Here Inside

2003-08-14T02:13:00.000Z

WHAT WOULD DIANA HAVE SAID?

What connects the scenes above with Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles, Charles de Gaulle, and the boiled bones skins and tendons of animals? (not to mention Julie Andrews, Klimt and plastecine and spit) ....if you want to know how a two-foot long prick touches them all, the answers are here, here, and here. Mozart would have had a good laugh I'm sure! (More photos here).

2003-08-13T12:59:00.000Z

GUTTER PRESS

With banner headline, the front page of today's Independent:

Two reporters, one story: Campbell sexed up the dossier

The same newspaper carries this report inside, with a somewhat different headline:

Serious differences emerge between BBC journalists over David Kelly

Newsnight's

After the last few months I thought it was impossible for the loathsome Independent to be more sickening, self-righteous, hypocritical, untruthful and vicious. I was wrong. There is no absolute zero of Independent vileness.

The whole Hutton Inquiry is as pernicious as it is unecessary, as Michael Gove so brilliantly demonstrated in the Times yesterday:

The whole Hutton hoo-hah is not really about Dr Kelly. Well before he took his own life politicians with a grudge and journalists with an agenda were demanding that a judge be sent for to try the Government for daring to win the war in Iraq. Those pressing for an inquiry wanted it to advance their political goals: some wanted to tarnish the Government’s press operation; others wished to undermine the Government itself; yet others hoped to discredit the whole notion that Western powers are entitled to use force as they see fit in defence of their people and their interests.How ironic that this fatuous irrelevance has, through its website, provided the most extensive public access to government documents and proceedings in the history of British central administration.

2003-08-11T13:39:00.000Z

AND HERE'S TO YOU ~~MRS~~ BISHOP ROBINSON
JESUS LOVES YOU MORE THAN YOU WILL KNOW.
GOD BLESS YOU, PLEASE, ~~MRS~~ BISHOP ROBINSON
HEAVEN HOLDS A PLACE FOR THOSE WHO PRAY.

Matthew Parris in the Times says that God would not have approved of gay bishops, and lectures "trendy" Christians about their understanding of the scriptures and revealed religion. This comes from a man who declares an agnosticism which is "as close to atheism as makes no difference."

The fact is that the whole business of electing and enthroning bishops, and of according them authority in a church, is a matter wholly for the members of that Church, and, to a lesser degree, Christians generally. For non-Christians, including non-Christian gays like myself, it is a matter of complete irrelevance, and I am completely indifferent about it.

I think Christianity has nothing of interest or value to say to gay people, and I can only look on with malicious bemusement as Anglicans tie themselves in knots over mitres and crooks. I don't care what the Most Rev Peter Akinola, Primate (in the ecclesiastical sense) of Nigeria thinks about homosexuality any more than I care what he thinks about any other subject -- which is precisely nothing.

2003-07-31T14:20:00.000Z

JESTER 1: HOW DO YOU GET A NUN PREGNANT?
JESTER 2: FUCK HER!
THE POPE: I DON'T GET IT
(from A Roman Catholic Love Story)

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has today published Considerations Regarding Proposals to give Legal Recognition to Unions between Homosexual Persons with the full approval of Pope John Paul II. It initiates a campaign against gay unions, and gay people -- it is the formal start of a war, and the Pope is issuing an international call to arms:

the approval or legalization of evil is something far different from the toleration of evil.

clear and emphatic opposition is a duty. One must refrain from any kind of formal cooperation in the enactment or application of such gravely unjust laws and, as far as possible, from material cooperation on the level of their application. In this area, everyone can exercise the right to conscientious objection.

COMPETITION:
Q1.What words best describe the Pope?
Q2. How should gay people treat Roman Catholics?

2003-07-29T15:56:00.000Z

THE ROAD TO EQUALITY

An American TV public service announcement made in the 1980s shows a man in a dinner jacket, who speaks on behalf of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD):

I'm proud to live in this great, free country and I'm proud of our commitment to free speech. And I'm proud of our country's commitment to protecting the rights of its citizens to work and live free from bigotry and violence. That's why I was amazed to discover that many people die each year in anti-gay attacks and thousands more are left scarred, emotionally and physically. Bigotry has no place in this great nation, and violence has no place in this world, but it happens. Prejudice hurts, kills. Please don't be a part of it.Which showbiz star was it who felt concerned enough to make that advertisement? Surprisingly, perhaps, it was the late Bob Hope.

2003-07-28T20:58:00.000Z

RENDERING NARCISSUS

The World Body Painting Festival held in Seeboden-Millstättersee in Austria concluded yesterday. The work of photographers and the event photogalleries are extraordinarily comprehensive.

It would appear that the vast majority of those having their bodies painted were women from Germany, while the body "artists" and photographers were men. Among the sponsors were Lipton's Tea, Kodak and ... (you guessed) the European Union, which also helped fund "Bodies in the Scenery" (see it to believe it -- likewise the gruesome photo of the month). Much more information is available on the wide-ranging Bodypainting site (unfortunately mostly in German), but the photogalleries speak for themselves.

2003-07-23T21:56:00.000Z

IN YOUR FACE

Isn't this the cutest little piece of javascript?

2003-07-23T13:13:00.000Z

HARD WIRING
50 Things That Made Me What I Am

5. Tom of Finland The pornographic cartoons of Tom of Finland (born Touko Laaksonen in 1920) have for several decades held a special place in the imagery of gay men across the world. Their world of leather-clad muscle-boys, bikers, and cops, giving and taking with delight every imaginable twist of bondage, S&M and penetrative domination, seems to be displayed on the walls of gay bars on every continent. There can hardly be a single edition of a gay publication that does not hi-jack or imitate his drawings in at least one advertisement.

[full detail]
The very second I saw a drawing by Tom of Finland I was riveted and electrified --- and awakened. From the very first instant my eyes fell on it, I recognised that it connected with and expressed an elementary part of my sexual personality. I wonder how many other gay men have had the same experience - hundreds of thousands, I would guess. For many immersion in Tom's fantasies of exaggerated masculinity (with physiques equally impossible and arousing) represents the extent to which they enter the world of leather sex; for others they are a first step to their real-life enactment. Either way, for me there was no element of incomprehension, no gradual corruption by insidious sadomasochistic seduction --- as much as anything was already there, waiting in the dark of my psyche to be illuminated, this was. Some years later I came across the ideas that particular "circuits" in the brain are already connected -- genetically or in the earliest period of life -- and spring into life when the switch is thrown. It was a description I immediately connected with my experience of Tom of Finland.

Tom's work continued to appear in new (and ever more erotic phases) for many years after I first discovered it. Its availability, and its influence, gradually took it out of its difficult and unmentionable sub-cultural niche and into the "mainstream" of gay life, and it played no small part in the parallel transferral of the homosexual leather sex scene itself from the special vocabulary of gay sexual mores into everyday "straight" society.

As this occurred Tom's work, alongside Mapplethorpe's, was beatified by the guardians of artistic validity and aesthetic taste (a develoment not unconnected with the price which originals were fetching) and -- somewhat awkwardly nevertheless, in my opinion -- it began to be talked about as the oeuvre of an original creative artist. At the same time biographies and retrospectives of Tom's work began to be published, and although commentary and interpretation was most appreciative and incisive in gay publications, once again the mainstream began to "notice" his general significance.

Back under the stone of the S&M sub-culture, Tom became one of a "stable" of hyper-realist S&M cartoonists with Etienne, the Hun and several others. To the extent that these artists have established an original, personal style (and sexual imagination!) they have achieved success alongside and with Tom. But they have never come near to challenging his expressive bravura, nor has their novelty displaced his intrinsic freshness.

Indeed, it has always been a mark of Tom's impact on me (and a comment on those processes of adoption and elaboration) that the erotic charge of Tom's drawings has neither dimmed over the years, nor lost its edge with repeated viewings and autoerotic utilisations. I remember very well the first Tom drawing I saw, and it excites me as much now as on that day back in 1975 (even though much of the Tom's most intense work had not yet been produced then). What a reassurance (albeit of the most ironic description) of the endurance without diminution of those internalised images that speak most completely to our sexual drives, and so keep love alive.

Tom's technical mastery is, of course, the key to the power of his imagery. But it is a testimony to Tom's symbolic distillation of the mythic Graeco-German athlete-warrior in male homosexual instincts that narrative and character are so important and involving. Tom's milieux literally breathe unifying sensibilities, and enmesh one in the interplays of universal sexual games: youth and age, flirtation and rape, innocence and experience, transgression and punishment, hierarchy and chaos, conformity and rebellion, in which challenge, assertion and submission are played out through numerous sexualised symbols of authority, especially uniform. How many gay men are comprehensively turned on by Tom despite themselves? How many will admit it?

2003-07-21T10:49:00.000Z

HUNTING WITH DOGS

Dr Kelly approached his superiors within the Ministry of Defence to admit that he had met Mr Gilligan. He was questioned by officials for five days, and warned about his conduct. He was then named in a letter from Mr Hoon to the BBC on 9 July. The name was leaked on the same day. As well as being questioned by two Commons committees, one meeting in private, Dr Kelly had to move into a safe house provided by the MoD for several days, to avoid the journalists outside his home near Abingdon

Not surprisingly the TV, radio and press have omitted to scrutinise their conduct towards the late Dr Kelly, rather than the substantive claims and counter-claims about the veracity of his statements and BBC reports. We can only imagine what level of abusive invasion press attention reached for it to have been necessary to move him to a safe location; or what distress and fear on behalf of his family such hounding by the press would have occasioned. We all know, surely, that encampments of news journalists mean petty bribery across the whole neighbourhood to discover ways of gaining access to the property of the jounalists' prey, or to extract any scurrilious, sensational or speculative information about their object, or his family, that serves their vicious and mendacious methods. The suggestion that this such conduct is in the public interest is as reputable a claim as the idea that pulling the wings off flies is principally a pest-control measure.

Appearances and evidence before committees of MPs might not be intolerable for a long-serving civil servant -- but the British press corps in full war cry would destroy the life and morale of many a stronger man than Dr Kelly. Such is conduct of a press that, as media commentator Roy Greenslade said, lacks all standards. And they call for the Prime Minister to resign!

2003-07-20T09:32:00.000Z

DRIVEN INTO EXILE

Three weeks behind with the alterations to our house, and the workermen from one of the best building contractors in the area continue to destroy more than they create. So far they have

broken the boiler (no hot water until all the radiators have reached take-off temperature -- so we are driven to use as little hot water as possible)

poured wet plaster all over the hall carpet

installed a new shower and then immediately broken it

gunged up the CD player with dust having failed to seal the room it is in

blown all the upstairs fuses, and

broken the cooker (and so far failed to act on promises to mend it)

We just have to get away, so we are heading down to London to catch the Ciny Sherman exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery before walking over to the Royal Albert Hall for tonight's Prom - a concert performance of Michael Tippett's King Priam (which I last saw 20 years ago when Kent Opera gave it one of the (homo)sexiest productions I have ever seen - no hopes of that tonight!). We're hoping that both will make up for the dire expanses of The Four Feathers which we inflicted on ourselves last night -- despite the presence of Wes Bentley, Rupert Penry-Jones and Alex Jennings it was almost as bad as watching the builders fill the fridge with cement!

2003-07-20T08:58:00.000Z

WHO'S COUNTING?

Ananova has recently reported some fascinating survey findings.

A poll of the residents of Baghdad found that 50% thought the US was right to invade Iraq (as against 27% who thought it was wrong), despite the fact that only 27% of the same respondents thought that one of the motives was to liberate the Iraqi people.
~ 26% said they felt friendly towards the British and US forces and 18% said that they were hostile, while 50% said they were "neither friendly nor hostile".
~ As far as occupation was concerned, 31% said the US forces should stay for a few years, 25% that they should stay about a year, 20% that they should leave within 12 months, and 13% that they should go immediately.
~ With resepct to the future, 36%, said they would like to see a Western-style democracy, while 26% wanted some form of Islamic rule "tempered by modern ideals of justice and punishment", and 6% favoured strict Islamic rule with mullahs in charge. A core of 5% favoured Saddam.

There were other extraordinary revelantions:
~ Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen came first among "male celebrities women secretly fancy but pretend not to" - a fascinating concept. Apparently these wowen have "a Mills and Boon-esque desire to be seduced by a man with a Prince Charming hair who won't moan when you suggest a shopping trip to Ikea."
~ almost 25,000 people had sex at this year's Glastonbury Festival, 56% on Friday night
~ 19.1% of 18-30 year olds admitted to drinking almost constantly when they went on holiday
~ 7% of Norwegians change their underwear only once a week (and some less often) making them the "dirtiest people in Europe"
~ and offices have been rocked by these findings:

One in three workers have come close to leaving their job because of the irritating habits of their colleagues. A list of the most annoying behaviour included listening to voicemails on speaker phone and swearing at computers. Virtually everyone said they hated being sent an email by someone sitting a few feet away."

2003-07-19T22:21:00.000Z

BLOOD LUST

"Do you have blood on your hands?" a ~~piece of sub-human scum~~ journalist shouts at the Prime Minister. Mr Blair responded in the only way appropriate, but had he been free to say what the journalist should have heard, he would have said:

"No, I don't. But you, and all your colleagues do. And not just on your hands. But oozing over your lips and dripping from your genitals as you pander to the worst in everyone, debasing evrything you touch without restraint or conscience. You deserve to be treated as you treat others, but to let your blood would contaminate the earth it on which it fell. Hang your head and crawl away."

2003-07-18T15:16:00.000Z

VISITING CARDS

Since I got back from Sardinia I have been having a very enjoyable time with old friends and new discoveries. The
2 Blowhards have been up to their usual standard - and as that is superlatively high (indeed, few if any are higher), it means there have been some unbelievably good reads about an incredibly wide range of subjects.

Then I have lost count of the number of wry smiles that Alan's Oddverse Journal and Peter's Naked Blog have elicited, while Marcus's hilarious (and ruthless) self-inspection in the blog mirror reminds me time and again that, for all the possibilities for deception, disingenuity and arrogance, the principal benefits I derive from blogging come through struggles to achieve personal integrity.

I have also added some new destinations to the side bar. Mike in Colorado is both a pretty rare bird and as average a (gay) boy from next door as you could hope to find - a product of, and a moulder of his times; Tyler from North Carolina could hardly be more different; Zbornak a great read and a delicious side-bar. I've been looking in on Groc, Ulterior and Invisible Stranger for a while now and it's time I made it easier for me (and anyone else) to get there!

The number of blogs (let alone gay blogs) that there are around with which I can say I pretty much agree (especially if they include any immediate political content) are few and far between - Dean and Richard are rare examples, while I find that Peter and I see eye to eye as often as one might reasonably hope. But then finding reflections of myself, or entering sterile, endless, petty strings of diatribes isn't my thing. All the same, Peter has recently raised a serious question - what do you do when the divergence becomes too great to ignore or treat with the tolerance one hopes one will receive oneself:

on their own site

even though they've meant no harm to yourself

Quietly take the link off the sidebar? Post an angry writ of disassociation (as if anyone cared, and drawing attention to the whole thing)? Deal with it privately? Get so depressed you give up blogging?

2003-07-16T09:53:00.000Z

SUCH UNWELCOME THINGS

As a kind of follow-up to the last post, people can come up with some most unlikely statements and assertions. How much do such unambiguous and emphatic (but de-contexualised) quotations lead us to re-evaluate their authors? This quiz not only tests your knowledge (factual or intuitive) of the great and the good, but prompts a few re-thinks too -- question 4 is particularly interesting.

2003-07-16T08:32:00.000Z

THE INTELLIGENCIA ~~SPEAKS~~ SPEWS

A new collective blog called Crooked Timber has recently been started by a bunch of intellectuals of the liberal/egalitarian left, most of them university teaching staff in one of the English-speaking countries. A recent post by Maria Farrell, complaining on Bastille Day about unpleasant conduct by (some) "French" men near to where she lives, has unleashed a torrent of sub-feminist racial bile the likes of which I havn't come across from even the most rabid of so-called conservatives. Here are some of the comments:

The urban Frenchman does not hold his liquor well.

I have always been of the firm opinion that the average French male is the purest example of a total ass-hole existant among the human race. Even your average American shit-head is generally just ignorant. The French know they’re pricks.

i’ve been to france several times and by preference hang out in the areas full of the naturally tanned, and have never had any particular problem. the one place i experienced hostile sexual harassment 24/7 to the point of not being able to have a sandwich in peace was naples, and they were all italians…

That’s going a little further than I’d like to... We have plenty of Arabs and Pakistanis in London and they’re no trouble at all. There’s something about specifically French culture that seems to encourage poor behaviour toward women.

The "naturally tanned" - now is that PC or just downright offensive? As for Daniel Davies (the socialist blogger DSquared) declaring Arabas and Pakistanis in London "no trouble at all"... And these comments are littered among suggestions for women taking self-defence lessons - one of the most ridiculous discussions I have ever read. The posting and the comments come from the same group that excoriates and ridicules President Bush's every statement on race.

2003-07-15T15:09:00.000Z

GAY ICONOGRAPHY

As she celebrates 50 years in showbiz Dame Shirley Bassey is appearing at the Llangollen International Eisteddfod, bringing out an album, making rapturous stage appearances, and auctioning off her fabulous gowns for charity:

Bidders will be able to tussle over such magnificent confections as the Diamond Dress, encrusted with Swarovski crystals and trimmed with lilac ostrich feathers. Or its matching floor-length cape, made entirely of tiered purple ostrich feathers. Or indeed the gold-and-silver sequinned and beaded gown, forever associated with her theme song for Goldfinger.But unlike Liberace the outrageous costumes were never more than a visual expression of her vocal personality. More than any other British singer Shirley Bassey has, among other astonishing feats of musical empathy, articulated the dramatic heart of gay life -- she is a massively upbeat Edith Piaf and an unalloyed national treasure. (With thanks to Duncan for the gown auction link).

2003-07-15T12:02:00.000Z

I'M OK, YOU'RE OK, GOD'S OK
50 Things That Made Me What I Am

3. Eric Berne and 4. Paul Tillich I guess we all have an existential crisis of greater or lesser intensity and duration at some time in our lives, often as adolescents or young adults. What does it all mean? How can we make sense of our lives, of the world, of death? How can we achieve peace of mind, or relief from unhappiness, despair or failure? In some respects, of course, those "issues" remain active elements of our intellectual-spiritual development throughout our lives, but at some points they assume a particular importance, and the search for solutions an explicit, directed and dominant feature. Two writers of theory and self-help guidance acquired special significance for me. Neither is as well known or regarded today as they were when I enountered them, and it seems to me unlikely that a young man looking for "answers" to personal and eternal questions would turn to them now.

In the late 1970s, when I was in my late teens, I found being gay more difficult than ever I have subsequently. Other openly gay teenagers (or even completely secretive ones) were not thick on the ground and my longings for a boyfriend of my own age were never fulfilled. But driven by instinctual need (and an almost ideological fervour) I sought out attractive partners among the large numbers of men in their mid-20's who could be found in gay bars all over London. It was not a particularly successful quest either, and I was not sure which was more depressing -- not picking anyone up, or some of the people I did succeed in going home with. Occasional "relationships" lasting a few weeks or months gave rise to terrible tension and apprehension, which I hadn't the least idea how to cope with.

Since my early teens (and indeed even before that) I had been familiar with the ideas of Sigmund Freud, and though I rejected much of his work as self-evident nonsense (in the case of homosexuality empirically as well as theoretically) I did accept what I saw as the central tenets of his system -- that what might be called "psychological self-knowledge" led to personal freedom and happiness; that everyone might benefit from such insight, not just those with severe behavioural or personality problems; and that the process of descovery involved some kind of "talking therapy" with another or others. So it was natural for me to look to psychotherapy for a way forward, and friends put me in touch with a remarkable gay Australian living in London called Laurence Collinson, a TV and radio playwright who had become an exponent of Transational Analysis (TA), and who ran TA therapy groups at his home in West Hampstead.

The great thing about going to TA was that it was not analytical but behavioural and interactional; it focussed not on the self but on the world; it aimed not at catharsis but choice. I enjoyed it and found it intolerably hard: TA demands that we get honest with ourselves and other people, and stop finding excuses and scape-goats for our failure to do so.

Ultimately it was the kindly, reassuring, perceptive Laurence Collinson rather than TA that helped me get through a lot of bewildered misery. But that was not possible without my accpeting no small part of the theory and practice of Transactional Analysis. Games People Play (1962), the seminal work by Eric Berne, is a great deal more sophisticated than its catchy title suggests, and the challenges it presents to entropy and inertia is acute and liberating. "Do you want to be right, or do you want to be happy?" is a choice we would all rather never needed to be made, and like many of its "wise up" distillations of everyday experience, it has remained my guide. But it was easier to turn to Thomas Harris's I'm OK, You're OK of 1967, the self-help publishing success that had popularised Berne. My positive experience of groups that employed the "ego-state" positions of its title lowered my resistance to its low-brow style, and permanently opened my mind to the possibility that its successors, however off-putting their titles, might have some-thing useful to say about being happy - like M. Scott Peck's Road Less Traveled, or Aaron Beck's Love is Never Enough.

It was in the mid-1980s, when I was in my late 20's, and AIDS was reaching its first peak, that existential anxienty reappeared alongside all the other incoherencies of my life in New York City. Living on the Upper West Side I began to enjoy wandering into the vast incence-soaked tranquility of the Cathedral of St John the Divine, where the consolations of religion seemed to demand none of the theological convictions that had always been impediments to me. With the positive meta-anthropolgical reworkings of myth and belief by Joseph Campbell and Jung behind me, it seemed "all" I needed in order to quieten my psychic turmoil was an equally reputable work of theology that would make it possible to "believe in God".

I thought I had found this in the work of German theologian Paul Tillich, whose 3-volume Systematic Theology and its more popular companion The Courage to Be (1952) employed an existentialist philosophy to affirm individuals' spiritual value against the anti-religious and genocidal totalitarianism of Fascism and Marxist Communism, and described "God" in sophisticated moral-philosophical terms "appropriate for our times". The post-War work of Protestant theologians (often Germans) occupied an important place in the development of social engagement in the United States in the 1950s (it was on Tillich that future civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr had written his doctoral dissertation). But for me there was, at the end of the day, little difference between Tillich and "secular" existentialists, whose ideas I had encountered and largely accepted. Tillich gave those who already believed a way of sustaining and re-affirming that belief -- he did not offer a clever way to fake belief for those, like me, with none.

Nevertheless, I owe to Tillich something which plays an important part in how I think, and which I feel is increasingly separating me from other non-religious gay people: an empathy with those who are believers, and recognition that a life with faith is no easier than one which rejects it, and a sense that the complexity and ambiguity of life and moral action are just as authentically represented in the way religious people think about things as in secular pronouncements. This leads me to the view that there is enormous value to individuals in religious belief; that religious conviction deserves respect; and that religious traditions should not be judged by modern secular standards.

2003-07-12T07:59:00.000Z

DUMMY FOR DUMMIES

In support of Lyle and his blog Destruction for Dummies in his spat with publishers Wiley, "Here Inside" hereby launches Dummies for Dummies with this link to "Best Baby's Dummy", a rare Russian advertising poster by A. M. Rodchenko (1891-1956).

For those who want to know more, Peter of Naked Blog explains everything here, here and here (or you can go to the horse's mouth for dummies here, here, here, here and here).

2003-07-11T21:48:00.000Z

WHORISH

Jez (aka Nixon) - author of that splendid blog Popdizzy - has won his employment tribunal case (and applied some interesting appelations to his soon-to-be-former employers on the way). Check out the most recent episodes of the story (culminating in amazing feats of auto-fellatio) here, here and here.

There are far too many bizarre and obscene juxtapositions from search engines that turn up in my statistics for me to report any of them more than very occasionally. But I was somewhat amused to see that "Here Inside" is number five according to alltheweb.com for "iraq whores porno" (but it doesn't figure on Yahoo which, not unreasonably, prefers such pages as
www.free-rape-photos.com/torture/Stories/
www.ohiovalleyinsulating.com/
www.caecam.org/cumshots-undressing.html and
www.gay4berlin.de/)

2003-07-11T14:56:00.000Z

RODENT EQUALITY

The Report on the Future of Higher Education by the House of Commons Select Committee on Education and Skills reveals that oral examination of Margaret Hodge MP (the Minister for Higher Education) was pretty bad tempered, as this little episode involving Andrew Turner MP (Cons, Isle of Wight) and the Chairman of the Committee, Barry Sheerman MP (Lab, Huddersfield) demonstrates:

Mr Turner: Do you think the response of the institutions to your comment about Mickey Mouse degrees was unfair or defensive?

Chairman: And why did you demonise Mickey Mouse? Why has it never happened to Daffy Duck or Bugs Bunny?

Margaret Hodge: Most people understand it.

A little later Mickey reappears:

Mr Turner: What you seem to have done, then, is illustrated as some examples those universities which have a high drop-out rate. Can one conclude that those are Mickey Mouse universities?

Margaret Hodge: That is not what I was saying.

Chairman: The fact is that any of us can come up with prejudiced views of which courses would fit that particular silly name—and it is a silly name, Minister, you must admit. Perhaps this is a subject the Committee should look at in some depth.

2003-07-11T08:01:00.000Z

CAN'T PUT IT DOWN

It's time to get down seriously to exploring the 50 things that made me what I am (and to repeat the invitation to tell me the things that made you what you are, for inclusion on this blog). Before I went away on holiday I started off with No. 1 - Donna Summer (and cautioned that these things, which I think have had the strongest influence on my personality development, from when I was a child up to the present day, are listed in no special order at all), so now here is

2. Penguin Books I started buying myself books when I was about 13 and building up a small library, of which, as it grew, I was inordinately proud. From the start I wrote my name and the date inside the front cover of each volume, and beginning a year or so later, added the place of purchase.

It's wrong, though, really, to describe what I collected simply as books. They were paperbacks, and almost every one of them was published by Penguin Books. What made Penguin so attractive to me was, of course, that as paper-backs they were so affordable. But far more important, that said, was that their fiction catalogue consisted almost entirely of works by writers of recognised importance (often the complete works of major authors), classics, and new fiction chosen for its special qualities; the editions seemed quite delicious, with their orange (Penguin) black (Penguin Classics), grey (Penguin Modern Classics - my special favourite) and blue (Pelican non-fiction) spines; front covers framing a detail from classic works of art; even the printed pages were a special experience, set in a variety of type-faces, identified precisely among the other publication date on the inside cover pages. As my collection grew I arranged it on my selves by spine colour and author alphabetical order. OK, so I was fetishising these intellectual eternals as ownable, handle-able objects, but the addictive mixture of aesthetic-sensual desire and intellectual curiosity that Penguins gratified led to my discovery of an enormous quantity of literature, by British and foreigh authors.

My first Penguin Classic is dated 1972 (I was 14) and volumes from this now legendary series -- which has been relaunched this year -- were always the most desireable, but also the most difficult to appreciate - Tolstoy and Dostoievsky, huge, thick, serious books, but they were balanced by Maupassant and Dumas. I was greedy and bought far more than I had time (or, to be honest, genuine inclination) to read, but I picked up a huge amount from the introductions and dipping into chapters: the Classics (especially the Roman historians), Balzac and Zola, Ibsen and Chekhov - though I never, for some reason, acquired Dante. Modern masters were far more abundant: Henry James (whom I simply adored), D H Lawrence, J-P Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir (what an autobiography!), Kinglsey Amis and David Storey, Aldous Huxley and Evelyn Waugh. The steady appearance of volumes in the brilliant Strachey edition of the Penguin Freud Library saw me through my adolescent intoxication and permanent adult rejection of psychoanalysis --- I even got my grounding in perverse homosexuality from Jean Genet's Thief's Journal and a pale reflection of it in E M Forster's Maurice and short stories.

30 years ago Penguin seemed unshakeably established; its huge catalgue expanding more every month to meet its enormous popularity. Its history since Alan Lane founded it in 1935 had been the triumph of an idea whose time had arrived, and now under Peter Mayer of Pearson it was a force to be reckoned with. It was a great time to be in love with Penguins. Changes in the 1980s and 1990s - as huge restructuring swept every publishing house - diminished for me the Penguin allure, yet at the start of the 21st century Penguin is back was a vengeance, promoting the titles I adored acquiring. Its website is a feast of intellectual goodies, and an archive of splendidly involving articles on great books -- the latest, Joris-Karl Huysmans's Against Nature, joins Anna Karenina, The Icelandic Sagas, Emma Bovary, Henry James and Oscar Wilde, among others.

2003-07-08T14:28:00.000Z

BEATING THE BISHOP

Double standards within organisations allegedly based on the teachings of Christ no longer cause me any surprise. I must confess, however, to some confusion at the treatment of Canon John. His sexual orientation and lack of confession are acceptable to priesthood in his role as canon but not as bishop. So are moral, ethical and religious standards dependent upon hierarchy? It became a little clearer when I read today that the volte-face results not from divine intervention but by threatened divergence of funds away from the dioceses.

Letters

Times

The controversy over the gay Bishop of Reading continues, with the so-called liberal members of the Church of England and their wealthier evangelical enemies trading blows. It's a scene that the Church of England and other churches have been serving up for decades now without any signifcant change. What neither side has been prepared to do is make the demand that would break the deadlock: that all gay priests and ministers should come out - that they should end their hypocritical, self-interested, deception and, as gay people in every other walk of life have done, affirm their homosexuality.

Why not? Because the evangelicals recoil from anything that would give a hint to the public (or appear within the Church to acknowledge and countenance) that the Church of England is full to overflowing with gay priests. Gay priests who live with their lovers in vicarages and rectories; gay priests who not only have sex outside marriage but have a lot of it and with a lot of different people; gay priests who live a complete double life; gay priests whose homosexuality and lifestyle are known to their bishops, and whose calling is known to everyone on the local gay scene -- indeed, to almost everyone except their congregations and parish workers (poor dumb fools).

Even less than having to admit the existence of this vast, uncontrolled body of camp clergy do the evangelicals want to have to acknowledge that the Church could not do without them. Only childless genteel playboys like the gay clergy of the Church of England would be able (or prepared) to live on the tiny stipends and be happy in homes they can never own; only these utterly compromised Christians could put up with the nugatory spiritual value and marginal social relevance of their ministries. Without the gay clergy the Church of England would collapse.

But the liberals (and gay clergy themselves) are no more anxious to admit this (except in camp chit-chat to one another) than their fundamentalist foes. For the full extent of the gay clergy's hedonistic and self-serving secretiveness would be revealed; their hypocritical transgressions would be scrutinised; their lazy (and even layabout) lifestyles of irrelevant irresponsibility, petty spite, and drunken sexual shenanigans (running from anonymous fellatio to fisting) would be revealed -- and their kindly, short-sighted parishoners, hitherto completely ignorant of these goings on, would in all probability recoil.

Then the gay clergy might be swept from their comfortable (and often grand) houses, obliged to find honest work, and be cut off from their endless opportunities for camping it up in ecclesiastical robes of every cut and colour at ceremonies decked out with every kind of ritual flummery. Everything they have wanted since they were teenagers, and everything they have achieved since they realised they were devoid of useful talents, would be placed at risk.

If evangelicals and liberals called on the gay clergy of the Church of England to come out, and thereby forced them to do so, the Church might in turn be forced to confront the divergence of belief, meaning and identity which it is currently devoted to covering up and denying.

2003-07-07T09:32:00.000Z

THE BISHOP WITHDRAWS

The latest homosexual controversy in the Church of England is one of the funniest yet - the theatre of the absurd, which seemed to have reached a dead-end with Beckett and Pinter, is alive and well in Lambeth Palace. But who can be writing the script? It really takes a genius to come up with something as ridiculous as a priest in a 27-year gay relationship (hitherto unacknowledged and unproblematical) who converts to celibacy (pity the poor partner). Future episodes are going to be brilliant as, given the current state of the Church of England priesthood, they search for someone, anyone to make into a bishop who isn't gay.

What I just can't understand is why all this has suddenly become a problem now. 25 years ago clerical friends of mine used to tell me all about prominent gay bishops. One -- whom they always referred to as Doris Lichfield (or whatever) -- was supposed to give the best (by which it was clear they meant most drunkenly debauched) parties. Another -- always called Betsy Bath and Wells -- was, apparently "camp as a row of pink mitres".

But of course, the problems all stem from the tragically early death of Diana, Princess of Wales, who before she died I predicted would be triumphant as the first female Archbishop of Canterbury, surrounded by gay clerics of every kind.

2003-07-06T05:13:00.000Z

EVERYDAY LIFE REDUX

I've been back a week now from Costa Paradiso in Sardinia (sample holiday pics of views from villa and local beauty-spots above and below) and have just regained access to my computer. The latter is one of the side-effects of the fact that the builders, who were supposed to have completed the bulk of the work on our house while we were away, are still very much in evidence. Another is that I have never gone so long without a proper wash!

Sardinia proved to be the holiday we wanted: we simply did nothing except relax, read, sun-bathe, swim, eat, drink and sleep. Although the small towns that could be reached by car from our villa were mostly charming and surrounded by arresting countryside, there was little within reach that was architecurally, culturally, or gatronomically involving -- which was just as well, since I think even if there had been we would have ignored them in favour of the pool and the beach. We heard not another English voice anywhere our whole stay on Sardinia; the landscape was often reminiscent of another planet; and we read not one newspaper, listened to no radio, watched no TV -- and still the world carried on without us.

Perhaps the most delightful part of the holiday (apart from the sheer laziness of it all and that complete abstraction from our everyday lives) was the abundant wildlife: bats that settled above one's head on the patio; wild boars that sauntered around the pool while one was having an evening dip; little salamanders that sat on one's hand and lizards that sunned themselves on the steps every day; small toads that set up a wonderful chorus of high-pitched croaking every night, and bigger ones that had to be rescued when they accidentally jumped into the pool; and a host of the most enormous beetles you have ever seen. The other big gain was that I took with me some cassette tapes that had been left unplayed for years, and with my walkman listened to Götterdämmerung, Parsifal, Mastersingers and Tristan, rekindling my once ardent enthusiasm for Wagner.

I don't feel it will be all that easy to get back into the routine of blogging, not least because there is so much I want to write about and, I fear, so little time in which to do it. But it's good to be back. What has been happening in the blogosphere while I been away?

2003-06-12T15:31:00.000Z

THE CALL OF THE MOUFFLON

Summer holidays for W. and me. We won't be anywhere near a cyber cafe - so it's going to be a blog-free few weeks.

Blogging on "Here Inside" (and the "50-things that made me what I am" meme) will resume on July 1st

If you are at a loss to know where to go for vicarious stimulation, I recommend....

the simply brilliant 2 Blowhards for art, culture, and ideas

Naked Blog for all that's good and true, and the courage to face what's bad and false - Scotland's answer to yin and yang

Dean's World for the right take on almost anything

Junius for the most urbane and even-tempered treatment of everything controversial in politics and thought

and Lubin, Richard, Marcus, Su(zi)e, Gary, Jez, Edd, Bart and Toby for freshnhess and/or filth.

2003-06-09T12:30:00.000Z

ROUND UP

Chris Bertram (well worth reading every day) points out this article on Tony Blair and weapons of mass destruction, which I think is very funny and basically right, while Chris throughly dislikes it. You can follow our exchanges (and some other interesting contributions) in postings and comment boxes on 7th and 8th June. Bill Hobbs provides a pretty definitive assessment of quotations about WMD here (thanks to Dean for the link).

Chris Bertram also discusses another example of arrogance bordering on insanity from continental "philosophers" -- lack of evidence for the existence of any of the things referred to doesn't seem to make any difference! Gary noticed the picture that makes what I think is the best response. But on a much more serious front, Low Culture reports that on this day in 1934 Donald Fauntleroy Duck made his first appearance in a Disney cartoon entitled The Little Wise Hen.

2003-06-07T22:43:00.000Z

HIER STEHE ICH, ICH KANN NICHT ANDERS

We all have an idea of what we "are" - of a self that cannot be any other way. We can sense the things that constitute the very core of our personalities, that we must affirm if our whole life is not to lose its purpose and meaning -- though how we might begin to actually explain what they are, and articulate their significance, is quite another matter.

Gay people do often experience a period of critical introspection (sometimes a long one) and explicit avowal of themselves as gay. But while it might be clear enough to parents and friends what "gay" means in terms of the gender of sexual partners, it is less and less clear-cut for gay people themselves what "gay identity" means in relation to that essential self, their own unique personalities.

All too often gay identity is presented as "group consciousness", and not surprisingly expressive individuals reject such pre-fabricated intellectual-emotional impositions. Even worse, it also seems to mean stereotypical behaviour and predictable attitudes --- and for those who do not share the historical and social circumstances in which those were formed, they are at best inadequate, and at worst irrelevant and restrictive.

But I don't myself have a lot of difficulty affirming a personal identity in which being gay always has been, and remains a primary and often determining element; one which depends on the psychic and institutional structures that gay people have built; and one in which the socially problematical nature of being gay, openly gay, and collectively gay, figures as large as the undoubted revolution in mainstream understanding and inclusion of gay people.

So I thought it would be fun and interesting to list the 50 or so things that I feel have "made me what I am" -- just to see what they are, and where some of the person I am comes from. And to see how they relate to my own ideas about being gay. Perhaps others will feel prompted to do the same and we will have a "Who Are You?" gay project underway.

I AM WHAT I AM

Here are the things that I think have had the strongest influence on my personality development, from when I was a child up to the present day. They are listed in no special order at all -- No.1 is no more important than No.50.

1. Donna Summer High disco-fever in the late 1970s coincided with my first freedom as a gay man. I disco-vered how to dance, and what a great time I could have in a huge hall full of sweating gay men. I never had the money or the style to be a disco queen, and disco certainly wasn't for me the spring-board to the frenetic gay life of Andrew Holleran's Dancer from the Dance. Rather, it spoke to an inner excitement -- that I was alive and moving forward as the person I was (as Patrick Hernandez said, "Born to be Alive"). That has remained the feeling that springs me up and out whenever I hear the over-produced beat pounding. I thought then, and still do (no doubt a politically uncorrect heresy) - "blacks and gays -- we can dance".

As the music went, nobody meant disco more to me, among all those songs , than Donna Summer. Years later a second generation of disco dancers latched onto Donna Summer's fundamentalist Christian phase, and forced her to address apologies to her gay market in her own voice, rather than that of her songs -- that made it clear: '70s disco was consigned to history. A favourite track? It has to be "McArthur Park".

2003-06-06T13:59:00.000Z

REST IN PEACE, KARL

For me there is no sadder story than that of a gentle person driven by the distress of persecution to destroy themselves. Unable to bear the pain, they sacrifice everything they love for peace; unable to turn their anger onto those who are inflicting misery on them, they direct it onto themselves.

So today I am thinking again and again of 16-year old Karl Peart from Northumberland who killed himself after half a lifetime of bullying. Gangs that he refused to join had put him in the hospital emergency room again and again, threw him off his bike, made going to the shop an ordeal.

I feel angry in a way Karl could not. I hope none of the thugs who kept assaulting him turn out to be the "disadvantaged" criminals that our education authorities and regeneration committees lavish protection and money upon.

2003-06-06T12:42:00.000Z

SHAMELESS

For days the Independent has been establishing new standards of puerile self-righteousness and craven ultra-leftism. On Wednesday it devoted yet another front page to attacking the Prime Minister for making war on Saddam, derogating events in Jordan where Pres Bush met with Israeli and Palestinian leaders in one of the clearest examples yet of the benefits of and reasons for that war.

The Independent and its principal journalistic voice Robert Fisk have spoken as self-appointed friends of peace and advocates of justice for the Palestinians, and belittlinh, vilifying and excoriating President George W Bush. It is an animus that actually expresses nothing more elevanted than partisan irreconcilability, exaggerated self-regard, and ideological prejudice. With uncompromising certainty they have projected onto Mr Bush all their embittered loyalty to the states and systems of America's enemies, and sneered that nothing he did could be legitimate, honest, fair, worthwhile, intelligent, informed, or beneficial. This has been the essential mainstream support the Socialist Alliance needed to mobilize a million behind the blood-soaked anti-semitic dictators of the UN, chant support for the most reactionary and ramshackle regimes on the planet, and slander President Bush as Hitler, as the incarnation of evil.

So it should be no surpise that as Presdient Bush drinks mineral water with the leaders of Israel and Palestine, and initiates a process that could lead to their peaceful co-existence, the Independent and the Socialist Alliance can do nothing but continue their efforts to destroy Mr Bush and Mr Blair. How truly galling, how bile-spittingly infuriating it must be for them to see Mr Bush exercising power to pursue peace in the Middle East, to end the cycle of slaughter which elicits from them only an endless one-sided anti-Israeli vituperation.

Like the Stalinists of the 1980s the Independent and Fisk are morally and intellectually bankrupt, and they and desparate and vicious as a result. For them the downtrodden must remain powerless, the injured must never recover, the bad must go to worse -- only if the people of Iraq and Palestine are impoverished victims can they sustain their attack on President Bush and the USA, their only concern. Any chance of Palestinian peace or prosperity or Iraqi progress in which President Bush plays a part elicits their deepest hostility. Never did people who deserve a break have such false friends.

How Israeli and Palestinian leaders and people explore in words the meaning of their co-existence will be an excruciating process, in which Islamic fundamentalism will have to be tested to destruction -- and while that happens will remain capable of inflicting hideous political as well as physical wounds (just as was the case with the corrupt dogmatic Marxism of the Soviet Union in the final stages of the War).

But the chance that this opening of a new post-20th Century trajectory, founded on the power of the United States, will prove a sturdily pragmatic opportunity in the Middle East, can only be aided by the discrediting of the arrogant anti-humanism that has colonised the weakest parts of the old bipolar order. So it is that those who cannot bear to watch boldness and courage stick close to the puny path to nowhere: "Where are theWMDs?" they chant self-hypnotically, "It's all about the oil, stupid!" they intone.

Today brings more of the same, with Robert Fisk spinning his usual web of deceitful fiction to an eager audience of irreconcilables. But elsewhere in the newspaper there is ironic counterpoint -- the New York Times the editors whose journalistically detached political values created the environment where invention and plagiarism went unnoticed have finally resigned. The Independent should heed the caution. The problem is not a government that orders intelligence reports to confirm its policy decisions, it is newspaper editors who publish concocted reports that refashion events to confirm preconceptions.

2003-06-04T22:34:00.000Z

BATHOS

I could not help but smile at the news page headline when I logged on to AOL tonight:

PLUS

2003-06-02T09:26:00.000Z

INTELLIGENCE

Peter Preston, the former editor of the Guardian asks in that newspaper today regarding the Prime Minister:

How can a man who supposedly doesn't know his wife is blowing half-a-million of their money on a couple of Bristol flats via a convicted conman be trusted to tell the truth about weapons of mass destruction?Brilliant! With an argument like that you hardly need to invoke the devastating truths of popular opinion -- that double the number of people now doubt that Saddam ever had weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and (according to YouGov) 63% think Tony Blair misled them.

With the population prone to these sudden bouts of contrary thoughtfulness it's astonishing that the press can keep pace with them. It's just the same with their insights into David Beckham's career - most people now think he'll soon be playing for Barcelona (whereas last month a clear majority expected him to be off to Madrid). Thank heavens those guardians of good government in Fleet Street aren't discouraged, and still provide the assistance their inconstant and fickle readers need to discover the unchanging core of truth in the swirling flux of their convictions.

2003-05-31T12:21:00.000Z

MINDING OUR LANGUAGE

I am much looking forward to reading Hello Sailor! The Hidden History of Gay Life at Sea by Paul Baker and Jo Stanley (published in March).

Hello Sailor!

Hello Sailor! takes forward the series of books by the same authors about polari, the "underground language" used widely by gay men up to the 1970s, and captured in those extraordinary camp sketches featuring Julian and Sandy on the 1960s radio comedy programme Round the Horne (which remain etched deep in my memory -- and that of many others.

Paul Baker (a rather dishy lecturer in linguistics at Lancaster University who did his Ph.D. on Polari) last year published a book all about Polari and Fantabulosa, a dictionary of Polari. Men Paul Baker's age might never have heard Polari "spoken", but its spirit continues to exert an influence in gay culture, and for anyone interested Hugh Young has provided an exhautive analysis of gay-speak. But for me the most delightful modern incarnation (!) of Polari is the translation by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence (Manchester Convent) of the whole of the Bible into Polari:

Vocabulary:

Gloria

nanti

munge

eke

nanti lucoddy

trolled upon

aquas

cackled

sparkle

vardad

bona

screeched

nochy

bijou nochy

una

2003-05-30T10:12:00.000Z

EXPERIMENTING WITH SEXUALITY

Dean, who has himself several times recently confronted the conflicts between organised Christianisty and gay organisations, and Christian individuals and individual gay people, today asks gay people and Christians (and nobody else!) to examine the issues between them. It's already an interesting thread (my own [first] contribution is the 10th posting). Check it out and contribute if the subject concerns you.

2003-05-28T16:17:00.000Z

CESURA

Luciano Berio died yesterday aged 77. As Ivan Hewett says in his fine obituary in the Guardian today: "Music has lost more than a marvellous composer who wrote some of the most moving and beautiful scores of the postwar period. It has lost one of its intellectual mentors, one of that handful of radical reforming composers who redrew the landscape of music."

2003-05-28T08:47:00.000Z

CALL IN THE ~~MARINES~~ FOREIGN LEGION

It was reported on Friday that "convoys of French troops with armoured vehicles have thundered into Ivory Coast's lawless west to guarantee a ceasefire meant to stop the former colony's civil war for good... Fleeing civilians tell tales of murder, rape and looting."

Two French convoys stretching for six miles and consisting of more than 100 vehicles each, some mounted with heavy cannon, rolled through the once-thriving coffee and cocoa-growing region.Strangely, there has been no UN involvement.

2003-05-27T06:13:00.000Z

BY APPOINTMENT TO H.M. GOVERNMENT

Su(zi)e recently provided intelligence -- and what else would the author of such a unique and engrossing blog provide? -- that "Here Inside" has been stamped with official approval. Sure enough, there was the link on the Becta (British Educational Communications and Technology Agency) website, listed on the the blog page of the community resources section (all those .gov.uk URLs!) Well, thank you Mr Clarke (and the Becta Board).

2003-05-26T03:43:00.000Z

HUMPING FOR CHRIST

The life of the Russian nun (as reported in today's Sunday Times) mixes privation and eccentricity in equal measure. Vegetarians and virgins, forbidden to touch one another, they restore the Orthodox churches in their convent-compund, protected from intrusion by a pack of man-eating hounds. And somehow they have collected a little zoo of animals. Ponies, tropical fish, parrots, turtles, and 'Sinai, a camel that was presented to the nuns by to cosmonauts who had "found God" when in space.'

"I'm not sure why they thought we'd want a baby camel when we live under 2ft of snow for half the year," giggles Yelena, "but we love him." Now full grown, Sinai stands about 12ft from nose to toe and is exercised morning and evening, when Yelena mounts him and trots around the grounds with her robes flapping over his humps.Which immediately made me think of that wonderful 1950s novel by Rose Macaulay The Towers of Trebizond which has one of the most bizarre and memorable of all opening lines: "Take my camel, dear," said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.

2003-05-24T11:33:00.000Z

READING BETWEEN THE LIES

All of us are prone to believe what we want to believe, and to find the latest news confirms what we have always thought (and if it doesn't, we get really angry). I've been pushing the idea that we need to wait a while before deciding what we think has actually happened (especially regarding wars and their aftermath), so I think this story provides a (hilarious) warning about taking the news too seriously.

2003-05-23T14:45:00.000Z

US SINKS, FRANCE STINKS

A thank-you to Dean (a magnet for everyone who tells it like it is) for pointing out this excellent article from a few days ago on the story behind the demise of the Kyoto Protocol (for which George W Bush has so widely been blamed).

2003-05-23T13:25:00.000Z

SLAP!

I was delighted to discover that Studio5ive is "changing the way men think about cosmetics" with products that "promote a handsome, fit, and healthy look." Like the Brow & Eyelash Gel -- "a clear light holding gel that's a must for men with shapeless and unruly brows", and the Beard & Brow Shader -- "the ideal product when your look requires a sturdier, more masculine appearance":

Male models and screen actors aren't the only men these days who depend on cosmetics to groom their face. In fact, men of all backgrounds and professions are using some kind of enhancing and concealing product from self-tanning creme and bronzing powder to tinted moisturizer and concealer.

Given that, it would be good to know whether or not one was a freak. This quiz claims to diagnose freakishness, but it turns out to be a pretty straightforward introverted/extraverted personality test -- but I liked the way the results were displayed, and it was (as always) fun to answer questions about me (If anyone's interested this was my result.)

If it turns out that you really are seriously freaky, then I guess this sick little game will be right up your street. But if all you're into is make-up morning noon and night, then you'll want to meet some other studs who feel the same.

2003-05-22T13:34:00.000Z

AVANT GARDE 1960-THE PRESENT

Two exhibitions have just opened that would be great to visit, but which provide food for thought in cyberform.

BRAINGIRL + E + PUSSY WEEVIL (work by Claudia Hart, Larry Bercow/Marina Zurkow, and Julian Bleecker) is at the bitforms gallery (529 West 20th St in Manhattan). The exhibition "investigates the relationship of character and narration" using the a range of hardware and software. BRAINGIRL is created in Flash animation with the character-story "a hybrid of the adolescent girl's exaggerated sense of self and the artist's viewpoint of the teen's externalized emotions... at the juncture between self, family and society."

That sounds rather like the province of the realistic novel -- it might be a description of much of Jane Austen's fiction (right down to the adolescent girls!) -- in the construction of narrative from the intersection of the presentation of, and commentary on, character. It also sounds rather like the province of the strip cartoon, with its small, recognisable cast of characters and array of commenting tools. What it is most removed from is the form which it most immediately resembles -- film -- which so problematically lacks a separation of character, action and stable external voice. Digital art of the kind showcased here represents genuinely new meanings, made possible by growingly confident (yet exploratory) use of new media -- and it is far more accessible than avant garde works in traditional media (especially film).

The bitforms gallery takes its name from the "fundamental unit of digital information" (bit) and "the realizations of creative possibilities" (forms), and presents the "nexus of art and technology" that is digital art:

Diversity of media is typical in this new domain of art, which often acts as a bridge between the traditional art world and an emerging creative scene based on new definitions - and combinations - of art and technology. As a result, visitors can expect to experience large-scale reactive sculptures, elegantly encased software art, and digitally influenced mixed-media pieces.

At the stunning new Las Vegas Guggenheim there is a major retrospective of 1960s art - American Pop Icons, 28 paintings and sculptures from eight of the most important precursors and participants in the Pop art movement - Jim Dine, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, Andy Warhol, and Tom Wesselmann:

In Pop art, the narrative or epic impulse of Abstract Expressionism was replaced with straightforward depictions of the everyday, and the mass-produced was afforded the same significance as unique works of fine art... These images, presented with - and sometimes transformed by - humor, wit, and irony, may be read as both an unabashed celebration and a scathing critique of popular culture.But precisely how Pop Art might be read remains the analytical preoccupation with this work -- in other words, we cannot even get beyond the critical first base. In representing consumer culture without any of the pretentions (or anti-pretentions) of Pop Art, digital art like BRAINGIRL constitutes a profound intrepretative challenge to Pop Art (even if the place of '60s iconography is assured), about which the article by Susan Davidson on the exhibition's web page defines many of the "established" readings.

That interpretative "crossroads" is represented by the physical development of the Guggenheim art museums. The Las Vegas -- itself a location loaded with every possible kind of modernist association -- galleries were opened in 2001 and present the two faces of the artistic establishment: the The Guggenheim Hermitage Museum is in every respect intended to be the companion of the great European galleries which its name evokes:

Both the exterior and interior walls of the museum are made of Cor-Ten steel, a material with a velvety rusted surface evocative of the velvet-covered walls in the eighteenth-century classical galleries at the Hermitage. The severity and serenity of the steel facade - which can be seen from the Las Vegas Strip and is strikingly prominent to visitors - dramatically contrasts with the derivative faux architecture of the major hotels and casinos in the immediate area. On the interior, four symmetrical galleries - each measuring 1500 sq. ft. - will also have Cor-Ten steel walls, which will contrast with maple wood floors and ceilings.The Guggenheim Las Vegas is for special exhibitions and is clearly the province of the establishment avant garde, its opening exhibition devoted to the Art of the Motorcycle.

The main gallery in the 63,700-sq.ft. building is approximately 210 ft. long, 160 ft. wide and 70 ft. high. The largest gallery features a 70 ft. square pivoting door, as well as a functioning industrial bridge crane (hovering close to the ceiling and suspended from tracks at either side of the space) with a lifting capacity of 35 tons. The main floor breached by a 210 ft by 30 ft.trench, which can either be covered with 21 5-ton trench covers to create a single level, or the trench covers can be selectively removed to reveal the galleries on the lower level. The lower level is accessed either by escalators, or via a 30 ft. wide lime green processional staircase. A skylight in the ceiling (125 ft. by 70 ft.) features motorized trap covers, located on the roof, which can either filter out all natural light or be fully open to the sky. In a gesture to the Las Vegas aesthetic the underside of the skylight is covered with a large-scale facsimile of the central scene from Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling.In their obsession with physical solidity, and the enormity of the dimensions of enclosure, these constructions represent the very height of the "real-time" concept of art, anchored deeply in space. But at almost the same time the Guggenheim launched a virtual museum of art -- a "morphing structure that is in constant flux":

The New York firm Asymptote Architects has been commissioned to design and implement a new Guggenheim Museum in cyberspace... The structure will be an ongoing work in process, with new sections added as older sections are renovated. The project will consist of navigable three-dimensional spatial entities accessible on the Internet."It is a "structure" intended to link and interchange the existing Guggenheim museums in a single interface, and so affirms a belief that the "enclosure, form and permanence" of existing art museum architecture "will undoubtedly persevere". But in recognition of the forces already sweeping forward heedless of the great institutions of the past, the Guggenheim affirms "a new architecture of liquidity, flux, and mutability predicated on technological advances and fueled by a basic human desire to probe the unknown."

And so the Guggenheim's "virtual art collection" is already running ahead of the structure being built to "hold" it. Cyberatlas is absolutely spectacular, an invitation to explore and relish sheer brilliance (go there!). Many will also enjoy net.flag by Mark Napier which might be intellectually rather conventional, but is as refreshingly transparent and explicit as one could hope. And Nancy Davenport's downloadable animated screen-saver May Day is a sheer delight:

May Day

2003-05-20T21:54:00.000Z

MOVERS AND SHAKERS

I love to read about American people - ordinary people - doing things, and I especially love to read about groups working to clean up the countryside and protect wildlife. The Loyalhanna Watershed Association (LWA) of Pennsylvania's site is a delight to visit:

Founded in 1971, the LWA strives to achieve its mission via the coordinated efforts of its 500+ members, 15 board members, 3 full-time staff and the support of several environmental partners. The mission of the LWA is to protect, conserve and restore the natural resources of the Loyalhanna Creek, which originates in the limestone aquifers of Laurel Mountain and finds its way to a confluence with the Conemaugh River in Saltsburg. From its beginnings high in the mountains, to its confluence with the Conemaugh, the Loyalhanna Creek encounters a series of environmental challenges that the LWA has, is and looks forward to addressing.Familiar no doubt to many Americans, I was surprised and very happy to discover the American Wetlands Campaign of the Izaak Walton League of America (IWLA), founded in Chicago by anglers in 1922:

2003-05-20T21:12:00.001Z

PAPER DEMOCRACY

There is a wonderful article in today's Times about the extraordinary flowering of the free press in Iraq:

2003-05-15T20:35:00.000Z

ONAN ROCKS

Until yesterday I was unaware that May is National Masturbation Month in the USA -- "a month-long celebration recognizing the many ways we can pleasure ourselves" Begun in 1995, it's the brain(?) child of Good Vibrations (a democratically-run worker-owned cooperative with a staff of over 100, a great website and a magazine, Good Vibes), and reaches its first climax this weekend (16th-18th May) with the Masturbate-a-Thon -- "We think it's important to bring masturbation out into the open and let people feel better about what they're doing -- and, for those who may not be doing it, we want to encourage it!" It's a great idea. We should stretch our hands out across the Ocean and join in. My only concern is: what happens from June to April?

Not a million miles away physically (albeit a few thousand politically) this month's Men's Journal offers advice and encouragement for hetero guys who want to be big smoothies:

During the past ten years male hair removal for purely aesthetic reasons has become more widespread, moving from the gay community to the population of grooming-conscious men in general.So what about making June pubic shaving month?

2003-05-15T15:00:00.000Z

REEKING OF HYPOCRICY

Education Guardian today reports:

Natfhe

policy

Of course we would welcome an abandonment of tuition fees by any government

Well, the Conservative policy is clearly not the only thing that's full of holes and reeks of opportunism, but I would say a more accurate description of it (and of course of Mr Mackney) would be "unprincipled and reactionary".

2003-05-14T13:32:00.000Z

MOVING ECCLESIASTICAL ARCHITECTURE

It looks like a bouncy castle, and comes complete with blow-up altar and air-filled angels. The inflatable church attracted unflattering attention from the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association [G&LHA] back in 2002, and now today it has finally made the pages of the Times. Its maufacturer writes:

This fantastic air filled building is 47ft long by 25ft wide and 47ft high. The attention to detail is heavenly with plastic "stained glass" windows and airbrush artwork... it has an inflatable organ, altar, pulpit, pews, candles and a gold cross.

It's a terribly easy target for "humour", but apart from references to clerical wind-bags and holy blow jobs, I did like these reactions:
    "Great! Child molestation takes to the road!" and
    "Just the place for me and my inflatable girlfriend
    to tie the knot."
As for comedy situations, it surely has all same the slap-stick potential as the water bed. But why stop at inflatable churches? They're not going to.

2003-05-14T00:18:00.000Z

I'M A GOD GET ME OUT OF HERE

From Ananova and AOL.News come profound and shocking news that gives new meaning to the postings on Lubin's blog:

Celebrity Worship Syndrome

Who do you worship? (possible objects of obsession in the pics) and what would you do for them?

I don't know if this has any connection with Justin Timberlake's claim that while he had dinner with David and Victoria Beckham they were constantly "groping". But in any case there are much worse dangers: apparently women who eat large quantities of contaminated fish are less likely to give birth to boys, while regular exposure to traffic fumes may damage sperm quality in young and middle-aged men, and people who regularly drink beer or spirits have an increased risk of rectal cancer (however wine drinkers are at less risk). Better stick to herbal tea -- except that it's just been found to be harmful to your teeth.

But imagine being called Superman - every ailment under the (don't stay out too long without factor 15+ sunscreen) sun would be sure to follow. So Swedish authorities have prevented a couple from naming their son Staalman (Swedish for Superman) after their favourite comic book ~~hero~~ celebrity "saying it is not appropriate and could be unpleasant for the boy."

2003-05-12T15:34:00.000Z

IN THE LONG RUN ALL HOSPITALS ARE DEAD

In all the current fuss over hospital ratings (with the instant round of interest-group condemnations and official defenses) it's easy to forget how long hospitals have been around -- in how many different ways their role has been conceived; how varied has been their role, organisation, and, perhaps most important, shape. You don't have to be Michel Foucault to think that the physical structure of institutional care is central to understanding its purpose. Like the University College Hospital (UCH) Cruciform Building by Sir Alfred Waterhouse (also the architect of the Natural History Museum building in South Kensington), or the extraordinary Hospital de Sant Pau in Barcelona by Lluís Domènech i Montaner.

UCH has been meticulously restored, and rededicated as a bio-science research centre (the WIBR) in a process that reveals the full complexity of assigning the spacial organisation of the turn of the twentieth century to the intellectual activity of the turn of the 21st -- and of the financial complexities of the Private Finance Initiative.

Looking at these buildings I came across one more EU cultural project with a genuinely interesting website (albeit one that will clearly never be finished) - PAPHE (The Present and Future of European Hospitals Heritage). It is useful to learn about the various forms the hospital has taken and the lexis that defines it, but the site's great value is its links to hospitals all over Europe with plans and photos -- and while it is fascinating to explore the hospitals of Finland or North Central Italy, the most comprehensive region to examine is Catalunya.

The London-based Architects for Health and the International Academy for Design and Health promote new paradigms of medicine and bio-science as well as clinical care. The British organisation is also exploring with the Healthcare Engineering Association of Japan, and their exhibition for Japan of six hospital architects is fascinating - I was particularly involved by the page from Devereux Architects showing the Haven Trust Breast Cancer Support Centre, and more than a little horrified by the Keppie Design page with the new Royal Infirmary, Edinburgh. What do we think a hospital is? Who should be responsible for it (and pay for it)? What place do death-rate leagues have?

2003-05-08T13:30:00.000Z

SEEING DOUBLE

In my last post I offered the opinion that statistical claims about pub licencing are untrustwothy. The following collection would seem to support that (though perhaps someone can correct them or offer definitive evidence on the question):

2003-05-06T18:05:00.000Z

ON A WISH AND A LAW

A letter in yesterday's Times angrily draws attention to an example of one of the root causes of misery in everyday life in Britain: a mass of national legislation based on no more that facile belief and bureaucratic assertion. The object of the author's wholly justified concern in the Licencing Bill which is currently passing through Parliament, which would completely liberalise pub and club opening hours. The government claims that "longer opening hours" are a "key mechanism for combating binge drinking, disorder and anti-social behaviour, which is often provoked by fixed and artificially early closing times", without any evidence whatsoever to support it. The same legislative guidance denies to local authorities the general powers needed to manage areas with concentrations of drinking places, and so is just as likely to lead to more and later vandalism, incontinence and disturbance in town centres (city centre drinking areas are un-reclaimable no-go areas).

What makes this especially galling, and typical of the bureacratic arrogance that drives so much impractical legislation, is that that very same guidance also "strongly recommends that no system of zoning is introduced because this proved unsuccessful when attempted in Scotland". That phrase speaks volumes, but leaves unsaid even more.

These matters were transferred in 2001 from the Home Office (where they properly belong) to the gruesome Department of Culture, Media and Sport, which declares that the licencing bill will provide "a balanced package of freedoms and safeguards" (by which horrible mangling of language and understanding is meant "and unrrelated set of opportunities for drunkenness and commercial profit from it, and regulatory requirements"). It further claims that the bill "will clamp down on crime, disorder and anti-social behaviour perpetrated by a minority [about which it in fact does absolutely nothing] and give the responsible majority more freedom and choice about how they spend their leisure time [on which it paradoxically seeks to impose a uniform and comprehensive regulatary regime]".

If as a result there is more vomit all over my front wall, more vandalism to my car parked outside my house, more violent quarrels and ludicrous discussions under my windows at 2.00 a.m. (and a few more at 4.00 a.m.), more thefts from my garden, and more assaults on my door-knocker at all hours, it will be because people refused to substantiate the asserted truths of the Department of Culture - which will be their fault (and my problem) I expect.

2003-05-05T11:58:00.000Z

SAP RISING

Yesterday we went to Hidcote Manor Garden, a few miles away in North Gloucestershire. We've visited the garden many times, the last occasion with my mother not long before she died. I guess it's one of those places with which it is possible to become familiar and yet which each visit reveals new features as the plants and colours change from season to season and year to year.

As the National Trust (which has looked after it since the 1940s) makes clear, it is a garden with a very significant place in the historical development of horticulture and garden design in this country, and it's not difficult to believe that as one wanders through the "rooms" that combine spaces, colours and shapes with such deftness that adjoining areas of similar size can achieve strict formality and the most profuse abandon, and harmonise their mood and perspective with wide velvet lawns, wry topiary, and narrow walks (see interactive photo-map).

I can't remember having gone to Hidcote in early May before. Everywhere was extraordinarily verdant, while much of the planting remained quite sparse, so it was possible to see far more clearly the architecture of the rooms and the arrangement of their components. Rigorous pruning left the structure of many large plants far more visible, so they served not to shade but intrigue; and without the scorching of Summer, the formal and informal water elements served not to refresh but energise. Everywhere there were tulips -- red, white, deep purple, yellow, sharp and assertive -- and lilac, soft and diffuse, late daffodils in chaos and clouds of forget-me-not.

Of course, the roses that scent the garden in high Summer were missing, and with them the feelings of desire and incontinent sensuality that the garden then evokes. In May all the power and force of fresh maturity raised my pulse rate and set my eye roving. [Un]fortunately the human specimens were far less impressive than the plant life -- we wouldn't want the NT to have the same problems among the hedges and hide-aways of Hidcote that it has in the dunes of Studland now would we?

2003-05-03T17:42:00.000Z

WHORES OF THE BALLOT BOX

The biggest losers in Thursday's local elections in England were the TV presenters and journalists, when voters robbed them of the story they had prepared, and with it the opportunity to impose their own perspective on the whole process. They had done everything in the days before the vote to assist the British National Party (BNP) short of campaigning for them on the dorrsteps, by highlighting their candidacies and predicting their successes. This was done not because they supported them, but (a) in order to provide shocking, hysterical attention-grabbing reports about racism and fascism which would dominate election coverage (as in "but the real story of these elections is..."); (b) to allow the journalists to lacerate both Labour and the Conservatives for failing to combat the BNP and the "rise of racism", for creating the "poverty and alienation" in which "racism grows", and for policies (on the war and asylum-seekers) that "encouraged racism".

But the BNP failed to get elected in any numbers at all. Of 25 candidates in Sunderland, not one made it. In Sandwell (72-seat council) the BNP now has 2 seats, and Dudley (which is next door to Sandwell, and also has a 72-seat council) they now have one. And in Stoke-on-Trent (home to the largest number of violent football hooligans in the UK) the BNP won just one seat in the 60-member council.

Only in Burnley (where journalists had already gone overboard about the fascist advance last year) did the BNP make headway, gaining 3 seats for a total of eight on the 45-member council. In absolute desparation the journalists reported this as "BNP become second-largest party in Burnley" - omitting to add that such a description is pretty meaningless when Labour hold 24 seats, and Liberal Democrats have 7, Conservatives 3 and Independents 3. It's clearly time to start referring to the BNP as "the electorally insignificant Burnley National Party" - but you can be pretty sure the journalists won't do that.

2003-05-02T03:22:00.000Z

SLOW FUSE

The nearst large city to my home is Coventry. There are those who would claim it has almost as little going for it as the Soviet Union, and I cannot say I visit it very often. In the 1960s Coventry was Britain's "motown" (though without the "sound") and it is now perhaps principally famous for a more permanent remainder of that decade, the modern Cathedral by Basil Spence that built alongside the bombed-out ruins of the medieval cathedral. In almost every other respect from ring-roads to high-rise public housing, from incompetent administration of welfare benefits to negligent social services, Coventry is a showcase for the worst that municipal planning can produce.

Over the years the deliberate creation of a hopeless environment blighted the lives of millions -- while the Labour councillors, who held an apparently invincible grip on local power, conspired with their incompetent and arrogant government officials to celebrate fictional successes and hide culpable failures. Nobody had grander or more chimerical clothes than Coventry's regneration emperor.

So it was with enormous pleasure that I saw in the BBC's results of yesterday's local elections that Labour had lost control of Coventry City Council (needless to say this morning the Council's website still displayed no results). It was the culmination of an electoral movement that had been gathering pace since the mid 1990s, as Labour lost more and more seats in every election.

Coventry City Council Seats by Party, 1998-2003

YEAR	LAB	CONS	SOC ALL	LIB DEM
1998	47	6	1	-
1999	44	8	2	-
2000	35	15	3	-
2002	31	19	3	1
2003	26	23	3	2

Soc All = Socialist Alliance (Dave Nellist)
Table constructed by Here Inside from BBC archive records

Whatever the specific combination of issues that moved 30-40% of the electorate this year -- (and those can certainly not be presumed to be the war in Iraq, and neither is Coventry in any way a small copy of nearby Birmingham) -- was part of a long-term trend. With a four-year electoral cycle, in which a third of the Council seats are contested each year, followed by a rest year, the 2004 elections will be crucial. There is hope for Coventry yet.

2003-05-01T15:18:00.000Z

RELATIVITY

The... actions were immoral and constitute a crime against humanity. [They are] using the pretext of war against terrorism to make people believe that all the means are acceptable in fighting terrorism... [People] have died because those in charge care more about their political agenda than human lives. They have died because of the country that historically puts its own state affairs above all, even human life.

These words were written by a Russian, not about the recent war in Iraq, but about the storming of the Moscow theatre siege by Chechen terrorists in October last year.

Gas (which was secretly pumped into the theatre by the authorities prior to an armed assault in which all the terrorists were killed) at the time caused the deaths of 129 of the roughly 750 people who had been held hostage. The Times now reports that another 40 of the surviving hostages have since died from the effects of the gas, 100 are seriously ill, and 80% are suffering from ilnesses and symptoms associated with exposure to the gas. However

The ingredients of the gas, which was pumped through air vents into the auditorium, has not been disclosed by the Government, rendering medical treatment almost ineffective as doctors struggle to diagnose the sufferers' symptoms. A week after the siege, the Health Ministry disclosed the substance to be a compound based on fentanyl, a potent synthetic opiate that was first used as a painkiller in the Soviet Army. It is estimated to be 100 times stronger than morphine. However, German doctors testing the urine of German hostages also identified traces of halothane, an anaesthetic, and American doctors speculated that the gas contained BZ, a hallucinogenic drug and a chemical warfare agent. The cocktail is proving to have lethal long-term effects.Relatives of those who died have brought evidence to show that medical preparations before the gas was used were totally inadequate, and that numerous deaths were caused by lack of, or inappropriate attention when hostages were brought out unconscious -- failures due to the negligence of the authorities. Survivors were held in hospitals and relatives denied access and information about them for several days. Leaders of the relatives of those who died claim that doctors removed the vital organs of the dead hostages in order to make post mortem examinations impossible. Officials still refuse to reveal the composition of the gas used, or to provide any assistance to those suffering medical symptoms, many of whom are now unable to work or lead normal lives. Despite evidence from the charity set up to assist the relatives of those who have died, the Moscow Healthcare Committee denied the reports that 40 more people had died from the gas. Sergei Polyakov, the first deputy head of the Healthcare Committee, said: "The former hostages are under observation in the city's medical establishments."

The Russian government behaved sickeningly, with major loss of life due to its decisions and gross incompetence, followed by denial of basic rights and continuing withholding of information and spreading misinformation . Meanwhile, President Putin paraded as a strong man to the general approval of the Russian population and the plaudits of world leaders. The full consequences of his own little war are becoming more and more clear. But of course, those who claim to hold human life so precious in Iraq don't give a toss about this -- because it doesn't help their propaganda war against the USA. It's simply one rule for Bush and another for everyone and everything else.

2003-04-30T13:32:00.000Z

FIRE IN THE BELLY

President Putin of Russia talks like a man of moral and financial substance. But in fact Putin (the former head of the KGB, whose route to office makes that of George W Bush look like the re-birth of Athenian democracy) presides over economic and social conditions that are universally catastrophic -- and worsening. Russia today has simply nothing that anyone would want to emulate. Take fire deaths - highlighted by the recent tragic school blaze in southern Russia in which 28 children died. Fire deaths in Russia are currently more than 18,000 per year - a rate of over 12.5 per 100,000 of population. In the US (with twice the population of Russia) there were 4,000 fire deaths last year (equal to 1.25 per 100,000 of population) and in the UK just 600 (1 per 100,000). Imagine the authority with which Tony Blair would speak if more than 20 people died in fires in Britain every single day.

2003-04-29T13:50:00.000Z

LISTENING TO...

A CD of Aulis Sallinen's Symphonies No 2 -- the dialogue for solo percussion and orchestra, and No 6. the "New Zealand Diary" -- amazing orchestral evocations by the outstanding Finnish composer whose opera King Lear was premiered in Helsinki's new opera house in 2000. Neither Sallinen nor the Swedish composer Allan Pettersson, with whom he has a stylistic affinity, are nearly as well known outside Scandinavia as they deserve to be.

2003-04-26T04:21:00.000Z

FROM RUSSIA WITH ~~LOVE~~ MALICIOUS HOOLIGANISM, EXCEPTIONAL CYNICISM AND EXTREME INSOLENCE

Interviewer: You were the first openly gay journalist in Russia. Have others followed suit since you?
Slava: There are no openly gay authors here, no.

Hint magazine brings news of Russian journalist-photographer Slava Mogutin's first solo exhibition in New York. Lost Boys (at the Rare Gallery, 521 West 26th Street) is a series of portraits -- Russian wrestlers and military cadets, German skinheads and football hooligans, Danish skateboarders and sneaker boys, Californian buddy boxers – exploring "self-identity and awareness in a modern youth culture immersed in lifestyles of fetishes and obsessions" (a colection that, as Hint put it in a hapless attempt at grunge chic: "comrades in the international rough sex set get in on the act in images that capture the rawer side of boyhood").

Mogutin moved to Moscow from Siberia (where he was born in 1974) and began a career as a gay writer in the very lasy years of the USSR. Collapse of the Soviet state did not prevent him from government persecution and in 1995 he was the first Russian to be granted politican asylum in the USA on grounds of sexual orientation. He went on to star in Bruce LaBruce's movie Skin Flick and Laura Colella's independent feature Stay Until Tomorrow, and to work as a photographer for Russian fashions and American pornography. He discusses all of these things in a recent interview in another design magazine, Index, bringing an unexpectedly light and humourous touch to his discussion of such subjects as the differences between American, German and East European gay porn, post-Soviet Russian television, and performances of controversial material (such as his poem "about me being adopted by a military regiment during World War II and getting fucked by all these Russian soldiers, then betraying them by running away to the Nazis. Letting them all be slaughtered because I’m tired of their shit-stained underwear and stinky cigarettes. I want something different. I end up being fed Belgian chocolates, and the Nazis smell of good cologne and know better sex.")

Slava:

Interviewer:

And you printed it?

Slava:

Mogutin is most obviously in the "tradition" of Gus Van Sant, but his ability to take the most outrageous elements and attitudes of gay sub-culture, blend them with surreal humour and translate them onto the avant garde fringe of mainsteam society is something he shares with Joe Orton, Gilbert and George, and Derek Jarman. That he should have achieved this in a repressive Communist state, its disintegrating successor, and then in the United States means that his takes the limitless public libido of homosexuality further than most.

2003-04-26T03:57:00.000Z

BRANDING

We are going to see Ralph Fiennes in Ibsen's Brand at the Swan Theatre in Stratford-on-Avon tonight. We both like Fiennes a lot, and I am a particular fan of the Scandinavian suffering and anguish of Ibsen - Peer Gynt (with Alex Jennings) and Little Eyolf (with Damian Lewis), both at the Swan, were outstandingly good, and I have never seen Brand before. The Swan production (directed by Adrian Noble) transfers to the Haymarket Theatre in London at the end of May, so it's nice to have it just up the road for a couple of months.

2003-04-24T20:47:00.000Z

BIGAMY, POLYGAMY AND SODOMY

In America at the moment leading Republican Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania is under sustained and heavy criticism for having put forward in an interview a social analysis of homosexuality that classifies it alonngside incest and polygamy, and which speaks of relationships between Catholic priests and boys in the same breath as mature, consenting gay relationships.

That criticism is, of course, thoroughly deserved. Sen Santorum's views will offend anyone who understands homosexuality as broadly comparable to heterosexuality, however they might understand its differences. But the Senator's comments are not just offenisve to gay people and those who care about gay issues. They represent a general attack on civil liberties, as gay blogger Arthur Silber claims in five lengthy postings on his blog The Light of Reason (and which are discussed very thoroughly and contentiously in the comments).

But while nothing obliges anyone to advance or approve the kind of arguments put forward by Sen. Santorum, it will always be possible to do so as long as homosexuality does not possess social value in itself, rather than some form of "equality" with forms and expressions of sexuality from which it is different. Women cherish values and esteem qualities that derive from their unique and incomparable social existence as women, and their demand for civil equality with men embraces these differences from them. The same is not possible for gay people because there are no values and qualities recognised by gay people and society alike as the "standard" (and approved) construction of homosexuality in itself (and which describes, and does not impose, wide agreement and conformity by gay people).

It must be highly unlikely that such a core socio-cultural "norm" will ever characterise homosexuality, not least because diversity and perversity appear to be at the heart of the reality of homosexuality as it is lived, and have become increasingly celebrated and widespread respectively. A single "homosexuality" that includes gay men and lesbians is infinitely closer than it was thirty years ago, but once again that does not mean inherent differences have been subordinated to equality. Even if these divisions were capable somehow of being transcended, there is no reason to say that gay people would (or indeed should) believe it was appropriate to do so.

However, as long as homosexuality lacks a recognisable stable social nature, all variations of homosexual personal identity and individual conduct will be equally capable of defining the social meaning of homosexuality. It has long been a complaint of some gay people that widespread negative reactions to activities associated with some homosexuals -- from sex in public toilets, to rampant promiscuity, to participation by S&M groups in Gay Pride marches -- attach to (a presumed majority of) "respectable" homosexuals. Such concern is wide of the mark. It is not that cottagers, cruisers and leather queens give "straight gays" a bad name, but that there is nothing ordinary gay people can do to give themselves a good one. Neither law nor custom distinguishes between long-enduring monogamous homosexual partnership, and any other of the social permutations in which homosexual sex plays a part.

This has many consequences, one of the most important of which is that the public "display" of homosexuality (in reality or portrayal) is almost always scandalous, shocking and negative. Not only is there no general ability to distinguish (without a completely contextualised guide) the homosexual expression of different emotions, but they are all in any case viewed as close to or within the realm of pornography - gratuitous and intended to arouse. The warm intimacy of a devoted young couple and the furious couplings of anonymous pick-ups are part of the same single public vision. The irony is that gay people fully share that conceptual scheme with the rest of the world in which they live.

2003-04-22T23:20:00.000Z

SUBLIME AND RIDICULOUS (2)

From Richard I went to this excellent article (a fuller version is here) about Wagner, which goes to show that everything there is to be said about the man and his music has not already been said.

The article is also a good example of why it is unwise to write off everything by an author with whom one generally disagrees profoundly, as I do with this one. There is good in all of us (isn't there?)

Meanwhile, Jan mailed me to suggest that I let people know that "the site where it all started about Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf was CroqueWeb.com", and that all the jokes all about Comical Ali (and soundboard) can be found here. Delighted to oblige.

2003-04-20T19:22:00.000Z

AVOCETS AND AMUSEMENT ARCADES

I'm back from the North Norfolk coast. Reports and reflections will follow.

2003-04-14T18:37:00.000Z

THE PRICE OF LAWLESSNESS

The Jamestown Foundation reports Pravda research establishing the current price list of police bribes in Russia. It lists the demand in cash for ten different "services", from rural police departments, through the internal affairs directorate of an oblast, to the central office of the Federal Interior Ministry in Moscow. The cheapest service is a "pardon" for lack of registration by a rural police department, which costs 20 rubles (about 70 cents). The most expensive is illegal release of an imprisoned criminal by the Federal Interior Ministry, which costs $500,000 or more (something which would cost only 1,000-2,000 rubles ($35-$70) in a rural police department). The cost of getting a criminal investigation cancelled was:
    city police department: $165-$650
    oblast internal affairs directorate: $2,000-$100,000
    Moscow city internal affairs directorate: $10,000-$300,000
    Federal Interior Ministry: $10,000-$500,000

2003-04-14T14:56:00.000Z

THE SIZE OF AN WALNUT

Chris Tarrant is promoting the fundraising Fishathon of the UK Prostate Cancer Charity John Neate, Chief Executive of The Prostate Cancer Charity, said: "It fits perfectly because the majority of anglers are over the age of 50 and predominately male. Prostate cancer is most common among 50-year-olds and over and affects men."

Prostate cancer has almost no unique symptoms, but one of the most common is a decline in the strength of the urine stream, a fact that has given rise Peeball -- "the most popular men's lavatory game in history." The online game features a virtual urinal and pints of beer, and really is a lot of fun.

information

The Prostate Gland Owners Manual

2003-04-14T12:47:00.000Z

A TASTE OF THINGS TO COME?

Where would you find "six pistols, eight revolvers, five shotguns, a rifle and a carbine, and 800 cartridges"? In the Iraqi Embassy in Madrid. How do we know? The Iraqi chargé d'affaires decided to confess. Meanwhile, Hans Blix has confessed his views of arms inspections, in the light of which his unwillingness to confirm Iraqi non-compliance with Resolution 1441 is not surprising -- or excusable.

2003-04-14T08:14:00.000Z

HINDSIGHT AND PROSPECT

Amid all the hilarity about Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf (aka Comical Ali) the former Iraqi information minister, it appears to have been forgotten that it was he who made all the pre-war public statements on behalf of the regime; that it was he and his department who insisted Iraq did not possess and was not seeking to acquire, weapons of mass destruction. I guess he must have been telling the truth then. We shall see.

Meanwhile, the claim that US military action would provoke more terrorist attacks, first advanced as a reason to oppose the US invasion, is being made again -- now with respect to the American presence. The claim is both unverifiable (because we have no idea from what baseline, linked to what motivational triggers, the "level" of attacks might be presumed to be measured) and analytically confused (since the anti-Western fundamentalism of Osama bin Laden, and international Palestinian protest, while related, are distinct). Indeed, it is possible that the opposite is true. The war attracted hoards of extremist suicide fighters from Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and across the Middle East. They were just about the only ones who put up any serious resistance to the US forces, and they were killed in their hundreds. The supply of suicide terrorists has quite possibly been reduced as a result.

In any case, claim is extraordinarily selfish in its short-sightedness. The principal victims of terror attacks have been innocent Israeli people. As Palestinians have openly acknowledged in their sorrow over the fall of Saddam, the Iraqi regime had been one of their principal suppliers of weapons and explosives. No doubt they will seek to find replacements, and will continue their terroristic strategy. But the means to do so, and their morale, have been dealt a hammer blow, for which Israel is, and all of us should be profoundly grateful.

2003-04-13T20:39:00.000Z

COMING TO YOUR LOCAL STREAM

A British national charity recently launched a fundraising "Fishathon" with appearances by TV gameshow host Chris Tarrant wearing wellington boots and waders. Anglers (who have to pay £5 entry fee plus a pledge of at least £20 to the charity) can land their catches any time in August. Those with the 70 best will qualify for the televised "celebrity final" on September 27th, when they will chase specially tagged fish representing individual prizes including cars, holidays, fishing equipment and cash prizes of up to £100,000. But can anybody say which national charity? And why a fishing competition? (There is a clue, albeit a pretty weak one.)

2003-04-12T11:22:00.000Z

UP YOUR GRAND CANAL

The latest edition of Benetton's Colors Magazine has just appeared, and is devoted to the Venice of the North -- which turns out to be Birmingham. Not that the reason for linking Brum with "la Serenissima" is explained by the images that are presented in the on-line Flash version. Clicking Sport gets you a picture of Birmingham City fans on the terraces with a soundtrack of their chant: "We are Brummies, You are wankers, You are wankers, Yes you are" -- pure Vivaldi -- now what would it be in Italian?

Night Life features a run-down pub, Dezzy (a DJ at a pirate radio station) and Michelle Brooks, a lap-dancer at "Sensations" who is desplayed with a dramatically shaved pubic area and a very full-chested profile -- all of which immediately make one think of La Fenice, of course. There are equally graceful pages on Romance, People and Family Life. What next -- "Vicenza, the Swindon of the South" ? No, not nearly shocking enough, when you remember recent editions put Birmingham alongside such featured subjects as Slavery, Prison, Madness, Trash, and Fat.

2003-04-11T08:44:00.000Z

FACING FACTS, NOT FABRICATING FANTASIES

In the comments box for the last posting, after some very nice words of encouragement, Peter wrote a note of caution that is (as always) on the mark and welcome:

I only hope to "whoever" that you are right, and that the US doesn't eventually do the dirty, bigtime. They can, you know, if they want to.

I posted my reply into the comments box, but it was too long, so here it is....

one day

proportionate

And as for all the endless self-serving agitation about the United Nations, all I can say is: vomit and more vomit.

2003-04-10T16:20:00.000Z

CLOUD CUCKOO LAND

They don't fucking give up do they? Kofi Annan, commenting on the situation in Iraq said first "When you think of the casualties, both military and civilian, the Iraqis have paid a heavy price for this." Was he referring to Saddam's 25 years of murder and war? No, to the American efforts to spare every possible casualty, right down to benign toleration of the religious fanatics who came from outside Iraq to kill them.

Then Kofi Annan said: "From what we have seen in the reports, it appears there is no functioning government in Iraq at the moment." What does he want, a fucking prize for insight? Of course, one day after the defeat of a dictator, with a party-system of total control, and no civic order, there isn't a "functioning government". What does he expect? A fucking miracle? People to dance in the streets waving constitutional law textbooks? What does he want the U.S. to do -- shoot looters on sight as they leave the Ministry of Torture? Why doesn't he come straight out and say he thinks it's a pity Saddam has been toppled?

Then Mr Annan said he expected UN weapons inspectors to return to Iraq after the war, as their mandate from the Security Council to verify Iraqi disarmament remained in force. Right -- now Saddam is gone. But if Iraq doesn't have a functioning government, then to what does the mandate refer, and who (according to Mr Kofi) is responsible in Iraq for acting under it? Indeed, if Iraq has no government, is it any longer a member of the UN? Whatever arrangements are made need to operate on, and with the agreement of, the interim government, or the Iraqi successor government. Or does Mr Kofi intend to continue to deal with Saddam's ministers in exile?

Although he failed to ask himself, Mr Annan should consider whether there is a Common Sense mandate on him to go and.... beat himself with his shoes.

2003-04-10T10:44:00.000Z

FRIENDS AND ENEMIES

A report this morning makes clear why the UN Security Council should not have any say in the future government of Iraq.

Also looted was the German Embassy -- representing a government that had emphatically opposed the U.S. decision to go to war.

Letting countries like Germany, France and Russia -- countries that sought to prevent the liberation of Iraq from Saddam -- have a say in Iraq would be a profound provocation, and a source of grave uncertainty to the Iraqi people, who need to be able to rely securely on new authorities. Meanwhile, anti-war protesters jumping onto a "Hands off Syria" bandwagon should try looking at what the government of that country is actually like.

UPDATE It is now reported that the French Cultural Centre has been cleaned out. No doubt Iraqis will be trying to think of something to do with all the pictures of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe they'll have found there.

2003-04-09T16:39:00.000Z

HEART BREAKING JOY AND GRATITUDE AS BAGHDAD FALLS

Jubilant crowds swarmed into the streets, dancing, looting and cheering U.S. convoys. A Marine tank helped residents topple a giant statue of Saddam in a sweeping, symbolic gesture. Cheering Iraqis, some waving the national flag, scaled the statue and danced upon the downed icon, now lying face down. As it fell, some threw shoes and slippers at the statue -- a gross insult in the Arab world.

"Welcome, welcome!" Baghdadis cried out in English, as young people took off their T-shirts and waved them in joy in front of the US soldiers.

"This is the greatest feeling I've had in my life, after spending 11 years in military service because of all the wars Saddam has put us through," said one.

"Thank you, thank you, Mr. Bush," some shouted.

An elderly man beat a portrait of Saddam with his shoe, while a younger man spat on the portrait.

"Good, Good, Bush!" chanted cheering crowds in a northern district of Baghdad as a US Marine convoy passed by, as elsewhere angry crowds defaced and destroyed symbols of Saddam's regime.

Others marked the regime's dissolution more passively, picking flowers from a garden and handing them to Marines. Yahoo News Service

2003-04-09T14:43:00.000Z

AXIS OF INSANITY

Pravda also carries a report about one of the Mayor of Riga's advisers, who declares:

but there are moral rules, which say: never hit a man when he is down.

Among the authorities on which he claimed to rely were his conversations with army officers during a sky-diving contest in Saudi Arabia in 2001. Well, I guess that clinches it. Well, it makes more sense than Tony Benn.

2003-04-09T13:00:00.000Z

THROWING UP INTO THE WIND

The English version of Pravda, the Russian news service, reports:

"Today's Russian-German dialogue focuses on discussing prospects of the Iraqi settlement and bringing it to the UN Security Council aegis", [a] spokesman for the Russian Foreign Minist[er] Alexander Yakovenko said in an interview... [about] the forthcoming visit to Russia by German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.President Jacques Chirac has made the utterly predictable "demand" that the UN should control post-war Iraq, echoed (equally predictably) by China and Russia, and (without any apparent irony) Syria. This rapacious pack is as uninterested in the fate of Iraqi as they are desperate to push their way into it, and they are joined in their power plays by Kofi Annan insisting the UN must dispense legitimacy.

But while an obvious role exists for the UN's humanitarian food, medical, children's and refugee agencies, I cannot see what possible reason (other than the protection of the economic and diplomatic interests of France, Russia, Germany and China, and of the political-territorial interests of Syria) there can be for involvement of the UN Security Council.

What would the large European countries do except (in view of their deep and long-established ties with Saddam) compromise and endanger civil order while jockeying for influence? What possible reason would Iraqis have for trusting these countries, or believing that they would do what they promised? Why on earth should Syria (every year on the list of countries aiding terrorism, home of Hammas, and run by another Ba'ath Party dictator) have any say at all in the future government of Iraq? What is the point of involving countries like Cameroon? What would Pakistan contribute except igniting religious fanaticism and conflict?

Fortunately, it is clear that the US will be getting on with things as it deems best. But can anyone make out a reasoned rationale for Security Council control of government in post-war Iraq that addresses these issues, and explain what the UN Security Council would actually do. The issue of legitimacy is examined with merciless precision in this posting (on the excellent blog Setting the World to Rights for the discovery of which I have 2 Blowhards to thank), and the notion that China, Cameroon, Pakistan, Guinea, and Syria are in any position to confer statehood would have Saddam splitting his sides in his bunker. Most of all, how would the UN Security Council establish order, institute the rule of law, introduce freedom of speech and contain ethnic rivalries?

Demands for UN control are completely irresponsible. France and Russia were directly responsible for Iraqi pre-war non-compliance, and then, when the war started, for Iraqi resistance. They gave Saddam good reasons to hope that divisions and opposition would restrain the US, and then derail and abort its invasion. As Nobel Prize winner Elie Weisel commented at the weekend, if these countries had put the same pressure on Saddam that they put on George Bush, Saddam could well have been dislodged with minimum force. But their unforgiveable encouragement of Saddam has cost many many lives and incalculable suffering. These countries must not be allowed to pile more misery on Iraq when the war is over.

They don't even have a euro or a rouble to spare for the rebuilding effort. If they really care about the future of multilateralism, they will set about reconstructing the UN itself -- and passing some resolutions that focus on Yassir Arafat, as he tries to destroy the Prime Minister he was obliged to appoint.

2003-04-08T07:33:00.000Z

SUBLIME AND RIDICULOUS

The approach of Easter brings performances of paschal classics like Bach's Passions, Handel's Messiah and... Wagner's Parsifal, which can be heard live from the Metropolitan Opera House New York on BBC Radio 3 on Saturday (12th) from 5.00pm. Placido Domingo sings the title role and Kirov maestro Valery Gergiev conducts. Wagner is also on the schedule on Radio 3 on Friday (11th) at 10.00am, with excerpts from Götterdämmerung and Lohengrin (in recordings with sopranos Helen Traubel, Kirsten Flagstad, tenor Lauritz Melchoir, and conductors Arturo Toscanini and Bruno Walter).

The same programme includes a rare opportunity to hear Milt Franklyn conduct his own arrangement of Wagner, What's Opera, Doc? Brünhilde is sung by Bugs Bunny (wabbit) and Siegfried by Elmer Fudd (bawitone) with the Warner Brothers Studio Orchestra.

2003-04-06T19:31:00.001Z

IT'S A FIRST

Exactly one year ago, on April 6, 2002 "Here Inside" was published for the first time.

2003-04-06T19:30:00.000Z

Listening to...The Symphony No 4 ("The Inextinguishable") by Nielsen, in the extraordinary performance with Launy Grondahl conducting the Danish State Radio Symphony Orchestra, recorded in 1951. Long one of my very favourite symphonic works, and one of the greatest 20th Century symphonies, Nielsen's Fourth Symphony is revealed and realised by Grondahl in a way no other conductor comes near -- despite the fact that Blomstedt, Rattle and others have made superb recordings too. No better way to mark my first blogging anniversary, and my feelings about events.

2003-04-06T16:00:00.002Z

OXFORD BY A HEAD

In view of the extemely close result of the annual University Boat Race, "Here Inside" felt the title should really go to the best looking crew. So here they are. Although Oxford (on top) had the advantage of a better photographer and a session with the stylist, they still seem on balance to be the clear victors. Anyone think the Cambridge crew (on the bottom) should get it?

If you want to examine things more closely for yourself, the links to individual rowers' bios and pics are all on this page, and each of them (if for any reason you wish to examine them particularly closely) can be downloaded in a huge high-resolution JPEG file of more than 2MB. Don't ignore the Isis and Goldie boats either -- there was some very fine talent in the "seconds" like Samuel Parker of Oxford.

2003-04-06T11:41:00.000Z

FATTER THAN EVER

We have a full-length mirror on the landing. It's a feeble, flimsy, low-grade item bought at Ikea a few years ago. When (eventually) the builders consent to come and do the work they have promised to carry out, the mirror will go out. Till then its lease of life has been extended because of its utility. Until yesterday, when I fell against it and bent the backing. We now have one of those crazy fair-ground mirrors: stand at a distance and it gives you tiny little legs, a huge bloated tummy and a strange wiggly head; move nearer and the legs get all long and spindly, the tummy almost disappears and the head goes flat with widely separaed eyes. Move around in front of it and all sorts of strange things happen. Most of the time I look enormously pregnant. I love it: there must be a permanent place for it somewhere. W. hates it. The only place it's going as far as he'd concerned is the rubbish tip. How will I save such a subversive article from destruction?

HUGELY PREGNANT

We enjoyed the little exhibition of pieces by Ron Mueck at the National Gallery in London -- not that there was very much of it. The hyper-realism, combined with extraordinary changes in scale do make for breath-taking creations. I was hugely (sic) impressed by the upward stretching oversized expectant female, and by the application of hair to all of the models. Where will this go, I wonder.

2003-04-05T09:42:00.000Z

SADDAM-LOVERS' LAST STAND

I see more anti-War protest demonstrations are being organised for today. More than ever those who march will be shouting their support for Saddam Hussein. Anyone who allows him/herself to be counted behind the banners of the Stop the War march in London will again be endorsing the Muslim Association of Britain and its support of the Palestinians, who parade with hundreds of pictures of Saddam, chanting their love of him and calling for him to be their leader (although it's significanct that MAB has recently been burying its Palestinian agenda deeper and deeper in their website -- and so much of what I downloaded for reference a few weeks ago has gone completely); it means they'll be listening to speeches by George Galloway (Glasgow Labour MP) who called British soldiers "wolves" and implored other Arab countries to attack them; it means they'll be trying to get the Kurds abandoned and betrayed into gassings and death camps again; they'll be protesting for terrror and torture, and against democracy and freedom.

Will the Liberal Democrats be there, like they were on February 15th -- you can be bloody sure they won't. Even Germany and Russia have suddenly abandoned the anti-American camp, leaving only France and the fascist dictatorship of Syria (which has been making valliant efforts to supply arms to Saddam). Just what is it that makes the most vile regimes in the world so worthy of support? Does middle class anger have no limits in its moral bankruptcy?

2003-04-05T08:26:00.000Z

SEA, SAND AND SEALS

We've booked a short holiday next week on the North Norfolk coast near to Blakeney Point. Sufficiently far away from any centres of population, we're hoping for a quiet time, a chance to do some walking, watch the bird life, and perhaps take a boat to see the Grey and Common Seal colony (which apparently numbered almost 400 until the recent seal-flu virus struck). Of course, the North Sea can be very unforgiving at any time of the year, so we'll also be prepared for gales and rain.

2003-04-04T03:57:00.000Z

GETTING INTO DUTCHMAN'S BREECHES

Spring is everywhere in the air, from the birds at the back of my house (the blackbirds have been joined by a pair of coal tits and a pair of robins) to the daffodils that almost line my route to work. But I can't help wishing I could be in N. Carolina and see the glorious wild flowers of the Eno River Valley. You san see the fresh delicate blooms of pendulous Dutchman's Breeches (r., top pic) along with bloodroot, trailing Arbutus, Catesby's Trillium, crested drarf iris and the swamp rose here and here. The way in which the Eno River was saved from damming, made a State Park and continues to be conserved shows that preserving and cherishing nature involves much more than government policies or activism (though they played their part). It needs an active love of wildlife and spending time in the wild -- hiking, walking, mapping, bird-watching, recording species -- and the generosity of people who give money, time, and land.

In the past four decades, the Eno River State Park has grown from a few hundred acres to 2,694 acres. With the addition of the Occoneechee Mountain State Natural Area, the community has come far towards realizing its preservation goals, but not far enough. Serious threats to the Eno and its surrounding watershed have not eased, and over the years have included a belt-thoroughfare, a city landfill, two sewer systems and a series of fish kills. A grassroots team led by the Eno River Association rises up to meet each of these challenges. Our members also congregate every year at the Annual Meeting and Spring Picnic, volunteer at the Festival for the Eno, and spread the word to friends and neighbors about the river. Best of all, protected for much of its thirty-five miles and host to a number of endangered species, the Eno flows on.

I sometimes wonder if those people who so delight in flailing American consumerism, churning out more UNFCCC documents and disparaging Pres Bush for withdrawing from the Kyoto Protocol, ever do anything a fraction as worthwhile as the residents of the Eno River Valley.

2003-04-04T02:07:00.000Z

OLDER, FATTER AND MORE BORING

A gay friend of mine at college used to have three lists of invitees for his parties: the people he didn't want to invite but had to, the people who'd come whether he invited them or not, and the hot young studs he'd love to invite but didn't know their names. Unfortunately he wasn't at my 25th reunion dinner on Saturday, but I think most of those attending would have been on his first list anyway. My expectations (that it would be great fun, or ghastly beyond all belief) were not met -- it was all rather low-key. There is very little you can do to bridge 25 years spent without exchanging a single word with someone. Jobs, places of residence, number of children (if applicable), and that about does it. No mention of deaths, disappointments or divorces. My one effort to engage a handsome guy (now a vet) that I didn't recognise, and had never met, foundered quickly in a sea of mutual incomprehensiuon. The faces from the past were older and fatter, and the personalities animating them, for the most part, I think, nicer . Nobody tried to impress me with the size of their salaries, cars or anything else. The biggest talking point among an overwhelmingly bald or balding and grey or greying assembly was my own full head, untinged by a single silver hair. Only one thing made me angry -- until I decided I really didn't care after all...

M., one of my closest and best gay friends at college had not begun to "come out" until his second year, by which time he had already become part of a circle that was remarkable only for its ordinariness and normality. M.'s gay friends weren't interested in them, while they viewed gay carryings-on with undisguised horror. M. remained in the closet, torn between the two. Unable to do without a gay life, he could find no way to disengage from the others. He protested that he liked them both. We were not impressed. Two school friends who were at the same university came out as gay. Things got worse as we chased these two good-looking guys and M. ran around in all directions. Whenever members of either of M.s groups met, he would go white with embarrasment and fear. Some wicked queens even made a sport of it, and when M. was with them the pedestrian group (and M.) were subjected to onslaughts of outrageous Divine-inspired campery. Of all things, I was often blamed for this!

M. and I got closer after we left college and M. moved to London. The closet problems fell away, and we had great times together in the 1980s, from the opera to other low gay dives, we talked and danced and laughed like lovers. We stayed over with one another, shared new friends, were on top of the world. Then, in the mid 1980s, the guy he shared a flat with died of AIDS, and M. found a lover, J. They moved to Paris, I moved to New York. We lost touch.

M. was at the reunion dinner, to my surprise. We bumped into one another almost immediately. We chatted. He still lived in Paris with J. Then he rushed off and we didn't speak another word. He buried himself deep in a group of his first-year friends. When I walked over he ignored me. I can't imagine what they talked about. Perhaps they knew all about M. and everything was completely cool. Perhaps not. Time heals, and it also destroys.

2003-04-03T15:57:00.000Z

WAITING FOR THE GAY BARS IN BAGHDAD TO OPEN

There is a depressing grim seriousness, borne of specious moralism, that informs the representation of British and American armed forces fighting in Iraq. These men and women deserve our gratitude and applause -- not the intellectual sniping and small-minded scrutiny they are saddled with. As a force and as individuals they do indeed excite my admiration - for their bravery, for their dedication, for what they are achieving. If we recognised them as we should there would be warmth and comradeship across the miles, and they would feel we at home valued them and cared about them. In such an atmosphere gay men would be turning their powers of innuendo to every opaque phrase of military-speak, and photos like this would elicit verbal wolf-whistles galore: so, with a cheer and a leer I say, this guy can liberate me any time. (The full size photo that appeared on the front of today's Times can be viewed here.)

2003-04-02T23:25:00.000Z

WINE, WOMEN AND HOLY ROMAN EMPERORS

We are going up to London at the weekend. The main objective is to see The Handmaid's Tale by Poul Ruders at English National Opera on Saturday evening (in which the music will have an awful lot of work to do to overcome my resistance to the ghastly story -- but reviews from Danish performances have been excellent, and it is impossible for it to be anywhere near as awful as Maw's Sophie's Tale at Covent Garden last December). But we're also planning to go to the Titian exhibition at the National Gallery in the afternoon.

I was suprised to learn from the National Gallery's Titian pages that this is "the first major exhibition in Britain devoted to the work of the 16th-century artist". I'm very excited. The last single artist "show" I went to was a Léger comprehensive at the Fundación Joan Miró in Barcelona, which I found distinctly under-whelming (especially alongside the magnificant Miró permanent collection). I'm not expecting that to be the case this time. Titian occupies a pivotal place in the development of western art -- comparable to that of his contemporary Michelangelo. His extraordinarily long creative life connected the world of high Italian renaissance artists like Giovanni Bellini, Mantegna, Botticelli and Raphael, with that of late renaissance and Mannerism painters like Tintoretto, Veronese and El Greco.

No national collection provides the key to exploring all these connections and comparisons, or even following Titian's individual technical and stylistic development. This exhibition brings together major works from Florence, Rome and Naples, Madrid, Berlin and Dresden, Washington DC and Edinburgh. There will be a novel opportunity to see the four paintings of Alfonso d'Este's camerino d'alabastro brought together reunited from the public galleries to which time has dispersed them. The third and most famous (Bacchus and Ariadne, its central figure almost as universal an image of masculine dynamism as Botticelli's Birth of Venus is of feminine serenity) is in the National Gallery in London, while the others come from Washington and the Prado.

I'm particularly looking forward to seeing the first, The Feast of the Gods, both because it almost represents a moment in the transfer of aesthetic control from one generation of pioneers to the next (Titian re-worked a canvas by Bellini to render it stylistically more consistent with his own later paintings), and beause the subject is so particularly ribald.

It will also be good to get a deep immersion in the Italian renaissance, since the works of the northern renaissance -- Grüewald, Dürer, Bruegel the Elder -- have in recent years become such a dominant part of English popular culture. Titian encoded the political, religious and cultural values of the Habsburgs and the Holy Roman Empire, the Venetian oligarchy and the Catholic Church before and during the massive upheavals of the German reformation -- to sustained applause from those at the pinacles of power. How should we prepare our minds to enter this world? what kind of approch would enable us to understand it? what intellectual and spiritual benefits do we hope to gain?

2003-04-01T12:36:00.000Z

MAKING ROOM FOR THE WELCOME MAT

One villager told British soldiers that there were "eyes and ears everywhere -- these are the men who dis-appear when you turn up, and come back to frighten us when you go."

The following pooled report Greg Swift that appears (among other places) in today's Times says more than anything I could write about the central importance of the Ba'ath Party, the so-called "humanitarian crisis" in Iraq, the degree of resistance, the absence of local uprisings and of welcome for allied troops, and the desperate need for a US-UK administration after Saddam's regime is broken. Let those who want the UN to run post-war Iraq explain how it would deal with the power of the Ba'ath Party.

British forces staged a dawn raid on a Baath party headquarters [in Basra] yesterday after receiving intelligence that it was being used to exert President Saddam Hussein's will. Five people were arrested and taken away for interrogation in a swift assault designed to send a powerful message to the intimidated local population that the Baath party's reign of fear is over.

The two-storey complex stood on the southwest edge of the Basra national oil refinery, three miles from the port city and surrounded by a shanty town. A sniper team from Zulu Company, the 1st Battalion Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, kept the building under covert observation all night before the attack. At exactly 5.30am local time, a 36-tonne Warrior armoured vehicle crashed through the perimeter wall. At the same time the vehicle's rear hatch opened and a section of infantrymen kicked down the front door and stormed the complex. Amid the confusion, the Fusiliers systematically scoured the complex hunting for Baath party members. One by one, doors were smashed down before soldiers with fixed bayonets burst into the rooms.

Once inside the sprawling HQ, the opulent lifestyle enjoyed by Saddam's henchmen -- in stark relief to the poverty just yards away -- became clear. Leading from each side of the grand entrance stood two huge kitchens with extensive cooking facilities. From these ran two cavernous store rooms filled with food. While local Iraqis are short of even the most basic items, the Baath party HQ was crammed with enormous humanitarian aid relief sacks of rice and grain. Fresh garlic, tomatoes and sauces stood alongside chest freezers filled with meat and frozen produce.

Along wood-panelled corridors the British soldiers raced through a series of comfortable bedroom suites, each one made up of two rooms in which a television, armchairs, a sofa and a bed were placed. In the heart of the complex a number of imposing rooms fanned out from a central reception area. In one was a bar and a snooker table with cues still resting on the green baize. In another an office had been set up, documents lying across a mahogany table.

In a filing cabinet were two bottles of single malt whisky. While an Arabic-speaking soldier trawled the paperwork for possible intelligence, the rest of Z company poured into a large dining room. Around a table capable of seating up to 40 people were chrome-plated dining chairs. On the table, knives, forks, glasses and salt and pepper pots were neatly arranged over a linen cloth. At the far end of the room was a huge, smiling picture of Saddam. Upstairs, dozens more bedrooms were searched until the whole building had been cleared.

The ferocity of the raid stunned locals who, still fearful of the malign influence of the Baath party, were reluctant to approach the newly cleared building. Major Duncan McSporran, the officer commanding Z Company, told the villagers that the building now belonged to them. Within an hour soldiers returned to patrol the area to find it being looted. Captain Alex Cartwright, 28, a Grenadier Guardsman attached to 1st Battalion, said that he was happy to allow the mob to continue. "Normally we would stop looting, but in this case we decided that it would send a powerful message -- that we are in control now, not the Ba'ath party."

Captain Cartwright said that villagers had pointed out a number of men who were considerably better dressed and groomed than the locals and who appeared to be agitated by what they saw. "It was also noticeable how the locals' body language and attitude changed -- they became more fearful, more cowed," he said. "One villager, having warned us that there were 'eyes and ears everywhere', said: 'These are the men who disappear when you turn up and come back to frighten us when you go.'"

"We wanted to arrest these guys and so appealed to their vanity by inviting them into the building explaining that we needed to talk to them in private. Once they were in the building, they were told they were under arrest and were coming with us. They protested, we searched them and then they were made forcibly aware that they were under arrest."

Under the rule of the Geneva Convention captured prisoners of war are not allowed to be paraded, but Captain Cartwright said that he made sure that all the villagers could see the men being led into the back of a British army Warrior in handcuffs." That will have done our cause here immeasurable good because the people here now know that we are right behind them, doing everything we can to rid them of the regime that has blighted their lives for so long."

2003-03-31T19:40:00.000Z

THE WEEK AHEAD

Looking through the BBC Radio 3 website, I picked out some highlights of the weeks's listening, and added a few links.

TUESDAY

7.30 pm 20th Century Masterpieces. Berg: Violin Concerto

violin

9.30 pm Night Waves. Discussion of Russian Ark

10.15 pm Late Junction

Spem in Alium

WEDNESDAY

7.25 pm Puccini: Madama Butterfly

conducted by Antonio Pappano

THURSDAY

9.30 pm Landmarks.

The Third Man by Carol Reed

SATURDAY

7:30 pm Live From The Metropolitan Opera House, New York, Verdi's Nabucco

11.15 pm UltraSchall Festival Berlin (Jan 2003)

Lichtstudie

Polygon

Trouble With Traffic

Un long fracas somptueux de rapide celeste

NUN

SUNDAY

5.00 pm Discovering Music.

6.30 pm Choirworks - John Rutter conducts the Cambridge Singers

The fear of the Lord

Hymn to the Creator of Light

Litanies a la vierge noire

There is a flower

The Falcon

I my best beloved's am

9.15 pm The Smith Quartet from the 2001 Cheltenham Festival

Steve Reich

Different Trains

Conlon Nancarrow

2003-03-31T13:26:00.001Z

WAR IN THE VIRTUAL FIELD

Jonno reports receipt of a piece of spam with a very cleverly contrived subject field: "Peasant shooted an Apache with a gun when he saw US Navi soldiers f*cking his goat". No doubt when you open it there will still be offers to increase the size of your penis and reduce that of your mortgage payments.

2003-03-31T13:26:00.000Z

"ROMAN CONSTRUCTION PROJECT FALLS HOPELESSLY BEHIND ON SECOND DAY" BARBARIAN DAILY NEWS

I guess I could be accused ot taking a sledge hammer to crack not-cases, so this report of the "media set-back in coverage of setback" offers a lighter (but no less accurate) touch. Meanwhile, a caustic and unostentaciously well-argued piece in the Times Tim Hames should hammer a final nail into the flag-draped coffin of "Americans stare defeat in the face in Baghdad-Stalingrad and Basra-Vietnam" reports -- except that it is just the kind of idiotic drivel the front page of the newspaper he is writing in is full of.

2003-03-31T12:36:00.000Z

ARMS INSPECTION, HEAD EXAMINATION

It has been suggested that there will be an inconclusive war in Iraq, that will end with Saddam left in power and again subject to arms inspection. It is strange what blogging does to people's heads! In 2002-03 the very reason for the failure to find a solution to the threat posed by Saddam, short of war, was the completely ineffective and inappropriate nonsense that inspection as a method of arms control had become. But that had been evident by 1988, when chief arms inspector Scott Ritter resigned; Saddam withdrew cooperation and the inspections collapsed; and Saddam's brother-in-law, General Hussein Kamal defected and provided detailed evidence of the lengths to which Saddam was going to avoid any discovery of his weapons of mass destruction (WMD). To this France and Russia responded by demanding that pressure on Iraq be reduced, and broke what had been firm Security Council backing for the arms inspections.

So it is interesting to read an analysis of the situation at this time -- before the 2000 US presidential election, before 9/11 and the "war on terror", and before the long-drawn out crisis over Iraq in the UN in 2002-2003. Of Iraq and Post-Cold War Arms Control [PDF file download] by Dr. Thomas S. Lynch III was published in National Security Studies Quarterly (Vol V, No.1) in 1999. Lynch, in 1997-98 a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and a U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, concluded:

The United States and Britain will also have to exercise the patience, persistence, and principle to stand together against certain UN Security Council pressure to end the essential confrontation and give Saddam another ill-advised chance at co-operation. Most significantly, an emerging focus on containment must not be muddled with the intro-duction of an UNSCOM-2 [United Nations Special Commission on Arms Control] or "UNSCOM-light" for Iraq. The wooly-headed notion that a re-engineered UNSCOM can bring anything of value to an unambiguously confrontational situation is illogical and untenable.... The UNSCOM experiment has long since run its course. It is high time the senior U.S. foreign policy leaders acknowledge this fact formally...

2003-03-29T01:09:00.000Z

BACK TO THE FUTURE

I have been persuaded to go to an official College 25th Reunion Dinner tonight. It's not that far away, but I'll be staying ovenight. I can't pretend I'm much looking forward to it, but rather than indulge my reservations, I'll wait to see how it turns out before saying any more here.

2003-03-29T00:56:00.000Z

TEST YOUR ~~ASSUMPTIONS~~ KNOWLEDGE

We are always hearing things about Saddam and Iraq, but some of the most important events and facts don't get mentioned. Here is a chance to test your knowledge. The answers can be found as the first posting in the comments box -- where you are very welcome to leave a record of your "score", and of course any other observations.

In 1980 Saddam Hussein seized Iranian territory and began a military conflict which lasted until a cease-fire in 1988. During this war Saddam used poison gas against the Iranians.

1. How many people are estimated to have been killed or died as a direct result of this war?
(a) 500,000
(b) 1 million
(c) 1.5 million
(d) 2 million

2. How much is it estimated that the war cost Iraq between 1980 and 1988 in economic terms (physcial destruction, lost production, trade etc)?
(a) $50 billion
(b) $100 billion
(c) $200 billion
(d) $250 billion

3. During the war between Iraq and Iran, which country was the largest supplier of arms to Saddam Hussein?
(a) Russia
(b) USA
(c) China
(d) France

4. During the war between Iraq and Iran, which country was the largest supplier of arms to Iran?
(a) Russia
(b) USA
(c) China
(d) France

5. During the war between Iraq and Iran, which of these countries was also a large supplier of arms to Iran?
(a) Syria
(b) Pakistan
(c) Turkey
(d) Kuwait

6. There are both Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims in Iraq. Saddam Hussein and his ruling group are Sunni Muslims. What percentage of the population of Iraq are Sunni Muslims?
(a) 85%
(b) 65%
(c) 55%
(d) 35%

7. Saddam has visited particularly brutal repression on the Kurdish people of northern Iraq, including poison gas. About what percentage of the total population of Iraq are Kurdish?
(a) 5%
(b) 10%
(c) 15%
(d) 20%

The Ba'ath Party is the main organisation through which Saddam rules Iraq. It operates in every part of Iraqi life. However, it is not easy to become a member: there are admission requirements, and it is much harder to become a party official or functionary.

8. What percentage of the total population of Iraq are members of the Ba'ath Party?
(a) 2%
(b) 5%
(c) 10%
(d) 20%

9. Approximately how many Ba'ath Party officials are there?
(a) 20,000
(b) 40,000
(c) 70,000
(d) 100,000

10. The Ba'ath Party leadership (and commentators in this country) emphasise the fighting anti-imperialism of the Iraqi people. When did Iraq achieve independence from British control?
(a) 1932
(b) 1946
(c) 1952
(d) 1958

Well, how did you do?

2003-03-28T23:09:00.000Z

THE REAL UNREPORTED FAILURES OF THE WAR

Why are the journalists so angry and scathing, so insistent that the allied invasion of Iraq has bogged down and failed to achieve its objectives a mere eight days into the war? I would suggest the following:

(a) Because they are profoundly ignorant of military science, and are unable to distinguish offensive strategy from defensive tactics. The latter is the response to the former.

(b) Because they are lazy and uninterested in the structure of the society from which they are reporting. They simply equate defensive resistance with either die-hard Saddam loyalists, or popular anti-Americanism. They have made no attempt to understand (and explain) the relationship between the Ba'ath Party and the direction of social and militarty activity, in a country in which most of the people's food and other subsistence needs were supplied through the Ba'athist state, and which can mount continuous terror through street-level cadres. Ofd course, they don't even want to think about the fact that the long delays and sapping of morale inflicted by France in the UN, and anti-war demonstrators, allowed Saddam to organise resistance, screw down the system of terror and control on the people, and prepare in every way.

(c) Because they wilfully ignore historical facts. The first Gulf War lasted seven weeks. This sought only to expel invaders from territory they had occupied, which they had had no time to integrate into the political-military system of the Ba'ath Party. There was no attempt to take centres of population in a country of 30 million. And this took seven weeks. How long did the bombardment of Serbia take before Milosevic gave in?

(d) Because they treat the war just like they treat domestic politics. They trap spokesmen into making statements, especially predictions, and then if things work out differently, harry them to admit failure and incompetence. In war the commanders seek to achieve particular goals, and unless their tactics result in them becoming quite unable ever to do so, or in intolerable losses or men and/or eqipment, they have not failed, or failed to live up to expectations. They are not responsible for the defensive actions they have to deal with (and advance intelligence can never predict these). The measure of their success is how well they deal with the circumstances they encounter --- enemy attacks, weather, logistics, maintaining order. If this approach guided the reports that journalists made, they would be very different.

(e) Because (and this probably controls all the rest) they are seething with fury, disoriented and confused. All the reports they wrote before the war began have had to be torn up. There were two main "predictions": one was a general understanding, supposedly based on American statements, that the US forces were infinitely superior, and that the war would be "short" and dominated by bombardment from the air (and local uprisings). The other was made by the anti-war demonstrators. They said there would be hundreds of thousands of innocent civilian casualties. And since everyone expected the war to be short, then the carnage would have to be immediate and tantamount to deliberate. That was what the reporters expected to wallow in. They had geared up moralise from amid carnage and mayhem, and indict the perpetrators of these outrages; to bring tabloid-TV stories of individual suffering and misery; to pose as the defenders of "ordinary" Iraqis. Well, so far, that God, that has not happened. Let us hope it never does.

The other area in which these whores of war were anxious to exercise their irresponsible power was the political exploitation of (and linguistic offensive about) "humanitarian disaster". They would be in ther element "reporting" the misery and suffering of ordinary Iraqis facing, or in the grips of hunger, disease, homelessness, and general despair, with recurrent pictorial emphasis on children and the elderly. They would be able to bring interviews of aid workers demanding immediate distribution of food, shelter and medical supplies, requiring cessation of hostilites (even if it would destroy the achievement of military goals) Well, they have lacked the events and the personnel to interview, and they can't get near enough to be part of it themselves (the heroes!). So what do they do? focus all their energies on the Iraqi propaganda about the accidental death of 14 civilians (or were they military personnel wearing civilian clothing - the journalists couldn't care less) in Baghdad.

I have now just read that about 50 civilians (according to the Iraqi authorities) have been killed by a blast in Baghdad. Already the inane sentimentalisation begins to be churned out. This is AOL:

Crowds of mourners wailed and blood-soaked children's slippers sat on the street not far from a crater blasted into the ground. Down the road, residents gathered at a Shiite Muslim mosque, crowded around seven wooden coffins draped in blankets. Some of the men stood silently. Others sobbed into trembling hands. In the background, women cried, "Oh God! Oh God!" Another witness, Omar Ismail, a 35-year-old engineer who witnessed the explosion, said body parts were strewn across the street. "Why do they hate the Iraqi people so much?" he asked.

Who orchestrated this "response"? Local Ba'ath Party organisers? Who is Omar Ismail, the 35 year-old engineer? was he asked if he was a member of the Ba'ath Party, or one of its functionaries? Of course not. Why does Saddam hate the Iraqi people? What are his terror and death squads doing to peope? Why doesn't he give up and go, and stop inflicting all this on the Iraqi people? -- but no journalist would be allowed to ask people those kinds of questions - and they wouldn't want to do so anyway.

And how strange that no detailed report was filed about attacks by Iraqi forces on Basra civilians leaving the city or going to fetch food and water on the outskirts. Iraqis committing atrocities against Iraqis. How do you write claptrap about children's slippers for that? How do you get pictures when the Iraqi authorities don't assist you, and when you would be under fire from Iraqis? How can you interview eye witnesses about this when they are members/functionaries of the Ba'ath Party, or if they are not, when they are in fear of their lives from them?

2003-03-28T21:27:00.000Z

BROADCAST JOURNALIST HAS RABIES

I had not until yesterday properly understood the metaphorical use of the word "rabid". Then I heard a British officer being interviewed on Radio 4. He had taken part in the successful destruction of a group of Iraqi tanks that had broken out of Basra, firing on British positions around the city.
"How did you know they weren't trying to surrender?" the journalist asked.
Tanks in formation that had opened fire -- of course they might have been trying to surrender.
But why not just ask the stupid, vicious, irresponsible, mendacious, hateful British officer why he had tried to murder, in cold blood, against all the conventions of warfare, the poor innocent tank drivers, who only wanted to enjoy the views of the desert? Why not just tell him he is the lowest of the low, and the British people hate him, and hope the Iraqis kill him and all his colleagues? Why not sink his teeth, mouth frothing think infected spittle, into the officers leg?

UPDATE

A BBC spokesman has denied that the news editor referred to above was in fact rabid. He said the interview with the British officer followed a brief report that Iraqi soldiers had machine-gunned a line of civilians leaving Basra. The BBC wanted to be completely even-handed in dealing with this kind of incident, and was anxious to point up the possibility that British forces might have been guilty of similar conduct in their treatment of heavily armoured Iraqi military vehicles leaving Basra.

2003-03-27T01:07:00.000Z

POLITICALLY CORRECT PETER

I shall never forget the Christmas present my closest gay friend in college gave me one year: a Sophia Loren cook book. It consisted of gushing accounts of Sophia's wonderful life (dinners with famous friends, lunches al fresco, her flowers, her clothes) and lurid colour photographs of Sophia posing with various tables of food, in the kitchen (designer clothes and long red finger-nails) and eating at banquets -- all quite unrelated to puny little recipes which were dotted through the book here and there. Ever since then (and quite separately from Never on a Sunday) I have idolised La Loren. So I can hardly wait until August when PentaTone Classics release the recording that has just been completed of a new version of Prokofiev's children's orchestral classic Peter and the Wolf, along with a new piece: The Wolf and Peter. The down side is that Sophia has been joined in the narrations by former presidents Bill Clinton and Mikhail Gorbachev.

The Wolf and Peter by French composer Jean-Pascal Beintus is, apparently, told from the perspective of the wolf, and "converts the image of the wolf from a fearsome creature to one that represents balance between the needs of human and wildlife populations".

He's in the forest but the forest is disappearing, urbanisation is cutting the trees away... and we see why the wolf is so desperate.
Kent Nagano (conductor)

And there is a happy ending: the Wolf succeeds in convincing Peter that they should live peacefully together. But why couldn't they have found something for Monica Lewinsky to do? (Good pictures of the recording sessions are on the Russian National Orchestra site.)

A school in Newfoundland, Canada has come up with its own version of The Wolf and Peter - but with this sequence, I somewhow doubt it would recommend itself to the likes of Gorbachev and Clinton (who are giving their fees to environmental and AIDS charities), though perhaps a memorable Peter narrator of the past, Dame Edna Everidge, would enjoy it:

The wolf jumped and showed Peter his sharp teeth just before he began his attack. First he backed Peter into a tree and then Peter screamed but nobody could hear him. The wolf jumped Peter and clawed his face and his arms. Just a minute later Peter's Pop heard the growling and grabbed his rifle. He saw the wolf and took aim. Instantly the wolf was dead. Peter was bleeding very much. Peter's Pop's friend came to see what happened but they were too late. Peter had died.

2003-03-26T16:13:00.000Z

~~GOVERNMENTS~~ TV JOURNALISTS IGNORE PUBLIC OPINION

The television war "coverage" hysteria continues unabated: the "journalists" and their editors just cannot believe that they do not control what the generals and soldiers do, so arrogant have they become in their exercise of power without responsibility in domestic politics. But they're sure as hell going to do everything they can to cut the military bastards down to size put them on the spot -- just like they do with the parliamentary politicians. The military commanders must be made to explain and abase themselves before the journalists for an accident that (according to Saddam's propaganda) killed 14 civilians. But the fact that Ba'ath Party desperados in Basra fired on unarmed Iraqis at close range - well, that doesn't allow them to harry and humiliate Anglo-American commanders, so it is passed over in a sentence. No attempt to investigate it either.

Another well-argued call for censorship of these appalling megalomaniacs is made here by an anti-war sympathiser.

2003-03-25T17:12:00.000Z

I MUST HAVE IT

I have hitherto abstained from offering opportunities for visitors to "Here Inside" to send me items from a wish-list of items like public choice economics books, recordings of twentieth century operas and posters of Colin Farrell. I somehow found it hard to believe anyone would be so generous (and I doubt if recent postings have made anyone feel more so). But now I am on the point of changing all that -- for a single item. My all-time favourite TV personality, The Swedish Chef, has been immortalised in a limited edition statuette.

The Swedish Chef is hand cast in heavy weight polystone and meticulously hand painted to the highest standards. He sits on a Corinthian-inspired plinth that evokes the image of a classical sculpture while also hearkening to the decorative motifs of the Muppet Theatre. The base also bears The Muppet Show logo and the character's name, while on the underside is listed the sculptor's name and signature, ensuring that this beautiful piece will be treasured item for many years to come.

10" ~~long~~ high and weighing 9 lbs. in a limited edition of 5,000 which cost a mere $60.00 each, the purchase process can be begun here.

2003-03-25T16:13:00.000Z

COOL CALM AND COLLECTED

TV journalists sickeningly insist that war provide constant excitement and live entertainment, and they infuse their incoherent and indiscriminate sensationalism with demands that those waging war conform to their flaccid ideas of morality, stand accountable to them for their conduct and achievement, and bow before their grotesque pretense of even-handedness. Nowhere are these characteristics more furiously displayed than in the insistence (without any proper knowledge of strategy, tactics or logistics) that the war should have proceeded without problem, at a speed hitherto unknown in the annals of warfare. That the US sought before the war to suggest it would be a short campaign was no more than psychological softening-up. And now we are getting a predictable round of interviews with relief workers predicting humanitarian disasters. In complete contrast, the leading article in today's Times is factually precise and realistic:

2003-03-25T11:40:00.000Z

NESCIENCE AND NURTURE

It is March, so blackbirds have started to nest. One pair has nested in the ivy at the back of our house, and from the kitchen window we can watch their comings and goings, and listen to their song. They are an absolutely splendid pair: the male a particularly glossy black, his partner soft smooth brown. They are one of the species that seems to have benefitted from urban sprawl: the West Midlands Bird Club reports that only 14% successfully fledge young in woodland, while nearly half do so in towns.

2003-03-24T19:40:00.000Z

THE WHORES OF WAR

Before starting to write this post I have visited Peter's blog. It brought me enormous relief and comfort. For there, far better and more courageously than I could hope to express it, was his verdict on the TV coverage of the Iraq war.

Do you, like me, sometimes draw back and just wonder at the amount of information given out on the TV? Is there censorship? There certainly should be. Is there deliberate misinformation? Ditto, if it will spare one drop of blood.

I have just watched tonight's Channel 4 News (can't be fucked to link to it). From start to finish its reports were moralising, patronisng, superior and snide -- and dubious, speculative, and almost certainly grossly inaccurate: not a hope that this was the "truth" they crassly and arrogantly claim to know. It was simply unofficial propaganda. Their self-appointed intrusion swept all before it, as the poor soldiers were unable to do on the road to Baghdad, they repeatedly mocked. The reporters oozed self-importance and assumed a mantle of bravery for no more than squatting on the periphery of a battle field with decent men and women; they pretended to a knowledge and expertise that allowed them to discover the very thoughts of those whom their photographers had posed or "captured" for them, and to the all-seeing competence of generals when their puny little perspective amounted to no more than guesswork.

These intellectual titans, these philosophers with microphones, told us that with the death of their comrades, soldiers were "finally" discovering the "true face of war". A shot of troops digging in the sand -- not just trenches we were told, but graves. British troops resting their heads, not one of whom was interviewed, were described as desolate and demoralised. Iraqi dead were shown, one holidng a white flag. We were invited to believe he'd been shot despite it, not, perhaps, that he was shooting from behind it -- an Iraqi tactic alluded to briefly by a British commander yesterday.

Delighting in the setbacks and difficulties of allied troops, we were told the "much vaunted" relief supplies were yet to arrive. Although not a single voice was heard welcoming allied forces (though they do exist: "some Iraqis waved or gave a thumbs-up as the convoy passed, while others stood stoically"), a dismal old woman was given time to shout her support of Saddam provocatively at the viewer.

Lindsey ~~Hussein~~ Hillsum in Baghdad declared that with the anti-war protests in the West the Iraqi authorities felt the propaganda war had been won. Then an Iraqi television report was shown: an American helicopter in a grassy field, and men in Arab head-dresses brandishing automatic rifles doing a victory dance around the aircraft, followed by an interview with an old peasant who claimed to have shot the helicopter down with his hunting rifle. As the days when it was permitted to laugh at the poor and the mad have long passed, I assume we were supposed to form an opinion of the determination of ordinary Iraqis to fight. We heard at length the Iraqi complaints that their surrendering men were shown on TV, and, as if to prove it, Channel 4 itself showed its own footage of them. Finally, following lengthy, uninterrupted doses of Saddam and other Iraqi propaganda, Ms Hillsum assured us she was free to say what she wanted. God alone knows what a doctored report would look like.

Let the Iraqis tell their people what they like, we are under no obligation to relay it too. Nor should we show tactical problems or difficulties encountered by the British men and women who allow the jounalists to accompany them. How dismal and genuinely demoralising for our troops to hear of enemy propaganda streaming into every home in the UK while they are shot at, and know they would have to protect the unarmed scum who produced it if there was a sudden enemy attack. But most important, the families, the loved ones, the friends and colleagues of those who are doing the fighting deserve to be spared this.

Of course, Channel 4 speaks to its audience and tells them what they want to hear. But Peter Riddell in The Times today reports that support for the war now stands at 55%, opposition at 36-37% (compared to 53% against, 29% in favour two weeks ago), and that "the 36 to 37 per cent against, according to the latest two polls, represent ... middle-class professionals and centre-left activists". How will Channel 4 respond to this drop? I shan't be watching to find out. (The Times also has an interesting piece covering the bias of eight different TV channels -- BBC is much like Channel 4, in case you hadn't guessed.)

2003-03-23T15:54:00.000Z

BEAVERING AWAY

I was delighted to discover that Kent Wildlife Trust is trying to reintroduce beavers into the wild.

Once widespread across the British Isles, the beaver effectively became extinct in the twelfth century. The European beaver is a keystone species with the ability to modify its environment to favour its own kind, and as a bi-product benefit numerous other plants and animals associated with aquatic systems. Beaver activity raises and maintains water levels, and diversifies the age structure and composition of bank-side and adjacent rangeland vegetation in a way that greatly enhances habitat and species diversity.It's a fascinating project that you can read all about here. Although the "pioneer" Kent beavers have come from Norway, it is to the the wonderful French achievements that everyone is looking. Following reintroduction of the beaver on the River Loire, and rigorous protection "on peut considérer aujourd'hui que le castor européen est sauvé"; and now, more than 10 years since the beaver began to spread throughout Burgundy "on dénombre des familles de castors sur une grande partie de la Loire et de l'Allier... L'avenir du castor européen est assuré dans la région de Bourgogne." Bravo!

For N. American readers, the European and American or Canadian beaver have significant differences, especially in the extent of damming, which is much less among European beavers.