If you decide to make a career in the entertainment industry, there may come a time when you must make a choice.

A time when you must choose whether or not you will work on a horrible thing.

A time when you must choose whether or not you will remain silent about the things your bosses are doing because it is A Job.

A time when you must choose whether to leave, or to bury yourself in the Work, and the Craft, and to choose to quietly wall off the part of you that wants to leave and focus entirely on doing the best damn job with your skills on the part of this horrible thing you are charged with making.

This horrible thing may be obvious in its horribleness. It may be subtle. But you will know it is horrible. And you will know there is a choice.

If you are lucky you may see this choice looming in your future while you still have ample time to get out. If you are lucky you may see other people making this choice, or having this choice made for them, and see what it does to them.

I was lucky. Other people I worked with in the entertainment industry were not.

The protagonist of “Berbarian Sound Studio” does not know this choice exists, I think. Until he suddenly finds he has made it.

I learnt tonight that there is a wound deep in my soul from the time I spent choosing to bury myself in my work and thinking I was avoiding making this choice. I learnt this because the last act of “Berbarian Sound Studio” gently lifted up the layers of my soul atop it, with meticulous, surgical precision. And then it licked its finger, and ever so gently traced the edge of this wound, and then delicately replaced the layers of mostly-healed soul almost exactly where they were beforehand. I thought it was all healed but now I know it is not, and perhaps may never be.

I had to take a shower afterwards.

This movie is going on the same shelf as “Requiem For A Dream”: beautifully, compellingly made movies, which I never ever want to see ever again in my life.

Berbarian Sound Studio: a nebbish who is very, very good at making soundscapes finds himself stuck working on a horrible piece of torture porn cinema, and makes his choice.

so once upon a time there was this musician

he was the child of one of the Muses (demigoddesses of music/poetry/etc)

and, as musicans sometimes do, he fell in love with a woman

and then, as people who have fallen in love with musicians sometimes do, she died

and he started singing about how sad this made him

thing is, since he was, like, a quarter-divine, he was *really really good* at singing

rocks literally started crying because Orpheus’s song about being sad that Eurydice was dead was so damn sad

so one of the gods was all, dude, this is fucking everything up, everyone’s just sitting here listening to Orpheus’ blues

it was really good blues but, you know, other shit’s gotta get done, yknow?

so they showed Orpheus where the nearest entrance to the Underworld was, gave him a little advice, and said “go get your lady back, please, just stop making everyone for miles around wanna lie down and pretend it’s Seattle in the middle of the winter”

he didn’t have any money to get across the Styx but he sang about how sad he was and the ferryman was all “shit dude just stop singing, I wanna kill myself now, just, like, go away”

he just whistled a sad refrain when he got to the three-headed dog that guards the gates of the underworld and Cerberus just sat down and whined until he passed by

and then he was in front of Hades, the god of the Underworld

maybe Persephone, Hades’ wife, was there too, I can’t remember, it’s been a while

and he sang the low-down-no-lady-sad-boy-blues for Hades for a while

and, like, Hades is a force of nature, he’s the lord of Death and all, he’s inevitable, but that buy was so good at singing that he even moved Hades

or maybe he just made Persephone sad enough to get her to take Hades aside and be all “dude you are never getting laid ever again until this boy leaves this throne room, okay”, like I said it’s been a while

so Hades calls up this sad little spirit that’s all that’s left of Eurydice, and he tells Orpheus to go back, if he can get her all the way to the surface he can keep her, but there is one thing: no matter what, he cannot look backwards until they’re both in the land of the living

and the thing is this little ghost is perfectly, completely silent

so all the way back up he is wondering, is she behind me? he can’t hear any footsteps, he asks if she’s behind him and hears nothing

and then right by the entrance he finally just can’t not any more, and he looks back

and he just sees the ghost of Eurydice looking sad and disappointed and then she fades forever

and then he goes out and sings about how sad he is for a while until one of the gods kills him and turns him into a constellation or something

:)

also I think afterwards his head got cut off and used as an oracle, greek myth is like that

I needed to take a break from Parallax so I spent a couple of weeks doing some commissions instead. There’s at least one more in the pipe, but it won’t be done for a bit, so I decided to post these.

An unflattering portrait of Alicia’s cat Savannah, with some stylistic cues from Gerald Scarfe.

I could have probably gotten it a lot more Scarfey if all my real media wasn’t packed away, but I think I still managed to get some of his energy in this.

Crowyote: a tricky, distractable shifting hybrid of two tricksters.

Sometimes they can fly. Let’s hope this is one of those days.

“Peggy can you draw me and my SO as a pushmi-pullyu taur, dancing?”

Yes. Yes, I can.

The cover from an obscure cult classic of 90s sci-fi, wherein an androgyne from a society of dinosaur-like people discovers some worrisome truths about what powers their Sufficiently Advanced Technology.

This is actually book 3 of Malachite’s “Octahedron Sequence”, though not advertised as such on the cover. Malachite (generally thought to be a pseudonym, though nobody has any idea who for) vanished without a trace after the publication of the fourth book of what that volume’s concluding Author’s Note said had begun to look more like a hexology than the trilogy it was originally solicited as.

And finally here is a link to a smutty commission I also did as part of this batch.

A thought I keep on having as I move though New Orleans is that this place is not so much a city as it is a process. This is true to some degree of anywhere, but when the swampy ground is constantly sinking beneath your feet, creating majestic potholes, when plants are rapidly growing up any surface they can cling to, when pumps have to run every time it rains to keep the bowl of the city from filling, it’s a lot more obvious. Especially when the whole place is still showing wounds from a storm fifteen years ago; I’m a few blocks away from a former hospital that’s been abandoned since Katrina, and is still slowly rotting from inside.

It’s a constant fight to keep the place viable, and I feel a lot more aware of that now that I’ve lived in colder, more stable places.