Nimona’s feelings about her vibe, body and form, her insistence that she is only “Nimona” no matter what she looks like and her aversion to “small-minded questions” together forms such a beautiful allegory about trans, genderfluid individuals.
Ballister asks her to be a girl, but for whose sake? It’s only for the comfort of people who refuse to understand her, and would rather see her die than let her be herself. And it’s this widespread rejection and loneliness that has eventually made Nimona indifferent to pain, that makes her feel suicidal.
In the end, it is another member of the LGBTQ+ community that truly sees and accepts Nimona for who she is. And that should be a reminder that we cannot let them divide us. Trans people stood up for the rest of us and made historical change happen, and we need to do the same for them. Besides, cis queer people are only the “good ones” until they’re done with trans people and then will turn on us.
eventually you realize you don’t want to die. you just don’t want to live the life you’re living. and slowly you try to create a life you want to live. just gotta start there.
Just saw someone on Twitter complain about the lack of Japanese people in Oppenheimer, and what did you expect??? Did you want the final act to be the bomb dropping and see people burning alive???
The reason why we don't see a Japanese perspective is because one, including a Japanese perspective, just to see how bad the suffering was would be exploitation. Two, to see an accurate and sensitive take on how the japanese felt about Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan (as incredible as he is) isn't the right person to do this. And three, it's based on Oppenheimer's biography
Oppenheimer, the movie, literally shows you white people doing something evil and just incredible inhumane because they removed themselves away, both emotionally and physically, from the people they are hurting. Nagasaki and Hiroshima only exist in those men's distant thoughts and imaginations. One guy literally asks to take a city off the bombing because that's where he had his honeymoon. It's disturbing and unsettling, as if those people were not real human beings. The lack of Japanese people drives the entire point home.
Also, Japanese cinema is right there. Barefoot Gen, Grave of the Fireflies, or Hiroshima (responsible for showing to many Americans the effects of the bombs for the first time) are just a few of the many, many decades of post-war Japanese movies we have
And personally? To be in the tickets booth, and see young girls, teenagers, adult women, coming in to see Barbie,
the most highlighter pink outfits, some of them coming in with the dolls they’re dressed as, laughing to each other, cheering for each other,
to see the men they’re coming to see it with, dressed in pink, cheering them on, taking their pictures with smiles and cheers in the lobby at the photo op
touches something so deep in me
I can’t say any nuances of the movie that haven’t already been said, but like, fuck man, love is so deep and so kind and to be able to see glimpses of it from behind my little ticket desk makes me a little less nihilistic.
Love that Oppenheimer is a deeply disturbing horror movie about a man forced to accept that he is, in a person, the representative manifestation of mankind’s evil in committing one of the greatest horrors of human history - LITERALLY acting as the modern Prometheus, tormented by his sins for the remainder of time. Knowing that he will never be pitied and his actions will forever be utterly unforgivable because the blood of genocide and the potential of total human annihilation will eternally drip from his hands.
But also the simultaneous indictment by the film that to blame a single person for the Manhattan Project is to refuse to accept your own capacity for great evil if the ends ever seem to justify the means, and the culpability of every member of a species that lets itself create something so unspeakably terrible.
Hate that twitter’s take on such a nuanced and brilliantly handled examination of those issues is “movie bad because protagonist not evil enough.”
while everyone's rightfully talking about oppenheimer and its flaws regarding the erasure of japanese and native american voices regarding nuclear testing and detonations, i'd like to bring up the fact that pacific islanders have also been severely impacted by nuclear testing under the pacific proving grounds, a name given by the US to a number of sites in the pacific that were designated for testing nuclear weapons after the second world war, at least 318 of which were dropped on our ancestral homes and people. i would like if more people talked about this.
important sections are bolded for ease of reading. i would appreciate this being reblogged since it's a bit alarming how few people know about this.
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in 1946, the indigenous peoples of pikinni (the bikini atoll) were forcibly relocated off of their islands so that nuclear tests could be run on the atoll. at least 23 nuclear bombs were detonated on this inhabited island chain, including 20 hydrogen bombs. many pasifika were irreversibly irradiated, all of them were starved during multiple forced relocations, and the island chain is still unsafe to live on despite multiple cleanup attempts. there are several craters visible from space that were left on the atoll from nuclear testing.
the forced relocation was to several different small and previously uninhabited islands over several decades, none of which were able to sustain traditional lifestyles which directly lead to further starvation and loss of culture and identity. there is a reason that pacific islanders choose specific islands to inhabit including access to fresh water, food, shelter, cloth and fibre, climate, etc. and obviously none of these reasons were taken into account during the displacements.
200 pikinni were eventually moved back to the atoll in the 1970s but dangerous levels of strontium-90 were found in drinking water in 1978 and the inhabitants were found to have abnormally high levels of caesium-137 in their bodies.
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i'm going to put the rest of this post under a readmore to improve the chances of this being reblogged by the general public. i would recommend you read the entirety of the post since it really isn't long and goes into detail about, say, entire islands being fully, utterly destroyed. like, wiped off of the map. without exaggeration, entire islands were disintegrated.
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as i just mentioned, ānewetak (the eniwetok atoll) was bombed so violently that an entire island, āllokļap, was permanently and completely destroyed. an entire island. it's just GONE. the world's first hydrogen bomb was tested on this island. the crater is visibly larger than any of the islands next to it, more than a mile in diameter and roughly fifteen storeys deep. the hydrogen bomb released roughly 700 times the energy released during the bombing of hiroshima. this would, of course, be later outdone by other hydrogen bombs dropped on the pacific, reaching over 1000 times the energy released.
one attempt to clean up the waste on ānewetak was the construction of a large ~380ft dome, colloquially known as the tomb, on runit island. the island has been essentially turned into a nuclear waste dump where several other islands of ānewetak have moved irradiated soil to and, due to climate change, rising seawater is beginning to seep into the dome, causing nuclear waste to leak out. along with this, if a large typhoon were to hit the dome, there would be a catastrophic failure followed by a leak of nuclear waste into the surrounding land, drinking water, and ocean. the tomb was built haphazardly and quickly to cut costs.
hey, though, there's a plus side! the water in the lagoon and the soil surrounding the tomb is far more radioactive than the currently contained radioactive waste. a typhoon wouldn't cause (much) worse irradiation than the locals and ocean already currently experience, anyway! it's already gone to shit! and who cares, right, the only ""concern"" is that it will just further poison the drinking water of the locals with radioactive materials. this can just be handwaved off as a nonissue, i guess. /s
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at least 36 bombs were detonated in the general vicinity of kiritimati (christmas island) and johnson atoll. while johnson atoll has seemingly never been inhabited by polynesians, kiritimati was used intermittently by polynesians (and later on, micronesians) for several hundred years. many islands in the pacific were inhabited seasonally and likewise many pacific islanders should be classified as nomadic but it has always been convenient for the goal of white supremacy and imperalism to claim that semi-inhabited areas are completely uninhabited, claimable pieces of terra nullius.
regardless of the current lack of inhabitants on these islands, the nuclear detonations have caused widespread ecological damage to otherwise delicate island ecosystems and have further spread nuclear fallout across the entirety of the pacific ocean.
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while the marshall islands, micronesia, and the surrounding areas of melanesia and polynesia were (and still are) by far the worst affected by these atrocities, the entirety of the pacific has been irradiated to some extent due to ocean/wind currents freely spreading nuclear fallout through the water and air. all in all, at least 318 nuclear bombs were detonated across the pacific. i say "at least" because these are just the events that have been declassified and frankly? i wouldn't be shocked to find out they didn't stop there.
please don't leave the atomic destruction of the pacific out of this conversation. we've been displaced, irradiated, murdered, poisoned, and otherwise mass exterminated by nuclear testing on purpose and we are still suffering because of it. many of us have radiation poisoning, many of us have no safe ancestral home anymore. i cannot fucking state this enough, ISLANDS WERE DISINTEGRATED INTO NONEXISTENCE.
look, this isn't blaming people for not talking about us or knowing the extent of these issues, but it's... insidiously ironic that i haven't seen a single post that even mentions pacific islanders in a conversation about indigenous voices/voices of colour being ignored when it comes to nuclear tests and the devastation they've caused.
he came. he slayed in this little see-through black number. and then he walked out of his own premiere with the rest of the cast in support of the strike... cunty af
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