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Bob Flanagan

The Pain Journal

Internationally famous as "that guy who nails his dick to a board," Los Angeles writer and artist Bob Flanagan created performances with Sheree Rose that shocked and inspired audiences from Seattle to Boston to Berlin. Combining text, video, and live performance Flanagan created a highly personal but universal exploration of childhood, sex, illness and mortality. A documentary film about his life, Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist , made with Sheree Rose and Kirby Dick, won the Sundance Special Jury Prize in 1997.

The Pain Journal , Flanagan's last finished work, is an extraordinary chronicle of the final year of his life before his death of cystic fibrosis at the age of forty-three. Whereas Flanagan celebrated the erotics of pain in his early work The Fuck Journal (Hanuman Press: 1994), The Pain Journal is a close-up, daily view of his ragged coexistence with the unavoidable pain of disease.

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"Love is a mighty force. It doesn't respect boundaries or rules. His 'sickness' showed while mine was hidden. It's through his heart-breaking humanness along with his breathtaking honesty that the rest of us can understand this super-ordinary man."

— Sheree Rose

"10/11/95 It's oh so late and the bad news is I fell asleep without writing after taking an Oxazipan cause I was so anxious trying to deal with the new drug system, Jenny being a shit to Sheree on the phone, which pisses me off, but Sheree handles it well, the way she handles everything well these days, including me (I just told her she's a highly evolved person, and that I love her), Ed pisses me off on the phone, calling me a control freak and spouting his stupid and cliché observations on S&M that the bottom controls the top, blah blah blah, more fuel for my headache which, by the way, at 3:30 in the fucking morning right now, is the reason I'm even writing this: I come to bed at 11:30, I do a breathing treatment, I set up the new bicrap, and I fall asleep like a good boy–but son of a bitch I wake up at 1:30 with not just a headache, but this excruciating pounding hammers and nails inside my skull; I rip the fucking bicrap jock strap off my face; I'm screaming; I'm crying; I wake Sheree up; she's scared to death; "Take Percocet, take Percocet"; "No!" and then the goddamn pump is beeping, an occlusion, something wrong with the line; I scream to Sheree to get me a needle and stuff to clear the line; does this have anything to do with the awful stuff going on upstairs?"