Rock N Roll

N-Word is the censored title of a famous song/poem by Patti Smith. The song was released on her 1978 album Easter. I love that song. I was thus completely perplexed and then deeply angered when I tried to download Easter on Apple Music and ‘Rock N Roll N-Word’ would not download. No explanation, no nothing. (There may be a solution but I’m not tech-savvy enough to find it.) Why is this happening? And specifically to members of minority groups? Patti Smith was and still is a woman (and working class). And black actor Jamie Foxx recently saw the cancelling of his 2016 film All Star Weekend. And then of course there’s me. I’m a fag, or more specifically a faggot, which is what I prefer to be called, as I want to own the abuse -- and turn it back on my abusers. When my 2016 novel Sad Old Faggot appeared, I was told by several online websites that they couldn’t advertise my book because the title was offensive. Rumour has it that Jamie Foxx’s cardinal sin was casting a white man as a Latino person. This is — and I am not exaggerating — if it continues — the end of art. It’s no use arguing about whether or not its ‘censorship.’ Any artist who wants to get  their work out these days is censoring themselves. That have to. It’s terrifying. Art has become ideology — which it is not. And this is very dangerous indeed. We have nothing in our lives which is not ideology these days, i.e which is not science or 'fact' or philosophy. Religion is hotly contested — decidedly over for some, and a passionate crusade for many others . But people need the irrational, they need the dark, as Hilary Mantel says (and I’m paraphrasing): we artists are kind of 'in charge' of your psyche, that is of helping you to organize it, and get it into shape. When you come to see a play or read a novel it is not a lecture or a political speech — the ideas in it are not meant to be ripped out of it and held against you, or the artist, or anyone else. Artists are in touch with something deep, and unexplainable, and irrational, and scary, and that’s why most of us are nuts and some of us are not very nice people. We are kind of like the 'Christs' of art, that is, we take all the pain on ourselves and put it in front of you so that you have the opportunity to be redeemed. As Artaud says, we are 'signalling through the flames’ desperately attempting to understand what it means to be mortal, while you go your merry way buying iPhones and software and new houses, all the while loudly proclaiming your ‘ideas’ on Instagram. And if we do it right, we are not just wanking — our art is not just an indulgence, it is a deep confession —— about the agony,, ecstasy and  comedy of being human. But when we expect art to be ideology, we destroy  one of our few connections with the irrational — unless of course we all decide to adopt some sort of religion or other (but a lot of baggage comes along with that). The nice thing about art is you can dip in and out of it. As Oscar Wilde said, there is no such thing as evil art, only bad art. I am and have always been in love with Patti Smith. I wrote approximately three plays about her; after all,  I was a boy/girl and she was a girl/boy —  and I was irresistibly attracted to her dedication to being an outlaw, and her strangeness, her quirkiness, her childishness, her innocent -- yet blatantly shocking -- sexuality. In the song ‘Rock N Roll N-Word,’ Smith uses the N-Word as a metaphor for outsider. She aspires to the holiness that comes from owning one’s oppression and insisting on standing outside the norm. You may never get to hear ‘Rock N Roll N-Word’, So  will tell you that in it, Smith proceeds to list all of the people who were ’N-words’ -- though they were not black —  Jackson Pollock and Jesus Christ for instance (because Christ was, as I understand it, brown, not black). What she is saying, and what is clear enough to anyone with half a brain, is that it is good to be the N-Word, because that means you are outside society and society is corrupt and the powers that be are detestable. Of course yes, it's tough being 'outside' and admittedly Smith is romanticizing anti-racism, and appropriating it.  But she is a working class woman who must as an artist have a right to use any metaphor she wishes without fear of being 'cancelled' on Apple Music.This digital decimation of art and the artist is a danger to our children. What are we protecting them from? If I’m not allowed to call myself a ‘faggot’ then I am not allowed to communicate the full extent of my oppression, in all it’s violence, its horror, and its humiliation. Calling my self a 'gay man,' or much worse yet ,a ‘man who has sex with men’ does not in any way communicate the cultural after-effects of being relegated to the outside. But most of all what Patti Smith does for young people — which is something they really need today — is communicate how beautiful and ennobling it is not to fit in. But not fitting in doesn't mean saying ‘I support the Ukraine’ or wearing a COVID mask while driving your car, or listening to a land acknowledgement -- as these are now nearly mandatory social approved rituals. It means doing and saying things that everyone else is not doing or saying—and not because you want to, but because you must. It’s all about bravery really. I have always aspired to be as brave as Patti Smith  — we should all be so lucky -- so gifted, and so divinely crazy.

We are powerless.

That's the problem That’s why people are sucker punching stewards on planes, and every is angry and crazy all the time. What is power? Well if you have it you think the decisions you make will have some effect on your actual life, you think that your judgement and choices matter, and that you can do things. There are lots of forces that, traditionally, have limited power: poverty, kingship, and dictatorships for instance. Well we thought that we had gotten rid of kingship but people seem to miss Queen Elizabeth a lot, and yes -- we are still trying to get rid of poverty, and dictatorships are unfortunately on the rise. But what makes us powerless these days is digital technology -- something that is often presented as simply convenient or even worse as our salvation -- but, we are assured, certainly -- essentially harmless. (Don’t get mad at me, I don’t hate technology, I just think we need to realize what it has done to us). For me nothing could be a more potent illustration of our virtual castration -- in Ontario, Canada -- than GO Metrolinx. I do a five hour commute to my job (I don’t have to go every day, but still — ) so before I get on the bus I’m in an awfully bad mood. But there is no one working at GO anymore, they stopped hiring staff at GO after COVID-19 — it may be true that they can’t find any -- but the fact is that they don’t have ticket sellers anymore. So just imagine if you come here from Kenya (people do you know) and you land at a GO station, and you had to deal with the dark, scary cement basements hallways with no signage, and announcements on loudspeakers chiding your for your own good -- like in a concentration camp, and  ticket machines that are complicated and don’t always work. And in the  Hamilton bus terminal, for instance, there are no actual stops for the busses -- the drivers just decide where they want to pick you up, and everyone kind of runs over at the last minute and tries to flag them down. And there’s no one to help you except some wandering folk dressed as crossing guards who usually say 'It's not my fault.' It's nightmare. But, generally, everywhere, there's just  no one to talk to anymore. You can say it, really you can. Especially if you are old like me, and you grew up counting on the fact that when you went out the door there were stores to visit, and clerks, and when people walked down the street they were not wearing masks, and they occasionally looked at you (not always of course but sometimes) and you might be able to meet a stranger or exchange a few words, or at least catch someone's eye? Yes, there was that thing, now and then -- you could look into people’s eyes -- it wasn’t a sexual thing or even a loneliness thing — or it didn’t seem that way at the time. Making daily contact with others was just part of life. So yes there is less contact, and when people do finally manage to meet people somewhere I think part of the anger comes from the desperate relief -- which they don’t want to reveal -- at how wonderful it is to actually talk to someone. Now you might think I’m crazy. You might not  like people at all, i.e. you might prefer to be alone, and/or at your computer -- which doesn't feel alone (but it is), and I know it takes all kinds to make a world — and I respect that. But though I have an ‘alone’ part of me (he’s writing this) I also have a part of me that needs urgently to connect all the time and have my amazing personality affirmed (at least I think it's amazing!) — and a lot of people have that need too. But most of all they want to feel that they have free agency, that what they do matters. But with things like globalism and the worldwide web and the deepening chasm between rich and poor we just  (to quote a famous poem) can’t get no satisfaction. All we can do is send an email that probably won’t be answered, or leave a message on a complaint phone line. The modern corporate world runs everything including government, and it does not need us or care about us, and we can’t affect it. I mean we’re lucky if we can get someone in Malaysia to answer the phone and say “I don’t understand what you are talking about sir, and will you please calm down?”  I have this paradoxical issue:  I can’t stand people, but I need to be around them, even though people are generally stupid and insensitive and selfish and narcissistic — like me, but then on the other hand touching them (especially their ‘private parts’ if they are male) is a lot of fun. And even more fun is entertaining people — I love that, making them laugh, and just diverting them from the dull apoplexy which is their daily regimen of avoiding work and confrontation and getting hold of someone at Amazon, or Bell or wherever --- to complain. Then there is love (what is that?) Well it's fleeting of course, meaning that it doesn’t last long, or does it? But love is actually kind of everywhere, if you are kind, and at peace with yourself, and open to it, which I know you’ve heard a thousand times and you think it’s a cliche, but cliches can be true. And if you just look around and see that person next to you, sometimes you can see through all the bullshit and just make a connection. Of course if they have a nice dick or ass it helps -- but there are a few people, who I actually consider myself close to, who I’ve never actually seen naked. And then there’s my partner -- who I won’t speak of -- except to say that it seems like I haven’t seen him for ages, because we’ve both been terribly busy, but that’s the way it goes. Right? Where are you, honey? If you are reading this blog and you know my boyfriend-- please tell him I love him, and miss him. I know he misses me. We’ve just been so (sigh) busy lately….

It’s not the

first time I’ve been to the Shaw Festival since he died. But suddenly it hit me. He’s not there. It’s not that I had seen Christopher Newton so very much in the recent past — the last time was about 2015  (and before that it was approximately in the year 2000). But he was always 'with me.' I don’t know how much I was 'with him'; but whenever we talked he was excessively warm with me, acting as if it was a blessing to have me around -- but he was always like that, beyond charming. I met him in 1981, in the dressing room of The Theatre Centre, at 666 King Street West, after a performance of my play Cavafy or the Veils of Desire. I can’t remember what he said —but he was effusive — something like 'you must call me, we must talk!' I was so excited, not daring to wonder what the artistic director of a giant theatre festival  might want with me. And lo and behold, in a couple of weeks I was invited to the Shaw to be his assistant director on The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs. I was enchanted; it was like a dream. When I arrived there that summer I had a house to myself, and there were all those amazing productions — especially Robert David MacDonald's Camille and my favourite — The Desert Song. Christopher confided that it was his very gay version of the old Sigmund Romberg operetta. 'Notice when she sings a kind of hymn to his sword — I wonder what that's about?' His favourite line was when some turbaned elderly actor -- before an exit --  announced ‘I’m off to the baths!’ Christopher was my friend, I thought. I would go over to his house every night after rehearsal, and get very drunk, and he would play me his favourite music, and we would talk about art, and I was on cloud nine. I know it sounds like a kind of fairy story; it definitely was. I didn’t know he was attracted to me -- as I was only 30 and I had just come out of the closet and my 17 year old first love had just dumped me; I had found a sort of lackadaisical love in Toronto, but suddenly down at the Shaw Festival Christopher made me feel like a young prince. And then one night, he casually said something like — ‘shall we go to bed?’ — and of course I said yes. He was 18 years older than me, but very handsome. Apparently the very short shorts I had been wearing (the colour of my shorts and my head bandanna always matched, I must have been quite the sight!) reminded him of the various Aboriginal outlaws that were usually his lovers. He told me their stories. One was in jail. He used to meet them at his favourite sleazy bar in Vancouver (The Shaggy Horse). He said that though I had the young hairless body of one of his Aboriginal bad boys, I was his ‘lawyer’ —and I didn’t know what that meant — and he said, you know ‘the one you really settle down with.' I was overwhelmed and charmed. I won’t tell you any more about our love affair. (Except for when we first saw a picture of Canadian actor/writer Paul Gross in the entertainment section of the newspaper, and Christopher blithely opined 'I think I'm dropping you for him' and when Tennessee Williams died, and the newspaper reported that the great writer choked on a bottle cap, Christopher said 'It was definitely poppers!') But like so many love affairs, it didn’t work out. We fought so many times, basically because he was trying to persuade me to be his associate artistic director (the job later went to Duncan Macintosh). I didn’t want any of that, and ultimately I didn’t want to be his lover, because that meant to some degree being his personal assistant, and forever his admirer (the amount of admiration Christopher demanded was kind of astounding, but I supplied it for as long as I could).  I needed to do my own work, and I was obsessed with younger men in Toronto. So that was that. Being back at Shaw today, in 2022 when he is dead, is so strange and sad, because even if I didn’t usually visit him -- I always knew his house was there, the house he loved so much. And he was always in it, tending the flowers, drinking some wine, writing in his journal (someone has to find that journal and publish it, he would have wanted that, and there’s good stuff in there, I just know it!). But I feel compelled to make it clear to you -- to anyone who will listen anyway -- what Christopher did for me. He did something for me as a young gay artist that no one had ever done before and will never do again. But it was absolutely necessary. I realize now that I won at least one award (The Pauline McGibbon Award) due to him — he kind of arranged it, he was on the committee and suggested my name. But most importantly — no one in the Toronto theatre scene would produce my work, and even when I founded Buddies no one knew what to do with me, especially the gay community, and everyone was frankly so mean and jealous, and he took me away and supported me and made me feel like I was important, and talented, and that my work mattered. He thus set himself up for ridicule — because I was a drag queen and a slut and (all that other stuff) and my work was always sexual, and his public association with me (even though he never revealed our private association, and wouldn’t hold hands with me in Niagara-on-The-Lake -- ‘the twitch of a curtain means a ruined reputation in this town!’ -- he used to say.) He gave me the courage to be, because I needed an older gay man brave enough to believe in me, when the rest of the world wouldn’t. And now when I go to the Shaw Festival, I prefer to imagine  Christopher is still there, tending his garden, getting stoned, being disappointed because I won’t smoke weed with him (it makes me paranoid), telling me that someone ‘wore’ the actor Leonard Chow to a party as an ‘ornament,’ sniffing poppers with me in bed, playing a new album by Philip Glass, teaching me proper table manners (“You’re going to need them some day at those fancy gay dinner parties!' — parties that of course, never materialized), popping antibiotics ('Well you can’t be too careful!') admiring a young actor from afar ‘That Dan Lett, he’s so slim, so easy on the eyes, isn’t it heaven?’). 

I could go on.

Sex is over.

That is clear. The COVID-19 pandemic ushered in a new era of paranoia that — remarkably —  rivals the terror over AIDS. The fear of touching, and the naive notion that ‘good’ people (the virtue signallers who continue to avoid contact with strangers) will live longer than the ‘bad’ people (who touch everyone, willy-nilly) will not disappear fast. It’s been labeled the ‘new puritanism.’ Now if you wonder how we can possibly be puritans when ‘the children’ are probably watching porn on YouTube as we speak, welp --  that’s the way hatred of sex and hatred of the body works. When we deny ourselves, our urges and pleasures crop up in the oddest of ways; hence the panopoly of twerking prebuscent female singers along with an alarming number of misogynist TikTok videos. Consider also — the Oakville transgender shop teacher who appears in class sporting gigantic fake breasts, protruding nipples and all. Well you just try criticizing her! Under the new puritanism rules — where sex no longer exists — she is a paragon, her performance consistent with the gender illogic of ‘drag queen story hour. ‘ You see, long ago The Wokies separated gender from sex. It seemed like a good idea at the time (ie. when Judith Butler suggested it in the 90s). But the fact is that gender is sexy, and this is one of the main reasons we cling to it. Men dress as women for three reasons only (sure there are exceptions) — a) because they are transexual and wish to have a sex change, or b) they are drag queens i.e. gay men who dress as a woman to flirt and perform, or c) because female clothing is their sexual fetish. Obsessive male crossdressing nearly always has a sexual component. And that’s good. Because sex is a good thing, right? (Do I need to remind you?) Now when women wish to dress as men— it’s a different matter altogether,  because women are different than men -- due to both hormones, and social programming. Women are often raped and abused by men; and they are generally treated with less respect than men (need I remind you, of this, also?) and so they hold a ‘lower’ place in our culture. So if women dress as men they are likely to be taken more seriously, whereas men who dress as women are likely to be viewed in a more sexualized way. The Oakville stop teacher is obviously a fetishist, and proud of it (more power to her!). But she should not bring her fetish into the classroom, just as drag queens should not bring their big kissy lips and sheer nylons into kindergarten. I thought of all this while viewing the absorbing new Canadian film Backlash: Misogyny in the Digital Age. Yes its a great documentary, but — it's not so much that there is a ‘rise’ in misogyny, (it’s always been there in western culture) but that the blithe acceptance of the digital world and its toxic algorithms is destroying us. Honestly -- why are we we taking seriously anything some anonymous idiot says online, anyway? The ‘digital world’ is all about money, period. Yes I know. You are now reading my internet bog. But in my defence,  I will remind you that this blog is wildly unpopular, only faithfully read by a handful of nutty people -- and my friends -- as I am no longer taken seriously as artist or thinker by anyone. Thank God I am merely a sad old faggot - whose plays will lie dead, forever unproduced; a pathetic drag queen who insists on nattering on about how great sex is, when, as everyone knows, sex is over. I do not frequent social media for the very reason that I would  be demonized there --  for all this. Social media is — as some are beginning to realize —  a kind of blood sport. Your cellphone is the modern coliseum; we gather daily to gleefully celebrate the suffering of others, as nothing can compare to the joy of a good dressing down or cancelling (‘You're fat and ugly and stupid and nobody likes you! So there!’)  Now it is true that the women in the documentary Backlash — including the president of the Italian parliament Laura Boldini — have experienced not only the imagined slings and arrows of outrageous social media demonization, but the terror of real life home invasions and threats of physical violence. But this imagined ‘increase’ in misogyny is a digital magnification of what has always been there, admittedly exacerbated very much by the well meaning but ill-fated attempts to de-sexualize relationships between men and women that characterized #Me too. Duh! — you can’t remove sex from heterosexuality, try as you might. Attempts to de-eroticize male/female relations just serve to make straight men more misogynistic.  Rape is a crime, but sex, like unwanted touching, is a lot like hate speech; it’s very human, and sometimes very attractive, we all need it now and again just to keep the ball rolling. And if we attempt to erase it, this thing we have so demonized will just appear somewhere else in an even more disruptive way The whole concept of ‘verbal violence’ is a romantic invention of the digital world — we never thought of words as actual physical violence before social media. What ever happened to -- 'sticks and stones may break my bones but names can never hurt me?’ Now that was good advice. If ‘hate speech’ is banned, then I will be, too  because mostly I just want to write about politically incorrect sex (and all sex is politically incorrect anyway). Ergo, therefore, in conclusion, let’s stop pretending that sex does not exist. Instead, let's start having more sex, and starting admitting that we are doing so, and admitting that sex is all about power, and power is sexy (see: Foucault). Sorry, but if we decry rape and misogyny without speaking of the intimate and complex relationship between sex and power, we do women — and well, everyone — a great disservice — to say the very, very, very least.

Abandon the left.

 It’s time, I’ve had it with the left, haven’t you? No, this doesn’t mean I'm now officially a Nazi; but of course the polarized, demonizing state of left vs right-wing politics might of course lead you to think so. 'Abandoning the left' does not mean that you become right-wing. I am, officially — no wing; but I’ve got wings, and I can fly away, thank God, from this madness -- until the time when we  can somehow, somewhere all have a civilized discussion again. Haven’t you had enough? Of the cancelling? The cancelling that left-wingers claim is a figment of a right-wing demented imagination? Hey, I work in the arts and I’m tired of seeing my friends fired from jobs by mean vicious, ambitious, young wokists, most of them distinctly untalented, who take advantage of the fact that those ‘in power’ have misgendered someone or used the wrong word. The left is over; it’s become the Communist Party in Stalinist Russian, it’s become Joe McCarthy in the U.S. senate in the 50s, serving the needs of desperate, stupid, ungifted, mean people who now understand all too well if they name names -- and curse others for any number of imagined sins --  that those who hold the jobs they want will now hand them over, and the wokies can step into those jobs sans credentials, or good will. And this is not about me. I could care less what happens to me; I’m old, and my career is over, and I will most likely be dead soon. But I can’t be complicit in what has become the suicide of the left; its self-immolation, its flagrant, exhibitionistic, theatrical parade of self-destruction. Did you notice that Green Party president Lorraine Rekmans quit  — saying -- ‘The dream is dead?” Apparently, during some ‘virtual event,' a Green Party member misgendendered interim leader Amita Kuttner. So what? This kind of thing is happening all the time (not the misgendering, but when it does your apology should be accepted!). The right is gleefully watching the left eat itself alive by encouraging the lowest common denominator of the human constituency, the cockroaches who would eat their own in order to gain a smidgen of power. But don’t fool yourself. The choices on the left and right are equally appalling. The left believes that there is no gender and only white people can be racist -- while the right believes that Joe Biden and Barbra Streisand are eating babies. It pretty much amounts to the same thing; organized insanity, and finally those who aren’t getting laid regularly (that’s a lotta blue-balled folks of all 1000 genders) — can finally get all that sexual frustration off their chests by burning their ‘friends’ alive. For some reason all this seems related to a film I just saw — Anonymous Club, a documentary about Courtney Barnett — an Australian singer. (I went with trepidation.) As soon as I saw and heard her (she is kinda talented by the way, and also quite sexy in her own closeted way) I spent the the whole movie being irritated by how subtly woke she was, and trying to figure out whether or not she was a bonafide lesbian. You see, you just can't be a woke lesbian singer these days (where is K.D. Lang now?) because that would mean declaring you are attracted to vaginas, and acknowledging that women have them. So cagily, this flic makes us guess whether or not Courtney is a dyke. There are the usual signals — the bad haircut masked by a toque, the men’s clothing (some things never change) and the song lyric “I am not your bitch or your mother.’ It’s all a little like reading a novel by Anne-Marie MacDonald (I asked a friend once if Fall On Your Knees was a gay novel — as I hadn’t read it — and my friend, a woman — and a pretty sophisticated one at that — screwed up her face and intoned: ‘Um I don’t know, I think there might be a lesbian character part way through…?’ ‘Too late’ I said, ‘too late. I’m sure it’s a great novel and a great summer read, but if you can’t figure out of the characters are lesbians or not, it’s not a lesbian one.’ Towards the end of Anonymous Club Courtney stands in the rain carrying a rainbow umbrella, because young wokies know better than to ‘act’ gay — or say they are — as they want to fit in with the new fascism. So Courtney could be a straight girl with a bad haircut who loves toques, and men’s clothing, and sings songs about how horrible men are — until we spot the umbrella which might lead us to conclude she is ‘non-binary.' Don’t get me wrong. Courtney is ‘out’ in the press, but not in this movie, where all she does is talk about how fragile she — and other people — are, and how her music ‘helps’ them. Woke people demand that art ‘help’ people. This is killing art. This, along with all the really talented people who are leaving the arts, cuz it’s just too damn scary to try to make something real that comes from your heart, as you might be accused of being an ‘ist’ of some kind or other. Oh well. There was art once. And once, there was left-wing politics. I hope somebody remembers.