Tag: United States

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Gay Rant

What Kind of Gay Am I?

Excuse me for rambling.  This may have something to do with the painkillers.  I don’t usually take pills but a mashed ankle and a severely strained leg…I gave in to the ibuprofen.

The news looks bad.  More unemployment misery, few jobs, double dip, creationism, President takes a vacation, stock market tanks, texting in church…etc.   That’s the news.

Some people are telling me that the only way the USA is going to save itself is when the American people accept third world wages.  The plan: the people will become so desperate they will work any job at any wage anywhere and the corporations will abandon India and China and return to America.

If this is true…and I suspect that it is, we are in for a long and desperate time.

There were journalists in helicopters filming black people lining up for a ‘Jobs Fair’ in Atlanta.  Well presented, educated black people.  The usual people who suffer when the economy slows.  Apparently some employers don’t want to interview the unemployed.  I have no idea why.  Can someone tell me?

The images from the helicopter reminded me of the Hurricane Katrina footage.   Desperate black people.  Waiting in badly organized lines.

“I’m a single mother and I am looking for a job.”

I’m not writing what’s been bugging me..apart from my aching foot.

I want to write about being gay, being a gay film maker/artist.   I have not written enough about my recent brush with the ‘gay community’.  I have been having the same multiple contractions of apprehension that I had years ago.

The same anxiety.  The same question plagues me…even after years of therapy and insight.

What kind of gay am I?

Is this the same question as what kind of man am I?  Is this a question I need answering?  I just don’t know who my tribe is.  The community that has sprung up around me on WordPress is as good as it gets.  I like that you write to me.  Some of you disapprove but you can’t get everybody to love you all the time.

Those of you who wanted the coyote to rip my throat out…well, it didn’t.

I called my friend Zach and I said, what kind of gay are you?  By the time he replied I had lost interest.

I don’t want to know what sort of gay he is.  I want to know who I am.

I tried to make gay films for a gay male audience…specifically, unapologetically.   We need to see ourselves as we really are.  We need to champion the language and locations of our lives as well as be critical of our bad choices, challenge our culture…reveal it, understand our politics..the differences as well as the similarities.

I loved making gay films, I loved travelling the world…meeting you in cinemas on every continent, in every major city.  I like meeting you, eating with you, sleeping with you.

You were very accommodating!

Recently, I have been tempted by the mass market.

I had a meeting with a well-known, important producer about my Surrogacy film.  Even though he was moved by the story he said that the story would be much improved if I could somehow incorporate a straight man’s perspective.  He thought a latino character would complicate the story.

He was part of the problem…not the solution.

His ‘take’ was woefully un-evolved.   Shame based.

At first I was irritated then it nagged at me: the suggestion that a regular audience could only identify with us if we sympathised with them.

I have sympathised with straight characters in movies all my life.  I have gone out of my way to understand their lives and loves.  I have walked in their shoes.

We all do.

I don’t think my producer friend is very interested in me.  He wasn’t interested in the film or the rare books he came to see.  I think he was interested in the twins.  Why shouldn’t he be?  It amuses me that he would have made so much effort to accommodate me when all he had to do was take Robby’s number.

Of course he has more to offer Robby than I ever could.  Robby would be a fool not to capitalize on that friendship.

I felt the same way when ever Jay Jopling visited me.  He would take what ever he felt he wanted..or was valuable from me.  He took a beaver lined Edwardian driving coat, he took books by Aubrey Beardsley and Djuna Barnes and Dorothy Parker.

He wasn’t the only one.

Korda Marshall borrowed and broke the rare and valuable  Venini vase that The Duchess of Argyll had given me.   Now he is rich I wrote to him asking him to replace it.  He did not reply to my email.

Robby is very special, he has a quality that may not get him modeling jobs but…and I rarely say this, may make him a star.

I felt that about Tom Hardy.  He used to be such a brat.  I had a very ‘loud chat’ with Tom in Soho House, London years ago about his excessive drinking.  He heeded my advice and gave up.  Then, a year or so later, he thanked me for telling him the truth.  A truth few dared to tell him.

In actuality I just repeated what Anthony Hopkins told me Lawrence Olivier had said to him about his drinking when he was a young actor at The National Theatre.

It seemed to work.

Pink (Alecia Moore) told me that the hardest thing she ever had to do was ditch her band.  The label wanted her and not the band.  They were her best friends.  She had to tell them as if it were own choice.

We all abandon those who helped us at the beginning.  We have to make hard decisions in life if we are going to get on.  Leaving our best friends behind so that we might succeed.  It is the secret story behind every Hollywood success.  Those that got left behind.

Lastly, from one of my personal heroes British gay activist Peter Tatchell:

“The UK establishment is quick to condemn rioters.  Yet, the police took bribes & failed to investigate phone hacking. No officers jailed. Cash for knighthoods & peerages. No one jailed. MPs abused expenses system. Only a few jailed. Editors bribed police. None jailed. Priests raped kids. No jail for most. Army killed & tortured civilians in Iraq. Soldiers not jailed. British elite = hypocrites. No right to moralize.”

Categories
Dogs Malibu

The Little Dog Returns From The Vet

The poor little darling was in worse shape than I thought.  The coyote bite was much deeper than it looked.  Today Jason and the kids took him to the Malibu Coast Vet and Dr. Victor made it better. Whilst he was asleep Victor cleaned his teeth and cut away a skin tab behind his ear.

We love Dr Victor. He is incredibly handsome.

I am in pretty bad shape.  I can only crawl.  So I am crawling to the bathroom.

We are laying in bed together.  Time will heal both of us.

The more I think about that brazen coyote the more it scares me.  He was waiting a few feet from us.  Waiting.  It was very frightening.

Must buy a gun.  It could be me next time.

Pain is very exhausting.  The shock really compromised me.  Anyway, we’ll get through this.

This is a picture of the drain and the scar.  I could show you my swollen foot but that’s more disgusting than this:

Categories
Rant

We Are What We Steal

In The Hot Tub Under The Lantern

Did you ever play Monopoly? Do you remember winning? An embarrassment of riches. Did you ever cheat? Letting your friends stay at your hotel on Park Lane for free because you wanted the game to go on? The thrill of being benevolent, philanthropic?

Did you enjoy forcing your enemies off the board. Did you learn about risk, acquisition, luxury?

Whenever I won the game of Monopoly I felt badly. It gave me no pleasure bankrupting my friends.

The game ends when one player takes total control of the bank and the board.

We are witnessing in the USA the end game. A few men and women who have won over all the rest. They have trillions of dollars. Some have acquired this cash from (amongst other things) war profiteering. From private prisons. From bloated healthcare costs. From gouging oil, gas and utilities. Stealing directly from the people.

The rich pay for laws to protect their interests, the rich consider the rest of us expendable.

Their riches and how they acquired them have not gone unnoticed.

In London, the people know something is up with the system. They couldn’t articulate what is wrong…because we have deliberately kept these people stupid. They just needed an excuse to act upon their frustration.

They have an inkling that they might be able to throw the Monopoly board in the air. Fuck the winner. I’m taking mine.

The rich have some serious thinking to do.

It is all very well to take all the money but what use is it when the cities are burning?

The rich must surely know that their ‘hard work’ and ‘good fortune’ without paying fair taxes is destroying their country…perhaps the world. It has not gone unnoticed. For that is the way of humanity. The people wake up and disparity is challenged.

British Prime Minister David Cameron sounds like he has a handle on the British riots.

Cameron said: “In the banking crisis, with MPs’ expenses, in the phone-hacking scandal, we have seen some of the worst cases of greed, irresponsibility and entitlement. The restoration of responsibility has to cut right across our society.”

The leader of the opposition agrees!

At last. An intelligent, cross party reaction to the shopping with violence that devastated London and other British cities.

Times they are a changing.

Solution is hard. What can any government do to put the pieces of society back together when it seems irreparable? Blame is frankly irresponsible, context is key.

Is it impossible to teach young people how to respect the established order when the established order is revealed to be corrupt? Respect cannot be forced upon our youth. As much as this breaks my heart to write: we must listen to those thugs and vandals.

Now, I am not interested in sitting down with a bunch of dim-witted, inarticulate youths. They have nothing to say that will teach me anything. Their actions, however, must be respected and understood.

There is no boot camp, army training, national service, prison that will change these young men and women. We have created monsters. We have given them false hope, rancid dreams, easy money.

They do not aspire to anything more than gadgets and fancy trainers.

Their limited aspirations are shocking to someone like me. Gadgets and trainers. Good God.

When Bagdad was sacked the youth took really valuable antiquities from the museums. They seemed to understand the value of their culture. Perhaps we are what we steal?

Rampaging through a city, stealing, breaking and screaming….takes a certain amount of guts. Physically challenging an army of police officers. Their actions must be understood.

We will never return to a time when young people respected their elders, the establishment, society and themselves. That time never existed. Young people have always and quite rightly challenged the status quo.

I’m glad Cameron mentioned the banks. Nobody would do that here.

The more I dwell upon the bank bailouts in the USA the more I realize just how catastrophic it was for the American People. Cauterizing the banking crisis with huge amounts of cash rather than letting those institutions fail has proved very problematic. It confused the message of capitalism. It undermined capitalist principles and laid bare the lies of successive US governments.

Mostly it disheartened those of us who understand that change is imperative for growth.

If the banks had been allowed to fail a new order would be established. A power shift. Other men would hold the reins. New ideas would have flourished. Capitalism would have sorted it out all on its own. Where there is weakness others come to make good. New opportunities revealed for the brave. The next generation of fearless entrepreneurs would have made themselves known.

By bailing out the banks we merely hold on to what we know rather than doing what humans are best at…striking into the unknown.

Does the USA deserve it’s AAA credit rating? Does it matter? I heard many times that Americans, after losing their AAA rating..had their self-esteem knocked.

America’s self-esteem exists in a putrid vat of delusion and self aggrandisement.

I am told over and over again that the US economy is the largest in the world. That may be true but somehow the people have become confused. They tell me that their police, fire department, health system etc. is the best in the world. We are the best at everything. We are the champions of the world. My army keeps you free.

I keep my mouth shut.

It is obvious to those of us who have lived in many different countries that this simply is not true.

I often tell the gays in this blog to get off their asses and break some windows if they want to see change in their country. I am scolded for doing so. Government is petrified of insurrection, rebellion, people on the streets.

David Cameron and the leader of the opposition have impressed me with their willingness to understand what is happening in Britain. Commentators, baffled by the violence, murder and mayhem are trying to work it out. It just didn’t make any sense. Now it is.

The British, like the French are good at letting their frustrations boil over onto the streets. It is part of the fabric of our lives. It sends messages, good and bad, to everyone who complacently enjoys a peaceful life. That peaceful life cannot be taken for granted. Peace, harmony, respect, order…they are earned together.

Together we create society so together we must find solution if we are to keep what we value.

P.S. Yesterday the beautiful deaf boy came to the house and came over my chest.

Dinner at AXE on Abbot Kinney.

So happy that it reopened after the fire that took it out a year ago. Great food, lovely people, delightfully limited menu. We ate goat stew. We ate delicious flat bread. We ate home-grown tomatoes and burrata.

Party at Gabe’s. Sat by the fire talking to a beautiful surfer with long blond hair and thick thighs.

Finally, this beautiful army man blew his brains out because he thought no God would ever forgive what he had done to others in Iraq. Very sad.

Categories
Rant

London Rebellion

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITJcparImeQ]
There is something very heartening about the British reaction to what can only be described, but is rarely described, as an insurrection.
What of it?  This insurrection?  Who understands it?
Look at what The British have experienced recently:  A corrupt government in league with corrupt media billionaires who in turn corrupt the police and the establishment.
Nothing can be trusted.
Phone hacking and police bribes may be more the cause of this rebellion than the death of a black cabbie.
The mess at the top sends a distinct message to those at the bottom that society is rotten.
I heard a young white British girl telling a reporter in Birmingham that she ‘hated the police’ because they did not ‘respect’ her.
“Why should I respect them, they don’t respect me?”  She sneered.
Why indeed?  She may have nothing that you or I think worth respecting.  But she lives in a country where her government and the police are known thieves and liars.  Where bankers have looted the system, bankrupted the country and she is being asked to pay.  To tighten her belt.
She feels disrespected.  She has a point.
Of course, it takes an old white man to say what that young, female heathen could never articulate.
Like many young, white people she is not eager to get on her knees and scrub floors, look after the smelly elderly, drive a bus.  She wants the Simon Cowell dream of instant riches.  A hidden talent that may earn her legitimacy.
She wants to win the lottery so she can be more like the Beckhams.  She wants to be Catherine Middleton and marry into a powerful family that is paid by the state to do nothing.
She has forgotten just how lucky she is because she wants stuff more than an attitude of gratitude.
The streets are teaming by night with angry black and asian men threatening the police with sticks.  By day the same streets are being swept by jolly middle-aged white women wanting to restore order.
Today my friends on Facebook are finding humor where there is no obvious answer.
At the Michelin awarded restaurant The Ledbury in Notting Hill Gate the rich cowered in the wine cellar as the looters came, stealing their money and their jewelery.   The looting continued on Sloane Square.  They rampaged over the thick carpet in Prada and Burberry, places that they could never hope to afford, leaving mannequins on the pavement like broken people.
What of this rebellion?  How could it be?  Why in London?  Why in Britain?
This is not a racially motivated rebellion.  This is about greed.  Taking what we want when we want it.  Instant gratification.  It has no focus other than greed.  These people have no political agenda.  The are not trying to wrest control of government.
This is a rebellion.  A refusal of obedience and order.   It may evolve into a mass non-violent resistance, it may attempt to destroy an established authority such as a government…but it wont.
“I can’t afford it, I will take it.”  It is the scourge of capitalism.   The ‘haves’ must prepare to either give a little or lose the lot.  The ‘have nots’ are beginning to find out how powerful they are…armed with clubs and their Blackberry.
Don’t be complacent America.  This will happen here too.  Sooner or later the desperately poor will take back their power and you will see what I have been suggesting since the beginning of the banking crisis:  the people will speak.   They will not be polite.
The difference here will be that any rebellion will be bloodier than our tame British street brawls.   It will be more like Syria.  Many dead.
Insurrection is as much a part of civilised society as the peace that reigns between.   The ruling class have had it easy.  They have looted from the poor and now the disenfranchised will have their say.
98% of the wealth owned by 5% of the people.   Seeing images of the British on their streets stealing what they cannot afford may inspire Americans to do the same.
In Britain the police were woefully unprepared, armed or organized to protect what we consider important.  The British police scarcely lifted a finger as the people came and took what they wanted.
The enemy for The British and The Americans are not in caves in Afghanistan they are in the trailer homes, homeless shelters and squalid broken cities like Cleveland and Detroit.
They are the casualties of a class war waged upon them by the rich.   They will tell us eventually, the poor, this simple fact:  We can’t earn it…we’ll take it.  When they come they will take what they want and they will not take hostages.  Not here.  They will come into our shops and our restaurants, our homes and our cars.
They will come because they are desperate and we do not respect them.
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Gay

Duncan Roy The ‘A’ List

Regardless of why I decided to get involved with Derek or The ‘A’ List I’m glad I did.  Our pretend boyfriend scam…it was fun.  Even though I have been portrayed as a smelly old man.

Pretending to be his boyfriend was absurd.   A joke.  I don’t know if that comes across on the show?  That we were faking it?

Occasionally I throw myself back into being ‘gay’.  I don’t have a very gay life on this mountain.  Most queens are totally appalled that I live here, so isolated, away from the urban gay idyl.

Tom calls it my Shangri-La.   Some men love it and for those I hold a special place in my heart.  They get it.  The dream of self-sufficiency, off the grid, chickens and home-grown vegetables.

When I pull off my country clothes (albeit RRL) and slide into something leaner I am dressed for the city.  Whether it is WeHo or Chelsea, Soho or The Marais I am there to be seen, acknowledged and play that peculiar game of being ‘gay’.

I can live two distinct lives, maybe more?

In England my snooty friends called me a chameleon, meaning to insult me.

Surely being able to change ones color to blend in…is rather good?  To adapt and change as the situation requires.

In England, my England I learned to speak with a different accent, merely to be heard.

I am a cock sucking homosexual but I wonder if others see it that way?  What kind of gay am I?

Perhaps my lack of interest in sex makes me less gay, less human?

Remember when I was on Sex Rehab and admitted that the sex I had with men was traumatic?   People wrote to me and told me that I wasn’t gay.  “If Duncan Roy doesn’t want gay sex, he isn’t gay.”

They tried to throw me out of the gay club…for having an opinion.

Meeting the cast of the ‘A’ List was memorable because they have become, in their own way, icons.  For good or for bad.  I met most of them just once. At least three of them have admitted drug and alcohol problems.

I really liked Austin and his husband Jake who I could very easily imagine seeing here or in London.  They are good people.  I like Austin’s authenticity.

The worst of the bunch has to be…Derek.  As you will see tonight (if you can be bothered) I enjoy ribbing him on camera.  I used stock lines, old jokes that an overly sensitive American queen did not find very funny.

When the food arrives I say, “That looks like something that came out of your nose.”  That’s funny isn’t it?  I used it before and my friends laughed.

We hung out a few times but really, his lack of sophistication, curiosity and insight were wonders to behold.  He seems so incomplete.  Derek’s consumption of alcohol masking a sadness at his core…like so many untreated addicts.  A problem that a huge number of gays share but have no intention of resolving.

Derek has no business to be anywhere but where he was born.  Like so many gay men he has been forced into New York by small-town prejudice and an insatiable desire for cock.

A bland, mid-western bag of meat and bones.

He had no truck with history, our history, any history…he knew nothing of the city where he lives, of commerce, politics or God.   Eking out an existence with appearances at provincial gay clubs and gay pride.

Derek lives every moment in the moment, no awareness of where he had come from and no interest in where he is going.

Did he read Eckhart Tolle?  I’m kidding.

The power of now and only now and God forbid that you make me consider anything other than right now.

I am without context.  I am without past or future.

Damn!  This Queen needs a drink!

He is the antithesis of everything the other was.

I looked at Derek as one might a monkey in the zoo.  The gay zoo.  Trapped like a miserable, half naked gogo boy in his techno cage.   Evidence of his genus.  The sub species of gay to which we must all aspire.

Cocktails with orange slices perched on the rim.

Moisturized, combed, overly tanned.  The shrill laughter and meaningless conversation hurt my ears.

I can’t imagine what the viewers of the ‘A’ List will make of me but…we’ll see.  I am old.  I am not Peter Pan.  I have a beard.  I live on a mountain.  I have no sexual traction…time has eroded my usefulness to the gays.

It was an adventure into a life I have only the barest knowledge.  A sociological exercise.  Ripping open the wasp’s nest.

I hung out at bars and in clubs.  I questioned who I was and the choices I have made.

When I was approached I politely declined.  When they spilled their drinks on me I didn’t say a word.

Categories
Auto Biography Gay

Whitstable 1991

OK, so here are a few interesting clips from 1991.

Starring the various boys and friends who ended up in Whitstable at my house on Island Wall.  Notably Jay Jopling, Nick Love and Damien Hirst.

There’s quite a bit of nudity and cock…so beware.

Bournemouth Film School…the house I shared with Lawrence and Charlie.

There’s some great stuff from Green Street, Orlando’s club in London.

Damien Hirst, Maia Norman, Orlando Campbell etc.

There’s the traveling, Sydney, Forbes NSW to stay with the Wilsons.  And…more boys.

Kevin at City Gym in Sydney. The beautiful Dane I met in Florence and spent the summer. Whatever happened to him?  I wanted to weep when I saw him again.  He was beautiful.

The local Whitstable boys.  Luke, beautiful Luke.

If any of them ever loved me I was blissfully unaware.

And…there’s a lot of…hair.  During most of this…I am drunk or fucked up, remember that.  I wouldn’t get sober for another 6 years.

There’s a lot of dancing and dressing up.  I seem to be lip synching to Judy…missing some man.  Again.

What a destructive theme.

Categories
Rant

Casey Anthony v Nancy Grace

Casey Anthony was acquitted.

Why? Because there wasn’t enough evidence to convict her.

Even though Nancy Grace seems to have witnessed the murder with her very own eyes she was loathed to take the stand and tell the jury what she saw.

Even if Casey Anthony was partying (according to an amazed Drew Pinsky) after her child went missing we can’t send someone to the electric chair for being insensitive.

Justice was served in the case that was presented to Casey’s peers.

If Nancy Grace and Drew Pinsky are outraged by the jury’s decision perhaps they should talk with the police or the prosecutors who failed to find any evidence that linked Caylee’s death to her mother.

Nancy Grace was outraged that Casey referred to herself as a celebrity even though Nancy Grace caused Casey Anthony to become one.

It is notoriously difficult for celebrities to be convicted.

If they had just left this trial alone, this morbid story, the jury might have convicted.

If they had left this woman to her own fate rather than trying to shape it for us all like so many bad soap operas and by doing so creating a celebrity who can now demand a million dollars per interview…justice may have been served.

There is no hope of a fair trial in the USA whilst uninformed, bigoted people like Nancy Grace are allowed to say what ever they want to say…creating a celebrity firestorm in their wake.

A baby girl was murdered.  It is very sad.  It is sadder still that due to an unregulated media justice may never be done.

 

Categories
art Rant

Hell is: Other People

Forgive me for rambling….

Rather lovely day yesterday.

Had lunch with Daniel Darling and his adorable girlfriend (?) in Cross Creek.

We were joined by Toby Mott and his friend Elizabeth.  Daniel went surfing and we drove to Malibou Lake where we sailed and then had a wonderful dinner at The Old Place on Mulholland.

Excellent food and service.  Charming!

A bird just hopped into the house and is now flying around.  We have just been for a five-mile walk so the dogs are strangely disinterested.

Willie is here visiting and we are all getting on like a house on fire.

I am going back to NYC next week.  I have people to see.  I think my Navy Seal may visit soon.

It has been fun having Toby visiting.  I sort of fall in love with my house all over again when he is here.  I am proud of the mountains, the house and the garden.

I see that my nemesis Amanda Eliasch and her truly talented friend Lyall Watson (whoring himself out to artifice) have written and performed in a ‘play’ called As I Like It.

Apparently it is rather ‘whiney’.  Apparently Amanda’s son Charles serves the actress who plays his mother as a weird, incestuous acolyte.  He has a huge head.  Apparently there is an opera singer with real talent who barely gets to sing.  Apparently the writer refers to ‘hairy legged lesbians’.  As we know, at her core, she is a homophobe.

Apparently this ‘play’ is crap.

It really isn’t any wonder, Amanda can scarcely string a sentence together.   It’s worth quoting the theatre programme notes:

This is a play what I wrote for my Father several years ago which he asked me to do after he had died. I turned it into a play with the help of Lyall Watson who had taught me at RADA in 1989. There are only a few plays for women and I wanted to contribute and increase the material available. It is a modern restoration comedy.

Yes.  You are going to do wonders for women with this pile of  tripe.  Wonders.

I once played Mr Puff at The Edinburgh Festival in Sheridan’s The Critic.   Have you seen that play?  A comedy of manners.  A real one.

Like Mrs Eliasch Mr Puff, the author of a terrible play, invites critics Sneer and Dangle to a dress rehearsal.

Puff explains to Sneer that he is ‘‘a Professor of the Art of Puffing’’: an author who has taught newspaper men and advertisers how to inflate their diction so they may ‘‘enlay their phraseology with variegated chips of exotic metaphor’’ and ‘‘crowd their advertisements with panegyrical superlatives.’’

Break a leg Amanda.  Read the review here.

By the way.  I was a terrible actor.  Terrible.

OK.  Next!!

What’s going on?  What’s really going on in the UK?

This ousting of the Murdoch family is well over due, applauded by the regime, the chattering classes, the aristocracy.

The public are baying for blood, hollering at the beastly Murdochs, “Get back on the boat like your criminal Australian ancestors.  Good riddance to bad rubbish.  Take your newspaper with you”

Hold on.

The British relish tittle-tattle.  We love it!  We love gossip!  The steamier the better.  Surely we didn’t lose our appetite for rooting through other people’s dirty washing?

Now The New of The World has gone…and the other news media get more cautious…

What, in heaven’s name, will replace it?

Are we witnessing the changing of the guard?  Has the internet (Google, Facebook etc.) and on-line news outlets like the Huffington Post trumped traditional media?

Apparently people don’t read The Huffington Post for the news..they read it for the gossip.

Was Murdoch simply too old, too complacent, too rich to have a grasp on our changing world?

Is this coup de grace being played out in the British press a pantomime we will see in the not too distant future in the USA?

One of the most telling quotes of the entire debacle:

The BBC’s business editor Robert Peston points out, the News of The World phone hacking scandal has hurt the entire UK newspaper industry, making News International less attractive to potential buyers if, as is now being posited, the British arm of News Corp is amputated and sold.

Does real, forward thinking money sees a future for print media?

Controlling the British has always been a huge problem for any invader and Murdoch will end up like all the rest.  Chucked out on his ear.  Romans, Saxons (initially invited), Norsemen, Murdoch.

The British public don’t a give a fuck about Jude Law having his phone hacked, that was just par for the course.  He deserved it.  They only started giving a damn when they realised that the police (who they loathe) were benefiting financially.

They only started caring when ordinary people just like them were proved to be abused, their ordinary stories sold, their phone messages ransacked.

Until Milly Dowler they didn’t give a flying fuck.  Then, rather amazingly, for an usually inert general public…they did.  And when the public speaks (remember Diana’s death) the establishment listens.

Remember the Queen of England reading/performing that excruciating statement televised by the palace at the behest of Tony Blair before Diana’s funeral?

The British let their leaders get away with much until they take too much.  A prudent leader will know when to stop.  Murdoch, his son and cohorts became too..how shall I say this without provoking your ire…they became too American.

It is obvious that American politicians are bought and sold by The Corporation.   They live huge lives with fantastic wealth and are applauded for doing so.

What baffles me is why a regular British MP with nothing much to gain should ideologically side with those who seek to do us, their constituents, harm?

During this entire scandal as heads began to roll I wondered again and again how British politicians benefitted financially from New Corp.  Unlike the paid for politician here in the USA it is unlikely that anyone in Parliament could benefit financially from anything…ever.

There are simply too many prying eyes.  Unless I am being absurdly naive.  Am I?

Is it simply the acquisition of power that our MP’s crave?

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Categories
art

Toby Mott at Honor Fraser Gallery

I am at The Honor Fraser Gallery on La Cienega.

My old friend Toby Mott is hanging his show Loud Flash: British Punk on Paper.

While the Sex Pistols and the Clash wreaked havoc on Britain’s pop scene, their disciples were busy with glue and scissors, channelling punk’s energy and DIY spirit into hundreds of posters, fanzines and sleeve art.

Toby’s exhibition brings back these lost classics of the revolution.

Later on in the day Punk Archivist Bryan Ray Turcotte joined Toby at the gallery.  Bryan wrote the best-selling Fucked Up and Photo Copied.

Backdrop courtesy of Bridget Riley.

Honor Fraser Gallery, 2622 S La Cienega Blvd, Los Angeles, California 90034

Categories
Gay

The Invasion

I am flying to LA today.  My work here is done.  I will be in LA for the rest of the summer.  There are tomatoes to look after.  Twins to tend.  Well, not all the summer…I’ll be back.

I am going to have a dinner for my actual birthday next week.

Yesterday I returned to the city from Fire Island.  I woke at 7am and after my rather wonderful encounter with Neil we cleaned the house, made breakfast and fought our way to the ferry through the invading drag queens.  Do you know about this Fire Island tradition?  Every Independence Day the trannys of Cherry Grove invade The Pines.

That’s it really. A bunch of trannys get on a huge boat, one full ferry boat after another, land in The Pines and start drinking…and drinking.   During all the years I lived on Fire Island with Joe I only ever saw the Invasion once and that was as I was leaving on a ferry for higher ground.

The train to Penn Station was all fucked up.  When I arrived in NYC I hung out with Alex and Toby at The Soho Grand.

FJ invited me to his apartment to see the fireworks but we decided to walk to the river with the people and watch what turned out to be a remarkable display.  Bumped into various friends including Alexei Muniak from LA.   Ate middle eastern food and chocolate.

I really wanted to see the fireworks.  Last July 4th Jake and me were flying over the very same fireworks on our way to Paris.  I remember quite clearly being very fearful.  Before we left I sat him down and told him how worried I was that when we came back I would miss him badly.  I was really scared.  He said, “We’ll deal with that then.”

We never dealt with it.  It festers in me to this day.  In September I return to the city and we will yet again face each other in court.

Is this the way he ‘deals’ with things?

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