GAY LOVERS’ DELI

 you know how it starts, babe

how we gnash teeth against shoulders & pick eachother apart like vultures & separate layers of meat with our fingertips; it's not like we can do much else— when two plugs entwine by the wire & connect, god throws stones but when i leave fingerprints on you it's electric & it's heretical to call eachother good, yet we continue down to the bone— actin & tropomyosin contract and we sigh like pigs in a slaughterhouse who can't stop kicking— god holds the shotgun at the end of the line because he didn't make our bodies for each other, babe; this wasn't part of his plan

be my butcher and i'll be yours, alright?

THE ONLY TIME I’VE EVER MAXED OUT MY CAR SPEAKERS

A friday night in September; I'm driving home from a football game. Senior year. I have the windows down and the Smashing Pumpkins on. Our team lost, but I couldn't hear the crowd over the sound of our laughter, as we made out under the tiny baseball bleachers on the edge of campus. Right there, in the pitch-black, I decided to stop pretending like I didn't care, at least for this golden year. Our last year of real, undiluted youth. The sky streaked with black and blue in a color we'd never see again, at least not with the same eyes.

Crucify the insincere.

The game theme was camouflage and there you were in your dog-tags and shorts, smiling into my mouth like you were made of sunlight.

ADVICE TO THE ODD YOUNG GIRLS AT THE PUBLIC LIBRARY:

Keep coming back. The library will always be there. Walk, bike, beg your parents if you must, but keep coming back to the library. Keep that little yellow card in your pocket. Get a second card for your bookbag. Waltz up and down the nonfiction aisles with your sticky note covered in Dewey Decimal numbers. Remember that the library will be there for you when no one else will. Get to know your librarians. Learn their names. They were in your place once. They don’t care that you’re weird, they’ll get you the books you need. I’ve known my favorite librarian, Mrs. Michelle, since I was an infant in her story hours. I’m sixteen now, and she has grown with me over the decades. Take my advice and don’t dumb yourself down. When you start public school after years of being taught by PBS and raggedy library books, you’ll be tempted to minimize your vocabulary to avoid stares. But by doing this, you won’t reach your full potential. Say words like “oxymoron” and “juxtaposition”. If they don’t know what it means, teach them. You probably don’t know half the slang they use, either. Laugh at yourself when you mispronounce “epitome” because you’ve only seen it in writing. Remember to keep your room clean, but not sanitized or dull. It shouldn’t be Pinterest-worthy. Paint your walls bright teal. Buy all the book-fair posters you want. Hang your cringy fanarts up on the wall with Scotch tape. Stack up Telgemeier and Riordan books beside your bed. Cover your ceiling in stars. Keep your floor swept, but beware of aesthetic minimalism for the sake of fitting in. You’ll try and fail at that, at fitting in, after years of ostracization, and it’s best not to waste the effort. Similarly, don’t dull yourself. Recalling what I said about not restricting your vocabulary - apply that to your appearance. Wear the cat ears from Claire’s. Paint your nails neon green, if you’d like, or coat them in Wite-Out during social studies class. Buy the most obnoxious Justice shirts and galaxy print backpacks. Don’t fall into the H&M trap. You’re in elementary school, not a music video, however much your classmates want to pretend you are. Also, nerd out without shame. I promise, if you know all about leeches, or medieval torture methods, or the periodic table, you know more than most of your peers. They’ll demean you for this, since they lack the same knowledge. Let them stare, but cut down the words they’ll inevitably hurl at you. Let them know that shit won’t fly with you. There is tremendous power in knowing when not to hold your tongue. And please, please, advocate for yourself. That mental health diagnosis will come soon enough, and adults will say you’re “too well-behaved” or “too well-spoken” to have [X]. Stand up for yourself. Demand accommodation. Learn about your condition and how it affects you. Chances are - your brain sacrificed social skills for a stellar memory. Most people have the opposite problem. And when it comes to friendship, don’t settle. Fact is, there are going to be very few people similar to you, or who want to be your friend. Find those other oddballs and cherish them, but know that it is better to be alone than to settle for shitty oddball friends. You’ll do better alone at recess than you would desperately trying to appease the “cool kids”.

Know that it’s lonely. I try to make the weirdo life sound fun, but there are horrors that accompany it. You’ll be terribly, terribly lonely some days. You’ll watch your peers dancing together in the cafeteria from afar, knowing that they’ll turn off the music if you dare to join. You’ll probably get asked out as a dare at least once. When I was your age, the popular girls pretended to be my friends and rehearsed a song with me for the talent show, and then ditched me the night of. Truthfully, I simply don’t have any magic keys to make your childhood like everybody else’s. This advice is merely stuff I wish I would’ve heard as a kid. You can disregard all this if you want, it’s up to you. You can attempt to squeeze yourself into Lululemon and learn all the top 40 hits to sing on the playground. You can kick your stack of beloved books underneath your bed, and replace them with a TV that cycles through Disney Channel and Cartoon Network on repeat. If this is your goal, I certainly don’t mean to discourage you, but just know that I’ve tried what you are trying, and it made me miserable. However, if you managed to glean anything coherent from this wretched stream-of-consciousness disaster, it should be my first suggestion. Drill it into your little head. Tape it to your mirror. Write it on your hand in Sharpie, even though your mother hates it. I repeat:
Keep coming back. 
The library will always be there.

AN OPEN LETTER TO KENNETH BRANAGH

Mr. Branagh,


To faithfully adapt one of the most popular classic novels of all time is a daring feat. A feat which has been attempted 189 times before your own. I will make it clear that I do not expect any adaptation of Frankenstein to be completely book-accurate, as that is near-impossible due to the limitations of film. But to label your grotesque mockery of this book with Mary Shelley’s own name in the title is beyond disrespectful. My problems with this film are all directly caused by you. You ordered a second draft of the script to satisfy your own personal sexual proclivities. You cast yourself as the lead, and butchered the character of Victor for your own ego. Your “adaptation”, if it even deserves the status of one, is nothing more than a thinly-veiled fetish piece that sexualizes human birth, incest, and mental incapacitation.

The script of this movie is littered with inaccuracies and ego. You fired your original scriptwriter, Steph Lady, and commissioned a second draft from Frank Darabont to specifically include “explicitly sexual birth images”. The original script was sold to Francis Ford Coppola’s film studio, and is unavailable to the public, so I don’t know how much better or worse it was than Darabont’s. Darabont himself states that the film was "the best script [he] ever wrote and the worst movie [he’s] ever seen". He believes the script was ruined by your direction and adaptation of it, which is true to a degree. Since the direction of this film hinges so firmly upon sexuality and lust, I imagine the parts of his script dealing with those topics were written by your orders.

This movie is an injustice to Shelley’s novel in that it fetishizes the non-existent incestuous sexual relationship between Victor and Elizabeth. For example, the scene where they kiss at the ball is completely contradictory to book canon. In the novel, they grow up with a sibling-like bond, and both express discontent over the expectation of their future marriage. In Darabont’s script, Victor and Elizabeth kiss before he leaves for Ingolstadt. Elizabeth says, “This feels… incestuous”, to which Victor replies, “Is that what makes it so delicious?”. This line alone is a gross mischaracterization of both characters involved. The two of them never kiss or express lust for each other in the novel, and their marriage is used as a symbol of the traumatic family dynamics in the house of Frankenstein. The usage of the words “sister” and “brother” during sexual exchanges makes it clear that those scenes are meant to provide gratification to the viewer by fetishizing incest. However, I have not met one viewer of this film who found those scenes gratifying.

If it couldn’t get any worse than your blatant fetishization of traumatic incestuous relationships, you manage to sexualize human birth in this film. You added an unnecessary scene where Caroline Frankenstein, Victor’s mother, dies in childbirth with William. Upon my first watch of your film, I was confused as to why you changed this plot point, since Caroline dies of scarlet fever in the novel. But when the camera panned to her exposed, bloody, postpartum dead body, I realized that the inclusion of this inaccurate scene was yet another addition designed by you to get yourself off. This isn’t speculation! Recall your words that I mentioned earlier about how you specifically wanted sexual birth imagery in your film. Another “birth” scene that you sexualized was the reanimation of Elizabeth. Although you compared her new form in the script to a “brain-damaged child who’s wet the bed”, you make sure to include plenty of shots of her fingering your and De Niro’s lips while she dances with them. Not to mention being a complete plagiarization of the much better 1990 movie Bride of Re-Animator, this scene fetishizes her incapacitated mental state, which just blows my mind. Why did you think that was a good idea? Not only is the reanimation of the Bride non-existent in Shelley’s novel, a major theme of said novel is bodily autonomy and the consent and authority of women to make their own choices. Book Victor refuses to create the Bride, recognizing that “she, who in all probability was to become a thinking and reasoning animal, might refuse to comply with a compact made before her creation”. You turn the Bride into a sex object to further the lustful overtones of the film.

On the topic of Book Victor, your portrayal of him is an atrocity. You turned the sensitive, intellectual, withdrawn Victor into a horny buff freak. Victor Frankenstein would not create human life without a shirt on. He would not kiss his cousin with tongue. He does not have a large ego! In the novel, Victor’s conflicts are internalized. He does not go around preaching his greatness as a scientist like you do. Victor becomes disabled with psychosis and fatigue after creating his monster. You lie in bed under Clerval’s care for a few hours and then go back to flexing your abs on camera. Book Victor escapes from the horrors of his life by going into nature, reading poetry, or traveling, all features of a Romantic novel. Your Victor’s escape is passionate incestuous sex. Calling yourself a fan of Shelley’s work, and then confusing Romanticism with romance, is a level of ignorance expected from high school students. The ego shown in your depiction of Victor taints the scenes you have with Walton. Their interactions are not supposed to be testosterone-fueled yelling matches. In the novel, Victor knowingly humbles himself by sharing his tragic story with Walton. That theme is completely lost in translation. I am not surprised whatsoever that you cast yourself as Victor, because his intolerable film personality directly reflects your own.

I’d like to congratulate you on producing the worst, most perverse, and most unwatchable Shelley adaptation since 1973’s Flesh For Frankenstein. It takes so much willful ignorance and disrespect toward the creator of science fiction to produce a film this terrible. If I had two suggestions to improve your film, the first would be to remove Mary Shelley’s name from the title. The second would be to burn all existing copies and turn your duties over to someone with a grade-school reading comprehension level. I pity the pigs who had their bones boiled to produce the gelatin for the film that this movie would eventually be shot on. I pity the miners who extracted the iron that would one day be used to create the props for your atrocity. I pity the cameramen, actors (except yourself), crew, and costume designers that were subject to your mere presence in the studio. Finally, I extend my most sincere condolences to anyone who has had the misfortune of viewing your film in the decades since it was released, for their brains are now imprinted with a corrupted telling of Shelley’s tale.


“And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper.”
Insincerely,
madtunesmith