DISCLAIMER The following is a work of fiction and bears no relation to existing people or events.
– Shelley and Josh on the beach surfing, taking pictures, everything chillax and cool and fun. We do not specify where they are, it could be any beach anywhere in the world where it’s sunny with a beach and waves. They both speak English with an accent but it’s a non-specific accent. We learn that Shelley is visiting Josh from “down under” (do not specify where) and that they met online. Jokes about vegans arguing all day on the social media, they respond to the threads making up snarky comments together. Two quick-witted sarcastic argumentative vegans in love with eachother picking each others brains while complementing each other. I have already shown what Shelley is like in another blog post. Josh is like this guy – in behaviour and manner of speech, not in looks because Josh looks like a mess, part raver, part g-thug, part goff, part dandy, part New Age, just a mess of styles and we can’t readily read him at first. Josh tries to be everything all at once and this mess is represented in the way he dresses. Josh wears a court jester’s hat. We learn he’s bald with fake hair extentions.
– Josh and Shelley at home. Shelley shows Josh her old social media videos about veganism which are crude and badly shot. Josh tells Shelley he can help her make better videos. Josh and Shelley at the Media Markt, buy a digital camera and split the price.
– Josh is an animator and he shows Shelley a black cat animation he has made. This signals the twist at the end of the film, and is also a reference to the ancient Japanese fairy tale, The Boy Who Drew Cats, only here Josh is the bat/rat — just like Alexander was the rat in 1984. Τhese predatory men all want to be rats and they know this of themselves which is why they subconsciously identify with rodents that sneak into places they shouldn’t.
– Some buddhist New Age talk about how Josh views Shelley as The Anointed One who will lead the masses towards their self-manifested evolution as vegans & hence towards higher consciousness. It is very important that these scenes do not become tacky or comical in any way. Josh has to be absolutely convinced of his New Age woowoo, and Shelley has to look absolutely enthralled (film in soft focus to make it look more romantic/intimate?). This is a charisma and confidence driven scene. It’s a scene about the power of men emotionally brainwashing women through love-bombing. The spell should be broken at the end, like a hypnotist snapping his fingers, when Josh makes a monkey joke, in reference to the 100th monkey theory revealed later.
– Josh and Shelley shoot a Youtube film in the desert near a dead tree trunk. The deadness of the tree should symbolize the deadness of their relationship, the relationship is doomed to fail. Josh is behind the camera, and he instructs Shelley to look like an animal and to act lewed. “Stick out your tongue”. Shelley is reluctant but performs as instructed. Josh asks Shelley to touch the camera, “Get out your bubble Shelley, take it, touch it, pick it up.”. POV shot should look romantic with a predatory undercurrent. Nothing too overt, above all else ambiguous. The male viewer should identify with Josh’s sexual predation, the female viewer with Shelley’s vanity getting the better part of her. The POV has to be confusing because Shelley is touching the camera and is filming herself but Josh is instructing her, so whose gaze are we looking through here? Is Shelley filming herself, or is Josh filming Shelley using Shelley herself as a proxy to do so? Is Josh using Shelley’s own hands to pray on Shelley visually?
– Josh and Shelley at the vegan animal rights convention/festival. Shelley meets her favourite vegan animal rights film director. This man is everything Josh isn’t: humble, philosophical, together, calm, soft spoken, humorous without being offensive, does not hide his age but acts his age. Josh feels like a third wheel and is revealed by his asinine/rude comments to be a New Age phoney next to the real thing. Josh tells Shelley he wants to be “at the other side of the table, because at this side I am just a fan.”. Everyone wants to interview Shelley at the festival about her new animal rights group. Josh feels ignored.
– A bunch of coloured women spot Shelley with Josh. Josh doesn’t see them because he’s relaying the 100th monkey theory to a bunch of animal rights activists listening just as enthralled as Shelley was earlier. Shelley sees the women in the distance, who are gesticulating and grimacing, upset and frustrated. The women get up and leave the convention room. Shelley follows them and stops one of them in the hall. She just looks at Shelley with sincere pity and says “watch yourself”, walks away with no further explanation just as Josh arrives. “You wanna know what Zeus said to Narcissus.”
– Josh and Shelley at the vegan restraurant. Shelley is eating strawberries and raspberries. CU of her fingers moving the fruit to her lips. ASMR intermezzo meant to hypnotize the viewer and create a false sense of calm with the overlayed whispers of the coloured women that we previously saw at the convention/festival. They are whispering at Shelley to warn her about Josh but there are so many women’s voices whispering that Shelley cannot make out what they are saying or that these are warnings from the whisper network of women warning eachother about Josh. Shelley keeps eating strawberries as Josh’s voice mansplaining some point about veganism becomes louder and louder. At one point Shelley’s own fingers are replaced by male fingers shoving fruit into her mouth (the sight of male fingers near her mouth has to come as a surprise as the audience was habituated first to Shelley’s fingers). Josh is now feeding Shelley, control of a parter’s food intake is a typical psychopathic trait. Shelley smiles and accepts the offerings. Josh says “I lub uuu” with a childish voice. Infantilization and pedophilia.
– Josh and Shelley fight at the vegan restaurant after Josh makes a sexist comment about the waitress. Shelley tries to make Josh understand why the comment was sexist, Josh does she “I was only joking/trolling” routine.
– Tender scene of Josh and Shelley in bed that ends up violent. Shelley wakes up to find Josh near her face jacking off and shooting cum all over her cheeks and lips (simulated because my movie isn’t porn, fuck Larry Clark and all that art house art porn shit). Shelley freaks out, screams, punches Josh in the gut, and jumps out of bed. Pandemonium in the room, furniture toppled over, etc. Josh pulls Shelley away from the door, locks the door and starts shaking and crying himself, because Josh has to be at the center of it all, it’s about him being abused by Shelley’s response, not the fact that he’s raping Shelley by shooting in her face while she is sleeping and with no prior consent. Josh must look like the “My Abuse Story” video on Youtube (“I have to collect myself” just as he start crying, etc.) The cats observe the whole thing. Josh’s Latina pot-smoking roommate bangs on the door in response to the noise, Josh opens the door just as Shelley is wiping his cum off her face with a towel crying. They both conspire to calm down the roommate with some made up story about what happened. That they were trying out positions and fell over or some lame excuse like that.
– Josh and Shelley smoking pot with the Latina roommate after the rape and fight. More babble about animal rights and veganism only this time completely absurd and incoherent, babble about wanting to kill omnis, wanting to warehouse them in communist style re/education camps, just full on Freely during this scene. Josh reveals his Mormon background, the religious brainwashing of his youth and reveals wanting to be a vegan cult-leader with multiple slaves/wives. Everything in this scene must be like junkie babble with lots of oblivious giggling and laughing. Audience is introduced to the New Age concept of the Indigo Child. Josh sees himself as an Indigo destined to rule the world. We now understand that he’s not just an eccentric but truly a madman with a Jesus complex… or is he just stoned?
When I first read Alex’s response to Mary Tsoni’s death I honestly didn’t know what to make of it:
«Το σώμα σου – Τα χέρια μου – Το πρόσωπό σου – Τα μάτια μου»
“Your body, my hands, your face, my eyes”…
What was that supposed to mean, other than being a reference to the Photoshopped cover image of their album “Mary and the Boy Praying For Your Sins” which is a mash up of Alex’s and Mary’s portraits airbrushed to form a single creature? Going through my archive I discovered that a couple of years ago in 2014 I had actually published a short horror story inspired by Alex’s creative output. I was writing these surreal horror stories at the time trying to deal with my anger, disappointment and rage towards Alex about the stuff I had discovered about him bein a pedophilia apologist. The story I rediscovered in my archive was titled: “Your eyes, your hands and the girl next to you”… Could it be that Alex was subconsciously referencing my story title in his tribute to Mary? And I swear that the title I came up with back in 2014 was not in reference to the Mary and the Boy album cover he was referring to.
“Was it suicide?” a friend and band-member asked me about Mary Tsoni’s death after I had shown him all the tributes I had collected from the Greek media. I told him that self-destructive people are not necessarily suicidal. That self-destructive behaviour is often a cry for help, a person crying out “Help me, I don’t know how to live!” rather than a commitment to self-destruct oneself to death. My impression is that Mary Tsoni wanted to live. The fact that she up called up the paramedics and asked them to come and save her strengthens my belief that her death was not a suicide but rather a mistake and an accident. This hush of mine is difficult to fact-check due to the hypocritical reporting of her death by the Greek media who are not giving us the specific facts about her untimely demise. Only one Greek article went into the public secret about Mary Tsoni’s life and death that all the other media refused to bring up:
Ηταν φανερό, εδώ και πολλά χρόνια, στις ξαφνικές εναλλαγές στη συμπεριφορά της, στον τρόπο που χανόταν, εμφανιζόταν, για να εξαφανιστεί ξανά, στον τρόπο που, ενίοτε, ζητούσε βοήθεια, συμπαράσταση ή προστασία από τους άλλους. Φαινόταν σε κάθε της έκφραση, σε κάθε της κίνηση.
Ηταν όμως δύσκολο να βρει τη χείρα βοηθείας που αναζητούσε, το αποκούμπι που έψαχνε, γιατί η ίδια δεν ήταν έτοιμη, δεν μπορούσε να κάνει το άλμα που απαιτούσε η κατάστασή της. Δεν είχε αποφασίσει να ξεκόψει από τις εξαρτήσεις που την παγίδευαν, από τις κακές συνήθειες στις οποίες είχε ενδώσει. Τα τελευταία χρόνια, η Μαίρη Τσώνη είχε μπει σε εκείνο τον σκοτεινό δρόμο των τεχνητών παραδείσων, που δεν την οδηγούσε πουθενά. Στο αδιέξοδο. Δεν μπόρεσε να αντιμετωπίσει τις αδυναμίες της, την κατάθλιψή της, να δει τη ζωή της κατάματα και να σωθεί. Σαν να είχε παραιτηθεί. …
«Μπορεί και να σε είχα σώσει», σκέφτηκε η φίλη της, το κορίτσι που βρήκε νεκρή τη Μαίρη Τσώνη μέσα στο διαμέρισμά της στα Εξάρχεια. Και θέλησε να της ζητήσει συγγνώμη που δεν την έψαξε νωρίτερα, που καθυστέρησε να φτάσει, που δεν μπόρεσε να κάνει κάτι.
Unfortunately Mary Tsoni’s death was to be expected because of the things she did to herself from a very young age, the people she had surrounded herself with, the people she had worked with, and the very toxic social environment she found herself in as part of the Athenian hipster scene that cheered her on as she slipped down into the abyss of self-destruction, with no one reaching out to her and offering a helping hand. The sad fact is that those who had the financial ability and the ethical obligation to help her didn’t.
I didn’t want to log into WordPress at all as I’m crazy busy with all sorts of projects at the moment, but I did when I heard on the news that Mary Tsoni from Alex’s old band, Mary and the Boy was found in a comatose state from that some people online suggests was a drug overdose or a by-reaction of a toxic mix of drugs. Mary fell into a coma and passed away shortly after she was found by the paramedics who determined she had stopped breathing. She had made an emergency phonecall prior to losing consciousness pleading: “Please come and pick me up, I’m not feeling well.”
Greeks who follow the alternative music scene in Greece mostly know Mary Tsoni from the aforementioned band with Alex, but people abroad mostly know her as the actress who played the younger sister in Yiorgos Lanthimos’ breakthrough movie Dogtooth. There are comments on Youtube from fans of that movie who only discovered Mary and the Boy after researching “the actress who played the little sister” online. Before he became a famous filmmaker Lanthimos was in the Filmmakers in the Fog group with Alex and his sister Constantina and it is even less well known that Lanthimos was a onetime photographer for Mary and the Boy. I myself first discovered Mary’s music through K the Clown, the frontman of my favourite Greek rock band 2l8. In an interview K did years ago, he was asked about his favourite song by another Greek group and he mentioned being taken by the song Staring At Your Friend by the band Mary and The Boy. Just because K said he liked that song, I looked it up on Youtube and that was basically my first introduction to Mary. At the time I had no idea who Alexander Voulgaris was or that he was “The Boy” in this band. K the Clown later told me that he actually hated the version on Youtube and that he was referring to the demo version which he only got to hear because he was signed to the same indie label. He told me that the studio version was significantly different from the demo he had orginally heard. I never got to hear the demo and hope someone still has a copy they can now release posthumously.
I quickly realized that Mary was abusing drugs when I began researching Alexander’s pedophilia apologetics for my essay on the topic. All over the internet were accounts from people who had seen Mary passed out or almost passed out in the streets of Athens. I suspected the only reason she was in Lanthimos’ movie was because of her connection to Alex and the Voulgaris oikogeniocracy. Going through her IMDB profile I realized that she never did another feature movie after Dogtooth or had done much at all after Mary and the Boy broke up and stopped touring. There were some songs on Youtube with a band named Joalz and some reviews of liveshows. One of these live reviews mentioned Mary collapsing after the show. My timeline of events suggested to me that as soon as that direct connection to the oikogeniocracy was gone, as soon as Mary was a Woman Going Her Own Way, her career, her health and her sanity all went downhill. One of the news broadcasts about her death claimed that she was suffering from a prolonged depression. I was even less surprised to learn that she was suffering bouts of anxiety and had developed intense phobias, because that’s what long-term drug abuse eventually does to users: the drugs make them anxious and paranoid. However, by neglecting to report on her long-term drug abuse the Greek media falsely suggested that her depression, anxiety and phobias were merely the symptoms of a sad girl rather than the side-effects of long term drug abuse.
Last summer I looked Mary up on Youtube just out of curiosity and discovered that she had worked on a number of performance art pieces, some of which included rather extreme forms of body art (someone breaking glass and then dancing with bare feet on top of the broken glass until their feet bled). There was also a peformance she did about s Vaslav Nijinsky’ L’après-midi d’un faune (1912) with a bespectacled dancer she hugged and kissed at the end of the performance. I don’t know if that guy was her new boyfriend or not. I was actually relieved to see that Mary had moved into performance art because I hoped that this would allow her to turn over a new leaf and explore another art form. Mary looked pale and thin in the video of the Vaslav Nijinsky performance but also energetic doing some kind of a strip routine on a chair. Later in the video she sang the song “You, you, you”, one of the Mary and the Boy songs that Alexander himself still performs during his solo shows as “The Boy”.
I want to take this opportunity to extensively discuss Mary’s connection to Alexander focussing particularly the role that Alexander appears to have played in pushing Mary Tsoni further and further down the path of self-destruction. That is surely a harsh thing to say of a man who only 2 years ago was posting about Mary on Facebook reminiscing favourably about their musical collaboration, describing how proud he was of their mutual work in Mary and the Boy. The public record as I have seen it all over the internet plainly suggests that there was darker more sinister side to their collaboration that went beyond making music and being roommates in a squat in Exarchia. Alexander never explicitized whether Mary and he were just friends, lovers, fuckbuddies or poly with eachother and others. What we do know is that in this particular relationship Alexander was always the older person, older by 6 years, and as the older person it was Alex who had an ethical responsibility to look out for the much younger Mary, who had left the Island of Crete to move to Athens at the age of 16. My impressionistic interpretation of events suggests that Alexander had failed his basic duty of care towards Mary. I will explain how I made that impression after examining the texts available to me.
Alexander has openly stated in public comments and in two of his solo songs that he once had a female friend who hung herself at the age of 17. Alexander wrote a song about this friend titled “I used to call her Kurt Cobain”.
Losing a friend to suicide was an experience that clearly scarred the young Alex. Just a few years ago he wrote the following on Facebook about losing this unnamed friend the Kurt Cobain fan:
Τέλος, είχα μια αγαπημένη φίλη που την φωνάζαμε Kurt επειδή τον λάτρευε και έφυγε με τον ίδιο τρόπο στα 17 της.Ο πιο κοντινός μου άνθρωπος που έχασα.
Presumably it was Alex himself who put the idea in his friend’s head that suicide was a romantic way to go by constantly comparing her with her favourite famous dead rockstar. Alexander apparently never stopped to wonder whether the constant comparisons to Kurt Cobain weren’t as harmless as he casually presents them here when he retells this story of losing “the closest person to me.”. Many people are now aware of the fact that Kurt Cobain was a heroin drug addict. Less people are aware of the fact that Cobain took an overdose of heroin prior to shooting himself. One wonders whether Alexander’s friend was likewise abusing hard drugs like heroin at the young age of 17.
While I was doing the aforementioned research into Alex’s pedophilia apologetics I inevitably ended up reading a lot about his band Mary and the Boy as well. Alexander once stated in a Facebook that he and Mary were listening to completely different things when they started this band and that the only music artist they had in common was another celebrated drug-addict promoting the rocknroll junkie lifestyle, the artist Lou Reed who is best known for shooting up onstage and having written what is still the heroin addicts’ anthem.
αλεξανδρος βουλγαρης heeft een link gedeeld. 28 oktober 2013 LOU THREAD….Δεν υπάρχει μουσικός που να ερωτεύτηκα περισσότερο απο τον Θείο Λου.Ξεκίνησα να γραφω τα 50 god damned songs μου παίρνοντας θάρρος με το πως κατάφερνε να μιλήσει για τον εαυτό του και τους φίλους του άλλα να τον νιώθει όλος ο κόσμος. Ζαλισμένος απο την μονοτονία της φωνής του και με απο τον τρόπο που το βλέμμα του όριζε μια ολόκληρη πόλη. Οταν γνωρίστηκα με την Μαίρη ήταν η μοναδική μας κοινή μουσική αναφορά και φτιάξαμε τους Mary and The Boy απο την εμμονή μας για το τραγούδι Open House το οποίο τραγουδήσαμε και στην πρώτη μας συναυλία .
In other words, the only musician Alex and Mary had in common when they started out making music together and trying to find a musical commonground to work from was yet another artist who glamourized drug abuse and had become more famous for being a icon of onstage drug abuse than for their music. Contrary to the myths alt-nerds tell themselves, most people and especially most young people nowadays do not know the Velvet Underground at all, outside of a small circle of indie kids or art school art fags who read about Andy Warhol or might have seen that Edie movie that came out in. I myself saw the Edie Sedgwick movie Factory Girl (2006) the second time I visited Berlin in 2007. I was not surprised to discover that Alexander hated Factory Girl. Because the Edie movie suggests that Edie was the victim of predatory men and that even her asexual and rather shallow relationship to Andy Warhol was essentially predatory and an act of consumption on his part, because Warhol used Edie up and discarded her when he was done with her. I wondered whether the real reason Alex was so upset about the Edie movie was because Alex wanted to disavow the possibility that his behaviour towards Mary might mirror Andy Warhol’s behaviour towards Edie. Maybe Alex was refusing to allow the idea that his relationship to Mary was not be the Lou Reed-Nico musical pairing he imagined them to be, but more of a Warhol-Edie thing.
During the course of my research I discovered that Alexander Voulgaris has a song on his 2004 debut solo album 50 Gawddamned Songs titled “Mary In A Strapless Bra” in which Alex appears to me making light of Mary abusing drugs in his presence:
mary is a strapless bra (…) Now she’s dancing in a blue light wearing a t-shirt of “The Miserables”.
Mary in a strapless bra. Her hair in a ponytail. Nose sniffing smack. (…) Mary in a strapless bra. Imagine the most decadence way of life. You can see that she’s gonna be important for all of us. (…) Her make up is wonderful. Her look is bizarre.
The Mary in this song is undeniably Mary Tsoni because she is wearing a Les Miserables T-shirt. As mainstream Greek media have reported, Mary originally went to London to study at the Dance Attic become a musical dancer and singer in the UK:
Από την Κρήτη έφυγε για να σπουδάσει χορό. Είχε περάσει στην Κρατική Σχολή Χορού, στο φυτώριο, λόγω του νεαρού της ηλικίας της, αλλά δεν παρέμεινε για πολύ. Μετά το Λύκειο έφυγε και πήγε στο Λονδίνο για να σπουδάσει ένα είδος που αγαπούσε ιδιαίτερα, το μιούζικαλ, μια τέχνη που συνδυάζει χορό και τραγούδι.
If only Mary Tsoni been given the chance to realize that dream… And I can’t help but wonder whether Mary would’ve found other people to associate with and maybe even another approach to art making if she had managed to get herself a steady career as a musical performer in London, instead of having to move back to Greece to start a band with Alex, becoming a part of or maybe even just a pawn in his dark cynical worldview with is very common place in the Athenian yuppie hipster circles where Alex is revered as a film connoisseur and as an edgy lyricist with aggressive freestyle rap-like lyrics.
The above excerpted lyrics from the song Mary In A Strapless Bra suggest that Alexander was already aware of the fact that Mary was “sniffing smack” before he even started the band with her, yet he did nothing to help her kick the habit. When Alexander released this song in 2004, Mary was barely 18 and Alex himself was already 24. It bears mentioning that Alexander was already shooting his first government-funded film at the time. Alexander – as the older person, the better connected and the more established artist in the relationship – had an ethical obligation to help and look after his younger friend Mary who was a newcomer in the Athens scene. Instead of helping her and looking after her, he used her drug abuse as fodder for his song. He never stopped to think whether celebrating her drug abuse in song would encourage and enable his friend’s self-destructive behaviour. He never once wondered whether immortalizing his friend’s drug abuse in a song would encourage her in assuming she was indeed living the “most decadent way of life” – and look, the son of one of the most famous Greek filmmakers confirmed it in a song, so it must be really cool to fuck yourself up like this! Alexander never even considered that it might be better not to romanticize or celebrate her “sniffing smack”. Also, lyrics such as “Her look is bizarre” suggest that Alexander perceived Mary as the closest thing in his life to a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, living “the most decadent way of life” that Alex was either too shy or too introvert or maybe even too smart to try for himself.
Feminist Frequency – Manic Pixie Dream Girl Episode
Watching the new film-trailer for Alexander’s last and third feature movie The Thread, I noticed a scene that seems relevant here in the context of Alexander discussing his friend’s drug abuse in a song:
Alexander’s feature movie The Thread is autobiographic in the way Jodorowsky’s latest two movies were biopics, using surreal elements to exaggerate or caricature real people and events. The main character of The Thread is a teeanged boy called Lefteris (or after the Greek word for liberty) a character based on Alexander himself and his experiences growing up in 1990s Athens with a mother suffering from a chronic depression. In the above still image from the trailer, the character that is basically Alexander himself is holding up what is clearly a syringe. Not having seen the movie myself and not knowing what happens next, I have to wonder about this particular still image in the context of Alexander writing a song about Mary Tsoni “sniffing smack”. Does this scene from the trailer suggest that Alexander himself was doing hard drugs as a teenager in Athens? Is it even possible that Alexander either had access to smack, was shooting up smack, or that he might have even introduced Mary to smack only to write a song about it later? Maybe someone who has seen the whole movie can post a spoiler for me? Because that particular scene from the trailer does become kinda eerie in retrospect and in light of recent events. So please do let me know what it is that I am looking at here.
I began to notice a pattern here. Alexander seemed to be drawn to girls who are in one way or another fucked up: the 17 year old Kurt Cobain friend, Mary “sniffing smack”, the other unnamed broken or damaged girls who populate the songs on his debut album 50 Gawddamned Songs, women he has explained on Facebook were real people he knew in Athens at the time. These are the girls we would nowadays refer to as Suicide Girls. Alexander also appeared to be obsessed with the decadent stereotype of the emotionally unstable drug-abusing depressed female artist who openly and carelessly flirts with death and suicide yet somehow still manages to make awesome heartfelt intense music. Alexander never seemed to question just where his obsession for this particular stereotype came from (hint: predatory animals in nature usually target the sick and the infirm) but seemed to accept it as a given that Manic Pixie Dream Girls were fucked up, flirting with death and that it was actually kinda cool and hot that they were.
I realized that Alexander was obsessed with this trope of the fucked up female just from going through his film lists, which he posts to Facebook regularly. For example, I eventually wrote but didn’t publish (just because I didn’t have the time to format the very long review in HTML) an analysis of every single movie that Alexander listed in his top 100 of female leads posted to his sister Constantina’s blog Hit & Run. My close reading of this list revealed that almost every other female lead Alexander had included in his top 100 was an interpretation of an unstable or crazy female who was nevertheless a nympho or had some other troubled relationship to sex. In my analysis of Alexander’s very overtly sexualized obsession with this trope, I had linked to the following article explaining just how destructive this trope of the so-called “Sexy Tragic Muse” really is in perpetrating the most sexist stereotypes about mentally ill women:
“The Sexy Tragic Muse can be found in music, film, literature and pretty much every other form of media. She’s not dissimilar from the Manic Pixie Dream Girl – in fact, I would argue that there is some crossover between the two tropes – but she is also very much her own distinct type. She is usually young, and nearly always white. She’s often portrayed as being hyper-sexual – she’s the type that 30 Rock’s Jack Donaghy was referring to when he said “Emotionally unstable women are fantastic in the sack.” She’s damaged, often as a result of sexual assault or other abuse by men. Her life carries with it some kind of Deep Lesson, usually a lesson that a male protagonist needs to learn. “ … “The Sexy Tragic Muse fetishizes women’s pain by portraying debilitating mental health disorders filtered dreamily through the male gaze. The trope glamourizes addiction and illnesses like depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia – diseases that are distinctly unglamorous for those of us who live with them. The Sexy Tragic Muse is vulnerable, and her vulnerability is sexualized. *Her inability to properly care for herself or make decisions on her own behalf is presented as being part of her appeal.*” … And perhaps this is the most frustrating thing about the Sexy Tragic Muse – the fact that this character type seems to be a neat way of removing a woman’s agency without the film or book or song coming across as overtly misogynistic. She occupies the intersection of ableism and sexism, and her mental illness is portrayed in a way that makes it commendable, even necessary, for others to care for her. We feel gratitude to the men that step up and save her, because she obviously cannot save herself. We feel empathy for the men that break up with her, because we see that she is difficult and volatile. We never get to see things from her perspective; often it is implied that this would be impossible, because her perspective is too confused and fractured. … It is so demoralizing to see so many narratives that treat mentally ill women as literal objects – objects that mostly exist only to fulfill men’s needs. Our pain and distress are not theirs to commodify, repackage in dreamy soft-focus, then serve up as some kind of panacea for whatever ails them. … We deserve the right to autonomy over our lives. We deserve to exist as whole people, people who might struggle, yes, but whose worth doesn’t depend on how those struggles might benefit others. We deserve the right to exist as sexual beings without having our illnesses sexualized by those who don’t experience them. We deserve the right to exist, full stop, no extra qualifiers needed.
The best example I can think of a stereotypical Sexy Tragic Muse trope in an American movie is the Tourettic female lead in Niagara, Niagara (1997). “Sex helps, for some reason, sex helps.”, she insists, but sex actually doesn’t help because in the end she still dies a violent death, ultimately for the betterment of the male lead who is seemingly better off without her.
Another example of a Sexy Tragic Muse is the female lead in the American movie Mozart and the Whale (2005), albeit with a happier more mainstream American ending of all the crazies united under one roof, away from mainstream America that wants to warehouse them:
Male Dutch film-makers are guilty of perpetrating the Sexy Tragic Muse trope too, for example in Paul Verhoeven’s film Turks Fruit where the character of Olga is revealed to have terminal brain-cancer which serves to both explain her crazy reckless over-sexed behaviour while at the same time suggesting – in true Protestant Dutch fashion – that she is punished with death for being such a wayward oversexed female. No one cares about a crazy girl being sexually exploited and certainly no one cares about a crazy girl dying for/because of having sex. Especially in a Protestant society that condemns but is still immensely fascinated with crazy girls and especially crazy girls that have lots of crazy sex. Worst of all are the movies where her death is depicted as some kind of sexual ersatz-catharsis.
I also suspect that the Sexy Tragic Muse is basically a de-racialized whiteman’s variation on the Tragic Mulatto film-trope, or maybe the Tragic Mulatto is just a racialized version of the same trope. The racist notion of bad blood, or the idea that someone has inherited racially tained blood and has hence inherited their bad or unrully character because of a black ancestor, is replaced here with the idea of someone having bad genes and being inherently predisposed to be crazy and over-sexed. Inevitably the character predisposed to be over-sexed is female. On the other hand, men themselves being oversexed is blamed on their “nature” which in the case of men is presented as something other than genetics or “bad blood”.
As for the Sexy Tragic Muse being, quote, “damaged, often as a result of sexual assault or other abuse by men”, in one of his Facebook posts Alexander suggested he had shot a music video of Mary that to me rather sounds more like the descripton of a porn film than a music video (not having seen the music video in question I cannot be sure of course):
Λίγες μέρες μετά γυρίσαμε και ενα βίντεοκλιπ στο οποίο δεν ακουγόταν όμως η μουσική (χαχα) άλλα βλέπαμε τη Μαίρη να την χαϊδεύουν ενα μάτσο γυμνά αγόρια (οι φίλοι μας).
So let’s put all the pieces of the puzzle together now: Mary Tsoni was in a band with Alexander, a man who had already lost a friend to suicide and who apparently did nothing to steer his new female friend away from self-destructive behaviour despite being aware of her drug abuse. Many of the Mary and the Boy songs have explicitly dark themes – I don’t obviously don’t know who wrote what but I suspect a lot of it was Alex urging Mary to write such lyrics or writing them himself and making her sing them. This suggests that Alexander was encouraging his self-destructive drug-addicted friend to explore dark themes that might trigger anxiety and phobias in a drug user, effectively pushing her further into the abyss of self-destruction. I don’t have a problem with women singing about suicide or other dark themes, since I firmly believe as a radical feminist that the destructive sexist patriarchy is meant to drive women crazy and eventually suicidal – I myself have a song about suicide on my last album – but I do have a problem with a man like Alex, who had presumably already pushed a suicidal friend over the edge by “jokingly” comparing her to Kurt Cobain, now appearing to, well, go looking for more of the same in his artistic and personal relationship to Mary Tsoni. I am sure Alex will say he was only being joking when he compared Mary Tsoni to Nico from the Velvet Underground on his Facebook wall, referring to her as “μια Νίκο του Κεραμεικού“. Alexander did not use his Kurt Cobain’s friend’s suicide as an opportunity to become a better more grounded person himself but appeared to merely want to replace the one self-destructive friend with a new one, while appearing to push the new friend to be even more self-destructive than the previous one. You could say that in the first instance with the Kurt Cobain friend, Alex was just a teenager himself and simply didn’t know how to deal with a suicidal friend at such a young age. You could say that impressionable young Alex was himself a victim of American cultural imperialism glamourizing the idea of a rocknroll suicide through mindless drug abuse and that having been completely brainwashed by the mainstream cultural industries promoting the self-destructive American rocknroll lifestyle, young Alexander simply did not know better than that rocknroll people were drugged up and fucked up on their way down into the abyss. Granted, that Alexander was himself young and impressionable the first time a close friend died on him is a somewhat valid excuse. But it becomes an unacceptable excuse when the same fucking thing happens again with another female friend that Alex appears to have pushed further and further into dark song themes rather than away from the kinds of themes that he knew would trigger self-harm with his friend entering a vicious circle where her drug-addiction is making her feel worse, which makes her phobias worse, which makes her to take more drugs to cope with her anxiety thus creating a downward spiral.
I am sure that Alex will deny everything I just theorized about and would instead pull a “James Deen” and insist that it was Mary Tsoni herself who begged him to take things further, even further than he himself wanted to. I am sure Alex will protest that Mary was the one who wanted to get into the dark themes that were brought up in Mary and the Boy songs and that he merely provided her with musical backup on the piano. You will recall that this was James Deen’s favourite excuse about S&M too. When James Deen was on the verge of being exposed as a serial abuse, his defense was to insist that female dominatrixes were more sadistic than he himself ever was (a totally invalid argument that has been completely debunked by us radical feminists – the sadistic domina is merely another patriarchal stereotype because men themselves like to fantasize about women having violent revenge on men, thus creating a female caricature in their own self-image). We have to remember here that under the patriarchy men always blame women for what men do to women. Men make movies where they tell women that they are sexy when they are a bit crazy. But when things get out of hand and someone actually dies, men blame women for being too crazy and hurting themselves. Men never stop to have a look at themselves and blame themselves for having brought up the worst in women by subjecting them to endless patriarchal brainwashing from the moment they were born. As a radical feminist myself I firmly believe it is impossible for women to be truly together and self-actualized individuals under a patriarchal hegemony that continuously reminds women they are less than, weaker than, dumber than, worth less than yet almost wholy dependent on men for their financial well-being and physical survivial. Any person growing up in such a toxic an environment designed to keep them down & remind them of their powerlessness in every imaginable way would go crazy eventually. If women are crazy it is because the sexist patriarchy is crazy making. You cannot expect anyone to be sane when they’ve been told every day of their lives that they are nothing more than disposable trash to the ones who really run this system, which under the patriarchy is men.
So we have to ask, what IF ANYTHING did Alexander ever do to prevent his old band mate from self-destructing on drugs? Did he ever check in on her to see how she was doing after they had already broken up the band? Alexander’s own comments on Facebook suggest otherwise:
Το υλικό του Praying for your Sins αποτυπώνει την καλύτερη περίοδο του συγκροτήματος.Τότε που ξυπνούσαμε και κοιμόμασταν παρέα.
Βλέπαμε ταινίες,ακούγαμε μουσικές και κρατούσαμε σημειώσεις με στίχους και φράσεις.
Εξελισσόμασταν μαζί σε κάτι που μας ήταν καινούργιο. Με το που ολοκληρώσαμε τις ηχογραφήσεις λίγο μετά τελείωσε και η συγκατοίκηση.
Απο εκεί και μετά το συγκρότημα συνεχίστηκε για άλλα 4 χρόνια όμως η όποια πρόοδος και εξέλιξη θα γίνοτανε πια στον καθένα ξεχώριστα και ποτέ μαζί.
I really have a hard time seeing someone dying at 30 as an εξέλιξη, much less as πρόοδος. So I wonder, did Alexander, having already had a self-destructive friend die on him once due to suicide, did he notice things were wrong with Mary, and did he ignore what he was seeing? Did he ever encourage his old band-mate to go into rehab? (Yes, I can hear you Athenian hipsters laugh at this question, and it’s exactly because you people laugh at someone asking this that she’s dead.) Did he offer to help her get her life back on track, either emotionally or financially? According to public documents in my possession the estimated total cost of Alexander’s film The Thread was about a quarter million euros to be receive from various public funding bodies in Greece. Did Alexander ever consider using a small portion of that money to get his old band-member into a program or to get her to see a shrink about her depression, anxiety and phobias? Alex must’ve heard the rumours of Mary being depressed, he must’ve read the stories online about Mary literally passing out in the streets of Athens, he must´ve read the live music review which described Mary passing out after a Joalz concert. Had Alex ever seen her like that himself? Did he look away? Did he walk away? Did he ever offer a shoulder, a willing ear to his depressed former band-member? Did Alex ever reach out? Did he ever care to look at what he had left behind after he had broken up Mary and the Boy?
As a radical feminist I know that men use women, use them up and suck them dry, and then discard them when they are done and never look back at the human ruins they’ve left behind. And when that discarded woman kills herself, deliberately or accidentally as appeared to be the case here (though we must ask, why didn’t the damn paramedics immediately respond to her cries for help? Because that’s Greece during the GermanoDutch financial bankster DICKtatorship where ambulances only show up after you’re already dead), men are always quick to mansplain the death, which was really death-by-patriarchy, in a way that absolves them of any responsibility for what happened, especially if it was due to something they knew about and could’ve prevented but didn’t. Men, with immensely more wealth and power than women, nevetheless pretend they can do nothing for the women closest to them to shield them from the patriarchy eating away at a woman’s dignity and sense of self every day. The fact is not that they can’t but that they won’t. Men are happy with the way things are, having all these women at their disposal to use and discard with little to no consequences for themseves.
It’s very hard for me to write this entry because eventhough I had never met Mary and never could listen to Mary and the Boy for long because of how much I despise Alex and all he stands for, I respected Mary as a singer and as a performer. She was surely one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen with a very Greek severity that was completely lost when Lanthimos casted her as the little sister in Dogtooth (but then again the cinema is just another patriarchal vehicle in Greece, where men have to use movies to castrate women’s true beauty, either infantilizing them or otherwise compromising them cinematically). Mary was even once compared to Diamanda Galas in the way she sang:
Και φυσικά το Bobby Peru ένα κομμάτι που μιλάει για το σεξ με έναν περίεργο κυνισμό, χωρίς όμως να ξεφεύγει από τα κλισέ που βαραίνουν τέτοιους είδους τραγούδια, αλλά με τη Mary να δίνει ρεσιτάλ ερμηνείας και να θυμίζει κάτι από Diamanda Galás δημιουργώντας την εντύπωση πως τα ελληνικά σύνορα απλά περιορίζουν μια performer του δικού της βεληνεκούς. (source)
Having been bestowed that unworthy comparison myself I will now admit I sometimes wondered what our voices would sound like together since we had both been compared to Diamanda as “screamo” singers. I had read that Mary was a blues fan and into BB King like I am, and having heard some of her more blues-oriented music with her new band Joolz, I imagined us picking a blues song to cover together with me playing the guitar and singing backing vocals. That simple dream of mine has been killed along with Mary, and it was killed by sexist patriarchy encouraging women to think that being disturbed, being crazy, abusing drugs to dull the pain and being suidical is how you get noticed by men as a Tragic Sexy Muse or as a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, categories and stereotypes invented and propagandized by men, when actually all of this is how you get fucked over by the patriarchy which awards and finances men like Alexander Voulgaris for doing the very things it routinely demonizes, condemns, rejects and even criminalizes women over. I am sad that Mary is dead but on the other hand I am glad she no longer has to experience this fucked up reality we live in where women are hated and actively suppressed just for being women. Being a woman under the patriarchy hurts, and for some women trying to maintain your sanity under a hegemony that actively hates you is crazy-making and oftentimes fatal.
Promo picture of actresses Geraldine Chaplin en Ana Torrent from the 1976 Spanish anti-fascistheritage filmCría Cuervos by Carlos Saura: “The film is an allegorical drama about an eight-year-old girl dealing with loss. (…) Ana takes refuge in the basement, where she keeps her ‘lethal’ powder, and where she is watched by an apparition of herself from twenty years in the future. The adult Ana, looking exactly as her mother, recounts her infancy: ‘I don’t believe in childhood paradise, or in innocence, or the natural goodness of children. I remember my childhood as a long period of time, interminable, sad, full of fear, fear of the unknown’. (…) Ana’s mother’s painful death from cancer; her father’s presumed murder, her guinea pig’s death and her own imagined suicide weigh on the girl’s mind. Ana even offers her grandmother, ill and using a wheelchair, the opportunity of dying and ridding herself from loneliness by providing her a spoonful of her poison. The old woman turns down Ana’s offer as the old woman realizes that the powder is simply baking soda.” (Listen man, μόνο στο τρελομυαλο σου γίνεται η πρέζα σόδα. Στο τρελομυαλο το δικό σου και άλλων κινηματογραφιστών. Μόνο αυτοί που φταίνε και το ξέρουν είναι γεμάτοι τύψεις.)
In a collection of original stories, essays, artwork, and photography, Nan Goldin, Eileen Myles, bell hooks, and other cutting-edge artists explore their use of art to survive madness, abuse, incest, depression, and the impulse toward self-destruction manifest in eating disorders, cutting, addiction, and contemplation of suicide. The book confronts the brutality many women and girls encounter in the world around them, and bravely takes as its subject the often misunderstood violence they at times inflict upon themselves.
The diverse array of contributors here—novelists, poets, cartoonists, dancers, photographers, playwrights, burlesque performers—traverse the pains and passions that can both motivate and destroy women artists and mark a path for survival. Together they show that creative women are not destined to the fate of lost visionaries such as Woolf, Sexton, Arbus, and Plath. Live Through This is a fearless exploration of women’s silent rage, the power that can come from internal struggle, and the possibility of transforming this burning force into fierce and enlightened work.
Live Through This Youtube video interviews with authors who contributed to the book:
“Οι Mary and the Boy ήταν ένα συγκρότημα φτιαγμένο για να καεί. Αυτό που σκέφτομαι τώρα είναι ότι η πρώτη περίοδος με το demo ήταν η μοναδική καλή φάση μας, μέναμε μαζί, ήμασταν φίλοι. Μετά απ’ αυτό μπορεί να γίναμε καλύτεροι, ο καθένας μόνος του σε αυτό που κάνει συγκεκριμένα, αλλά δεν ήταν πια το ίδιο. Υπήρχε τόσο έντονη αντίδραση για μας απ’ τον κόσμο -θετική ή αρνητική- και η Mary κι εγώ είμαστε άτομα που δεν αντέχουμε την αποδοχή ή την απόρριψη. Μας βγήκε πολύ έντονη βία απέναντι σε όλους, νομίζω ότι θέλαμε να τρομάξουμε τον κόσμο, και αυτούς που τους άρεσε και αυτούς που δεν τους άρεσε. Ήταν μεγάλο κεφάλαιο για μένα, αλλά ίσως έπρεπε να είχε τελειώσει και πιο νωρίς”.
I want to highlight the following heartfelt comment posted underneath the above article:
Sotiris Kremos • μία μέρα πριν Η Μαίρη Τσώνη δεν ζει πιά. Θυμώνω καθημερινά με όλους αυτούς τους επώνυμους, που από την ώρα που ανακοινώθηκε ο θάνατός της, βρήκαν τον τρόπο να έρθουν οι μούρες τους στη δημοσιότητα προβαίνοντας σε δηλώσεις γι αυτήν.
Ότι τάχα την αγαπούσαν, το πόσο ταλαντούχα ήτανε και διάφορα άλλα.
Το μόνο που θέλω να γράψω εδώ, είναι ότι όλι αυτοί, κάποτε ίσως να γνώρισαν το παιδί αυτό και το κάποτε ήτανε όταν έπαιξε στον Κυνόδοντα.
Ιδέα δεν είχαν το τι πέρναγε και το πως ζούσε. Και φυσικά καμία διάθεση δεν είχε κανείς τους να την βοηθήσει σε ότι και αν πέρναγε, σε έναν χώρο τόσο σκληρό, που όσο ταλέντο και αν έχεις μπορεί και να βρεθείς εκτός, γιατί δεν ανήκεις σε κάποια κλίκα.
Παρακαλώ λοιπόν, όλους αυτούς που συνεχίζουν και καπηλεύονται τον θανατό της, όποιοι και εάν είναι, είτε ηθιοποιοί, είτε έντυπα, είτε ηλεκτρονικές σελίδες, είτε κριτικοί κινηματογράφου, να την παρατήσουν ήσυχοι και να βγάλουν τον σκασμό.
Λυπάμαι γιατί κανείς από όλους αυτούς που μέρες τώρα δηλώνουν και γράφουν γι αυτήν, δεν την είχε δει ούτε της είχε μιλήσει τα τελευταία 7 χρόνια. Να ναι ελαφρύ το χώμα που σε σκεπάζει.
Alex also posted this, claiming it was “με διαφορά η πιο αστεία στιγμή στην ιστορία του συγκροτήματος.χαχα.”… did you know of all people vegan animal rights fanatic Moby was a Mary and the Boy fan?! I always wondered whether Moby’s grand animal rights propaganda plan to make vegan porn movies in association with PETA was the direct result of listening to Mary and the Boy ->
αλεξανδρος βουλγαρης
με διαφορά η πιο αστεία στιγμή στην ιστορία του συγκροτήματος.χαχα.
Project Keep Staring 