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.