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fmbishop · 4 years

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* I'VE GOT MY VEINS ALL TANGLED CLOSE .

* ╰ chicago’s very own 𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐣𝐚𝐡 𝐛𝐢𝐬𝐡𝐨𝐩 has been spotted on madison avenue driving a 1960 vintage jeep bronco , welcome ! your resemblance to 𝒈𝒓𝒂𝒚𝒔𝒐𝒏 𝒅𝒐𝒍𝒂𝒏 is unreal . according to tmz , you just had your twenty - first birthday bash . your chance of surviving new york is uncertain because you’re 𝒄𝒉𝒖𝒓𝒍𝒊𝒔𝒉 , but being 𝒔𝒕𝒆𝒂𝒅𝒇𝒂𝒔𝒕 might help you . i think being a taurus explains that . 3 things that would paint a better picture of you would be 𝒑𝒆𝒆𝒍𝒆𝒅 𝒔𝒌𝒂𝒕𝒆𝒃𝒐𝒂𝒓𝒅 𝒈𝒓𝒊𝒑 𝒕𝒂𝒑𝒆 , 𝒅𝒂𝒓𝒌 𝒄𝒊𝒓𝒄𝒍𝒆𝒔 𝒃𝒆𝒏𝒆𝒂𝒕𝒉 𝒕𝒊𝒓𝒆𝒅 𝒆𝒚𝒆𝒔 , & 𝒌𝒏𝒆𝒆𝒔 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒑𝒂𝒍𝒎𝒔 𝒓𝒖𝒃𝒃𝒆𝒅 𝒓𝒂𝒘 . ( i cut ties with my best friend and collaborator because i was secretly in love with her , but our publicist had her date my brother instead . ) & ( cis male + he / him ) + ( ruby , 18+ , she / her , pst )

 𝒊 . 𝒔𝒕𝒂𝒕𝒔 .

𝒏𝒂𝒎𝒆 : elijah alexander bishop 𝒏𝒊𝒄𝒌𝒏𝒂𝒎𝒆𝒔 : eli , e . from his loved ones , he recieves variations on ellie , ugly ass mustache head , tony hawk , and zumiez employee of the month . 𝒂𝒈𝒆 : twenny - won 𝒛𝒐𝒅𝒊𝒂𝒄 : taurus 𝒐𝒄𝒄𝒖𝒑𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏 : professional skateboarder and youngest x games gold medalist in history , brand ambassador for several skate fashion brands , established youtube vlogger , and aspiring filmmaker . 𝒈𝒆𝒏𝒅𝒆𝒓 𝒊𝒅𝒆𝒏𝒕𝒊𝒕𝒚 / 𝒑𝒓𝒐𝒏𝒐𝒖𝒏𝒔 : cis male / he him his 𝒐𝒓𝒊𝒆𝒏𝒕𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏 : heterosexual , heteroromantic 𝒉𝒆𝒊𝒈𝒉𝒕 : 5’11 𝒍𝒂𝒃𝒆𝒍𝒔 : the black sheep , the despondent , the fallen angel , the isolato , the intangible concept , the dirtbag , the doryphore 𝒌𝒆𝒚 𝒕𝒓𝒂𝒊𝒕𝒔 : - churlish , emotionally reserved , hesitant , resentful , self - sabotaging + steadfast , benevolent , chivalrous , reliable , down to earth 𝒉𝒐𝒈𝒘𝒂𝒓𝒕𝒔 𝒉𝒐𝒖𝒔𝒆 : hufflepuff 𝒔𝒐𝒏𝒈 𝒊𝒏𝒔𝒑𝒐𝒔 : that’s on me - mac miller / obstacle 1 - interpol / just my luck - marc e bassy & blackbear / EARFQUAKE - tyler the creator / superfast jellyfish - gorillaz / here comes a feeling - louis the child / horseshoes and handgrenades - green day / boys don’t cry - the cure / SUGAR - brockhampton / slow dancing in the dark - joji / come back to earth - mac miller / swing , swing - the all american rejects

𝒊𝒊 . 𝒃𝒂𝒄𝒌𝒔𝒕𝒐𝒓𝒚 .

harold and lillian bishop welcome the heirs to the bishop throne on an early may morning . ceo of the multi-billion dollar bishop industries construction empire , and partner of the bishop & franklin international law firm respectively , the boys enter into the shadow of a last name prepared to build onto its own legacy . eli comes into the light moments after his brother , a hand firmly grasped onto the ankle of his twin , victorious to emerge into the world first . parallel to the biblical brothers jacob and esau , his nurse notes , but his parents pay no mind . on the whim of a meaningless sequence , the elder twin is delegated as the champion of the bishop legacy , to bear the weight of their family empire and its subsequent legacy on his shoulders with pride .

elijah , on the heel of his brother , isaiah , by a mere fraction of a second , bears the weight of his second-coming due to such a christening for the rest of his upbringing .

the black sheep is perhaps too delicate of a phrasing to explain the conflict stirring daily in the bishop household , a family of perfection — and elijah , the foil to them all , a failure by definition , perhaps crafted simply to emphasize the feats of his twin brother . he’s smaller , scrawnier , slower to pick up school work and requiring relentless tutoring and support throughout his elementary school years . sensitive and introverted , he spends the first decade of his life cowering behind isaiah as a shield , receiving constant critiques of not enough , not good enough , not close enough to —

he tries not to focus on his shortcomings , as plentiful as his parents may convince him that there may be . any expression other than a stoic compliance is seen as contumacious , swiftly corrected with a ‘ i wish you would be more like your brother . ’ eli withers into himself shortly after his 12th birthday , the onset of puberty and a discovery for a natural athletic inclination giving him some semblance of musculature , his jaw sharpening and gaze taking a similar harshness . his body becomes a fortress , the only protection he can implement as his brother begins to split from him , taking on more responsibility as the twins are brought increasingly into the spotlight of their family name and fortune .

each moment harboring a critique only stokes resentment behind each clenched jaw and tight lipped smile eli has to fake . he knows its all for show , his brother is the only true heir written into their legacy regardless of what path he chooses to take . bearing the weight of a whole family tree of disappointment , eli takes on odd hobbies and begins to compose bits and pieces of himself as the him he wants to be , dismantling the illusion composed by expectations to mirror his infallible brother . by 13 , his secretive hobby becomes an increasingly viable career in skateboarding , by 17 , he’s hired his own agent and moves out on his own to escape the increasing burdens of being the bishop legacy disappointment . his parents all but excommunicate him , and he spends spans of month-long silences between them with only his brother to bridge such gaps . eli is gnarled and hidden away from the glitz and glamour he had grown so comfortable with , navigating his shattered self-image and desire to amount to something entirely on his own — but at the very least , he’s free .

it’s a tabloid’s dream , the black sheep of the bishop family , reuniting with his herd for their move to new york . eli is resentful and bitter at the idea of uprooting himself , but it’s his brother’s impassioned pleas of a reunion that soften eli’s resolve and cause the young skateboarding sensation to follow the rest of his distant family to new york . his brother assures him with honeyed promises of a family reunited , a change of heart of their parents’ callousness , a desire to see the bishops as one . their father’s upcoming retirement and a supposed reflection on the cruelty imposed on his brother are all cited as reasons why eli should just come with them . and eli , hardened and bitter to all but the implorations of his brother ( and perhaps a gnawing desire for some sort of familial validation after a lifetime of being dubbed the disappointment , ) begrudgingly follows through .

their parents do not .

it awakens a particular emotion within eli to see his parents for the first time in nearly 2 years and be received with the same coldness he had been seen off with at their last meeting . backhanded compliments follow fronthanded insults and it ends with eli and his father in a screaming match , fingers jabbed dangerously into chests and tempers on full blare . the betrayal comes not from a set of parents who didn’t want him — eli knew it was entirely too good to be true to be taken as the prodigal son . the betrayal , he laments , is in the falsities told by his brother , the one person who had spent so long protecting him and had now allowed him to walk without guard into the lion’s den . eli knows his brother had nothing but the best of intentions and keeps him as the sole bishop contact : this is the last he talks to his parents after years of torment .

they stay in new york together and fill their time with work and the occasional youtube video at the behest of their management , random vlogs that surprisingly take off . the bishop twins become something of an internet sensation — isaiah a charming and composed law student , eli a brooding and unkempt skater boy , with a dynamic that viewers are quick to fall in love with . they turn out content on a regular basis , building a fanbase through their vlogs that begs for collaborations and ‘ linking up . ‘ they go through the motions of collabs until one particular set of youtubers have a chemistry with the twins that their fans eat up . quickly hired to the same management team , the bishops create a mini vlog squad with their friends , a dynamic that finds eli more emotionally invested than he’d care to admit . but forever the self - saboteur , he keeps himself from admitting these feelings to their collaborator , repressing them until an email from their publicist reveals plans to have her date isaiah for the sake of views .

eli , despite having kept his feelings from practically everyone in his life , takes the move personally and cuts off all work with their collaborator , the ensuing drama being enough to keep his publicist happy despite whatever happens between her and his brother . their group goes back to being a duo , a secret for eli to keep perhaps to his grave , and he pushes to forge on with creating a name for himself out of the shadow of his family .

( um for context slash anyone who knew version one of eli we’re gonna say he got sick of the celeb world and went backpacking through southern asia w no phone n no outside contacts , just recently returned to ny after the past 2 months of isolation ! )

𝒊𝒊𝒊 . 𝒅𝒊𝒔𝒑𝒐𝒔𝒊𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏

i’m so excited to bring eli back . … i love wealthy sm lemme give y’all a few bullets for the rundown of the uglie mean sk8r boi that u should all say ‘ see u l8r boi ‘

as the bio implies , he had a really tough upbringing in the shadow of his perfect brother . a lot of his parents’ cruelty resulted in the personality he has now .

eli is most known for his resentment of wealth and fame . in the celeb world , he’s always known as the one who’s just a normal guy . super down to earth and constantly critiquing ppl who let the fame get to their head

in a way , he gets this weird sense of superiority that’s super hypocritical ? like he thinks he’s better than the rich ppl bc he doesn’t act boujie .. . . . but ? he’s rich too ? just bc ur chinos r ripped doesnt make u better than anyone else u dumb bitch

super , and i cannot emphasize this enough , SUPER emotionally constipated . he acts like he’s above it all to serve as his defense mechanism bc on the real he’s terrified of being rejected by people the way his own parents rejected him . his solution ? if u act like u don’t give a shit , nobody can hurt u .

if he’s not angry ranting , he’s honestly p stoic . nobody knows what he’s thinkin or feelin which is how he likes it . it gets real annoying when he keeps playing the cool disconnected guy n ur like ‘ what do u want for lunch ‘ n he’s like ‘ i dont give a fuck ‘ n ur like ‘ we know dumbass edgelord we still gotta EAT tho ‘

on that ranting note , he’s usually pretty reserved and calm during things like interviews or talking to fans . when he’s in touchier situations , his defense mechanism is to switch to his hairpin trigger hostility .

ig he feels like he has something to prove by being the tough guy so he just ? gets mad super easily instead of processing his feelings like a normal person ? he detaches himself from his emotions bc he has a really fucked sense of self - worth and has an eternal belief he’s not worthy of happiness so he’ll sabotage himself to no end

shockingly sensitive and will hold onto his pain as if to fuel him . he takes disloyalty personally and will often hold onto abandonment or slights that happened years ago because they genuinely affected him , even if he didn’t show so at the time .

in terms of the celeb life : he’s p low key . isn’t much of a partier bc he has social anxiety sdfsd but he’s comfy sipping a beer on the patio as long as everyone else stays inside lmao . he’s cool w hookups but isn’t actively sleeping around ? like he could prob live like a fuckboy but rlly surprises u when he doesn’t do the fuckboy thing .. … . it’s the sensitive boy in him or somethin idk.. . .. mayb he just can’t care enough .. .. it’s the apathy … .

when he’s not seeing red , he’s rational man meant to BUST everyone’s stupidity . usually the only mfer w common sense in the squad to plan ahead n shit but if someone pushes his homies ? eli comes out SWINGING n then avoids all the tabloids about him sloppy fighting in the club like he’s mariah carey n can’t read or somethin

cannot flirt for the life of him , says dumb shit like ‘ u smell nice ‘ and hopes his muscles do all the talking lmao fuckin BEEFCAKE

on the real , when he’s calm n collected he can be surprisingly sweet and this is when the down to earth comes in . doesn’t get attached to many but to the few he does , he defends to the end and is the type to sacrifice whatever it is to protect them . this mans LOVES his friends and ppl are surprised to see how kind he can b bc he’s usually masking his kindness with his brutishness lmao .

he’s also ? surprisingly funny ? we’ll see abt that tho bc most of his shit is deadpan

most of the time : just fuckin . mean as hell sdfsdf

anarchist mfer ! he said FUCK the system , it’s a big skate energy and he tries to be as creative and undefined as possible . follows random whims as he learns to be less self conscious bc now he’s his own brand and doesn’t have to always think about ‘ whats best for the family ’ and all that bs ! he’s rlly passionate abt skate culture and originality and is a really big outspoken feminist / social activist bc what’s more punk than dismantling the patriarchy and other oppressive power structures ?

on that note . lowkey . a simp KWHRJWE he acts hard and won’t let any man come after him but he’s afraid 2 be mean to girls n lets most of his female friends bully him while he does the office stare in2 the camera .

i always stick random blurbs downhere but the mans is vegan , cares more about his car than anything , spends most of his time in his ratty skate clothes that barely get washed bc they ‘ hold the energy better ’ ( nastie ) , if it aint sk8 shoes its socks w sandals n he doesn’t get whats wrong w that , he’s a hufflepuff n a ISTJ-T myers briggs ( The Logistician ) , n tbh he really just appreciates the little things in life ? thats eli my lil meat head .

#wealthyhq:intro #as always like and i'll come 2 u 4 plots ! 💖🥰#back at it again w the clownery 🤡#all old members : we can def keep old plots if wanted or revamp ! lmk ! 🥰

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dustedmagazine · 4 years

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Listed: Horse Lords

Baltimore-based Horse Lords have been forging their own take on experimental rock music since 2012. The quartet, Andrew Bernstein (saxophone/percussion), Max Eilbacher (bass/electronics), Owen Gardner (guitar) and Sam Haberman (drums) weave together pieces drawing on divergent sources that include everything from 20th and 21st century classical music to just intonation tuning to African and Appalachian musical traditions to intricate polyrhythms and studio experiments. In a recent interview, Gardner talked about their approach to putting pieces together. “We generally write right up to the edge of our abilities. And sometimes slightly beyond. We’d had to scrap quite a few songs because they proved to be basically impossible to play... It keeps it interesting.” Ian Forsythe covered their newest release, The Common Task, noting that “Their nearly ten-year core pivots rhythmic and tonal ideas athletically, and their ability to pull elements from anywhere and everywhere is seemingly more fluid with each record.”

For this Listed, the four members runs down a list of live shows, recordings, blogs, movies, and books that have been on their minds.

Gleb Kanasevich plays Horațiu Rădulescu’s “Inner Time II for seven clarinets (Op.42b),” Baltimore. 2018 (Owen Gardner)

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A near-hourlong ear workout, combining impressive sonic and structural brutality. The interaction of what these close dissonances do inside your ears with what the clarinets do in space (Gleb played live with 6 recordings of himself, meticulously arranged around the audience) is a haunting experience, celestial but with no concession to human music.

Maryanne Amacher — Perceptual Geographies, Philadelphia 2019 (Owen Gardner)

https://issuu.com/bowerbirdphilly/docs/amacherprogramonline

So much revelatory material has come out of the Maryanne Amacher archive so far, and particularly these loving reconstructions of her instrumental music. A lot more attention seems to have been given to “Petra,” which is certainly gorgeous and shows fascinating symmetries with the spatial/timbral concerns of her electronic music, but “Adjacencies” struck me as the Major Work of 20th Century Music. She wrote the damn thing in 1965 and it sounds fresh half a century later, which we can say of no previous piece of percussion music and not much written subsequently. I am slowly losing my mind waiting for Amy Cimini’s book on Amacher to come out, craving a deeper dive into her theory and methods.

Sarah Hennies, Bonnie Jones, Lê Quan Ninh, and Biliana Voutchkova at the High Zerofestival, Baltimore 2019 (Owen Gardner)

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One of at least three great things Sarah Hennies did last year (Reservoir 1 on Black Truffle and the 90 minute cello/percussion duo “The Reinvention of Romance” being the others) was to take part in Baltimore’s High Zero festival, four mind-frying days devoted to free improvisation. This set was one of the highlights of 2019’s festival; each of the four performers having at least one foot in composed music (Ninh is a long-time Cage interpreter and Biliana has collaborated with Peter Ablinger) seemed to lend it a certain sureness and serenity, but ultimately their combined strength as improvisors (fastidiously captured by High Zero’s crack recording team) is what makes it such an engaging listen.

El Chombo — Cuentos de la Cripta (Owen Gardner)

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A relentless tetralogy that nicely balances the rawness of ‘90s proto-reggaetón productions (the first volume self-identifies as “Spanish Reggae”) and the slicker, synth-oriented sound and settled genre conventions we’ve come to enjoy (or not) in the 21st century. This was helpful when working on “People’s Park,” not least for its insistent connection to Jamaican music. I can understand very little Spanish but I'm guessing the lyrics are not unproblematic; signifying language always disappoints.

Wallahi Le Zein! (Owen Gardner)

http://thewealthofthewise.blogspot.com/

An invaluable resource for anyone interested in African music, much more consistent and informative than the often yucky reissue market, which seems to prioritize awkward (and marginal) attempts at Western musical fads—as if what was available was not an impossibly rich and heterogeneous network of self-sufficient musical cultures but merely a broken mirror facing America. The archive of Mauritanian music alone makes this the most worthwhile stop on the information superhighway. There’s plenty of goofy drum programming and appalling sound quality if that’s your bag, but the rich variety of traditional musics is what keeps me coming back.

Miles Davis — On the Corner (Max Eilbacher)

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Some might say Stockhausen serves imperialism but he did his little part to help cook up some of the most twisted American Jazz/funk jams ever. Davis only kept one cassette in his convertible sports car during the On the Corner sessions, a tape of “Hymnen.” He would take each member of the band on highspeed joy rides with the car’s stereo system on full blast. That same energy was channeled in the arrangement and editing. The convergence of a lot of different elements keeps this record on my top 10 list ‘til the end of time. The little detail of Americans taking concepts from European Neu Musik and making something incredibly funky and pleasurable is the cherry on top.

Olivia Block & Marcus Schmickler at Diffusion Festival, Baltimore 2018 (Andrew Bernstein)

This was an amazing pairing, with both artists playing in 8-channel “surround sound.” Marcus’ set was incredibly intense. Pure synthesis with a lot of psychoacoustic inner ear tones and unending overlapping melodies. It felt like the sonic equivalent of watching a strobe light at close distance. Olivia’s set was a slow creep, laying samples to create lush textures that were truly immersive. This was the kind of concert that reminds you of the awesome power of music.

Blacks’ Myths at the Red Room, Baltimore 2019 (Andrew Bernstein)

Blacks' Myths II by Blacks' Myths

I’m there for anything bassist Luke Stewart touches (see Irreversible Entanglements, his solo upright + feedback work, frequent collaborations with too many people to name). Blacks' Myths, his bass and drumset duo with Warren Crudup, is loud, noisy, and intense, and this set at the Red Room last year was particularly transcendent.

“Blue” Gene Tyranny — Out of the Blue (Andrew Bernstein)

Out of the Blue by "Blue" Gene Tyranny

I have probably listened to this record more than any other the last few years. Perfectly crafted pop songs segue into proggy funk jams and then into stream of consciousness drone pieces based around the doppler effect. I’ll put it on over and over again, an experience with an album I haven’t really had since I was in high school.

Bill Orcutt — An Account of the Crimes of Peter Thiel and His Subsequent Arrest, Trial, and Execution 2017 (Max Eilbacher)

AN ACCOUNT OF THE CRIMES OF PETER THIEL AND HIS SUBSEQUENT ARREST, TRIAL AND EXECUTION. by BILL ORCUTT

Legendary underground American guitarists from the most important American rock band also makes top notch conceptual digital audio art. Years ago I thought computer music lacked a certain sub cultural attitude. While this was/is not true, this 2017 release feels like it exists in its own world. High and low brow are in perfect harmony for this patterned enjoyable hellride of a listen. What if Hanne Darboven had to make art while working a full time job and dealing with mild substance abuse?

Lina Wertmüller — Seven Beauties 1975 (Max Eilbacher)

By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=42000553

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Beauties

During this pandemic I have been talking film shop over emails nonstop. I went through a big Wertmüller phase in 2018-2019 and as people are trading recommendations I usually try to recommend something by her. This film is the one that I keep reaching for. The email recommending this film usually starts as a draft with “this is really intense” and then I try to hearken back to my film school days and write about the male gaze, patriarchy, communism or something of that nature. I end up writing a bit, feeling like it’s way over the top for a casual email and then I end up deleting everything except “this is a really intense and beautiful film.”

Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the Sixties by Tom O’Neill (Sam Haberman)

https://www.littlebrown.com/titles/tom-oneill/chaos/9780316477574/

The last book I managed to check out of the library before it closed. Though it in some ways resembles works of conspiracy theory, Tom O’Neill is always straightforward in telling the reader that, though the official story of the Manson case is almost certainly not true, the actual details don’t cohere into any kind of Meaning. Every new discovery is its own digression that points to a new unknowable truth or unverifiable claim. This really inverts the normal thrill of conspiracy theory, which invites you to either buy into the story being presented or reject it all together, either path offering its own sort of comfort. Chaos offers no such comfort.

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wonderingangelsuniverse · 5 years

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January 7th 2018

I’ve noticed something different in me which I think I understand. The universe is astonishing lately, keeping kind. It maybe because my wishes always vary from light to dark in some ways, so it doesn’t have to worry to much about how to find that fine balance between love and torture. I consider myself invested in my own growth as I tend to make sure I learn things I need to for my overall goals of becoming a better writer and most importantly so I may understand the humans more. I realize I have a fine sense of people/psychology as I have never truly been one myself, so I am able to take a not so bias embrace to what I’ve heard is truth from many voices in my lifetime. Mostly empathy not so much sympathy.

This brings me to my point. As we both know I’ve been experiencing raw emotions on a next level basis like I have never before felt. In any case I have expressed that I may need some assistance discovering what true evil within a person is like. I never expected in any way that I would become the dummy. It makes a very large amount of sense to me that in some aspects I must suffer in order to test what darkness is, but for me to be both the antagonist and the victim is a shock. Destiny is the greatest writer and although I too wish to be that good, I almost feel like it has a fairly high advantage over me. Over my existence, even at a young age, I have found that if destiny wants to shake anyone simple put it can, perceive or think such an outcome maybe not so much. Its kind of screwy, I have spent many, many of times writing out all the possible situations that may unfold upon the future. I have gone as far as taking bets with you. I feel like its not always entirely true as destiny attempts to persuade me otherwise with letting me predict small things. The problem is that it appears to keep an equal playing field for all the players in the game. If I am able to predict something then someone with an equal or better ability of anticipation an assumption can also interpret the next move. I can’t decide within myself weather to be mad or what, however my only outlet right now appears to be: to push everything towards the unknown. It’s because of the unknown that I am having these issues. This will never solve my problems and will only just do what I am proficient at which is to withdraw and berry any remnants of my issue. I keep finding myself having no reason to be so sad, not depressed, no, sad. A deep rooted sadness that makes me question if I’m going to stop living shortly. My lead theory is this strong inner emotion that often strikes me later in my day almost but most definitely heartbreak. I thought and I keep thinking, sadly, that I have once before experienced heartbreak undoubtedly, previously in my lifetime, however this is not true. We can come to this conclusion because of a recent discovery, one that separates admiration from lust. I’ve always understood love, as love is something given out. Love is not only something given out but something us humans are often exposed to at a very young age. I however have had a real tussle with lust so far. Not necessarily in a bad way but in a very confused way. Confused to the point that the only thing that makes sense to me, may not make any sense at all in the long run. I feel like the conclusion I have come to is both easily agreeable and nearly identical to the literal definition which should lead me to believe I am correct, although, from my point about destiny, I surprisingly may not know definitively. Let me explain, admiration is an extremely intoxicating feeling that makes me unable to get enough, because I find this person to be godly beyond and I must impress them. I fall unable, silent in fact, and yet I absolutely crave that persons presents. No matter how imperfect, their imperfection becomes my idea of perfection. Simple put, envy to an extreme. Lust is completely different is it not? I have gathered at some point that both lust and admiration enjoy holding hands romantically while they gaze at the vast illuminated ocean at the days end. Lust picks at me like ticks in hidden places, making me yearn for something I want desperately. I don’t consistently want actions from a person, but I feel a consuming warmth, like I’ve been eaten. I feel my blood rush in response to the ticks. The ticks are no unpleasing in anyway, but exactly the opposite of pain. I find myself taken away by lust just as I am taken by admiration except the dreams I have of lust are pearly sexual and admiration treats sex like its embarrassing.

In middle school the trendy thing to do was to have a boyfriend. I have to say I’ve always admired the idea of an intimate relationship with another. As I am/was female and ignorantly unable to be anything else, questioning the boy part in the word boyfriend wouldn’t cross my mind. What I wanted in my partner wasn’t sexual and just included sex in the package, so what did it matter to me? I was never repulsed by the thought of having sexual interactions with any gender anyways. In factuality I had already had intercourse with a male before I even entered the middle grades. I found it very glorious on a physical level. When I found the right guy, it would be both physically good and emotionally good as well, right? I was positive that the right guy would spark greatness in every encounter we made together. Wrapping this up I had absolutely no way of telling or evidence to reconsider about my partner not being a male. Why would I ever set out to make my life any more difficult then it already was? I scouted the halls of the middle school for the perfect male partner, even when I had a boyfriend, and was regarded as very happy. I was even admired for my cute little half cocked relationship I graciously accepted my way into as a kind favor. I loved the thought that someone genuinely enjoyed who I was, and could easily be broken emotionally if I were to protest. I’ve always been quite a kind and gentle soul. The boy I did end up admiring, key word, was a kid I thought was perfect in his appearance. I had little to no idea about him and in no way ever wanted him to mount me. I was addicted to how I felt about him however, always speaking of him kindly, and felt disingenuous stringing my so called current boyfriend along for no reason. If I had to break his heart it was going to be over the truth. The truth was simply because I didn’t find him, or in his defense any man, ever to be sexually appealing. I didn’t feel anything but love for him as a good overall person. always feeling that way over and over again towards admirable male personalities. Back to my walking art piece. My luck was quite fantastic when it came to wooing over the male I thought was perfection, sense I ironically had picked up many females online before. Definitely not an overly obvious hint to my clear lesbianism. I persuaded him to go out with me for a whopping ten days. I however was completely ignorant to this fact and avoided him like the pledge. I thought he genuinely rejected me sense he dashed off and didn’t answer my question. When I finally did catch up with him I found many people cheering in shock for whatever reason. Turns out he had admitted he would like to date me for some unknown reason. I didn’t understand this at the time so I was completely crushed into small shards of melting glass pieces when I did come to the realization. We did not love one another, I am still sure of this, but we were going out for an entire ten days. We never actually hung out or chilled, or did anything at all. He just kind of acknowledge my existence, stuck some half ass gum in my hair and made sure to remind me that my life was shit occasionally throughout those days. It was when he broke up with me and I realized I’d momentarily squabbled my chance that I was truly tortured. I retired from ever going back to my only public school option therefore deciding I could easily be self taught. I have only ever know this as heartbreak.

You however maybe wondering quite deeply at this point on, why or,who or, perhaps how, I managed to become heart broken considering I haven’t been with anyone as of late. I’ve acquired many deep and meaningful connections with an assortment of types of humans so far. One of my dear friends for example displays a personality type I like to consider like minded. Their like mindedness gives my brain a magnetic pull of justification. This person is always ahead of me on deep beliefs/concepts that I try to explore making them everything I could find attractive. I guess hiding that this person is female would be silly at this point, but you’ll have to excuse my need to be discrete. I did mention that I didn’t want to desire to struggle in anyway if I didn’t absolutely need to. Having a partner who could communicate both appropriate and clearly to me some of the answers in which I often seek out hands me no reason not to want them by my side forever. I find them both attractive physically and mentally, although I am unable to give out any physical features they have, I am sure you know whom I am speaking of Pain. Possibly I could go on and on about how I have been emotionally connected to this person, however I am not witting this out to cause myself inner conflict. My opinion on this person hasn’t seeped into the quicksand, because it was ultimately I who decided to be a masochist. That’s right I chose to stomp on my completely legitimate feeling. I debated spiritually and mentally about it but inevitably asked the universe to give me the ability to truly open up to her. How would I ever get anywhere in our already existing relation ship if I am constantly clouded by emotions that I don’t have a license to drive? It seemed illogical to me for many reasons. One major cause being that we had already spoke about in some way of, us. She didn’t break my heart because I find that she does love me dearly. Quite sad isn’t it? Already it’s unfortunate, although I am entirely to blame. It is I who fell for her. It is I who didn’t stop me, and it was I who made the end choice of continuing. Even at the time of discovery of my feeling, I still felt back then that I wasn’t a lesbian. I debated long and hard with myself on the topic of whether or not I believed that I honestly enjoyed who I was as an individual. All because of this heartbreak I poisoned myself with. I have always stuck true to myself so if I did decide that I hated me, it would be a difficult task to change who I am, nearly impossible in fact. I really can’t justify disliking my character in anyway due to my overall life accomplishments.

Finally all of what I have written about will come around now into my new thoughts. I asked the world what true evil was like. The only evil I have ever found is greed. Now I know that true evil can and will come from within. Sense I am now extremely heartbroken in order to speak with a dear friend on the same level, regardless of all the circumstances, I am pissed off. I am unable to be regretful about all of it, I am unable to be to angry at her in anyway sense she has done nothing wrong and doesn’t deserve any form of ridicule, and most important I am not going to be mad at myself for this shit that I didn’t sign up for. I didn’t say I wanted to be gay, I didn’t say I wanted to love her in that way, nor lust. I in no way said yes. I asked the universe questions, I asked the universe for favors. Oh yes I fucking nearly begged for love, because that’s what I was sent to this plane for. I was sent here as a human to do human things and be human and I REFUSE to take the blame for doing what I was called to exist for. No, I caused this, I undeniably did this to myself. I am the victim of my own crime and yet I have no choice but to be entirely angry at the universe. I will thank it, I will take more, I will complete any task it asks of me, but it can’t really be frustrated at me in anyway. NO, if the universe is a friend of mine then it should allow me to be mad. More Importantly because of the truth that it is I who both caused and was effected by said heartbreak. It has ripped a black whole deep with in me. My purity ruined by myself. I see the evil. I see it. I lay my gaze on the darkness I feel, how it manifests from the this sadness.

Edit from the Future: Blackhole of sadness not heartbreak but a deep warning from the pits of space calling to me, watch out.

#universe #dear diary #help #heartbreak #heartache #signs #therapy

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idreamtofmanderleyagain · 7 years

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Hellraiser as a Horror Fairy Tale

So for a while now I’ve been struggling to come to a clear, concise take on what I feel the classic Hellraiser’s are actually trying to be about. There’s a lot of themes here that are easy to emotionally grasp, but it’s been a bit of a struggle to try and build a coherent logical analysis on what all of these layers are conveying when properly understood all together (let alone figuring out how to verbalize what I was seeing). This is going to be a MASSIVE post, so buckle up for a long ride.

This has been especially frustrating because so many people have already asserted so much. There’s a lot of analysis out there that feels very unfocused and vague, or focuses far too much on very specific aspects that someone has isolated, like the unsettling theme of “pain and pleasure, indivisible.” The problem of course being that these aspects isolated like this are taken out of their full context, divorcing them of the very necessary emotional/psychological depth of the narrative, resulting in a rather simplistic, confused, or vague understanding of what kind of story we’re actually being told. This is problematic because it’s very clear that these films, the first two (and even three!) in particular, are deliberately using these horror elements as metaphor and analogy in a way very similar to traditional, dark and bloody fairy tales (see the outright fairy tale themes and references in H2). These are films that seem to function with a similar kind of gothic unreality that say, Angela Carter’s works do. And in any good fairy tale, a wolf is not a wolf.

Overall, I feel like the classic Hellraiser films are narratives discussing the nature of physical versus spiritual experience, the intersections thereof, and how this applies to the complexities of human suffering, trauma, abuse, etc. First, I should clarify what I mean by “spiritual.” I don’t mean “spiritual” in a faith/religious/superstitious sense, but as in humanity; in other words our personhood, the part of us that experiences emotion, empathy, craves human connection and emotional intimacy. So in turn, when I speak of “physical vs. spiritual,” I mean “physical” as the body divorced from it’s humanity. With me so far?

The first two films cover this this topic in different ways, with the second adding layers of spiritual complexity to the initial ideas laid out by the first film (and the third film, while extremely flawed, adds a few more intriguing elements that kind of bookend the themes for me), so there’s a lot of ground to cover. But hopefully, this will clarify my take on the themes of these films and how they suddenly became some of my favorite films of all time. I was actually quite surprised I enjoyed them so much, because I kind of expected something more akin to Nightmare On Elm St., or worst case scenario the subject matter would completely repulse and offend me, but instead I found something rather sophisticated and more fitting on the shelf where I put Cappola's Dracula, Labyrinth, Legend, In The Company Of Wolves, etc. It's much more like a gothic dark fantasy series than your general 80's horror franchise. I felt like I was watching a long-lost classic that nobody told me about, and nothing has really given me the same feeling I had back when I first watched all those nostalgic cult classics. Hellraiser 2 might even be ripping Labyrinth off a tiny bit, actually. If you're only familiar with Hellraiser because of the awful sequels (movies 3 to 9), you don't really know what the originals are like at all.

So without further ado, here’s my long-winded, [TOTALLY SPOILERIFIC, YOU WERE WARNED] analysis under the cut. ;P

[Warning for discussion of difficult subject matter from the films, including implications of past child abuse, attempted sexual assault, objectification of women (intentionally depicted, not as a failing of the films), allegorical kink-themed demons, etc. In the films It’s all imo presented rather tamely/tactfully outside of the over-the-top 80′s gore, but we’re talking a bit about all of this under the cut.]

I see the first Hellraiser film as dealing specifically with the evils of selfish, consumptive physical gratification, devoid of spiritual substance/humanity. Frank opens the door to Hell through a desire to reach new pleasures, because he’d exhausted all other avenues. He’s unsatisfied with what this world can give him, so he seeks out “the pleasures of heaven or hell,” he doesn’t care which. And I feel this speaks to what is at the heart of Frank, namely nothing at all. Frank is a being that exists purely for his own physical gratification. He is a textbook sociopath; essentially empty, devoid of emotional substance, and so he seeks to fill that void in him with physical pleasure. In that endless consumption Frank dehumanizes women; they become objects who’s humanity he disregards entirely. I’ve seen people try to call Frank a somewhat “sympathetic” villain (in the literary sense, not the ~redeemable~ woobie sense) even if he’s revolting, because apparently people can relate to his (and Julia’s) dissatisfaction with the banality of life, but Frank’s dissatisfaction comes from a place of spiritual emptiness. He is disconnected from his own humanity and the humanity of others, and so he wanders endlessly in search of the next base, physical high (so uh, personally, I find it hard to relate).

This is mirrored in Julia, who abandons the “emotional” roles of wife and step-mother in order to resurrect Frank, who gave her the physical gratification she holds above all else in her life, including her own morality and the lives of others. Julia is slightly more sympathetic because her dissatisfaction seems to stem from a sense of being pushed into traditional female roles that give her no fulfillment, so there are interesting elements of women’s oppression creating a human disconnect for Julia (particularly when it comes to the ways in which men dehumanize/use her). That said, I think it’s clear from Julia’s behavior across the board that her disconnect from her humanity is exacerbated by her obsession with the physical fulfillment she finds with Frank. There is an interesting line in the film from Frank, where he describes the relationship they have as being “like love, only real,” implying that he rejects the highly spiritual, emotional concept of “love,” as though he perceives what is purely physical as the only thing of real value. For Julia, I’d imagine that this has become a truth for her, because the traditional “loving” relationships of “wife” to Larry and “mother” to Kirsty brought her no fulfillment.

The men in general of the film seek this same selfish gratification - Julia seduces men home to feed to Frank, all of them seeking to consume her. You can see this underlying consumptive menace when the first man she drags home reveals his true colors, spitting angry words under his breath at her when she starts to seem hesitant. (it is interesting that she in turn is “consuming” them; they serve a material purpose to her that has nothing to do with their personhood. She’s feeding them to Frank, who literally consumes their life-force.) Larry also reveals a consumptive side when Julia tries to distract him with sexuality; she starts to shout “no!” (at Frank, who is looming menacingly in the shadows ready to strike at Larry), and it not only takes him way too many “no’s” to actually stop kissing her, he gets indignant at Julia’s “hot and cold” behavior, as if he was owed her body and denied. There’s little regard for her needs; he does not ask if something had hurt her, if she was okay, he only says with indignation that “he just doesn’t understand her,” rather than make any attempts at understanding.

H2′s Dr. Channard is another case of a consumptive soul, single-mindedly obsessed with his pursuits. However, unlike Frank, Channard’s obsessions are, for the most part, non-sexual. Channard has a sadistic, clinical fascination with the mind, endlessly consumed with a need for knowledge and discovery. But while Channard’s obsessions are focused in a mental space, it could be said that this too is a soullessly physical pursuit; he views the mind as an object to viciously plunder, and so human beings become objects for his purposes. So, like Frank, he is a character utterly incapable of empathy, humanity. The sexualized Male Gaze is unnecessary for dehumanization.

Despite all this objectification and abuse, despite the heavy underlying sexuality in these two films, they both seriously lack any Male Gaze whatsoever. In fact, all images of sexuality are pretty much entirely given to us from the perspective of women. There is a single exception of Male Gaze bullshit in H2, where there's a woman hanging topless for no justifiable reason in Julia's murder room, though you could actually blink at the right moment and miss it entirely (and we don't see a man or monster perpetrate violence against her, it's just Julia who promptly eats her). While Clive Barker directed the first film (and is a gay man), the second film was directed by Tony Randall (who is I believe a straight man), and it's things like that one little topless moment and the mild focus on Channard's enchantment with Julia that makes H2 lean slightly further away from H1's Male Gaze-less track record. That aside, Hellraiser 1 and 2 are rather unique for their time period in this way, because it's such a hard-hitting focus on women's experience of sexuality, or how women experience male sexuality in particular, which in Hellraiser is almost always predatory, un-self-aware, or in Steve and Kyle's romantic designs on Kirsty, a little bit too self-focused and limp. This is starkly contrasted with Hellraiser 3 and pretty much all Hellraiser films after it (particularly the constant callous objectification and violence perpetrated against women in Revelations, which surprise surprise, is the most recent film. Thank's modern cinema. Don't fucking remake Hellraiser you sociopaths). Hellraiser 3 was the first film to feature Pinhead committing violence agains a woman (that fact right there? that's fucking amazing for an 80's horror franchise. Especially one featuring these themes.), who in the moment is scantily clad and just had somewhat graphic sex with J.P., and the visceral and negative reaction I had to this dumb, cringey scene is very different than any of the reactions I had to the gore of the first two films. It's nothing too hard to handle (he rips her skin off with a hook in a bad effect and then the evil pillar eats her, so it's very gory but nothing shocking), but I mention it because the first two films really stand out as horror films that managed to deal with the abuse and objectification of women as a subject without actually objectifying them or showing us gratuitous, fetishistic shock-value surrounding that abuse, the way so many contemporary horror, thriller, and crime-procedural media does.

Beyond Frank and Julia, the other half of this story deals with Kirsty and the Cenobites. First of all, Kirsty is someone directly harmed by the consumptive, selfish gratification of both Frank and Julia - with Frank, there are fairly blatant implications of child abuse that may have occurred years prior (and if not, most certainly he intends on abusing her now). As for Julia, Kirsty likely wanted a mother figure after the death of her biological mother, and she was denied this emotional connection from Julia. Later, Julia becomes a direct agent facilitating Frank’s attempt at abusing Kirsty. Julia doesn’t seem to care who is harmed in the wake of Frank’s consumption, as long as she can still receive gratification.

Kirsty is the major character who breaks this mold of reckless obsession with the physical. All of Kirsty’s dilemmas are focused in a spiritual, human place. She lost her mother years prior and is still struggling with her grief. Her relationship with Julia is strained, so any hope of a mother-daughter connection after that loss has been entirely torn asunder for her. She loves her father dearly, but she’s just gained her independence and is dealing with worry over her father. Her father wants her to play mediator in his strained relationship with Julia, who she dislikes. She’s starting out a new relationship with Steve, possibly her first adult relationship ever. She’s dealing with either a secret abuse trauma and/or traumatized over Frank’s re-appearance and physical assault of her. Where Frank and Julia are obsessively absorbed in their need for physical gratification, Kirsty deals with many layers of spiritual/emotional realities, positive and negative.

The Cenobites, as we know them in the first film, are cosmic beings that exist in extreme, grotesque excess of sensory experience, far beyond any human comprehension of “pleasure.” All they truly understand is pain. Their function is to reap the souls who intentionally open Hell’s door and enact literal eternal torture; Hell consumes souls like meat to rend and tear (an interesting juxtaposition of flesh and spirit that I’ll discuss more when I get into H2). These creatures seem almost devoid of anything recognizably human in terms of emotionality (in the first film anyway), they are Borg-like. But again, a wolf is not a wolf. These beings, and Hell itself, are supernatural allegories for the human character’s dilemmas. In this film, they are the looming threat of eternal consumption devoid of humanity, given face. The oblivion on the other side of the threshold. You invoke their presence, they come at your call.

There’s more to say about how all this plays out in the first film, particularly when it comes to how Kirsty is the second person (after Frank) to summon the Cenobites and how she uses them against her abuser, but first I want to bring up aspects that are more prominent in the second film to pull this whole picture together (the films really are a “Part 1 and Part 2,” to me).

The second film (my favorite, if you couldn’t tell) focuses much more heavily on spiritual themes. It’s set almost entirely in either a mental hospital or Hell, respectively. So immediately, we’re given two pictures, one of a place of spiritual/emotional healing, and one of eternal spiritual and physical torment, the lines between the two blurring and distorting as we get further into the story. This is important because this film seems to focus much more on the experience of psychological/emotional trauma.

“The mind is a labyrinth,” Channard says, as he artfully performs a grotesque procedure on the brain of a patient. And so too is this reflected in H2′s depiction of Hell as an endless cthonic Labyrinth, where lost souls experience hallucinatory reflections of their traumas and vices, subjected to psychological and physical punishments eternally under the watchful eye of Leviathan, the “god of flesh, hunger, and desire.”

Leviathan as an entity is a rather interesting and ambiguous being. Certainly, it is a “god” of baseness and physicality, but it’s realm is made of psychological torment, perhaps more so than it is a place of physical torture. Whether you are a “good” or “bad” person is utterly irrelevant; if you are in Hell, your soul gets reflected back to you, often with a heavy focus on traumas of your past. For Kirsty this manifests in her childhood home and images of her mother, which begin bleed and transform into an image of Julia - and perhaps it manifests in Frank’s presence. Although according to Frank, Kirsty has stumbled across “his” little corner of hell which manifests “his” punishments, the first time I watched the film (before he explained where they were) I initially was convinced that behind this second door was another reflection of Kirsty, that it was another trial for her to face. It looked to be the exact same door as her own, and well, the writhing ghostly women under sheets seemed to be an image of sexual repression or fear of sexuality (the brief glimpse of the woman who Kirsty pulls the sheet off of has her hair, as well). Is this piece of hell reflecting Frank’s punishments, or Kirsty’s fears, trauma, possible repression, etc? Or is it reflecting both simultaneously? It’s still rather ambiguous to me, actually. But I digress.

The point is that there is this heavier focus on trauma in H2, where H1 was much more tightly focused on the folly of reckless, single-minded physicality without human connection. This focus on trauma adds a whole new layer of dimension to the narrative because “pain” itself is something much more complex, here. Here, it is revealed that the Cenobites were once humans, and that humanization of these creatures that were once presented to us as allegory and pure cosmic evil is very interesting. Rather than present the Cenobites as the ultimate culmination of personalities like Frank when consumed by Hell, it’s presented as if these Cenobites were perhaps relatively innocent people. Why then, do some people become Cenobites, while others stay as tormented souls? To me, the answer is still unclear. I'm not sure there actually is an answer, beyond the whims of Leviathan. (Channard is the obviously monstrous person who was changed, but he seemed to me to have been chosen as a tool in the moment and then discarded. ) That said, “suffering” itself is more than just the experience of physical pain; the psychological nature of hell implies that this is also internal suffering, and the Cenobites aren’t just entities there to enact physical torture. They are beings that exist in this eternal, perpetual suffering of all kinds, who speak of that experience as something sublime.

The Cenobites spend the majority of their time in both films popping up periodically to speak to Kirsty, from ominous threats of eternal torture, to invitation of joining them, to mocking her with insinuations that some part of her wants their world. For Kirsty, they are demons that reflect back to her all those fears and repressions, all her internal confusion and torment, which is what they spend most of their time doing in the first two films. In Hellraiser 3, there's more of this element of Cenobites as psychological reflections: Pinhead acts as a tempter, using the psyches of the humans he encounters to ensnare souls, which is why with J.P. he's literally consuming women, and for Terri, he switches gears to be the voice of female vengeance.

Earlier in the film, we are given multiple references to fairy tales, usually as used by older adults to mock and belittle Kirsty. The detective mocks her for making up fairy tales about “demons,” and Julia mocks her by comparing Kirsty to Snow White and herself to the Wicked Stepmother/Evil Queen. These side characters demoralize Kirsty in her idealistic efforts to rescue her father from Hell and fight back against forces much larger than herself that a more cynical person could scarcely imagine overcoming. Later, quite similarly to the west wing sequence in Beauty and the Beast (I think coincidentally so, Disney’s BATB came out a few years afterwards), Kirsty explores a dangerous place (Channard’s home) and finds an old, faded picture of a man who she recognizes as the monster she has previously encountered. Ultimately, Kirsty saves herself and another girl through an act almost unbelievably idealistic and naive, especially for such a dark story. She finds a way to transform a monster back into a human being. This was a victory won not with physical violence, but through humanity; a fairy-tale-esque triumph that flew in the face of those who tried to demoralize or deny Kirsty’s reality. Furthermore, this victory is not about the tragedy of Pinhead, but the triumph of humanity and empathy overcoming darkness.

There are a few expressions of human connection and empathy in these two films, like the care between Kirsty and her father, or the attraction between Kirsty and Steve, Kyle’s attraction and care for Kirsty, or Tiffany holding Kirsty as she cries over her father, But for me there was never quite a moment as striking and emotionally raw than when Kirsty and Spencer are looking at each other across the darkness once his human face is revealed. It feels like very artful, deliberate visual contrast to the circumstances and surroundings. But I digress.

So to clarify this picture: Kirsty is faced with monsters personifying everything that represented her trauma and fears, etc. They represented all-consuming physicality without humanity, they represented the things in herself she may have tried to suppress (sexuality, trauma, etc.). Monsters that wanted her to be as consumed by their world as they were. She then utilizes her demons to destroy her abuser, and later recognizes the humanity in her demons and transforms them, frees them from their spiritual and physical eternal torment, and in turn is saved from the same fate, herself.

The third film (which I enjoy despite the fact that it is admittedly a raging trash fire) features a cast of characters all dealing with similar situations. J.P. is our endlessly consumptive user, and Joey and Terri are two women dealing with spiritual trauma. Joey through the loss of her father, and Terri through a broken home life and later abuse at the hands of J.P. The reason why I include the third film in this is because of those additional elements and the insight it gives into Pinhead’s human self, Captain Spencer, and how he perfectly bookends the narrative. Spencer is another person who once opened the box, but it was never clear why he did so in the second film. In the third film, he explains that he was trying to escape spiritual suffering (war trauma/PTSD) through physical means ("forbidden pleasures,” aka kink). At some point he came across the box and opened it. While there are plenty of monstrous men in all three Hellraiser films, and Pinhead himself is a literal monster bent on taking any soul who opens the box with some form of desire in their hearts, my take away from H3 was not that Spencer himself was ever an abuser like Frank or J.P. (and indeed his behavior when lucidly himself in H2 and 3 is decidedly in immediate defense of women he cares about, up to and including two counts of total self-sacrifice), but that Spencer was perhaps pushing his explorations into unsafe realms of self-harming. He was punishing himself, and was thus made into a cosmic punisher of others by Leviathan. So, unlike Frank or Channard or J.P., people who are susceptible to the box/Hell’s temptations because of their need to endlessly consume, Spencer was susceptible because he was so effected by spiritual suffering that he turned towards unhealthy physical means of escape. In my mind, there is something in this idea of self-punishment/self-blame that is also potentially true of, say, Kirsty. How else would she be genuinely susceptible to the box (beyond basic desire having opened it initially), if not that she was teetering on a similar edge, herself? (However, I think perhaps her darkness also veers into a streak of sadistic vengefulness.)

This actually makes the extended cut of the H6 Pinhead/Kirsty reuinion scene a lot more tragic and distressing for me, because underneath all the bullshit, there’s this subtext of Kirsty still running from her Hell and yet still encountering consumptive, abusive men and being pushed off the deep end into untempered vengefulness and violence. And Spencer, who once was freed by her and in turn sacrificed himself to free her from Hell, trapped once more in his monsterous form and obsessing instead over dragging Kirsty down with him to be as endlessly consumed by her pain as he is within his own. No thanks on that grimdark noise, H6. ...but fucking wow, tho. If you've seen Hellseeker but have never seen the extended cut of this scene, I'm linking it Right Here. Warning for...just...ugh. Badly written infuriating creepy grimdark bullshit that genuinely sounds like a bad fanfiction writer wrote it. But at least you have that one moment right at the end where you can hear Spencer's voice come through to help her get free.

In conclusion, I think Hellraiser is a story about, well, Hell. But Hell not as nebulous place where the really bad people go, but Hell as an allegory for eternal spiritual suffering, that absolutely anyone can reach and be effected by once a gateway is opened for them. Particularly so when it comes to reckless physical indulgence, or consumption, or unsafe vice overtaking one’s humanity to others, or towards one’s self. So ultimately, the “moral of the story,” if you’d like to call it that, is that in order to protect one’s self from being consumed by spiritual suffering, one must cherish and cultivate their own humanity, and in the case of people who have been traumatized and/or victimized, one must fight back against the consuming force of that spiritual suffering through confronting the hell that exists within. Sometimes that doesn’t mean blasting the darkness away and ignoring it’s existence, it means reminding the darkness that it is only human.

[Regarding the content of the films, feel free to message me if you decide to watch them but you feel you need a total break-down of what to prepare for.]

#Hellraiser #This is my meta post for this weekend #some of you are not as keen on DW or are on it less often I know #so here you go my dudes #if you see me around too often call me out on it #Horror #Meta

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'A different way of living': why writers are celebrating middle-age

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'A different way of living': why writers are celebrating middle-age

Viv Albertine, Deborah Levy, Lavinia Greenlaw and Rachel Cusk are redefining life after menopause, children or divorce and it has never looked so good

When Viv Albertine performs her 2009 song Confessions of a Milf live, she alternates between two voices. Theres the saccharine lisp of a brainwashed housewife chanting home sweet home, and theres the raging chant of an angry punk proclaiming that if you decide one day that youve had enough, you can walk away. Though swans and seahorses mate for life, we aint so nice.

In the 70s, when Albertine performed with her punk band, the Slits, she appeared fully immersed in her performance of exuberant anger, but also strikingly unformed, too busy bouncing and shouting to hold the gaze of her audience. Then, she retained the vulnerability of her younger self, but there was a steeliness underlying it. Now she stares out at us, no longer interested in hiding.

I chose being an artist over being a wife, the housewife sings, predicting sadly that now Im gonna lead a very lonely life. But then the punk takes the lines over and the life shes going to lead becomes very lovely. By the end the two voices have exploded into one and theres a joyfully furious torrent of wife wife wife life life life that ends with a list of the household activities that are being abandoned by the housewife and reclaimed by the artist: cooking, cleaning, baking, washing, faking, fucking, cleaning, shopping.

In her recent memoir To Throw Away Unopened, Albertine describes deciding to return to music after more than a decade as a housewife, ending her marriage as a result. In the past century of fiction, the middle-aged male protagonist has sprawled and rutted his way to a kind of bathetic greatness in the hands of Philip Roth, John Updike and Saul Bellow. The middle-aged woman has appeared far less often as a protagonist questing for a style and identity, but that is changing fast.

Enjoying the freedom that no longer being constantly looked at by men brings Viv Albertine. Photograph: Duncan Bryceland/Rex

Albertine is one of several writers this year to tackle lives that follow divorce and the menopause. Lavinia Greenlaws forthcoming novel is a middle-aged love story. Deborah Levy uses the moment of transition from one life to another to fashion a new story about femininity in her living autobiography The Cost of Living. Like Albertines, Levys career began in an era when the young insisted on their own youthfulness. Whats striking is that both writers have found a way to incarnate their middle-aged selves in new voices that dont reject the spontaneity of punk but reinvent it in a quieter yet no less vigorous form.

It was possible that femininity, as I had been taught it, had come to an end, Levy writes, tired of serene femininity and of corporate femininity. There were not that many women I knew who wanted to put the phantom of femininity together again … it is a role (sacrifice, endurance, cheerful suffering) that has made some women go mad.

The task is both to create a new life and to redefine what being a woman means. Albertine returns to singing and buys a new haphazard home for herself and her daughter. Levy discards the marital home and installs her daughters in a flat, where she mends the plumbing in her nightie and transports her groceries on a liberating electric bike. One female friend teaches her to live with colour and another provides a writing shed.

Deborah Levy discards the marital home and installs her daughters in a flat. Photograph: Sheila Burnett

For both writers, theres a particular pleasure in the physical freedom that no longer being constantly looked at by men brings. Its easy to assume, as a young woman for whom being desired matters above all else, that much will be lost when men start looking at younger women. But Levy and Albertine enjoy it when men are no longer central. I get the same lurching thrill now when Im about to sit down to an egg mayonnaise sandwich and a packet of plain crisps as I used to get when I fancied someone, Albertine remarks. Ive had two great loves: my mother and my daughter.

Albertine is here in a lineage with Germaine Greer, who published The Change in 1992 aged 53, and has recently reissued it with new material. Greer urges women to accept the changes of age. She suggests that HRT, used to minimise the symptoms of the menopause, is part of a male-centric conspiracy to contain the wisdom and rage of older women. There are positive aspects to being a frightening old woman, she writes.

Greer describes how, aged 50, she looked ahead into what seemed like winter, ice, an interminable dark. But having grieved for her younger self, she finds freedom and calm on the other side, attained through giving up on sex. Younger women might find it impossible to believe that when they are no longer tormented by desire, insecurity, jealousy they wont be as dead as a spent match, but they can look forward to a whole new realm of experience.

Beguilingly, Greer compares the difference between the clamorous feelings of the younger woman and the calmness of the apparently withdrawn older woman to the difference between how the sea appears to someone tossing on its surface, and how it looks to someone who has plunged so deep that she has felt death in her throat. The older woman can love deeply and tenderly because she loves without the desire for possession.

Free to command attention in new and more authentic ways Doris Lessing circa 1975. Photograph: Express/Getty Images

Women through the decades have claimed something of this liberation through age. When I first read Doris Lessing, I wasnt convinced by her announcement in a 1972 interview (when she was 53) that the physical changes of middle age had been one of the most valuable experiences that I personally have ever had. Now Ive come to admire her explanation that in middle age a whole dimension of life slides away, and you realise that what, in fact, youve been using to get attention has been what you look like, leaving you free to command attention in new and more authentic ways.

Lessings 1973 novel The Summer Before the Dark is a great portrayal of this moment of transition, and a book ready to be rediscovered. Kate Brown, a pretty, healthy, serviceable housewife, becomes disillusioned when her children leave home and her husband has one too many affairs. She accepts a job as a translator for an international conference, dyes her hair a sleek red and has an affair with a younger man. But its in what follows that her real discoveries are made. She becomes sick and spends weeks in a hotel, consumed by a fever that sends her deep into herself and then leaves her alone, stranded far away from her married life, curiously free. Wandering the streets in ill-fitting clothes with dishevelled hair, she discovers what it is to be ignored by men. And when she returns home, she insists on keeping her hair as it is: plain, greying, tied neatly behind her head, as Lessings was when she wrote it. Her discoveries, her self-definition, what she hoped were now strengths were concentrated here she was saying no: no, no, no, NO a statement which would be concentrated into hair.

This is a charged yet odd novel, as baggy as Kates clothes. Characters are introduced and discarded; Kate begins one phase of life after another apparently at random. One of Lessings achievements was to find a structural equivalent for the mental state of middle age. As children leave home and sexuality changes, several women describe being left with a feeling that the script they grew up with has run out. This is both frightening and exhilarating. And it opens the way for a new kind of plot.

Illustration: Nathalie Lees/Guardian

So the love stories with middle-aged women as protagonists take on a more episodic form, with love itself presented as an ambivalent prize. In 2016 there was AL Kennedys Serious Sweet, a romance between two damaged loners. And now theres Lavinia Greenlaws In the City of Loves Sleep, published next month, which offers us a story of lovers neither beautiful nor certain nor young. This is an elegantly meandering tale in which the lovers repeatedly connect only to lose interest in each other, stuck in a kind of endless middleness. Perhaps falling in love in middle age is in part the desire to experience fixity again, the narrator muses. But the drive for fixity is thwarted by the form of this novel, which is determinedly fluid, as if in search of a style appropriate for the fluidity of the middle part of life.

Levy experiments with form in The Cost of Living, discarding the traditional literary structure as she discards the marital home, and creating a memoir out of a collage of deftly interconnected fragments. Objects perform a lot of the work here, often appearing to know more than the humans who surround them. When the I no longer quests for the familiar goals of love and marriage, the authorial persona becomes a subtler figure, glimpsed through shadows. Levys bike threatens to become a major character and relegate her to a minor player, though we can see Levy winking at us as it does so, less shadowy than she might appear.

Nowhere is the narrator more occluded than in Rachel Cusks spare, strange trilogy Outline, Transit and Kudos. On one level, these are novels about a marriage ending and a woman, Faye, seeking new forms of freedom as her children move towards independence. In Outline, Faye describes herself as trying to find a different way of living in the world. But though Cusk is interested in questioning ideas of femininity, she seems most concerned with using the dissolution of familiar structures to seek a new concept of selfhood and a new structure for the novel.

By Kudos, the characters all speak in the same international voice and the narrators experiences at the hands of men are interchangeable with those of all the other divorced middle-aged women she encounters. One of these, Sophia, observes that shes coming to think that too much has been made of the distinctions between men, when at the time the whole world had appeared to depend on whether I was with one, rather than another. By this point the committed reader is coming to think something of the same about characters in general. Perhaps in all our novel reading, weve made too much of the importance of individual characters, when it turns out to be more general truths that matter.

The truths revealed here resonate with those explored by Levy and Albertine. Near the end of Kudos, Faye has a revealing encounter with a woman called Felcia, who has just lost the final battle of her marriage for custody of her car. Now, cycling exhaustedly across the city, impoverished, mocked even by her mother (Look at what all your equality has done for you), Felcia accepts that she has not found freedom by leaving him: in fact what I had done was forfeit all my rights.

Its not wholly a coincidence that a bicycle should play a central role here, as in Levy. Bikes have served as symbols of independent womanhood since the turn of the last century. Felcia, cycling around stoically, has something of Levy and Albertines doggedness and dignity in countering the assaults of the world. She hasnt gained the freedom she sought in separation, but its also clear that she couldnt have remained with a man prepared to treat her as her ex-husband does. Freedom, in all these books, becomes less of a good in itself once the struggles become primarily practical. But this doesnt invalidate the initial urge for freedom that takes these women out of their marriages. Its an urge towards a life lived in good faith, which is what all of Cusks characters are struggling in their different ways to do. The peculiarly even quality of Cusks prose doesnt just provide a literary equivalent of the middle years, it points us towards the thought that the way to act with integrity may be to relinquish the struggle for individuality, though the singularity of her style always works bracingly against this.

An urge towards a life lived in good faith Rachel Cusk. Photograph: Richard Saker for the Observer

Cusk presents us with a radical new vision of communality at this stage of life, one which asks us to consider that we dont yet know what solidarity is. This takes us back to Levy, guided in her new life by her female friends, and to Albertine, accepting that the love that means most is the love of women. And it opens up the question of feminism.

Greers suggestion in The Change is that men have been denying women the right to a quietly sex-free middle age in championing HRT. In this context, the acceptance of middle age becomes a feminist act, and the same seems to have been true for Lessing in 1973, whatever her crotchety scepticism about womens lib. Certainly Kates rage in The Summer Before the Dark is rage at men who have told her she will be fulfilled by appealing to their lust. It was a rage, it seemed to her, that she had been suppressing for a lifetime. This is a woman poised to explode into Albertines cries of wife wife wife life life life.

Its significant that the women Albertine has loved most are her mother and daughter. The death of Albertines mother is a central event in her book, as Levys mothers is in hers, offering one form of feminist connection. Albertine describes learning her rage at the patriarchy from her mother. Dont ever give the biggest slice of cake to a man, you take it for yourself! she informed her daughters. And now in middle age, Albertine feels that she is turning into her mother. I can see [the patriarchy], I can hear it, I can feel it, and Im burning up because of it. Levy, looking back with love on the war between myself and my mother, quotes the US writer and activist Audre Lorde: I am a reflection of my mothers secret poetry as well as of her hidden angers.

Read alongside the reflections on the death of the old forms of femininity, this allows the older generation of women to have a voice in the poetry and anger of the present. And Lorde herself is a mother figure for these writers; the essays collected in last years posthumous collection Your Silence Will Not Protect You have something of the energy of punk. Im saying that we must never close our eyes to the terror, she told Adrienne Rich in an interview when in her 40s, recovering from breast cancer and reconstructing her sense of herself in middle age. At this point it seemed vital to attend to the chaos which is black which is creative which is female which is dark which is rejected which is messy which is sinister, smelly, erotic, confused, upsetting.

The erotic is significant here, connected as it is to the dark and the messy. The role of the erotic in middle age troubles many of these writers. Greenlaws Iris finds that the rigmarole of undressing for sex with a new lover feels like a foolish masquerade: They are two middle-aged people trying to persuade themselves into sex on a Sunday afternoon. Things improve when they forget about surfaces and allow themselves something more diffuse. But if Lessing and Greer advise abandoning sex altogether, Lorde insists that the erotic remains key to everything. This is no longer the young girl taking pleasure in being looked at by men. In Lordes hands the erotic transcends narcissism and patriarchy and becomes the force that binds our sense of self with the chaos of our strongest feelings. This is a force that connects women to each other and perhaps especially to their mothers. Lorde advised all women to listen to the black mother within them, who she believed countered Descartes with: I feel, therefore I can be free. It seems all the more appropriate that Levy should think of Lorde in mourning her own mother.

Yet this is not a simple tale of freedom-seeking daughters realising their mothers hopes for a better world. Theres a disillusionment, too, because if feminism has now become mainstream, theres a danger of it becoming an accoutrement of a society that hasnt changed in the ways that the feminists of the 1960s and 70s hoped it would. This is presented as clearly not good enough. If the news upsets me I just switch it off, sings the housewife in Albertines song. But what more can she do in her angrier punk incarnation? Is it better to watch the news? To sing and write about it? Is this a necessary component of the freedom of the middle-aged woman? And will it help her feel more free or just enable her to be committedly feminist as she seeks her freedom?

Freedom and calm on the other side Germaine Greer. Photograph: Yui Mok/PA

The answer may lie partly in the complex sense of the communal evoked by all these writers. Arguably, its more necessary than ever to form communities of insight and sensitivity situated determinedly within the realm of feminism. Whats compelling in these books is that other more uncanny lines of affiliation can coexist with this. Its important that Albertine remains connected to punk, Levy to surrealism and psychoanalysis, Cusk to particular strands of European high modernism.

But we search in vain if we turn to these books for answers, partly because these writers are more interested in asking questions, and partly because they are too singular, and too defiant, to tell us what to do. Greer ends by announcing that though younger people anxiously inquire, and researchers tie themselves in knots with definitions, the middle-aged woman is about her own business, which is none of theirs. Women come racing up from behind, asking how to negotiate the next phase. But were not going to learn much because, Greer says, the middle-aged woman is climbing her own mountain, in search of her own horizon, after years of being absorbed in the struggles of others. The ground is full of bumps, the air is thin and her bones ache. Nonetheless, the ascent is worth it, however baffling it may seem to others. Greer exhorts her middle-aged readers not to explain or apologise. The climacteric marks the end of apologising. The chrysalis of conditioning has once and for all to break and the female woman finally to emerge.

Lara Feigel is the author of Free Woman: Life, Liberation and Doris Lessing (Bloomsbury).

Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/us

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