Daily Slow Chat

3 comments

1. Continuing my thoughts on Innocence. I’ve seen it compared to Alban Berg’s opera Wozzeck (which is on the shortlist of operas I really really wanna see). It’s from the 1920s, a story about an Austrian soldier who is treated wrong by almost everybody around him and he ends up murdering his wife and killing himself. It’s a fairly early example of an antihero protagonist, somebody who the audience knows does wrong but still in a way roots for them. We all are familiar with this trope, it’s been very popular lately during the golden age of TV shows. Tony Soprano, Walter White, et cetera. Characters that are morally extremely complex.

   What’s different in innocence is that the actual perpetrator, the school shooter, is hardly seen on stage at all and his motives or feelings are not directly explored. But as the story goes on and what happened is revealed there is a sense of collective antiheroism, collective guilt. The parents didn’t pay attention, the teacher and priest didn’t step forward when they saw concerning signs, the brother helped in search of acceptance from their older sibling, the friend was in on the plan to deal with loneliness, the other kids took part in bullying. All this collective guilt is laid out in a very delicate way without ever apologising for the shooter or forgetting that the victims are victims. In fact, as much as everybody is collectively at guilt, everybody is also collectively victimised.

   While works like Wozzeck or Breaking Bad explore the moral complexity of a person, Innocence seems to explore the moral complexity of us as a group, and the complexity of violence itself. My thoughts about the whole work are still quite scattered, but I feel like I’m getting closer to concluding them. It was easy to think that the opera doesn’t offer any solution and ends on a dark note in a dark place, but on second thought, it does speak for working together. It doesn’t offer a solution, but it shows a possible path to it. Collective responsibility, action, and discussion. It takes a village.

   Speaking of antiheros though, Taylor Swift’s Anti-Hero wasn’t my favourite song from her most recent album but it was a solid tune nonetheless, I do enjoy listening to it. However, I still don’t understand how the line “sometimes I feel everybody is a sexy baby and I’m a monster on the hill” made it through to the final version. Like, I get what she’s trying to say, but “sexy baby” sounds just wrong…

2. Today was a first for me! I put something on ebay to be sold. It was very anticlimactic.

   I still would like to buy something on ebay some day.

   What was not anticlimactic was… shit. I knew this was going to happen. So, after accidentally buying some gum arabic powder, I made some watercolor binder, which was very easy, actually. Just to try it out, I mixed it with some graphite powder and…

   Guys this is so much fun. It’s like I was born to do this. And my own liquid graphite paint is like 110% better than the commercial one I had. It paints smoothly, it doesn’t rub off (but fuck if I am making graphite powder again, that was a mess). It mixes beautifully with my other paints.

   Now, I need a new hobby or new colors as much as the world needs more CO2 emissions. Why did this have to be so much fun 😭 fuck my life.

3. Tomorrow is the next big day for me – I’ll finally have the long awaited psychological examination regarding what I had to suffer a while ago. Then the psychologist will have up to three months time to make a verdict about me, and then they might one day finally rate my damage in a percent range from 0 to 100 which in turn will decide if – and how much – victim’s pension I get. I am already so done with it and I hate to have this appointment, even if it wasn’t a 250 km drive (which someone else has to do for me given I’ll be too nervous and to busy with myself to drive that trip safely). The past two years drained me so much, and I so urgently need to finish the start. It’s going to be the second-to-last appointment in that regard, and the last major one if things are now going as planned (that’s a big IF).

   But on the other hand the pension is potentially lifelong and tax free extra income, and be paid for the last two years as well. So it would be stupid to throw this away so close to the finish line. However I’d gladly forfeit everything and add the same out of my own pocket if the images in my head, the memories and all the suffering could be removed instead.

   Don’t worry, I’ll rant about it next two days as well 🙁