ACHTUNG

Listen up, grimy disco slutmonkeys. The time has come for us to emerge from this chrysallis of a domain name like the luminescent butterflies what we are, and announce our move to thisisfitcrit.blogspot.com.

We'll be tarting things up and shifting stuff around, but there's one thing that will never change. And that is our enduring love for Ben Whishaw. And of course you dear readers, you fittie faces out there in the dark...

Tri-dog-ulation!

A Few Good Men...

...And a pretty looking girly-boy. I mean seriously now. He even makes Tom Cruise look straight.

Bright Star

QUITE LITERALLY A JOY FOREVER

Jammy bugger (quite literally)

A jam-themed Merlin/Arthur fanfic. So good.

Click on picture to follow link

Merlin has returned to our screens, and to our hearts. Colin Tadzio Morgan reprises his role as the young wizard for a second series, and was back on form as the dopey and adorable young wizard. But will my predictions for the second series (deeply homoerotic and fiercly bitchy) come true?

Well, the plot didn't really make any sense, featuring the return of a dark wizard through a precious object which contained his soul, and who used ravens and living statues to terrorise Camelot. It was completely derivative, and the debts to Voldemort and his Horcrux, and to the Raven King in Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell should be all too obvious. So no change there.

As for delectable sexuality, the show is still quite the tease. I was convinced that the opening scene - with Arthur slinking topless out of bed, calling Merlin from wherever he lingers while the Prince sleeps - was going to set the tone. And by 'set the tone' I mean 'growwwwl'.

But clearly the BBC is more interested in the concerns of teenage girls rather than the people who actually pay the licence fee and want to see a bit of tea-time cock. Arthur just flashed his hairless boobs and gave some boring order - I'll come to orders in a second - and Merlin ran away, sweetly wide-eyed and obedient.

I do love their whole relationship tho'. It's somewhat reminiscent of the Allen Ginsberg poem 'Please Master' which begins

Please master can I touch your cheeck
please master can I kneel at your feet
please master can I loosen your blue pants
please master can I gaze at your golden haired belly
please master can I have your thighs bare to my eyes
please master can I take off my clothes below your chair
please master can I can I kiss your ankles and soul
please master can I touch lips to your hard muscle hairless thigh
please master can I lay my ear pressed to your stomach
please master can I wrap my arms around your white ass
please master can I lick your groin gurled with blond soft fur
please master can I touch my tongue to your rosy asshole
please master may I pass my face to your balls,
please master order me down on the floor,

And goes on from there. I don't expect much from you, Merlin, in the way of dialogue, characteristion, profundity, mediaevalism or generally making sense, but I do expect to get some slash out of it.

And yet when I watched the teaser for the rest of the series, I wanted to scream.
Merlin's beard! Quite literally!

Copula(ting): Philosophy and Sex

The first instalment of my new best-seller, Old Men are from Athens, Young Men are also from Athens (title tbc) which details the sex tips from the ancients, summarised into handy axioms for use in your own life. Enjoy!

Let's start at the beginning, with the Ancient philosophers, who were hornier than most. In Plato's dialogue the Lysis, the character Socrates makes some important points about dating. One of the interlocutors, Hippothales, has been irritating his friends by endlessly singing the praises of Lysis, and generally being a bit of a forum-stalker. Socrates points out that these songs are really in worship of himself, since if Hippothales gets what he's after, then these songs are just "hymns of praise" bragging about what a beau stallion he's ridin'. Furthermore, the big S points out, " if he slips away from you, the more you have praised him, the more ridiculous you will look at having lost this fairest and best of blessings."

Axiom #1: Coming on too strong makes you look either smug or foolish.

He then teaches Hippothales how to speak to your lover by engaging Lysis in philosophical dialogue. Socrates questions him on the nature of friendship, and by a cunning argument gets Lysis to admit that "it follows that the lover who is genuine and true must of necessity be loved by his love". The meaning of this is slightly tortured, partly because of the translation, and partly because of the complexities of queer pronouns. But it means basically that by loving someone and being a good "friend" to them, they are forced to love and be a friend to you, based upon the logic that friendship is a shared partnership, and cannot be one-sided. When Lysis accepts this argument, it makes Hippothales "change into all manners of colours by delight". It is the first blush in all of western literature.

Some philosophers might argue that the Lysis is an open-ended, dialectical discussion on the nature of friendship: a philosophical treatise. But clearly, there's more sexual politics here than the average episode of Skins, and it has an effect on the philosophy. It's not what Plato says - which is clearly just designed to seduce Lysis - but the way he says it. He doesn't expound his views in dusty logic, but givesa slightly-queen acting masterclass in the art of seduction. He seems to argue that rather than praising them to the heavens, you should use all the logic you can muster, and impress them with your mind. So rather than writing poems and songs...

...Axiom #2: Take advantage of their stupidy, and get them into bed with a syllogism.

Little Pashes

Thanking you please!

I'm too tired to talk about Little Ashes just this second, cos I've got to go a see a monk about a job, but I shall blog about it in due (inter)course.

A Defence of Make-Up

Since I have been talking about nothing else all week... He looked lovely after his "make-under", but I had a pang of regret for his previous face. At one point, the public were asked whether they would have a fun night out with him. All the prissy little fuckers, decked in French Connection, lined up to say that he looks a weird nightmare. His response: "Are you serious?! It'd definitely be the night of your life. Look at me: do you know what I mean?" I know exactly what he means. To look like that in rural Scotland, and at that age, he must have a fantastic sense of humour about himself, and I genuinely admire his prostration before the altar of artificiality.

The show - Snog, Marry or Avoid - tries to create hate-figures out of the charmingly deluded and instead comes across as patronising and sententious. Some of the candidates are genuinely convinced that the artificial is beautiful, and that the natural is nothing. And as a confirmed aesthe I am forced to agree. Who are the BBC to tell them that they're wrong? Vicki James ("occupation: single mum") sounded like Baudelaire in a D-Cup when she presented her own Défence du maquillage, saying that "there is nothing that is naturally beautiful without make-up." That's almost an epigram.
I think their looks are interesting, and the programme simply suppresses the imitation of people like Jodie Marsh and Jordan in favour of the more socially-acceptable and middle-class models which the show offers them, like Anne Hathaway and Jennifer Aniston. Just as the drag-queen demonstrates the construction of feminity, the artifiality of these people, and the show itself, simply demonstrates how "the natural" is itself an artificial construction. It was meaningless of the dullard voxpops to say that they have bad dress sense. They have no dress sense, and that's much more interesting.

My grandma Bea Arthur

I heard today that Bea Arthur had died. She was a rough tough cream puff, and I'll miss her. Bea was wonderful as an eighty year old Carrie Bradshaw, and of course in Golden Girls which my mother and I watched kind of religiously (I know, right?). I think her strangest perfomance is her rendition of Don't Rain on My Parade at the Tonies. Of course, she can't hit the high-note at the end like Barbra Streisand, so she gives it the ol' Bea Arthurian treatment. Enjoy.

She's so sassy and fabulous! And the ending is very humorous. The orchestra comes in early and totally rains on her parade. Don't you just know Barbra would have thrown a hissy fit, but Bea just goes back and reads out the nominations. CLASS ACT.

Brideshead Redecorated Pt. 2

One exciting thing to note about Brideshead is that it is much sexier. The book is muted, but you pretty much get the idea, and the tv-series ran screaming from the whole issue. So in theory it was a canny way to make the film seem more authentic than its superlative predecessors. In theory. But the film is hamstrung by having to continually appeal to an american audience, and fails to capitalise on it. (Stephen Fry's Bright Young Things could not be named after the novel Vile Bodies, it was rumoured, because american audiences would think it was a horror.) This is even more surpising, since the script was written by adaptor of the wonderful Line of Beauty and period drama veteran Andrew Davies (Pride & Prejudice). The gay element just doesn't fit anywhere, but I can't help but love it all the same. Ecoutez.

One of the more famous scenes from the original is the lunch party at which Charles meets Sebastian and Anthony Blanche, the exotic, stuttering queeny foil designed purely to make Sebastian look even vaguely hetero. On entering the room, Antoine kisses Sebastian on the lips, which is perhaps not as anachronistic as reviewers have suggested. As Eve Sedgwick points out in Between Men, it was common for men to be much more affectionate with each other than even now, often walking arm in arm and holding hands. In any case prudery was much more vulgar than sodomy.

This scene economically implies a back-story between the two, although Sebastian is already smitten with Charles, and gives Antoine a hilarious little brush-off.

Sebastian falls for Charles, and takes him to Brideshead to visit Nanny, and says "I'm your family now." Revolting and cloying, but, again, I am helpless.

Hayley Atwell plays the cuckoo in the nest as the irritating cock-block sister, as she does in The Line of Beauty. Which is a very strange way to be type-cast.

They're making an actual triangle with their bodies! Fucking triangulation. Story of my bleeding life. Despite there being a sex scene between Julian and Charles, there is only one kiss between Charles and Sebastian, which helps to strengthen the heteronormativity of the book. Thanks a bunch, Andy Davies!

Bloody good kiss though. Ryder is completely passive (as he is throughout the film) and Sebastian is surprisingly wilful. And I LOVE the little blushing smirks in the awkward silence afterwards. (Click for greater detail).After "snogging", there is a lovely bathing scene (cf. Little Ashes, The Swimming-Pool Library, A Room With a View and My Summer of Love. Those gays sure love to swim.)

And then they towel off, before Julia comes to ruin everything AS FRICKING USUAL. The third wheel gets the grease. And by grease, I mean Matthew Goode's cock.
The film takes so many liberties, I don't know why they didn't just put a sex scene in between Charles and Sebastian. Instead of having Whishaw try to kiss Goode in the middle of a ballroom, they could have just had them kissing each other's ballrooms. I would have enjoyed it so.much. more.

I don't like my hair neat

Tiga's newest proffering. I like the quotation marks in the video, wittily pointing out that our aesthetic has become almost exclusively citational and derivative. The only problem with this is that future generations won't be able to retro-rape us for their own fashions. They'll be fucked. I can't say I care overly.

Brideshead Redecorated Pt. 1

I have a troubling weakness for the aristo-drama. Characters who I would (and do) detest in life I find irrestible in fiction. The films I watch again and again include Metropolitan, A Handful of Dust, Gosford Park, Bright Young Things (the sublime marriage of Waugh and Stephen Fry) and the only great drama produced by ITV, Brideshead Revisted. That three of the aforementioned were based on novels by Evelyn Waugh is no-coincidence: he is the master of the dazzling veneer which occasionally allows a glimpse into a hidden pathos. And that's exactly the kind of emotional power I like.

I only recently got around to watching the 2008 film version of Brideshead, which stars some of my absolute favourite FACEs: Ben Whishaw as Sebastian (Perfume, Nathan Barley, Criminal Justice), Matthew Goode as Charles (My Family and Other Animals, Watchmen), Hayley Atwell as Julia (The Ruby in the Smoke, The Line of Beauty) and Emma Thompson, Michael Gambon and Greta Scacchi to fill out the britflick quotient. I've adored Whishaw for ages, fevered longingly over Goode in Other Animals (even though we decided his face has something indefinably missing) and since Atwell starred in two of the best minidramas possible ever (Line and Ruby) I was excited that they would all be frenching like crazy. But as a fan of the original tv series and novel, I was also a little terrified. Which explains why it has taken so long to view.

The new film is beautiful, as are the clothes. Indeed, they are a bit too self-consciously beautiful, as though this were a photo shoot rather than a drama. The lovely Ben Whishaw is a stellar actor, although I thought he was perhaps too slight for the part, and Goode too cold and ethereal. It's not that I mind lingering on the surfaces - and what lovely surfaces! - but that I was unable to lose myself in any of them.

The women's fashions were neglible, and the men were rather appropriately the focus of the gayze. Lots of crepe-de-chine, flannel, loose-knits, muted salmons, and pomade. Beautiful though the costumes were, and doubtless accurate, they were worn without the sort of louche insouciance and absolute confidence that they were immaculately dresed which characterise men of their rank and generation. Almost all period-dramas since Pride & Prejudice look like they have stepped out of the historical equivalent of Topshop.

I enjoyed it, but the film has many faults. Although the leads' faces fit together a lot better than Anthony Andrews and Jeremy Irons, I still couldn't quite believe it. Whishaw is undoubtedly sexy, but he comes across as far too wet, and Goode can never manage to express desire for either sibling. And much like Sebastian, the film feels an overwhelming weight of duty towards its predecessors, and eventually crumbles under the weight of its own beauty. It is chilling and thrillingly appropriate.

Rupeverett

I love Rupert Everett. I love that he released a Bowie-esque album of staggering ineptitude; I love that he is the basis for something called Dylan Dog; I love his insane affair with Sir Ian McKellan which basically began with him stalking McKellan until he gave in, and also his fucking Susan Sarandon; I love his insane and brilliant autobiography; and most of all, I think, I love his defining interpretations of Wilde's dandies in The Importance of Being Earnest and An Ideal Husband.

Imagine my disappointment when I heard the internet gays chattering frantically about his new face-lift. "Makes Joan Rivers look eau naturelle." "DILF to ‘Daddy im Scared’ in seconds." It was with some trepidation that I opened the link:
My eyes! My beautiful eyes! I am inconsolable. He looks like he's dressed up as Zac Efron for Hallowe'en.

Full marks for faghag bagging numbers one and two on the list of all time amazing women, but christ! But perhaps these are particularly bad pics: in real life he seems not quite so damaged, as this video evidences:

Evs is still pretty smokin' so I'll cool my jets. But please for the love of god no more. Men age so beautifully. And male actors can look like a crock of shit and still get work. Speaking of work, RE's soon going to be playing Lord Byron in a Channel 4 documentary. (NSFW: article features a horse giving Rupes a blowie.) Not the perfect casting, but I would like to see Ben Whishaw as Keats and David Tennant as Charles Lamb - thanking you, please.

Glory and loveliness have passed away

Along with finding out the death of Clement Freud, I heard yesterday that the queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick had died, and felt incredibly sad. Freely admitting that as a married woman who enjoyed "vanilla sex", and that she was basically a fag hag of tremendous proportions, she introduced the world to the concept of triangular desire, without which fitcrit would be nothing. In Between Men, Sedgwick demonstrates that in the nineteenth-century novel, desire between men is often played out through a competitive desire for a third woman. It's a great concept, because you can apply it to any pair of straight up straighties and imagine them in all sorts of positions of panting, barely suppressed eroticism.

She also had a really cool aesthetic, which I adored.
As an appropriate tribute to the inventor of the concept of the homosocial, I thought I would put quote one of my favourite passages from Shelley's Adonais, in which he mourns the death of the beautiful Keats:

He is a portion of the loveliness
Which once he made lovely; he doth bear
His part, while the one Spirit's plastic stress
Sweeps through the dull dense world, compelling there
All new successions to the forms they wear;
Torturing th'unwilling dross that checks its flight
To its own likeness, as each may bear;
And bursting in its beauty and its might
From trees and beasts and men into the Heaven's light.

Big Bro; Daniel Defoe; Fo' Sho'

Courtesy of my friend Rachel, a comparison between the life and death of Big Brother's Jade Goody and that of Moll Flanders, of Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders. Compelling, superlunary, and brilliant.

(Mervyn Peake's illustrated cover for Moll Flanders)

"Life in the Goody/post-Goody world is an exemplification of Defoe's ideas regarding tireless and impossible reinvention of character, especially in the public eye, against all kinds of shilpa-related-adversity, it's what Jade achieved. She is basically the savior of the facebook generation, Big Brother has given his only daughter for us, that we may follow her example. She is a quasi Christ-like figure who was condemned (the shilpa front pages are like the trial, the carrying of the cross, her crown of thorns) and died in order to show us that all forms of media exposure are legitimate, and by following her example we will come to learn that only life documented and performed is authentic, legitimate existence.
What Jade did on a macro-level (in the eye of the media) we must do in our own lives, by following Jade's example we will find happiness, only through complete eradication of autonomy, depth, privacy can we truly be living life in the way that the (face)Book of Goody advises. We can only aspire to her frontpage exposed greatness, where her death/marriage etc etc was on the front page we can tag ours on facebook."

This suggestive and illuminating comparison between Goody and Christ puts one in mind of Pontius Pilate's offer to the public. Was the vote for Barabas or Jesus the world's first example of a (rigged) reality eviction? Answers on a postcard; in Aramaic.

My latest GILF is Frederico García Lorca. No doubt I have something of a penchant for dark and brooding poets, with Romantic deaths and a taste for bow ties. I also find the Sonnets of Dark Love unbelievably sexy. In the intense 'Night of Sleepless Love', Lorca addresses his lover, the young student Rafael Rodríguez Rapún, in a very dark version of an aubade. (Dark here is usually taken to mean 'homosexual' but Lorca plays with the image of light beautifully; a lovely queering of Othello/Romeo and Juliet?)

Dawn married us on the bed,
our mouths to the unfrozen spout
of unstaunched blood.

The sun came through the shuttered balcony
and the coral of life opened its branches
over my shrouded heart.

Frozen spout, indeed. Anyway, of course I am not (solely) interested in the high-brow. Pop-culture slut-bag as I am, I am really only able to understand the gilfitude of Lorca through the medium of film. Tickets for the new biopic Little Ashes went on sale today, and the film charts the love affair between Lorca and Salvador Dalí, with a little bit of Luis Buñuel thrown in for good measure.

Dali and Lorca

The film stars Robert Pattinson (of Twilight fame) as Dalí, and Matthew McNulty as Lorca. McNulty is no stranger to the biopic, having starred as a rather Frankestein-ish Ian Curtis in Control, nor is his tongue a stranger to the face of Sugar Rush's Olivia Hallinan, whom he macked on in Lark-Rise to Candleford. Anyway, now I guess he'll be shoving his tongue in the Diggory.I am always suspicious that these queerifiying movies are going to cop out instead of copping off, and there was latitude for them to do that. Dalí repeatedly claimed that, although Lorca 'was madly in love with me' and 'tried to screw me twice', it hurt too much and 'nothing came of it'. To me, this doesn't really ring true. Firstly, I don't understand why Lorca would try to put the ostensibly-straight Dalí in the passive role (although I can't wait for Pattinson to act that one out). And secondly, in a typically contradictory mood he suggests that they did indeed do it: fast and nasty. Dalí felt flattered by Lorca's attentions and 'deep down I felt that he was a great poet and that I owe him a tiny bit of the Divine Dali's asshole.' Deep down, indeed.

Happily, it sounds as though the film is really running with it, and Cedric Diggory in the GQ interview says that he shot an 'extremely hard-core sex scene' with Javier Beltran, and there's some synchronised fucking between the leads in a beautiful E. M Forster/Swimming Pool Library bathing scene. Plus, Pattinson revealed that in one bit, Lorca, frustrated by not being able to fuck Dalí sleeps with a mutual female friend while Salvador just wanks tearfully in a corner. I know I say this in every fit crit, but triangular desire MUCH?

Thus, in conclusion, Little Ashes sounds like a riot. But my god, this is a booger trailer if ever I saw one. They make Dalí look like Mo Mowlam. I'll probably still see it anyway. But first I have Brideshead to catch up on. Adíos.

Dorian Gay, or, A Mid-Bummers Dyke's Cream

In other Dorian Gray related news, I fear mine and Caro's hopes that the new film version of Wilde's novel starring Colin Firth and Prince Caspian would be tremblingly homoerotic are to be quashed and thwarted. In a convenient example of triangular desire, it seems the introduction of the character of "Emily Wooton" will serve as both a validation of Lord Henry's frankly dubious heterosexual credentials, and a potential love interest for Gray, and thus provide a cathexis for Wooton and Gray's less Hollywood friendly mutual-facexploration.

AND YET, the choice of Ben Chaplin to play the pro-active aesthete Basil Hallward (and seen here with Billy Crudup in Stage Beauty) is surely some sort of subtle sign? They say a nod is a good as a twink, but I like my nineteenth-century gothic queers to be hot, hard and flaming. I'm writing to gay santa as we speak.

An American stimulus package

For all its faults, Broadway must be given praise for consistently aiming below the belt. Recently I've been putting in hours of research, posting searching questions on messageboards -- "What is the plot of Cute Boys in their Underpants Fight the Evil Trolls?" "Not 100% shure... U SUK DIKKK" -- and generally parking my nosey into the world of gay theatre. (To quote Margaret Cho, it smells like balls in pantyhose.) Firstly, there's James Edwin Parker's 2 Boys in a Bed on a Cold Winter's Night. It's a kind of Cute Boys in Their Underpants but without the underpants and the crippling shyness:

Other intruiging productions include Blowing Whistles and the slightly unappealing but nevertheless glorious Slap and Tickle. But I wonder: are we breaking glass ceilings, or just the fourth wall? With a penis? The New York Times wrote interestingly on this topic in 2005, so as fit crit goes it's practically vintage. Their entire article is but a shameless excuse to show things like the hilariously named Keith Nobbs dressed like this:

Although the Times piece makes some interesting comments about the introduction of the penis to the theatre coinciding with the emergence of gay men from the closet, it failed to question whether this is indeed a positive move. The idea that gay men are only valid if they are entertaining and pecc'd out to the nines -- and indeed judge one another by this standard -- is outdated and potentially harmful. Take Matthew Bourne, the influential choreographer, who has had a lot of success with productions like the incredible, all-male version of Swan Lake and the Play Without Words. However the line between an admiration of beauty and a less artistically credible exploitation is much less defined as it is with female ballet dancers, and I think this is a problem. Bourne's adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray for Sadler's Wells will shortly be returning to the stage:

And I think it'll be interesting to see how Dorian Gray handles this potentially problematic fetishizing of the body -- since this is of course something which the novel explores -- or whether it will itself becomes victim to the narcissism and objectification of art which Wilde critiques. The critic in me fears the latter. The bonertronic in me just doesn't care.

Comparisons are odorous

If you ever want to find an attractive poet -- and believe me I've tried -- you could do a lot worse than Ezra Pound. I am voting him my number one GILF, or gratuituous literary fittie (the 'I' is for eye-candy):

I've recently become interested in early photographic portraits, and the way that posing evolves from stillness to capturing motion, and therefore from intense formality to an intense privacy. Here for example the three-quarter profile is interesting-- head slightly tipped downwards, with an almost blossoming smile. Caught in his shirt-sleeves, this is clearly a private picture and not a public portrait -- and even the pose seems to demonstrate the modernist opposition to everything conservative, suburban and Victorian. It also gives we fitcritics a boner.

In his capacity as (m)advisor to T.S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats, he demonstrated an incredible ear, and even better hair:

It is interesting to imagine how Pound would have styled himself with today's sartorial accoutrements. One can only guess what the invention of hairspray and the tortuous manlegging would have done to the poor dear - perhaps the noxious fumes and loss of circulation to the vitals would have only exacerbated his rampant anti-semitism and splendid unreason. Witty and sesquipedelian to the point of incomprehensibility, I would therefore propose for my odious comparison this little chappy, the Ezra Pound of booky wooks:


Take heart, Russell: even the best of us make mistakes on the radio.

Lezz Be 'Avin You

Channel 4, you tease. Having cruelly cancelled the much-loved seminal teen lezzer drama Sugar Rush, they leave us no choice but to turn to the (somewhat disappointing) third series of Skins for our barely-legal fitty needs.


That said, they've pulled off a blinder in the blossoming romance between unsure sapphist Emily and her objet de désir Naomi. Skins never knowingly underdoing the angzzt, we're not quite sure why they didn't go the whole hog and have Emily fancy her equally cutely coiffed twin sister. Sure, it'd infer all manner of outdated queer theory on the lesbian urge to merge, but think of the drama.


What we've got, however, ain't half bad. A gorgeously shot woodland love scene nicely referencing modern epic lezzorama My Summer of Love, followed by a lewdicrously symbolic confessional via Emily's cat flap: the pussy-centred counterpart to Pyramus and Thisbe's hetero hole in the wall. Amazing. Channel 4, we salute you.