Self-suppression

[pasithea]

Sin City: A dame to kill for is both beautiful and ugly. I'm fascinated by the use of sillouhette and yet the world and characters are really ugly and gritty. I'm only two chapters in so I'm not sure how much I like it yet. Having listened to a lot of old radio shows like 'Dick Diamond', 'Johnny Dollar', 'Phillip Marley', etc the story (thus far) is nothing unique. I like those shows sometimes though, so it's kind of fun, and the graphic media brings it to life in a very different way.

I still find myself thinking about the 'Draw what you believe in' thing I posted on last night and I was struck in reading this book that I could never create something and give it a name like 'Sin City'. It's too pat and obvious, too open to ridicule, too unrefined. And yet for this book, it seems to work and when he calls the place, 'Sin City' it doesn't jangle my nerves nearly as much as I thought it would.

I read some poetry I wrote a decade ago and laughed at it. Though it was very meaningful to me back then now I see it and think, 'Ugh, how juvenille.' Choice lines like, "My soul a pool of blood" make me cringe and wrinkle my nose. I kept reading though and the last line, "Pain please set me free" really shook me and took me back to that place. I haven't written poetry in quite some time now, I think largely because I look back on some of my earlier work and I'm ashamed of it's pure awfulness, but at the same time, I think I let this become a limiting factor. Never do anything that might seem stupid or awful later. Never present something about yourself that others can rip up and laugh at. I became reserved, filtered, steriled, hypoallegenic and non-toxic. I make things wearing rubber gloves from behind a wall of plexiglass.

I think, therefor, that I am going to compile a list of imagery and I like, music I like, stories I like, no matter how foolish and akward these things might seem. Not sure if I'll post it or not. On the one hand, I could see taking criticism from friends as a step towards getting over such silly inhibitions. On the other hand, I can imagine I might say, 'Oh! If most of my friends think X is really dorky, I should stop doing X. In truth, I'd hope I wouldn't do something like that, but I know how underconfident I can be too.