Bob Flanagan

And that's another thing.

I was thinking about when you were starting to talk about lifting people with piercings, I was thinking about Bob Flanagan.

And there were a couple of moments where I watched it where I thought about Bob Flanagan.

Yeah.

But Flanagan made sense.

Jacqueline? Was her name Jacqueline? Janet? I don't fucking know.

I don't fucking care.

yeah, I don't know either, but, but, uh, but yeah, I mean this, I keep thinking about, and I kept thinking about Bob Flanagan and his relationship to pleasure and pain and his, uh, his desires to be, to have, to the mortification of the flesh and to have, you know what I mean? And, um, and to have someone assist him with that, um, And that is kind of like the role of the Cenobite.

Mm.

But it, it met either at that West Washington Boulevard address or at the Venice City Hall, 681 Venice Boulevard, for decades and decades, and was headed up by people such as Jim Crusoe, uh, Jack Grapes, Michelle T. Clinton, and, and Bob Flanagan, whose collected poems will, uh, be celebrated, in fact, at the end of September 2024 at Beyond Baroque.

So is it kind of, like, aspiring poets reading and then having, having their, their pieces critiqued?

Oh, yeah.

Right.

Right? He, I think he saw, he saw poetry as something that had a kind of performative aspect to it, too, and so he, uh, absolutely served as, uh, I think, a bridge.

Um, it's not an accident that one of the, uh, two of the people, in fact, associated with, um, Dennis Cooper's projects, uh, Jack Skelly and Bob Flanagan, also formed a, a band at a certain point.

Lawndale.