By the time I was deep into writing this piece, memories I had repressed surrounding my father’s death began to surface, usually as I was falling asleep. I had forgotten his funeral was open casket, until an image floated into my mind as I was drifting off. I screamed. It was not the image of his dead body that made me cry out. It was the gaudy flower arrangement beside his casket, hung with a beauty pageant sash that read: “Loving Father, Devoted Husband.” Words that provided some small comfort on that day now seemed to proclaim his cause of death: a man who died in service to his family, a man whose devotion to an abusive spouse killed him, a beautiful man whose essence was traded for things, the father I lost to consumerism when I was 16. When I started this project, I thought it was going to be about exploring my love of industrial ruins, thinking I might be able to connect them to my love of industrial music. By the time I finished, I realized I was ...
SISTERS OF MERCY “AFTERHOURS” HEATWAVE POPSICLES + TREVOR RISTOW’S WAITING FOR ANOTHER WAR
If you’re a fan of The Sisters of Mercy, Trevor’s Ristow’s band biography Waiting for Another War is a must. Reading it felt immersive and vivid, and it’s amazing how Ristow brings scenes to life through his detailed research, from evocative descriptions of early gigs at iconic venues like New York City’s Danceteria, to the songwriting that took place in the cellar of the Leeds apartment where The Sisters practiced. According to Ristow, Andrew Eldritch never rehearsed with the band, not even once, preferring to remain “...upstairs in his armchair listening to the rehearsals through the floorboards, poring over draft contracts from WEA, writing lyrics, smoking, watching television, and stroking his cat.” Ristow describes the apartment as a lair, where the curtains were perpetually drawn. These are the kinds of wonderful details you will encounter if you read the book. One of my favorite scenes that Ristow crafts relates to the genesis of the song “Afterhours,” from the Body and ...
Instagram, Capitalism, and Vampires: Confessions of a Food Blogger + A Gluten-Free Venetian Feast for Drab Majesty’s Modern Mirror
Once upon a time there was a girl who wanted to be a professional food blogger. She brought her camera and wandered through a magical forest made of purple kale and dying roses, melted candle wax and vinyl records, where it was always the golden hour. But she got lost. There were vampires in the forest, and they fed on her. She became a vampire herself. Blind with the thirst for blood, she couldn’t see anymore. She saw only likes, follows, and comments, until she disappeared. This is the story of how I got lost on Instagram. It’s about everything that’s wrong with Instagram growth culture, and how it compromises our mental health, our personal relationships, and our art. It’s also about the potential for music and dance to facilitate transcendence. And it’s about my relationship to Drab Majesty’s Modern Mirror, a “tragic wave” concept album inspired by the myth of Narcissus, the story of a man so obsessed with himself, he drowns in a pool of his own reflection, re-worked ...
YOUNG AND DRIPPING WITH BEAUTY: MULLED WINE POACHED PEARS FOR MY DARK VANESSA + REEVALUATING MY TEENAGE RELATIONSHIPS WITH OLDER MEN
There are men who never turn into boyfriends, who peer behind the curtain and see the mess of me - literal and figurative: the apartment with a narrow path through the clothes and trash leading from the bed to bathroom; the drinking, endless drinking; the blackout sex and nightmares. “You’re kind of screwed up,” they say, at first with a laugh in their voice, an attitude of maybe this will be fun for a while, but as soon as I slur out the story - teacher, sex, fifteen, but I liked it, I miss it - they’re done. . . I learn that it’s easier to keep my mouth shut, to be a vessel they empty themselves into. -Kate Elizabeth Russel, My Dark Vanessa For anyone who hasn’t heard the buzz, My Dark Vanessa is a novel about a 15-year-old girl’s sexual relationship with her 42-year-old English teacher, Jacob Strane, and the long shadow it casts over her adult life. It jumps around in time: 2001, when the affair began, and 2017, where Strane finds himself implicated in a series of “Me Too” ...
PET SEMATARY CHILI + RESURRECTING MY FATHER
This is a story about how you can have a relationship with someone beyond the grave by reading the books they loved. My father died unexpectedly when I was 16. He was, at that time, the love of my life. His death was my greatest fear from a very young age, and that fear came true one summer in the middle of the night, a lightning bolt straight down the sky and through the roof of my parents’ bedroom in the form of a massive heart attack. My father and I were very close and shared a deep love, but there is only so much you can share when your sense of self has not fully developed. When a parent dies when you are young, you never have the privilege of getting to know them as your true self. In turn, you never get to see them as their true self, because your capacity to see has not fully developed either. Your relationship is forever robbed of that level of depth. There are questions you never get to ask, conversations you never get to have, because you haven’t yet become the ...
I’M NOT AFRAID ANYMORE: HEALING FROM ORTHOREXIA WITH POTATO LEEK SOUP + EMBRACING UNKNOWN PLEASURES
I'm not afraid anymore,I'm not afraid anymore,I'm not afraid anymore,Oh, I'm not afraid anymore. -Ian Curtis, lyric excerpt from “Insight” by Joy Division Ian Curtis photographed by Kevin Cummins. Midway through a depressive episode, I was walking to work, listening to "Insight" by Joy Division. A song I loved and had heard a thousand times before, but that morning, when I head Ian Curtis sing, "I'm not afraid anymore," I felt a new freedom. I was stable on my meds. I would continue to be stable. I was eating solid food that had not been pre-digested in a blender, and my digestion was steady. I was occasionally watching TV after 8pm without it inducing a manic episode. I was going to be ok. The asphyxiating paranoia was lifting. I was not afraid anymore. This is a story about my experience with orthorexia, and how I found my way back to eating for pleasure. Orthorexia is a condition in which one becomes obsessed with only eating healthy food, and ...
How Adaptogens Fried my Brain: My Journey to a Biploar Diagnosis + Love Letter to Medication, The Bell Jar, and Crab-Stuffed Avocados
In the fall of 2014, I quit taking the SSRI I had been on for 13 years because it wasn’t “natural.” It was one of the biggest mistakes I ever made. I was in my early 30s at the time, and very closely identified with the values of the wellness community. I loved green smoothies. I loved yoga. I loved the idea of only putting food into my body that was clean, organic, and pure. Goop, the natural lifestyle brand of Gwyneth Paltrow fame, had recently published an interview with a holistic psychiatrist about tapering off of antidepressants, which admittedly, was very responsibly written and by no means encouraged its readers to run out and stop taking their SSRIs. But it influenced me. An evening spent reading about the possibility of SSRIs being no more effective than a placebo and causing side effects such as decreased libido and emotional numbness were enough to make me drop those pills cold. I’m impulsive and prone to black-and-white thinking, and I stopped taking my antidepressants ...
HEALTHY HIPPIE LAZY PUMPKIN PIE: GLUTEN-FREE, SWEETENER-FREE, VEGAN, AND BEAUTIFUL
Healthy Hippie Lazy Pumpkin pie is a dessert you can feel 100% good about putting inside your body. It’s a bowl of pumpkin-spiced kabocha purée topped with an airy dollop of whipped coconut cream, crunchy nugs of slow roasted granola, and seductive flecks of Celtic sea salt. That’s it. It’s a beautiful, naked, sexy dessert, and it’s a lot easier than making a pie. One of the most amazing things about this recipe is that it tastes very sweet, despite the fact that there’s no sugar in it. Kabocha pumpkin is naturally sweet, and becomes sweeter still when simmered with pumpkin pie spice - a blend of cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, cloves, and allspice. It’s an easy thing to throw together and bring to a holiday gathering so you don’t feel left out, sipping from a sad teacup, watching everyone else gleefully consume a glutenized, sugar-soaked dessert while a single tear trickles down your cheek. Now you get to have dessert too. And I wager that “our dessert” might taste even ...
The Cranberries Sauce: a low sugar, chutney-spiced alternative + Everybody Else is doing it so why can’t we?
American Thanksgiving is just around the corner, and cranberry sauce is a quintessential part of a traditional Thanksgiving meal. My version contains no sugar, sweetened instead with chopped apples, a handful of raisins, citrus zest, warming spices, and a bit of freshly squeezed orange juice. Most cranberry sauce recipes call for a terrifying amount of sugar. The Barefoot Contessa puts a whopping 1¾ cups into her “Cranberry Conserve,” and that's in addition to orange juice and the ¾ of a cup of raisins her recipe calls for. My recipe is loosely based on the Contessa’s, but with less raisins, more spice, and no white lines (my preferred, cocaine-laced metaphor for sugar). Don’t worry, I promise it tastes good. Fruit sweetens up plenty when cooked, even cranberries. As the sauce heats, the raisins grow plump and start to melt, the apples roast down like pie filling, and everything grows sweeter still in a warm bath of cinnamon, ginger, allspice, and cloves. The result is a sauce ...
GLUTEN-FREE AND-THERE-WILL-YOUR-HEART-BEET-ALSO MUFFINS, DEATH ANXIETY + LOVE LETTER TO ELIZIUM
“The death of someone with whom a person has been long and closely associated leaves a literal vacuum in that person’s life. The streams of psychic energy directed toward that lost someone now have no object. . . Since the consciousness of the deceased is so vulnerable to impressions, the emotions of those left behind can have a powerful effect on it. Intense sorrow creates a vibration which actually causes pain to the departed, holding them back from progression.” Richard Mattheson, What Dreams May Come These heart-shaped muffins stained with the blood of beets are the stuff of lovers separated by death. There’s a haunting ache in finding one’s true love: the knowledge that one day, one of you will die, and the other will be left alone. Fields of the Nephilim take this subject on in their concept album, Elizium. It’s loosely inspired by Richard Matheson’s What Dreams May Come, which tells the story of a man who dies in a car crash and journeys through the afterlife ...