Sunset
New screenshots
These shots are still work in progress and even though they do not represent the final beauty of the game, they say a lot about what is going to make the penthouse a spectacular environment to explore. Rather than try to make a photo-real environment we’ve stuck to our artistic strengths. All Tale of Tales games have a really subtle stylisation that may not look real but once you are in these environments, they feel real. To pull off this effect in Sunset we’ve pushed the colour scheme to its saturation point with the tones of the evening sky, chic lighting from designer lamps and dramatic shadows.
Reflections of a Housekeeper, by Angela Burnes, week 24
I wonder if Gabriel Ortega prefers men. He's married, but sometimes that doesn't mean much, especially within well to do families like his. I mean, the apartment has all these statues of men, naked and gorgeous. From one perspective they're representations of idealized form, but they're also sensual.
The faun playing cymbals reminds me of reading Nietzsche my sophomore year. I didn't enjoy Zarathustra much, with his mad raving about the Ubermensch. Maybe he meant well, but it's a dangerous idea to put out into the world. People are weak and ideas like that inevitably get twisted. But later I read Nietzsche's earlier work, from a time when he was really into the ancient Greeks. The statues in the apartment call all that to mind, the fascination with abundance, and with the cult of Bacchus, the god of wine and dancing. Lush and indulgent, in opposition to austere Apollo, who would have bored Nietzsche (and Gabriel?) to tears.
The entire apartment has an Apollonian feeling, with its clean perpendicular lines and its penchant for symmetry. But Gabriel's furniture and art introduce a sort of aesthetic bacchanalia. Oh man! I miss him. He looks kind of foxy in some of these photographs too. Suddenly I'm realizing that maybe Gabriel and I would get along just fine. He's quite a bit older, but I think a girl like me could handle that.
Reflections of a Housekeeper, by Angela Burnes, week 23
A few of the sculptures are modern, though. Abstract. At first glance they're just haphazard jumbles of geometric shapes, but their origins are clear to me. The artists of the early 20th century are so deeply influenced by African and Oceanic art that it’s disturbing. They must have felt really cool embracing all those “primitive” concepts in their longing for a more authentic experience. It’s like another wave of colonialism happened in the salons and groovy bohemian attics of frosty Paris. It wasn't enough to steal African bodies. They had to leech away the spiritual and aesthetic ideas too. Take the marrow from the bone.
By birth, I'm a Westerner, an American. But when I look in the mirror, I don’t see one of the pale-pink ladies from Boucher’s paintings. I don't see the "perfect proportions" of the Venus de Milo reflected back at me. What I see is an African face, an African body. And while my mind is comfortable with the European pieces, I feel an indescribable affinity with the African artwork here in the apartment.
On bad days that duality tears me apart, but today I feel just fine. I think I might create a little something myself, mixed and impure, everything about me all tangled up.
Reflections of a Housekeeper, by Angela Burnes, week 22
I saw Cabaret a few years ago in New York, but now they're making a movie based on the musical. I doubt we’ll get to see it here, since the new regime panics over anything with anti-authoritarian undertones. Of course, that nervousness implies a lack of confidence in their own beliefs.
This curious apartment does feel like the backdrop for a stage play, especially since Señor Ortega moved most of his stuff in, but hasn't really settled yet. The place is starting to feel lived in, but it lacks warmth. Ortega's visiting his family in the countryside, and he hasn't given me anything new to do, so while he's away I'm going to transform his apartment into a home.
Reflections of a Housekeeper, by Angela Burnes, week 21
Maybe that goes back further than most of us might imagine.
I can even see the Indians and the Conquistadors bonding over a shared fascination with death. The morbid Catholicism of the Spanish might have felt really comfortable inside the pyramids and tombs dotting the new continent. And the darkly romantic flamenco could have been danced at the very same festivals where the ancient Anchurians held their cruel sacrificial games.
The mixing of pleasure and pain, life and death, still reverberates through modern Anchurian culture, but the most sinister practices have been abandoned in favor of loud parties with dancing skeletons and colorful candy, almost like Halloween back home. Only the very traditional families in the country continue to remember the dead with any real enthusiasm these days, but some of those make up for the rest, engaging in all sorts of bizarre local rituals.
I wonder what Gabriel Ortega's family was like when he was young. What did he inherit from his oldest grandparents? Sometimes these wealthy families stubbornly maintain old traditions, despite how that seems at odds with their business affairs and otherwise worldly views. Who knows what goes on behind the closed doors of those colonial mansions?
Reflections of a Housekeeper, by Angela Burnes, week 20
It was the people who struck me. The West derides communism, accusing it of all sorts of crimes, and mocking the relative poverty in communist states. But what I encountered in Anchuria was not something the American school system had prepared me for. What I saw forced me to re-evaluate the concepts of wealth and poverty.
I found a beautiful country, tropical and hot, with remnants of a colonial past, either repurposed or decaying gently. Lush palms and banana trees growing along the roadside. Children in elegant school uniforms, stopping their games in the road to let the occasional bus trundle past. People in groups everywhere, talking, laughing or working together.
People like no others I had ever seen. Such warmth and beauty. Dressed with impeccable taste, despite their meager homes and the very old cars they drive. A kind of dignity comes through in the way they carry themselves. There's a sharp contrast between the Anchurians and the people I knew back home. It helped me see that the more materialistic "developed" nations create consumers, not culture.
In those early months here, I had never seen people more free in the way they lived, in their attitudes, than in San Bavòn. Liberty, equality and fraternity. Never had I seen those lofty ideals realized as profoundly and tangibly as here. It's not just that there was no racism, but there were simply no races to speak of. All possible shades of skin color and not a shred of discrimination. I wondered how they had accomplished this. Racial equality still seems like an unachievable utopian mirage in the States.
But it wasn't just race. For the first time in my life, I saw women and men living with each other in a state of mutual respect. There was no power struggle between them, none of the ever-present friction I was used to. Simply together.
It took me a while just to absorb it all, a sensation of freedom that permeated every minute of every day. No one in my home town would believe it, much less understand it. This was something deeper and more soulful than the freedom of choice offered back home.
I've come to realize that "choice" is a silly concept for people who are truly free. Real freedom is not constantly struggling to differentiate and elevate yourself. It's not choosing between labels and neighborhoods and products, all the things I'd seen people using to define themselves growing up. Real freedom is simply living an enjoyable life, in harmony with those around you.
This knowledge makes the military takeover by General Miraflores all the more cruel. Why would the US government even bother supporting his regime, out of spite? Could the leaders there be threatened by what the Anchurians have achieved, with nowhere near the resources or power of the industrialized countries, and without the undignified circus of the free market? Are the Anchurians being punished for the beauty they possess, the goodness they've cultivated? Whatever it is, it's unjust.
But now the rumors are growing stronger, talking about a rebel army rising up in the hills of Yaguara. And it makes me glad.
Reflections of a Housekeeper, by Angela Burnes, week 19
I remember Janus from a course on mythology. Two faces, looking in opposite directions. One at the past, the other to the future. One young, one old. One male, one female, though in this instance both faces look androgynous.
What struck me is the lack of conflict between the two faces. The statue is in equilibrium, with no obvious tension between the two sides, despite facing away from one another, looking in opposite directions.
That seems right to me. There's union between the sun and the moon, between the two sides of a single coin, and there's really no need to choose one or the other because we all contain both. Some things just exist like that, and whatever contradictions people perceive only exist because language can't fully capture the reality of the world, the plural essence of being.
This statue embodies that sense of that unity. It's a divine dream where God loves all His children equally.
Reflections of a Housekeeper, by Angela Burnes, week 18
There are more soldiers on the streets now, harassing people, shouting out orders. They claim to be searching for insurgents, terrorists. They say they're protecting us. But for most folks the effect is intimidation. We're left with an unsettling sense of insecurity. A fear that gets under the skin, which of course plays into the hands of the authorities. People get quiet. It's always the same - any political regime benefits from frightened and obedient citizens.
And to be clear, it's Miraflores' soldiers who are the ones dealing out the terror.
This shit has a tendency to backfire, though. I wouldn't be surprised if the new security restrictions lead to much greater support for the Yaguara rebels.
Anyway, back to work. Cleaning this place up will calm my nerves.
Reflections of a Housekeeper, by Angela Burnes, week 17
It's strange to hear a white man from Florida singing blues that sprang up from Black people in the Deep South. Music born of suffering, tracing back to the chanting and hollering of slaves working in fields. Somehow sad and hopeful at the same time. Recorded and packaged up in Los Angeles, piped out across the world.
But I have to admit, the songs are really good, and no doubt it'll be the last Doors album.
Now the voice coming through the radio, singing these deep, morose songs, is no more. I have the words of a dead man echoing in my head because Jim Morrison went out like an electric bulb last year in Paris of all places. Jim Morrison, who seemed like two people in one body. Hard and masculine, but sinewy and seductive. Commanding attention and drawing away. Now alive and dead at the same time.
Duality is an enduring mystery. So many things can be divided into halves, each incomplete without the other. Women and men, head and heart, body and soul. We are all doubles.
The mirrors in Gabriel Ortega's apartment are a chore to keep clean, but my reflection makes me feel less alone. And I have to say my double in the mirror looks good. The sisters back home would be jealous if they saw how much my hair has grown out.
Ortega seems to share this fascination with the number two. There're several sculptures in his home that consist of paired figures. One is clearly African and I love it, though I have no idea about the precise origin. It's a kind of mask with two heads. Maybe it's a mask for two people standing close together. I love the way the artist captured the African facial features and body decorations. If only I was that comfortable in my own skin. To grow up among your own, immersed in thousands of years of culture. Even if that meant running around barefoot across the grasslands, I'd trade in a second.
Reflections of a Housekeeper, by Angela Burnes, week 16
It's an image I can't seem to shake. Should I get flowers for them? I could give them an outpouring of color, of expression, as if they were all describing the same beautiful ideal.
There's an overgrown lot along the road I take to work, and I've seen orchids there. We're in the tropics, baby. Orchids grow wild here. Walking to the apartment, I could pick some. They'd look lovely.
Although lilies are probably more Ortega's thing. The white lilies from the Annunciation paintings. Uncorrupted and austere, distant. Until they open and stink up the place. So I wouldn't do that to him. I'm sure if I look around, I can gather enough white orchids. That's a good compromise. Wonder what he'll think.