First of all, great news! In case you didn't already know, Resonance FM has finally been given its five-year licence. This is a superb Christmas present for all of us, and we celebrated last night at Bar Kick in Shoreditch High Street. Big ups, shouts, etc, to the Resonance crew, who have been working extremely hard to keep everything going while we waited for Ofcom's decision. Tomorrow - the world!
I have had a somewhat cool present of my own, which I shall reveal in due course...
For the first time in Midnight Sex Talk's 32-show history, we issued a Disturbing Content Warning, but only because we were talking about dead bodies and stuff. Two of our favourite regulars, Dr Ben and Alex Fitch, became positively competitive as they vied to provide the most gruesome details. Above, the famous Necrocard. I was given a fistful of these many years ago by Stewart Home, during a book launch at an 'exclusive' private members club. (You know, the kind where they need bouncers to tell you not to do drugs in the loos, the main reason being that you did not buy the drugs from them.) The barman, a floppy-haired screenwriter-manque type who was probably being dry-humped by the resident fag-hag at the time, did not agree that his counter was a good place to distribute the cards, pronouncing them 'disgusting', or some such.
Useful links: Rob's Necrophilia Site, and Death online. Films we mentioned: Kissed, Dans Ma Peau, Nekromantik, Frankenhooker, and Mordum. And here's an interesting essay about snuff movies.
Kim has, very sensibly, left London for a bit, and I am holding the fort here. We're having a break on 1st January, and the next show will be on Sunday 15 January 2006.
More very soon, is my intention. But just in case I succumb to Christmas flop-out and do not post for a bit, we want to thank you all for listening and supporting the show. And another big thank you to all our guests and contributors over the past 12 months.
Festive hugs from both of us. :-)
This was a scary one, I'm glad you were able to keep the humour level way up because some of the discussion was truly disturbing. If I'd seen a tv show about this I wouldn't have batted an eyelid but something about audio only, your imagination takes a hold :O
Still, I'm going to make it my personal quest to pop my mortal coil with a woody, just for a laugh.
Posted by: Riddick | January 05, 2006 at 04:16 PM
This turned out to be a quite stunning show; the contributions from Dr. Ben and from Alex were superb and made for a memorable Christmas special.
As is so often the case, an hour is just not long enough to fit in everything we wanted to feature, but a glaring omission is the case of Jeffrey Dahmer.
I knew nothing of Dahmer before the show, but my mother (being one of the most bizarre and wonderful people I know) bought my partner a copy of The Shrine Of Jeffrey Dahmer by Brian Masters. Just picture the scene for a moment; I bring my partner (both of us are men) to the Morgan family home for Christmas, we all go dutifully to Midnight Mass on Saturday, and in the morning, opening our presents – socks, hats, choccies and so forth – my boyfriend unwraps a book about a gay serial killer from my mother, the formidable Mrs. Morgan. Oh, how we laughed. She also got us feather boas, cowboy hats and guns, but enough of all that, I’ll just tell it to my psychotherapist on the ward some time.
Anyhoo, I really got into this Dahmer dude, and – ladies and gentlemen – he was off his nut and I wish I could have done an extra hour on this guy alone as a follow-up to the radio show. For more information, I can heartily recommend http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Dahmer as a source of information.
He had such difficulty relating to the men to whom he was sexually attracted that he fetishised the bodies themselves and coveted these objects; chests and torsos in particular. He masturbated over a taylor’s dummy and most of his most intimate interaction took place with men who were either drugged, or dead.
One would-be-victim of Dahmer had a very close and very telling escape. Jeffrey took Tracey Edwards home promising him money to handcuff him and take pictures, but had none of the sleeping pills he normally used to subdue his victims. He tried hitting him with a rubber mallet, but this had little effect and Edwards was able to struggle his way to safety, but not for several hours, hours in which he fended off Dahmer’s attacks. It seems that as Edwards talked, he personified himself, and mutated – in Dahmer’s eyes – from a blank canvas upon which to impose his fantasies, to a human being who would no longer slot readily into the mould his body fitted.
This kind of illustrates one of the points that really fascinated me during the show about the sexualisation of a corpse; is it the corpse itself, or what it represents? Is it a way to retain the person, or to remove the personaility from the equation entirely? Dahmer lost interest once the object became a person, but what of people who want to retain the person?
I have no answers, but I feel like I have gone further into this issue than I would have expected. Maybe we’ll come back to this.
Posted by: Kim | January 10, 2006 at 07:14 PM