Svetac mazohizma koji si je čavle zabijao u penis kao što su ih Isusu zabijali u zapešća. Čovjek koji je svoju bolest pretvorio u medij, potpuno poistovjetivši bol i užitak. Bol kao sredstvo preživljavanja. Bol kao kamen mudraca. Bol kao tjelesno blato i religijsko sranje. Bol kao zabava. Bol kao borba protiv prirode. Bol kao masturbacija. Bol kao osjećaj nepobjedivosti. Supermazohist = Superman.
Cijeli dokumentarac o Flanaganu: ovdje
"Bob Flanagan, born in 1952 in New York City, grew up with Cystic Fibrosis (a genetically inherited, nearly-always fatal disease) and has lived longer than any other person with CF. The physical pain of his childhood suffering was principally alleviated by masturbation and sexual experimentation, wherein pain and pleasure became inextricably linked, resulting in his lifelong practice of extreme masochism.
In deeply confessional interviews, Bob details his sexual practices and his extraordinary relationship with long-term partner and Mistress, photographer Sheree Rose. He tells how frequent near-death encounters modified his concepts of gratification and abstinence, reward and punishment, and intensified his masochistic drive. Through his insider's perspective on the Sado-Masochistic community, we learn firsthand about branding, piercing, whipping, bondage and endurance trials"
"The bane of all cystic fibrosis victims/An S&M Icon.A crime fighter that actually would scare the shit out of criminals.
Just The Facts
- It took God 47 years of concerted effort to kill this man.
- A lot of that effort merely turned Bob on.
Why He Was A Decent Guy
Bob Flanagan is probably the most famous
person to have suffered from cystic fibrosis. It is an uncurable disease
that will smother people by creating excess mucus in the lungs until
the body effectively drowns itself. Most people people afflcted by it do
not live to be 20.
But rather than simply use that as an excuse to be a ball of rage that devotes its life to getting vengance on all us normie-lung types, Bob became an actually active activist that spent twenty years of his life as a volunteer counselor for a camp for cystic fibrosis sufferers. He became an actually amusing comic and tolerable poet. He made us laugh as his body made us cough, even if we half wanted to retch. He even was part of the L.A. Groundling comedy group, his alumni including Pee Wee Herman.
But rather than simply use that as an excuse to be a ball of rage that devotes its life to getting vengance on all us normie-lung types, Bob became an actually active activist that spent twenty years of his life as a volunteer counselor for a camp for cystic fibrosis sufferers. He became an actually amusing comic and tolerable poet. He made us laugh as his body made us cough, even if we half wanted to retch. He even was part of the L.A. Groundling comedy group, his alumni including Pee Wee Herman.
Why He Was Pure Living "Fuck You Awesome"
Okay, now that we've got the pamby-namby crap out of the way, it's time to rock:
-He was a performance artist that made Robert Maplethorpe look like friggin Norman Rockwell. He had himself beaten, freezed, pissed on, sewn, stapled, and nailed. I mean literally nailed. As in, Bob was personally take a hammer, a nail, a board and his penis and do the thing you and I would least like to do with a hammer, a nail, a board, and our penis. Since apparently that wasn't enough, he sometimes supplemented this penis act holding himself up by the his arms with chains, which was ridiculously dangerous when you had lungs like his. You know, as opposed to the safe way to nail your benis to a board recommended by your doctor.
-His work as a performance artist was featured in the New York Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art and others. By contrast, we've had drawings featured on the TOP half of the refrigerator. Someday, God willing, we'll get another one up there.
-He was featured in three music videos. One was "Happiness in Slavery" by the Nine Inch Nails. Imagine NIN's "Closer" meets "Hellraiser" and you're skimming the surface. The other two were Danzig's "It's Coming Down" and Godflesh's "Crush My Soul." In "Crush My Soul," Flanagan had one of the greatest of music video achievements: he completely upstaged the footage of cockfighting. Sure, he had to have himself hung from a cross upside down while down his genital thing, but that's show biz.
So you see why he's the bane of all people suffering from cystic fibrosis: he just raises the bar for what a person with cystic fibrosis is supposed to achieve impossibly high. No doubt some kids have gone over to the house of their friend with CF and asked them to do the Flanagan." - Cracked
-He was a performance artist that made Robert Maplethorpe look like friggin Norman Rockwell. He had himself beaten, freezed, pissed on, sewn, stapled, and nailed. I mean literally nailed. As in, Bob was personally take a hammer, a nail, a board and his penis and do the thing you and I would least like to do with a hammer, a nail, a board, and our penis. Since apparently that wasn't enough, he sometimes supplemented this penis act holding himself up by the his arms with chains, which was ridiculously dangerous when you had lungs like his. You know, as opposed to the safe way to nail your benis to a board recommended by your doctor.
-His work as a performance artist was featured in the New York Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art and others. By contrast, we've had drawings featured on the TOP half of the refrigerator. Someday, God willing, we'll get another one up there.
-He was featured in three music videos. One was "Happiness in Slavery" by the Nine Inch Nails. Imagine NIN's "Closer" meets "Hellraiser" and you're skimming the surface. The other two were Danzig's "It's Coming Down" and Godflesh's "Crush My Soul." In "Crush My Soul," Flanagan had one of the greatest of music video achievements: he completely upstaged the footage of cockfighting. Sure, he had to have himself hung from a cross upside down while down his genital thing, but that's show biz.
So you see why he's the bane of all people suffering from cystic fibrosis: he just raises the bar for what a person with cystic fibrosis is supposed to achieve impossibly high. No doubt some kids have gone over to the house of their friend with CF and asked them to do the Flanagan." - Cracked
"Sick: The Life & Death Of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist
BY ROGER EBERT / December 5, 1997
A few months before he died, Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose had an argument. She was angry with him for refusing to submit to her sexual discipline. He was angry because she couldn't see that he was dying--drowning in the fluids of cystic fibrosis--and could hardly breathe.
This bare outline makes Rose seem like a monster, but the reality was much, much more complicated. Years earlier, in 1982, Flanagan had signed a contract giving Rose ``total control over my mind and body.'' They had a sadomasochistic relationship lasting 15 years. At the end she was not being cruel, so much as expressing her fear of losing him. It sounds cruel because she speaks in the terms they used to express their love.
"Sick: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist'' is one of the most agonizing films I have ever seen. It tells the story of a man who was born with cystic fibrosis, a disease that fills the lungs with thick, sticky mucus, so that breathing is hard and painful, and an early death is the prognosis. He was in pain all of his life, and in a gesture of defiance he fought the pain with more pain. With Sheree Rose as his partner, he became a performance artist, using his own body as a canvas for museum shows, gallery exhibits, lectures and performances. He was the literal embodiment of the joke about the man who liked to hit himself with a hammer because it felt so good when he stopped.
Flanagan's masochism began early in life. He recalls forcing himself to sleep under an open window in the winter, and torturing himself by hanging suspended from his bedroom ceiling or the bathroom door (``My parents could never figure out why all the doors were off the jambs''). By the time he made it formal with Rose, he had already been a masochist for years. ``Where was I?'' his mother asks herself. ``Did we only give him love when he was in pain? I don't know. He was in pain so much of the time.'' How do you develop a taste for sticking nails into yourself? His parents recall that as a small child he had pus drained from his lungs by needles; since he felt better afterward, perhaps he identified the pain with relief. Later it became a sort of defiant gesture. His father says, ``He's saying to God: `I'll show you!' '' In Rose he found a woman who was a true dominatrix, not just a kinky actress with bizarre costumes. He also found a life partner, and the closeness of their relationship seems frightening at times; they seemed to live inside each other's minds.
What makes ``Sick'' bearable is the saving grace of humor. Apart from the pain he was born with and the pain he heaped on top of it, Bob Flanagan was a wry, witty, funny man who saw the irony of his own situation. We see video footage of his lectures, his songs, his poems. He takes one of those plastic ``Visible Man'' dolls they use in science class and modifies it to illustrate his own special case. As he jokes, kids himself and makes puns about pain, we are aware of the plastic tubes leading into his nose: oxygen, from a canister he carries everywhere.
We are a little surprised to discover that from 1973 to 1995 he was a counselor at a summer camp for kids with cystic fibrosis, and around the campfire we hear him singing his version of a Bob Dylan song, ``Forever Lung.'' He was ``scheduled'' to die as a child, but lived until 42 (two of his sisters died of the disease). He was a role model for CF survivors. We meet a 17-year-old Toronto girl named Sara who has cystic fibrosis and tells the Make-a-Wish Foundation that her wish is to meet Bob Flanagan. She does. How does she deal with his sex life? ``Bondage. I can relate to that. Being able to control SOMEthing ... .'' Flanagan and Rose collaborated on this film with the documentarian Kirby Dick. It is a last testament. Flanagan was very sick when the filming began, and died in January, 1996, almost literally on camera. We see and hear him gasping for his last breaths. If that seems heartless, reflect on his (unrealized) plans for a final artwork: ``I want a wealthy collector to finance an installation in which a video camera will be placed in the coffin with my body, connected to a screen on the wall, and whenever he wants to, the patron can see how I'm coming along.'' There are scenes in ``Sick'' that forced me to look away. But the scenes I did watch were, if anything, more painful. At the end, as Bob fights for breath and Sheree weeps and cares for him, what we are seeing is a couple who had something, however bizarre, that gave them the roles they preferred, and mutual reassurance. Now death is taking it all away.
No one can say that Bob Flanagan, after his fashion and in his own way, did not fight back"
The Pain Journal by Bob Flanagan
Bob Flanagan - Super Masochist
Los Angeles writer and performer, Bob Flanagan was the author of several books of poetry and prose including The Wedding of Everything, Slave Sonnets, and the infamous Fuck Journal which was destroyed by its printer in India out of fear of reprisals by Indian customs agents.
Flanagan grew up with Cystic Fibrosis (a genetically inherited, nearly-always fatal disease) and has lived longer than any other person with CF. The physical pain of his childhood suffering was principally alleviated by masturbation and sexual experimentation, wherein pain and pleasure became inextricably linked, resulting in his lifelong practice of extreme masochism.
In deeply confessional interviews, Bob details his sexual practices and his extraordinary relationship with long-term partner and Mistress, photographer Sheree Rose. He tells how frequent near-death encounters modified his concepts of gratification and abstinence, reward and punishment, and intensified his masochistic drive.
Together, Flanagan and Rose combined text, video, and live performance in highly personal but universal explorations of sex, illness, and mortality. While some of his performances were notable for acts of extreme masochism (on at least one occasion he hammered a nail through his penis, while cracking jokes), he also wrote humorous songs, many of them intended as much for children as adults.
One of their major collaborations was “Visiting Hours” which premiered in 1993 at the Santa Monica Museum, California traveling the following year to the New Museum of Contemporary Art, NY (1994) and the Museum of the School of Fine Arts in Boston (February, 1995). This installation dealt with Bob’s lifelong battle with cystic fibrosis in relation to his sexuality. His latest posthumous piece by Sheree Rose entitled Bobaloon, was shown in Japan, featuring a 20 foot tall inflatable Flanagan complete with pierced penis, ball gag and straitjacket.
In addition to performing in art venues, Flanagan also appeared on stage with Los Angeles Groundlings Comedy Improv Ensemble and in numerous films and videos including the Nine Inch Nails music video “Happiness is Slavery” (tortured by a machine), Danzig “It´s coming down” (pierce his lips togheter and hammers a nail in the head of the penis) , Godflesh “Crush my soul” (upside down suspended christ), and in Michael Tolkin’s film, The New Age.
He also the subject of Kirby Dick’s 1997 documentary: SICK: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, which films the final years of Bob’s life, Flanagan explains, with engaging humor, how his obsession with controlled, self-inflicted pain has helped him to deal with his uncontrollable suffering. He´s also the subject of a 1993 RE/Search publication: Bob Flanagan: Supermasochist, a book of interviews with Bob and photographs by Sheree.
On January 4, 1996, he died of cystic fibrosis, aged 43. The doctors said he was one of the longest-living survivors of cystic fibrosis, which is genetic and usually kills before adulthood.
Bob reads his own obituary.
Why – Poem by Bob Flanagan
Because it feels good;because it gives me an erection;
because it makes me come;
because I’m sick;
because there was so much sickness;
because I say FUCK THE SICKNESS;
because I like the attention;
because I was alone a lot;
because I was different;
because kids beat me up on the way to school;
because I was humiliated by nuns;
because of Christ and the Crucifixion;
because of Porky Pig in bondage, force-fed by some sinister creep in a black cape;
because of stories of children hung by their wrists,
burned on the stove, scalded in tubs;
because of Mutiny on the Bounty;
because of cowboys and Indians;
because of Houdini;
because of my cousin Cliff;
because of the forts we built and the things we did inside them;
because of what’s inside me;
because of my genes;
because of my parents;
because of doctors and nurses;
because they tied me to the crib so I wouldn’t hurt myself;
because I had time to think;
because I had time to hold my penis;
because I had awful stomachaches and holding my penis made it feel better;
because I felt like I was going to die;
because it makes me feel invincible;
because it makes me feel triumphant;
because I’m a Catholic;
because I still love Lent, and I still love my penis, and in spite of it all I have no guilt;
because my parents said BE WHAT YOU WANT TO BE, and this is what I want to be;
because I’m nothing but a big baby and I want to stay that way, and I want a mommy forever, even
a mean one, especially a mean one;
because of all the fairy tale witches, and the wicked stepmother, and the stepsisters, and how
sexy Cinderella was, smudged with soot, doomed to a life of servitude;
because of Hansel, locked in the witch’s cage until he was fat enough to eat;
because of “O” and how desperately I wanted to be her;
because of my dreams;
because of the games we played;
because I’ve got an active imagination;
because my mother bought me Tinker Toys;
because hardware stores give me hard-ons;
because of hammers, nails, clothespins, wood, padlocks, pullies, eyebolts, thumbtacks, staple-
guns, sewing needles, wooden spoons, fishing tackle, chains, metal rulers, rubber tubing,
spatulas, rope, twine, C-clamps, S-hooks, razor blades, scissors, tweezers, knives, pushpins,
two-by-fours, Ping-Pong paddles, alligator clips, duct tape, broomsticks, barbecue skewers,
bungie cords, sawhorses, soldering irons;
because of tool sheds;
because of garages;
because of basements;
because of dungeons;
because of The Pit and the Pendulum;
because of the Tower of London;
because of the Inquisition;
because of the rack;
because of the cross;
because of the Addams Family playroom;
because of Morticia Addams and her black dress with its octopus legs;
because of motherhood;
because of Amazons;
because of the Goddess;
because of the moon;
because it’s in my nature;
because it’s against nature;
because it’s nasty;
because it’s fun;
because it flies in the face of all that’s normal (whatever that is); because I’m not normal;
because I used to think that I was part of some vast experiment and that there was this implant
in my penis that made me do these things and that allowed THEM (whoever THEY were) to monitor my
activities;
because I had to take my clothes off and lie inside this plastic bag so the doctors could collect
my sweat;
because once upon a time I had such a high fever that my parents had to strip me naked and wrap
me in wet sheets to stop the convulsions;
because my parents loved me even more when I was suffering;
because surrender is sweet;
because I was born into a world of suffering;
because I’m attracted to it;
because I’m addicted to it;
because endorphins in the brain are like a natural kind of heroin;
because I learned to take my medicine;
because I was a big boy for taking it;
because I can take it like a man;
because, as somebody once said, HE’S GOT MORE BALLS THAN I DO;
because it is an act of courage;
because it does take guts;
because I’m proud of it;
because I can’t climb mountains;
because I’m terrible at sports;
because NO PAIN, NO GAIN;
because SPARE THE ROD AND SPOIL THE CHILD;
because YOU ALWAYS HURT THE ONE YOU LOVE." - Creepy Insight
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