It’s not the

shock of the new; it’s the shock of the same old misogyny played yet again. They now provide politically correct analysis with old films on TCM, not sure how long it will last, I hate it. That is sort of what I am doing here. No, it’s defintely not. I can’t tell you how much I admire the misogyny of Leave Her to Heaven.  Don't get me wrong -- I don’t admire misogyny in itself, just the expert expression of it. This is vile but extremely adept propaganda;  the problem being that the people who denounce it are all too ready to produce vile propaganda of their own, which is what a ‘pro-women’ film would be. For years I was accused of writing gay propaganda by people who hadn’t ever seen my plays; for me, this was the supreme irony, as I was regularly castigated and ultimately exiled from my own community for being anti-gay. I worked with Martha Cronyn many years ago (yes she was  related to Hume, and was a marvelous actress — but so incredibly insecure; I spent most of my time trying to convince her she had talent).  Anyway when one of my earliest plays The Dressing Gown was mired in controversy, she took me aside and meekly inquired (meekness was her trademark) ‘Why do you hate gay men so much, Sky?” I didn’t hate them any more than I hated anyone else, the problem was my fundamental misanthropy and my hatred of hypocrisy. But back then  I was trying to write 'message plays.' Anyway, when I set out to deconstruct the misogyny of a minor masterpiece of hate literature called Leave Her to Heaven, I am trying to make all and sundry (the 98 people who occasionally read this blog) aware that all art is political, but that it is our job as artists to try and not make art that is consciously so, to not think we have failed if they ‘didn’t get the point’ but rather, if they do. For there must be something else, beyond the mundane didactic, the quotidian preaching ('Wear a mask, save your mother!') that is our lot, even in this pandemic world. I wish I could say Leave Her to Heaven transcends sexual politics; it certainly tries. It is an adaption of  a novel, ergo very pretentious. And the title comes from Shakespeare (Hamlet’s curse on his mother) and Shakespeare -- though not at all misogynistic himself -- lived in a very misogynistic era. But he would have been bored by Leave Her to Heaven, because in almost every play he wrote, he in some way or another acknowledged women’s desire, and hardly ever blamed it for evil. The play also has a line in it that echoes Othello. When the statuesque Cornel Wilde is trying to figure out what’s wrong with his crazy obsessive new wife Gene Tierney (very windblown, sparkly-eyed and wet-lipped, yes, this is Oscar worthy stuff!) his mother-in-law says “She loves too much.” This is almost, but not quite -- ‘loved not wisely but too well.’ But Othello doing that is nothing like a woman doing it, especially when she is drowning in feminine virtue. Women love, you say? Well this one loves too much. Women care you say? This one cares to the point of suffocation. Women would do everything for the man they love? Well this one kills her disabled brother-in-law (who she labels ‘a cripple’ --  in a deliciously detestable, politically incorrect moment, even then) and then murders her unborn child by throwing herself down a very lovely flight of blue carpeted stairs. “I wish the little beast was dead” she mutters. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say — not that Gene Tierney is too feminine -- but that she picks only one of the feminine virtues (i.e. loving ‘her man’) and plays it to death, ignoring love for ‘family’ and love for ‘children.’ And this is where we get to the essence of the film’s vile misogyny. Cornel might as well be naked in this film; my ex-ray vision kept seeing through his clothes. He often removed shirts and displayed his magnificent chest and arms in films — not so here, but you know they are there, He was a sex symbol of the highest order, and from the moment Gene Tierney sets eyes on him she wants him. The fact that she is framed as a desiring woman should be evident from the fact that she proposes to him; or rather she announces they are getting married and then proposes -- to his chagrin. Yes — there is some Freudian stuff tossed in  (he looks like her father) as this is 1945 when Freud was chic, but the fact is that she wants to be screwed by him night and day. Any woman who wants this is a demon, we all know it, a child killer (isn’t that what all those promiscuous women do — have lots of sex, get pregnant all the time, and then abort their children?). You can say that Leave Her to Heaven is some sort of universal parable (and I hate them as a rule) about anybody who loves too much but there is far too much misogynistic cultural baggage swirling around the prototypical image of the unnaturally horny, destructive female for that idea to be ‘universal.’ What exactly is the difference between ‘loves to much and ‘desires to much’ when Cornel Wilde is the object in question? Gorgeous Gene Tierney just sits in her little boat watching little crippled Danny drown (Darryl Hickman played the guileless Danny; his brother was Dwayne Hickman who starred in Dobie Gillis), wearing the most divine sunglasses, and we know it’s all just so she can get back to the house and screw Cornel Wilde one more time. What could be a more appalling example of homicidal female lust? Blanche Dubois at least has our sympathy: Tennessee Williams loved her even more than he loved Stanley (who Williams treats quite self-consciously as a sexual object). (Apparently the reason he cast Marlon Brando as Stanley was Brando quite successfully fixed a leak in his Provincetown plumbing -- and yes that is a dirty joke, and yes I owe it to a Cole Porter song and also to a line from Hello Dolly). It’s that kind of technical mastery we truly feminine creatures love. I’m in a good mood because I got a 'booty call' last night. I had to put him off until tonight, (poor boy). For yes, I am, unabashedly, a desiring woman. But -- you will note -- not a murderous one. If you can only get that through your head! What I mean is: desire is not murder. Although an orgasm seems like a little death. Let me tell you, we should all be so lucky.

Now, she is

concerned. Joan Crawford asks: “What’s wrong with me, doctor? Why do I see things that couldn’t be?’ The doctor — who is beyond considerate  and understanding — especially to those who are not as wise as he — explains it all, calmly, careful not to alarm her — “Insanity is not a word we like to use: this is the inability to distinguish between what is real and what isn’t.” Ahh, of course. Alas, Joan attempts to ignore her burgeoning mental illness, but of course it will not go away. Soon she is lying on her satin bed curled in a foetal position beside the giant shiny headboard, moaning. Her husband, the perpetually elderly Raymond Massey thinks she should return to the doctor. Joan races around the room, pressing her hand to her forehead, doing that wild-eyed-thing that someone told her was acting: “You think there’s something wrong with my mind, don’t you? You’re trying to put me away, aren’t you?” Soon after, she shoots Van Heflin. It’s not clear if it’s because he’s not in love with her, or because he insists on being a concert pianist and an engineer (‘I’m much nicer than a girder and also more interesting” she says to him) or because she is jealous of Geraldine Brooks (a young actress who is much prettier than her) or because Van Heflin is simply a far better actor than she is — in fact the juxtaposition of his performance against hers may have cost her The Oscar. At any rate, she plugs him. Inevitably, she is lying in a hospital bed, comatose, drugged, staring at the ceiling. An errant gay makeup man has sprayed her with grey paint — her hair, her skin, even her eyes — she looks like the 'Tin Woodsman' in The Wizard of Oz. The doctor is once again brilliant and beyond compassionate --we marvel at his wisdom as he explains the complex machinations of science to the uninformed yet receptive Raymond Massey: “A clear case of psychosis, completely unbalanced, insane if you insist on using that term. Such a person is possessed with devils.” Ah. What is valuable about this ‘diagnosis’ of course, is that it is so terribly ‘scientific,’ don’t you see? But we have not yet reached the eminent physician’s bone chilling conclusion — the forecast of what lies ahead for Joan Crawford — who lies stiff as grey telephone pole on a hospital gurney. The doctor smiles, gently, his right hand gently caressing the corner of his desk: "It is only through greater pain — and suffering beyond belief — that she will get well again.” A few seconds later the doctor is walking alone through a hospital hallway, the walls naked, the building apparently empty -- obviously on his way to deliver another spine-tingling epitaph for some half-dead crazy person.  This kind doctor reminds me of Dr. Fauci. Why, if God hadn't created Dr. Fauci, then we would have invented him. Yes, we have always known — since 1947 when Possessed was released — that the only way to be cured is through ‘suffering beyond belief.’ And this is our journey now, as we always knew it was our lot; it makes no sense to protest that the cure is more painful than the disease. Why of course it is. No cure worth its salt is easy. When they told us this was a pandemic, little did we know this was, in effect, a cancer diagnosis, the subtext being that we would be asked to endure suffering beyond belief — not so much because chemotherapy always works (in fact it often doesn’t, and the patient dies anyway) but because if we refuse to endure endless pain, then we refuse to be released. If it seems biblical, it is. We all know —in our heart of heats —  that COVID-19 goes deeper than a cough, and the agony of a ventilator, deeper even, than death. There is something about this disease, about all disease in fact that transcends science.  Dr Harvey Willard queries his intern, ruefully: “How many does this make?” And the Intern replies — “Twenty today: 1 manic, 3 seniles, 6 alcoholics, and 10 schizos.” We can forgive the intern for his somewhat insensitive language -- he is, after all, what we would today call a ‘front-line essential worker,' undoubtedly under enormous stress. Dr. Willard caresses his requisite doctoral goatee thoughtfully, and sagely opines: “Going up all the time. This civilization of ours is a worse disease than heart trouble or tuberculosis, and we can't escape it.” We know it. Of course our civilisation was diseased -- there was something wrong with us -- and it all had to come to a stop. It's very right, somehow.  I have a friend who thought she was losingher mind, her hand was always trembling, moving towards her temple. She said: ‘I don’t know what’s happening to me, the stasis of this lockdown, this inaction, this uncertainty, this endless day after day of nothing.’ I assured her, no, we are not losing our minds. That’s silly. We are not Joan Crawford in some silly old movie trying her best to win an Oscar for an unremitting piece of crap called Possessed — no, no, we are not all going finger-to-the-temple insane. Calm down. I urge you all to calm down. This was the way it was meant to be; God knows why, and I mean that literally, Only God knows. (God and -- of course -- Dr. Fauci). Whatever is our fate, we must accept it, because — well that's the problem! Why, in heaven's name, are you asking why? We cannot understand, it is beyond us. Surrender. And in the surrender you will find a kind of release. Go back to Possessed, you’ll see. It’s what happens when Joan Crawford melts into Van Heflin’s arms. He’s not even attractive -- never was --  he's a merely witty playboy who smokes and cares nothing about her, but still she gazes out at the sea, unable to stop loving him. She takes a boat to his house and hurls herself around the room, hoping this will somehow make him love her. We are all Joan Crawford in Possessed, and our folly is only not giving in. The doctors know. We are not mad, we are merely human. And if we wish too ardently to end this lockdown, then our soul is certainly inhabited by devils. I here and now commit myself to only living here, in these blogs. Life has become fantasy, and fantasy has become life. I Life, as we knew it, was the disease. And this is the cure.

Oddly, Joan Crawford

does a lot of crying -- in a movie called The Damned Don’t Cry (1950) in which she is without a doubt ‘the damned.’ She has the eyebrows and the shoulder pads we associate with the later Crawford films, and in the first scenes she is married to Richard Egan — who is at least 17 years her junior (Crawford successfully managed to hide her birthdate, even postshumously). It’s quite a good film—  for a didactic melodrama — though it's a copy of Mildred Pierce. In these ‘women’s films’ it’s all about the motives of the heroine. In Mildred Pierce Crawford is driven to the very unfeminine vices of greed and ambition by her evil daughter. Thus she is a victim, and ultimately feminine, and can be forgiven. Not so the case in The Damned Don’t Cry where she is pure unmitigated evil. Her name is ‘Ethel Whitehead’ — until it gets changed to the more respectable — ‘Lorna Hansen Forbes.' Crawford’s quick changes of character are loads of fun; she starts out a suffering Mildred Pierce (her son dies because she is too poor to buy him a bicycle), and soon after she’s a wisecracking clothes model who shares her favours with repellent businessmen -- smoking, chewing gum and wielding heavy slang all at the same time. Her transformation into a lady would wow 'enry 'iggens, and when she finally hooks up with gangster Steve Cochrane all is right in this topsy-turvey world. (The less said about Cochrane the better, as in his case less is more, for Cochrane was not only breathtakingly handsome and hairy-chested, but in proud possession of one of the biggest ‘members’ in Hollywood. He occasionally served as a houseboy for Mae West. In the TCM summary, Cochrane’s character Nick is referred to as a "member of the underworld’ — a startlingly accurate description.). They don’t make ‘em like this anymore; i.e. they don’t make men who are men and women who are women. And like some sad-old, dyed-blonde, trashy Trump supporter, I am alas, going to pine for that past. Here Crawford is Lady Macbeth; she was obviously born cursing her useless ‘dugs’ and her pesky menstrual flow, eager to dash her soft-haired babies on a rock if it will get her what she wants. The movie is clear in its feminist politics, if nothing else, as Crawford’s anger — as in Shakespeare’s play — has its origins in her womanhood. When she’s climbing her way to the top, a tough talking hooker friend opines, wisely: “What else have we got besides a face and a figure?’ And even at 46 (perhaps older?) with the right lighting -- and a gauzy lens -- yes, Crawford still has that. Soon she’s smiling ruefully with her gigantic mouth and saying lines like 'the world isn’t for nice guys’ to her hapless leading man David Brian, and we understand that Crawford’s anger is deeply steeped in female rage, and that though darkly unkind, and entangled with the 'root of all evil,' it has a 'root' cause. It’s strange that a movie so engulfed in penis envy should have instigated so much envy of Venus. But how many little girls must have watched The Damned Don’t Cry and decided, finally to toss their Playboy Bunny outfit in the garbage and stand up for a woman’s right to chose? There is nothing like Crawford’s bug-eyed rage, her determination is beyond steely, it's a wreck of a train steaming its way to a cataclysmic end. All of this made me think of the ultimate idiocy of trans politics, for buried in the heart of it is an enormous fallacy: the rejection of gender. I speak now, directly to Kate Bornstein. “We shared a few drinks many years ago, I produced your plays (you owe me nothing, it’s not that) and I kind of loved you as much as a gay man can love a person with a vagina. And I admire your beauty and your ideas beyond belief, and I think you are an enormously kind person. But you 'kinda' invented the ‘no gender’ movement; and that’s a big problem. You remind me of Aristotle, Kate. I know that may sound like a compliment, but I never liked Aristotle. (From the very moment that I met him in Ayn Rand’s preachings, I knew there was something awry.) Aristotle rejected the law of non-contradiction, which, in laymen’s terms (i.e. terms which may be understood by those who have the time to get regularly laid) means that Aristotle believed contradictions must not be tolerated, and therefore don’t  exist. The problem with heterosexuality is that it is an unresolvable contradiction, that the larger and more powerful body (i.e. male) will inevitably oppress the female. This is a lot more than simply not desirable. But it will never go away: the dialectical tug of war between male and female is eternal, as are the two sexes. The inevitable clash of these forces (it’s called hot heterosexual fornication) is not only eternally appealing but absolutely productive. This does not mean that women must be perpetually oppressed, it just means that they must perennially fight back — as Joan Crawford does. And fighting back works (proof positive: #Metoo). Yes, when they fight back they can and do, win. But the denial of this fundamental antithesis, this vastly sexy opposition between male and female -- well sorry, but it's simply a non-starter. As Foucault reminds us -- it’s always a battle -- and victims and oppressors need each other, not just because it’s sexy, but because the human hunger for power will never go away, and the best we can do is try and win one little battle at a time. I talked to a woman yesterday who is quite excited about eventually (when all this is over, yes, hah!) finding a tiny public space (a room) somewhere and putting on a tiny feminist play in Muskoka. She told me that she knew 10 people who might come, and though she also knows that The Canada Council won’t grant money anymore to anything but ‘digital theatre; (whatever that is), she is going to forge ahead anyway. There is something 'Lady Macbeth-ish' about her quest, which I doubt she would have initiated if she didn’t have a vagina. We need women, and we need men, and the furious battle that rages eternally between them. Be trans please, but don’t imagine you will rid the world of injustice by banning these holy opposites; for out of the fire that emerges from their combustible confrontation a phoenix will always arise — and it is the fierce,  righteous, beady-eyed demon that lies behind Joan Crawford’s eyes.

Design for Living

 is a lousy play. There, I said it. Coward wrote many lousy plays, (and yes, Donizetti regurgitated tunes for a number of lousy operas). It happens with prolific artists — so what? Design for Living is so bad  it is often used as an example of bad playwrighting in schools; and well it should be. My 1979 BBC version stopped two-thirds of the way through; I re-read the ending for the thousandth time. It’s still lousy. It featured Rula Lelnska — apparently famous for her 'Alberto VO5' hair commercials — and two very young British actors who I had never heard of — John Steiner and the ravishing Clive Arrindell. There was nothing to complain about here — that’s why my views are now confirmed — they gave it the best reading it might get. But, like Texas, there is simply no there, there. Coward wrote it right after Private Lives; I would say it is clearly an attempt to rewrite Private Lives as a vehicle for himself and the Lunts. I have tried many times to write sequels. It  rarely works, the magic won’t return. The enchantment of Private Lives is considerable, but Coward could not re-conjure it, so he decided to write a very didactic play devoid of inspiration. The ideas are mainly around morality, specifically sexual conduct, inside and outside marriage. Gilda is probably Coward’s most feminist heroine — she is not only smart and talented, but sleeps with whoever she wishes, and betrays her two lovers, again and again, with each other. She plays Otto and Leo like a game of cards -- but Coward never judges her, he simply adores her. Finally the two men end up alone together — in a scene fascinating only because of its repressed sexuality. They roll around together on a couch and hug, vowing to get along without her. Then they go off ‘to sea’ (a pirate fantasy, but — who, one might ask— is the cabin boy?) and finally return to Gilda to save her from her loveless marriage to an art dealer. You might  ask — 'Why?' And also, 'How long oh Lord, how long?' (As it is a very long play.) I think all this has partially to do with the Lunts themselves: I know what it’s like to love actors so much that you are compelled to write for them, but also what it’s like when you just can’t come up with the goods. Alfred Lunt was gorgeous and gay, and Lynne Fontaine was his lesbian equivalent; they were both brilliant actors, and posed as a married heterosexual theatrical couple. Of course Coward loved them, and probably wanted to (or did) get into Lunt’s pants. At any rate, they were living La Vida Loca in 1933, and in Design For Living Coward attempts to describe their situation. There is a lot of false joy and false anguish, but though the play has a calculated structural integrity it lacks emotional resonance. Part of the problem is that Elyot and Amanda in Private Lives desert a pair of spouses who are earnestly in love with them -- whereas Gilda, Otto and Leo just keep hopping in and out of bed together. The play was scandalous then, and is scandalous now, because it is a definitely a peon to promiscuity, never mind polyamorousness (Design for Living is probably the only play that accurately describes and promotes the polyamorous lifestyle). I would love to love it, but I simply can’t. Especially when Coward is capable of so much more. And I am probably capable of more than this blog. But it is another ugly grey lock-up day. I am convince now that we have been lied to by the powers-that-be. Or it may not be that, you know? Maybe they're just stupid, like most people. I’m not knocking science (God help me!). Scientists keep plugging away —  like artists — some for the fame and fortune, others just for the joy. No, I am talking about the medical profession. Particularly nurses. They are not all saints — neither are policeman (or priests) and as we all know deifying a particular profession just whitewashes the guilty, and encourages perfidy. My friend’s elderly father lives in a seniors home and the 'Nurse Ratched' in charge literally had to be persuaded to let the residents out after they were all vaccinated. She had them all in a prison, even though they were all utterly safe from disease. I know another nurse (the partner of a friend of mine) and apparently she has been sent do deal with vaccine roll-out in Vancouver and is consequently doing absolutely nothing; they can’t figure out what there is for her to do; she presently lolls about on her computer. Another friend of mine is connected with the nursing profession in Ontario; she says they are not busy, but idle. And now we have the Canadian government getting into an argument with themselves, because some public health nurse has decided that maybe we shouldn’t be taking the Astra Zeneca vaccine (which I got) or Johnson and Johnson. This will completely halt any and all attempts to get this country vaccinated, by dutifully sowing the seeds of fear that have already been planted. It will keep us all home for another three months. Great work. I am not a conspiracy theorist. I put all this down to  incompetence. (It’s rampant, especially now.) It’s like I always said about Tennessee Williams: I happen to know two boys who were propositioned by him during his stay in a Vancouver hotel in 1980 (three years before he choked on a pill bottle cap and died). If I — that is, li'l ol’ me — happen to know  two boys who were propositioned by Williams, then how many boys did Tennesee proposition? Similarly, the fact that I have piles of anecdotal evidence concerning the massive incompetence of the medical profession as we reach the so-called ‘end’ of this pandemic means that there is definitely incompetence of the highest order. I put it down, not to malice, but  human error. But because of that error we all sit in the dark watching our lives drain away in coffee spoons. I was going to cry again, but I think I’ll save that for tomorrow. To quote the wife of another famous homosexual actor ( who worked with Noel Coward) — from the only actually good movie she ever made (which has been unjustly banned by the ‘woke’ crowd and ergo will not be mentioned here) — "After all, tomorrow is another day."

I discovered Coward’s

A Song at Twilight (1966) on my own BBC home video collection (technical difficulty before; I thought they were unplayable). It is the best of the lot so far, Paul Scofield and Deborah Kerr are very fine actors indeed. Scofield is stellar as the ageing closeted homosexual Hugo Latymer, a character based on Somerset Maugham. The play is not only pretty perfect dramaturgically — with a startling climax at the end of the first scene — but it still rings true. Watching it, I was struck by how many ‘Hugo Latymers’ are still trotting around today, that is, so many gay men (older and younger) who are prudish and mean, and who curl their baby fingers at the very mention of sex or sexuality. In fact it used to be the old that were uptight; now it is the young (apparently birthrates were going down before COVID-19 because young people are no longer screwing as they used to — God knows what’s happened to those statistics now!). The transgendered youth are anti-sexual, very much like Hugo Latymer, they insist with stinging puritanism that gender is not about sex at all. And what if it was? I don’t know what to tell you but my gender is all about sex, I wouldn’t bother with gender if it wasn’t, I mean what’s the point of anything, but especially — of being a man — if it’s not at least, sexy? When I enter a den of dyed-haired, nail-painted, gender-binary youth (you often find tons of them working at Starbucks these days — ordering you to stand in a corner and not infect anyone, then smiling, and chirping — ‘No worries!’) I remember that to them I am not only dangerously old — they are afraid they will somehow catch it — but a magnet for disease — as I am associated with AIDS too because of my age — and also there is the scorn with which I generally treat mask wearing (I never wear one outside) — but I must under no circumstances make a sexual joke like a horny gay man (God forbid). Anyway, that is Hugo Latymer, every inch propriety, and Coward has great fun separating himself  — through Hugo — from Somerset Maugham — who he considered old-fashioned and closeted, unlike himself. The irony is that Coward was closeted, and the very thing Carlotta (Kerr) accuses him of in the play Coward was guilty of — i.e. prattling on about big-busted beauties in his memoirs. I suppose Coward would insist the difference was that Maugham claimed to have had affairs with such women, whereas Coward took the 'baby step' of not doing so. But, for instance, when Coward  introduces his friend Marlene Dietrich (it’s priceless you must hear it  — on a Dietrich album) he manages to conjure up the notion that women are the only existing attractive sex objects in the universe. In A Song at Twilight Paul Scofield is always ‘making eyes’ at the waiter (something my mother told me never to do, on the very day I came out to her) and then acting prim and proper. Nowadays I am surrounded by queers like these — they are old and young, pretty and fading — but they all dye their hair, strangely enough, some to get rid of the grey, others in wokeish misplaced rebellion. (Does anyone but your mother really care if your hair is green?). Seeing this, I am stunned once again at how far we have not come, and how easy — as Coward said — it is to pass legislation, but you can’t legislate the human heart. I don’t know if I can write about Coward today. Mondays are always bad for me. I’m worried about my friends, they're sending me depressed emails bowing out of everything, and it isn’t just my own selfish need for them, I’m actually worried about them. I just spent a terrifying few moments on the phone with a nurse. I know we must assume they are all hard-done-by-suffering-saints  but I’ve just about had it (if essential workers are such saints, why are air ambulance paramedics in Ontario threatening to go on strike? Shouldn’t they work for free? Isn’t this an emergency? Aren’t hospitals overflowing, and people dying in droves?). Anyway I have a bump on my head. It’s probably cancer, my father had a cancer bump on his head, so I’m not being facetious. When I phoned my family doctor the nurse said - “You should be able to get an appointment by calling the dermatologist directly, as you just saw him three months ago." I did, and the dermatologist's nurse started asking crazy questions “What exactly is the problem?” “I think it’s a wart” “Oh so it’s a new problem, then you might not be able to see him --"  “I didn’t say it was a new issue, I don’t know what it is, it may be a cancerous bump, God knows!” “Please don’t raise your voice with me, sir!” You know when they say that, you’re in trouble. I immediately apologised, she put me on hold, and dutifully returned: “I have to check with the doctor — he may or may not see you, these are difficult times.” Well that did it, it triggered me “I know” I said, and I started sniffling “and I am dealing with COVID-19 myself  and I am under a lot of stress, and I hope you will understand that this is very trying for me!” It was an Oscar winning performance. I almost wept. And when I hung up the phone (she said she would get back to me) my knees were shaking. I’m always amazed at how emotionally involved I get in such a performance. Perhaps Plato was right and acting is dangerous, infectious, we catch what we do. But then again I think I was crying about my own helplessness, the helplessness of us all, this deadly day, dark outside, nothing, no rain, no nothing, no friends, I’m having to pull old Noel Coward plays on DVD off my desk to find something to occupy my mind, no end in sight. There was a 100,000 person protest/ riot over COVID-19 in Montreal, but of course you won’t hear of it, only on Rebel News, which I know I’m not supposed to watch, but what’s a horny old ADHDish fag  to do -- one who keeps on writing plays that no one will perform -- because no one will leave the house? I will cry! I enjoyed crying! Maybe I’ll spend the whole day crying. Screw Plato. He didn’t know what he was talking about anyway. A table is a table, okay Plato? I don’t care  that its goddamn ‘pure essence’ exists in heaven. I'm about to have lunch on it. Now.

Fumed Oak is

the last Noel Coward play I was able to find on YouTube. It was part of a series of one act plays (Tonight at 8:30) that Coward wrote for himself and Gertrude Lawrence. (One of those plays Still Life went on to become the film Brief Encounter). It’s part of a YouTube series called ‘Collins meets Coward’ in which Joan Collins stars. This is irritating, if only because of the inevitable exculpatory comments on Collins expertise (‘she can act!’ ) bestowed upon her only because she deigned to appear without makeup as a working class mom (she’s still wears eyeliner though). I’m especially irritated because I worked with -- and loved -- a marvelous actress named Jennifer Phipps -- who went to school with Joan Collins -- and was a much better actress, and would have been much better in this part. The play is pretty fascinating; it's strangely didactic and quite serious, although — because it’s Coward — it’s also quite funny. It’s also significantly un-feminist, and would definitely be fuel for those who imagine Coward a misogynist. Henry Gow is a white collar nothing who lives with his wife Doris, his young daughter Elsie, and his mother-in-law Mrs. Rocket. At first the three female characters bicker:  it’s somewhat amusing but mostly just annoyingly petty. Finally Gow locks himself into the dining room with them, slaps his mother-in-law, and informs the lot that he is taking off on a boat to the South Seas. It’s a masculinist reversal of A Doll’s House —this time the husband is oppressed instead of the wife. Any tale of breaking free and telling-off-oppressors is fun to watch, and would not be out of place in Boal’s Forum Theatre —except  that these days we find the notion of a man being oppressed by women both fictional and fantastical. Well I would posit that it is not -- especially in Coward’s hands. Coward’s work features two kinds of women:  a) 'victims' —  boring, judgemental, quite often unattractive, and certainly not sexual (Sybil in Private Lives ) and b)  ‘sirens’  -- independent, intelligent, fascinating, and openly desiring (Amanda in the same play). Coward’s contention is that often women who claim to be victims are not victims at all. If he was talking about rape this might be objectionable, but In Fumed Oak Coward floats the situation of a man who has was tricked into marriage by a woman who lied about being pregnant. Men abuse and kill women -- because they can. That's evil, of course. But women can be just as evil; they are simply not capable of inflicting the same amount of physical damage as men, so they find subtler ways to hurt. Mothers (God love them) know this, and as wonderful as most mothers are there is also a singular minority capable of using their powers of manipulation and persuasion for evil — and who pull a sad, persecuted face when found out. Coward makes it clear that the women Henry Gow yells at are not victims;  he gives them cash and claims old Mrs. Rocket has a fortune stashed away anyway. He tells his wife and his daughter that they should simply start a new life without him -- and he leaves the three of them in a moist, wailing heap. I am not afraid to say that our culture is a ‘fumed oak’ culture. Fumed oak is oak stained by the ammonia used to darken it; our world is now darkened by the stain of victim politics. I’m particularly sensitive to this — always have been. I’m guilty and always will be. No matter how ‘good’ I am, I imagine I'm always to blame. My dear mother taught me this -- or perhaps rather than demonizing her I should admit the possibility that I just might be so alarmingly and neurotically sensitive that I  soaked up this mental disorder from the culture around me. If something goes wrong I figure it’s my fault, and if I do make a mistake, instead of admitting it, I get highly defensive and lie. Sometimes I even cry. I’m an actor and quite capable of crying quite convincingly if accused of doing anything wrong. In the past, I’ve also been known to fly into a tearful rage — which I am also quite good at — and which I can produce at will at the drop of a hat. I am all too feminine, having been schooled in feminine wiles -- I absorbed them from my mother who used them on me for years, and I'm more than eager to use them -- at the slightest provocation -- as posthumous revenge against her memory. So I am not an unbiased observer of Fumed Oak — the play triggers me. But also, it is particularly relevant to present day 'woke' culture. 'Wokeness' would try Coward's patience. It’s fascinating to me that the old used to — at one point — be treated as victims; people once had sympathy for us because -- after all -- we do have loads of aches and pains, and will probably die at any moment. Often we didn’t deserve this respect. But now the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction and we are scorned, laughed at and kicked to the curb. When an old guy like me expresses disatisfaction with toxic victim culture, I am assessed as a neo-fascist; but I am not, and neither was Coward. Pulling up your bootstraps and wiping the mud off your face was something you once automatically did when you had been kicked in the shins; nowadays even the mildest rejection is used as an excuse for a mental collapse, for not completing your homework, or for staying home and hiding underneath your laundry and watching Netflix. When I was railing against Vivek Shraya three years ago I told her to stop being afraid of cisgendered society; after all I used to venture out of my comfort zone in drag all the time, and still do. In drag -- or in a blog like this -- I can live in ways I can't in real life. Living means meeting the slings and arrows hurled at you, and if you can’t take it you are not only a wimp but in danger of living your life as a dead person. Perhaps our cultural obsession with zombies is related to the dead people that we have become, drenched not so much in blood as in fear of a harsh word;  all we are actually 'woke' to is our own victim-hood, which is merely an excuse for a paralysing a stasis. Act out, act up, get laid, fight back -- and be the only one on your block to do something -- whatever it is -- and be the only person of your particular kind in the social group you frequent. I highly recommend this, as when I'm not caught in the trap of performing my own victim-hood in a feminine way, I am performing my own bravery -- have been for years --- and if there's one thing I can say about myself it's this: I've escaped the fate that has befallen so many, i.e. ending up an actual sodden pile of moaning inconsequence.

I, Eliot Page

have decided that I am a kangaroo. It was a tough decision and it was long in coming, but I now fully identify as a marsupial. This may be confusing to some of you -- because I also recently came out as transgender -- but I am, in actual fact, a transgender kangaroo, and I wish to be addressed as they, and an animal. I’m sure you can imagine how difficult it has been for me, living with this secret for so long. As I child, I watched kangaroos bounding about on ‘nature’ shows. I just knew I wanted to be one, I knew — well -- that was me. So free and without care — so athletic — so wondrously nonchalant! Well, it’s something you can’t explain -- and something you may not understand. So you can imagine how frightened I was to reveal to my parents that inside I knew I was a kangaroo. I only wish I had the support back then that children have now for their inner longings and identifications. I kept my feelings repressed for so long, so now I am telling you, and I hop — excuse me, hope you will respect my decision. I know many of you will be concerned with how this will affect my continuing participation in my series, The Umbrella Academy. Well, rest assured that I will continue to play a cisgender woman on that TV show, even though I now identify as a kangaroo. The producers have been very gracious in respecting my identity. I also wish to address some vile people who may think that my ‘coming out’ as a kangaroo has something to do with my career. Nothing could be further from the truth. I have been very happy at The Umbrella Academy, though it was something of a comedown after the academy award winning Inception — also starring the academy award winning Leonardo DiCaprio. Of course I would be pleased to be in a major Hollywood film celebrity again some day, and to act with the likes of Leonardo (a dear, dear friend) -- if of course, the 'powers that be' can see their way to hire a kangaroo. Times are changing, but ever so slowly. It’s important for you to understand that this is not just a personal decision, but a philosophical one. I have put a lot of thought into the implications for environmentalists everywhere. For too long we have privileged the human over the animal, and over non-sentient beings. Shakespeare makes this mistake when he speaks pejoratively of ‘You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things!” (!!!) As ecological literary critic Mel Y. Chen points out “All Life, we might say, is precarious life.” My identification as a kangaroo is not only my right — my birthright— it is a statement about environmentalism. For too long we have treated human beings as 'special, ' as for some reason better than animals, and we have exploited our entire environment because of it. We are now paying the price. I hope that my identification as a kangaroo will be the metaphorical ‘shot heard round the world’ for radical ecological ideas. Before I go on, I want to anticipate the inevitable questions about ‘bottom surgery.’ On the one hand these are private matters and there is no point in discussing them in the public square. However I realise that I am -- somewhat reluctantly I would add -- considered by some to be a public figure, or a ‘star’ and as  such — people feel they have the right to ask me anything. I will therefore speak to this — even though I don’t agree that I am required to, or even that it is appropriate for me to do so. After all, there may be young people out there who are considering identifying as marsupials, and it is to them I speak. No, I am not at this time considering having ‘pocket surgery.’ And it's none of your business — what goes on 'down there' — but no — I am not. I have my own private reasons for not having the surgery at this time. But let me reiterate — or iterate, as I don’t think this has been talked about anywhere before — that my decision about whether or not to have pocket surgery should not reflect on my decision to identify as a kangaroo. I can be a kangaroo if I want to. Anyone who challenges me because I — let’s say — don’t have the necessary ‘kangaroo equipment’ is quite obviously someone who has something against me, or against the environmental rights movement, or someone who hates kangaroos. The other issue I wish to address is related to a recent article in The Spectator which raised the question of the media, especially social media and it’s influence on young people. The article (by James Kirkup) is related to transgender issues, but it has ramifications for my decision, -- which I realize may be considered, by some, to have a certain social influence. James Kirkup mentions a JAMA article that "concedes that social contagion via social media is a possible factor in the rising number of children with gender issues." The Journal of American Medicine -- though a well respected publication -- is way off the mark here, and shockingly insensitive. The suggestion is that children will grow up wanting to have transgender surgery merely because they have read about it on social media. First of all, this article in the JAMA does not take into consideration the fact that children who are denied the right to identify as whatever they wish are at a very high risk of committing suicide. Do you want to send these young people to the gallows --  to the rope? I am thinking now of a young child, sitting all alone in their room, watching nature shows, and innocently  identifying with the galloping marsupial they see on the screen, and wishing, longing, nay creating themselves in their minds eye -- as that transcendent being.  That child was me. Then you come along and tell them -- 'No — you’re crazy, you don’t have a pocket, and on top of that you were born a girl, not a kangaroo!' Well of course -- the child chooses suicide. You are driving children to suicide by not recognizing their inalienable right to be kangaroos. And what if I identified as a rock? A rock is a part of nature's grand design, and as important a part of the environment as you are. I do hope my ‘coming out’ as a kangaroo will help to ease some of the pain in this topsy-turvy world, and I leave you with my motto -- steal it if you want to: "I am a kangaroo, too!"