#like what are the odds? writing a song about a mother grieving her dead daughter isn’t a common thing at all!

[longleggedsocialist]

at this point god actually wants me to kill myself

[brokehorrorfan]

Best New Horror Movies on Netflix: Autumn 2017

There's an overwhelming amount of horror movies to sift through on Netflix, so I've decided to take out some of the legwork by compiling a list of the season's best new genre titles on Netflix's instant streaming service.

Please feel free to leave a comment with any I may have missed and share your thoughts on any of the films you watch. You can also peruse past installments of Best New Horror Moves on Netflix for more suggestions.

1. The Void

Not afraid to wear its influences on its sleeve, The Void is a fun amalgam of genre favorites such as The Thing, Hellraiser, Prince of Darkness, The Beyond, and Assault on Precinct 13, along with a healthy dose of H.P. Lovecraft for good measure. The '80s inspiration is furthered by a plethora of practical effects and a pulsating, John Carpenter-esque synthesizer score. Set in the most understaffed hospital since Halloween 2, a small group of people fight to survive against Lovecraftian monsters and cultists. A lot of the plot points are familiar, but the astonishing effects are more than enough to make it feel fresh and exciting.

2. The Transfiguration

Like a modern take on George A. Romero's Martin, The Transfiguration is a subversive vampire film. It's also an urban coming-of-age tale with social commentary. The plot concerns an adolescent boy (Eric Ruffin, The Good Wife) who is a practicing vampire in New York City. Not just an avid watcher of horror films - although he name-checks plenty of them - he partakes in murder to drink blood. He begins to question his outlook on life when he befriends a girl who's also an outcast (Chloe Levine, The Defenders). Although largely a somber, dramatic film, there are a couple of truly shocking moments. Due to how raw and real it feels, this one will stick with you.

3. The Devil's Candy

Written and directed by Sean Byrne (The Loved Ones), The Devil's Candy combines elements of haunted house, demonic possession, and home invasion movies, all with a lean toward heavy metal music. It follows a struggling artist (a nearly unrecognizable Ethan Embry, Can’t Hardly Wait), his wife (Shiri Appleby, Roswell), and their teenage daughter (Kiara Glasco, Map to the Stars) as they move into a new home. Meanwhile, the house's disturbed former resident (the great Pruitt Taylor Vince, Constantine) returns, and he takes a liking to the young girl. It's akin to a 1970s slow-burner with modern sensibilities. The restrained approach allows the audience to become more invested in the characters, building toward an unpredictable and emotionally draining final act. Read my full review of the film here.

4. A Dark Song

A Dark Song is an engrossing slow-burn horror film predominantly told with two actors in one location. The story involves a grieving woman (Catherine Walker, Ferocious Planet) who seeks the aid of an unstable cultist (Steve Oram, Sightseers) to perform an elaborate ritual that allows you to ask a guardian angel for a favor. She wants her deceased child back, but this is far from a Pet Sematary retread. It's all about the build-up, with some genuinely creepy moments along the way before it culminates in a tense finale. Irish writer-director Liam Gavin makes a powerful debut anchored by strong performances.

5. What Happened to Monday

What Happened to Monday is set in the not too distant future, when a strict one-child policy is enforced in an effort to preserve the planet. Noomi Rapace (Prometheus) stars as septuplets, who hide from the government by sharing a life; each one only goes out during the day of the week for which they’re named. When Monday disappears, the other six siblings must track her down before someone else does. Rapace wonderfully diversifies the seven parts, and it's quite impressive to see them all seamlessly interacting with one another in the same shot. Willem Dafoe (Spider-Man) plays the girls' grandfather who raised them, while Glenn Close (Fatal Attraction) is the head of the agency stripping families of their children. Tommy Wirkola (Dead Snow) directs some superb action sequences in this sci-fi mystery thriller.

6. American Fable

American Fable is true to its name, often playing out like something of a dark fairy tale in the country’s heartland, but its fantastical elements largely take a backseat to a rural drama with mystery/thriller elements. Writer-director Anne Hamilton, who got her start as an intern on Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, makes a dynamic feature debut. Set in the 1980s, the story revolves around Gitty (Peyton Kennedy, Odd Squad), an 11-year-old girl with an affinity for storytelling. She finds herself in a real-life fairy tale upon discovering a man (Richard Schiff, The West Wing) imprisoned in a silo on her family's struggling farm. The picture is an admirable American complement to Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth; not only are their stories thematically analogous, but they also share a similar horned creature. Read my full review of the film here.

7. Here Alone

Here Alone is a zombie movie in which the zombies are almost never on screen - and that's not a bad thing. It depicts the hardships Ann (Lucy Walters, Power) must endure and the elaborate precautions she must take in order to survive, weaving between two different points in time: early in the apocalypse with her husband (Shane West, A Walk to Remember) and their baby, and the present when she befriends a fellow survivor (Adam David Thompson, Mozart in the Jungle) and his teenage daughter. Director Rod Blackhurst (Amanda Knox) delivers a subtle, dramatic character piece with shades of The Walking Dead by crafting dynamic characters backed by engaging performances.

8. Little Evil

Tucker and Dale vs Evil writer-director Eli Craig returns to horror-comedy with Little Evil. Having perfected his deadpan delivery on Parks and Recreation, Adam Scott makes awkward an artform as a man who believes his new wife's (Evangeline Lilly, Lost) 6-year-old son is the literal Antrichrist. The supporting cast, underutilized as they may be, is also great, including Bridget Everett (Patti Cakes), Clancy Brown (The Shawshank Redemption), Tyler Labine (Tucker and Dale vs Evil), Donald Faison (Scrubs), and Sally Field (Forrest Gump), who is Craig's mother. The most obvious influence is The Omen - it's even name-dropped in the movie - but there are also references to the likes of Poltergeist, Ghostbusters, Children of the Corn, Rosemary's Baby, Child's Play, and The Shining. It's not always laugh-out-loud funny, but it remains entertaining throughout.

9. Patchwork

Patchwork is like a modern take on Frankenhooker with a dash of Re-Animator for good measure. It may not be as masterful a blend of horror and comedy as those '80s classics, but it's delightfully absurd just the same. It also offers a bit of social commentary, namely regarding the issues modern dating women face. Three girls - stuck up Jennifer (Tory Stolper), naive Ellie (Tracey Fairaway, Hellraiser: Revelations), and weird Madeline (Maria Blasucci) - are murdered, sewn together, and brought back to life by a mad scientist. They must learn to coexist in the same body in order to exact revenge. Cleverly conceived by director Tyler MacIntyre (Tragedy Girls), the girls are portrayed as one Frankenstein-ed creature in some shots and as three individual women in others.

10. Death Note

While purists decry the changes that Death Note made from the popular Japanese manga on which it's based, those with an open mind (or, like me, unfamiliar with the source material) ought to enjoy this Netflix original film. A book labeled Death Note literally falls from the sky to the feet of Light (Nat Wolff, Paper Towns), granting the high school student the power to take the life of anyone whose name he writes inside. Quickly realizing its power without fully recognizing the responsibility, Light dishes out vigilante justice remotely, killing criminals and becoming a worldwide phenomenon. Also mixed up in it are Light's love interest (Margaret Qualley, The Leftovers), his detective father (Shea Whigham, American Hustle), a mysterious man trying to catch him (Lakeith Stanfield, Get Out), and Ryuk (Willem Dafoe, Spider-Man), the monstrous keeper of the book. There's a definite sense that the story has been condensed, things may have been lost in translation, and the fast pacing takes away from the weight of the situation. It may not be a highlight of his filmography, but director Adam Wingard (Blair Witch, You’re Next) delivers a fun, stylish movie with some gory, Rube Goldbergian deaths a la Final Destination.

Bonus: Castlevania: Season 1

Castlevania is a Netflix original animated series based on the classic Konami video game series. Season 1 consists of only four episodes totaling around 90 minutes, resembling more of an anime film than a show, but it ends without a conclusion to the story. Thankfully, a second season is already in the works. Following the murder of his wife, Dracula summons a scourge of goblins to destroy the region of Wallachia and dismember every person along the way. Trevor Belmont, the last in an infamous family excommunicated for dealing in black magic while slaying monsters, leads the charge to bring down the legendary vampire. It's heavy on exposition, but each episode contains a couple of big action scenes to hold viewers over through the abundance of dialogue. Adult language, violence, and gore are on full display, looking great in old-school-style animation. The series is written by comic book scribe Warren Ellis (Red) and stars the voice talents of Richard Armitage (The Hobbit), James Callis (Battlestar Galactica), and Graham McTavish (Preacher).

[angidescent]

Tonight I'm seeing Iron Maiden live for the 5th time. It's always an emotional time for me and I started thinking about a blog post I wrote about it in 2016. Figured I'd copy it here just in case anything ever happens to my Wordpress blog.

A Musical Memorial

April 21, 2016

“And in a moment the memories are all that remain, / And all the wounds are reopening again” – “Blood Brothers” by Iron Maiden

I firmly believe that a life without music is not worth living. It reaches into the deepest parts of our souls and allows us to process or feel every emotion imaginable. It makes us relive moments. Music has the ability to break all cultural, societal, economic, and language barriers to make us feel something powerful. And no person experiences or hears a piece of music the same way. It is also a well-known fact that in the metal community, there is a deep connection among the members. Some say there are no strangers in metal, just friends we haven’t met yet. While music has always had this magical hold over me, Iron Maiden in particular has the power to make me feel every emotion and relive almost every moment of my life. Especially the most painful ones. It has taken me a while to write this, but earlier this month, I attended my fourth Iron Maiden concert. To understand the significance of this, you need to understand why this band in particular is closely tied to my relationships with three important men in my life. After I get those details out, I promise to rip your heart out with a very emotional story.

I am very fortunate to be a second generation metalhead, hence my common use of the phrase “from the womb to the tomb” to describe my metalhead status. It can be argued that metal music always brought me comfort because Dad would sing metal songs to me as lullabies. Yes, Enter the Sandman and Screaming in the Night were excellent lullabies! And when I became a properly sentient larvae, I would pick CDs to fall asleep to. I essentially stole Iron Maiden’s Somewhere in Time and Twisted Sister’s Big Hits and Nasty Cuts from him. Some of my favourite childhood memories are sitting in the living room while Dad acted like a DJ. He would play all sorts of records, cassettes, or CDs and tell us trivia or memories associated with them. He’d also quiz us on what band or album it was, a game Sister never excelled at and hated! I am happy to report that she is much better at it now. Perhaps it was partly due to me always being a daddy’s girl, but metal has remained my primary genre of music throughout my life. He was so damn proud of me when I started my metal and punk radio show in university!

Growing up as a metalhead was frustrating at times. I’m not usually one to pull this card, but being a girl didn’t help. Other than liking the odd song or band, most of the other girls didn’t listen to metal. And the boys? Well I stopped even mentioning my music preferences because most of them would claim I was lying or quiz me to prove my authenticity. Hell, even Spike didn’t quite believe me when we first met, but I soon made him see the truth. What didn’t help my case was the fact that I was a shy kid and tried to blend in to avoid being bullied. I wore casual, bright clothes while at school and got straight-As; I didn’t fit the stereotype. I will never forget the look on my Literature 12 teacher’s face the day he played Iron Maiden’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” in class. He hated metal and lectured the whole time he was setting up the CD player about how much he hated metal and expected the students not to enjoy it, but he was going to play this anyway because it was an example of how old poetry can still be relevant in modern culture. He was obviously shocked and disappointed in me when he noticed I was quietly drumming on my desk and lip syncing while pretending to serenade my ballerina friend.

That moment in Literature 12 was also a significant one for Ragehorn and I. You see, although Ragehorn and I had known each other since elementary school, we weren’t close. In high school we ended up in two of the same social circles, but remained friendly acquaintances at best. During grade 12, after the majority of one of those circles had graduated, we finally became proper friends. Maybe it was just out of loneliness. For the first time since elementary school, we had classes together and were both on the Scholarship Team, so we got better acquainted. But when he looked over during that moment in Lit class and I noticed his foot tapping along, we had a sudden realization that we had more in common than we thought. After that, our bond continued to grow and developed into full-fledged best friend status when we started university.  And Maiden continued to be the soundtrack of our friendship: driving around town, sitting in the campus hallways, or passionately arguing when we had different opinions about individual songs or albums. Through me, Spike and Ragehorn also became close friends and it wasn’t long before people started cracking jokes about me having two boyfriends or calling Ragehorn Spike and I’s boyfriend. We were quite happy with our platonic threesome whatever way you sliced it.

The first time Iron Maiden announced a concert near me in my lifetime, I told Dad we were going. He didn’t even have a choice; he was bringing his daughter to the slaughter! I was 19 at the time and also asked my boyfriends if they wanted to come. Of course they did, it was Iron fucking Maiden! By Eddie that was a magical night! It was Spike, Ragehorn, and I’s first big concert and we were excited!  Ragehorn was a really shy, quiet guy during this stage of his life and didn’t know Dad well yet, so he almost pissed himself the first time Dad let out a scream. While the three of us were head banging and yelling, Ragehorn quietly rocked out with foot tapping, head bobbing, and the odd horned salute. And he definitely pissed himself when we were driving home and “scary” Dad told my uncle over the phone that he had to switch spots because Ragehorn wouldn’t stop grabbing his ass. It took a while for him to get used to Dad’s humour. Two years later, Iron Maiden returned and Dad, Spike, and I bought tickets! Ragehorn originally declined our invitation, but decided to come last minute and bought a spare ticket my uncle had right next to us. In those two years, he had become much more outgoing and knew Dad quite well so he threatened to grab Dad’s ass outright. Thankfully his head banging had also improved. At the time Cupcake and I had this shtick where we would send “snexy selfies” to one another. The point of them was to be unflattering or downright goofy. The night of the second Maiden concert, we took this snexy shot:

I will always be so thankful that Ragehorn decided to join us that night because less than a month later, he was dead. Yep, the night of his birthday a whole group of us were celebrating. We had a designated driver (me) and left his ride at a totally different location blocks away from where we were. No one thought anything of him and Orange going for a walk around the block to sober up because that is what they had done for years without incident. For whatever reason though, they decided to walk to the bar we left the car at and drive that night. If there is anything positive to this heartbreaking and traumatic experience, it was that it was a single car crash and they both died painlessly on impact. The only people that suffered were those left behind to grieve. When Ragehorn’s mother wanted his guitar played at their funeral, we knew it had to be an Iron Maiden song. It was decided that his bandmates, Spike and Saiyan, would perform. Dad, Spike, and I spent hours deciding on what song to choose before “Blood Brothers” hit us like lightning. Leading up to the funeral, even more hours were spent in my parents’ living room arranging and rehearsing a shortened, acoustic version. And crying…lots of crying. Saiyan couldn’t touch Ragehorn’s guitar at first, so he used my guitar; which he had to retune because Ragehorn had decided to tune it drunk a couple weeks before. I’ll never forget the moment he unconsciously grabbed Ragehorn’s guitar and Mom quietly saying “Saiyan…don’t panic, but do you realize what’s in your hand?” He almost dropped it, but from that point on he used it. Every minute from the moment we realized Ragehorn and Orange were missing to the day after the funeral is burned in my memories, but the performance at the funeral is a particularly vibrant one. Watching Saiyan hesitate picking up the guitar, Spike singing every painful emotion, me gripping Cupcake and Toxic’s hands when I saw my ever strong father crying. It was the only performance Thanatos Instinct ever did; the band couldn’t go on after losing Ragehorn. Further on the Maiden theme, the shirt Ragehorn bought at one of the concerts was turned into a stunning memorial teddy bear.

Not a day goes by where I don’t think about Ragehorn and Orange at least once, but as the Maiden concerts approach it becomes almost unbearable. The first Maiden concert without Ragehorn was two years after he died. I cried for days leading up to it; it was the first one without him and the universe didn’t seem fair. Assholes will argue that he somehow deserved to die for driving drunk, but Spike and I didn’t deserve to lose our best friend when we were all so young. We didn’t deserve to lose our best man before we even got engaged. The first song that got to me that night was “Afraid to Shoot Strangers,” a favourite of ours to blast in the truck while driving around in the middle of the night. Then came “Wasted Years,” the ringtone I had assigned for his calls. Along with “The Evil That Men Do,” which they played later, these were the tracks I played on repeat when I couldn’t control my grief. With lyrics like “And I will pray for her, I will call her name out loud/And I will bleed for her, if I could only see her now” and “Too much time on my hands, I got you on my mind/Can’t ease this pain, so easily/When you can’t find the words to say it’s hard to/make it through another day/And it makes me wanna cry and throw my hands up to the sky,” they struck all the right emotional chords. As Hans Christian Andersen said, “Where words fail, music speaks.” But even with the tears, it was cathartic. Yes, it was painful, but it was also a perfect time to remember him and all the crazy adventures we had. It made us feel like a piece of him was still with us if only for a few moments.

It has been over 5 years since we lost Ragehorn, so as the lights were going down and Maiden was taking the stage this time, I thought to myself “let’s see if I can do this without crying! Tears are not metal!” I’d have thoughts like “Ragehorn would be so mad because these seats are amazing,” but I was keeping positive. I was doing fine…until the encore. The front man, Bruce Dickinson, was doing his little speech between songs to introduce the next one, and then he caught me off guard with a song I didn’t expect: “Blood Brothers.” Sure, they had played it at the second concert we attended, but I didn’t expect them to perform it again. As soon as Bruce said the word “blood,” I started tearing up. As the music started, Dad looked back at me and said “Ragehorn’s with us.” At that point, I fully broke down crying. Spike hasn’t been able to listen to the song since the funeral, so I wrapped my arms around him, buried my face in his chest, and just cried as I sang along. I started to compose myself as the song ended, but they followed it up with “Wasted Years.” I texted Cupcake “Fuck they’re doing Blood Brothers” followed by “And they fucking followed it with Wasted Years.” Then I sent her a snexy selfie of me all teary-eyed giving the horns, haha! I belted the song out as loud as I could, tears still streaming down my face. And what went through my mind when this happened? I just pictured Ragehorn standing with us, laughing at me and too proud of himself for making me lose emotional control; for making me cry in a METAL concert! As much as he hated seeing me cry, I know a piece of him would love that we still miss him so much. That we still think of and celebrate him at every Maiden concert, throw a little birthday party for him, and tattoo our bodies because we loved him so much.

[hellstate--rp-blog]

↪ b a s i c s ;

N A M E: Rhiannon Cooper Nankova A G E: 25 P L A C E   O F   O R I G I N: Berkley, California G R O U P: None F C: Nina Dobrev

❝ There is a charm about the forbidden that makes it unspeakably desirable. ❞

↪ p e r s o n a l i t y ;

P O S I T I V E   T R A I T S: solicitous ; resolute N E G A T I V E   T R A I T S: insecure ; capricious

↪ b i o g r a p h y ;

L I F E   B E F O R E   T H E   O U T B R E A K:

“Rhiannon rings like bell through the night and wouldn’t you love to love her?”

Rhiannon Cooper Nankova was born to Ivan and Pamela Nankov on September 12th, 1991. Both professors at UC Berkeley ( Ivan in glaciology and Pamela in anthropology ), the two had waited longer than many of their peers to have a daughter and were in their early forties when she was born. Both having been active in the counterculture movement of the 1970s, they didn’t give Rhiannon the strict homes they’d been raised in. Named for the Fleetwood Mac song with the cool edge of Alice Cooper ( Ivan was by no means traditional, and did not even blink when Pamela rebuked the idea of adding a patronymic name for their daughter ), Rhiannon found herself the odd girl out in many settings. Her parents were older, hippie professors from UC Berkeley, her father from a country no one her age had even heard of and their parents often assumed was Russian instead of Bulgarian. Instead of allowing herself to feel as though she didn’t belong, Rhiannon made it clear early on that she didn’t need friends to find her own happiness, which could be made in public gardens with her dog Bogart, or in the simplicity of a good book, curled up in the hammock that hung off her back porch.

The bright-eyed child with a halo of chestnut locks grew into a charming, delightful girl. With a gregarious personality and a strong sense of self, she cruised through life well-liked and happy. After finishing high school, Rhiannon opted to live an ‘artist’s life’ ( as her mother so often called it ) in a loft in downtown Berkeley while working part-time at a trendy restaurant and helping her mother with her research. With her parents’ support, she spent little time forcing herself to create and though their connections got her gallery shows from time to time, she didn’t actively pursue a career–her dreams mercurial. With her passion distributed across so many different interests and genres, nothing she did seemed to ‘belong’ together and after several years of forcing herself to make something cohesive, Rhiannon accepted that she was never going to make it big in the art world. 

Frustrated and unsure of her future, but tired of working a dead-end waitressing job–even if the tips were enough to accommodate her lifestyle–Rhiannon started to take advantage of the free tuition at Berkeley. A couple terms in and she still didn’t know what she wanted. Rhiannon enjoyed the classes and learning, the environment and the social aspects, but wondered if it wasn’t a waste of her time. Nothing seemed to grab onto her and insist that it was meant for her and she for it.

When her mother took sabbatical to travel with her father to Antarctica, planning to stay for a year to write an ethnography on the scientists’ lives during the harsh winters after being inspired by a thousand and one stories Ivan brought back from his research trips, Rhiannon was eager to tag along. The experience was the most unique thing she could think of doing and she was eager for the adventure it promised; a stark contract when held up against her cool summer days off lounging on the balcony of her loft apartment.

The expedition went off without a hitch, aside from some terrifying weather on the plane ride in. Rhiannon felt EXHILARATED. The cold air stung her eyes, the silence deafening to her ears, but the harsh wintry landscape was unlike anything she’d ever seen. The first couple of months were grueling, but the novelty didn’t wear off. Not even when they ran out of “freshies” and were stuck eating non perishables. Not when a guy freaked out over not getting cheese on his burger and threw a tray at the cook after mumbling over an empty plate for half an hour. Nothing seemed to tarnish the invigorating landscape that had captured the hearts of the entire Nankov family. Rhiannon had found the right place to rekindle her interest and cure her of her prodigal boredom.

L I F E   D U R I N G   T H E   O U T B R E A K:

“All your life you’ve never seen woman taken by the wind”

The Nankov family was still in Antarctica when the outbreak occurred. When the internet was knocked out, neither were shocked or surprised. They had a supply ship coming from France to replenish their stores and with it would bring new blood onto the continent which meant stories from the outside, magazines, and the WORKS. But when the ship finally docked, it brought with it something worse than than a beat-up outdated copy of Italian Vogue or Rolling Stone. The crew were shaken up–they’d stopped in Argentina to pick some of the awaited scientists on their way to the continent and things had only gone south from there.

During the two-day trip, one of them had gotten feverish and sick.Twelve hours before docking, he “fucking snapped” and attacked the doctor in the ship’s infirmary. ‘A wounded animal will bite when cornered,’ one of the ship’s crew said bleakly. After a short scuffle, the scientist was killed when he was shoved back and slipped, striking the back of his head on a medical supply cart. No one was more shaken up than the physician who’d had her arm bitten in the attack. She was brought in immediately to see the physicians on base after she developed a fever and chills–signs, Rhiannon overheard, that might be indicative of sepsis.

Pamela had always been a compassionate woman. When she’d heard about the sickness the physician faced, she confessed to Rhiannon that it was hard for her not to see herself in the same professional woman’s shoes. With no family accompanying her, Rhiannon suggested her mother visit the woman, if not for her own peace of mind, then at least to give the sick woman a comforting hand. If nothing else, she could give the medical crew their much needed break to get some rest for themselves after a long day.

Pamela brought the woman clean clothes, a cool rag, and a book–hoping to ease her woes–but the physician was much sicker than she had allowed herself to hear. Resolved to be strong, Pamela spent the woman’s final moments with her–wiping sweat from her feverish forehead with a cool rag, humming softly to her the tunes of her favorite songs fromRumours. Halfway through Landslide the woman began to arrest and Pamela called for help, holding her hand in tears. If someone heard her cries, no one came. The physician passed away, delicate hands cooling quickly in Pamela’s clammy, shaking grip.

When the medical team members returned after filling their bellies and resting their weary eyes, they were horrified by the amount of blood in the room. Their terror was short lived, as their attending physician and the woman who’d come to give her compassion tore through their necks with expert finesse for a couple of monsters so fresh and inexperienced of maiming. The group made it through the corridors and into the cafeteria before they were gunned down by a toastie who’d been heading through the caf on his way to repaint his own quarters with his brains after spending six hours crying for no reason he could figure out. After that he dug his heels in and clung to living harder than he’d ever clung to anything in his life.

The outbreak in antarctica was FRIGHTENING but quickly contained. Those left on the base were clever enough to connect their recent loss of contact with the outside world with the disease brought with supplies. They chose–unanimously, but with heavy grief–to stay on base as long as they could before leaving on the ship that brought the virus to them in the first place. Ivan had never felt the pressure to be so strong as he did now, a grieving daughter held tightly in his arms as they watched the love of his life burn alongside the bodies of the other infected. The two learned to be strong for each other, but in the process never allowed themselves the shelter in grieving with one another. ‘We’ll keep living.’ Ivan would say, blue eyes fixed ahead on the distant glaciers he’d once loved that broke through the ocean in white sheets, so cold at their core they were blue–like the hottest part of a flame.

L I F E   A F T E R   T H E   O U T B R E A K: 

“She rules her life like a fine skylark and when the sky is starless”

After another year, supplies had run so low that they had no hope of surviving without leaving their barren, but LIVING wasteland. Rhiannon kissed the snow goodbye from the hull of the boat as flakes landed on her lips and eyelashes. Her favorite place in the world might only have her again in her dreams and she was terrified of the world that she was returning to. After docking in Ushuaia, Argentina the Americans left alive made their way home–uncertain of what else they could do aside from looking for their loved ones and hoping for the best. 

Ivan and Rhiannon had little hope to returning to Berkeley, both of them shared the unspoken feeling that returning home to a California with no sun ( no Pamela ) was as comforting as volunteering to live in a crypt. Cobwebs clung to their memories, suffocating and binding. There was nothing left for them there. The two heard of Cheyenne from some traders who’d helped them out with an extra map ( not all human kindness had been sucked from the world, it would seem ). 

The pair made their way to the city, which her father was convinced shined in the Wyoming wasteland like glittering ice. Those cold, distant eyes held smiles once again and the man who’d held her hand and walked her to school everyday seemed to return. One morning he left to catch some breakfast near the Colorado River. She waited five days for him before she let him go. Even a lark knows when its song is done. As far as Rhiannon knows, out of all those she left the frozen south with, she’s the only one who survived. 

The prodigal, childish girl she once was became replaced with a stronger, faster girl–still frightened of the world around her and the DEATH, but rising to the challenge of survival. It seems any courageous part of her, despite her determination to keep it, wavers with the overwhelming loneliness of being without her family. Since she’s arrived in Cheyenne after finding nothing worth living for in California, she’s been trying to rebuild herself and figuring out a skillset she can actually use. Still, the weight of survival buckles her knees some days and she cannot help but break down–in private moments, in desperate hope–regretting every small thing she might have redone if given half a chance.

[writingguide003-blog]

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

New Post has been published on https://writingguideto.com/must-see/a-different-way-of-living-why-writers-are-celebrating-middle-age/

'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).

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