tonreihe's blog

Jesus Christ arrives from the future.

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Make Believe Mailer #169: North West's New EP From The Perspective Of Vocaloid

"Miku Hair / You Can Call Me A Vocaloid"

Patrick St. Michel on North West and Hatsune Miku.

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[tonreihe]

“The sinister Backrooms, a mysterious dimension that users risk getting sucked into at their own peril, burst onto the collective imagination in the late 2010s and early 2020s, and represent a continuation of the cultural strand that came into being in the previous decade with viral stories like the Slender Man. But the narrative around the Backrooms phenomenon presents a number of distinctive features. The idea of an infinite labyrinth of identical rooms, a place whose origin and exact location are unknown, is indeed a powerful symbolic image capable of evoking atavistic fears and contemporary nightmares, a potent cocktail of esotericism, horror, quantum physics, philosophy, and gaming. While most creepypasta stories are far-fetched but theoretically possible, and set in the world we know, albeit a world haunted by serial killers, monstrous creatures, and cursed objects, the Backrooms push harder at the envelope of reality. It is not a real or even realistic place; its existence is entirely hypothetical, and the original myth has no narrative elements or characters. It is a purely speculative entity. The best description of it was coined by the anonymous author of the podcast The Backrooms 101, who, in the introductory episode, called the Backrooms ‘a theoretical liminal hellscape.’”

—Valentina Tanni, Exit Reality: Vaporwave, Backrooms, Weirdcore, and Other Landscapes Beyond the Threshold

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Eldritch Priest

Will Fraser: Your work travels through the durational space of the earworm, the daydream, probing for what these distracted sites—where, as

Eldritch Priest, interviewed by Will Fraser.

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In the mail.

[beguines]

Ron Hansen, Mariette in Ecstasy

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“For all the darkness to be found in von Balthasar’s Apokalypse, a world in which the human being lives in the shadow of total death without the Christian God, beauty has not died. Well into his theological career, von Balthasar begins a massive theological project: the trilogy (his “Triptych”), of which the first word is beauty. If Apokalypse and Glory of the Lord are to be viewed together, then the first word of the latter is a response to the first word of the former: beauty responds to terror.”

—Anne M. Carpenter, Theo-Poetics: Figure and Metaphysics in the Thought of Hans Urs von Balthasar (Ph.D. thesis, Marquette University)

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“Just as the century-long crisis of the art system’s two founding values—that is, the uniqueness and originality of the artwork—is reaching its apex, another destabilizing element is starting to take hold: the overwhelming and uncontrolled rise of amateur creativity. In other words, the production of images is no longer limited to a specific and qualified category of people. Everyone can participate in the construction of the collective imaginary, by creating things anew, remixing existing material, and contributing to the dissemination of content through the practice of sharing. Artworks, whether past or present, are no longer untouchable objects to be contemplated in museums or books; rather, they are available materials. The entire history of art is subject to a continuous process of appropriation and reinterpretation: images are downloaded, modified, and reintroduced into the flux of communication, in an unstoppable and vertiginous cycle that makes any content unstable, mutable, never final.”

—Valentina Tanni, Memesthetics: The Eternal September of Art

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Schoenberg in Hi-Fi: Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21

Schoenberg in Hi-Fi: Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21

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Picked up just now from the Amazon delivery spot.

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“It is easy to argue that Japanese is a hopelessly vague language from which it is impossible to translate, but the argument usually comes down to an unreal notion of what even the best translator can accomplish. No two languages make quite the same distinctions, and every translation is a makeshift insofar as this is true.

“It is undeniable, however, that the refusal of the Japanese language to make distinctions often seems scandalous, and the problems one faces in trying to make Japanese literature understandable in translation grows accordingly. Tanizaki takes the position, in an illuminating study of literary style called A Composition Reader, that it is the duty of the Japanese writer to know the genius of his language and to accommodate himself to it: if Japanese is vague, its vagueness must be made a virtue of.

“Tanizaki puts himself in a line of stylists stemming from The Tale of Genji, stylists who aim at a dreamy, floating prose. They are suspicious of too vivid a choice of words, too clear a view, too conspicuous a transition from one figure or idea to another. They prefer their prose to be misty, to suggest more than it says. They are, Tanizaki says, pure Japanese stylists, in opposition to Chinese-influenced writers who aim at conciseness and precision. One is left to conclude that the latter, who rather dominate the field today, are trying to do something that can only result in violence to the basic nature of the Japanese language.”

—Edward G. Seidensticker, in the introduction to his translation of Junichiro Tanizaki’s Some Prefer Nettles

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“The novel [Some Prefer Nettles] is also autobiographical, of course, in that it tells of Tanizaki’s growing attachment to Osaka and traditional Japan. But so much contemporary Japanese fiction is thinly disguised autobiography that one pounces with joy on a novel that is more.”

—Edward G. Seidensticker, in the introduction to his translation of Junichiro Tanizaki’s Some Prefer Nettles

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“But with Mary, John too must come forward in the Church. He takes his place at a strangely veiled midpoint exposed to all winds, between Peter, to whom he is united by mission and apostolate, and Mary, to whom he is united both by the commission to love given under the Cross and by that pure love to the Lord that is not to be exhausted in any one form. With one hand in Peter’s and the other in Mary’s, he unites Mary to Peter in terms of their mission. (This does not prevent Mary, as Ekklēsia, from being the higher midpoint between both apostles, not Peter from remaining the visible midpoint as the one who administers everything, including love, including Mary.) The Mariology which has been brought into prominence will slowly prepare the way for a future ecclesiology (though perhaps it can never be so exoterically formulated as the dogmas of Mary’s individual privileges can be); more important, it will furnish the basis for the new ecclesial consciousness, especially that of the laity.”

—Hans Urs von Balthasar, Razing the Bastions: On the Church in This Age

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“Here we see also the meaning of the Mariology, surprising to many, that suddenly comes into prominence in a seemingly one-sided way, developing like a hypertrophied twig on the tree of the Church’s teaching, twig by twig; now, the ecclesial meaning of the Marian dogmas reveals itself: Mary is the womb and archetype of the Church, she is the fruitfulness of the Church herself, she is the internal form of the Church, since she is the Bride of Christ. Mary stands closer to Christ than Peter and than the other apostles; where Peter embodies the official ministry of the Church, Mary incorporates the totality of the Church; where Peter is the one who administers, Mary is the one who says ‘yes,’ who is herself administered and taken by the Bridegroom; where Peter must demand obedience, Mary is the virginal-nuptial vessel of all obedience, out of which flows not only the Christian’s obedience but Peter’s demands as well. The opposition between Peter and his flock, between the hierarchy and the laity, is superseded in Mary and taken into the deeper reality that is the basis of both: into the reality of the Church as Bride. And the idea of obedience too, which the last of the great ecclesial Orders, standing with one foot in the medieval order of social classes, has fully developed, taken on an undreamt-of deepening in the fundamental Marian attitude of the Church and of each individual in the Church; only now has this Marian grounding become something conscious. In her presentation of herself, the Petrine Church has come upon what lies deeper in her own being, without which this being would be merely a monster: obedience in the Church is nothing other than love, the form and fruitfulness of bridal love. And thus the juridical-moral concept of merit, in use till now, is irresistibly giving way—in keeping with revelation—to the deeper, universal concept of fruit.”

—Hans Urs von Balthasar, Razing the Bastions: On the Church in This Age

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“When God becomes man then man as such becomes the expression, the valid and authentic expression of the divine mystery. Certainly man needs supernatural faith to understand what God in his sovereign freedom wills to proclaim in his spontaneous self-revelation. All the same, this divine meaning is never something external and alien to man, who is indeed elected to be its expression. God is love. This he has testified to us as man, and so the two commandments of love can and must, in Christ, coalesce into one. In other words God, in revealing his own countenance to man, has also disclosed to him his own human countenance. God is under no sort of necessity to make use of man for his own self-revelation; but once he has decided on this and done so in an incarnation, all human dimensions, known and unknown, are taken up and used to express the absolute person. Consequently the Christian religion, though it is from the sociological point of view but one among others, must necessarily embrace the totality of human nature; only thus can it be acknowledged as truly catholic.”

—Hans Urs von Balthasar, “God Speaks as Man,” in The Word Made Flesh (Theological Explorations, 1)

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Koji, the Magic Mold - Through the Kitchen Window

Learn more about food in Japan on NHK WORLD-JAPAN!https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/shows/category/17/?cid=wohk-yt-2605-ttkw309-hpMore qual