#glitter up the dark

[orpheusdrinkinga40inadeathbasket]

The Beatles invigorated the role of the fan because they were the first cultural product to engage holistically with the figure of the teenage girl. They emerged onto ground broken by Elvis and then outpaced their predecessor creatively and commercially. Elvis supplied an avatar for the forbidden promise of sex, but his appeal rested in how easy he was to objectify, his obviousness. Cartoonishly handsome, he was a body onto which the teenage girl could project unspoken and illicit desire. He inspired adoration, but it could not compare to the ferocious awe frothed up among Beatles girls. There is no Elvis equivalent to the term "Beatlemaniac." "To younger teenagers, the Beatles' cheerful, faintly androgynous sexuality was more approachable than Elvis's alpha-male heat," wrote Lynskey. The Beatles offered something more complex than an empty sexual template. They presented an opportunity for identification. A girl could invest her desire in the band, but she could also discover herself there. The gaze cast on the Beatles was a queer one from the start. Before American women looked at the Beatles, they had been seen by Brian Epstein, the closeted gay record clerk who discovered and ferociously advocated for the band when record executives failed to give them a second glance. Watching them play a lunch hour show at a grimy club in Liverpool, Epstein picked up on the magnetic potential of the four young men. In Vivek Tiwary's graphic novel The Fifth Beatle: The Brian Epstein Story, artist Andrew Robinson closes the frame around the future manager's stunned face as he beholds the Beatles for the first time, as if he could sense his life pivoting around that one rapturous moment. "There was some indefinable charm there," he wrote in his 1964 memoir A Cellarful of Noise. "They were extremely amusing and in a rough 'take it or leave [it] way' very attractive." Upon becoming their manager, Epstein was tasked with convincing the world to see the Beatles the way he saw them: via a gaze that desired its objects without othering them. Heterosexual desire spans a chasm, coveting difference. Queer desire pulls together like elements, finding attraction in affinity. That teen girls could even feel the kind of active, demanding sexual desire evinced by their screams was still a novel concept in the early '60s, which carried vestiges of the prior decade's postwar conservatism. "In a highly sexualized society (one sociologist found that the number of explicitly sexual references in the mass media had doubled between 1950 and 1960), teen and preteen girls were expected to be not only 'good' and 'pure' but to be the enforcers of purity within their teen society—drawing the line for overeager boys and ostracizing girls who failed in this responsibility," wrote Barbara Ehrenreich in a 1986 essay. "To abandon control—to scream, faint, dash about in mobs—was, in form if not in conscious intent, to protest the sexual repressiveness, the rigid double standard of female teen culture. It was the first and most dramatic uprising of women's sexual revolution." Befuddled by the Beatlemaniacs' exuberance, interviewers and critics (who were more often than not men) pinned the scream to a desire, of all things, to mother the band. "It has been said that you appeal to the maternal instinct in these girls," began an interviewer in 1964. John cut him off: "That's a dirty lie." Joking or not, he was right. The dynamic at hand did not correspond to a mother/son model. Beatles girls wanted the way men were expected to want: unabashedly and directly, as active agents in the exchange of desire. There was nothing coy about their hunger.

Sasha Geffen, Glitter Up the Dark: How Pop Music Broke the Binary

[honey-and-summer-wine]

[frozenhi-chews]

Pancake and Starlo, the space desert couple

[graveyardfullofstars]

[glittergroovy]

Wake Up Alone - Amy Winehouse

[joelsdolly]

me core moodboard . 🎧

[your-fave-is-bi]

Painted n dry sets + just painted set, second coat drying

I only made the red raw meat set, the rest were made by my sister n just never got to the being inked stage lol

[mrdrhenwardhykle]

POM POM: KILLER OF MASCOTS ISSUE#3: Pom Pom vs Bubsy

"HAHUEHEHEH! I don't evvvveeerrrr get why some of the playmates I meet are just sooo tightly wound and soooooo grrummpyyyy! Hehehuehe!-But of course, as a clown; it's my job to fix that! Sooo lately, I've made my attic a makeshift Spa! In my game-there used to be powerups that let you stretch out and feel sooooooooooo good ~shhhhh~ but they're only for meeee; my game can't respawn thingies anymore. Hahuehaha-but that won't stop me from helping others manually! Hehahaha!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

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Happy Pom Pom Friday!!!

Character/concept description:

Pom Pom is a virus/glitch formed by the scrapped side-scrolling arcade game from the early 90's “Pom-Pom Panic”. Pom Pom (the main character of Pom Pom Panic) for whatever reason gained sentience halfway during the game’s development. The game was cancelled halfway because the publishing company thought it was too bizarre of a concept and mascot character to gain interest. Pom Pom heard of the news and took it way too personally, as she literally cannot fathom why someone would think she’s ‘bizarre’-even to the point of getting ‘axed’. Prompted by the ‘poor judgement’ Pom Pom went rouge-breaking from her game to ‘axe’ any ‘approved’ game mascots/characters she thought could count as ‘bizarre’ like her.

[marley-manson]

i love when i read a thing and it's just a nonstop barrage of validation for my own takes

[demolitionsoup]

everyone dreams about talking with mcr and they' re so sweet.

i've dreamed about them a couple times in the last month, and both times i couldn't talk with them because i started crying too fucking hard

[cronicasdeunafashionista]

[gottastim]

loveemeillia on ig

[mashkaroom]

Forgot that there’s a whole paragraph in yentl talking about how anshel is the bechev girls’ manic pixie dream boy

[viir-tanadhal]

my music book collection kills me

[byanyan]

grey's accidentally byan energy thoughts: "wait can u get high smelling nail polish"

[glittergroovy]

the blackest day • lana del rey