Is this the last summer?

I only ask because everything associated with summer is gone. I remember a summer four years ago in Vancouver, by a pool, with friends; we were at a theatre conference together. These were people I had known for many years — mostly women — we bought food and shared it. I don’t do this often — that is attend a party — I’m mainly alone in groups with strangers. (I don’t know why, because I like parties — but then I don’t, because meeting new people is perilous, being trapped with a bore even more so— I know, awful of me to say— and worse yet is being ‘Sky Gilbert,’ that is, meeting someone who won’t tell me their name, so awed are they by talking with ‘a star.’ I’m not bragging, it’s just a reality and crazy and wrong. I won’t speak to such a person if they don’t identify themselves. And then there is the awful memory of my first gay parties — because in my imagination it was there I would meet men. What frigid condescension and high-school cliquishness! I was immediately excluded, and hurt — no wounded. I only seem to enjoy parties when I am the centre of them, which is sad, I know.) Anyway, here is Lewis Carrol on the end of summer days: “Dreaming as the days go by, / Dreaming as the summers die: / Ever drifting down the stream— / Lingering in the golden gleam— / Life, what is it but a dream?” I’m talking about touching,  cavorting, swimming (naked?), being less than six feet away from each other, sharing food, kisses, drink, drugs, and who cares what else? I don’t see the new normal ever disappearing as this paranoia about human contact is not only related to our increasingly digital lives, but to increasing paranoia about disease. I do not see the world getting less infections, but more so. (Not in reality, in fantasy. But, fantasy is all that matters.) Who knows whether we will be living in a more or less ‘infectious’ time, nevertheless living and breathing will be perceived as essentially dangerous, and other people perceived as potential agents of harm. We are biologically wired to fear difference, so it’s a hop skip and a jump to this particular brand of madness. We can talk about anti-racism forever but if we are pretending to embrace the ‘other’ but simultaneously viewing every stranger as a potential carrier of the plague, our pious social justice platitudes will have no effect. The 50s notion of the ‘family’ — has also made a return. One is safe in it’s ‘bosom,’ while God knows what kind of abuse, at worst —  or emotional manipulation, at best — is going on there. But it’s all misery. We are ordered to love our families though they are often more strange to us than those with whom we are not yet acquainted. The bond of ‘blood’ is insidious and the very source of hatred. But all this valorization of the family heralds our upcoming winter; it’s best to scurry home every night, and not look about. We’ll turn on the lights and start the fire in our little safe cave — a bulwark against the dangers of touching, drinking, carousing, singing, and dancing. I echo Nashe’s sentiments from “Summer’s Last Will and Testament”: “Go not yet away, bright soul of the sad year; The earth is hell when thou leav'st to appear.” Summer is gone, we must try and forget it ever happened. But I’ll always remember that party by the pool where we laughed quite cruelly, viciously even, at others, we laughed at Brendan Healy and his gang of beautiful boys who swam nightly and didn’t seem to want to talk to us, we laughed at anyone who was not there and was our perceived enemy, and we also knew of course that we were wittier and more profound than anyone, for nothing seems quite as charming as that which happens on a summer night. Last night ‘beauty’ visited the baths. I was in my room minding my own business, and I saw him approach. Was he a stripper who had gotten lost somehow? What was he doing there? And why was he looking at me? He entered and I was all over him; doing things he very much wanted to have done to him — if I was to believe the noises he was making. I won’t go on — but it was heaven and then after getting into a few of odd positions and situations, he was very nicely and apologetically gone. I went to shower a few minutes later, but I could not take one, because he was about to get into into it with someone else. And this is the image that will stay with me — the future smile from this summer night: because whoever he was climbing into the shower with was not, obviously, protesting. Why would they? It was a minute epiphany: this is what it means to be young and gay and beautiful (for I never was) and to know that if you are in a sexual environment (and even sometimes not) you have absolute license to invade anyone’s personal space, to start kissing anyone, because quite simply everyone not only wants you, but can’t get enough. So partly it’s never having been that young man and never having had that experience, but it’s also knowing that’s the way things should be — for everyone — at some time or other. And if not, that’s somebody’s fault. What a crime to tell you my dirty stories in the middle of a COVID Summer of suffering! But remember, it’s not really summer, if you’re not gathering freely (shall we call it) if you’re not getting into some sort of mischief, even if it’s just badmouthing somebody with a drink in your hand under the stars. It will all be a dream, some day, a remembrance, so I wanted to say goodbye. It’s not easy. Lewis Carroll again:  ‘Still she haunts me, phantomwise / Alice moving under skies / Never seen by waking eyes.” We shall not be awake but we shall know that summer exists always in our minds eye  —  not just  to help us cope — but so that we might enter it through a private door, when are sitting home, snug and cozy, content with the morally approved loneliness of society’s chosen eternal winter.

To call it the end of reason

 is too dramatic; let’s just call it — ‘Sky doesn’t want to write essays anymore.’ This means I am announcing my abhorrence for a certain structured, cohesive, argument that is persuasive, but only to the extent that it is logical. No, that’s not for me. So you can hold it against me if and when I write one; but I really never want to again. I didn’t want to end my endless Plague Diary either, but I didn’t know what to do. So I’ve settled for this —which is something else, certainly not the same — but inspired by it somewhat. I feel that ‘reason’ is over, for me. Much the same way it was over for the Dadaists after the World War I; they saw the carnage, so many young men exterminated, and why? Has ‘reason’ led us here? We must have something else, the unreason; the ‘unart.’ But I don’t think art has anything to do with our present dilemma, or rather it has everything to do with it but in a very sly way. Art — as I knew it, is over — the dream, the fantasy, the made-up concoction, the candy floss or perhaps nightmare artificiality, we will have none of that. We demand a lecture on environmentalism, preferably delivered from a podium by someone who is perhaps grandmotherly, and reassuringly inept, but well intentioned. We demand right-mindedness. Indeed we want to be corrected and art must scold us, it’s all ‘teach’— the delight has never been so far away. So just as art has become a statement of truth,  our real life has become fiction. We consume it every day, it’s what constitutes most of our so-called lives, in the form of pornography, Netflix, Apple News, and social media. COVID-19 has taught us the digital world is the only safe place, and that it is a very appropriate replacement for reality. This is the truth, it must be, because our computers are the only place we dare to live. So consequently to write a well-reasoned essay on the subject of COVID-19 — or anything else — is no longer helpful. As I am a Covid Radical (I think shutting down our whole society is a big mistake) you will disagree with me; but most likely you will not argue. That is something people used to do, when there was ‘reason.’ You will be shocked, or most likely just laugh at me in a shocked way — ‘that’s ridiculous, you’re ridiculous, I won’t even dignify your idea with a response.’ Oh yes and: ‘What you’ve said is dangerous, do know that?’ — the requisite distrust of my actual person. Perhaps I am a child molester —certainly I am causing danger to others by having such ideas, or at least ’mentally ill’ in a very unbenign way. The argument from intimidation is the only argument we trust; ‘if he says that, he must be bonkers.’ All this is a very reasonable excuse for being unreasonable, but to speak frankly (why not?) I’ve never really been very fond of reason, and felt I was masquerading as a boring, predictable, ‘nice’ person — very unlike my real self — every time I wrote an essay. (But Shakespeare doesn’t count; I will write essays about Shakespeare, but not here, because Shakespeare is sacrosanct, don’t ask me to go on about it, that’s just the way it is.) No. The writing of ‘articles’ is a ‘hat’ I don’t want to wear. It just won’t work anymore. (Truth be told it always felt kind of ‘heterosexual’ to write an essay that made a whole lot of sense.)  All media has become underhanded, no one is reporting news or presenting arguments (or if they are no one is listening). What we have is much more eloquent: photos — or better yet videos — of children with inflamed limbs from COVID-19 (a fantasy that doesn’t exist). This speaks much more eloquently than any rational argument. So what will I put in place of an essay? Not art (that’s not what this is) instead a kind of unexpurgated, unwanted, un-asked-for, ultimately unnecessary and certainly not in any way useful regurgitation of my personality, my feelings, impressions, hopes, fears, what turns me on (God help us!).  It will quickly separate the adults from the children. It will be a kind of spilling of myself — yes orgasmic (sorry). It will be like Jack Kerouac’s endless typing on a scroll — I think it was Capote who called in typing not writing — so this may be just that. And inevitably, it will be very personal and very self-incriminating. Because it’s time for self-incrimination; writing which does not do that no longer has any value. Reasoned criticism has become character assassination, so let’s get my self-immolation out of the way. I hereby assassinate myself, I am an untrustworthy narrator, I am not a ‘good’ person, I have endless faults, I am narcissistic and insensitive, I love very unwisely and not very well. There is no reason to admire me (but I’m sure you’ve figured that out) best to be suspicious, I have my own motives, and could be — in fact am — trying to put one over on you. I think this is how we should approach every piece of writing, and especially anything that purports to be truth or dispassionate observation. This writing is not the truth, it is simply my truth (unless I’m lying, or even when I am). I was sitting in Union Station yesterday looking at the tiles on the columns. This was after having discovered that the humungous men’s bathroom (there must be 20 toilets in there —counting the urinals) is only — by order of the Covid Police — to have 2 people occupy it at a time. Anyway, so I was idly staring at the tiles, thinking about this, and the ceramic tiles reminded me of something else very tedious — the time my father invited my sister and I over to his house to meet his second wife. She was much younger than he was, and more beautiful, and my father had decided that in order for us to have something to do and mitigate the awkwardness, we would all sit around together and glue ceramic tiles to his new coffee table. I needn’t tell you, it didn’t work. Whenever I see ceramic tiles I think of that evening of terrifying, fraught dullness. So now I am in Montreal and the night is endless and mysterious, and it’s not at all like Ontario. There are no ceramic tiles anywhere to be seen — except those that someone has either thrown at the wall in a rage, or vomited there, and all I can hope for is that the possibilities here are endless.

PLAGUE DIARY 122: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

Murder, My Sweet (1944)

The first of the Philip Marlowe movies — with the oddly cast Dick Powell (usually a musical comedy star) as the lead. When Claire Trevor coos over his slender body in a t-shirt it’s a bit hard to take; but it’s important to remember that notions of physical perfection —especially male ones — change over time. The plot is as impenetrable as most film noir, and there is a ‘McGuffin’ — ‘jade’ instead of the famous ‘Maltese falcon.’ There is a certain masochism about the hero; it is a requisite of masculinity. Regularly being beat up and nearly killed is a sort of badge of honour for a real man, but only if he makes wisecracks about it (007 does this too). I’ve never read a Raymond Chandler novel, but it seems to me this aspect of Murder, My Sweet is the most literary aspect of the movie, and hints at its depth. Some lines seem very Raymond Chandler, or at least beyond philosophically witty, as when Marlowe says, in response to a call for silence — “Remarks want you to make ‘em. They’ve got their tongues hanging out waiting to be said.” And good girl Anne Shirley sizes up bad girl Claire Trevor with remarkable alacrity: “I hate the big league blondes: beautiful expensive babes who know what they’ve got, all bubble bath. dewy morning. and moonlight. Inside blue steel, cold — cold like that only not that clean.” But it is the dream sequence that marks the profundity of Chandler’s world view (filmic though the sequence is — not perhaps as nakedly surrealistic as the one in Hitchcock’s Spellbound — but arty in it’s own way). Otto Kruger plays Jules Amthor — a pathological psychiatrist, and the scene where he drugs Marlowe with what appear to be psychedelic chemicals is truly horrifying. But Marlowe staggers out of it with unbelievable good humour -- in search of his next adventure. This kind of residence I don’t understand. Coward that I am, I kept wanting to tell Marlowe to go home and hide. This kind of attraction to violation — throwing one’s body into the nexus of brutality — seems almost like an addiction for Marlowe, and the only conclusion one may draw about the universe — from Marlowe’s compulsion to be destroyed, as well as the opportunities offered for him to have it happen — is that it is beyond chaotic. Life’s vicissitudes are merely nonsensical and not only is something rotten in the state of Denmark but it just seems at every moment, for no discernible reason, to get rottener still. And it was never so clear to me before that it is the femme fatale that sits at the  heart of this chaos, because she represents an evil so paradoxical and so alluring that it’s irresistible. There is no defence. Leaving the misogyny aside for a moment — and also acknowledging that to outlaw the femme fatale is to outlaw opportunities for actresses like Claire Trevor to be evil, beautiful, feminine, tempting, heartless and vulnerable — a great test for a thespian of any ilk — Dick Powell's conflicted response to her is the essence of every person’s perceptual confusion. She is like a psychedelic drug; on the one hand as much a tantalising escape from the relentless numbness of the day to day routine as a treacherous stairway to madness, morbidity, blindness, incoherence, and living hell. She says to Marlow “I find men attractive” and he responds “I bet they meet you halfway.” How could they not, as the femme fatale breaks the first rule of being a woman: that she is not at any cost to desire openly, and certainly must not ever be more desiring than a man. Trevor crumbles in his arms, Marlowe’s nostrils disappear in her too blonde curls, and she cries “I haven’t been good not halfway good, I haven’t even been smart, but I need help — please I need you!” — and he is like putty in her hands — or perhaps something firmer than that. A thug called Moose (Mike Mazurki) calls her “cute as lace pants” and when she’s dead “cute as lace pants, always.” But Marlowe is not a force for good, he just happens to be in the middle of this chaos called life, just trying to make a buck; after all it feels like people have to bribe him to investigate anything. When Anne Shirley accuses him of not taking sides he says: "I don't know which side anybody's on. I don't even know who's playing today.” I’m trying to quit smoking, and the cigarette is as toxic and yielding as Claire Trevor, it’s always throwing itself in front of me and acting vulnerable, as if it might die if I don’t smoke it, and what it’s offering me is everything I don’t want to miss. I screamed at the man I love today —“this is a nightmare” and it certainly seemed that way to me, after a sleepless night and an anxious morning; addiction is certainly as appealing as Claire Trevor and just as scary. So what do we do about this chaotic mess called life, where evil often masquerades as good, or just the grandest pleasure? Philip Marlowe seems to be saying the best you can do is just roll with the punches and make caustic remarks, because, as he explains, those caustic remarks are lined up just waiting to be made. The appeal of the myth of COVID-19 is the appeal of all latter day thinking; an obsession with a binary, any binary. (I’ve been told it’s simple-minded to blame digital technology — which as I understand it, is based on a binary—especially since human history tells us the notion that the world is evenly divided into good and evil, that both are recognisable, and that evil, once identified can and will be punished — is just too appealing even for words.) This chaos is too much; we want answers. But reason, is, I’m afraid, woefully inadequate to sort this out. COVID-19, on the other hand, offers so many reassurances: climate change, populist politics, economic decline — the answer is in your mask. You are good if you wear one; you are making the world a better place, because you care for your fellow man. I don’t so much oppose masks, I just wonder why bother? As there is as much proof that they work as they don’t? (See https://hugsovermasks.nationbuilder.com/) But it’s a moral question; and I just don’t want to get involved, and it won’t work anyway, to even try. I can only do my best to be an obedient masochist who manages now and then to offer a wry remark; I may even switch sides, as Marlowe does, because the only way to ally oneself with truth is to assert that there is none.

PLAGUE DIARY 121: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

Mark of the Vampire (1935)
 It’s a very strange thing. It’s necessary to give it all away, or else what else would there to be to talk about. It undoubtedly inspired Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein — i.e. big candles (torches), a stoney basement, and a bookcase that twirls to reveal a passageway (though these may be in other horror movies; I’m no expert). And this is not a horror movie it is a comedy; except it isn’t the least bit funny. Tod Browning, who also made Freaks (see blog 42#) was obviously somewhat of a freak himself, and not a very good filmmaker (though he somehow got James Wong Howe to be the cinematographer and two Lionels — Barrymore and Lionel Atwill — to act in it). So, you think you’re watching a horror movie, and it’s pretty straightforward fare; the best thing about it is the mechanical bats that are flying at you now and then — in mists of bat fog — or whatever, they really are kinda scary, and apparently Browning was a bit too concerned about getting them right (the crew complained). There are also what appear to be number of real live bats squirming on the floor, attached to the ceiling etc. They are very creepy. And then there is Bela Lugosi and Carroll Borland as the ‘terrifying’ vampires. They mainly just try to transfix you with hilariously frigid stares (esp. Borland) and over-the-top clown white makeup, and march around like robots. It’s difficult to get caught up in it; Elizabeth Allan is quite convincing as the beautiful young heroine, and it’s fascinating to see Lionel Barrymore actually erect (not in a wheelchair) — and he’s not looking as old as usual, and is almost handsome. But here’s the trick; the vampires are not really vampires. You find this out about two thirds of the way through the movie. Just as Barrymore seems to be hot on the trail of Bela Lugosi, he suddenly hypnotises Baron Otto (Jean Hersholt) and we are plunged into another film. It turns out Elizabeth Allan’s father was not killed by vampires but by Baron Otto, and this whole vampire thing is just a plot to hypnotize Baron Otto, and get him to re-enact his crime -- to prove he’s guilty. The one thing that’s not really clear about all this is why you need to hire people to pretend to be vampires in order to get a murderer to confess— perhaps that says more about Tod Browning’s oddly organised pre-frontal cortex than anything. I personally don’t believe that Browning actually knew what he was doing, I believe he made it up as he went along. I say this because apparently he didn’t tell the actors that the vampires were fake vampires until it was time to film the final scenes —  Lugosi and Borland thought they were in an ordinary vampire film. And Lionel Barrymore really thought he was playing Professor Zelin, a very brilliant and earnest scholar convinced that vampires do exist — when he was playing Professor Zelin (?) who hired a fact a bunch of actors (?) to play vampires in order to ‘force’ a killer — under hypnosis — to re-enact his crime and ergo confess. It’s kinda almost maybe funny at the end, momentarily, when Lugosi and Carroll (the sign on her truck says ‘Luna The Bat Woman Theatre’) are packing up their vampire gear. Lugosi has a  line with huge camp resonance: “I gave all of me, I was better than any real vampire.” One wonders of course, is Lugosi speaking about his whole career? And it brings up a fascinating question with epistemological, ontological and metaphysical ramifications, do vampires exist? Well we needn’t  go there because this tacked on ending doesn’t mean anything in the context of the film; like the Freaks gimmick this is Tod Browning fooling himself that he was a ground-breakingly original filmmaker. What is interesting, to me, is that Lionel Barrymore is really quite earnest as the vampire killer, actually I found him oddly good — and he had all the appearance of an actor deeply believing his part. So did Browning’s ruse work? Did he get a great performance out of Barrymore who seems to be acting his tits off in a very stupid movie? What’s even odder is that audiences were apparently grossed out and frightened by this movie, and wrote letters to the papers about how vampire movies should be banned. God bless lousy filmmakers like Todd Browning and Ed Wood (Plan Nine from Outer Space) who suspended their own disbelief to such an extent that they were actually convinced they were brilliant. Now that’s beautiful. The Greek sophists said (something to this effect that) ‘he who is fooled is wiser than he who is not.’ I am too wise to believe in COVID-19 -- but I do earnestly envy the ecstatic complacency of those who believe that, because they wear a mask, they will live forever.

PLAGUE DIARY 120: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

Andy Hardy Gets Spring Fever (1939)
It took an Andy Hardy movie. I don’t know if I’ve ever really watched one from beginning to end.
I spoke about Mickey Rooney  — as a sex object at age 24 (see blog #75)— but here at age 19 I became him, he was me. I guess it’s always spring fever where I’m concerned. It’s always love, because I have not entirely discarded the breathless wonder I discovered when I first came out, when every man I had sex with was the real thing; like Andy Hardy I mistook each puppy-like obsession — even simple body worship — for the fulfillment of a hidden longing. What never ceases to confound me is the notion that one must have a feeling of emptiness after a promiscuous encounter. When a pale, tall, handsome youth walked into my room the other night at the baths  —and this young God acted as if our intimacy was the most normal thing in the world — I felt as Andy Hardy feels about his teacher, Miss Meredith. (Played by Helen Gilbert — she has the same name as my grandmother, and my grandmother too, was a teacher.) I’m touched by all this (I’m somewhat ashamed to say) -- by a friggin’ Andy Hardy movie. And it isn’t just the foolish, fond early forays into lovemaking, it’s the ridiculous bravado he displays when he imagines he has grown up. What a treat to see Mickey Rooney come bounding down to dinner in a suit and tie with a bad British accent --  because he has been chosen to write the school play, and suddenly thinks he's Noel Coward. The voice Rooney takes out of his back pocket is very odd and very funny — a forced baritone his sister describes ‘like molasses running down the stairs.” Later too, after Mickey comes to terms with his unrequited love for Helen, he swaggers about in a very wise and world-weary way. He waves a rose in Helen’s face saying: “I’m going to keep this all my life. When it gets old and withered it will remind me of you.” And when he turns up at a party with friends his own age, he intones “I hope you children are enjoying your games.” All this, even in its ridiculous exaggeration, is accurate. But that's not what made me cry. Mickey Rooney writes a play, and it’s called ‘Adrift in Tahiti.’ He plays a ‘Rear Admiral’ while his usual adolescent paramour in these movies  — Polly (Ann Rutherford) — plays ‘Tahoolah.’ The details of the play are beyond imagining; the best part is when the Rear Admiral rejects Tahoolah and she jumps into a volcano. There is a moon — which a boy with the unlikely name of ‘Stickin’ Plaster’ (Terry Kilburn) — is tasked with guiding smoothly across the sky; he messes it up, and is contrite, and the audience laughs. Mickey calls his masterpiece a ‘spiritual play of loves and renunciations.” His inspiration for writing it is scorn and rejection (I identify). He says: “A man isn’t altogether to blame when he finds he’s developing into the sensitive type.” (Again, I identify.) Mickey’s biggest problem though is the burning question — are there actually volcanos in Tahiti? This kind of question has plagued writers from the dawn of time; but Mickey doesn’t let something as frail and unconvincing as reality stop him. It is right that Tahoolah should jump into a volcano, and so she does. It is a fantasy performed in front of other people; it is as far from reality as anything can be, except that when we experience that fantasy with others, it becomes a reality of its own. You see -- in 1939 people still did that. Nothing makes me sadder than theatres in Toronto sending out press releases about the latest digital performances —  "The Resiliance Project,  "Alone Together""Let's Stay Together." I saw an image from Toronto of a bunch of people doing Yoga — all separately of course, in little plastic bubbles, each bubble with its own fan and Kleenex box, it really was too tragic. I don’t mean to be funny about this, because it really is ominous; watching us abandon experience as a necessary and redeeming thing. At the end of Andy Hardy Gets Spring Fever Mickey and Helen sit outside. and there are crickets. Yes, there is nature, yes, you can always go up to the cottage and sit by yourself and have that. (And at this time of year I eat dusk, because dusks disappear -- the change of light in the afternoon on a cold winter day is not the same). But because we are human real experience involves live human beings who are, yes, no doubt, spraying their infectious germs on us. Those videos we keep seeing (often they are animations) in which masses of particulate are expelled when you speak or sneeze — or especially sing (singing apparently is the worst, far more toxic even than the COVID itself) — these images teach us to fear embodied experience. But it’s not just closeness — it’s shared experience in time. May I briefly, mourn for it? That’s what a play is, it only happens once in that particular way, and you experience it with other people, and the actors never do it the same way twice. (As actors know, some nights you are carried away by the audience, other nights you fight them.  Either way, it’s alive, like Rosemary’s baby.) Last night I was standing outside Stock, a gay strip bar in Montreal. It was ‘ladies night,’ my favorite. There was the usual old guy dancing by himself — he just does that — from ecstasy (the feeling, not the drug).  Only this time some of the patrons were gesturing for him to move away (COVID, you know). But nothing could stop all the crazy-screaming-out-of-control women in tiny leather skirts and shorts. They were in their element — ‘this is our place, is our bar, we’ve scared most of the men out  for once!’ (Except the brave ones like me.) And outside was one of the tallest drag queens I have ever seen, she wore nearly foot-high platform heels. And she was beautiful, and she had a Chihuahua. And then another drag queen — not quite as tall, or quite as beautiful — joined her — and she too had a Chihuahua, and they spoke of them. Of Chihuahuas. In Andy Hardy Gets Spring Fever, early on, there is a discussion about how to spell the word ‘weird.’ Well, one spells it like this.

PLAGUE DIARY 119: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

Marty (1955)
I remember this movie as the touching tale of a lonely, ordinary guy — the brutally realistic story of a man who is — well Marty himself says it — “just a fat ugly man!” One of the problems is that it is unlikely that a ‘fat ugly man’ would say that — but even more importantly for Paddy Chayefsky (the writer )— Marty would be a more interesting character if he didn’t. Chayefsky’s characters have a habit of describing themselves accurately directly to other people. Faye Dunaway (in Network) says “I apparently have a masculine temperament. I arouse quickly, consummate prematurely.” All this is unlikely, but the problem isn’t so much Chayefsky’s faults as a writer -- or even the fact that Marty is so proud of its class condescension — these are poor Italian people after all and we can’t help congratulating ourselves that we are open-minded enough to be watching a movie about them. I want to be on side; especially when everyone tells Marty to dump Betsy Blair because she’s too old and  skinny — but nevertheless Marty asks her out on a second date because it means (unlike his superficial male pals) he‘ll always have a date for New Years. Yay Marty! — love who you wanna love, screw who you wanna screw. But I’ve been in lock down for four months, and I finally get to Montreal, and suddenly there are men everywhere, men who are — well, just the same as before — because men don’t change, they want it all the time and they want it now. But in Ontario I have been living in an alternate universe where suddenly the boys on GRINDr are posting signs that say “Stay Home, Stay Safe” -- instead of dic pics. I know that’s supposed to be admirable. But that’s the only reason they do it, to be admirable (or else they’ve been looking for an excuse to stop having sex for a long time and this is it). Marty’s male friends at the end of the movie are trying to get him to have  fun: “Lets go down to 72nd street. We’ll walk around, we'll end up with something.” And -- “There’s a burlesque at Union City.” This is my life: boy strippers and yes, knowing that at the end of the night I’ll end up with ‘something.’ But Marty says “Burlesque, Louie’s Paradise — miserable and lonely and stupid - I gotta something good here, what am I doing here?” And he runs off to Betsy Blair. My first question is, why the ‘Sophie’s Choice’? Why does it have to be Betsy Blair or the Burlesque Palace? Why can’t she go with him? (She might learn something from -- or hook up with -- a fabulous sex trade worker!). Well I’m tired of this. I disagree with Peter Knegt. I read the stupidest article by him on the CBC website yesterday. I hardly know this guy at all. When I met him he looked like he was about 12 (but I’m ancient). This was about 15 years ago, and he was putting together some sort of gay guide to Toronto, and called me up and asked me to write something for it, as I was ‘pretty knowledgeable' about the Toronto gay scene. So I did. I didn’t hear much about him after that until he wrote a huge article about Buddies 40th anniversary (’40 Years 40 Queers’). Someone asked me if I wanted to be interviewed for the article— as one of the 40 people who had 'some association’ with Buddies. And I, prima donna that I am, said: ‘I founded this friggin’ theatre with my bare hands 40 years ago, and I’m not going to be interviewed along with 39 other people, could I have my own special interview please?” (I know, hate me, I deserve it). Anyway Peter Knegt subsequently published this damn article about Buddies and did not interview me. (I’m not sure if that was his decision; but I helped him out long ago, the least he could have done is reach out to me!) And then yesterday I had to read this smelly-pile-of-bilge-crap called ‘Gay culture has grown toxic with unchecked privilege. It's time for us to reset.’ Knegt ignores many issues that face gay men, including class, AIDS criminalisation, and homophobia, saying gay men are too privileged. Okay, can I tell you why Peter Knegt wrote this? Why any gay man goes around these days saying: “I’m so sorry I’m so privileged?” Why are gay men on the front lines on Facebook shaming people for not wearing masks? It’s a career move. Listen honestly, I’m not trying to demonise Peter Knegt. It’s not his fault — he’s a victim of circumstance -- caught in a paradigm.  He’s got to have a career like anybody else, and the best way to get one these days — if you’re gay — is to apologise for being gay, deny there is a ‘gay sensibility’ and demolish gay culture (i.e. camp) -- and people like me who helped create it. Yes I am promiscuous, Yes, I love sleaze, yes I like to imagine my life is a film noir movie — and yes — a different man every night — bring ‘em on! I’ve lived this way for 67 years and I don’t expect to stop until I have to — (which I’m sure will happen soon). But what I’m saying is I think you can have that and still have love too, because if you like sex and/or promiscuity you are not a bad person-- and people will still love you. Years ago, a beautiful young man (the lover of my best friend at the time) cursed me. He hated me (truth be told he kind of hated everybody) so when I was whining about not having a lover he turned to me and said: “you’ll never have a lover because you’re a slut.” (His curse did not come true, and he’s the one who ended up alone, not me.) I go to a public pool occasionally in Montreal and there’s a young woman there who I am platonically in love with. She is some kind of demented Marilyn Monroe. She has humungous breasts and long straight platinum blonde dyed hair. She wears sunglasses and hat, and carries a little clear plastic purse. She kind of toddles across the pool deck, causing much rolling of eyes among the fashionable young hipsters. Today, on top of her red bikini top and thong, she wore a translucent-black-lace-nighty-sort-of-thing. She appears to be stoned. I love her, but I don’t know her story — so I'm making it up. To me she seems a tragic slut — because someone has cursed her too, and told her that she will never in this lifetime find true love. Yes you will, honey — I guarantee it! I am living breathing proof that sluts can be happy, and that only the very best men love them. But I’m worried about Peter Knegt. In his his latest article, he says he's looking to ‘find the love of his life.’ I gotta tell you, Peter, for your own good, if you don’t start getting slutty fast, it might just not ever happen.

PLAGUE DIARY 118: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

Point Blank (1967)
 I wasn’t prepared for this one. It’s an art film masquerading as film noir (shot in Technicolor). I was distracted by one irritating aspect of John Boorman’s sensibility. (He directed Deliverance, after all.) The content of this film is so incredibly macho — so misogynist — it made me feel like an uninvited guest at an stag party. However the form of the film is quite the opposite. It has a diffuse artiness that flirts, flits and dawdles over the images in an almost masturbatory way. Yes, it’s very sexual, but that’s because it’s all about power. (I just wish the power wasn’t all in the hands of the men.) Sharon Acker -- Marvin's wife and his buddy John Vernon's sexbuddy -- appears briefly and muses: “How good it must be, being dead…….is it?” and promptly commits suicide. The only other women in this movie are Angie Dickinson and a fat woman at a cocktail party who says “Lunches, dinners — I’m getting as fat as a pig.” I’ve never understood the appeal of Angie Dickinson — of course she’s sexy, but so what? To call the violence in Point Blank gratuitous would be an understatement, men are constantly overpowering other men. I often forget straight men are so obsessed with dominating each other. It seems to me to be about internalized homophobia, but I’m prejudiced. Why can’t they just leave that other big guy alone? Why do they always have to kill him or torture him? Here it’s about money; Lee Marvin wants the $93,000, now. In one pretty unforgettable scene he takes Michael Strong for a drive in a new car and proceeds to crash it into telephone poles and bridge abutments. Why doesn’t Marvin just punch him out? But no, Marvin is so macho he has to wreck a car. Later Marvin throws a nude John Vernon off a building. It’s the touch of sexuality — of naked humiliation — that I find a disturbingly erotic. There are three gay characters in the film. Marvin makes two guys tie themselves up together — one of them is obviously effeminate. And later Marvin is watching a movie on TV (I looked it up — the scene is from a movie called The Cobweb, with John Kerr -- who played the conflicted young homosexual in Tea and Sympathy. In the clip Kerr speaks of getting over his “neurotic inertia.” What could be gayer than that?). I know it sounds like I’m creating something out of nothing here, and I probably am, but to me when men dominate other men it’s kinda sick if it’s not just a sexual game. One of my favourite — but again nutty — moments? When Angie Dickinson gets so angry with Lee Marvin she flails at him, with her fists, her purse, her body. He just stands there and takes it. (Never has one image made it so clear that men are nightmarishly stronger than women.)  Finally she collapses on the floor in an exhausted heap, and he turns on the TV. Another favourite moment - demonstrating Boorman’s ‘arty’ side — is when Marvin and Dickinson start making love. They keep rolling sideways, towards the camera, and after the first roll, Lee Marvin is having sex with Sharon Acker, and then they roll again, and it’s John Vernon having sex with Sharon Acker. Well it’s the 60s after all — but what a startling and eloquent visual equivalent of what — promiscuity? degrees of separation? a daisy chain? Point Blank is chockful of similar craziness — images that seem to remind the filmmaker (or Lee Marvin) of other images, and suddenly we are hurled back into a previous scene, or a future scene — where the same words or similar words — are spoken. Film Historian David Thomson calls it “a wistful dream and reflection on how movies are just fantasies.” Yes, but what also interests me is the girl inside John Boorman, the lady who drifts aimlessly from allusion to illusion — very unlike Lee Marvin who is out to get that money, period. Poetry is gendered.  It is women’s work. (So why weren’t there more great women poets? It’s called oppression.) But since poetry is essentially feminine there’s always a certain amount of overcompensating going on. That’s why Hemingway had an obsession with big guns and lean prose. James Joyce, I am quite certain, was a sexual submissive, obsessed with cunnilingus — it’s apparent not only from his dirty letters to his wife, but also from his, excessive, complex, ornamented writing style. A dominatrix friend once explained to me the difference between a top and a bottom: ‘Do you want to decide what you’re going to do in bed or let somebody else do it?’ Well of course I’ve always left the decision up to my effortlessly masculine partner. She also said: ‘since you are a submissive — don’t let a lot of people know, or they’ll make you wait at the end of the line at movies’. Well this was obviously John Boorman’s issue, ergo the men in his flicks are always tying each other up and shooting each other, while, paradoxically, the images are allowed to freely associate, and hook up with whom and whatever they wish, promiscuously. After Marvin turns on the TV he watches a concert, an old movie, a cartoon, and than an advertisement for cosmetics. Then he hears noise coming from the kitchen. In her anger, Angie Dickinson has turned on all the appliances in the kitchen — which he then turns off one by one. Soon she starts speaking to him on a loudspeaker (it's a very modern, luxurious house). It’s all has the feel of a dream. But we know whether we're awake or dreaming, don’t we? But couldn’t we not only be dreaming when we are awake, but also dreaming that we are awake? It’s the kind of uncertainty Lee Marvin wouldn’t like. There is one moment that makes me want to forgive John Boorman for all his excesses — that’s when Dickinson’s hand wanders  aimlessly but lovingly over Marvin’s furry, muscled abdomen — did Boorman’s free association triumph over his heterosexual content here? Here's the question: would we rather be Lee Marvin the decisive killer, or Lee Marvin drifting lost among the kitchen appliances Dickinson has deliberately left on? The choice that seems less free may just seem less free — that is, it may seem deceptively so.

PLAGUE DIARY 117: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

The Barkleys of Broadway (1949)
I’m going to trash Fred Astaire just a little bit here. It’s just —when you realize how truly good Ginger Rogers is, he pales somewhat in comparison. Gene Kelly has always been my favourite, and my mother was kinda in love with him. She used to force me to sit and watch Singin’ in the Rain with her (there wasn’t much forcing), but Kelly’s biceps, his blatant, adorable physical narcissism — and his general effortless masculinity have always bewitched me. Astaire, on the other hand, could be mistaken for unattractive and effete. Don’t get me wrong, he’s a stunning dancer and choreographer, but when he and Rogers dance 'They Can’t Take That Away From Me' (the only good song in this musical) he is simply coming on to her, while Rogers is playing a subtle game of parry and faint;  subtly melting under his charm. She can do anything — and her comic timing is perfect. Then there is Oscar Levant — at this point his appearance in a movie doesn’t have to be explained: he’s always the wry, cynical womanising ‘Jew’ who stands outside things and quips. And because of the scriptwriters Betty Comden and Adolph Green, he has some gems: (to a dumb girlfriend) — “You know what I like about you, you’re free of the slavery of talent,” and when a magazine publicity spread gets cancelled — “You can fill it with 8 pages of an appendix operation in colour.” (This is eerily prescient, we know from COVID-19 that serious illnesses have endless entertainment value). This film, slight as it is, occasionally manages to enchant — due to Green, Comden and Rogers. But it’s about an eternal and reassuring reality; couples that remain together no matter how much they fight. When Rogers meets the charming French ‘legit’ playwright (played by Jacques Francois — what could be more French?) and is momentarily attracted, Astaire phones her and pretends to be Francois, wooing her by playing his arch rival. It’s all silliness, but we are intrigued by whatever it is that makes people able to argue like fiends and still love each other -- or even more strangely, by those whose knock-down-drag-outs seem key to their passion. It’s the ‘George and Martha’ syndrome -- many couples I know have it -- and it appears, to me, to represent the height of love. I know most would not agree — would in fact call such a thing a nightmare relationship. Well let me tell you it’s not about the makeup sex. It’s about how far you can stretch love before it breaks -- and some of us need to do that. But why am I pondering this craziness  on a warm summer night in Montreal?  Because it’s been fourth months! Four friggin’ months of friggin’ lockdown. Because I still officially live in Hamilton and the bars in Hamilton won’t open until July 25th, if we are to believe Fatty Ford (and why should we?). I can just hear you clucking “People are dying and he’s talking about bars opening.” Let’s make a pact, okay? I won’t judge you if you won’t judge me. Try this one on for size. Last night I was having sex with a stranger, and in the middle of it all, he had a coughing fit. Yup, I’m not kidding. Thank God he had the good manners to turn away and cough into a wall, but of course I had a sudden flash of ‘How suicidal am I? Letting a man who’s having a coughing fit continue fellating me after he’s done?’ Well first of all I want you to put this all in context. I lived through AIDS. I lived through paralysing fear, it was like rats coming out of the sewers and dying during the plague, it was no game (Do you know anyone who died of COVID-19? I don’t). It was ‘look around you!’ — and ‘you might be next!’ And still — we didn't stop having sex. I’ve never had an AIDS test. And I’m 67 years old. (I thought at one point they would make it mandatory and they’d force me to). Why? Because I asked a doctor in 1990 or so — should I have the test— even if I have no symptoms, and I seem really healthy, and I practice safe sex? And he said that with my prodigious promiscuity, I was unlikely to get it if I hadn’t already. And, I didn’t want to go into the ‘AIDS Zone.’ What’s the ‘AIDS Zone’? It what’s we’re in now —only it’s the ‘COVID-19 Zone’ — it means being in perpetual fear of illness and unable to live your life. So you can judge me for being traumatised because bars have been closed for four months, but remember my whole sex life and a great deal of my social life revolved around bars. (Okay yeah, judge me, I know it makes you feel good, so why not?) But what I’m trying to say here is — let’s not judge each other — I’m just saying whatever part of your life was destroyed by this illness — and for some people, yes it was a loved one — but for most people it was something else — a relationship (do you know of any relationships that went under during COVID-19? I sure do) or a job, or worse yet a career — something you loved, hopes dreams, self-esteem — maybe a way of thinking about yourself — it's now gone. We’ve lost a lot  but just like  AIDS — this will never be dealt with. I guarantee it, because the fiction of this illness has taken over. By fiction I mean — all of the questions this disease pretends to answer (are you are a good person?, do you love your fellow man? do we live in a caring society?) — and all those beliefs this disease affirms (how important ‘family’ is, and most of all how much better it is to stay at home and gaze at your computer than go outside). These myths will dwarf reality. I know my trauma doesn’t seem traumatic to you, and I apologize for that. You remind me of the sadistic doctor I had once who was so intent on me having an AIDS test that when I asked him about a swollen blood vessel in my thigh he said ‘that’s a swollen lymph node — I haven’t said anything about it because I know you  don’t want to worry about HIV’ Okay, so why after four months, am I still analysing a silly fictional love affair between Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire in The Barkleys of Broadway? Because it’s been four damn months. Four damn months dammit. And it’s not the scars —  I’m not worried about them. No, a scar would be a good thing. Because a scar means the wound has healed.

PLAGUE DIARY 116: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

Blithe Spirit (1945)
I know it all too well. It’s not my favourite Noel Coward play, and Coward himself didn’t much like this movie. I’m not sure what went wrong — but the banter between the married couple is tired and not very witty — never was — the only thing that’s really marvelous about the movie is Margaret Rutherford (see blog #34). The idea behind this play is unbeatable — a man is tormented by the ghost of his first wife, who appears to him, only — and his present wife can’t see her. But that’s really all here that’s brilliant. Coward wrote much better plays —Private Lives, Hay Fever and Present Laughter are my three favourites. Present Laughter and Hay Fever are about imagined worlds that keep impinging on real ones, and this is also the appeal of Private Lives — though there it is the fantasy of one couple’s love that seems able to survive even the most harrowing real-life conflicts. But it’s when Coward lets his language get away with him that his work is truly unique and truly dangerous — for words do have a life of their own. I still have no idea what this blog will be about; this is my fourth night in Montreal and I’ve told myself I wouldn’t get drunk. It’s going to be a task to turn Montreal from a vacation place to a place where I might live now and then, because of course — in spite of Baudelaire, one can’t always be drunk, can one? That is a harrowing thought, and I am trusting this blog to take me away somewhere instead. I saw my favorite coat check boy at Starbucks today and I was unable to speak to him. He was with another lovely young man, and who knows — maybe they are a couple, or soon to be, and I just didn’t want to appear like a cloying nutty old man, but I do like him. I think he is very nice and would probably have welcomed a hello. I never talk to anyone here. The other day a fan spoke to me — for the second time — at Starbucks — he seems very nice and though he is not my type, I found him somewhat sexually attractive. (Maybe I shouldn’t have written that because he might be one of the few people to actually read these blogs!) But things that you write do have a way of becoming true. I thought of showing the coat check boy the blog I wrote about him; but I didn't do that either. The balcony of our Montreal apartment is very ‘Rear Window,’ there are three sets of windows clearly visible on each side, and three balconies also. There is often a dog on one of the balconies; he is my only companion when I write in the mornings. He is a very cute bulldog and seems to me, forlorn, but that is probably projection.  A heterosexual couple lives one floor down on the left across the way; I can see everything they do and they never close their curtains. I’m no peeping Tom but I can’t help looking. He is lean and young and hardly ever wears a shirt (well, it’s hot) and she is a young woman who has no problem whatsoever stripping down to her thong in front of the window. (I’m not blaming her, just saying.) To the right the curtains are closed at night but a big screen TV can be dimly viewed playing constantly, I imagine it’s a young man who is shutting me out. Across from me and beyond the modest trees is a giant parking lock for some sort of huge nefarious business. I call it nefarious because it’s a giant ugly building that has to do with delivering things, and trucks keep pulling up and to me it just seems me semi-operational and shady. There are also shady people constantly walking across this parking lot; they are the perpetually unwashed— the street people, Montreal’s poor — there are sadly, so many — and there is usually a crisis that is being yelled about, girls in high heels and bedraggled looking boyfriends hauling giant bags or garbage, stopping only haggle. Why do I want to disappear into this blog? Why do I want to disappear, period? I think it would be easy enough to psychoanalyse me and blame it all on homophobia or my hard life but truth be told my life has bee comparatively easy. Can I suggest that it is a universal wish — that we all want to disappear inside something that’s not real — something that is not us —as long as we can safely come back? In  Private Lives when Amanda is lying to her new husband about how she just happened to see  — but didn’t speak to — her previous husband — Elyot — she pretends she viewed Elyot from a safe distance — on the beach: “Down there, in a white suit.” And Victor says, skeptically “White suit?” And Amanda says — “Why not? It’s summer isn’t it?” This whimsical wishing of fantasy into truth brings to mind the recent Broadway production of Present Laughter with Kevin Kline. He is lying to some young woman, speaking of how much he loves her and how difficult it will be to give her up, when he realises that the lie is not working — and Kline shoots her a look as if to say 'Oh, you’re not buying that are you? Then let’s try another one.’ Or in Hay Fever, when Judith is quite accidentally kissed by her daughter’s boyfriend — she suddenly flips into melodrama; she must tell her husband “ everything” -- terrifying the young man. I toured with a play a couple of years ago starring a beautiful actress who I love very much. But I got to know her in ways I hadn’t expected, and her personal life was so charmingly odd. That is, she became a kind of Judith from Hay Fever. She’s so gorgeous and very sexual and is always flirting with everyone including me, and always complaining that no one is interested. Well her lack of success with men didn’t make any sense to me, until I saw her in action. We met a young man at a Jazz Club — who was definitely giving her the eye — and she came on to him so strongly that fled, terrified, and it became clear to me that this whole narrative was a fantasy/reality of her own making; the only reason young men run from her is because she’s frightens the hell out of them. It’s a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy — but it’s a story she likes telling herself, about herself, and when she believes it enough it becomes real. I am persuading myself that this night will bring me to a pleasant mystery and maybe (am I asking too much?) a mild epiphany? And who’s to say it won’t? The point here is that if I can imagine it, it can happen, and if you think that’s just corny, old-fashioned positive thinking’ it might very well be what’s stopping you from living.

PLAGUE DIARY 115: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

Invitation to a Gunfighter (1964)
It’s got all the right ideas, too bad they couldn’t make it into a movie. Richard Wilson, the director of this creaky mess, was apparently associated with Orson Welles, which doesn’t speak well for Orson Welles (who is overrated anyway). Invitation to a Gunfighter stars Yul Brynner and George Segal. Segal is the surprise as he is young and handsome, blonde and blue eyed, and a very convincing dramatic actor (I remember him as his older comic self in the 70s). Then there’s Yul Brynner — the only reason to watch this movie — if only for his smouldering sexuality alone. He just stands there and  burns up the screen in tight black pants and a frilly shirt — talk about mastery, well he could master me anytime. By the way, he was discovered by Noel Coward, who saw him in some play — and recommended him for the part of the The King of Siam in The King and I, because they were having a hard time finding an Asian actor to star opposite Coward’s beloved friend Gertrude Lawrence. Brynner is not Asian, he is part Mongol/part Swiss — but Coward knew a young man bursting with talent when he saw one. Invitation to a Gunfighter is about racism, and again Brynner is asked to play a race other than his own -- in this case, Creole. And they darken is skin; he appears at times to be in blackface. He’s confronting racism in a southern town "full of old folks, cripples and Mexicans.” Brynner’s character is the prototype for many non-white characters in films, plays and movies — a character of the Sydney Poitier ilk — meaning perfect (except for the scars of racism). Brynner is more eloquent, handsome, well turned out, and musical (he plays harpsichord, and guitar, and sings) than any other dude in this one-donkey New Mexican town. He ends up wrecking the place — literally — it’s a Black Lives Matter moment, and remarkably prescient. If only it was watchable. Wilson has directed the tedious script tediously, all the actors act endlessly, every moment is milked for — I’m not sure what — it’s sure not maximum effect. What’s worse is Brynner’s character is not only good but wise, the keeper of the truth. Really, I never did this, ever. The most sympathetic protagonist in my plays (I hope) is drag queen Lana Lust, who while making a plea for the right to be ‘different’ also mentions that she has swallowed ‘busloads’ of male sperm. Brynner and Poitier never made any such admissions, and it’s insulting to insist minority characters must be perfect. Honestly, if you don’t believe me, I’ll say it now; most gay men are assholes — because most people are assholes — and gay men are people. But also, they are more damaged, because of homophobia which (unlike these screen paragons) leaves them truly screwed up. I rarely meet an older gay man I like or can talk to, because most of them have drug problems, or are just unfulfilled and unhappy, and even if they’ve got it together somewhat, often they never learned how to deal with their own sex lives and act out ‘inappropriately.’ (No this is not because gay men were born bad people, it’s because being trained to hate yourself screws you up.) With younger gay men it’s drugs and lack of self esteem. And if it’s not that — it’s the opposite — acting odiously perfect. (I’ve dealt with that kind of gay man all my life). James Joyce talked about it — it’s a disease gay men have (no not that one) — and the Irish had it too. The Irish were routinely ridiculed as drunken, lazy louts, and as a result there was a type of Irishman who Joyce named (but I can never find his reference to it, anyway) —super-respectable, pretentious, dreadfully overcompensating for the abuse hurled against him, acting holier-than-thou-I’m-better-than-you-and-my-asshole-doesn’t-smell. Now it’s true that most gay men’s assholes don’t smell. I know one gay man who  over-douched to such a degree that he killed all the helpful bacteria in his gut. So when it comes down to it, we’re clean as a whistle back there, but there’s no reason to be proud of it. My point here, is that it doesn’t serve any minority (and I know being gay is not the same as being black) to try and appear over-sanctimonious and judgemental and virtuous (I say that because whenever anyone is evidently virtuous, they are pretending, they aren’t really being virtuous, if you are virtuous you just are, and you don’t tell anybody, and nobody really notices except quietly when it counts). But lets get back to aesthetics, because art is much more important than life, because life is very fake anyway, but we don’t admit it, we pretend it’s real, we pretend our experiences are the only truth, and the only experiences, and that everyone has the same ones, but they don’t. So it’s art that matters -- because it at least is (or should be) openly a lie that offers us alternatives and possibilities. I saw a play last summer (remember plays?) where the black protagonist was not a good man -- the author could get away with it, because the author was black -- and God it was good. There was a great scene in it where a Hispanic church lady came to visit him (he was a black cop) and redeem him and she ended up sucking him off , and he hadn’t had an erection in years. So it was a miracle. God it was beautiful. And this black man was a fallible character because he had accused a white man of racism -- a white man who was not racist. All I’m saying here is that if and when you see a movie or a play and any character is basically as good as Jesus Christ, you aren’t going to get much out of that play or movie. Christ is not an entertaining or morally uplifting character in a work of fiction (like, let’s say The Bible) — he’s just boring. In medieval morality plays the devil is the juicy part; I know I played him once -- I wore a giant codpiece that had a face on it, and I cackled like the Bad Witch of the West. I say to gay men, at least — because that’s the culture I know —  If you’ve been through a lot of crap and you’re a mess, I personally find it’s best to just admit it. I’ve been through a lot of crap and I’m a mess, I’m lousy in bed, and selfish, and insensitive, and the only thing I’ve got going for me is this blog, so there you go, how sad is that? I can’t even come up with something profound to say at the end of this. Maybe I’ll just leave it dangling. There is something about dangling, though.

PLAGUE DIARY 114: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

The Whole Town’s Talking (1935)
It was a scam to revitalize Edward G. Robinson’s career. He was tired of playing gangsters, and the public was tired of seeing them, so in The Whole Town’s Talking he plays a man mistaken for a gangster. He gets to be both mild-mannered and threatening, and Robinson is such a good actor that he pulls it off. The Whole Town’s Talking gives me a chance to talk about Jean Arthur though; her screen presence makes me feel good when I feel bad, and today I just feel ‘uncertain.’ You will remember her from the ‘Mr. Smith’ and ‘Mr. Deeds’ movies — but she’s another one of those pre-feminist dames with spunk. When we first meet her she’s smoking a cigarette, tosses it, then punches the time clock for work. Her boss confronts her for stepping in late at 9:30 — “Well if you must know it’s because I saw fit to step out at 9:30 last night” at which point he threatens to fire her, and she says “In that case I quit — do I go now?” This scares him, so she plonks her feet up on her desk and reads the paper. Her cocky, kooky self-confidence is never false and Jean Arthur acts as if good nature alone is enough to get you through. It all has to do with love; she offers it to all the men in her movies quite freely, and they take it — with her little girl voice and her pretty face she’s irresistible — and I’m so glad to know she’s there. But I don’t know what to say about this movie, it’s a slice of entertainment made to delight the masses, which I'm sure it still does. I suppose it would be on Netflix today. The only thing remotely resembling an idea comes at the beginning when Jean Arthur is mistaken for a gangster’s moll and a female reporter says “Yes, she has a cruel sinister look,” which make us think about the power, and magic and ultimate danger of entertainment which has been and still is, 'the news.' Shakespeare was all about this, which is why I go on about him. Honestly though, if one of my friends tries to tell meabout his favourite friggin’ Netflix series  again I’m going to scream. I’m not interested in your stupid Netflix. ‘What’s on tonight?’ I’d rather kill myself. Yes I’m in Montreal again, and suddenly it’s possible to live. They’ve opened strip clubs and bathhouses. I had a fabulous conversation with my favourite coat-check boy. I know him cuz once I actually caught him in the ‘bear’ store once trying on a pair of spangly shorts, and gave him some advice. They were too big, and he is very small — at least of frame — and I advised against them. Last night he was reading a piece of ‘mythological fiction’ at the coat check — which is beyond me - but at least it was a book. I tried to talk to him about it, but eventually we got to talking about COVID-19. He kept lowering his mask and indicating that he wasn’t. buying. any. of. it. Well why should he, is he insane? On the train yesterday I was bullied for sitting with my significant other (how’s that for a euphemism?) but last night I was pressing my lips to the body part of a stranger which should not be mentioned in polite company. It’s been so long since I’ve done that. So my reluctance to go anywhere near Netflix has everything to do with this, because it’s the only choice that has been given us. It what is provided not merely to fill those gaps (and those gaps need some real fillin’ let me tell you!) but to replace every human need. The problem is this; before the digital world, there were natural curbs on mankind's ability to get what they wanted from fantasy. There was the problem of who would create it, then -- how would it be disseminated, and, of course -- would it to be approved of by the powers that be? (I’m talking about these fantastical gory sexy images that we called up in our memory banks and poets utilised to create poetry before The Enlightenment shut it all down.) Then finally computers came along, and suddenly the problem of who would create fantasy was taken care of. It would be created not by each of us for ourselves, but by mega-corporations. And of course the digitalisation of everything covered dissemination. And finally — who in hell is going to disapprove, anyway? We are talking about Disney here — no one disapproves of Disney — and Netflix is the Disneyfication of America. Sure you can find your odd indie or foreign film if you really search. But that’s not what Netflix is for. Just like yes, you can still get interesting books online, but eventually you won’t be able to; all will you find is Harry Potter and it’s adult equivalent (although some adults do, apparently, adore Harry Potter). Last night the most beautiful boy in the world came into my room at the baths and I under no circumstances would have assumed he would ever be attracted to me, but he was — in an effortless way that boggled my mind -- but thank god did not boggle my body. He ended up getting into the weirdest position — which was totally convenient for what I had in mind — and what made this old guy go (i.e. me) go in for the long haul was that he wouldn’t give up. I must say I am impressed by that kind of persistence, and it is something that I find in certain people (I have mentioned before it is a working class trait; devotion). Yes, the truth of the matter is I have abandonment issues. And for a person like me if you can find someone who will absolutely never under an circumstances abandon you (it’s called unconditional love) it’s kind of ‘the ticket.’ Now this was, to be frank, only a good lay, but when it was over he was all devoted: ‘anytime, anytime’ and ‘I work just across the street’ -- and at first I wanted to put all that information into my cellphone— then I thought no, not sure, it’s a little sad and desperate that he wants to get married already. But really, I’m not complaining. As I get older and shall we say ‘things’ (there’s a euphemism for you) — take more time than they used to — someone who won’t give up is a Godsend. And I have no doubt God sent him, but God sent everyone to this earth. Or if you don’t believe in him  you believe Mother Nature did? If not that, then -- fortune, chance, or — atoms? And nothing. Nothing created this, and nothing comes to nothing, but if you’d just stop gazing so adoringly at your computer for one damn second  then you might dive into this tremendous aporia we call life (aporia means hole — black hole — if you wish) knowing you may come up gasping for air and empty — but it might just give you a great ride.

PLAGUE DIARY 113: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

The Seventh Seal (1957)
I do get it that Ingmar Bergman made it to help himself conquer his fear of death, and I’m glad it seemed to help. But I don’t really understand what all the fuss is about. I do remember liking Bergman once — Scenes From a Marriage, that sort of thing. But even then I had some reservations, it all seemed somewhat of a downer. How can one not be grim about death, or perhaps one should be, I’m just saying that particular sensibility is not as interesting to me as let’s say Fellini’s somewhat lighter touch. I am someone who has not experienced death very much (knock on wood). My friend Larry Clemson died of AIDS, I often write about him, and my friend David Pond also died of AIDS — I don’t write as much about him, but both were in other cities, and there was just a final phone call. My friend Ken McDougall died — but we were not really friends anymore. I was supposed to be in a film with him, filmed at Casey House, while he was dying. I  couldn’t do it, which has to do with what a coward I am — but  also I knew Daniel MacIvor would take my place, and that’s who Ken was actually in love with— not  me, and it only seemed right for Daniel to be there at the end. I’m not able to watch it (it’s called The Last Supper) which probably speaks to my own lack of a certain kind of what — character? And then there is my mother’s death, which I was present for, but she was unconscious, and at that point she had left my life long ago. And — oh yes. I was not there when my father died, but two weeks before, he collapsed on the floor and couldn’t get up, and I did help him up. I remember how bewildered he looked. I wish I had seen some of that bewilderment in this film. There is a confidence about The Seventh Seal which pretty much amounts to arrogance; and I know I sound very arrogant in these blogs, but there’s really nothing else you can do in an essay like this. I feel as if the reader wishes me to be certain of what I am saying, or else why listen? Of course sometimes I feel dreadfully uncertain, and am quite honest about it. And that’s okay too, I feel, as long as you are one way or the other. I’m on the train to Montreal and I yelled at one of the conductors, or attendants, or what are they? You know one of those people who order you around, and there are so many of those everywhere these days. I suppose it’s a good thing, in a way, because people need jobs, and there are lots of jobs now for cleaners, security guards, and people who like to order you around. Well, anyway, it’s all very odd here no on VIA because up until now we could choose our seats and were spaced out, and didn’t have to wear masks. Suddenly we do have to wear masks and the trains are packed, but oddly, we still get to choose our seats. So it’s kind of chaos. But we don’t really get to choose our seats, because sometimes we sit in the ‘wrong’ places. So here we were my (partner/friend/lover/significant other/or some other completely inadequate term) sitting, of course, beside each other and a woman comes up wearing one of those orange outfits with a big yellow cross on it, which used to indicate school crossing guard, I think now it just means ‘COVID-19-beware!’ She told us we couldn’t sit together, and we were confused, then she said you have to move, sit someone else, in a four seat area. This confused us as there were couples sitting together everywhere, and I had not heard a rule that couples could not sit together, and then it suddenly occurred to me that this women did not actually consider us a couple, and I got more and more agitated by her telling us we couldn’t sit together —shouldn’t that have initiated a lightbulb? Anyway I went a bit off my noodle (I think it’s because I’m smoking less) and said ‘why are you being prejudiced against us!' —which I know is over the top. But she triggered me -- it seemed like homophobia — maybe it wasn't, but what else could it be? Well maybe it was just ignorance, but aren’t ignorance and homophobia the same thing? Anyway, it’s over now, though the person I am traveling with (I won’t attempt to describe our relationship) was not very pleased with my outburst and I had to sit penitent, for awhile. He said we could have been kicked off the train, which is the kind of thing you have to think about nowadays, or worse yet, becoming a headline on everybody’s iPhone that says “Strange large Effeminate Man with too many Tattoos let Loose with Incoherent Tirade on VIA’. But to get back to The Seventh Seal, it seems arrogant to me, because it’s just brimful of philosophizing, it’s a film about death where people talk about death all the time, like: “Fate is a villain crawling with worms!” or " You — bloated with complacency — don’t you see this could be your final hour” Or probably my least favourite moment -- when someone who is going on about the plague -- (oh yes, did I tell you, this movie takes place in the ‘time of plague’) says to a pregnant lady: “You woman filled with the lust of life. Will you wither and fade before dawn?” That sort of thing. As far as I can see this movie is just a big Party for Protestants, and protestants don’t really party, they get together just to feel guilty about everything and think about how death is such a punishment — which is really what’s going on in The Seventh Seal. I‘m really not fond of Nordic melancholy, or any melancholy, though I do get that way, but certainly not all the time, and I don’t think there’s anything necessarily profound about it. The latest COVID-19 news — speaking of plagues — is that the ‘inflammation’ that they found in children turns out (they’ve done tests) not to be related to COVID-19 at all, but (surprise!) doctors are still convinced it is. You know there is something I love about how convinced all these doctors are about things that are not true, it reassures me once again that we haven’t abandoned art, or artists — as scientist are artists, and Fauci is more a poet than a doctor. And like Bergman, he is painting an unconvincing and somewhat unbalanced picture of our devastating lives, but if it makes him feel better (as I say, for Bergman, it apparently did the trick) then more power to him. But we’re such a long time dead anyways; it just makes little sense to me to contemplate that hole in the ground, even if we are digging our own graves.

PLAGUE DIARY 112: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

Ninotchka (1939)
It’s about dogmatism and there’s a lot of that running around now; you might catch it — like COVID-19. The best way to fight dogmatism, as this film teaches us, is to laugh. That was the tagline for Ninotchka —  ‘Garbo laughs” — and that is the turning point for her. Melvyn Douglas tells Ninotchka joke after joke, but nothing penetrates her grim, politically correct exterior. Then suddenly he falls off a chair. She is as convulsed as Garbo might ever be, and after that she is a new person. Laughter is magical; Bergson tried to explain it, he said laughter happens when we see human behaviour that resembles a mechanism. But this explanation is inadequate — any explanation might be. If it strikes us as funny, it’s as random as striking us as beautiful, and the two responses may come from a similar place. Could the key be that very unpredictability? (the very opposite of Bergson’s theory?). I feel guilty for  reviewing Ninotchka because it doesn’t in any way qualify as a bad movie, but for some reason it didn’t make a big impression on me when I first saw it many years ago. But there was no ‘woke’ back then, nor had feminism taken the #Metoo route. What’s amazing is that Garbo, as a Conscientious Communist, is as much a Modern Woke Feminist, as anything. And by ‘woke feminist’ I mean, by definition, a humourless person. I have a friend who's a female writer, and she wrote a novel many years ago, in which a man throws a woman down the stairs. And that scene is meant to be funny. The novel’s female editor said that it could not be funny for a man to throw a woman down the stairs. But what can I say, it was. This goes to the very basis of art; it must be what we don’t expect or what offends us, because the element of surprise is what shocks us out of life, which can be very boring. Ninotchka in the first half of this film resembles a certain kind of woman — the kind of woman I no longer have as a friend. The world is filled with them these days; what I notice is that they cannot accept that I am a girl inside. This is odd to me, because the women who disapprove of me  are usually committed feminists, and trans-enthusiasts. But that’s the point; I am not trans, I am sexual gay man (an old thing really, and by that I mean not just an old man, but an old concept) that is not in vogue and is now offensive. For these modern sexless woke feminists, gay men are even worse than straight ones, because they are more sexual even than straight men (after all, we tend to come in pairs). Well when I am with these women I can feel their creeping contempt when I start to act girly (am I making fun of them? making fun of trans?); they refuse to accept that a being with this body and a penis that works so well (at least mine did, up until recently) could ever have a girl inside. So I admit it, now I try and hang around with women who adore homosexuals; because yes I’m somewhat of a narcissist, and I feel comfortable with women who not only tolerate me, but love me too. At any rate, when I meet the kind of sex-hating feminist I’m talking about (they used to be lesbians, now most of them are straight women or trans men) it’s impossible because I am addicted to anarchic irreverence; when I feel a judged I just want to crash through the envelope. Just in case you don’t believe that Ninotchka was satirising these glum disapproving wokies as far back in 1939, consider what happens when a valet tries to take Ninotchka’s bag. She says — “Don’t make an issue of my womanhood.” And when the valet replies that taking her bag is his ‘business,’ she says — “That’s no business, that’s social injustice.” I quiver in fear nowadays when I hear that term social justice: and not — as you might suspect — because I am so unjust, but because social justice warriors judge people only on their ideas — they are impervious to your energy, intentions, and yes, any love  you have in your heart -- and will instead respond robotically to the content of your thoughts. (Maybe Bergson was right after all, it is this robotic-ness which is funny about Ninotchka, and which invites us to laugh at ‘social justice warriors’ — that is, when we're not terrified.) At any rate Ninotchka can teach these modern politically correct feminists a thing or two, when she says unequivocally to Melvyn Douglas -- “I have heard of the capitalistic male in western society. It’s your superior earning power that has made you that way. Your type will soon be extinct” -- this is what we hear in the voice of young trans pioneers who are oh so pleased to inform me that the rule of cisgendered males is over, and they have come to take my place. (There is no doubt that I am already extinct; the best I can hope for is that after I'm dead all these blatherings will be studied as example of ancient irrelevant attempts at wit that have no relationship at all to social, political, or cultural redemption). But Ninotchka, unlike the modern woke warrior, is somewhat sympathetic to a rich, powerful male: “You are the unfortunate product of a doomed culture” she says “I feel very sorry for you.” But we only have pity for Ninotchka. She gets drunk with Melvyn Douglas (apparently Garbo had to be convinced to do it — she had quite a bit of Ninotchka in her — she found the drunk scene ‘vulgar’). After which, Ninotchka says “No one can be so happy without being punished.” How true that is, especially these days. But for me the moment that rang most true was when her three Russian compatriots defected to Constantinople and opened a restaurant, and had a sudden realisation: “Imagine, we don’t have to whisper anymore!” Or maybe it's when Ninotchka first sees the Eiffel Tower, and says matter-of-factly: “I do not deny its beauty, but it’s a waste of electricity.” I know  several men who are on the autism scale, and they sometimes say things like that; I know that life is not easy for them, and I just want to help. Perhaps the challenge and the allure for me — being with all those who do not laugh — is trying to make them do so, and it’s been one of my biggest mistake in life, to mistake that laughter for love.

PLAGUE DIARY 111: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

A Woman’s Face (1941)
It contains one fascinating idea — the inside should resemble the outside — and that the inside was in fact meant to resemble the outside, and that somehow the inside and outside are the same. It’s a fantasy, and really, the quintessential one, the stuff of Shakespearean comedy. I’ve certainly known enough beautiful young men to understand that beauty and truth are often two very different things. And yet one can’t help hoping. In A Woman’s Face Joan Crawford starts out as physically ugly. And by this movie’s standards, she’s therefore not really a woman. But after all, it’s only movie ugliness (which is all one can imagine Crawford consenting to). The terrible burn scar on her face looks  like someone attached it with Scotch Tape. I did try and like this movie, but Crawford sticks in my craw. She’s best at the beginning when she’s vile and angry  — because it seems to come naturally to her. But not so much after the transformation to ‘beautiful and good’ takes place. And that's this movie’s unpleasant fiction. Crawford submits to 12 operations. Melvyn Douglas is her doctor and the man who sees the beauty inside her. Finally, with calculated slowness, it seems, he peels off the final bandage. Lo and behold — she’s beautiful! Meaning she’s Joan Crawford — and from then on Crawford does the same thing she always does: act quiet, and martyred, and underestimated, smiling sheepishly, and showing off those noble cheekbones and that straight yet sensuous mouth, that says — kiss me if you want to, I’m beautiful — but honestly I don’t know it. So A Woman’s Face is perfect for Crawford because she gets to act like a woman who doesn’t know she’s beautiful, because she’s never been beautiful before. But at this point the fiction becomes repellent. On a feminist level, the idea that a woman who is beautiful is nicer inside — whereas ugly women are mean — is abhorrent. So I guess no one is attracted to an ugly woman -- whatever that is -- men, women, and even children just turn away? After the operation Crawford is so grateful when people suddenly turn toward her and fall a little in love. It is suggested that this is the way it should be for women. If not, they turn bad, like meat left to rot in the sun. That’s the other miserable lie: that if people love us, we become good people. Well I certainly think it’s true in some cases. Sure, lots of people are mean because they’ve had traumatic childhoods (someone kicks them, and they kick the dog). And this is certainly today’s creed: the mantra of victim politics. (But it was James Baldwin who said; “There is something very safe about being a Negro…… at one point, somewhere inside yourself, you have to realise you’re responsible for what happens to you. You cannot blame anybody for it.” This from a man who was very gay and very black at a time when both identities were reviled, is perhaps -- in today's present cultural climate -- a little impossible for us to understand.) However,  for each person we meet who was treated badly, and ends up badly, we can point to 3 others who were treated equally badly and turned out just fine. Ignoring that constitutes the sanctimonious posturing that makes this kind of melodrama somewhat execrable; A Woman’s Face wants us to feel that women must be loved for their beauty, and that being loved for their beauty is good for them, and if we were all just kinder to people they would all turn out fine. But I’m a sucker for Crawford’s final lines. She explains that her need to be a wife and mother is ubiquitous -- that every woman wants it -- “I want to have a home and children, I want to go to market, and cheat the grocer, and fight with the landlord — I want to belong to the human race!” These lines are as self evident as ‘all men are created equal’ — and just as toxic in a certain context. I’ll explain something to you — not because it’s such a terribly complex idea, but because most people seem resistant to it for some reason (I think it’s because they think I’m trying to spoil their fun). This movie, like all manipulative melodrama, is quite persuasive, but what you have to do is separate the candy coating from the poison inside. And that may ruin it for you; it always seems to, when I try and explain what I think these old movies — and many new ones — are really saying. It’s like when I tell people Cary Grant was gay —‘No, I don’t want to hear — you’re ruining it for me.’ I understand; and I'm not saying Crawford's goodness is unbelievable because she apparently used to beat her children in real life. (I do take exception to Faye Dunaway though — she blamed the fags for ruining her career because we loved Mommy Dearest -- but it’s not our fault you actually believed your own bad acting in a camp classic was Oscar-worthy!) No — I don’t care what stars do off screen, what Crawford’s projecting is simply fake; and it's what this movie is about  — that fakeness, the beauty that's only skin deep. It’s what attracts us, and what, sadly, we really want, or think we do. But if you know it’s morally bankrupt at the centre, it's quite alright to still want it. Honestly. I give you permission. As long as you separate the two, and see them for that they are, you can still lick the sugar on the outside no matter how toxic it is at the centre. Last weekend I saw a waiter on Church Street who I’ve lately been obsessed with -- it’s mainly about the way his fine plump young ass meets his furry thick legs — (there I said it, it’s quite often about that with me). I was trying to gather up the courage to give him a compliment and tell him how hot he is. (Oh yes and it also has to do with the fact that he is so gay, a total queen, such a girly boy, and so snooty too). Anyway, I told my friend -- and once he figured out who I was talking about, he said — “No, no don’t go there, no, bad news.” I pleaded — ‘But why? Why?” And finally he said..”Drugs…” as if that shouldn’t have been self evident — and I said nothing to that young man, probably will say nothing, and it’s probably better that way. But I will still yearn to touch that outside, to feel his fine young arrogance close to me — in fact I’m fantasizing about it now! Because at least I will know the consequences and will be going into ‘it,’ so to speak, with eyes wide open. And don’t knock empty pleasure; it’s like leaving the lights on when the barn doors are open, and enjoying watching the horses having quite the party as they’re on their way out.

PLAGUE DIARY 110: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

Every Dawn I Die (1939)
Another gay movie, everyone’s favourite Cagney film, and the only film he starred in with George Raft. Cagney and Raft gaze into each others eyes, and though it's his girlfriend (Jane Bryan, her film career lasted only 3 years — though she’s quite sweet here) who fights for Cagney’s life, what really impresses us is that Cagney manages to soften the heart of convicted killer George Raft when he helps him escape from prison. So Raft puts himself back in jail just to save Cagney. When they are reunited you think they’re going to kiss. After all, they both came from the same bad backgrounds, but Cagney got the breaks and made better choices and — you get the idea. At the end Cagney is reunited with Jane Bryan — but who cares? — because The Warden hands Cagney a signed photo of Raft, that says “To a square guy.” However, it’s Cagney’s speech when he gets released from solitary that that I won’t soon forget: “When I first came here I believed in justice / Now I hate the whole world and everybody in it for letting me in for this  / Buried in a black hole because I’m a good citizen / Now I’m a convict, I act like a convict, smell like a convict / I think and hate like a convict / Beat me, kick me, put me back in the hole / I can take it.” Cagney is a crusading reporter, framed by a sleazy high powered district attorney; the crooked American legal system crushed him, but he never gives up and never stops fighting. This was Joseph Stalin’s favourite film, and I can see why. The end of the COVID-19 lock down is not going as expected; we all thought we would be set free — as Cagney wishes to be — but instead, we keep getting sent back to solitary. And some people aren’t giving up. I still respect those kids they keep interviewing on the beach, and they’re getting more articulate. They just used to just ejaculate, drunkenly 'Let's party, man!' now they’re challenging the statistics: “I just don’t believe it’s dangerous enough to shut everything down.” But it’s the Nick Cordero story that is doing me in. It took him three months to die, dammit, and he went through hell, and he was from Hamilton Ontario — where I live — and a Broadway star — his beautiful wife had just given birth to a baby boy. I don’t for one minute deny that his death was tragic — more than that — torturous —  or that he went through hell. The problem is, I don’t believe he died of COVID-19, And I think it’s an insult to his life and death for those in power to use his death to keep kids off the beaches in Miami. Nick Cordero had three COVID-19 tests. Yes, three. He tested negative twice, but the doctors believed he had COVID-19. They figured he’d make a good poster boy to keep those errant kids inside. So on the third test — lo and behold — the doctors won, and Cordero was diagnosed with you-know-what. Now the media can bring his brutal suffering to the masses, interview his wife, and then turn to those beach kids, grief porn in hand, and speechify. 'Is that the kind of suffering you want to cause? All for your fun? You’re killers, do you know that? All you kids are killers. And for what? For a little friggin’ pleasure? You had to have your cheap kicks, and it ended up killing this poor man — not just killing him, but putting him on the rack. Are you happy now? With your ‘COVID parties,’ and you’re whining -- I don’t want to put on a mask, it doesn’t look good, and it’s itchy -- well Nick Cordero is dead, and it’s you’re fault. I hope you’re satisfied.'  If it isn’t Nick Cordero, then it’s some overweight woman going on about how she's certain she got ‘dementia’ from COVID-19 — a first person account (no doctor in sight) someone who appears as if she has lived her life as a victim, telling us about the nightmares — the awful nightmares — she saw a vision of her dead mother, can you imagine? - beside her bed — and her mother has been dead for years! Okay so who dares now to claim that people with COVID-19 don't suffer? And I swear, nowhere is there a single statistic that puts this in context. Sure, all these young people who are supposedly testing positive ‘may not die — but they may end up with lasting effects.’ This is not doctors pontificating, just the usual public health suspects, the dark talkers with the sad grim eyes. It all takes me back to AIDS — stay home, stay home, it was the same message then. Why can’t we just learn to stay at home? Drinking, singing, dancing, screwing, these things bring it on — we always knew those things lead to bad shit — why do people insist on doing them? If you stay home with your family, you are safe. An old friend of mine just wrote an article about how COVID-19 is for him the same as PTSD, and that we are all to some degree traumatised. I would say instead that we are all now permanently victims. We used to love those medical shows on TV, now we get no actual news — what is happening in Russia? Thailand? Syria? We don’t know, we’re too busy clicking our tongues at teenagers who are not social distancing, and enjoying people suffer and die. People always suffered and died, but you know what the problem was? We didn’t think about them enough. As of today, you must understand that just because you’re healthy and happy it doesn’t mean that everybody is. It’s time that you took a moment from your selfish little life to think about someone else. In fact, it would be better if you just covered yourself with a shroud, sat at home, and poured dirt on your head. I think that’s best; because if you think it’s a good thing to have fun in times like these, then you have no morality, no pity, no love. Well I’ve had it with this forced mass contrition, and like James Cagney — if you’re going to throw me back in solitary for saying so, then go ahead. You’ve met your match. You’ve met someone who doesn’t give a rats ass if you hate him. In fact I enjoy being hated. I enjoy outraging people! There yes, I said it. Perhaps in fact I am writing this just to outrage you. Yes, it’s giving me immense satisfaction! Is there no depth to my depravity? No, none; I give you license to hate, to dig down into the darkest recesses of your soul, where you know without a shadow of a doubt that you are one of the good ones, one of the virtuous few — and that I am evil incarnate. I’m feeling rather Christlike.  But that would be too good for me. I’m not dying for you sins, but for your virtue.

PLAGUE DIARY 109: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

The Scarlet Coat (1955)
I was completely bored and befuddled and didn’t know what I would write about. John Sturges was a ‘man’s man,’ he made war movies and westerns. That would explain why everyone seems so very constipated in The Scarlet Coat; not even the emotional scenes are emotional. Anne Francis, who is quite pretty, has two scenes in which she is clearly meant to be the love interest for both the male leads, then promptly disappears. It’s a film by a man, about men. Remember The Great Escape? The quintessential buddy movie — about the bonds between men that transcend women and have nothing to do with them? (John Sturges directed that too.) I won’t attempt to explain the plot; The Scarlet Coat is supposed to be a movie about Benedict Arnold but Arnold is nowhere to be found. Maybe that gives you some idea of how crazy the plot is — I couldn’t follow it and didn’t care. What is important, though, is the idea of ‘honour,’ especially among males. In The Great Escape Steve McQueen personifies it every time he’s released from solitary confinement in the ‘hotbox.’ He keeps being sent there as punishment for doing bad things, but no matter how ravaged he is by what is obviously severe physical and psychological torture, he manages to come bouncing out with a smile, and all the other guys are watching him, and his jaunty expression says: ‘If I can take it, so can you!’ What’s so moving is that he does the brave act not just for himself, but for them; if he can inspire them with his stoic resolve, maybe they’ll get through another day in a prisoner of war camp. The Scarlet Coat has a similar moment, when Michael Wilding is sentenced to death, and Cornel Wilde — sweet little puppy he is — has quite forgotten about Anne Francis — because he’s too busy trying to get Michael Wilding pardoned. But Wilding refuses to be pardoned, because it wouldn’t be ‘honourable.’ And then he marches out onto the green and the drummers are drumming, and he thinks he’s going to be shot, and even quips: “I hope your soldiers have good aim,” but a few seconds later it’s clear he is going to be hanged. Then he says a few last words to Cornel Wilde “It’ll be a momentary pang, Jack.” And then they hang him. At that point there were tears in my eyes, and it’s because (and I know you’re tired of hearing this) it’s a completely gay film. A Shakespearean context may help. Shakespeare wrote (or co-wrote) a very strange play called The Two Noble Kinsmen — a play that shocked me. Now the poetry is a problem, because all the stuff written by John Fletcher is very accessible, but the stuff by Shakespeare is very dense —  so it’s kind of a dizzying style rollercoaster. But what’s more dizzying are the sexual politics: Arcite and Palamon are Greek warriors, cousins, and friends to the death. They are both also extremely beautiful and kind and perfect. Then they happen to fall in love with the same woman, and they must (because of honour, you know) fight to the death to see who will win her. But as they are preparing to fight each other to the death, they are putting on each other’s armour, and one cousin asks the other ‘does it pinch you?’  — or something to that effect. The nonsensical idea is this: ‘I wouldn’t want to pinch you while I’m dressing you, in preparation for the moment when I am going to hopefully stab you to death with my sword.’ This is called honour between men, but it’s more than that, it’s a love between men that is purer and sweeter than love between man and woman.  It’s what Shakespeare means when Antonio is so in love with Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice, that Solanio says: “I think he only loves the world for him.” No one has ever expressed so poignantly what it means to not be able to find a reason to live in this world without the presence of a certain someone; or more precisely, when there is nothing about the world to love, except, well — him. Michael Wilding has a ‘Shakespearean’ moment too. When he's depressed and chatting with to his manservant, he muses: “Do you suppose death is beautiful Peter?” And Peter say: “Only if life is ugly…..[because] you seem unhappy sir.”  And Wilding says: “I’m just lonely.” He is supposedly lonely because Ann Francis doesn’t love him, or, he could also be lonely because Cornel Wilde is in love with Ann Francis. But, frankly, it’s clear neither of them are as in love with her as they are with each other. (No, hear me out.) After they find out they are rivals for Anne Francis, they stage a mock sword fight, and finish off with a conversation in which they fondly gaze into each others eyes and basically say ‘let the best man win.’ Eve Sedgwick talks about how, in a homophobic world, men use women to love each other, and though they compete over women, their relationships with other men are ultimately more important (she calls it ‘the homosocial’). But if you don’t buy all this, just remember that Shakespeare’s The Two Noble Kinsmen is rooted in a heterosexist/misogynistic/homophobic culture that says women are the body, and the body will drag you down into the mud, and the love men have for other men is purer than that. And in The Scarlet Coat Anne Francis’ boobies are kind of hanging there, staring at Cornel Wilde and Michael Wilding, daring them to fondle them, and they are decorated, somewhat forlornly, with cloth flowers, but neither man wants them, because they have something more noble to pursue. The misogyny only comes because homosexuality is -- in this context -- a symbol of the purest love; because it was assumed men would never be so gross as to want each other’s bodies, to want each other’s hanging things — so the love between men must be purer. Lytton Strachey called it ‘higher sodomy’ and Oscar Wilde described it as something “beautiful — it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection… That it should be so, the world does not understand.” And hey, sure, we all know that the chambermaid spoke in hushed tones of the disgusting ‘brown stains’ on the sheets at the hotel where Wilde stayed with Lord Alfred Douglas. Well there always are stains like that; but the sheets may be washed, and later hung out to dry, and we can imagine they have always been as white as the wings of angels.

PLAGUE DIARY 108: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

Bomba, the Jungle Boy (1949)
These movies were very popular, it might be important to understand why. Of course there’s Johnny Sheffield himself, fetching in leopardskin (I found a stock photo of him with chest hair, but in this film he’s shaved clean; fascinating what a fetish we make of that). Sheffield was 19 when he first impersonated Bomba, after playing ‘Boy’ with great success in the Tarzan movies, and audiences were glad to have him back. It’s the same fantasy, and a very appealing one. The notion is very much of the Rousseau variety; and related to environmentalism, and also Adam and Eve. If Barthes was around, he would tell us that is what the Tarzan movies mean, and why they are so comforting. The big bad hunters are always appearing, and they are white — but they are not us, we  — the audience — are good white people, who identify with Bomba — kind to the natives, and of course ‘at one’ with the animal kingdom. These films speak to us of the inherent innocence of humans in their natural habitat, which means The Garden of Eden. When Peggy Ann Garner (Bomba’s Jane) first tries on her leopard-skin dress (as IMDB notes, Sheffield hands her a raw animal hide and a minute later she returns modelling a flattering and tasteful chemise; she’s obviously handy with a needle) and he inquires if she likes the jungle, and she says “I like it too much.” There’s not even a hint of sex between them; we are to assume that Bomba — being a virile young man with recently shaved chest hair —is too innocent to lust after her, and probably has something going on with the monkeys (is this the origin of AIDS?). At any rate, before finding her a leopard-skin, Bomba generously offers her his own. She demurs in shy fashion, but what she might have said is: “It wouldn’t be right, Bomba, for you to stand in front of me, naked — in all your 19 year old post-adolescent splendour — I know you do not understand, because of your jungle innocence, what that might lead to, so let’s just say it would be best if you kept your loincloth on.” When she dons her leopardskin apparell, the monkeys naturally (oh those monkeys!) steal her clothes and try them on; this makes Peggy Ann Garner and Johnny laugh. (Monkeys also entertained Tarzan and his family, and that seems to be what they were put on earth for, to keep us in an endless state of bliss.) But it’s important to remember that this vision of the world is a fantasy, just as environmentalism is a fantasy, because ever since mankind graduated from hunting and gathering (and the verb ‘graduated’ is not meant to be a value judgement) we have wished to tame the world and put it to use. I am not suggesting that environmentalism is not a good idea, or that it’s best we should continue raping the planet, only that (how to tell you this?) putting your plastic bottles in a separate bin from your paper boxes may not solve the problem right away (oh, and don’t forget black plastic does not go with other plastics, it goes in the garbage). Environmentalism is partially based on the romantic fiction that the animal world is kinder than the human world, and that anyone who lives in a so-called ‘primitive’ way is also kind and unspoiled. This is not true, and is a kind of reverse racism, valorising tribal people, because we are all tribal, and that’s not necessarily a good thing. To this movie’s credit not all the monkeys are laughing — some are shrieking — and there is a moment where a pride of lions ravages some poor hyena. But there must be the final moment when Peggy Ann Garner and her father (Onslow Stevens) watch Bomba walk off into the jungle, and Onslow remarks that it is odd, “him turning down all we have to offer — for a home in the hills, and flock of wild animals.” We nod and smile, thinking how uncivilised we so-called civilised people are, and how much kinder and more innocent we would be, if, like Bomba we were always in some sort of natural habitat, left to our natural ways. But if you have been reading these blogs (I’m sure you haven’t) then you would know that I’m not convinced that most people are by nature, inherently good. There are, sadly, some flaws in Rousseau’s ironclad notion of the benign ‘general will’: one of them involves the family. The family is not something that Bomba knows. When Peggy Ann speaks of family, he says ‘What-family?’ (which I must translate because it is in Bomba’s mangled English). What Bomba means to say is ‘What is family?’ (you’re welcome). So ‘family’ -- as a concept -- is unknown to Bomba. And similarly, when she says that Onslow Stevens is her father, Bomba asks “ What-father?” She explains this concept to him ingeniously, saying “I’m his — cub” and then the light dawns for Bomba. But does it for us? Because when she tells him what her father is up to Bomba says “Father bad’ which again is terribly distorted English, but hopefully you’ve got the picture. The problem is that fathers can be bad, and it’s something imperfect about the notion of humans being without vice in a state of nature. Then when Bomba has understood the concept of father, he tells her about ‘Cody’ who raised him, and consequently died, but who lived alone in the Jungle and didn’t like people. Peggy Ann calls Cody a ‘misanthrope’ —which Bomba doesn’t understand. I'll explain for her. ‘Well, Bomba, a misanthrope is someone who hates people, so the man who raised you hated people, and he probably did so for good reason. I hate people too, especially this morning, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to be around them, and have sex with them occasionally (which I haven’t done in awhile, which is probably why I’m so cranky about them). But you know, Bomba, you can’t love people by idealising them, it’s best to realize that they, like you, are fools, and that all we can do with other humans is try and help them when they inevitably drop their requisite arrogance and discover they’re own fallibility, which also means having a sense of humour about themselves, because nothing is to be taken too seriously, as nothing is real, especially your hopes and dreams. And everything changes Bomba, and all you can ask of beauty is that you get to admire it, and screw it, now and then. And that’s today’s quite imperfect lesson — in an imperfect world — my dear, dear Bomba.’