#the modern leper

[irlmarthamasters]

i’m notmal

(lyrics are from the modern leper by frightened rabbit)

#house md #hilson #greg house #james wilson #everybody dies #8x22 #the modern leper #frightened rabbit

[juliens-bakery]

love happens in a series of bursts and inches, and it is worth convincing the brain to do the work the heart is already capable of

#hanif abdurraqib #scott hutchison #frightened rabbit #the modern leper #love love love

[paintingofapanicattack]

the greatest love song of our times is The Modern Leper and it’s not even close.

#frightened rabbit #FRabbit #scott hutchison #the modern Leper

[aka-the-bastard]

The Modern Leper - Frightened Rabbit / Televangelist - Julien Baker

#frightened rabbit #scott hutchison #the modern leper #the midnight organ fight #julien baker #televangelist #turn out the lights #masochist

[swimmingback]

the absolutely monumental build up in julien baker's the modern leper cover makes me insane. i think all music should be like that or conversely i think that is the only cover ever

#this is niche and mostly unrelated but it kind of makes me thing of glass animals its all so incredibly loud in the sheer force the the bu #build up driving through the length of the song. both are fuckin masterful #julien baker #frightened rabbit #the modern leper

[mywifeleftme]

333: Frightened Rabbit // The Midnight Organ Fight

The Midnight Organ Fight Frightened Rabbit 2008, FatCat (Bandcamp)

Not long after he killed himself in 2018, I started working on a long poem about Scott Hutchison and suicide that I called “The Wrestle.” I fiddled with it for about a year before abandoning it. Much of the writing was sentimental and overwrought, trying to pull in too many clever allusions to Hutchison’s work, but reading back now I can see that the real issue was how much I wanted to center myself in the proceedings. I wrote about Scott, and about friends of mine who had struggled with suicide, and about the old sex-death dyad, but also a lot of mostly stolen valour about burning myself with cigarettes and cutting, forms of self-harm I’ve only very briefly experimented with. The poem reflected where I was at then: a callow young man who’d been moderately miserable much of his life, grasping for a means of ennobling his own pain. Pain cannot be observed or measured; we can only witness its effects, and, at the time, those who attempted or completed suicide seemed to me to have the dignity that comes from having the reality of their pain affirmed, made concrete. If I couldn’t be one of them, I at least wanted to be their Virgil, a poet tour-guide through the experience of despair.

In the time since I put “The Wrestle” away, I spent two years volunteering on a suicide line, or roughly 400 hours talking to anonymous callers in crisis. None of that makes me an expert on the subject, but the pressure of having had to make so many quick assessments of callers’ likelihood of imminently harming themselves has helped me better understand in retrospect what the experiences of suicidal ideation I was grappling with in my writing were. There have been extended periods in my life where I have felt so lost that I fantasized on a daily basis about the bliss of not having to wake up in the morning. And I have had periods where my self-loathing has been so intense that I have wanted to physically destroy my own body. I have been so tired of it I’ve even called a line. But my ideation has never moved from the realm of abstract desire to practical planning or, beyond that, to an attempt. This doesn’t mean that my pain hasn’t at times been as “real” and intense as that of some who have committed suicide—what it means is that, even at my lowest, I have been lucky in so many respects. That I experienced love and did not suffer abuse at a formative age; that I have nearly always had many supportive friends around me; that my socioeconomic circumstances have never truly crumbled even when I’ve had little money; that the chemistry of my brain, while prone to gloom, is not in a perpetual state of panic and civil war.

I don’t know that I would’ve found my way to volunteering on the line if it hadn’t been for the way Scott’s friends and family reacted to his suicide. They had clearly lived with the possibility that this might be how he would go for long enough to educate themselves on what depression really is, and to understand, as much as anyone outside Scott’s head could, what he was struggling with. Despite their shattering grief, they understood that his was not an act of selfishness; they didn’t trot out any lines about how it made no sense for someone of his talent and relative fame to throw it all away so young; they didn’t try to spin it as an accident. They just talked about how sorry they were that no one had been able to reach him and hold him until this latest attack of his illness had passed. They treated his drowning as they would’ve a cardiac arrest in a man known to have a heart defect—the sort of condition even the most rigorous safety planning can’t guarantee won’t strike at the wrong moment. None of them were ashamed of him for doing what he did or of each other for failing him. They simply grieved him, and their sorrow was like a river and that river was love. Virtually from the moment his body was identified, if you were a Frightened Rabbit fan you were instantly immersed in this flood of fond recollections, funny stories, and tributes to his artistry, the way his music gave people the tools to deal with situations just like this one.

I have known and loved people who, like Scott, have lived with the presentiment of their own suicide for decades. At times, it looms so large over them they can see nothing else. Other times, it hangs distantly over their horizon like a small grey sun, and though they catch sight of it each morning when they gaze out the window, it doesn’t prevent them from making what they can of their days. I hope for them that someday they look up and find that hard sun has disappeared completely. I feel fortunate to have known and learned from them.

These days, I feel okay. And if “The Wrestle” never ended up being a publishable poem, working on it was part of some thinking I needed to do. There are even a few lines in it where I think I got at something real, and perhaps someday they’ll find themselves in something else I write. This bit from the end’s just about Scott though, and I’d like to leave it here for him.

Can you see in the dark? Can you see the look on your face? Somewhere, a girl who walked the margin of nothingness is sculpting her own likeness in granite; thousands are sitting bolt upright on their gurneys with their breath crashing in their ears; and a singer in a club is telling an audience to remember how funny his friend was, how good, to treasure the songs. No matter how alone you may be now, there is still this place in which your body exists. Lamps shine on you, whether anyone sees it or not. In time, though, these bright lights will all be turned off. For a margin, however thin, it will be in nearing death as it was to near birth— a world of closeness to the self, of sound. Wanting nothing, we will be denied nothing. Being seen no more, we will be seen to lack nothing. We will no more have to endure the reaching, being sufficient in ourselves to at least this final purpose, going. From our perspective, Scott’s body has been identified, under the signs of the fists which held him down and beat him all his life, which will be recorded as having been his own, by the marina, by the cold Scottish water from which emerged his dreams of disappearance and encounter. The poets, they know nothing while they live, the living poet Mary Ruefle once said, and they know everything the instant they die. Dry of eye and wet of lung, Scott knows more now than Mary does, more than any of us trying to wring meaning from his sodden clothes. What he knows is not in his body but in the shape stirring beneath it, that which quickens our blood and promises no answers, only changes.

333/365

#frightened rabbit #scott hutchison #indie rock #r.i.p. #poetry #the modern leper #suicide #'00s music #music review #vinyl record

[dearestlyrics]

well i am ill, but i'm not dead

i don't know which of these i prefer

#daily lyric #song rec #11/16/23 #the song is #the modern leper #julien baker

[sugaredoleander]

house md × side wounds

#house md #hilson #hate crimes md #lena oleanderson #web weaving #i actually have so many edits ideas for this show. so much brainrot #but i'm busy like. getting MY md and these take a surprising amount of time to make #Going to make a modern leper edit though istg #can you tell i'm projecting lol

[osplague]

Late night modern AU sketching

Thirst trap Dismas suffers modern consequences

no text version for all the non-reybabys ;)

#darkest dungeon #dismas #dd highwayman #highwayman #darkest dungeon fanart #darkest dungeon modern au #modern au #dd grave robber #dd hellion #dd shieldbreaker #dd houndmaster #dd flagellant #dd leper #dd jester #dd vestal #dd antiquarian #dd plague doctor #dd occultist #dd crusader #reynauld #darkest dungeon crusader #reymas #dd arbelest #dd musketeer #dd man at arms #dd bounty hunter #dd abomination

[modong]

#leper x jester #darkest dungeon #dd2 #dd jester #dd leper #dd tyrant #tyrant x jester #modern au #sarmenti #baldwin

[boygeniuspolls]

i’m sorry, i seem to have missed some songs on the lucy covers poll. to prevent that from happening again does anyone have ideas of julien covers i may have missed for today’s poll? like ones that aren’t on spotify or something :)

#also let me know if you think i should redo lucy’s! #not bgpolls #i have paul; thick skull; a dreamer’s holiday; bad things to such good people; the modern leper; and ballad of big nothing

[juliens-bakery]

"and at some point, I believe one must say 'I've survived myself and I think I can be good for you, and I want to try that for a while'"... hanif how do you keep doing this.

#hanif abdurraqib #scott hutchison #frightened rabbit #the modern leper #love love love

[paintingofapanicattack]

WHAT YOU DID TODAY

#frightened rabbit #scott hutchison #frabbit #the modern leper #the work

[flhoarder]

Dismas and Baldwin are in an underground book club together. The club has only 2 members and it’s only underground because Dismas won’t let anyone else know he likes to read, so he made Baldwin swear on his honour not to tell people about it

#dd modern au #dd #darkest dungeon #darkest dungeon 2 #dd dismas #dd baldwin #dd highwayman #dd leper

[swinging-stars-from-satellites]

Playlist! this is a random vibe, so no worries if it just doesn't work for you rn, but um coyote/canid survival playlist? Coyotes are a much-hated "pest species" and not as charismatic as wolves due to their solitariness and smaller size, but they're survivors, they're clever and they adapt to all situations and it just gets me, man... city coyotes surviving despite all odds... doesn't have to be songs *about* coyotes specifically, just... the wild dog... <3

S/C/A/R/E/C/R/O/W by My Chemical Romance

Up the Wolves by The Mountain Goats

The Foundations of Decay by My Chemical Romance

Zombie by The Cranberries

Desert Song by MCR

Sound + Fury by Ella Mine

Bones Don't Rust by TMG

Burn Bright by MCR

Immortals by Fall Out Boy

Hello Cold World by Paramore

The Modern Leper by Frightened Rabbit (there's also a cover by Julien Baker that's very good but I feel like the instrumentation of the original will be very up your alley considering that you like TMG)

Optimism (As a Radical Life Choice) by Spanish Love Songs

The (After) Life Of The Party by Fall Out Boy

The Killer Was A Coward by Dermot Kennedy

I See Fire by Ed Sheeran

You First by Paramore

Love From the Other Side by Fall Out Boy

#the speed at which i added scarecrow to this list. song about merciful lies of survival to a child amid nuclear fallout #oh btw language warning for the modern leper but I think it's a good/fitting enough song to have an excuse skskfns #language warning for the killer was a coward also but that one's actually for emphasis. and the song is #all about cunning imo #righteous anger and grief tied up into cunning. or something like that #I might make this one a proper Spotify playlist ngl. you got me Thinking with this prompt #Lu rambles #music #adventures in playlist making

[sonnywortziks]

okay back to thinking about which of my favorite songs fit my favorite terror characters 💪

#i listen to anything frightened rabbit i think about fitzjames and/or crozier #ted leo walking to do is a tozer song so is australia by the shins #actually wish i was sober is a crozier song. naturally #but the twist? fast blood? the modern leper? all extremely jfj coded #not to talk about cut off their thumbs no.1 by tmg (goodsir) or radiohead knives out (guess) #the terror