PLAGUE DIARY 43: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

Our Miss Brooks (1956)
Her last line is to a chimpanzee, and that pretty much says it all. Believe it or not I had high hopes for this one, because I do love Eve Arden so much. It’s  one of those middle class comedies that is crafted not to offend. The opening is promising, The new teacher Eve Arden arrives in town and finds the biology teacher — Mr. Boynton (Robert Rockwell) — exercising, shirtless — and even without taking into consideration 1950’s pre-male-body-fascism standards, that’s a lovely sight. When Rockwell says he is a biology teacher she eyes his hairy chest: “Biology — I love it.” And when he says he exercises just to “keep his red corpuscles going,” she says “I bet you have lots of them.” This is what we love Eve Arden  for — the wise, world-weary quip. (Because we don’t expect women to be wise or world weary, but Eve Arden always is.) The squishy sentimental core at the heart of Our Miss Brooks might be unwatchable if it wasn’t for her cynicism. When the lecherous Don Porter propositions her, Eve Arden says — “That look in your eye makes me feel like I was curled up in a wienie roll.” These quips are not as potentially savage as the ones she gets to unleash as a real outsider — not part of any action but just commenting on it — in films like Anatomy of a Murder or Mildred Pierce. Because one has the feeling that Eve Arden could make out quite well without a man, so it’s unsettling to see her in a movie about a woman who dreams of settling down with one. Speaking of which, I have always somewhat enjoyed my own personal non-status as ‘a loud-mouthed fag who will never be taken seriously by anybody.’ I do adore not being at the centre of things, and not being loved. Yes it’s true I have a hankering for applause, but the applause always goes away, and I am always just as alone after it’s over as I was before. Because the easiest way to be alone with one’s thoughts is to be despised. And to be actually despised one has to speak one’s mind in a rather blithe and naive fashion, which I’ve always done — but also confess everything, especially things no one really wants to hear. I like to separate the men from the boys early on; I like to let you know the worst about me first, because if I do, and you are still around, there’s a possibility you might love me. Ergo, I tell you I have a small penis. Or that I murdered someone. All lies of course. Cuz I ain’t gonna get no love from nobody by pussyfooting around. The character Eve Arden usually plays is what is called —in dramaturgical terms — the  ‘raissoneur’ which means the person who doesn’t take part in the action but watches it, understands it deeply, and explains it all to the audience. Here goes. Today I decided the only interesting people that will be left after whatever COVID-19  becomes next (because it will never actually end) will be the very rich and the very poor, because they are the only ones who remember how to live. As you may or may not have perceived, this COVID-19 hysteria is all part of an world view that has been approaching for decades. It started with AIDS, and moved closer with environmentalism and ant-smoking campaigns, and finally climaxed with the woke movement. The notion is that the puritans were right, and our health, our environment and culture are disintegrating, and they only way we can  fight it is to stop doing the very things that make life worth living. But it’s only the middle classes who believe that, because neither the rich nor the poor have any intention of giving up sex, alcohol, jet planes, drugs, gender, self-destructive behaviour, and an obscene obsession with body parts that are too large to even describe in words —  in lieu of caring for their fellow man. If jetting about the world is banned at the end, then the rich will just buy private jets — and you can all screw yourselves. And on the streets, life is so cheap that they’ll be drinking, injecting, (look both the window, if you can) and hugging, and doing it in the streets, now that the weather is better and they don’t care about the cops, and they don’t care about tomorrow, and you don’t really care about them anyway, so what the f….? Whom am I to talk? I am middle class — of course I friggin’ know that. The only thing I can say on my behalf is I’ve spent my life reaching for the gutter — and I know that only a middle class person with enormous privilege would actually aspire to be there. But I’ve found myself there many a night — because as much as I might enjoy my house and my lovely job I cannot stand the people who are my economic compatriots. The end of the world won’t come from COVID-19 or climate change, it will come from middle-class people with noble ideals who believe that we need to care for each other and the world more. And now I have revealed what  I need more than anything — and what  I have in common with the very rich and the very poor. The very rich and the very poor are often drug addicts, and do a lot of wild and crazy things. Certainly it’s partially because they can, but also partially because they — like me — are simply terrified of being bored. I have filled every day with stuff to do. I don’t have any time. The other day I practically ruined my relationship with someone by sending off an email in a  hurry, because I just didn’t have a millisecond to waste. And I thought, how can I not have enough time -- with isolation and social distancing? Every every second of my day is scheduled because I am terrified of leaving a moment empty. And you can go all middle class zen on me and say — well I should be able to deal with nothingness. Well alright I’ll admit it, yes I have meditated, and it did work for me a bit, but basically I got bored with it. Yes I did. I know that shows how shallow I am — but I’ll ask you one simple question. Is being alive not just being stimulated? And is not being stimulated just being dead? When I see that somnambulant Justin Trudeau step forward and start jawing his way towards mediocrity, I fear for all Canadians, the ones who say ‘let’s not rock the boat’ and ‘things will be okay,’ the Canadians who elected Stephen Harper for 9 friggin’ years because the economy was doin’ just fine. Jesus Christ, today I was standing with my best friend staring at a friggin’ cardinal! A friggin’ cardinal! We heard it and then we were looking for it in the backyard. Really. ‘Oh where is it? It’s in a tree.' Are we actually talking about friggin’ cardinals now? And we were hardly drunk at all. I didn’t realize — ’til after — how insane that was. I didn’t have the heart to tell her what we just did. But she’s the only one who said — (when I told her I need to have every moment in my life filled now because I’m afraid I'll end up alone in silence):  ‘Welp —I’ll always be here.’ Jesus Christ. I hope she reads this and knows saying that kept me alive for one more day. Because I’ve tried everything to scare her away — but for some reason — I just can’t make it happen.

PLAGUE DIARY 42: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

Freaks (1932)
So much bilge has been spilled about this movie that it’s incumbent on me to clear the air. Todd Browning’s cinematic images are certainly carefully framed and composed and at times, beautiful. But the acting and the dialogue are execrable. The film is dead boring. The primary actors — Olga Baclanova (as Cleopatra) and Harry Earles and Daisy Earles (as the midgets Hans and Frieda) are unwatchable. This is not because they are ‘freaks’ or ugly (Olga Baclanova is a ‘normal woman’ - and all three of them are quite beautiful in their own way), but none of them can act. After the first screening of Freaks, a woman sued MGM for causing her miscarriage. Could it have been the acting? There is only one really thing good about Freaks, and that is that the actors really are ‘freaks’ — period. And the only other sorta good thing about Freaks also happens also to make it  lousy in conception (if not execution). Freaks is perfect propaganda. Early on, the presumptive mother of the ‘freaks,’ Rose Dione (as Madame Tetralini) gathers the pinheads around her, protecting them from ridicule, cooing ‘these are my children.’ I won’t make fun of the sentiment, because it is in fact, noble. But Freaks has only one noble sentiment to express: that ‘freaks’ are human too, and of course, the corollary — it’s not ‘freaks’ that are evil, but the so-called humans who do violence against them. Freaks was banned in England for 30 years, until 1962, when (brutally, a year after Todd Browning’s death) it was hailed as masterpiece. Though Browning is certainly well meaning, his politics are fiercely inconsistent. The film — when it is not loving the ‘freaks’— gives free rein to the audience’s voyeurism — from ‘ The Living Torso’ (actor Prince Randian) lighting a cigarette with his mouth, to the armless woman eating dinner with her feet, to the bearded lady having a baby. The most pornographic scene offers us a gratuitous glimpse into the sex lives of female Siamese twins. When the husband of one meets the fiance of the other they say: “You must come and see me sometime.” This phrase mimics the politesse one brother-in-law might display for another. But the question on the everyone’s mind is — are all four of you going to be having sex at the same time? I don’t despise the film for it’s voyeurism, but rather for the hypocrisy of those who watch it and praise it’s nobility. Recently the ‘woke folk’ and the disabled community have embraced this film because its stars would today probably self-identify as transgendered and/or disabled. For me (and perhaps it’s my own problem) the most horrifying ‘freak’ of the bunch is ‘Schlitzie. Schlitzie was a real disabled man, who had (see Wikipedia) “microcephaly, a neurodevelopmental disorder that left him with an unusually small brain and skull, a small stature (he stood about four feet tall, myopia, and severe intellectual disability.” I’m not going to say it was cruel of Todd Browning to put a disabled person on display and make fun of him as a woman (which is what happens in Freaks). Nor am I going to tell you Schlitzie was a person too — though undoubtedly he was. What I’m going to say is that for myself, and other people, Schlitzie was fascinating, horrifyingly and bewitchingly odd. And, come on, be honest, if you had seen him on the street you would look twice, or maybe a third time, —and that third time you might stare, like it was a car accident. Those who made money off Schlitzie knew this, and Schlitize himself seemed to enjoy the attention, and missed it when it was gone. And it’s a good thing to admit all this. Because not to admit it, is to join the ranks of those ubiquitous people of good will who deny that there is a difference between you, me and Schlitzie. But we are all very different, and it is natural to react in a frightened, fascinated and/or horrified way at that difference. (I asked a biologist once; and she said that such a reaction is tribal and inbred). We have to LEARN HOW not to kill or beat or humiliate those who are different from us, but it doesn’t help to pretend that they aren’t different at all. Woke culture deals with difference by telling us we are all the same. The newest transgender theory is that— not only is there no such thing as gender — but to desire one gender over another is hateful and cruel. There is no heroism in denying that Schlitzie is different. But Schlitzie is not just the same as you and me, he is completely alien — in many many ways. Such is the enormous challenge of being human; to somehow come to terms with that which we may never like, love, or ever want to have sex with.  I know this because I am a freak, I have been since I was a little boy and well-meaning people asked me why I talk with my hands. I am, and always will be, a little girl in a gigantic scary man’s body. I know how freaky that is, and I don’t expect heterosexual men to like me, and not very many of them do. Am I allowed to say this? Gee, are you allowed to say, in these COVID-19 times, that hospitals are actually empty? Oh sorry, the approved truth is this ‘we must stay away from hospitals unless it is an emergency because we have to make room for the massive influx of COVID-19 patients,’ Well I know three people who have gone to the hospital recently (cut finger, herpes vaccination, and cancer). Apparently the nurses are all sitting around filing their nails because THERE IS NO INFLUX OF COVID-19 PATIENTS FLOODING OUR HEALTH CARE SYSTEM! (Where I live in Hamilton, 19 people have died.) So since this lie is being propagated, I’m not sure if I am allowed to say that the hospitals are empty, and since we are all supposed to pretend that 'freaks' are not different or scary or horrifying because we are all the same, I’m not sure that I’m allowed to say that Freaks is a well-intentioned mess that misunderstands the principle of difference. Twenty minutes of Freaks was censored in 1932. People are outraged by that (and they should be, that footage is dead and gone, lost —never to be seen) — but for all the wrong reasons. Sometimes what is censored is a fact you don’t want to hear -- like that nurses are bored in hospitals while you are suffering deeply — and sometimes it's a scene you don’t want to see. Like the last minute of Freaks (which they cut) — when they castrate Hercules. Yeah, castration. Those who claim to love this film also claim it was censored because people couldn’t handle the idea that 'freaks' are just the same as you and me. What they actually couldn’t handle was a man singing in a girls voice because somebody has just snipped off his nuts. Hey, I really wish I coulda seen that. That should tell you something about what’s a freak and what is not.

PLAGUE DIARY 41: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

The Man Who Could Work Miracles (1936)
It seems quite faithful to H.G. Wells and it’s filled with juicy British actors — including Ralph Richardson, Lady Tree, and Roland Young (who played Topper — my favourite character — in the movie of the same name, and who’s pretty delightfully dotty in the leading role here). Oh yes, and a young George Sanders plays ‘Indifference’ — one of the three young faggots who, it seems, rule the universe. The movie starts fantastically with three handsome gays on horseback in shimmering shirts approaching from what appears to be — outer space, chatting about what they should do with insignificant misguided mankind. With their girly British accents, their sparkly shirts, and their blithe ‘indifference’ they seem awfully queer too me. (Perhaps three cranky, indifferent fags ARE running the universe. It would certainly explain a lot.) At first they think they should give every human the power to perform miracles; but then think better of it, and give that power only to Roland Young. Roland Young is sweet and ruefully insignificant, he never seems quite up to the task at hand — and in this way he’s quite fully human. At first he does silly things — like turning candles upside down, and filling his bed with grapes and rabbits (well, to each his own), but he discovers quickly that he can’t “get into people’s minds.” (Which is probably a good thing.) A  pretty, vain shopgirl asks him to dress her like Cleopatra. He does, but says: “Now that I can have everything, something seems to hold me back.” Someone suggests — “Why not banish disease from the face of the earth?” Roland says: “Oh — I thought I’d just go ‘round and cure somebody here, somebody there.” Soon he gets mixed up with a bunch of old white men. (Fags may rule the universe but these old farts rule the earth.) The businessmen oppose giving money away: “without want, what would people do?” The old colonel (with that oddness that makes Ralph Richardson so special) — is perturbed when, in biblical fashion, Roland turns his wine to water and his swords into ploughshares. Then a crusading minister deems it appropriate to start the “golden age of peace and plenty.” But Roland has had enough. He proclaims — “I want to get what I fancy!”, and creates a castle, makes his girlfriend queen, and gathers all the best minds of the world around him. His orders are: “Run the world better!” But the best minds warn him this will all take some time. (Kinda like the best minds of the world working on COVID-19). So Roland goes nuts and stops the earth from turning. Finally, the three fags turn back the clock; now Roland can’t turn candles upside down, and that’s quite a good thing. This movie does what a work of art should do —  show you a model of something, of life, of a life, of an idea of life. Then it just let’s you wonder what it all means. At one point Roland Young says “You can’t shoot truth!”  Well, of course you can shoot people who tell the truth, but you can’t actually shoot truth, because it keeps coming back. Where’s truth? In this strange era we live in, where everything is topsy turvy, where the left love being told what to do, and the right are the only ones talking about rights — our right to live, to breathe the air outside, and run our friggin’ businesses? And no one can stand this home schooling anymore, especially kids, but everyone is fully committed to being nice to old people, and to the incalculably deluded fantasy of a crazy dream world where no one ever dies. Well I mentioned in my last blog that I might have killed someone — and now it’s up to me to convince you that I haven’t. It’s like what Chekhov said — when a gun appears in act one it had better go off in act two. I’ve stopped reading these blogs to my best friend — because it’s you and me alone in this now. And if you’ve read it this far then you are a sympathetic ear, I know you are. I have to believe it, because the fact that you are reading this is what’s keeping me alive. “Another Blog That Nobody Reads,” right, I really believe that. (That’s rhetorical humility, I learned about it in books and there’s no stronger persuasion.) Of course I bloody well want someone to read this. But just one person. Just one person who gets it, who understands how guilty I have been since the day I was born. When I first read The Lutheran Book at age 9 — my mother made us visit The Lutheran Family because she liked to smoke and drink with The Lutheran Mother — and I hated that little boy — who I was supposed to be friends with — because he made me read The Lutheran Book. It said we are all born sinners, and we’ll die sinners, period. Yes that’s me, I thought. I am a sinner. From the moment I was born— I knew that I simply must have done a mighty wrong.  Did it start when my mother told me to clean my room, and she said it frightened her because I made it too clean? I don’t blame her, I honestly don’t, I’m sure she just told me to clean it nicely. But there is something in me that is never satisfied with myself, and I don’t mean that in a precious, perfectionist way. I mean if you wanna make me feel bad, you can do it in a second. Just look at me wrong. Or tell me that this blog is actually killing somebody from COVID-19. That might work. Go ahead.  I’m used to that. It’s kinda what happened with the whole Evelyn Parry Buddies thing. It was right; it was right that I should be shunned by a whole generation of young people — not because my words ‘hurt’ people — because if words didn’t hurt, what would be the use of them? — but because from the time I was young I looked on my own self, my own body, with contempt. I never masturbated, I never masturbated until I was 29. I never touched my penis. You got that? I used to rub myself against the bed. I was a good boy—  or tried to be — because I knew the real alternative was the brutal truth that I am bad, truly bad. And everyone at Buddies is right to hate me, I suppose it’s my attempts to look young even when I’m nearly 105 (in gay years), or my pitiful penis (which honestly I never touched until I was 30 — does that help?) or my privilege —yes those ancestors on the Mayflower, or just my entitlement -- yes, that’s it! My entire life I have blindly believed that what I have to say is actually significant — and you and I know full well there are two million people who are two hundred times more talented than I am. But no one — no one but me, is so willing to open my big mouth, and shout out everything that I think or feel, every bloody truth I can imagine or even make up. It’s called guts, not genius. And you can’t shoot the truth, right. Jesus, if I even knew what that was.

PLAGUE DIARY 40: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

Speak Easily (1932)
I’m not sure how this one will turn out. I have no clear idea of how it might finish (sometimes I have a vague idea). I went for a walk through my neighbourhood in Hamilton after seeing Speak Easily, just to think. I walked past a house that I have never walked past at night — I’m kind of afraid of that building — because it’s apparently a halfway house for men who are on their way out of Hamilton-Wentworth Detention Centre. Once I saw a man come out the door who had one of those tear drops — you know — tattooed — beside his eye. That means he killed someone, doesn’t it? I’ve never killed anyone. Although I dream that I have quite regularly, and even feel as if I need to admit something now. I wrote a novel about that. Not sure where that comes from. Guilt. And next door a girl was sitting on the porch singing, and a man started chatting with her. That’s an idea. Maybe I should try this at my guest house in Toronto. If she’s the one I think she is, she’s on crack — the whole house next door is on crack. Two people have died there. One was kind of my friend. I’ll never forget taking a bath and looking out the bathroom window and seeing one of those yellow police banners — ‘do not cross’ and knowing that something very bad had happened there. I found out it was a crack house because a cab driver told me. I kind of knew before, but the cab driver confirmed it. 'So you’ve got a crack house next door’ ‘How do you know?’ ‘Oh you can tell, anyone can tell, by the way people run in and out of there.' Apropos, I was thinking today of how sex has driven me into extreme situations. (For me, living in Hamilton is more about love than sex.) But once I was in Phoenix, in a dirty video store that was in the wrong part of town. Well I found out later that in the USA when they tell you it’s the wrong part of town and you should never go there, it just means poor and black. I asked a cab driver (as you may have noticed, I get a lot of my information about life from cab drivers) that all the ‘dangerous’ parts of these American towns are quite often not dangerous, just poor and black. The cab driver said ‘you won’t get killed there, but somebody may try and sell you drugs.’ That’s seemed fine to me. Well anyway I ended up in this dirty video store in Phoenix trying to get laid, and I did, or I achieved some sort of impersonation of it. I’ve often end up like that, on my knees somewhere, asking myself  how did I get here? And then I realised it was desire. Or compulsion, or something. Not sure….. A therapist once tried to figure out if I was sexually compulsive. He said he was going to ask me a couple of questions. ‘Do you ever find yourself having sex when you’e not horny?’ ‘Oh yes, all the time.’ That was it, confirmed as a sexual compulsive after the first question. I live with that, try and struggle through, try not to be compulsive. But can you ever really change yourself? Perhaps you can modify things…somewhat? Buster Keaton stars in this movie and he plays, well — me. He’s a professor, obsessed with Aristotle. I happen to be completely lost in Greek rhetoric right now (it’s a Shakespeare thing). And somebody comes into Keaton’s office at the university and says “It’s a drag day.” I’m sure that meant something different to Buster Keaton than it now means to me, but still, I identified, because Keaton said “I’d rather sit here and read Aristotle.” And really at the moment I’d rather read about the Greek sophist Gorgias than do anything else. But I also happen to have read the only book that — I think — exists, about Gorgias, so that’s done. And frankly I’ve played all the operas I love, and now I have to go back and play the ones I love, again and again. Will I stop loving them? I often wonder that. I wish there were more operas. At least there will always be new young men, who — even if they don’t want to look at me — I can look at. So Buster Keaton in Speak Easily (which is wordplay on 'speakeasy,' and the film was made during Prohibition, and is madcap slapstick, which I like even less that I do screwball comedy )— is me. I’d rather be writing this, or reading a book, than actually living. Keaton’s friend says about him “He’s learned everything except how to live.” I don’t expect to ever know how to live. But then Keaton’s friend says to him “If you’d only go out and find life you could live it” Which is impossible now, as you know with COVID-19, and that’s why I’m scared I guess. Because I’m a sexual compulsive which means I don’t really care about having sex with anyone, and people do, ultimately scare me, and sex scares me, and I’m so terrible at it anyway. And what worries me is what I kind of like about isolation is I can just bury myself in books and writing and avoid living altogether. So now you don’t have any sympathy for me at all. (That’s fine because I probably did kill somebody without knowing it because I dream it all the time, and often write that I did. Or maybe I just like confessing?) But believe it or not this is not about me. It’s about my neighbours and the guy with the teardrop tattoo who might be living down the block. I’m not sure what’s going to happen to them, and believe it or not I am concerned — as the economy collapses. They’ve just figured out in the good ol’ U.S.A. that black people are ‘inordinately affected’ by COVID-19. Wow, brilliant, is it really such a revelation that the oppressed are automatically more oppressed — by virtually everything — than anyone else? When Keaton’s friend analyses him he says “being constantly alone creates an inferiority complex.’ Well quite right it does. Because ‘people who need people are the luckiest people’ as Barbra says. And I do remember my mother pulling me aside once: ‘this song has a very important message.’ Sad, because my mother generally hated people, and alienated them at every turn. But I guess what I’m saying is that even people like me, who are somewhat misanthropic, and who stumble through life like Buster Keaton, and are bad at everything, need people. (Thelma Todd keeps asking Buster Keaton to ‘have tea’ with her, and he has no idea what she is talking about, and I think he would just actually be quite willing to simply have tea with her, in any case.). Well I still don’t know where this is going to end. And I have to end it soon. Shall I say, even if we we are just stumbling through this mess we call life, we need flesh and blood people to stumble through all this with? (What is consciousness? I asked myself this morning, as I stepped out of the bathtub.Rreally I did, I’m not trying to sound profound -- because I do think it’s an important question, that no one has quite yet answered.) We need people, even if we don’t know how to deal with them. How do I treat them, the ones I love? I always thought entertaining them would be enough. Writing this -- well it's  the way I show my love. It’s the only way I know. I’m sure when Buster Keaton falls over a couch over and over again, he’s just, in his own way, saying ‘I love you.’ It was Terence who first said “I am human, I consider nothing human alien to me. And then Tennessee Williams had Hannah Jelkes say the same thing in Night of the Iguana: “Nothing human disgusts me, Mr. Shannon, unless it is unkind or violent.” She says this, after telling a story about how she met a man in a darkened movie theatre who asked her if she would give him her underwear. These are random acts of kindness. And believe it or not, that’s what this is trying to be.

PLAGUE DIARY 39: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

Elizabeth and Essex (1939)
Nothing can bring this film to life. It is based on a script by Maxwell Anderson, who could not write. Though a giant of the American theatre for many years, his plays are pompous, stodgy, windy, pretentious, pseudo-poetic parades of pseudo-profound speeches, and that’s what kills this movie. The other problem is that Bette Davis is playing a woman of nearly seventy when in reality she is the same age as Errol Flynn. They’ve done everything they can to make her look ugly, but she doesn’t ever look old. Errol Flynn is, however, young and achingly beautiful. Apparently Flynn used to run after teenage girls — and one could see what they might see in him. He’s a good actor and so tender in the love scenes, it seemed somewhat voyeuristic watching him be so vulnerable. And one can see that he is so handsome that if he made love to you, you simply wouldn’t care if he was sincere or not. Not much happens in the movie, really, other than Elizabeth executing him. And poor Bette Davis has many vacuous Maxwell Anderson speeches, crumbling down Flynn’s side in a sad embrace: “I’m old, old, old’ she says, but she doesn’t look a day over 30. Lytton Strachey told this story better in his twin biography — Elizabeth and Essex, suggesting that Elizabeth would have put up with anything from Essex — and did — but Essex was ambitious — which is clear from the film — and crossed over too many boundaries. But according to Strachey someone told the queen that Essex had at one point referred to her as having a ‘crooked carcass.’ That was, as one might guess, the game changer. When it came to finally executing him, ridding her life of the Essex Trouble it was those horrible words that rang in her ears, and no longer could she be generous. (One of my gay friends once told me that his ex-lover told him ‘I am no longer sexually attracted to you’; he found those words impossible to forget.) It is, again, mad love, and Flynn tries to convince us he’s in love with Bette Davis, but because she’s not able to be who she was in real life — that ‘gorgeous bitch’ that we all love (and the b-word is only a compliment here) — it’s all just a little odd. He says “She’s got a witches brain, I love her, I hate her, I adore her,” all very well but with this pretentious forced dialogue not convincing enough. (The only other line I remember is: “Don’t count too much on the love of queens!” It has a gay application, and is all too true.) But I do feel I have to address something I said in my last blog, and express a feeling I have today. I’m hung over for sure. Yes, I’ve spent most of my weekends drunk (as I always do) — even during COVID-19. But during ‘social distancing’ I am not able to embrace the night, plunge into the friendly and/or dangerous dark — meet strangers I’ve always counted for kindness, or for, whatever. Instead I share drinks with friends in enclosed spaces hoping not to be arrested for having fun. At any rate, today I am somewhat somnambulant, it all seems like a dream. Perhaps I just haven’t woken up yet, perhaps this blog will wake me up. But I do have the worrisome, numbing sensation that nothing I do matters anymore. This is, I think, actually true. It’s related to the fact that suddenly everyone has the same excuse, for anything. It’s COVID-19. What is utterly devastating to my sense of reality is that deadlines, commitment, plans, hopes, fantasies whatever, don’t matter anymore because the future is in limbo, and there’s no way one could hold anyone else to anything, or. demand a response, or say — ‘why didn’t you turn up?’ because the inevitable answer would be ‘COVID is getting me down,’ or ‘I’m sick with IT,’ or ‘I’m worried because my uncle lives in a nursing home,’ or of course, inevitably, ‘I can’t leave the house because of IT.’ But I console myself with the idea that life is a dream, so this is nothing new. I mentioned this idea in my last email, along with the idea that love is a dream — which as a concept is a lot easier to understand, and perhaps, easier to stomach. But to speak of ‘life as a dream’ seems more bold and eminently arguable. It is the title of Calderon’s play about Prince Segismundo who is imprisoned in a tower by his father (due to a seer’s prediction that his son will someday kill him and destroy the country). But the kind king frees his son briefly, and Segismundo is a prince first the first time — in his own mind — until his father imprisons him again, convincing the temporary prince that being a prince was merely a dream. (The whole of Taming of the Shrew is also a dream, dreamed by a drunk named Christopher Sly. ) What if life is a dream? It means that when we die, we wake up, which is a cheerful thought. I like the idea that life is a dream because I was in therapy for many years with a woman named Anne Madigan, a kind of saint of psychotherapy (she was the therapist for a whole generation of Toronto artists at one point — I know she counselled Daniel MacIvor and Tracy Wright — I saw Tracy in Anne’s office waiting room once). Anyway Anne was a narrative therapist, which means she encouraged you to look at the story that you had created for your own life, because we all do that. Whenever you say “I’ll never fall in love” or “I always fall in love with selfish idiots” you are living your narrative; you have written a script for yourself and you must live it, you have no choice. But Anne tried to teach us how to change our narratives. My narrative at the time was “I can’t survive without being the artistic director of Buddies in Bad Times Theatre.’ It was amazing how easy it was to change that narrative, and so I quit my job. All fine and good, but is life actually real, or is it a dream? Well, I think the whole notion of reality is misleading. It’s not that a table isn’t a table, or a glass of water isn’t drinkable. It’s that the facts of your life don’t matter really, it’s the significance that you give to them, and that’s the dream. Some people lose both their legs and become heroes — that is their dream. And others lose both their legs and commit suicide; the dream they are in is more depressing but nonetheless just as ‘real.’ I know you won’t take this idea seriously. But, really, you might. Because it releases you — not from responsibility — but from tragic necessity. And it is something finally to say to all those that would say to you; ‘you have to face facts!’ ‘Well I don’t really. There are none. I make them up, we all do, and I’m going to make some up now, thank you!’ I am making up the idea that someone is going to read this and that it matters. I am making up the idea that certain people love me, or a beautiful man will kiss me again for no reason (yes that did happen and I’ll tell you the story someday) but with COVID I’m not sure. Is that uncertainty part of the COVID dream? I’m not going to say “my dream has become a nightmare.’ But I will say the dream I’m living in right now is a lot calmer than usual (do I like that calm? — no not at all). And it is a dream in which I have never felt so strongly that the only thing that actually matters — because it is the only thing that is really real — is what I am writing here, now.

PLAGUE DIARY 38: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

A Face in the Crowd (1957)
Not since Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart has there been such a pathetic attempt by an author to deify himself in his work. In 1952 Elia Kazan betrayed six members of the Group Theatre by identifying them as communists to the House of UnAmerican Activities Committee (the arm of Joe McCarthy, an anti-communist demagogue). This movie centres on a Trump-like demagogue (adequately portrayed by Andy Griffith). But at its centre is the moral dilemma of Patricia Neal, the journalist who discovers him. Griffith is sleeping in an Arkansa jail with his ubiquitous guitar when Neal finds him and turns him into a media celebrity, until — at the height of his fame — he is almost appointed ‘Minister of Morale’ for a right wing, isolationist, anti-communist president. At the end of the film, the luminous Patricia Neal suffers through the requisite torture over her contribution to Griffith’s corrupt success. But that suffering rings hollow — for me — because when Walter Matthew tells her: “You were taken in, like we were all taken in, but you got wise to him,” we realise that Neal is a stand in for Kazan — and he is only forgiving himself.  Apallingly, Kazan received an honorary Oscar in 1999 despite betraying his friends during the red scare. Yet Meryl Streep and Warren Beatty applauded him out of “regard’ for Kazan’s “creativity.” Many other Hollywood stars, to their credit, did not. Kazan’s crime was gigantic and unforgivable, but Kazan’s contemptible cowardice is not what makes this a bad film. The problem with A Face in the Crowd is that it is a polemic, not art. It is merely a passionate, articulate critique of demagoguery; it is an essay. At the end, Andy Griffith, after being exposed by Neal as a fraud who hates his followers, stands and yells, alone in a vast empty hotel room (with only an automatic applause machine for an audience): “They’re mine! I own ‘em! They think like I do, only they’re even more stupid than I am!” Yeah, hey, we get the message. Art that lectures is not art. And anyway, it never succeeds in changing anyone, because it preaches mainly to the gullible or already converted. A Face in the Crowd is propaganda; it appeals to people’s basest instinct; reason. Art, on the other hand, speaks to the heart. The heart does not know the difference between right and wrong, as it is an organ of feeling and instinct; and the home of paradoxical, mysterious, mixed emotions. The heart neither reasons, nor comes to solutions. It simply understands. Kazan’s dead serious A Face in the Crowd— praised as a film of ideas — pales against La Cava's screwball comedy My Man Godfrey. The proof is in Carole Lombard’s face.  A Face in the Crowd wants us to think about love and betrayal, right and wrong. But Carole Lombard’s face —when she looks into William Powell’s eyes — simply is mad love. Titania in A Midsummer Night's Dream experiences mad love when she wakes up with an ass. And what exactly is she in love with when she kisses the ass, and cradles him with flowers? Well, first of all, she is in love with —an ass. In other words, that part of the human body that is sometimes hairy and which we expel unused food out of. You can try and deny it. But Shakespeare’s audience certainly knew, and would not have been too uptight to admit it (for chrissakes, the ass’s name is ‘Bottom!’) Titania is also in love with a donkey. And the phrase ‘hung like a donkey’ comes to mind. Ergo, Titania is love with either a human sphincter or a human dildo. Alternatively she is in love with a dumb animal, and an animal is not sentient in the same way a human being is. So ultimately, Titania — even if you reject the idea that she is in love with a someone’s bottom or the penis of a donkey, or even the donkey himself, is, at the very least, in love with a human who it is no way appropriate for her to be in love with. Someone who, if she was thoughtful, and in her right mind, utilising reason, she would not -- and should not -- be in love with. Have you not ever experienced this? (It’s the kind of love we see in Carole Lombard’s eyes when she gazes idiotically at William Powell. And Powell is the perfect recipient of that love, because he is not particularly handsome, especially when he shaves off his beard.) Love is supposed be rational; but it’s not. Shakespeare knew that, which is why he put lovers, madmen and poets in the same poetical soup. When I was 13 I read Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. Her ‘Objectivist’ creed was that we fall in love because we find our highest value in another person. When I ingested it, I was trying to convince myself that I was heterosexual — that I should fall in love with a good woman — when the only thing that actually turned me on were the parts of men’s bodies I saw in dirty magazines, or their anonymous handsome faces — the faces of men I didn’t know. And now I have been in love for nearly twenty years with someone who I imagine is noble. But I’m not at all sure that it isn’t mad love, and that I really know him at all. Take my father. After my mother divorced him he quickly married a woman much younger than he was, on the rebound. He soon found out she was already pregnant and had the marriage annulled. He promptly married my stepmother who was a homely, small-minded, rather dull woman. When she died, he turned his affections to his ex-wife’s best friend Kathy, who was very pretty and did not love him. I know this because she took most of his money but would not live with him, and rarely saw him. I didn’t care about losing my inheritance (no honestly, I didn’t). But it was hard to watch him sit at the dinner table, at age 85, and tell my sister and I: 'The reason I keep on living, is because of this little woman here’ -- a woman who lived in another country and refused to have him visit her, but nevertheless loved my father’s credit cards enough to wave them around proudly and with a certain elan: “I’ve got his cards!” she would say. It’s not up to me to judge another person’s love. But it seemed to me that my father loved a dream of Kathy, and his dream was that this very pretty, much younger woman, loved him back; and I wasn’t about to disabuse him of it. A drunken friend once said to me that maybe the apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree. He was saying that my feelings for the man I love have no basis in reality, that it’s a romantic fantasy, and nothing more. My answer is this. Life is a dream. Love is a dream. They are not a polemic, they are not a solution for anything. And there’s nothing to preach here; because there is no answer. Whatever I feel about love is glowing in Carole Lombard’s eyes, in the innocent doglike devotion she offers William Powell. “I want to want you, and I will, no matter what, whether it’s a dream or true.” That’s mad love. Full of puzzles, contradictions, making no sense at all. A revelation like mad love is what art give us; it can’t be quantified, or rationalized. It’s just there. And it will be there, long after didactic lectures from guilty cowards like Elia Kazan are long forgot.

PLAGUE DIARY 37: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

My Man Godfrey (1936)
It’s become a bit of a tyranny this — writing these blogs. It’s an addiction like any other. I sit down in front of the computer and I am tied to the act of writing, loving it — not hating it — but just, knowing that I will perish without it. Which makes no sense. It’s COVID-19 that’s supposed to get me. Anyway, here’s the real admission; I’ve never really understood screwball comedies. I’m ashamed because I should like them, but I don’t think my sensibility is anarchic enough. When comedy gets too nutty, I just can’t go with it. Bringing Up Baby has always confounded me. I love the sensibility and the performances, but truth be told I get insecure when things go really crazy. (Ditto: The Marx Brothers. I recognise the liberation in their lunacy, but sometimes it goes beyond comedy and becomes grotesque. I was afraid of Harpo and Groucho as a child, just as I was afraid of clowns.) So what does all this say about someone who is supposed to have a comic sensibility? Am I not really funny? My Man Godfrey is certainly an interesting film, and I’ve never, I’m afraid, seriously considered the work of director Gregory La Cava. I still don’t know what to make of him. It turns out he started in animation, and one can certainly see signs here, as everything is stretched beyond belief. But there is also something very serious going on, which is the basis of all great comedy. Which brings us to Carole Lombard. Again, I’ve never known quite what to do with her. I remember a comic actress friend many years ago exclaiming: ‘I just adore Carole Lombard, I just want to be her.’ But I’ve never been able to watch Carole Lombard without getting bored and/or anxious. I acknowledge her craft,  and she consistently portrays a singular, demented creature of her own devising. She reminds me of the British theatre director Derek Goldby (where is he now?)— who was a great director of comedies, but he directed What the Butler Saw (a play with the screwball sensibility that I find both alarming and attractive) and told the actors to play it seriously. It was a failure, but — a magnificent one. To me, that is Carole Lombard. Don’t get me wrong, she is obviously gorgeous and charming and funny as a hat (if that makes any sense) but she goes beyond beyond, and usually leaves me behind. This time I allowed her to take me along. William Powell is a hobo (which is what we used to call a homeless man) with a beard. You usually don't see William Powell sporting a beard (only that awful moustache) so he is actually quite handsome (it’s because he lacks a chin, but you know what they say about men without chins — God giveth when he taketh away). And for a moment I understood why Carole Lombard — as the dizzy society girl — falls in love with him. The film is charged with class politics, and they are not pleasant. A party of rich people on a scavenger hunt have been required to bring home a ‘forgotten man.’ The barbarism of this blatantly classist tourism is repellent; the rich are immediately implicated, especially Lombard’s spoiled older sister (Gail Patrick), who Powell pushes into an ash heap. But Lombard is another matter. Her character is Shakespearean, i.e. she instantly falls in love with Powell, and while everyone else in the cast is just being delightfully dotty, (Franklin Pangborn, Mischa Auer, Eugene Palette and Jean Dixon are all superb) Lombard is being ‘madly in love’ with an intensity that is terrifying, conjuring up Helena from A Midsummer Nights Dream. Also befuddling: she seems — as a character and a person — to be both acting and being dead serious a the same time — which is of course the definition of camp. She is both playing at being in love, and being in love. And of course there is something profound in that. Once she persuades William Powell to become her butler ("Do you buttle?” she asks, airily) she then starts leaning on columns, hanging on curtains and crying on couches, writhing around in a kind of sensual agony that is both sympathetic and unsympathetic, real and unreal, but still somehow desperately funny. She dances through philosophical speculation with an obtuse fury. When asked how she is, she says — “It doesn’t matter how I am — the whole thing is only a delusion” and then, out of nowhere — “Life is but an empty bubble.” These are delicious parodies of romantic philosophic melancholy. When offered an hors d’oeuvre, she inquires “What is food?” — instantly unlocking the riddle of anorexia. But La Cava is looking at more than just lovesickness. William Powell is not a real butler, but a rich man posing as a hobo, posing as butler, who has pondered The Great Depression and wondered at “how fast you can go downhill where you start to feel sorry for yourself,” especially when there were "People who were fighting it out and not complaining.” La Cava is obsessed with the spoiled excess of the filthy rich. Lombard’s potty mother (Alice Brady) natters on about how her ancestors didn’t arrive on the Mayflower — but (consolingly) they did arrive on “some boat.” I was told my ancestors came over on the Mayflower, and my father’s mother was a ‘Daughter of the American Revolution.’ Am I, then the spoiled one? It would seem obvious -- and obviously I would deny it. But La Cava seems to define not being spoiled --  not by just the sheer volume of hardship you endure -- but also by how much you complain about it. Now I’ve gone on about being gay forever, but I’ve never thought of it as a disability, or something that I need to be compensated for. On the contrary, it’s straight people I worry about (how do they endure that endless foreplay?). But — dare I say it? Well, you know I will. A friend of mine who frequents Africa remarked: 'What's the big deal about this whole pandemic thing? They have them all the time in Africa where they don’t have antibiotics. It’s just new for us.'  Well we haven’t run out of ventilators, or hospitals, or doctors and nurses — so isn’t it kind of spoiled for people to run around al the time worrying about their children (who are basically not at risk) or their 90 year old parents? It may seem like I’m the spoiled one -- just complaining about being cooped up here -- but I’m not. I mean I’m fine with my blog (though being co-dependent on it is spooking me out). What I’m really whining about is that our basic human rights have been ripped away, and I’m not certain exactly why. Could it be we’re just spoiled rich white people who have spent years trying to avoid the fact that we get old and we die, and COVID-19 has suddenly made that a reality we can no longer ignore? The homeless men at the dump where William Powell is discovered are casualties of the depression (something we are entering now, by the way) and they keep repeating over and over again, with wry mocking smiles, the false official message of cheer at the time — “prosperity is just around the corner.” That sounds as ridiculous as having to listen over and over again to the ubiquitous COVID-19 party line: ‘we’re all in this together”  — when we have never been so very much alone.

PLAGUE DIARY 36: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

Seven Days in May (1964)
If you want to know what good directing is, you need to watch Seven Days in May; not because it’s a particularly good movie, but because it’s very well directed. It’s Rod Serling’s script again -- which means earnest, masculine and boring. Nary a woman in sight — just Ava Gardner who is hard to miss, but she’s forty-five, and I kept worrying about her makeup and the lines under her eyes. She can’t really act, but she does do anger and sexy very well, and after all, SHE'S A STAR. And Kirk Douglas gets to remind her that she ‘let an air force general use her like his personal airplane” which is the kind of inept metaphor that only Rod Serling could come up with. But Seven Days in May is all about white men in suits or uniforms, smoking, talking earnestly. So leave it to John Frankenheimer to make some moments incredibly unsettling, with music and lighting and vast doomed empty spaces — like the one where the senator is trying to escape from being murdered and he’s suddenly left alone in the airport, and there’s an eerie silence, and there's a black woman and her son, and the son is playing with some weird military toy. It’s very empty and it seems as if the senator might be shot dead — he isn’t, but all that is pure Frankenheimer. Frederic March (stars galore!) gets to deliver the penultimate  speech that says it all — then and now — about fascism: “ Our enemy is an age, the nuclear age, it happens to have killed man’s faith and his ability to influence what happens to him… a sickness of frustration, a feeling of impotence, helplessness, weakness, and from this desperation — we look for a champion in red white and blue.” But frankly you don’t want lines to ‘say it all’; that’s just bad writing. You want lines that say next to nothing but somehow seem real and significant and you’re not sure why. This movie brought back a night from my childhood; the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962). I was 10 years old. For awhile after I was very afraid of the sound of planes overhead  — and this just occurred to me — perhaps this is the reason I’m afraid of flying now, because planes for me have always meant destruction. In case you don’t know, The Cuban Missile Crisis was the moment when President Kennedy stood up to Castro. But Castro had missiles, and it seemed quite possible that he might launch them. I was practicing the ‘cello in my room, and I came out, worried and asked my mother “Can you tell me what’s going to happen?”, and she said “I wish I knew dear. I really wish I knew.” This was the first time I had ever seen her betray the slightest uncertainty. Of course two years later she would divorce my father and start her affair with a married man, and I would spend years watching her cry because of his neglect, and I would start having anxiety attacks. Now I know it was probably because I was taking care of my mother when she of course was meant to take care of me. It was her only responsibility as a mother really, but it was something she was constitutionally incapable of doing. Yes she got us a house in Don Mills, which was way out of our price range, so that we could grow amidst upper middle class children — but now I realise this was more because she was a snob than anything. And still she couldn’t save us from brutal reality. The most traumatic thing I remember from our new little townhouse on Cassandra Boulevard was the plastic toilet seat. I had been used to a wooden one, and this seemed the epitome of cheap classlessness. What, were we peasants? I mentioned it to my mother and she said “Oh we’ll get a proper one.” But we didn’t, and that was the next step towards my disillusion. But I’m not going to go on out my mother, or rather I am, I always do, but I’m not going to blame her for anything. Because she was a brave woman, a trailblazer in many ways. It took such courage for her to divorce my father simply because he was unfeeling (he told us: I didn’t beat her! I didn’t see other women! What was the problem?). But then to embark on a life of perpetual unrequited love, and start her own business, and then drink herself to death, yes I think these are brave things. And if that shocks you, I will tell you something that I am proud to say that I owe to her. The love of bars. She used to tell me that she and Jerry Kelly frequented the Colonial Tavern and Three Small Rooms. They were dedicated jazz fans, and they loved Blossom Dearie (who came to Toronto and sang her own songs in that sweet tiny voice -- I have an autographed napkin from her) and Woody Herman, and Dave Brubeck. And then when I was old enough my mother would take me to jazz clubs, and she was in her element. These were dark old bars and she was noticed, always, and that’s all she wanted, really was to be desired. And that’s all I really want too. In the gay bars it’s called s/m — ‘stand and model’ — but sometimes it’s all we do. In another blog I mentioned A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, Hemingway’s short story about a man who is sitting alone in a bar late at night and won’t go home. And the bartender asks him why, and he says because he fears ‘nothing’ — meaning the lack of everything. And all anyone needs, he says, is clean well-lighted place. I know what Hemingway meant (here I am explaining Hemingway — but he had a problem — too few words, among other things). He meant we need a clean well-lighted place that is not our house, that has something and someone in it, even if it’s just a waiter and a barstool. Yes, it’s about flirting, and being alone, and chatting with the bartender, and looking out the window at the people going by, and perhaps stumbling in an embarrassing way, and perhaps having fumbling contact with someone in a corner, and perhaps a beautiful young man comes up and kisses you madly for no reason — perhaps only because he is unhinged (this has happened to me a couple of times in the last couple of years) but really, it’s worth going to a bar for that. If you don’t get it — and you don’t have to, then at least respect it. You can see the world of dimly lit and seedy bars in Ava Gardners eyes (after all she was married to Frank Sinatra and spent all her time with him either fighting or screwing — what could be better?)  I love being alone in a crowded place and nursing my own dreams over a vodka tonic (but only the kind of dreams you won’t find on Netflix or the Disney Channel). This is all, of course, unnecessary and selfish, and if you didn’t think I was a frivolous and pampered, superficial old fag before, then you certainly think so now. Or else, you understand.

PLAGUE DIARY 35: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

No Blade of Grass (1970)
It was all I could find. It was either this, or An Inconvenient Truth. Because it’s Earth Day. This is perhaps the worst film ever made. There are many films, I’m sure, that could vie for that title. Where do I start? — bad lip-synching (how did that happen?— it’s filmed in English), too many naked breasts for my particular taste, an afterword —“This is not a documentary, but it could be!”, it stars the director's wife (Jean Wallace — there’s a reason you haven’t heard of her), ingenue John Hamill’s claim to fame was that he was a male physique model but he never takes off his clothes in this movie, Roger Whittaker wrote the title song, every ten minutes or so the movie cuts to images of abandoned cars / polluted streams / dead animal carcasses (don’t worry, the epilogue assures you that no living creatures were killed in this film — that of course doesn’t include the hopes and dreams of Cornel Wilde — the director — and his well meaning cast). Do you get the picture? All are fleeing an environmental emergency set in the distant future. But halfway through the film — just in case you make it that far — a fleeing pregnant woman has a baby. The birth of the baby is shown quite, quite graphically — I must say I’ve never seen a baby being born before, at any rate I have never seen a bloody vagina before, with a bloody baby being pulled out. It was very educational. I’m not quite sure why this was in the movie? Perhaps because the birth of a child is the most enthralling and inspiring moment in the life of any human being? I really can’t comment on such things. Then there are the movie’s tag lines: A VIRUS OF DOOM ENVELOPES EARTH!!!! THE CREEPING TERROR DRIFTED TOWARDS THEM STAMPING OUT ALL CIVILIZATION IN ITS EERIE PATH!!!!! MADDENED BY FEAR, THEY TURNED AGAINST EACH OTHER!!!! As you can see, No Blade of Grass is a documentary about COVID-19. Further proof: the virulent virus that is infecting the grass, and killing all the animals (but please remember, none were hurt for this movie) causes food rationing, travel restrictions, and martial law. Proof also,  in this quotation "You know what I think caused the virus it’s because them Chinese fertilize everything with shit.” And: “If the country shows the spirit of the battle of Britain we will pull through!!” However, there is one line in the film that might disqualify it for status as a COVID-19 documentary: "None of this would have happened if we had gone to Canada, we would have been safe and my daughter wouldn’t have been raped!” Are you sure? Actually I’m not sure about you — the person reading this (if there is one). I’m not sure if you are following me. What’s the point of making fun of bad old movies — when people are dying? Well for that matter, what’s the point of living — when people are dying? But we somehow always managed to do it in times gone by. No, something  changed, in the zeitgest, in people’s world view, in our collective unconscious. It’s as if people are finally taking the phrase ‘my brother’s keeper’ much too seriously. The mayor of Las Vegas wants to open casinos. Anderson Cooper asks, incredulously: ‘And people will be smoking there, and drinking there, and gambling, and having fun?’ Nothing could have disgusted Anderson more. How dare we have fun while people are dying? In case you hadn’t noticed, having fun while people die is one of the most difficult tasks that life has given us, and if we can’t rise to that particular occasion then we are dead too. I see -- I’m so callous. So cold and unfeeling. Well the reason it’s important to review stupid old movies is because we are now living in a stupid old movie. It’s an apocalyptic movie called: No Blade of Grass, or Mad Max, or Snowpiercer or The Road, or Zombieland, Doomsday, Children of Men, On the Beach, Escape from New York, Dawn of the Dead, The Day After Tomorrow, Planet of the Apes, Soylent Green, SHALL I GO ON? All of a sudden — for some reason — we have discovered that human life is expendable and it’s so, so shocking. Why didn’t we think of that before? What bubble have we all been living in? A bubble created by that little screen in front of you. And it’s a drug far more powerful than anything Aldous Huxley predicted in Brave New World. Fact has become fiction, and fiction has become fact. Aristotle and Plato knew it — they were terrified of the rhetors (a fancy word for artist). There are very few artists left, but art left us with darkly efficient technologies of deception — which are no longer used in the cause of art (techniques like: surrealism, genre mixing, anti-heroes, unreliable narrators, creative non-fiction —to name a few…). The only actual conspirator here is capitalism — which is one animal that I would have liked to see killed in No Blade of Grass. Capitalism eats money. It eats your life. It’s not right or wrong, it’s a thing, like a rock, meaning it’s not alive, but it produces mass entertainment, which is very much alive and is now eating us whole. On second thought imagine capitalism as a giant snake, and we are the body of rabbit — cute and furry and unsuspecting, slowly being digested under its skin. CNN is so boring right now, and Anderson Cooper presently pisses me off. But oddly, some people just adore it. Real life, true to the heart real stories, about people dying. About people who loved their mothers and fathers. People who cared. People who had winning smiles, and cheered up a room when they walked into it — but are now tragically inexplicably gone. Why, why oh dear God why? People who cared for other people, and never asked for any thanks for what they did, and weren’t movie stars — but they suffered like martyrs for us, and if not — then they suffered in spite of us. And so, we want to go to a party and smoke a friggin' joint? What kind of beasts are we? We are the kind of beasts that an animal called capitalism has brainwashed into believing it’s better to sit home, order food, watch Netflix, and watch porn -- than it is to walk out the door, eat an apple, see a play and have sex. Cuz it’s so much easier to stay home. So much safer? And let me tell you — you’ll live a lot longer? And it’s so nice and cozy inside. For God’s sake will you stop complaining about not being able to go out? Go out where? Why? You have everything you need here! You have a family who loves you, or are you so tone deaf to real human feeling that you don't even understand that? Wake up, smell the coffee. It’s brewing downstairs. Put on your robe and your bunny slippers. Snakes don’t eat bunnies. Nah… that’s just a horrible thing a horrible man said, in a horrible blog. No, no, there are bad things outside, but you are inside —where it’s safe, and you can dream you are anything you want to be — that is, within reason. As long as you stay in the boundaries set up The Disney Corporation (i.e., your dream must have to do with super-heros, and be animated, and heartwarming). There's only one caveat. Just don’t try and live your own dream. Why bother? We’ve set up a ready made dream for you here -- it's the same as everyone's -- and the most magical thing about it is you don’t have to go out of the house. Ever. Because dreaming is all you need.

PLAGUE DIARY 34: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

Murder, She Said (1961)
It’s an Agatha Christie mystery so there’s not much to say, yes Miss Marple sets out to solve a crime and it all boils down to six people who start accusing each other, and then executing each other, one by one. It’s very adequately done; but there’s one element that makes this into an instant classic: Margaret Rutherford. If you’ve never come across Margaret Rutherford than you haven’t lived. I mean that. She is not just an actress. If you see her on screen she will be become a part of your life. She is a force of nature -- I knew she get me through one more night of quarantine. Her big stage hit was Noel Cowards’ Blithe Spirit — playing the nutty medium Madame Arcati. (Interestingly, the character of Arcati was based on the lesbian novelist Radcyffe Hall. Coward once spent a weekend with Hall in Dover, watching her try to contact the spirit of her ex-lover.) Apparently Margaret Rutherford was surprised when people found her funny. This in itself, is shocking. Her face alone is a giggle instigator. Imagine a potato left out in the rain, staring at you, nonplussed. When someone asked Margaret Rutherford how she felt about Madame Arcati’s wacky spiritualist practices (going into trances, humming old songs, speaking in the voice of a small child) she was flabbergasted. (That word suits Margaret Rutherford so well). No, Rutherford didn’t find anything odd about Madame Arcati at all. This is the secret of great comic acting, not only do you not ‘act funny’ but — and few can achieve this — you actually have to believe the character you are playing is serious. Miss Marple — despite resembling a wet potato — is serious about everything — she even opens an umbrella with a maniacally dedicated intention. To see her throw on a cape and muffler and run out the door is heaven; and her absolute refusal to be rattled by anything makes one know for certain that all is infinitely right with the world — COVID or no COVID. From the first scene where the police challenge her and she corrects them — “If you imagine that I am going to sit back and let everyone regard me as a dotty old maid you are very much mistaken” — there is a sturdy self-sufficiency about her that is better than God. And finally it’s almost impossible to look at her in that French maid’s outfit; a giant bouncing blob of flesh with a sequinned black bow stuck on it’s head. Or perhaps more accurately she appears to be— well, a man. Nothing makes Margaret Rutherford look more like a man than a dress. I’ve had my suspicions about her, so I went into a Wikipedia wormhole. The first clue is Coward hired her to play a lesbian (not only does the character have a lesbian pedigree but Madame Arcati’s insistence on bracing walks and invigorating bicycle rides are yes — not only more English than the queen — but more lesbian than a bad haircut). In addition, Coward surrounded himself with lesbians. They were his favourite people — Gertrude Lawrence (who had an affair with Beatrice Lillie — another Coward Favourite — as well as Dahne DuMaurier the famous novelist), Gladys Calthrop (Coward’s favourite designer) and Coward’s favourite actress Joyce Cary. But if that isn’t enough — Margaret Rutherford was married to a man six years her junior — Stringer Davis — who is quoted in Wikipedia as saying that: “for him she was not only a great talent but, above all, a beauty.” No straight man in his right mind would ever say that about Margaret Rutherford. In addition Davis is also in Murder She Said, and resembles an old woman somewhat more than Rutherford. But I’m not done yet. Later in life, Davis and Rutherford adopted a young gay man (whaaaa…?) named Gordon Hall. Are you sitting down? Gordon Hall was an extremely effeminate young writer who moved to New York, promptly met a hot black butler named Jean Paul Simmons, and promptly had a sex change — becoming Dawn Simmons after marrying him. (Gordon Hall claimed that he had been born with a large clitoris that was mistaken for a penis, but gay tribal lore has it that the promiscuous Gordon Hall had been a bit too prodigiously endowed for that.) When people who didn’t know Dawn was transsexual were shocked that she would marry a butler, Margaret Rutherford said “What would it matter, if he were a good butler?” And when they further objected that he was black, she said “Oh, I don’t mind Dawn marrying a black man, but I do wish she wasn’t marrying a Baptist.” I think we’ve stumbled on an essential page of queer history here, something that tells us our lives are not always exactly the same as yours. Something that also tells us that there are queers walking the streets today in these self-isolating times — queers who don’t lead ‘new normal’ lives (sexual or otherwise) and therefore aren’t married to the person they are with, and who are afraid they are going to be arrested for standing too close. All that said, I don’t love Margaret Rutherford because she was probably a raging bulldyke who blazed a trail — however closeted she had to be — or because she still managed to get an Oscar (for The V.I.P.s). I love her because she was more than a great actress. She was my friend. Perhaps the friends I’ve been talking about in these blogs are not living breathing people — perhaps they are the people I’ve met inside the movies I watched. For instance — Jean Harlow — well I got quite close to her in Red-Headed Woman, and Bette Davis and I went out for a drink when I watched The Star, and Paul Newman in The Rack asked me for some advice (but I found it hard to concentrate when speaking),  and during Of Human Hearts James Stewart and I shared a piece of American pie. (For your information, Shirley Temple wanted to share a drink but I refused.) And we haven’t even seen a Judy Garland movie yet. These are great actors because they became the parts they played, and yes, they are my friends, because they lived on screen and in my life! Theywere were real for the time that I knew them in the films that I love -- and if you challenge that then I won’t speak to you, no matter how flesh and blood you are. Because I know that tonight, when I think I’m going to scream if I turn on the TV only to hear one more bloated statistic, one more self-righteous weeping widow, or one more rictus-faced public health official — all I have to do is think of Margaret Rutherford in that kitchen, in that ridiculous maid’s outfit, sipping tea and assuring the police detective that he needn’t worry, because she thinks she just might know who the killer might be. She’s the mother that I 'kind-of' had — in our best moments. And nothing is more real than that.

PLAGUE DIARY 33: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

Out of the Past (1947)
I have a lot of trouble not believing everything will end; and of course it will — but today that idea seems more potent than ever. I didn’t want to review a movie tonight, but I hoped this much-praised-film-noir might carry me away. It didn’t. I suppose I can understand why Out of the Past is so popular — the actors do a helluva a lot of very sexy smoking — so much smoking that it’s almost ludicrous — and the femme fatale is about as fatale as a femme can get. The dialogue is delivered at such a pace and with so little thought that one can’t help imagining that the lines just might be witty. But the wittiest one I could find was  —“A dame with a rod is like a guy with a knitting needle” (which is actually witty by accident, because a rod only meant a pistol in 1947). Speaking of murder, Out of the Past is also lethally misogynistic. Jane Greer is an empty actress, and all that is required is that she be beautiful and point guns at people. I suppose some might be sexually aroused; for me she is Karla Homolka — irredeemable — and since that’s what so many men already think women are, do we really need to see it? Anyway — reading the Wikipedia reviews,  it’s very revealing to discover I’m not alone in finding the plot inscrutable. I hate plots, but I love narrative. You can trust a narrative because it loves you back, but a plot is something that confounds you — merely out of cruelty and arrogance. Remember that TV show (I never saw it) — that was always befuddling everyone because they couldn’t figure out the secret — and then it turned out there wasn’t one? That’s pretty much Out of the Past. Is there, perhaps no secret? I mean, generally? I’ve suggested before that the secret is beauty. I could write about Robert Mitchum’s eyes. Are they perpetually crying, or perpetually laughing? Both perhaps. But God gave them to him, or if you don’t believe in God, then it was an accident of nature, a confusion of atoms. At any rate, there’s no sense in congratulating Robert Mitchum on it. Then there’s the 22 year old Dickie Moore, child actor, who in this particular b-move plays a stunning deaf mute with amazing eyes, cheekbones and teeth (what could be more symbolic?). I could talk about his beauty. But I won’t. Speaking of deaf mutes, here is the writing advice I received from Mavor Moore, who was the worst writing teacher I ever had. I know he was a giant of Canadian theatre but he was also a stunning charlatan. I learned from his writing seminars at York University how to format a script. That’s it. Oh — and one day, he gifted the entire class with this dramaturgical gem: “Here’s some valuable advice. Write a play about a deaf mute girl. I guarantee, there’s a lot of money in it.” (He was referring to his hit musical version of Johnny Belinda.) I wasn’t offended as much by his dismissal of the suffering of disabled people as I was by his raging commercial instinct. (A raging commercial instinct is not unlike a raging hard-on — it’s very pleasant for those that have it, but not always for those that are on the receiving end.) But I’m tired of trying to entertain you, or more properly, trying to entertain myself. On a night like this — with three weeks to go — and they — everyone says— will surely extend the social distancing guidelines after that — who cares? Apparently there are people who actually enjoy living like this? I don’t have the time or inclination to ponder the demented craziness of someone who actually enjoys self-isolation. I couldn’t get ahold of a friend for a week, and she said she hadn’t answered my emails because she was burning incense and praying. I don’t believe that —not that she was praying and burning incense for a week — but that she couldn’t pick up her phone. It’s an endless nothing. And then of course the thought came tonight — because it will be dark and cold tomorrow, and so many people I know are on the verge of cracking, and that guy in Halifax just killed 19 people  — what if there was nothing anymore to write about? That’s my m.o. : I think everyone will leave me, and no one will read my work or watch my plays. I imagine everything ending, but specifically my talent. I know that sounds conceited to imagine even that I have talent. But don’t worry, at the same time as I imagine I have it, I also imagine it will disappear. So I might as well not have any talent at all. (I probably don’t.) I wish I could write about nothing, Shakespeare was very good at that. And also Hemingway (A Clean Well Lighted Place). Perhaps that is the measure of a writer, being capable of writing about nothing, zero, nada (Pause) Aporia. That’s what this is, isn’t it? Tell me it’s just a pause? I’ve imagined  that things will get better after the endless pandemic — sexier, maybe — but I know they won’t.  I’ve had a lot of ‘If I died’ talks with people lately. ‘If I died right now, would it be okay?’ And the ones I love say: ‘if I died right now it wouldn’t matter because I’ve lived the life I want to live.” Do those words strike terror in your heart? Well it’s my theory that the people who love self-isolation are the ones who have not lived their lives. They regret everything, and nothing could make them happier than to continue on in exactly the same manner — without regret — because, after all, what is there now for them to do? I always think of Susan Sontag in this respect. She had cancer for I think nearly thirty years; her life was always being ripped away from her. And i like to think that she wanted to live, and that’s one of the reasons why she stayed alive. (But we all know that’s not true — some people are just taken, even when they want so much not to go, and that is the nightmare.) But although I am one of the ones who likes to say ‘If I went now it wouldn’t matter because I’ve lived the life I want to live’ I am lying. Because it would matter — to me. (I can admit this because I am a submissive — not so much in bed but — well yes, that too — but also just generally, believe it or not). I wish I could say I’m fine with dying because I’ve lived my life to the fullest. But I would say no no please  don’t take it away — not because I’m afraid of the nothingness that is death, but because life is just too much damn fun. I suppose I'm privileged for enjoying my life especially at this late age. But I’m crazy enough to think it should be that way for everyone, and that to want to die — to want nothing — as opposed to everything — is a kind of pathology. Nothing, nada. For Shakespeare ‘nothing’ was also slang for female genitalia. (I’m phrasing that tactfully just in case you are reading this aloud to your children every night, after origami and calisthenics, during this 'trying time that we are all enduring together.') But I think perhaps that pun made ‘nothing’ bearable for Shakespeare, which is perhaps why he was a genius, and a real writer. Sadly, it’s not enough for me.

PLAGUE DIARY 32: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

Red-Headed Woman (1932)
Written by a woman (Anita Loos) — although the first draft of the screenplay was by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and based on a novel by a woman — it is what you might expect: way ahead of its time. In fact I think it might be necessary still, to catch up. I kept waiting for it all to turn tragic, as Jean Harlow plays quite an awful woman, the amazing thing is that she still manages to maintain our sympathy. Lil Andrews is Shakespearean in conception; there is nothing good about her other than her beauty. Her journey In the film is from man to man, and she’s clearly only after them for their money. She ruins a perfectly good marriage — out of greed — and decimates poor Chester Morris by flinging herself at him in a manner that is almost frightening, until he divorces his wife and marries her. Then she leaves him for a richer man, and finally ends up shooting Morris — not fatally, thank God — because, remarkably, it’s a comedy. Lil Andrews would have been a ‘fallen woman’ in 19th century melodrama — and only 40 years earlier Oscar Wilde managed with much wit and dramaturgical craft to redeem such women, but not without excessive breast beating, to expiate the guilt and shame. I am trying to think of a movie that I have seen recently in which a woman screws her way to the top and does not end up dead and/or detestable. Jean Harlow ends up married to some old rich geezer and we feel almost a little sorry for her — is this what you wanted? A life sentence of having sex with that creature? But the camera pans back and we realise that Charles Boyer (in 1932, he was really sexy) who is her chauffeur and paramour, is driving the car. So she’s really got everything she wants. And it never happens that way, for sexual women, in art. My favourite moment is when she chooses a dress at the movie’s start. She asks the salesgirl “Can you see through this?”, and the girl replies, tentatively: “I’m afraid you can, Miss” and  Harlow responds —“I’ll wear it.” And when she’s chasing after Chester Morris she gets a waiter at the restaurant to tell him he has a phone call (he’s having dinner with his wife) and Harlow is waiting for him in the phone booth (remember phone booths?), and shuts the door and throws herself at him, and after necking a bit they come out. Someone is waiting to use the phone, and watches Chester Morris and then Jean Harlow, each by each, exit the booth. Yes, I’ve been in the situation (only it was a toilet) many times. Yes, I was kicked out of a washroom in a gay bar in Brighton England, for setting up a kind pf a practice in a cubicle (you don’t want to know) and it was Pride Day and that was the only place to go in Brighton. So you see Harlow and I have a lot in common.  And yet I don’t know if I’ve ever been able to convince anyone that I’m actually a very appealing person, at least one on one.  Of course that’s a bald-faced lie; some people do seem to think I’m nice and ‘human;’ but you do cut yourself off from easily half the population imagining you are capable love, if you talk too much about sex. Chester Morris’s wife says exactly that about Jean Harlow “You caught him with sex — but love is one thing you don’t know anything about and never will.” I learned about being a ‘fallen woman’ from my mother. When we joined the Unitarian Church in Don Mills — this would have been back in 1968 perhaps — she told me how difficult it was for her to make friends because she was a divorcee and couples would of course not have her to dinner. Then of course, she fell in love with Jerry Kelly, a philandering, alcoholic, Roman Catholic father married with six boys; they used to stay up late at night, and drink, and smoke listen to Frank Sinatra, and I assume, after I was in bed, they did it. Because my mother was in love with Jerry, she had sex with hardly anyone else, but she was always so beautiful that men wanted her endlessly, and women were endlessly jealous (at least according to her) — kind of like Jean Harlow. How does Jean Harlow manage to maintain our sympathy, especially when she is basically a pragmatic home wrecker who uses sex (Noel Coward coined this phrase) “like a shrimping net”? We sympathise with her because she is believably vulnerable, and her desperation to get up in the world “I'm not gonna spend my whole life on the wrong side of the railroad tracks” is noble, in the same way that Shylock’s anger over the treatment of the Jews makes him demand a pound of flesh. Well it’s important to know that just because you’re obsessed with sex, and even if you use it to get what you want (and why shouldn’t a woman use it? It’s a man’s world, and that certainly hasn’t changed) that doesn’t mean that you’re not capable of love. I think Jean Harlow is in love with Charles Boyer at the end. Anita Loos has her number; I mean, you can’t marry a chauffeur, can you? So you marry a rich man and have it off with the chauffeur on the side. And right now I want to tell you all sorts of things about the man I love, but I’ve been sworn to secrecy. You see I couldn’t write this, or anything like this, ever again, if I ever revealed any details about him. I do write about him in poems, or I did, when I was still writing poems, but poems are different. It’s nice to think that he’s too big for prose.  But I don’t keep these kinds of secrets about anyone else. I’ve written things about my dead mother and father that I know they would have hated but  — and not unlike Jean Harlow — I thought it was worth it, career-wise for me to  spill those beans. But I can’t do that with him. The terror of losing him is enormous, and I do have a terror of losing things. The irony is that he will never leave me; I know that, even if he comes to hate me some day. It’s a weird kind of love, when they love you like that. And when you’ve said things to each other that are quite savage — not just laced with hate but dripping with blood. And then of course, you kiss and make up, knowing that you have ripped each others guts out. That’s a gesture that is more than courtesy and respect, it’s like being friends with someone who has just killed someone, and steps over the body to kiss you. ‘No  — that’s not love!’ — you say? ‘Love is affection and sweetness and cuddling with a good kind person?’ Well you have your love and I’ll have mine. I’m afraid of him — and adore him — because he knows everything about me and everything about himself; and I’ve never really met anyone who knows that much about those two things. He can cut me to the quick and he does, sometimes, but then when he doesn’t; it seems like an act of the utmost tenderness, so gentle I just can’t put it into words.

PLAGUE DIARY 31: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

Sergeant York (1940)
I refuse to review this film; I almost don’t want to tell you anything about it, but suffice to say it’s propaganda, pure and simple. In 1940, I’m sure America needed to persuade all those young men to volunteer to die. World War I produced some of the greatest carnage in human history. And for many the aftermath was to abandon reason and a certain ordered way of life. The anti-logic went like this; if civilisation, learning, and knowledge has brought us to this nightmare, then maybe we shouldn’t be civilised. Ergo: drugs, Dada, the 20s, a nervous fury to live, live live. One could, I suppose, analyse propaganda. If so the primary warning is this; beware of the humble. I know that a propaganda machine named Donald Trump is the opposite of humble, but at least we know what we are getting with him. We must be much more wary of the shy tact of Justin Trudeau, who registers on most everyone’s radar as if he wouldn’t hurt a flea. Gary Cooper’s Sergeant York is so sweet and shy and god-fearin’ that you want to kick him in the nuts. At least I did. He finds God, and soon after, he devours a book of American history and — before you know it — lickety-split — he’s off killing people and winning medals. When offered a monetary reward for his daring deeds, he turns it down. But of course he is rewarded on earth, not just in heaven. To put it in the manner of Sargeant York, I must admit -- 'I can’t abide religion. It sticks in my craw.’ I went to a Buddhist temple once. I tell you all religions are the same. Worshippers who I thought were supposed to be meditating were measuring their karma in coffee spoons: ‘I’ve built up enough karma, I think, so that now I can be more successful in my business or my marriage?’ What? Sargeant York is a selfless, bible-thumping sharp-shooter who wants nothing but to do good, and at the end he gets the ‘bottom-land’ he’s always yearned for. Capitalism eats everything — even religion — and in this movie you understand the real reason to believe in God: because the material rewards are substantial. Okay, enough. Let’s talk about beauty. Let’s talk about Gary Cooper. He was 39 when he starred as Sergeant York, playing opposite that perennial old coot Walter Brennan, who was only 7 years older than him. But that's fiction: we believe Gary Cooper is a young man, there are: those eyes and the delicate lashes, his slim body, the vertical lines of his face, those long graceful fingers. (Yes — according to Marlene Dietrich — he was extremely well-endowed.) Gary Cooper is that kind of marvellous actor who can’t act. What we appreciate is how hard he tries, such earnestness attached to such perfect beauty. And that’s certainly enough. I know Keanu Reeves played Hamlet at the Manitoba Theatre Centre in 1995. Watching that would have been like watching Gary Cooper in this movie. Is it okay to talk about beauty? I’m never sure nowadays. I’d like you to understand what beauty is, first. Beauty is whatever you want it to be, and that’s what makes it truth (in the Keats sense) and not in the sense that you might want it to be. When I tell you that Gary Cooper and Keanu Reeves are beautiful, it’s my job to persuade you of that fact, because without my persuasion, their beauty will vanish into thin air. Several of my own friends are older artists, and a lot of them are talking about dying. Some have told me that they don’t see any reason to live anymore now that they don’t get grants and don’t create. I’ve been trying to help them find a reason to live. I think they have have decided to live, and I think it’s because of beauty. Beauty is the only reason to live. Now you might say — ‘I live for truth, not beauty.’ But if you live for truth in the usual sense, then you live for propaganda, you live for someone’s idea of what is right or wrong, or someone’s idea of what is the origin of the universe, or for someone’s idea of what is the most effective political system. I’m trying to think of the most beautiful thing I have experienced recently, so I can persuade you. But it’s been so long since I’ve been to a dark room at The Eagle! (I’m completely serious.) The urgency of his kisses I suppose. I met a young man there a couple of months ago. It was a poignant encounter, at the end of the night, poignant because it was so urgent, we met about 10 minutes before the lights went on, which is when you are summarily kicked out. But that’s what made it so feverish and intense. I thought that was all it would be, and then a couple of weeks later I was, there, not waiting, just there — happened to be — same time same place. And he turned up again. Full lips, long hair, and I remember touching his body, so slender and small compared to mine, but we just couldn’t stop kissing each other. Is it tawdry and sad to you? And what is tawdry and sad about a young man’s yearning? Ah, I am romanticising it — it was the meeting of two horny bodies in a the filthy back room of a sleazy gay bar, and I’ll probably never see him again. Everything dies, and everything is renewed, but what we had was inured by fantasy. For both of us, I’m sure. I think I was for him a big, protective older ‘daddy,’ and for me he was a drawing by Cocteau, a churlish youth with curly hair painted in black ink on white paper. I think I know what it is about kissing a young man. It’s my own lips I am kissing. I waited so long. I didn’t know what love was. I heard love songs, and I thought they were stupid, I was embarrassed by my difficulty in understanding them, then I met Glenn Cassie, who was a poet with curly hair. They are all poets with curly hair, as far as I am concerned. And I was boy poet with curly hair who wrote tortured journals, telling myself over and over again that desire did not matter, and emotion did not matter, and I didn’t have to follow my feelings just because I felt them. So every time I kiss a beautiful young man I am kissing myself — which sounds like narcissism but it’s actually not. I am rescuing him. Don’t you see? ‘No, no, young man, you don’t have to endure a yearning that is never fulfilled, hiding your desire, cursing yourself. No. Instead throw yourself against it, no directly into it —  be it. I give you all this by kissing you.’ Have I persuaded you of the beauty of that encounter in the most unlikely of places? Doubtless I have not.  (I am using humility there; the rhetor's secret weapon.) Sergeant York is rhetorical beauty — it has only Gary Coopers humility, his earnest bad acting, and his young lean body to convince us, and it works, and I would like to love it, if only we were not being told that what the movie offers us is ‘the truth’ — truth that is very specific, and must last forever. I am offering you something else. I am offering you beauty — which is as truthful as a cloud and as likely to disappear. I make no claims for it other than it may divert you for a second or two, so that, alas, you won’t have to think about death.

PLAGUE DIARY 30: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

Neptune’s Daughter  (1949)
As Keenan Wynn (the narrator) says: “It’s the story of a guy, a girl and a bathing suit.” It’s actually quite funny as these musical comedies go, there are several cases of mistaken identity, and lo and behold Esther Williams (the queen of all swimming musicals) ends up getting along swimmingly with Ricardo Montalban, and they both look pretty fabulous in bathing suits. I keep stumbling across these movies written by women, and I’m beginning to think that maybe the notion that Hollywood was created by men and for men, is a myth. The screenwriter of this movie — Dorothy Kingsley — also wrote the screen plays for Kiss Me Kate, Pal Joey and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. Okay I’m gay and I admit I find heterosexuality very confusing, and I can’t understand how it would not be frustrating for all those involved. Because with gay men it’s a matter of just doing it, or perhaps doing it too much, but it usually doesn’t take very much time to get down to doing it — unless the gay men are trying to act like heterosexuals  (which they do sometimes, dammit) — whereas with straight people, it seems to me like it’s all about the getting down to it, so much so that they sometimes forget to actually do it. You don’t have to listen to my opinions about feminism, unless you decide to read on, but most of them were formed by my friendship with desiring women. My mentor was Sue Golding, — now Johnny Golding — who when I asked her so many years ago about female agency in pornography, sent me a postcard (we were fond of have discussions through postcards) featuring a bunch of women in some old Hollywood movie spanking each other. I remember when I questioned her about it — ‘how do you know some man didn’t tell them they had to spank each other?’ She just looked at me in that way she had -- bold, challenging, and kinda quirky: ‘Who says?” Sue would always assume that every woman was a lesbian; I think it may have gotten her into trouble, but it was the kind of trouble she liked. I know this because she started a story once with ‘I was talking to my bank teller, who I assume, of course, is a lesbian,’ and I asked her ‘Why do you assume that?’ And she said  ‘Because I always automatically assume every woman is a lesbian.’ That was the kind of lesbian Sue was (and still is; she’s called Johnny now, but she’s a woman called Johnny, not a man). Not all lesbians are like Sue/Johnny. There are also lesbians like Susan Cole — a journalist acquaintance of mine, who generally acts as if lesbians don’t have desire, or if they do, it’s very different from the the desire gay men have — not just different, but as if we are another species. Once I met Susan Cole at the live concert performance of Elaine Stritche’s one woman show. I didn’t really want to talk to her, but she was sitting in my seat. Once we worked that out, she said  leaned over with condescending, pedantic interest, and asked: ’I’ve always wanted to know — what is it you gay men love so much about Elaine Stritch?’ 'The fact that she’s fucking talented,’ I said. It wasn’t so much the question, as how it was posed — are we really so different from you Susan, us gay men? Well desire is what I want to talk about, especially women’s desire, and I also want to clear up a whole pile of crap that has been spewed about the song ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’ which if you remember was recently banned by the politically correct #MeToo thought police. Apparently that song is supposed to be all about rape, and so we’re not allowed to sing it anymore. Well the song was written by Frank Loesser (Guys and Dolls). He first sang it with his wife (a musical comedy actress) for a gaggle of friends at a ski resort. It first appeared before the public in Neptune’s Daughter, performed by Esther Williams, Ricardo Montalban, Betty Garrett and Red Skelton. Riccardo Montalban sings the song to Esther Williams, who is wearing a fur coat on a cold night. He is trying to get her into bed (shocking, I know!). It is a song about flirtation between a man and a woman, in which the man is using every persuasive method at his disposal to get the woman into bed. But that’s not all. In the middle of the duet between Williams and Montalban, the screen cuts to Betty Garret and Red Skelton. Only in this case it is Betty Garret who is chasing Red Skelton around the couch. During the song, Red Skelton dresses up like Betty Garrett, and does a bit of a drag turn (which he repeats in a slightly different situation where he dresses in a woman’s swimsuit -- in a big Esther Williams synchronised swimming number -- because he’s trying unsuccessfully to pretend he’s a pretty girl to hide from gangsters. Where did the gangsters come from? Who knows. It’s that kind of movie) . If that isn’t enough fo you, have a look at Betty Garrett’s character. She is a man-hungry man-chaser (and she's really the funniest thing in the film, though Red Skelton is actually pretty funny too). When she hears that the men’s polo team is coming to town, she says “It’s my chance to meet a romantic Latin. I’m madly in love with the Whole American Polo Team” When her staid sister Esther Williams. (Yes she’s staid, even though she works out all her emotional problems by swimming in sexy bathing suits. For Esther Williams, a good swim is akin to a Shakespearean soliloquy, it calms her down.) Anyway Esther Wiliams challenges Betty Garrett, and Betty says “What’s wrong with a woman chasing a man?” and uptight swimsuit Esther says well it’s usually the other way around, and Betty Garrett replies, rather pithily, I think: “I don’t want to change it, I just want to get in on it.” Betty Garrett is like all those women who have ever asked me --  ‘why aren’t their bathhouses for women?’ When you call 'Baby, It’s Cold Outside' a rape song you wipe out the history of female desire, which goes further back than screenwriter Dorothy Kingsley — as far back as Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (and further). 'Baby, Is Cold Outside' is not a rape song, it wasn’t written or performed as a rape song, it’s a song about men and women and desire. Women have rape fantasies and rape flirtations and want to rape and be raped just like men, even though no one in their right mind ever wants anything in real life but consensual sex. And that’s all ok. Cuz you can’t police desire.  And I’m sure Betty Garrett would agree with me (if she hadn’t died, dammit). And, I think Esther Williams (after giving it a few moments of thought in her swimming pool) would agree with me too.

PLAGUE DIARY 29: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

Isle of the Dead (1945)
There is too much about this movie that applies. Boris Karloff — looking rather statuesque with black eye makeup and what appears to be curly blonde hair (kinda David Bowie, actually) is the cruel-to-be-kind general in a Grecian town. His first act is to order a rebellious soldier to shoot himself  (“Who is against the law of Greece is not a Greek”). The next thing you know Karloff’s on an island cemetery,  a doctor declares a plague, and they’re not allowed to leave. Sound familiar? Jason Robards Sr. (yes, the father of….as Albrecht, a Swiss archeologist) — and Boris Karloff  —argue about whether to follow the doctor’s orders. Karloff says: “The doctor is the doctor. Do what he says.” Albrecht says: “We’ll make a wager, The doctor can use his science. I’ll pray to Hermes.  We’ll see who is saved.” They go to shake hands and Robards notices: “You broke the doctor’s first order — no contact.” But Karloff is firm: "I’ll break no more of his orders.” He’s right. Karloff becomes the health policeman, yelling “No one may leave this Island!” a little too loudly. Later the handsome young Marc Cramer wants to kiss the beautiful young Ellen Drew (who are those actors? What happened to them?). Boris Karloff follows them into the woods until Marc lashes out: “There’s something more dangerous than septicemic plague — your own crazy thoughts.” Boris Karloff is an awful lot like Theresa Tam, Canada’s Chief Public Health Officer. In fact she somewhat resembles him. When they smile, it comes out like a grimace. What is it with Public Health Officials? Do they enjoy making us feel terrible and ruining our mental health? I used to think so. But after watching this movie I’ve decided it’s really not their fault. As Jason Robards Sr. says of  the dead Karloff at the end of Isle of the Dead: “In the back of his madness, there was something good; he wanted to protect.” Ahh. Yes. Who knew it would take a 1945 RKO b-movie to explain COVID-19? Perhaps the writer — Ardel Wray, a woman who went on to write many horror movies and TV shows, and was somewhat of a writing legend in Hollywood — is the clue. This film is serious, thoughtful, business, with a dash of feminism thrown in — young Ellen Drew is not sure if she is the ‘Vivoliker’ — the evil female spirit causing the plague; thank God it turns out she isn’t. I’m going to say it now, I’m going to speak out against science; it’s about time someone did. Okay, objects do exist in reality — we need to know that a table is a table —  and yes, where would we be without toasters? I’m not saying that science hasn’t done some good, but lately (during the last 200 years)  it’s become somewhat of a religion. And instinct, magic, and intuition all have bad names. But there is something about us — called humanity — that can’t be created in a petri dish or poured out of  a test tube. Kuhn and Foucault will both tell you: it’s almost impossible to think outside a paradigm when you’re smack in the middle of it. (But Einstein did.) Think of what science was like before Einstein’s theories were proven and accepted. We still lived in Isaac Newton’s world and gravity had nothing to do with time. Then, for a short while, two realities existed simultaneously because, after all, there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Well there's more truth in these old movies than in a single mindnumbingly tedious, and subtextually angry speech by Theresa Friggin’ Tam. But hey, I feel sorry for her, she’s caught in a trap not of her own devising, To dare to step out of the science ‘box’ is to be struck dead by facts (with religion, it used to be fate). A friend of mine is in love with someone who he hasn’t seen for a month because she won’t leave her house. She’s a writer and she sends him arty, befuddling, bewitching videos — very Russian, riddles wrapped in enigmas. He is defiant and will leave his house. But he’s noticed just the tiniest hint of discomfort in her emails (it’s tough reading emails for the slightest discomfort — but it can be done). And then yesterday yes, he saw her on the street. I’ll never forget him telling me how he felt, all the confusion, anger, love, hate, fear, etc. What was she doing on the street? Why did she go out? She was wearing blue muffler covering her mouth (of course). He said something very unthreatening, like ‘Here we are, this is strange isn’t it? Isn’t this the oddest experience you’ve ever had?’ It was something out of a movie. And she just said. ‘It’s the new normal’ and walked away. He asked me to analyse her remark for tone, and I said it’s angry, it’s an angry remark, you know it is —but she’s not angry at you he’s angry at ‘it.’ But unfortunately for her and all of us, like so many, she doesn’t want to be angry, she wants to be normal. And what are you supposed to do when there is a new normal, but normal is something you’ve aspired all your life not to be? This little scene was Romeo and Juliet. I have no doubt this so-called plague is going to break up families, and lovers, because I know  that some people are on my side, some people are on my side but won’t say it, some people are not on my side, some people are doing what they are told, some people just love being normal, and finally, some people are fiercely furious that I am going outside. I know you’re still shocked that I’m crazy enough not to trust science. What am I, nuts? (Maybe. Is that a bad thing?) But can you understand that I might be willing to take a pill (and I do I take them, lots) but when it comes down to choosing between loving people and being ‘healthy’ I have to look all those scientists in the eye and say ‘Excuse me but you’ve created a false dichotomy. I simply refuse to choose between love and death.’ And I’m not going to be happy about putting my art on a friggin’ computer — I’m not happy about putting this on a computer. It’s just that if I didn’t I’d explode. And I curse all those artists saying ‘little did we know that all the time there was this tremendous resource, that we could reach out and touch people with digital technology.’ Well you can’t. You are not touching anybody unless you touch them. You have to be in the same room and smell their sweat, and lick their vagina, or yes, I’ll say it, their butt. That’s what it’s all about. Without that, you’ve forgotten what it means to be human. The monster lurking behind this movie — The Vivoliker — sounds an awful lot like The Vulvalicker to me. I wouldn’t put it past the writer of a totally feminist horror movie from 1945, unacknowledged by anyone— Adele Wray. I get the sense that she knew how important it was to lick a vulva (or the male equivalent of one) now and then. And I’m kind of afraid to ask. But If you saw the person you loved for the first time in a month on the street wearing the required mask would you speak to them?  Would you do what love tells you and touch their arm? Or would you do what science tells you, and walk away?