One more very Don Loos quote:

Mr Coogan has a very curious accent in this movie. His character Charley is a rather goofy and uptight English gay man who’s lived in the US for the last twenty years. Accordingly, his accent is a mix of slightly-camp Mancunian with a Mid-Atlantic twang. He calls chocolate ‘candy’. It takes some getting used to when you’re familiar with Coogan’s usual voice. We’re also treated to an unlikely scene where an attractive young man pleasures himself to secret closed-circuit TV footage of Mr Coogan sweeping up in his underwear. The other way round would be more believable, but then, much of Mr Loos’s movies involves a certain suspension of disbelief. You just sit back and enjoy the unlikeliness of it all.

But Mr Coogan’s main storyline, involving a fear that his boyfriend’s sperm has been used by their lesbian friends to father their child, suffers the ensemble movie curse of being upstaged by other more engrossing plots. Not least the storyline involving Maggie Gyllenhaal’s character, an older and less rabidly evil version of the Christina Ricci role from “The Opposite Of Sex”. Ms G is a homeless gold-digger who inveigles her way into a wealthy household, bedding first the (gay) son then the father.

She even gets a poolside bikini seduction scene, just like in the other film:

From The Opposite Of Sex:

From Happy Endings:

(to be continued)

Saturated with the inevitable cold that’s going round, I stay in and rent a new movie. I’m rather enamoured of the DVD vidcap function on my computer, where one can pause the movie complete with subtitles, and save the image. It enables you to quote the dialogue and visuals at once, being careful to avoid spoilers.

In fact, I think I can get away with showing stills from late in the movie without blowing the main plot developments, as long as they’re out of context and out of order. Proper trailers do that all the time. This still, for instance could be from the last scene, or the first. Actually, it’s from about 15 mins in. But that’s a one-off detail, don’t fret:

This is from “Happy Endings”, a US title made in 2005, released on UK DVD this week.

Summary: “The Opposite Of Sex” director Don Loos does more of the same in his unique style of self-aware black comedy. His favourite themes are all present and correct (blackmail, definitions of parenthood, abortion, adoption, gay relationships, family secrets) but this time they’re played out as a multi-plot ensemble piece. Lisa Kudrow is fantastic, Steve Coogan acts straight as a gay man (Cashback Mountain, anyone?), Maggie Gyllenhaal steals the film. Not as striking as “The Opposite Of Sex”, with which it’s inevitably compared, but worth watching for the performances, Coogan novelty factor, and Mr Loos’s unique meta-narrative title boards that punctuate the action. They’re in the same vein as Christina Ricci’s waspish voice-overs from that previous film:

In fact, this very night (Weds) also marks the “Happy Endings” UK cinema premiere as part of the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival Opening Gala night. While Ms Kudrow and Mr Loos are a few miles away at the Leicester Square Odeon, presenting the movie on a huge screen to a sold-out crowd, I’m watching it here at home on DVD. So it’s technically not quite “straight-to-video”, as the painful euphemism goes.

Things are changing in that respect, as it is. I’ve read a number of recent articles about the cinema versus DVD schedules now being on a par with hardback books versus paperbacks. Big screen distribution costs so much money, that in terms of recouping finance, a cinema release can often be just an expensive, luxurious, limited-edition advert for the later DVD version, where a profit margin is more likely.

(to be continued)

This only applies to those who use the LiveJournal Friends Page system to keep up with this diary.

I’ve just realised that the syndicated Atom feed includes all the diary entry’s text in one’s LJ Friends page, not just an excerpt and link like its RSS counterpart.

So if you’d like to follow this diary on your LJ Friends page with fuller entries, click here to add “dickon_atom” as a Friend. And make sure you de-Friend “dickon_rss”.

If, however, you’re worried about me posting long entries that rudely dominate your Friends Page (the next entry is full of DVD vidcaps), stick with the RSS feed, which acts as a kind of ‘cut tag’.

Sunday: to Rooz in Old Street for the first Fosca rehearsal of 2006. Kate plays my guitar on the bouncy “It Only Matters To Those To Whom It Matters”. So I can, well, bounce around the stage with just the microphone.

We also start work on “We See The World As Our Stunt Doubles”, “Come Down From The Cross, Someone Else Needs The Wood”, and new versions of “Confused And Proud” and Kate’s song “Evening Dress At 3PM”.

I dust off my sky-blue Cocteau Twins-esque chorus pedal, in the new Fosca spirit of attempting something dreamy but wordy. Rachel says we still sound like Orange Juice, though.

I like to think my vocals on “Cross” are quite Dean Wareham-y circa Galaxie 500’s ‘Strange’. That means nothing to many, everything to me. Mr Wareham’s voice on that song is a kind of existential boyish squawk, breaking up – cracking up – as it battles with a melody that’s clearly too high for him. I far prefer it to his later, lower & safer vocal performances. I remember how upset I was when the first Luna album came out (Luna being the band he fronted after Galaxie 500). He’d started singing within his range; perfectly in tune, but less exciting to my ears. I prefer the Icarus hysteria of his early singing style. It just has to sound confident enough, that’s the trick. Deliberate rather than a sheepish mistake. Like Mr Samuel Beckett said, ‘fail better’.

The hands that build Fosca:

Tom Edwards:

Kate Dornan:

Saturday is a traditional day for protest marches in London. I’ve been sitting here at my PC for some hours, shielded from the Highgate rain, engaged in a quiet sit-down protest of my own.

The Internet photo-hosting company Flickr recently deleted author Dennis Cooper’s account. They did so in such a coldly destructive and blanket manner that I feel a small boycott is in order on my own part. I have a paid Flickr account myself, so I’ve been carefully removing every single image in my account and re-hosting them elsewhere. It’s taken a while to sort through my old diary entries and change the image links, but I’ve done it all now. No more Flickr-hosted photos in my diary from now on, not if I can help it.

It’s a shame, as the service is otherwise very handy and user-friendly, which is why I happily bought a year’s paid account. Suffice it to say that I won’t be renewing the subscription. It’s like a stationer selling you a scrapbook, then suddenly taking it back after eight months of regular use and tearing up all the pages, purely because they didn’t like what you put in it.

I’ve stopped at deleting my own Flickr account altogether just in case I require it at some point. It’s like rebelling against Rupert Murdoch’s control of things: you’d be silly to boycott watching The Simpsons if you enjoyed it, just because it’s an essential part of the Murdoch empire. I try to use independent bookshops over Waterstones, Amazon and Borders, but it’s hard to ignore a franchise’s 50% discount of an indie bookshop price when you’re living on a limited income. You do what you can according to your own conscience and needs. Living entirely on principles is often a luxury lifestyle choice for those that can afford it.

A little backstory for the uninitiated. Dennis Cooper is an internationally renowned cult author of some decades’ standing. His novels (Closer, Frisk, Try, etc) are often visceral, explicit and darkly funny punk-rock tales of beautiful boys engaged in all kinds of masochistic sex-and-murder situations. Often the stories venture into impossible and surreal dream-like scenarios, continuing in the tradition of De Sade, Octave Mirabeau, William Burroughs, and so on.

His online blog is quite unique: stimulating, intriguing, personal, sometimes shocking, often inspirational. It tends to be illustrated with images of his selection. His readers are curious to know what goes on in his mind and what inspires him, so he obliges us. Some blog illustrations are found images, some are DVD vidcaps, some are from his own camera. At times he uses images which are what the Internet tellingly terms ‘Not Safe For Work’. (Who is this Mr Work person, and why must we care what he thinks, anyway?). It’s the use of others’ images rather than what they depict that is the Flickr reason for deleting Mr Cooper’s entire account, it seems.

In blogs, the use of images which technically belong to others is something that is generally not jumped upon, due to the free-for-all nature of the Web. Everyone does it, usually in the spirit of what magazines call ‘review purposes’. If the copyright holder minds, they should contact the blog author, not the host. The image is not the point – it’s the selection and juxtaposition that matters. Like DJ-ing or making a compilation CD to show the world who you are yourself, or the way you’re feeling, or discussing what interests you. DJs in small clubs don’t tend to pay PRS royalties to the artists whose work they’re spinning, but proper radio DJs do. Likewise Internet blogs versus published books. It’s all quoting and pointing, to make a point.

To put images into their online blog, many people use a third party image-hosting service like Flickr, because it’s terribly easy to use and organize. It now transpires that Flickr take their guidelines for content seriously enough to abruptly terminate Mr Cooper’s entire account without question. It’s so much not their stringent rules that offend me, but the thoughtless manner with which they applied them in this case, deleting everything regardless, including his own personally-taken photos. As the images had become an integral part of Mr Cooper’s blog, it’s difficult not to equate this act with at best nannyish ignorance, at worse vandalisation and book-burning.

Mr Cooper in his blog:
“I tried to reason with Flickr, saying they were destroying eight months of my blog, and that I would delete any offending images if they would just restore my account. But they refused. Honestly, I’m crushed by this. I started this blog casually, but it’s been my central artistic work for months, and now it’s all empty, a ghost, ruins. I’m pretty devastated by it. Silly as it may be, I’ve put a lot of time and energy and ideas into this blog, and to have all those months of work ruined is hard, very hard.”

Mr Cooper’s status as an internationally award-winning novelist, poet and cultural critic means nothing to Flickr. Thankfully, Flickr is not the world. DC DOES mean something to his many readers, students and admirers. The happy ending to this sorry incident is that many DC fans have been clever and kind enough to help restore his blog by pooling their own computer skills and resources.

To my friends out there who use Flickr I say: take heed.

Postscript: I learn later that today’s march in central London was for free speech; calling for freedom, tolerance and that particular quality lacking in Flickr on this occasion: reason.

At an arty event in a Kings Cross sex shop basement the other day, I noticed someone was handing round flyers for a one-off club night that plays Talulah Gosh, McCarthy and 1000 Violins.

BIG PINK CAKE: “A celebration of C86 with its befores and afters.”
Saturday April 8th, 8pm to 1am.
Free entry.
Venue: The Royal George, Goslett Yard, off Charing Cross Rd. Tottenham Ct Rd tube.

I receive an email from the Tate Gallery shop people. They’ve seen my earlier diary entry moaning about the lack of available postcards relating to the Gothic Nightmares show, and are happy to inform me that Fuseli’s Nightmare is now back in stock in postcard form. They even offer to send me a free card in the post, which is terribly kind.

Also, they point out that people can order ‘custom ‘prints’ of Tate Collection works that aren’t available as postcards, like the Blake ‘Satan’ I was keen on. Only thing is, prices start at £28.

It’s great when you get an email out of the blue like this from someone stumbling upon your diary.

According to the website statistics, this diary now receives 111,000 ‘hits’ a month, which boils down to 12,000 ‘visits’.

I finally go to see the film Brokeback Mountain and fail to understand what the fuss is about. I’ve read the Annie Proulx short story: unusually, you can read the story in less time than it takes to sit through the movie adaptation. Perhaps it’s because I already know the story, or perhaps it’s because it’s more about denial and frustration than love, but I leave the cinema unmoved to tears save for one moment: and that was the trailer for ‘March Of The Penguins’.

‘Brokeback’ starts brilliantly: the sexual tension between the two male leads in the first half-hour is truly astounding and genuinely sensual. After that, it becomes a slow, scenically attractive study of macho Mr Ledger’s failure to accept his feelings. He channels his frustration into manly violence and mumbling (I could have done with subtitles), while doe-eyed Mr Gyllenhaal flutters his long eyelashes at Mexican rent boys by way of compensation for Mr Ledger’s lack of commitment.

Mr G is more accepting of his nature: he knows the two men are meant to be together, but Mr L insists this is impossible. It doesn’t help that the latter is haunted by a childhood trauma, where he was shown the grisly results of a local queerbashing. He mumbles ‘If you can’t fix it, you’ve got to stand it’, which is also the last line in the Proulx story.

The movie starts out impressively as a celebration of the effect of Mother Nature (you come out whistling the scenery) upon Human Nature, suggesting that gayness is utterly natural and instinctive: literally as old as the hills. Those ‘purple-headed mountains’ in the hymn All Things Bright And Beautiful rather spring to mind. Less inneundo-minded, the implicitly Sappho-erotic ‘Picnic At Hanging Rock’ could also be compared. Ancient, magnificent, mysterious landscapes tampering with the emotional world of humans.

But then it becomes a rather depressing and old-fashioned tale about the need to deny such feelings once set in motion. It’s about homophobia, both internalized and institutionalised. It even has a very obvious metaphor for ‘closeted’ at the end. And yet, it’s been presented to the world as nothing to do with gayness per se. This is what really annoys me.

I appreciate that the producers have toned down the actual depiction of homosexuality in order to get as many people to see it as possible. I’m reminded of Quentin Crisp lamenting that The Naked Civil Servant had to be a TV movie, because a cinema release would have only been seen, as he puts it, ‘purely by gay men and liberals wishing to be seen going into and coming out of the cinema.’ For Brokeback, I would add to that list fans of male beauty and women fascinated with gay men (as long as they’re attractive): I noted most of my fellow cinemagoers were female.

To this end, Brokeback Mountain wants to have its gay protest cake and eat it. The boy-on-boy action and male nudity is kept to a curiously prudish minimum. The director, Mr Lee, seems more interested in showing us the breasts of the protagonists’ wives than the men’s own nether regions. Why?

All in all, it’s lovely to look at, and a pretty good adaptation of the original story… but one which isn’t all that original. Worryingly, I’m most reminded of the groundbreaking 1960 UK film “Victim” in which Dirk Bogarde plays a barrister blackmailed into revealing his love for a rent boy. It’s not a great film because it’s too aware that it’s trying to Do Good in its call for toleration. Likewise with Brokeback Mountain: at face value it’s smothered by its own message. But even this is smothered in turn by the presentation, distribution and promotional spin telling critics and moviegoers how to interpret the film. Don’t you dare call it a gay cowboy movie, they instruct, it’s more about love, pure and simple. Well, that’s at best missing the point, at worst a promotion of ignorance and negative connotations with homosexuality.

So you either adore Brokeback Mountain as a pretty romance, meaning you’re not paying too much attention. Or you realise what it’s actually about, and are then left feeling it’s a quaint period piece in the old-fashioned ‘gayness can come to no good’ ilk.

It’s certainly not a patch on Mr Lee’s other movies like the excellent ‘The Ice Storm’. Still, it IS much better than his previous opus, ‘Hulk’. Another movie with not enough gay sex in for my liking. And why did The Hulk’s trousers never rip off along with the rest of his clothes? Oh, I’ve stopped being serious now, haven’t I. Actually, did you know the reason for the 70s ‘Incredible Hulk’ TV series altering Bruce Banner’s name (as it was in the comic) to David Banner? Because the name ‘Bruce’ was thought to be… too gay. It all links, you know.

Anyone who calls Brokeback Mountain a ‘universal love story’ is in denial. About a movie about denial.

Monday: more Fosca recording with Tom. Song titles: “It Only Matters To Those To Whom It Matters”, and “Come Down From The Cross, Someone Else Needs The Wood”.

Tuesday: To see ‘Capote’ with Ms Shanthi. Difficult to come out of the cinema without speaking in Mr Hoffman’s cartoonish Capote voice; though if anything, Capote was more cartoonish in real life. Thought-provoking stuff about the writer as amoral magpie, secretly wanting their subject to die so they can get on with the immortalising in print. Biographers and their love-hate relationship with their subject. Gielgud told his official biographer to wait until his death before publishing. Of course, he then lived way into his 90s, outliving his peers (Olivier, Ralph Richardson) by some time. He was 94 when he played The Pope in Cate Blanchett’s ‘Elizabeth’. Just as well the biographer hadn’t died before him.

It’s hinted in the movie that Capote had a kind of platonic love for the convicted murderer he was writing about, and then just like Wilde’s “each man kills the thing he loves”, once he’d got the confession he wanted, he cut off contact. He wanted the young man to hurry up and be executed so his already publicly acclaimed book (In Cold Blood – excerpts had already been published) can be finished. We see him at a luxurious NYC bar, whining that the wait for his subjects to be hanged is ‘torture’.

We browse in Borders Books afterwards, and I note there’s a current non-fiction bestseller called ‘Stuart: A Life Backwards’, about the life of a homeless beggar. I bet the subject has died, I muse, and flick through the text to find out. Yes, yes he has.

Good, I say inwardly, it makes the book better. And now I feel the amoral magpie guilt myself.