Playlist : Half Waif, Son Lux, Sufjan Stevens, Róisín Murphy, Lonny Holley

This week’s best songs.

Half Waif  - Ocean Scope

YouTube

       

Son Lux  - All Directions

YouTube

Sufjan Stevens  - Tonya Harding

YouTube

Róisín Murphy  - Plaything

YouTube

Lonnie Holley - I Woke Up in a Fucked-Up America

      

      

      

      YouTube 

A Photo from the Eighties

The early eighties were my formative years. I taught myself literature and cinema in the seventies, just by reading the newspaper supplements and watching every movie, from classic Hollywood to experimental cinema, on Dutch, German and Belgian public channels. But at  the start of the eighties I left my home and moved into a dorm.

I had my only long lasting friendship in those years. A male friend,  a dark handsome stranger he was, he looked like a cross between  a young Humphrey Bogart and Montgomery Clift.  It wasn’t sexual in any way. It was more like a  classic male friendship in westerns by Howard Hawks and Anthony Mann.  Think about  Im Lauf der Zeit, the 1976 roadmovie by Wim Wenders;  probably our favorite film those years. 

We made trips together, later  the three of us, with his girlfriend, we went to concerts and exhibitions, we recorded some songs on a cassette recorder.  I remember one song I’d written about Kierkegaard and his love for Regine Olsen, with  the title 'The Kierkegaard Blues'. 

Here’s a photo form those days. I love the androgynous image  of me this photo depicts.  There’s a softness in my face, now long gone, my fingers are not that long though, I love my hair here, now I’m having a bad hair day every day. 

                                                                       

 I fell in love with a girl from time to time, but it was always unrequited.   I had no idea  what to do would that not be the case.   I loved boyish girls. In my diary is a note: “I don’t know if I can handle an excess of femininity.”  I  remember  I  had a photo  from a magazine of a slim, small-busted shorthaired girl on the wall of my room.

I probably thought : equality in appearance  = equality in all, and that will exclude sex.  Some theory, haha. Reminds me of  Francis Fukuyama’s idea  of the end of history with the victory of liberal democracy.

I longed for the company of girls, but when I came upon a group of girls on the street or in a café, and I listened in to their smalltalk, heard their laughter,  I felt excluded from their intimacy, mocked. (My imagination fuelled by my sense of inferiority.)  And that hasn’t changed since, I ‘m afraid.  [ I try to evade the company of a group of men ].  

Remember The Smiths’ song  ‘I know it’s over’, from their 1986 LP The Queen is Dead,  when Morrissey sings :

 ‘Love is natural and real 

But not for you, my love Not tonight, my love 
Love is natural and real But not for such as you and I, my love’

I know it's over, The Smiths

I know it's over , Jeff Buckley (cover)  

Why Are Some Feminists In The UK Freaking Out About Trans Rights?

Is there anything that hails the start of Pride more clearly than the roar of engines from the self-proclaimed Dykes on Bikes? There’s the low grumble of hot steel held between the powerful thighs of lesbians and their friends and lovers, who have long been the much-loved unofficial openers — and protectors — of pride marches across North America.

But not so here in London, England, where on Saturday, Pride in London found a very different group usurping its lead: anti-trans protesters.

Around 10 people held up Pride in London, London’s annual pride parade, by standing on the giant rainbow flag that’s traditionally carried at the beginning of the march — before organizers gave in and allowed them to lead the march themselves. Waving signs saying things like “Transactivists Erase Lesbians,” the protesters shouted slogans targeting trans women and highlighting the hashtag “#GetTheLOut of Pride” as they led the parade down its route to Trafalgar Square. One of the protesters shouted, “A man who says he’s a lesbian is a rapist,” according to Gay Star News. The group also distributed leaflets that accused trans activism of “coercing lesbians to have sex with men.” Pride in London staff and volunteers, as well as police officers, appeared to do nothing to intervene — though live video released by Pink News showed Pride in London staff working to prevent journalists from filming the protesters.

Pride in London has come into criticism this year for strictly limiting the number of organizations and their members who could march in the parade, rejecting some 20,000 applicants, according to cofounder Peter Tatchell — which makes the sudden addition of an unregistered hate group and the lack of attempts to remove that group puzzling at best. (Other Prides around the world, including in New York and Los Angeles this year, have been similarly criticized for limiting numbers of participants.) Mayor of London Sadiq Khan had been intended to lead the London parade in celebration of 70 years of the NHS, Britain’s national health care service, but the protesters were moved ahead of him by Pride in London organizers.

Over the weekend, Pride in London released two public statements regarding the incident. The first cited “hot weather” and “safety” as reasons why organizers decided to let the anti-trans protesters lead the parade. Their most recent statement condemned the hate group’s actions as “shocking and disgusting,” but they continued to defend their decision not to remove the unregistered group from the parade. Pride in London’s cochairs have not responded to a request for comment on this story.

This latest stunt at London Pride comes as anti-trans bigotry in the UK has reached a fever pitch. Both left-wing and tabloid media have flooded the country with constant attacks on transgender youth. Earlier this year, BuzzFeed News reported that BBC staffers were sending each other anti-trans messages in private group chats. Other groups of anti-trans feminists have begun a project, called #ManFriday, which involves pretending to be trans in order to ridicule trans rights — seen in a recent incident in which they invaded a men’s pool and were escorted out by police. And yet another hate group, Transgender Trend, has been raising funds to distribute anti-trans propaganda to schools as a neutral-sounding “resource pack,” in a similar style to crisis pregnancy centers duping women seeking abortions. Meanwhile, Britain’s left-leaning Labour party has become embroiled in controversy surrounding their decision to allow trans women on all-women short lists, which are intended to increase the number of women MPs in the United Kingdom.

So why is the UK losing its mind over trans people? Anti-trans feminists, accusing trans women of invading women’s spaces, and anti-trans lesbians, angered at trans women being welcomed into the lesbian community, have been whipped up into a fury by proposed changes to trans rights legislation in Britain.

Last Tuesday, alongside releasing the results of a massive National LGBT Survey, the government opened consultations to reform the Gender Recognition Act of 2004 — the piece of legislation regulating how trans people can legally change our genders. The current legislation requires trans people to jump through numerous hoops to “prove” that we’re “trans enough.” These hoops include getting a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, living two years in our “acquired gender." The legislation also allows for a “spousal veto,” which means that disgruntled or abusive spouses can hold up the process. The law also doesn’t allow for the recognition of nonbinary identities. And finally, all of this evidence must be submitted to a secretive panel of strangers we’re never allowed to meet. The GRA as it currently stands lags behind more progressive legislation in countries like Argentina and Ireland.

Trans-exclusionary radical feminists, known as TERFs (though they consider this term a slur), believe that reforming the GRA would allow trans women, whom they characterize as men in disguise, access to women’s bathrooms, women’s refuges (shelters), and other women’s spaces — beliefs explained in the literature handed out by anti-trans protesters at Pride on Saturday.

But these rights are already protected under the Equality Act 2010, and the reform of the GRA would have no positive or negative effect on any other piece of existing legislation. Trans people in the UK already regularly use the bathrooms associated with our genders, and trans women already access women’s refuges and many women’s services without incident. What should have been a fairly innocuous update to an overly laborious legal gender-change process has instead, for some feminists, become the frontline for debate over what makes a woman, who gets to define that, and the evolving landscape of queer language and identity.

Let’s not get it twisted: This isn’t a battle between all cis feminists and trans women. It’s a battle between a small but vocal and politically connected group of anti-trans bigots and everyone else. A coalition of Welsh women’s organizations this week released a statement of solidarity and support for trans rights — making this Welsh-Canadian scream “Cymru Am Byth!” a little too loud in the office. Meanwhile, organizers of London’s Butch, Please lesbian dance party released a statement on Facebook and Instagram condemning the anti-trans protesters at Pride in London titled “Not in My Name.” Europe’s largest LGBT campaigning organization, Stonewall, has criticized Pride in London’s actions and statements, with CEO Ruth Hunt writing, “Pride in London had a duty to act and protect trans people ... They didn’t. They had a duty to condemn the hatred directed at trans people. They didn’t.” Even the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, released a strong statement condemning transphobia immediately following the event.

This small group of hateful bigots here in England finds their roots in early 1970s America. Radical lesbian activists at that time merged with the second-wave feminist movement, starting iconic organizations and events that centered the voices of lesbian feminists. But within these groups, divisions quickly broke out over a number of issues, none more controversial than the existence of lesbian trans women and their place in the women’s movement.

In 1973, trans woman Beth Elliott was subjected to both verbal and physical attacks at the West Coast Lesbian Conference in California after a group calling themselves the “Gutter Dykes” demanded that she be fired from her volunteer position editing lesbian group the Daughters of Bilitis’ newsletter Sisters. The entire editorial staff of Sisters walked out in solidarity with Elliott, but not before the Gutter Dykes rushed the stage during Elliott’s scheduled musical performance in an attempt to beat her (two cis lesbian comedians physically intervened to prevent Elliott from being assaulted, themselves sustaining injuries).

Similar controversies raged throughout the decade, leading to Sylvia Rivera’s iconic speech at the 1973 Christopher Street Liberation Day Parade, unearthed and digitized by trans filmmaker Reina Gossett. At the 1973 event, lesbian Jean O’Leary gave an anti-trans speech, causing Rivera to fight her way to the stage and deliver a now-legendary denunciation of anti-trans bigotry within the LGBT community. “I have been beaten, I have had my nose broken, I have been thrown in jail, I have lost my job, I have lost my apartment — for gay liberation! And you all treat me this way?” Rivera yelled at the crowd.

The feminist movement’s internal fight over trans women finally culminated in a 1978 campaign against lesbian record label Olivia Records (now Olivia Cruises) for employing trans woman sound engineer Sandy Stone, which led anti-trans author Janice G. Raymond to write a screed against trans people called The Transsexual Empire, which has served in the decades since as a founding text for feminist transphobia.

While anti-trans sentiment from within the lesbian and feminist communities has continued to be a problem in the United States — anti-trans protesters recently crashed Baltimore Pride — it’s reached particular heights in the United Kingdom. Anti-trans sentiment among feminists here in the UK has long been a problem, inflamed by the popularity of affluent white columnists like Julie Bindel and academics such as Germaine Greer, and taken to dizzying extremes by users of popular online parenting forum Mumsnet. While second-wave feminism has largely lost its luster in the United States, prominent second-wave academics like Greer maintain a strong hold over feminist thought and politics here in the UK. Plus, it seems that all sides of UK media are intent on taking a swipe at trans lives — with even progressive publications like the Guardian giving platform to anti-trans fearmongering. And this isn’t the first time anti-trans bigots have derailed a pride celebration in London, either — they previously attacked London’s Dyke March in 2014 for including a transgender speaker.

With the GRA consultation set to continue into the fall, the anti-trans protesters holding up Pride in London are surely only the beginning of a new wave of hostility sweeping across the nation toward vulnerable trans communities. In such a heated climate, one would assume that LGBT organizations like Pride in London would take a firm and unequivocal stance in solidarity with the trans community.

In spite of a total lack of leadership demonstrated by Pride in London, it’s time for the LGBT community to stand up against anti-trans hate, including from within our own communities. Trans people and their allies within the UK can counter these messages of hate by filling out the Gender Recognition Act consultation available on the UK government’s website. And those only just beginning to learn about trans lives can educate themselves with Stonewall UK’s helpful Truth About Trans FAQ.

Pride should be a space to fight for the rights of all LGBT people and to celebrate our survival and resilience in the face of sometimes overwhelming hate, the devastation of the ongoing AIDS crisis, and attempts to legislate us out of existence. It should be a place to feel the flutter of our hearts as Dykes on Bikes roar their engines at the start of the parade, while we commemorate the 1969 Stonewall riots sparked by trans street queens like Marsha P. Johnson and black butches like Stormé DeLarverie, working together against police brutality. There’s no pride in hate, and no room for hate at Pride.

by Morgan M Page. Buzz Feed News, July 9, 2018.

Also : 

This is by no means an extensive list; other groups, including Fair Play for Women, Transgender Trend, A Women’s Place, Man Friday, and ReSisters are also at the forefront of transphobia. Transgender Trend has written an incredibly transphobic booklet advising teachers how to respond to gender-questioning kids, which is disguised as a helpful, friendly resource.

Many of the individuals in these groups have come together to write a book that came out earlier this year entitled: Transgender children and young people, born in your own body. And Man Friday compared being trans to being a Wotsit ahead of the Trump protest.

These are the kind of people we’re dealing with. Although small, they have the power to make life incredibly uncomfortable for trans people. Someone telling you your identity is no different to pretending to be a Wotsit, and eight people shouting that you’re a rapist as they lead Pride – a space where you are supposed to feel accepted, celebrated, and is literally supposed to be for you – is all it takes to make an already discriminated against group feel defeated.

The day after London Pride, a transmasculine person has committed suicide. In the UK 48 per cent of transgender people have attempted suicide. Forty-five years ago, Marsha P Johnson was either murdered or took her own life for who she was.

Transgender women started this movement. As Sylvia Rivera said, trans people have given everything and lost everything to champion all of our rights. Anti-trans protesters would do good to remember it – until then, they are the biggest part of our problem.

The anti-trans protests at Pride were the latest in a long history of transphobia in the LGBTQ+ community,  by Yas Necati , The Independent,  July 15, 2018. 

TERF ? Trans-exclusionary radical feminism.  RationalWiki

'Women Are Getting Feminism Wrong'.  By Munroe Bergdorf. GraziaDaily UK,  February 27, 2018

Feminism: the advocacy of women’s rights based on the equality of the sexes. A simple enough concept, right? Wrong! This is 2018 and if the past two years have taught us anything, it’s that nothing is simple any more – especially when it comes to matters of equality and identity.

As a society, our understanding of the language we use to describe aspects of gender, sex and sexuality is evolving. We’re beginning to understand that identity isn’t always black and white, it’s more like a sliding scale in which all can self-identify. What makes a woman ‘a woman’ has no definitive answer, nor does it need one.

A woman is more than a vagina, than her ability to bear children, the gender she was assigned at birth, a socio-economic class, marital status or sexual history – yet every one of these points has been used to define and control a woman’s place in society. This is why feminism must serve as an inclusive tool of liberation for all female identities and experiences, not just some. This is where so many women are still getting it wrong.

An example – January saw the second annual Women’s March in major cities in the US and UK. Rightfully charged up in the wake of the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements, hundreds of thousands of women took to the streets to show a united front against abuse and harassment. But in among the banners, a well-intentioned yet misguided symbol of women’s equality was worn by protestors – the pink pussy hat.

It might seem like a fun, inoffensive and light-hearted accessory, designed to unite women, but it feeds into a narrative that continues to push us apart. Last month, prior to the march I tweeted a reminder to those participating that it was an event for all women. I said, for the day to be truly progressive, it should focus on elevating the voices and experiences of those who are most often silenced and ignored in society. I felt it seemed reductive to summarise women as walking vaginas – isn’t that a similar approach to that of misogynists?

Almost immediately, I was shut down with a tidal wave of rebuttal, largely from cisgender women who seemed to believe that it was my desire to ‘co-opt the female experience’. Some said transgender issues are a ‘special case’ that not ‘all women’ should be expected to relate to. I stressed that you don’t need to be able to relate to somebody to exercise a sense of empathy. Injustice is injustice and trans women have a place under the umbrella of ‘all women’.

Ultimately, this demonstrated to me a lack of interest about what we as trans people go through emotionally – it seems that that’s not quite as exciting as what we may choose to do with our bodies in a medical sense. These women do not see me as a ‘real woman’. Therefore they do not believe I had the right to be demanding space within a day that should be used to bring attention to issues that I too face at the hands of the patriarchy.

Trans women can’t continue to be an afterthought, especially when statistically we are the most at risk when it comes to issues of mental health, sexual assault, unemployment and homelessness. Our experiences must be approached with the same urgency in which we address the issues affecting cisgender women.

In the past, my relationships with cisgender women have been a valuable source of strength. There is great power in having allies and making use of social privilege to empower those who don’t have the same level of access. Lacking from so many conversations around feminism and equality is the acknowledgement of privilege and a strategy on how to use it to uplift women who are most at risk. If we’re going to have conversations about rape and sexual assault, we also need to talk about sex workers’ rights. We need to talk about the fact that the average life expectancy of a transgender woman of colour is just 35, largely because they’re statistically more likely to end up in sex work to survive.

As a trans woman, I find it so distressing to see the media host conversations about abuse, yet consistently fail to focus on such issues. In doing so they’re perpetuating the idea that safety and dignity is only for some women. I long to see more cisgender women in positions of influence standing up for trans women, making people aware of issues that may not affect all of us, but that we should all care about deeply.

In the same vein, we need to see more women who identify as straight standing up for lesbians. More Christian women standing with Muslim women. More able- bodied women standing with disabled women. For feminism to be an empowering sisterhood that all women bene t from, we must stop prioritising the experiences of only certain kinds of women and stand up for women who are different to ourselves.

We must learn to see all women’s experiences as worthy of being listened to within feminist discourse. Because the fact is not all women possess a functioning reproductive system, not all women have a vagina, not all women’s vaginas are pink. So, when ‘pink pussies’ are used as imagery intended to unify all women, what they are actually doing is excluding a large amount of women from feeling like they have a voice within feminism.

A Channel 4 documentary showed how trans activist Munroe Bergdorf hopes to change perceptions.

‘Trans people are just trying to exist in a society that won’t let us be part of it’. The Guardian, May  13, 2018. 

See her documentary  What makes a woman? here : BoingBoing, May 25, 2018. 

Transactivist Charlie Craggs takes her fight against transphobia online with Nail Transphobia, an online-campaign-turned-travelling-pop-up-salon which educates and exposes people to trans issues while they have their nails painted, free of charge.   Dazed , July 24, 2018. 

The ‘macaroni’ Scandal of 1772: ‘gay’ Trial a Century Before Oscar Wilde

Much derision was directed toward aesthetes in the late 19th century, who, led by Oscar Wilde, declared their devotion to beauty in all its forms. That moment in the history of men and their fashions is remembered today because of the fate of Wilde, imprisoned for what was then the crime of “gross indecency”. But this was not the first sensational trial of a high-profile homosexual. That had happened long before, such as in the notorious “macaroni” case of 1772.

Over the centuries, all manner of dandies have attempted to make their place in society. Wilde’s predecessor, George Bryan “Beau” Brummell became an arbiter of men’s fashion in Regency England despite his obscure social origins and lack of interest in women. Part of the secret of his success was his cultivation of a refined but understated style that avoided the kind of flashiness that could get a man condemned for “effeminate” flamboyance.

In the 1760s and 1770s, there was an explosion of public interest in the “macaronis”, fashionable society gents who were given that name because, in the eyes of the penny press of the day, they committed such cardinal sins as rejecting good old English roast beef for dainty foods from continental Europe – such as pasta. Those finicky eaters, who also sported excessive French fashions in clothing, were in some ways the predecessors of Wildean aesthetes, but they have largely been forgotten today.

Wilde, by contrast, is remembered because of his talent and for the way he was treated by the British legal system. In the 1980s and 1990s, he became a kind of “gay icon” with a new relevance to a generation struggling with the horrors of the AIDS epidemic. His disgrace at the end of the 19th century was reinterpreted as a kind of queer martyrdom that presaged later struggles for lesbian and gay liberation.

Queer theory

Enthusiasm for Wilde on the part of lesbian and gay activists in the late 20th century was connected to the rise of a new form of cultural and literary analysis known as “queer theory”. This development was heavily influenced by the work of the French philosopher Michel Foucault on the ways in which textual discourse operates. The focus was no longer on identifying gay men or lesbians in past centuries but on identifying when and why those terms were used.

It was this thinking that led the prominent scholar of Alan Sinfield, a leading British queer theorist, to identity the Wilde trials of 1895 as a “queer moment” when dandyism became linked with same sex desire.

The stereotypical proto-homosexual man emerged as a being that was attracted to younger men, who was theatrical rather than understated, effeminate rather than manly, and artistic rather than sporting. But it was not true that Wilde became obvious as a homosexual during the course of his trial – for the simple reason that the term “homosexual” was not reported in the British media until the time of another scandal, that surrounding the Prussian Prince of Eulenburg, that unfolded between 1906 and 1909.

And the fact is that Wilde was far from the first allegedly effeminate “sodomite” or “bugger” – and here I use terms that were widely employed at the time – to be disgraced in court.

The scandal of Captain Jones

Hester Thrale (1741 - 1821) was a member of the literary circle surrounding the famous encyclopediast Dr Samuel Johnson. She kept a fascinating diary in which she noted a wide variety of sexual foibles and eccentricities in the society circles of her time. She had a striking ability to recognise homosexuals (both male and female). Thus, in the entry for March 29, 1794 she discussed “finger-twirlers” as being a “decent word for sodomite”. In one passage, recorded in late March or early April 1778, she recalled the time six years earlier when a certain Captain Jones had been convicted of crimes against nature, and sentenced to die:

''He was a Gentleman famous for his Invention in the Art of making Fireworks, and adapting        Subjects fit to be represented in that Genre; & had already entertained the Town with two particular Devices which were exhibited at Marylebone Gardens & greatly admired: viz: the Forge of Vulcan in the Cave of Mount Etna, & the calling of Eurydice out of Hell – If he is pardoned says Stevens, He may shew off the Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah; it will have an admirable Effect.''

Jones was a man of fashion in society who had been convicted at the Old Bailey for sodomising a 13-year-old boy. The link that Thrale made between camp dandyism and same sex scandal was rife in the papers of the time. As one correspondent put it in a letter to the Public Ledger on August 5, 1772, Captain Jones was “too much engaged in every scene of idle Dissipation and wanton Extravagance”. He was referred to as this “MILITARY MACCARONI [original emphasis]”. And, the writer concluded, “therefore, ye Beaux, ye sweet-scented, simpering He-She things, deign to learn wisdom from the death of a Brother”.

Arguments were brought forward that the boy’s testimony was unreliable and Jones was granted a royal pardon on the condition that he left the country. Members of the public seethed with indignation at the thought of an establishment cover-up and a variety of men fled to the Continent.

The macaronis have, however, been remembered for their style rather than for imputed sexual notoriety. We remember the uncouth revolutionary soldier who was originally mocked by the British as a “Yankee Doodle” for having “Stuck a feather in his cap / And called it macaroni”. But we’ve forgotten how queerly peculiar such an act may have seemed in the wake of a trial that bears comparison with those endured by Wilde a century later. That Americans could appropriate the song as a patriotic air implies a degree of innocence or, perhaps, of convenient forgetting.

Article by Dominic James, in  The Conversation    July 12, 2018. 

See also : A Queer Taste for Macaroni   by   Dominic Janes. Essay published  in :  The Public Domain Review  , February 22, 2017

The dandified man of fashion was no stranger to rumours of vice. As “Ferdinand Twigem” wrote in The Macaroni: A Satire (1773) “what pigmy monsters teem / what crowds of beaus effeminate are seen” who first blush at their acts of dissipation but afterward give way to all indulgence. Earlier in the century it had been the aggressively masculine “rake” who was associated with vices such as excessive drinking, gambling, and whoring. Effeminate “fops” in the Restoration and earlier Georgian periods were vapid, enervated men who were likened to weak and feeble women. Both the rake and the fop were characterised by their repeated attempts to gain the confidences of respectable women but were mocked for being, respectively, over- and under-achieving in their endeavours. Susan Staves is one scholar who has been notably keen to assert that the allegedly effeminate fop was not some sort of proto-homosexual but rather a kind of “new man”: “the so-called effeminacy of these old fops was an early if imperfect attempt at the refinement, civility, and sensitivity most of us would now say are desirable masculine virtues”. A queer quality had, however, crept into some uses of the word “fop” by the mid-eighteenth century, particularly when employed in association with the term “macaroni”.

Yale University houses an excellent collection of the furniture, objets d’art, books, and prints once owned by the prominent connoisseur, writer, and politician Horace Walpole, the son of the man generally referred to as Britain’s first Prime Minister, Robert Walpole. Horace, who was not a married man, presented himself as something of an old-school fop and it was he who first recorded the existence of a “Maccaroni club” in 1764 which consisted of “all the travelled young men who wear long curls and spying-glasses”. This trait of being “travelled”, or at least adopting certain Continental affectations, was particularly salient for the identity of the macaroni, and indeed lies behind the slightly peculiar label itself. Whilst British patriots rejoiced in roast beef, some of those recently returned from the Grand Tour flaunted their newly acquired tastes for Italian cuisine — with a supposed penchant for macaroni pasta in particular.

As with food, so it was with the wardrobe — a certain flair for Continental fashion being an essential aspect of macaroni life, and one mocked in hundreds of satirical prints. One such print, A Macaroni Dressing Room published in 1772, shows a group of affected, fashion-obsessed men. At the centre of the print an individual wearing facial beauty patches has his wig attended to by a flamboyant hairdresser and his black assistant. Another man practices fencing and a third plays with a pet cockatoo.

The implication was not merely that they had fallen prey to the supposed vanity that was held to characterise women of fashion but also that they were in thrall to French-derived notions of the elite lifestyle. Dandyism, therefore, was equated with a treasonous flirtation with the nation’s luxury-obsessed enemy across the Channel. Furthermore, so Peter McNeill argues, this flair for outlandish styles can be coded in terms not simply of effeminacy but also of sexual preference: “by the 1760s when the macaroni emerged, such attention to fashion was read as evidence of a lack of interest in women, or as potentially unattractive to women”.  The macaronis in their dressing room were, from this point of view, dressing up for the benefit of each other, and so snubbing the ladies. Indeed, permeating all these late eighteenth-century notions of the macaroni is the idea that strange cuisine and dress were not the only unconventional customs these travelled young men brought back from abroad. Italy, in particular, was associated by the Protestant British with perversity because of the influence of an unmarried Roman Catholic priesthood which, it was thought, expended its sexual energies on cuckoldry and sodomy. The further implication was that British aristocrats might also bring a taste for such vices back with them from their travels.

 On the earliest references and etymology of the word ‘macaroni’, see: 

 TheMacaroni Club :  Homosexual Scandals in1772, by Ricor Norton

Curb Ball

This wonderful feeling of powerlessness.  I am standing opposite him. He, with his precision, once again throws the ball against the curb.  The ball describes a perfect  arc when it bounces back and he catches the ball where his  hand expects it. I am offside and feel somewhat lost, at first.  But I am standing on my own.  I claim his beauty,  it’s mine.  I observe  and delight in  this wonderful feeling of powerlessness.

I don’t know if you played that game in your youth. A game that is lost. Due to too much traffic, too many cars, the need to park your car in your street, and the curbs have lost the proper requirements.

David Cronenberg: I Would Like to Make the Case for the Crime of Art

I would like to make the case for the crime of art. For the criminality of the artist. For the artist as criminal. Let us turn to Sigmund Freud for clarity.

In the Freudian formulation, civilization is repression. That is to say that without the repression of subterranean destructive human impulses, such as violent tribalism, sexual triumphalism and so on, human society as a coherent, functioning community could not exist. But the appeal of art is exactly to those repressed desires and instincts, to what Freud called the subconscious, and so in that sense, all art is subversive of civilization. If art by its nature is subversion, then artists are by their nature subversives. Because we think now in terms of civil society rather than grandiose concepts of civilization, I believe we can characterize art as essentially criminal. And yet at the same time, the case has been made that art provides a contained, safe outlet for these destructive, anti-social impulses, and in that way is, paradoxically, supportive of society and its demands for conformity and repression. A conundrum.

But is it contained? Is art ever truly contained? Is it ever safe? Art is not a toy, a fashion statement, a decoration. Art is inherently disruptive. Art is dangerous. It can explode in your face. Not that art can be a crime; art must be a crime. In my formulation, there is a need for art to be under the radar, criminal, subliminal. Constant as the society above it changes. Art is Notes from Underground. That is the strategy of criminal art.

Is the artist a complete anarchist, having no respect for society and the law? No, not at all. The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, commenting on the thief and playwright Jean Genet, via Marx, said: “Our future burglar starts by learning absolute respect for property.” Must artists understand that they are criminals? To do that, they must understand the law, the conventions of social discourse. They must understand what is criminal.

Can one be arrested for committing the crime of art? Oh yes. Maybe not right here, today. But tomorrow morning. Very early. Oh, yes. Revolutionary art has always been criminal art in the eyes of the ruling class.

The pressure to rise to all expectations offered by your art form, whatever it is, can sometimes transform/mutate into pressure to conform to already established norms. That is civilization. But then where is the subversion? In the isolation, the pain, the loneliness, the hopelessness, the tears, the anguish. And the truth. The telling of truth. These will be there, and they must be acknowledged and expected.

In particular, technology-heavy art forms such as architecture are deeply embedded in their social, political and economic contexts. But when we collaborate, is there truly an ecstatic dissolution of the self into a perfect fluid composed of many selves? You are not writing poetry in your garret in Paris, alone, destitute and starving. Or are you? I suggest that you are, somewhere in there, that poet in that garret, alone, destitute and, yes, despite the commissions, starving, philosophically and emotionally, if not viscerally.

Sometimes, art is bad for the environment, despite progressive desire, despite visionary passion. Very often, perhaps inevitably, architecture is bad for the environment. What can we do about this? And should we do anything about this? Criminal art. Criminal architecture. The crime of art. The novelist Philip Roth warned against “the unforeseen consequences of art.” That’s the key. You cannot know what you’re really doing, not in the context of the universe, and so all notions of socially progressive work are basically delusions, and are to be realized accidentally, if at all.

Can such a thoroughly socially embedded art form as architecture be criminal? Even if it’s bad architecture, environmentally irresponsible architecture, socially hostile architecture, Stalinist, brutalist, Nazi architecture? Can a building be criminal in its essence? I say it must be, it is. We must be honest here. All human architecture is a crime against nature, even that of Frank Lloyd Wright. Maybe even especially, because he understood what he was doing.

Crimes against nature. What can they be? Ironically, the list is always socially determined, not naturally. Because nature itself is criminal in its essence. Laws of nature are necessarily broken – through mutation – in order that nature, in the form of evolution, can subsist through time. I mentioned human architecture. There is insect architecture. Insects create architecture. Mud dauber wasps create beautiful multilevel nurseries, larval high-rise apartments, which they fill with paralyzed spiders to feed their children. Are they artists? Do they break the laws of nature? Perhaps we are, in fact, mud daubers. Perhaps our buildings are not crimes against nature, but constitute nature itself. Perhaps we come full circle.

The painter Willem de Kooning said: “Flesh is the reason oil paint was invented.” I say, the human body is the reason the cinema was invented. The face, the body, is its true subject, the most photographed object in cinema. Cinema is the body.

I’m here today because I’ve made some movies. But because of the internet, Netflix, streaming, cinema is dissolving, the big screen is shattering into many little screens, and this is causing much stress amongst movie-nostalgia hardliners. It doesn’t matter to me. In fact, it pleases me. Because the human body is evolving, changing, and since the cinema is body, it makes sense that the cinema is changing, evolving as well. If movies disappeared overnight, I wouldn’t care. The cinema is not my life. Your art form cannot be your life. To say that it is, to make it be that, is to evade life itself. But you won’t do that, will you? No, I’m sure you won’t.

   

The text  is adapted from a speech by writer and filmmaker David Cronenberg on receiving an honorary degree from OCAD University on June 12.

The Globe and Mail

Some comments on his speech about the death of cinema.

David Cronenberg Says Cinema Isn’t Dying, It’s “Changing, Evolving”.

The Playlist. 

'If movies disappeared overnight, I wouldn’t care': David Cronenberg on the death of cinema. The Independent

  If you don’t know who David Cronenberg is, here :

Profile in the Great Directors series Senses of Cinema

and here :

David Cronenberg: 10 essential films

From Videodrome to Cosmopolis, key stepping stones through the career of master filmmaker and body-horror maestro David Cronenberg.

British Film Institute

The painter Willem de Kooning said: “Flesh is the reason oil paint was invented.” I say, the human body is the reason the cinema was invented. The face, the body, is its true subject, the most photographed object in cinema. Cinema is the body.