Why it’s called

Purple Noon I’ll never know, the original title in French is Full Sun, which makes a little more sense; the main thing about this movie is it stars Alain Delon, who I’m vaguely familiar with, but I can’t remember what I’ve seen him in. Oh yes — and Patricia Highsmith’s comment on the film — it was the first adaptation of her novel The Talented Mr. Ripley, and she called the suggestion at the end that Ripley would be brought to justice a betrayal. It is. Highsmith wrote several novels about Ripley. I’ve read most all of them; she had the uncanny knack of getting inside a twisted brain. Her killers are most often cultured fellows, and certainly sympathetic — they just have one ‘quirk’. Many of her novels though — not the Ripley ones — present really interesting moral dilemmas. In one of her novels a young woman falls for a Peeping Tom. The Peeping Tom is kind of a nice shy guy; she is more predatory than he, so she invites him in. In another one of her novels a man sets out to kill his wife, but is not able to carry it out, then she dies. Is he somehow then guilty of murder? Purple Noon has been called sun-drenched, and indeed it is. I am trying desperately to remain calm, but I’m supposed to be going to Montreal on Saturday, and yet again the whole trip is fraught with anxiety. Will it live up to expectations? Will life begin there again? Will I be sun-drenched, or just desperately lonely for life the way it once was? My therapist says I have to come to terms with loss; I’m certainly not very good at it. My best friend tonight reminded me that it is going to happen to all of us — death — because her ex-husband just died of brain cancer. Then she told me that she would be there to take care of me when I passed away. I’m not even sure I believe her — not because she’s a treacherous person but because she has also told me before that she is categorically not good at that. But with her ex-husband, she was. She just sat downstairs and drank -- with the knowledge that he was dying upstairs -- helped him as much as she could, and did the most beautiful thing you can imagine. For she said to him “Are you afraid of death?” And he said “No. I’m just afraid of leaving this house.” So he never did — that is, he died there. She did take care of him, so perhaps she will take care of me. At any rate it’s the thought that counts. Dear me what brought that on; well I’m somewhat ill — nothing serious it appears — but I never like to get ill before travel, and then there is my own mortality which keeps staring me in the face. I mean when am I actually going to start living again? Enough of that. So, Alain Delon plays a luscious Mr. Ripley, less guilt-ridden and certainly less gay then Matt Damon. And far far prettier. He’s quite unbearable to look at him; he is perhaps the most beautiful man I have ever seen, and that says a lot (or does it because I call a lot of men beautiful.) There is the blue of his eyes, which matches the sea, and those cheekbones, and the firm line of his jaw, the casual straight hair, his lean body and yes the bulge in his bathing suit (I think they didn’t even notice of such things in the 60s. Elvis’ bulge is quite out of this world in some of his movies — did no one notice?). The thing about Alain Delon is that he reminds me of Tim Guest. I don’t know if I have ever told you the story of Tim Guest. He was another one who was too beautiful for words. He was too beautiful for me; I never had sex with him, I wouldn’t have known where to start. I had heard of him, he was famously the lover of Felix Partz — part of General Idea. I remember looking at photos of Felix Partz and wondering how Tim could have been in love with him; but back then I had no idea how strange love can be. I moved into 67 Homewood and Tim lived there. We hung out quite a bit; I had never met someone quite as brilliant and quite as beautiful. It was odd because everything he said was interesting and complex and somewhat sarcastic in a gay sort of way, and at the same time he was so drop dead gorgeous that you wanted to just  drop to your knees and worship him. The only thing I remember — besides the long list of beautiful young men he dragged to his room — were his comments on them: “I like to watch the very very clean boys get dirty” and then at one point: “Don’t you love it when your screwing them and they look surprised?” (I had experienced the first thing but not the second.) He was an art curator, and later he curated performance art for Rhubarb! (at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre — the theatre that I used to run). This is so Tim Guest: he said  -- “I have this fabulous piece — it’s a homeless guy (I think he would have called him a ‘rubby’ back then) and he takes a bath in front of the audience! That’s the whole piece!” This was Tim’s sense of humour to a tee. The piece was performed at Tarragon Theatre, and I remember the bigwigs there -- Urjo Kareda and Mallory Gilbert -- were not amused. I liked it. I felt morally compromised watching it; but I thought, that’s the point, isn’t it? After all, the guy was getting paid, and he got a bath, and he seemed to have a good time. (Nowadays you would probably be run out of town for it for programming this.) Then Tim moved to New York, and found another lover and I was so happy for him — that seemed like the perfect ending. And then suddenly I heard that he had mouth cancer, and had died -- just like that. This devastated me. I didn’t want to think of him as anything but the most beautiful boy in the world. Sorry this blog has been so much about cancer. It’s strange the way COVID-19 makes me, at least, think less about COVID-19 than just dying in general. Because it is a kind of death. All the crime going on everywhere, and the ODing, and just the look on people’s faces - or just the faces you can’t see  because of those damned masks, or the fear of each other. That’s it. We are all of afraid of each other in a way we weren’t before, ever, and that’s a kind of death in life. Sorry. Best not to think about all this, I guess.

Ah! Mamma Roma

is devastating. Most artists only dream of being protested by fascists — Pasolini was. (What would the equivalent be today: getting bashed by QAnon on social media?). Pasolini was first and foremost an antifascist. His Christ, in The Gospel According to St. Matthew, is a revolutionary, Marxist Christ, trashing the merchants in the public square. And in Mamma Roma it is the city of Rome that stands for fascism — the oppression of the poor: those ugly, naked, monolithic apartment buildings looming in the distance — below them the fragments of ruins — grotesque, phallic, crumbling -- like Pasolini imagines fascism to be. But Pasolini found his ‘proletariat’ in the faces of the boys — they belonged to him — the boys of Rome, the young suburban ne’er do wells -- their grubby mischievous faces — playing soccer, loitering, stealing stuff, plotting to lay the neighborhood tramp. Pasolini loved them in more than in just a political way; although his adoration might be deemed economic, as it was those boys that he paid to have sex with him every night. And one of those boys (Giuseppe Pelosi) killed him (although his friend Laura Betti insisted that it was the fascists who really did it.). Let’s face it — for a lot of people Pasolini represents the apotheosis of evil. In private, with his boys, he was the ‘king of shit’ —he wanted them to do their ‘business’ on him; they were forever his tasty, nasty brethren. Pasolini refers to his sexual predilection at the end of Mamma Roma, when Ettore, the son of prostitute Anna Magnani, is strapped to his bed in jail — the bed where he dies — and his fellow inmates are joking about the 7th ring of Hell which apparently (sorry, I’ve never read Dante) is shit. How did Pasolini’s pickups feel about being asked to take a dump on him? I’m sure it mattered not at all to them really, he was just an old guy who gave them money to do gross things. But the fact that Pasolini was an admitted human toilet seems to have hurt his literary reputation somewhat. I remember when I first found out about all this from Peter Day. Peter was a gay man — a Brit, very witty, very smart, kind of dashing too. He had a lovely young boyfriend (who I still know). Peter committed suicide a couple of years after I met him; he was on the board of my theatre company, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre. I remember walking up to him in Glad Day Bookshop about 40 years ago (the gay bookstore in Toronto) and telling him that I had written a play about Pasolini. Peter said, blithely, savouring every word: ‘You know what Pasolini was into, don’t you?” “No,” I said innocently — for I was somewhat innocent back then — “Shit. He liked boys to shit on him.” I didn’t know quite what to say. I was disappointed, partially because I hadn’t included this in my play, and also frankly because it took Pasolini down one notch from the very top of the pedestal where I had so carefully placed him. (But I was also a bit frightened by how much Peter enjoyed making me feel like an ignorant prude.) Certainly Pasolini is my ideal. A perfect artist, and shockingly amoral in real life. On the streets — he was a scatalogical outlaw, on the screen, a puritan aesthete. All that mattered to him was beauty. In Mamma Roma Pasolini's ex-lover Franco Citti plays Magnani’s ruthless ex-pimp, and an oddly gorgeous boy with the face of a 10 year old — a tiny pug nose and pouting mouth — Ettore Garofolo (a second glance at Ettore Garofolo makes you feel like a pederast ) is Magnani’s gawky adolescent son. (Garofolo appeared only in two movies after this.)  Pasolini loved each of these young men ostentatiously, the camera worships their faces, their very ordinary sex appeal, their imperfect masculine charm. Then there is Magnani, simply a force of nature. In her first scenes she is dragging pigs to a wedding — presumably to make fun of the hick girl her pimp Citti is marrying. In every scene she laughs or cries or screams or dances — or all four — she’s eternally shaking her voluptuous body — not just with abandon, it’s a commitment to animality that is all too frighteningly human. She’s terrifyingly real; and gives quite a new definition to words like femininity and ‘woman.’ The bond she has with her son is primal, her friend asks if she would die for him. She says ‘like Christ on the cross.’ And though she quits hooking — in order to ‘bring Ettore up right’ — there is absolutely no hope for her, or him. The forces of capitalism are against them. Rome will eat her son — the way Magnani would like to, obviously. She says ‘look at him, isn’t he a prince?” (If only it was possible for any of us to love anybody, without killing them just a little.) She watches him working in the restaurant, and Pasolini captures the aching essence of a young buck at work, an anter-less stag strutting about boldly on his skinny legs, grinning sheepishly at his mother and hauling food from table to table, as in love with her as she is with him. Mamma Roma’s dream of respectability is in vain; the pimp Citti reveals to Ettore that his mother is a whore. Ettore then steals a dying man’s radio in a hospital (in anger), the next thing you know he’s in the seventh circle of Hell, strapped to his bed in prison. “I’ll be good” he pleads, but it’s too late, the system has already chewed him up and spit him out. I wrote a play once called Why We Tortured Him for Theatre Aquarius. Susan Clements --a fascist, law and order freak -- trashed it in The Hamilton Spectator, without either reading it or seeing it. The play was cancelled by Theatre Aquarius  It was a play about the relationship between poverty and crime. It’s not something you’re supposed to talk about. Pasolini does. But you will not find this type of truth in Niagara Falls, stitched on a pillow. You might find it one night in Rome, when you’re being screwed against an ancient ruin. If you're like me, you will gaze up at the stars, and suddenly realize that ruin is you.

Bonjour Tristesse is

a beautiful movie. After viewing it I went directly to Wikipedia. I was confirmed; the American critics hated it — the film resembles none of the Hollywood slop that was being dished up in 1958. Everyone associated with the film must have felt privileged to work on it, because it’s about something important. It deals with human evil in a matter of fact way; Jean Seberg and David Niven drive Deborah Kerr to suicide — both Seberg and Niven are charming, beautiful and simultaneously odious people — and they get away with it. The only American film comparable to this is Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanours, in which the anti-hero gets off scott free after committing murder. Jean Seberg’s character and Martin Landau’s character (in Allen’s film), both experience remorse, but also relief that they can never be implicated. This is in contrast to the scores of Hollywood films in which good is rewarded and evil punished. That is the way Oscar Wilde defined fiction. It is something that hardly ever happens in real life — i.e. truly evil people like Donald Trump more often end up being worshiped like Gods. Stanley Kauffman (an idiotic American critic famous for an article in which he castigated Williams, Albee, and Inge for undermining American culture with their ‘homosexual influence’) found  Bonjour Tristesse ‘tedious.’ Seberg was also ripped to shreds by critics, the British Film Institute accused her of merely 'speaking' her lines rather than acting them (it's called naturalism). There nothing to justify the  general hatred of Jean Seberg, or her harassment by the FBI (they may ultimately have been responsible for her death). The FBI harassed her because she supported civil rights and and made contributions to the Black Panthers. The FBI's method of destroying Seberg’s life is worth noting; they spread rumours that her child (fathered by her husband Romain Gary) was actually her child by a member of the Black Panthers. She was characterised as not only a lefty but a whore; a double-misogynist whammy. The child in question subsequently died, and Seberg insisted on an open coffin so that the press could see that her child was not black. All this foreshadows social media;  we destroy people today the way Vladmir Putin and J. Edgar Hoover did&do, that is -- not by shooting them with guns -- but by spreading lies about them on social media. Which brings us back to evil. I will make the argument here that all great artists are bad people — or at least deeply flawed. It is necessary for artists to know evil intimately in some way. This runs counter to the latest trend — that artists must be nice, good, moral people — i.e. not Woody Allen or Roman Polanski. Alfred Hitchcock and Otto Preminger (he directed Bonjour Tristesse) were also infamous — not for molesting children — but abusing actors; Hitchcock tortured Tippi Hedren by demanding she be locked in a room with live birds (for The Birds) and Preminger fired Tom Tryon on the set of The Cardinal -- in front of the whole cast -- and later on told him denied it ('Didn't you know I was just joking?’) I have said before that I think we must not see the evil artists do in their lives as a reflection on their work as -- if we did --  there would be no  art anymore. But I am going a step further by stating that a familiarity with evil is necessary for any great artist. Yes, that means artists are necessarily evil. I don't know if artists have to be 'evil incarnate,' but they have to have done bad things, and what is particularly important is that they must at the very least be fully conscious of — or at best plagued by guilt over -- their misdeeds. The does not necessarily redeem them as human beings. If you do something awful it only matters in a court of law if you are sorry, in real life one might find your apology irritating, frustrating or even a nightmare to listen to. I'll use myself as an example. I’m very ashamed of being a homosexual. That’s why I go on and on about how wonderful homosexuality is; it’s why the Black Panthers said that black people were better than white people, it’s why Lytton Strachey went on about ‘higher sodomy’ (he preached that homosexuality was superior to heterosexuality). I will always think it’s wrong to love a man, or to suck his you-know-what. I was born in 1952, for Chrissakes. Yes I go on and on about gay liberation and how wonderful gay sex is, but that is just overcompensation for my self-hatred. I have not done too many bad things (at least as far as I know), but what I have is a heightened sense of guilt, so that I am constantly accusing myself of wrongdoing, and I feel bad about everything in kind of a Lutheran manner (Lutheranism is the most poisonous religion of all --  original sin that can never be wiped away.) The reason a familiarity with evil is important for artists is that evil is the only thing that it’s important to write about — but the only reason an artist will write about it, is if he or she is appalled by their own evil deeds, which leads them to detest all human hypocrisy, and ergo, the artist tries to destroy hypocrisy by exposing it. (Hypocrisy is rampant nowadays; everyone thinks they are a good person, it’s what’s destroying the world.) Jean Seberg is a pretty cheery young French girl — but she ain’t no Gidget — she is perfectly willing to destroy someone’s life if she can’t get what she wants. This means she must welcome sadness into her life (i.e. 'bonjour tristesse!'). Perhaps what Francoise Sagan is saying in her novel — and Preminger in this film — is that being an adult means welcoming the sadness which comes with the loss of innocence. I still like to imagine though, that I am innocent, when I get naked with another man -- or kiss him -- but usually I am drunk -- so all is soon forgetten. Sad perhaps, that this is far too true for so many gay men; we are enslaved by our addiction to forgetting.

I don’t know what

 to say about House on Haunted Hill (1959)— even the title is a mess; it feels like it should be 'The House on Haunted Hill,' and anyway, what in heaven’s name is a 'haunted hill'? And it’s the house that’s haunted anyway, not the hill. Add to that the fact that the nutty director William Castle decided to feature as 'the house' — not an appropriately haunted looking old gothic mansion as in Hitchcock’s Psycho —instead a quite gorgeous looking building — The Ennis House — designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. (As was Wright’s wont, the house looks more like a postmodern version of a Mayan Temple than anything else, but that’s the way it goes.) The most alluring thing about this movie is the vat of acid in the basement. That is truly the only thing that struck even a small spark of the slightest fear, in me. The idea of being dropped in a vat of acid is pretty horrifying. But other than that the movie is just arch, and silly, and about as scary as your grandmother’s behind (I take that back, in certain cases that might be pretty scary). This all explains why camp film director John Waters loves William Castle. Keep in mind also, that Castle was fond of promotional gimmicks, the gimmick for this one was called ‘Emergo.' When a skeleton flies out of the vat of acid at the end of the movie, a skeleton was rigged up — in some theatres — to fly over the heads of the audience. I think at this point we need to differentiate between ‘startling’ and ‘terrifying.’ Terrifying things have a psychological nature. In other words, you are terrified because your imagination is caught up in a fantasy; you are imagining yourself in a situation that is particularly terrifying for you (we are all terrified by different things). For instance, I am not afraid of skeletons, nor am I afraid of the ineptly painted fake heads that keep appearing in this film — at one point in a woman’s suitcase. The head looks nothing like a human head, it looks like a rubber face trying desperately to be a decapitated head. This is the essence of camp as Susan Sontag describes it; trying magnificently and failing. This makes William Castle very special — I understand what a pathetic filmmaker he was, and how stupid his gimmicks were. Waters loves what this says about the human condition, the human ego, ambition, imagination etc. It also says something about art; that all art is a fake and a manipulation and that we shouldn’t trust it; all very important to hear. Unfortunately though, what Castle does ultimately, is what most of the popular horror filmmakers do today. Like them, he doesn’t have the talent or imagination to invent a terrifying fantasy, or to execute a film about it (like Hitchcock does in Psycho) so what they de instead is surprise us. Again, in Castle it’s charming. But unfortunately this is now the modus-operandi of horror films everywhere. Nowadays horror films are populated mainly with moments of silence followed by sudden loud noise— but this is startling, not frightening. Then there is the unexpected appearance of a blood-soaked 'something', a 'something' you know is fake, whatever it is, but when it first appears, yes, it startles you. Ergo, the charming camp ineptitude of William Castle has been turned into much more than a cottage industry — people are making millions off bad horror films that are greedily consumed by the young — and this is a problem. I am concerned about the young (and I speak of them with fondness, you may imagine that I am old —which I am — but not that I am jealous of the young— I am merely concerned about them). The young have been trained by the commercial film industry to go to horror films with the expectation of camp — except it isn’t camp they are seeing. They go to a horror film expecting to laugh at the ridiculousness of the special effects, period. Oh yes, they also wish to be startled, but not deeply frightened, and certainly not deeply terrified. No, that would be too much for them. But being deeply terrified by art is what art is all about. If we have forgotten that, we have forgotten what art is. Take for instance — Midsommar (2019) a fine Swedish film directed by Ansi Astar. The film was somewhat of a success, but I know for a fact that some young people were afraid to see it. I was ranting about how wonderful the film was one day, and some young woman said to me: “We went but we left because my friend got too scared.” Okay, fine. People don’t have to watch scary movies if they don’t want to — after all I avoid movies about torture (for that reason I have never been able to watch The Usual Suspects). What I find worrisome is that when we watch a movie or a play these days we want to maintain ‘control,' when art is all about losing control (remember Dionysus?). It’s about intoxication, hypnosis, unreason, and the loosening of boundaries that keep us ‘normal.’ We experience art because we know we all will get sick and die, and we need to experience these things at a safe distance — it’s part of good mental health — and also part of just being a person who actually lives in the world. If we don’t experience these things then we end up like the young of today (again, I am concerned, not chastising) many of whom would rather not have any sort of truly unpleasant experience, or ever lose control. Midsommar is particularly scary for young people because it features pretty teenagers who visit a lovely commune in the Swedish countryside one summer. It seems like it is going to be an adolescent fantasy of romance in the woods and fields. It soon proves to be quite something else. Gradually the visit goes sour -- there are drugs, public sex rituals and inevitably -- human sacrifice. I found the whole thing exhilarating — and yes, truly scary. We are losing our capacity to dream; this may also be why so many of us are happy being locked up in our homes. For to really dream, is to escape everything that is normal, expected, and deemed correct. I do hope someday we will begin to dream again.

The Light in

 the Piazza (1962) is an odd film; the premise is a bit difficult to handle. Yvette Mimieux has the mental age of a 10 year old girl because she was kicked by a horse as a child. She is, however, ravishingly beautiful. George Hamilton (actually quite good here, as he is speaks very little and most of it is in Italian) falls in love with her. Olivia de Havilland  (who died last year at the ripe old age of 104)  dreams of her daughter marrying, and encourages her to do so. At her wedding at the end, in a moment which is conspicuously but inappropriately comic — like much of this film — Yvette Mimieux bends down to pick up -- what appears to be a bit of popcorn -- off the ground, and eats it. De Havilland is worried — will her daughter be exposed as mentally deficient? But George Hamilton proves to either as mentally deficient as she is —  or just terribly in love with her — as he picks up a piece of popcorn off the ground and eats it too. De Havilland intones, quietly (to herself) — ‘I think I did the right thing.’ But did she? Earlier, when her husband objects to their mentally deficient daughter marrying, de Havilland says “She may not know long division, but she is woman.” This is perhaps the most disturbing sentence in the film. Why might not knowing long division be an integral part of ‘being a woman’? The suggestion seems to be that all you need is breasts, not a brain — or simply you only need to be as beautiful as Yvette Lemieux — which no one ever will be. I’m a hopeless romantic, so I couldn’t help getting wrapped up in Olivia de Havilland’s plans for her daughter. But when Rossano Brazzi says of George Hamilton — ‘he’s no scholar’ the implication seems to be since his son is dense as a post it’s alright for him to marry a mentally deficient girl. In other words, it’s fine for  stupid people to find other stupid people and marry them. You see what I mean?  One doesn’t quite know what to say; on the one hand the film seems to want to raise profound moral questions (does it matter if you don’t tell someone that the person they are marrying is — what we used to call — ‘retarded’?). On the other hand the movie is a kind of ode to love. And the message seems to be that love transcends intelligence. Well let me clear this up. Wouldn’t all this make sense if both members of the betrothed pair had an ‘intellectual disability’? Though I must say I am not fond of that particular politically correct euphemism. ‘Retarded’ is at least clear, you know what you’re talking about, and frankly ‘intellectual disability’ seems more to define someone who believes in QAnon, is against abortion, or believes that an aliens has have probed their anus — i.e., there are those who are quite intelligent and even entertaining, but when it comes to certain topics they have a couple of screws loose. Sometimes it has to do with trauma — not getting kicked in the head by a horse, but— having an unfortunate experience that makes it impossible for you to think about something rationally. I have a friend, for instance, whose brother — a sex trader worker — was brutally murdered. To this day I know he cannot stand to hear me talk about ‘sex trade work’ in a positive way. Although I do understand, this does seem to me to be an affliction. Okay let’s use the damn term (because we have to): I have no problems with people who are ‘intellectually disabled’ —I think they should be able to live their own lives, but it might not make sense for an intellectually disabled couple to have children. But even that gets into a sticky wicket, because The Nazis routinely sterilized ‘idiots.’ Montgomery Clift plays one such person in Judgement at Nuremberg — the filming of which raises the same moral questions as does Light in the Piazza. Apparently Clift was so addled and drugged during filming that he couldn’t remember his lines; Stanley Kramer suggested he ad lib his speeches. Kramer claimed that Clift still achieved the essence of the character. He certainly did, Clift’s unhinged, wide-eyed, stuttering performance is utterly chilling — the problem being only that it is so effective because Clift was at that point in his life certifiably nuts  — and not in any way acting. I will now take the opportunity to implicate myself in a fundamental way. I am somewhat attracted to people who are deficient in some way. Of course we are all deficient in some way, and I am perhaps the most deficient of all (something which my present partner constantly reminds me of!). But one of my ex-boyfriends also had a disability, and I know this was perhaps part of my attraction to him. This is not quite as evil as it sounds. It can be evil, though. I know a straight man who is perpetually attracted to only blind or disabled women. It may just be a matter of needing to be deeply needed. Robert Wilson (the esteemed avant-garde American theatre director) fell in love with, lived with, and adopted a young man (Christopher Knowles) who was severely autistic. The boy also inspired -- and starred -- in Wilson’s play/opera/extravaganza Einstein on the Beach. Now I never starred my ex-disabled-boyfriend in a play (though he claimed he was a very good actor) but I starred him, for a time, in my life. I think I did that partly because I was attracted to the fact that he was more controlling than even my mother (who, when she died, was so controlling that her bowels were as hard as lead). However, the reason he was so controlling was because he had been a mistreated, disabled child — so when he grew up, he decided he would have no more of that. I must also admit that I am a little bit in love with another young man with a disability — right now, today. (But I won’t go on, because he might read this blog.) I’ve tried to make The Light in the Piazza relevant, and in the meantime I have turned myself into a monster in your eyes. Good. Anyone who writes anything — or calls themselves a writer -- is a monster. Everything a 'writer' tells you is suspect. Enjoy, but — watch out.

At the end

of Ship of Fools Michael Dunn, the narrator/dwarf speaks to — and for — the audience when he says, ironically — “What has all this to do with us? Nothing.” This seems particularly prophetic right now, as Ship of Fools is one of director Stanley Kramer's noble cinematic rants against fascism — i.e. the same fascism that is ever so popular these days. It’s obvious, Adorno was right (‘after Auschwitz, to write a poem is barbaric’) and well-meaning artists who rail against evil are ultimately ineffective; mankind will continue to bumble along quite suicidally no matter what. What matters, though, in this endless film (it's 2 and 1/2 hours) are the performances. I was particularly taken with Oskar Werner (who was nominated for an Oscar) and Vivien Leigh (who wasn’t). Simone Signoret is lovely but she’s required to be sad all the time — although a gracious God did bless her with those ever-weeping eyes, which — when enhanced with black mascara -- make her into a veritable crying machine. Signoret plays a drug addict, but Leigh undoubtedly was one — certainly she was ‘mad’ —  described as such by her peers. Her performance here is heartbreaking -- a repeat of her character in The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone. After awhile it seems they only wished her to play the desiccated siren who has reached the bathetic, sordid nadir of her existence, and must avail herself of the services of paid male escorts. In her final gorgeous scene Leigh slaps on too much makeup and inquires of the mirror: ‘is this what men want?” Then she beats Lee Marvin furiously with her spike heels (apparently she accidentally did actually hurt him — quite seriously). I want to be Vivien Leigh. No! I am her.  I went to a party in Danville Sunday (I bet you don’t know where Dunville is!) in drag, and was reminded, fleetingly, again, of what it is like to perform. My appearance was ‘just for friends,’ but one darling man did ask me about a play I wrote (Toller), and I held forth at quite nauseating length re: my wonderfulness. As I now am possessed of the requisite leathery turkey-neck, I feel rather authentic as ‘old’, and it’s so much fun to play a sexually inappropriate, fading lady — forlorn and dissipated — and be pitied certainly -- but never ever scorned. It was harder I’m sure for Vivien Leigh to actually be that, but to some extent she was playing at it too; a role she had been given in life, as the discarded, unsuitable wife to the closeted Laurence Olivier. (When they divorced, Olivier married Joan Plowright —  who was not a drag queen like Leigh — and a much less likely ‘beard.' Rumour has it Olivier was having it off with Danny Kaye at the time. I imagine their sex was 'inventive'). Ship of Fools is an ‘invention’ by novelist Katherine Ann Porter in the tradition of an episodic tale — the screenplay bounces from couple to couple, each slightly more dysfunctional than the last. The film invokes a wise, Shakespearean melancholy in the audience —‘we’re ALL pretty much fools, aren’t we?” Indeed we are. But when this movie premiered (1965)  there was such a thing as reality, and movies were the opposite — a fantasy; Ship of Fools was heightened, attenuated, drama ‘four people being rude in a room’ as my friend David calls it. I’ve noticed that I mention my friends more and more in this blog. By name, even. I can’t resist, sorry, but I’m so lonely. The only place I live now is with my friends, really (and in this blog). They’re all in the theatre or I should say were of the theatre; all illusionists of some kind, they make things up - their lives, their loves, they don’t live much in the real world, but they are (as Vivien might say!) terrifyingly entertaining. I need them all so desperately right now and hate them for it -- because, with them, I do a lot of reminiscing about theatre; if we get drunk enough we can pretend we are back in the past, when there actually was theatre. When -- after a few drinks -- a theatre friend says goodbye, the curtain goes down, and I don’t quite know if I can stand it. The nice thing is that fantasy has taken the place of reality in all of our lives. Or perhaps I should say fantasy is now framed as reality, and reality bears no relationship to truth. Plays and novels must bear witness to righteousness, but the news is insane. We are all dying from an illness called COVID-19 (except that we are not), trans people claim they are being driven to self-immolation by our bottomless dearth of sensitivity to their agonised, tortured, victimhood — and when it comes to intersectionality we might as well give up, as we never will understand how deeply unhappy everyone is. Then there are those who have been driven by the insanity of the COVID-19 unreality to invent another unreality -- one which is far more entertaining — the conspiracy theory that Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci and George Soros (who is he again? It’s been explained to me so many times but I keep forgetting) are out to take over the world. It all has to do with the high price of steel and lumber and — gee, I get confused. But I do know that ‘they’ are programming something into our DNA with these vaccines. If I were you I wouldn’t trust anyone;  the ‘truth’ is officially as slippery as an eel and twice as messy. There was a time when one could feel safe in the day-to-day reality; now we walk down the street at our peril — it’s not the germs, it’s the homeless people living in tents and OD-ing, willy-nilly --with a kind of benign audacity, everywhere, every day, as if it mattered to anyone but themselves whether they lived or died. You can’t get properly sexually serviced anymore, nor can you get a phone plan that isn’t so complicated that it rivals Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason or the Theory of Relativity.  Oh, for the days when life was mundane but made sense, and then we watched Ship of Fools and escaped, wistfully, guiltily to an artificial world of tinsel and sawdust. Now we are in that movie; we are the deluded mad lovers -- and if Lee Marvin broke into our cabin by mistake one night we would probably butcher him to death with that high-healed shoe.

So Evil, So

Young (1961) is the title. And it’s true, the young are evil. You can measure the corruption of a society by its romanticization of the young. In the Victorian era children were deified as pure, and fed graham crackers and cornflakes to keep them from masturbating. The play The Children’s Hour is based on an actual court case in Scotland (1811) — two little girls whispered that their teachers were lesbians; the teachers were assumed to be guilty because no child could possibly make up such an atrocity. Nowadays children are exalted again — we pretend they are not all watching porn on line (isn’t that what the internet was created for?) — especially now, during the sacred lock down, where children must find salvation in the ‘safety’ of their computers — we would rather they learn about sex from the warped world of porn (I’m an addict; but I don’t recommend it for children) than reach out and touch someone real. Anyone who has been bullied knows how evil children can be; and most bullies are enabled by their parents. Parents wish to get off scot free: ‘It’s not my fault — she was a Bad Seed.’ But they are guilty too. Those are the facts. (I said don’t trust me when I say ‘It’s a fact’; so don’t -- but, are you persuaded?). So Evil, So Young is a much better movie than its title; I thought it would be too lousy even for camp -- but outside of the pink reform school outfits, there’s nothing camp about it at all. It’s especially relevant to our lives now, we are all in prison, and likely will continue to be so for some time; it’s as if someone has nailed our hands to the floor and is slowly pulling out the nails one by one. Miss Smith (Joan Haythorne) is the matron, and Jill Ireland’s nemesis. Jan Haythorne is Theresa Tam, Dr. Fauci et al. For a minor misdeed a sensitive girl is sent into solitary by the formidable Miss Smith (who Jill Ireland calls a 'fat old witch' in a particularly enthralling moment). The girl commits suicide. Miss Smith says “You had your fun, we all have to pay for that.” Another girl, innocent of any crime -- but in reform school -- weeps: “Sometimes I think it’s all a dream and I’ll wake up! How can this happen when I didn’t do anything wrong?” This is the question we ask ourselves every day during lock down. There is a prison riot, in So Evil, So Young —like what’s happening in the The States right now. Why else do you think everyone is suddenly shooting everyone else? Because we have all been punished for more than a year -- told we are bad for simply wanting to live -- and sent to our computers for salvation -- where we find only capitalistic rot: the poison of wokeness and populism. And yet they continue to disinfect, and erect plastic berries in restaurants which won’t stop the dreaded ‘germs’ from flying up and over. Well here’s a taste of what real people have been doing while you meditate and watch Netflix — they’ve been screwing and doing drugs for months; they're too poor for this fake pandemic to make any difference in their desperate lives. I hang out on the poorest part of St. Catherine Street East, Montreal, swarming with crack and meth addicts, people lie on the pavement for hours, days, no one is sure if they are dead or just sleeping. At night they prowl about; so do I. Last night I displayed my wares in such a gross and blatant manner that even the beggars were shocked. I was leaning against a shuttered patio sipping a malt beer (“Teasy’); a  tiny angry human started screaming at me: “That pizza place is closed! I know what you’re up to hanging out there? If you leave and there’s any of that beer I’m taking it!” I left an empty can which he threw angrily on the ground. There are some ‘nice’ people on St. Catherine East, mostly fags in couples walking very quickly, with their dogs, chatting each other up wildly, trying not to see me-- but it’s hard to miss someone as large and tattooed as I, especially when I have managed a semi-erection that makes a huge bulge (for some reason) in my shorts — which I touch occasionally — when someone hot walks by. I almost got laid twice. A very cute guy came up to me: “Do you smoke?” “Only cigarettes…” I know that’s not good enough; he’s off again. Later on my way home, there is a look from someone, and then another, and we end up in an alley, But he keeps saying ‘People can see us…” We kinda do it — but he’s too skittish and then he’s gone. This is the chase;  an acknowledgement that I am a sexual being and that I exist -- which, strangely enough, I still need to know. Think of these blogs as an anthropological expedition of sorts — you learn here about a sordid life you will never participate in, thank God. That’s fine. They will rise up you know -- the poor, and they will kill us, and burn us, and eat us, if at all possible. That’s what the new movie New Order is all about. I saw that yesterday too. It's a sister film to So Evil, So Young — but while the earlier film is a preachy lesson on the need for prison reform, New Order is truly great, by Michel Franco — a Mexican filmmaker of prodigious talent. Roger Ebert doesn’t like the film because he’s not sure which side Michel Franco is on. Franco is clearly on the side of artist -- Roger Ebert --you dumb twit! Franco is presenting his own version of reality. That means New Order is a fantasy, a game, a lie, and a provocation. Franco does not tell you how to think, or what to think -- only priests and politicians do that. New Order is the story of a Mexican uprising in which the poor, Indigenous, working servants finally take on their oppressors — the arrogant, Spanish, oblivious, idle rich. It starts at a pampered daughter’s wedding — most everyone there is eventually killed and/or tortured. As in life, there are ultimately no good guys or bad guys — just people committing atrocities in the name of ‘the truth.' You must see it. Don’t forget, also, that the poor — that is the ones who have not died of their addictions or from lack of proper medical coverage during the fake pandemic — will rise up in anger everywhere in response to the ridiculous, needless finger wagging we call COVID-19. The poor know something we don’t — that life is nasty, brutish, short, and really only about pleasure --  and if you can get it, keep it —  and for that, there must be no punishment.