Dreamer Easy

I really shouldn’t be posting when I’m hypomanic, but I can’t be the only 미친 여자 out there who has had an episode triggered by a Kpop song. I once turned up at a doctor’s appointment exploding out of my skin after listening to FT Island’s Hit The Sands on the bus. This afternoon it was VIXX and Hyde. I was abruptly so absurdly high that I had a little trouble functioning in the supermarket.

I’ll be OK: this is just the cumulative effect of jetlag, anxiety, PMS, and, above all disrupted sleep. But I realised there was another factor at work as well - which inevitably led to an explosion of thoughts, which I’ll try to get down here.

Now, VIXX’s MVs are sometimes at odds with the lyrics of their songs. For example, the six-voiced protagonist of 저주인형 (VOODOO DOLL) threatens his ex’s faithless lovers - “Open the doors of hell / sinners who made her cry / (you will) cry tears of blood”, but the band themselves portray those sinners. In Hyde, the narrator (once again a single character shared between six bodies and voices) puts up a tormented struggle, verbally and physically, against his own aggression - but at the end, those big, black wings come bursting out, and he displays them without shame to the faceless girl, who holds him, wings and all, in her heart.

It’s tempting to smile or even laugh at the melodrama of it all, but adolescent feelings are real and overwhelming, and what’s more, teenage boys are surely both the most alluring and the most dangerous - literally - things in the lives of most heterosexual teenage girls. Songs and MVs like this (and fan fiction, too) must be a place where young women can safely work through some of their complicated feelings about young men.

More importantly, they may be a place where girls can work through their own negative feelings, especially feelings of aggression, which we are taught to swallow, not show. The boyfriend of VOODOO DOLL is willing to endure his lover’s anger, without ending the relationship: “Sing the curse song of / tell me the fury hidden inside you / my body is an offering to you / I’ll devote myself to your happiness” (and the one in Chained Up (사슬) is willing to be the recipient of dark sexual fantasies). The protagonist of Hyde protests over and over that he is not a bad person, but ultimately he admits and owns the “other person inside me who is not me” (as we see in LR’s Beautiful Liar, he can control :), and that person is accepted and loved.

You can be a bad person, and survive! Even a kimchi-molesting pervert like me. XD No wonder my mood jumped through the ceiling in the space of three minutes and twenty-one seconds.

"The hideous forms or archetypal images rising full-blown from Tiamat's collective unconscious may be looked upon as compensatory devices designed to help her deal more effectively than earlier with the crises she faced. Personifications of rage and hatred that manifested themselves in the form of serpents, dragons, or scorpions may be looked upon as shadow forces representing the 'dark, unlived side of her unconsciousness'... Like talismans, amulets, or antibodies, shadow forces frequently take shape in time of need to help the individual struggle against harm."

"A scathing U.S. Justice Department report released Thursday found that Sheriff Joe Arpaio's office carried out a blatant pattern of discrimination against Latinos and held a "systematic disregard" for the Constitution amid a series of immigration crackdowns that have turned the lawman into a prominent national political figure.

"Arpaio struck a defiant tone in response to the report, calling it a politically motivated attack by the Obama administration that will make Arizona unsafe by keeping illegal immigrants on the street." (my emphasis)

"In truth, reports on Arpaio's extraordinary incompetence and oversight on sexual abuse cases have been well-documented for months -- an ABC15 investigation earlier in the spring noted that "children who had the courage to come forward and say they were molested, raped or abused were simply ignored by Maricopa County Sheriff's Office detectives."

"...more than 400 sex-crimes reported to Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio's office during a three-year period ending in 2007 — including dozens of alleged child molestations — [were] inadequately investigated and in some instances were not worked at all, according to current and former police officers familiar with the cases.

In El Mirage alone, where Arpaio's office was providing contract police services, officials discovered at least 32 reported child molestations — with victims as young as 2 years old — where the sheriff's office failed to follow through, even though suspects were known in all but six cases.

Many of the victims, said a retired El Mirage police official who reviewed the files, were children of illegal immigrants.

[...] El Mirage Detective Jerry Laird, who reviewed some the investigations, learned from a sheriff's summary of 50 to 75 cases files he picked up from Arpaio's office that an overwhelming majority of them hadn't been worked.

That meant there were no follow-up reports, no collection of additional forensic evidence and zero effort made after the initial report of the crime was taken.

[...] Bill Louis, then-assistant El Mirage police chief who reviewed the files after the sheriff's contract ended, believes the decision to ignore the cases was made deliberately by supervisors in Arpaio's office — and not by individual investigators.

"I know the investigators. I just cannot believe they would wholesale discount these cases. No way," Louis said. "The direction had to come (from) up the food chain."

[...] El Mirage paid the sheriff's office $2.7 million for a wide range of police protection from 2005 through mid-October 2007 [...](My emphases)

"When we asked women what female rage looked like to them, it was always Medusa... One woman told us that at times her rage feels 'mythological'. Another psychologist, with a mass of curly hair, said her teenage clients call her 'Medusa' because she can see right through them. A third told us her coworkers have dubbed her 'Medusa' and address her so, 'Because I don't take any shit.' When she first experienced her own rage and released it at an anger retreat, she said, 'It was like a flood of snakes coming out of me.'
- Mary Valentis and Anne Devane, Female Rage

"Writing... converts anger and disappointment into deliberate and durable aggression, the writer's main source of energy. It converts sorrow and self-pity into empathy, the writer's main means of relating to otherness. Similarly, his wounded innocence turns into irony, his silliness into wit, his guilt into judgment, his oddness into originality, his perverseness into his stinger."
- Dani Shapiro quoting Ted Solotaroff

"There are seething undercurrents in Yes. Only very few people surely can have failed to see beyond the love and peace? If you took the group only at that level, then you'd have to wonder where all that aggressive playing came from for a start. There has been some severely aggressive playing in Yes. It is an interesting irony that there is all this love and peace and hippiedom, whereas in fact Yes is a very tight, highly structured, nerve-wracking organisation always short of money and always spending too much and always in trouble, which is eventually reflected in the music."
- Bill Bruford, quoted by Chris Welch in Close to the Edge: the Story of Yes