Freedom is the Freedom to Enjoy Pornography

Do you think the world has gone mad?  I don’t.  I know it’s gone mad.  More and more the human race resembles a heard of lemmings, rushing towards that final precipice.  I am the little girl looking at life’s absurdities, shouting, as the parade passes by, that the emperor is naked.  Nonsense, the mass response comes: he is just beautifully dressed!

Speaking of nakedness, I have porn on my mind at the moment, specifically the dire Fifty Shades of Grey by the talentless E. L. James.  Who buys this appalling rubbish, I wonder?  What purpose does it serve?  Is its bewildering success a measure of just how empty the emotional and sexual life of middle aged women has become?  Is it an indictment of middle-aged men?  Alas, I fear it must be.  More than that, I fear its commercial success shows just how stupidly gullible a great many people are, how stupidly gullible most women are, particularly women of a certain age.  These are the people who look before and after and pine for what is not.  Actually they pine for what has never been, for what they have never had, true erotic fulfilment.  All they can do is feast on it vicariously, dining on fifty shades of boredom. 

E. L James is really Julia come to life.  Surely you remember Julia?  A pledged member of the Anti-Sex League, she is Winston Smith’s lover in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.  When she’s not having extra Anti-Sex League sex she works in Pornosec, Muck House, as it’s colloquially known, a sub-section of the Ministry of Truth, which produces erotica for the masses.  Specifically she works on the novel writing machines, turning out boring, ghastly rubbish, as she puts it. 

Still, it’s important to recognise that rubbish, particularly pornography, serves a purpose.  It’s often a way of mopping up all sorts of residuals energies and frustrated libidos.  How prescient Orwell was to make an outwardly orthodox member of the Anti-Sex League a functionary in the manufacturing of muck!  For porn, it might be said, is really just a form of anti-sex, judging real sex to be contact between real people, people who are emotionally and physically engaged with one another.  Who knows?  Without porn to compensate for vacuous sterility hordes of frustrated and under-fulfilled proles might cause social chaos.  “The people have such empty lives”, the queen is told.  “Let them read Fifty Shades of Grey”, she responds.

The underemployed members of the European Parliament really should be told that they close down Muck House at their own peril.  This week, you see, they will be voting to ‘ban all forms of pornography.’  This will include yet more censorship of the internet in an attempt to “eliminate gender stereotypes” that demean women. 

Our MEPs, the dear old things, are also proposing the establishment of an Anti-Sex League.  No; what they actually want is for governments to set up state sex censors with “a mandate to impose effective sanctions on companies and individuals promoting the sexualisation of girls.”  Would that include girls, I wonder, promoting their own sexualisation? 

The charge is being led by Kartika Liotard, a left-wing Dutch feminist MEP, bedecked with the characteristic red sash of the Anti-Sex League, who wants "statutory measures to prevent any form of pornography in the media and in advertising and for a ban on advertising for pornographic products and sex tourism.”  So, Amsterdam’s red light specials can - excuse the profanity - get fucked! 

There are of course unenlightened people (aren’t there always?) who see this as just another erosion of free speech.  The accusation has been given added weight by the fact that the parliament has blocked the orgasmic rush of protest emails that followed when news of the measure emerged.  Criticism in any form, the vox populi itself, is being treated like so much rubbish, dumped straight into the Memory Hole by the spam filters. 

Yes, indeed, we move ever forward into a modern version of Orwell’s super state.  It is not governed by malign forces, though, just those who act for our own good; those who know what is best for us in their magnificent condescension.  The anti-porn drive comes soon after a report urging tighter press regulations, including the right of Brussels officials to control and supervise national media, with powers to enforce fines or sack journalists.  Censorship is clearly the wave of the future in our brave new – sexless - Europe that has such people in it.

I have little or no interest in porn.  I agree with Julia - though not E. L. James - that commercial erotica is boring and predictable.  I do not want to read about sex, still less watch other people having sex.  I’m far too hands-on for that.  No empty and unfulfilling fantasies for me, thanks ever so much; I leave that for the mummies and all others who are past it, assuming that they ever drew alongside it in the first place.  No, I could not care less about porn, but I do care more about freedom. I will speak as often and as loudly as I can against Big Brother, or Sister, in Brussels, whose creeping tyranny does not creep any more.  Freedom is the freedom to enjoy pornography, even if it is something as banal and lifeless as Fifty Shades of Grey.  

Psycho Rising

Seeing Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 classic, for the first time is a bit like losing one’s virginity: one never forgets. I was sixteen. It was a slumber party with a group of friends. There was a TV in the bedroom. Psycho was the late night feature. Oh, gosh, it’s so old; it’s so black and white. But that mood did not last, especially after the sudden and wholly unexpected demise of the woman in the shower, the point where the story changed so rapidly that the gears grinded. For some time after no shower came easy. Oh, those screeching and stabbing violin sounds!

Since then I’ve seen several Hitchcock movies, though none quite as compelling as Psycho. Quite recently I saw The Girl, set while the director was making The Birds. This depicted him as a bit of a psycho himself, particularly in his semi-sadistic relationship with Tippi Hedren, the actress he threw to the birds. Now I’ve seen Hitchcock, a more nuanced and balanced portrait, set around the troubled and uncertain birth of Psycho.

Actually it might just as readily have been sub-texted as A Portrait of a Marriage, and a very good one too. Beyond Psycho it tells of the relationship between Hitch and Alma Reville, his wife and amanuensis, a brilliant dual performance by two of the brightest stars in the British acting Milky Way – Anthony Hopkins and Helen Mirren. There is Hopkins, padded out to Hitchcock proportions, Joe, the Fat boy from Charles Dickens' The Pickwick Papers, who wants to make your flesh creep!  There is Alama, the one certain anchor in his life, supportive but not uncritically so. 

Directed by Sacha Gervasi and based on Stephen Rebello’s Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, the movie opens with Hitchcock at the height of his career. Parading the streets like a Roman emperor after his latest triumph, North by Northwest, he is asked by a reporter if it would not be better to quit while he is ahead. Hitchcock, now sixty and with over forty movies behind him, begins afterwards to reflect on being left behind. Like Alexander, for him there would seem to be no more worlds to conquer. Oh, but there is; there is the real life world of Ed Gein, and there is the fictitious world of Psycho, a recently published novel by Robert Bloch, which brought the mother-fixated Norman Bates to the world.

Hitchcock is all surprises and Psycho is his latest. To begin with it’s a struggle to find acceptance (why not go for something safe like James Bond and Casino Royale?). To begin with Alma is not convinced. Barney Balaban (Richard Portnow), the studio boss to whom Hitch is under contract, is certainly not convinced. He only agrees when Hitch and Alma say that they will raise the finances themselves.

Then comes the visit to the censor. I’m not sure how this sort of thing is done these days but surely not as pettily censorious! Hitchcock cannot resist making jokes, not at all pleasing to the censor-in-chief, Geoffrey Shurlock (Kurtwood Smith). There is that shower scene with Janet Leigh (Scarlet Johansson). Will she be naked, the prurient Shurlock asks? “No”, Hitchcock responds, “She won’t be nude. She’ll be wearing a shower cap.” What I find particularly droll was the debate over whether a toilet should be shown or not. Apparently, up to that time, the great American viewing public had never seen a toilet on screen!

Generally speaking the movie is quite lightweight, with none of the directorial tautness that is such a feature of Hitchcock’s own movies. At points the screenplay is almost as flabby as Hopkins’ fat suit, particularly the relationship or non-relationship between Alma and Whitefield Cook (Danny Huston), a hack screenwriter who hopes to get to the director through collaboration with his wife. But it serves to show a more vulnerable side of the imperious and self-centred virtuoso, concerned that his beloved Alma might be having an affair.

There are good supporting parts. Johansson is a convincing Janet Leigh as is Jessica Beil as Vera Miles, Hitchcock’s one-time star that he was gradually casting into a B light. Tony Colette playing Peggy Robertson, Hitchcock’s secretary, is also worth an honourable mention. But above all - and too little on screen - there is James D’Arcy, a man who was clearly born to recreate Anthony Perkins creating Norman Bates! The imagined and occasional dialogue between Hitchcock and Ed Gein (Michael Wincott) did not work so well, a little too contrived for my taste.

In the end Hitchcock and Alma – the supporting role of Alma really does have to be emphasised – surprised them all. Little or nothing was expected from Psycho by the studio. The movie was given a limited screening with minimal marketing and no premiere. This was a movie that was clearly intended to die its own death. But Hitchcock hams it up, in what must be one of his best off-screen acts of huckstering showmanship. The public is intrigued. In a wonderful moment of high tension, Hitchcock leaves the auditorium just before the shower scene, conducting madly in the foyer to the mad music, as the audience gasp and scream in shock and amazement.

Hitchcock is far from being a great movie; perhaps it’s not even a true depiction of a slice of Hitchcock life, but it is a clever one, warm, engaging and enjoyable in an entertaining and memorable way. It’s a movie about dedication, it’s a movie about movie making, it’s a movie about a couple; it’s a movie about one of the great double acts of cinematic history, recaptured in a sublime double act.

The Echo of Coriolanus

I shared rooms as an undergraduate with a girl from Beecroft in New South Wales. Quite often late at night in her homesickness she would listen to an online broadcast from Sydney, a sort of comedy talk show, earthy harmless stuff hosted by a man and a woman.

Unfortunately I can’t remember their names or the name of the show, but I’m now beginning to wonder if it was Mel Grieg and Michael Christian, the two radio hosts responsible for the prank call to Edward VII Hospital last week, asking about the health of the Duchess of Cambridge. If it was them I can only say that they are about as far removed from ‘shock jocks’ as is possible to imagine. The latter – I’m thinking of some American presenters - are really nasty, usually indulging in vicious political invective verging on total character assassination.

The nurse business is truly tragic. Who could not feel sorry for Jacinth Saldanha and her family? But the reaction to her ‘apparent’ suicide – this word keeps being stressed – I find shockingly out of proportion. It was a childish prank but childish pranks have been the small change of radio and television for years. What is Candid Camera, or more recently Fonejacker, but a series of childish pranks?

This one, which was directed at the Royal Family, not the nurse, went horribly wrong but the vicious mob calling for the immolation of the two presenters quite frankly disgusts me. I imagine it includes lots who took delight in previous pranks, laughing at one moment, snarling at the next.  These are the canaille, the people that Mark Antony manipulated from one state of mind to another with consummate ease.  In their stupidity they shock me far more than any shock jock. 

It wasn’t the paparazzi who drove Princess Diana to her death but those who lapped up publicity, no matter how the story and the pictures were obtained.  I was only eleven years old when Diana died but even then I felt disquiet that evening her body returned to London, a grim procession through the dark, punctuated by the flash of countless cameras.  There is nothing, absolutely nothing more ghastly than the passions of the mob.  

You common cry of curs! whose breath I hate
As reek o' the rotten fens, whose loves I prize
as the dead carcases of unburied men
That do corrupt the air - I banish you...

Russia is a Beggar

The Beggar Queen

I’m sure it will be no great revelation if I tell you I take no interest at all in beauty pageants.  You know the sort of thing; a succession of women whose breast size is in inverse proportion to that of their brains, telling some slavering old Jimmy Savile-type host that they want to help old people when they grow up, with hints, perhaps, of oral pleasures to come. 

I was amused to discover, though, that one of these contests is called Miss Earth.  What, Miss Earth?  Does the competition come from Miss Mars, Miss Venus and the rest, from the ultra hot Miss Mercury to the cold and distant Miss Pluto?  Now that might be something worth watching!

Earth girls come from all over the Earth.  It wasn’t really the name of the competition that caught my attention; it was the comments of one of the competitors.  She is Natalia Pereverzeva from Russia, different from the usual run of beauties in that she had some unusual things to say about her country. 

Asked what makes her proud of her country, she started off in a glowing if slightly eccentric fashion.  Russia, she said, “is bright, warm, patched, but it is pleasant to slumber under it on a winter evening when the storm rages outside.”  I get it: Russia is really just a giant duvet.  Wait; it’s more than that, it’s “a kind of cow with very big eyes, funny horns and always chewing its mouth oh, what sweet milk she gives!  Oh, how it smells – meadows, herbs and sun.”  A comfort blanket, kindly cows and fragrant herbs, my, my, Russia is obviously the lost Eden.

But it’s not.  In an instant bedding, cows and herbs disappeared, revealing something nasty in the woodshed.  Russia started to smell not of fragrant meadows but of corruption.  “But my Russia – it is also my poor long-suffering country, mercilessly torn to pieces by greedy, dishonest and unbelieving people.  My Russia is a great artery, from which the chosen few people drain away its wealth.  My Russia is a beggar.” 

The beggar cannot help its orphans and its elderly.  Engineers, doctors and teachers are fleeing, as from a sinking ship, because they can’t make enough to live on.  This is her country, she concluded, her dear, poor Russia.

Not the sort of thing one expects in this kind of bash, I feel sure you will agree.  It’s caused quite a stir in Russia.  Komsomolskaya Pravda, one of the main tabloids, headlined the story on its front page.  Did our Miss Earth 2012 contestant slam Russia or tell the truth?, it asked.  No, she did not tell the truth, one of its commentators proceeded; her tirade was just a rehash of Western clichés about Russia.  That would not include the bit about duvets, meadows, herbs and cows, I suppose

Dmitry Steshin went on to accuse her of “trading her body in photographs to arouse the sexual instincts of the end consumer, thereby ruining her credibility.”  You can make of that what you will but I rather thought trading one’s body in photographs to arose the sexual instincts “of the end consumer” was what beauty pageants were all about.  Perhaps Dmitry is of a more innocent cast of mind, giving no thought at all to the girl’s future intentions towards old men. 

Alas, he seems rather out of touch with the rest of Russia, or at least the more than 90% of the thousands who responded in her favour in the paper’s online poll.  Clearly the end consumers’ sexual instincts have been aroused by the former Miss Russia’s body of photographs.  Either that or she speaks a deeper truth, one that explodes the self-serving illusions and forms of political deception that Putin’s gangster-state specialises in.  That is no beauty contest.  

Remember the Fifth

It’s Bonfire Night!  This is an event celebrated every year in England on 5 November. It’s a night of fires and fireworks, of bangers and bangers! Now, least those who are not English misunderstand me here, a banger is just a type of firework and a banger is a sausage, really quite delicious when cooked over a fire in the open air.

So, yes, November 5 is our firework night, just as July 4 is firework night in the States. But whereas the one celebrates rebellion the other celebrates loyalty, loyalty to the crown. It celebrates the frustration of the most significant terrorist conspiracy in English history, perhaps in the history of any nation - the Gunpowder Plot of 1605.

The commemoration now is all great fun, the political connotations having been wiped smooth by the hand of time. Still, it’s important not to lose all sight of the fact that if the Plot had succeeded it would have eclipsed even the historical significance of 9/11.

I feel sure that’s bound to raise a few American eyebrows but just imagine a 9/11 that had, at one stroke, killed the President, the Vice-President, the Secretary of State, every member of the government, every member of any alternative government, and just about every member of the Senate and the House, then you might begin to appreciate the full significance of the Gunpowder Plot.

In 2005 a reconstruction by one of the English television companies, using the same amount of gunpowder planted under a replica of the seventeenth century House of Lords, showed that the ensuing explosion would have left no survivors; that it would have been seen and heard many miles away from London. It’s difficult to imagine the political chaos that would have followed.

The conspirators were headed by one Robin Catesby, though the whole enterprise is now more closely associated with Guy Fawkes, a soldier and explosives expert. You will probably know his face, or a caricature of his face, from the grinningly inane V for Vendetta mask, one of those cultural artefacts that I absolutely loath! Fawkes and all of his co-conspirators were Catholics, frustrated by the failure of the Protestant government of James I to raise some of the more irksome restrictions on their religion.

The discovery of the plot was the cause of an immediate anti-Catholic reaction, recalled in a traditional rhyme;

Remember, remember the fifth of November
Gunpowder, treason and plot
I see no reason why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot

Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes, 'twas his intent
To blow up the King and the Parliament
Three score barrels of powder below
Poor old England to overthrow
By God's providence he was catched
With a dark lantern and burning match
Holloa boys, holloa boys
God save the King!
Hip hip hooray!
Hip hip hooray!

A penny loaf to feed ol' Pope
A farthing cheese to choke him
A pint of beer to rinse it down
A faggot of sticks to burn him
Burn him in a tub of tar
Burn him like a blazing star
Burn his body from his head
Then we'll say ol' Pope is dead.
Hip hip hooray!
Hip hip hooray! 

It was Parliament itself that originally decided that the Plot should be remembered in an annual act of thanksgiving for the safe delivery of the King.  For years after it was known officially as Gunpowder Treason Day, with strong sectarian and anti-Catholic overtones, clearly captured in the rhyme.  This was hardly fair, given that the conspiracy was roundly condemned by the Vatican and most English Catholics remained loyal to the crown, fully demonstrated in the Civil Wars of the mid-seventeenth century.

By the following century anti-Catholic sentiment started to die away.  In popular parlance the 5th was no longer referred to as Gunpowder Treason Day but as Guy Fawkes Day.  Latterly it’s more often referred to as Fireworks Night or simply Bonfire Night, after the traditional fires to which an effigy of ‘the Guy’ – any guy really - was consigned. 

In these days of ‘elf n safety’ there has been an increasingly nannyish approach to the whole spectacle by public authorities, anxious to corral the masses into sanitised official events.  There is also a tut tutting disapproval of residual anti-Catholic overtones, so residual that it they are only brought to mind by politically correct moral arbiters!  As I noted on a previous occasion, the event isn't even celebrated in Northern Ireland, a place where sectarianism has an abiding presence.  

The simple truth is that Guy Fawkes Night or Bonfire Night or whatever you want to call it was transformed from a state-sanctioned holiday into a genuine popular fiesta, the very thing that fills the authorities with fear and trepidation.  If you like it’s anarchy in action, by the people, for the people, of the people.  Long may it remain so; long may the killjoy guys be placed on top of the fires.  

Yes, it’s all about fun, and I had fun, watching the rockets illuminate the night sky, dancing around the fire in the best pagan tradition, seeing the encroaching darkness of winter lift just a little. I will always remember.  In future my children, if I have any, will remember also.  

Daria and I

If you were a cartoon character, who would you be?  This is a question I addressed myself to recently.  I did not have to hesitate before answering.  There is only one choice for me – Daria!  Daria, if you’ve never heard her, is the eponymous heroine of an American animated television series created by Glenn Eichler and Susie Lewis Lynn for MTV. The series focuses on Daria Morgendorffer, a smart, acerbic, and slightly misanthropic teenage girl who examines the world with dry, cynical humour.

Running over several series at the turn of the century, it was my favourite cartoon show by far when I was in my tweens and teens.  Here was a character I could really identify with, someone who stood apart, a character who could see through the shallow pretences not just of her own peer group but of the adult world in general, a character who could dissect and analyse life with forensic insight. 

The show itself is a satire of American suburban life, with Daria commenting on the various absurdities she encounters in an amusingly sardonic fashion.  It was a pattern I adopted for myself, my own particular form of assertion and rebellion.  As I’ve matured I have, perhaps, become a little more accepting and a little less biting but there is still so much to be cynical about, so much foolishness to challenge. 

It seems to me that the best way of dealing with life’s frustrations is to develop a sense of detachment.  I do get angry with some of the more outrageous things that I see around me, I get angry at the shallowness and banality of so many of our politicians and public figures.  But it is not in my nature to campaign and protest.  Or, rather, such campaigning and protesting I do is through the medium of words. 

I love words and I love language.  I love to express my thoughts, to take arms against a sea of crassness and by opposing have a spot of impish fun.  Ana the Imp is my vehicle, a platform that has allowed me to sharpen my wit through observation and comment, to praise what is worthy of praise and expose what needs to be exposed. I’m a devil with words, I know, and this devil likes to dance! 

Loving words I also love to debate, something I’ve been doing since my school days.  I do not take prisoners, as some have found to their cost, and I have no hesitation in exposing folly, in exploiting weakness and stupidity when it deserves to be exposed.  Debating for me, you see, is just war by other means. 

OK, as I get older I begin to dissimulate a little more than I used to; I begin – heavens help me – to equivocate!  That’s truer of my personal life, of my relations with other people.  A certain amount of equivocation will always be necessary in this area, for the sake of harmony, if nothing besides.  But on the wider issues, the fashionable nonsense that pollutes so much of existence, be it windmills or gay marriage, there is no room for equivocation.  Irony is my weapon, one I will continue to use with ruthless precision.  Daria would expect no less. 

My advice is stand firm for what you believe in, until and unless logic and experience prove you wrong. Remember, when the emperor looks naked, the emperor is naked. The truth and the lie are not "sort of" the same thing.

Daria Morgendorffer 

Please, no more Jingle Bells!

There is a store on the west end of Edinburgh’s Princes Street near the Caledonian Hotel which sells Scottish-themed products, the sort of tartan tat that’s most likely made in China. I’ve never been in – I can’t stand this sort of thing – but I could not help but notice it on the two occasions when I walked past – it blares out pipe and drum music, horrible stuff really loud. It was bad enough for me, passing in moments; it must be intolerable for the staff, who have to listen to this ghastly racket all day long.

I have music in mind, or rather muzak, the sort of background noise that Wikipedia defines as elevator music, sounds on a cycle, an endless loop. In discussion recently I mentioned that one of the horrors of Christmas is that supermarkets (I have my local Tesco in mind) insist on pumping out seasonal noise, jolly tunes on the loop, tunes coming round time and time and time again.

I don’t know what they are attempting to do in this, put people in the mood, perhaps, for spending and happy times in Tesco. Well, it’s not working, at least so far as I’m concerned; I work on a different psychology. It makes me shop as quickly as I can, get what I need and get out before my ears are hammered by Frosty the Snowman yet one more time! It’s the people who work there I feel most sorry for, people who have no choice but to be beguiled by Frosty or Rudolf for as long as they are on shift. To my mind this constitutes the very acme of cruel and unusual punishment!

I had an experience of this once myself. I was in Havana over the Christmas and New Year period a few years ago, staying in the Hotel Parque Central, right in the heart of the city. The usual Christmas horrors were played from the bar by the roof-top swimming pool. I’m not much for sun-bathing (frying like a fry bores me!), which is just as well, as I would have gone quietly mad with that as a constant background. Swimming or lunching to this accompaniment was bad enough!

I finally cracked on 2 January. “Look”, I said to the barman in my broken Spanish, “Christmas is over. Can we please, please have some Cuban music, some salsa, anything but Jingle Bells?” And that was that, a sigh of universal relief.

I’m not Scrooge; I do enjoy some Christmas-themed music, just not the mass market stuff. What’s my favourite Christmas song, you may wonder? Why, it’s a fairy tale, a strangely poignant one. I do hope you all have the kind of holiday you most wish for yourself. :-)

No longer a menace

When I was little one of my favourite TV shows was Dennis the Menace and Gnasher, the adventures of a naughty schoolboy and his dog. This Dennis should not be confused with the American version – he’s not nearly as cutesy! No, the British Dennis is much naughtier, much more of a delinquent – or, rather, he was.

Dennis, with his spiky, unkempt hair and red and black striped sweater, first appeared in March 1951 in a children’s comic called The Beano. He has remained a steady feature ever since, growing in popularity, even as he moved down the generations. He was loved precisely because he was a bad boy, because he got into all sort of naughty scrapes. In so many ways he was the perfect outlet for the childish imagination, crossing all sorts of boundaries. Sadly Dennis is no longer such a menace – no, he has been sanitised, giving way to the onward march of political correctness.

I was amused by William Langley’s article in Sunday Telegraph (Why he’s no longer such a naughty boy) describing how Dennis’ standards – my God! -are improving! A timely piece now that the Menace is sixty years old, mature and increasingly rather tame. The whole thing is really quite risible and ultimately condescending, a possible intimation of an encroaching death. Children know when they are being got at – a clean and didactic Menace is the last thing they want!

There is so much irony here, things that unconsciously reveal adult concerns about children. As Langley says, an airbrushed and bubble-wrapped childhood is increasingly being demanded by TV and much of the publishing industry. So Dennis is no longer allowed to carry his catapult and peashooter; Gnasher is no longer allowed to bite people and Walter the Softie, the Menace’s pansy-like alter ego, the object of his repeated persecutions, has been given a girlfriend, Matilda, to counter any accusations that he might be gay! Remember, this is for a target audience whose average age must hover around eight years old.

In the early comics the strip apparently ended up with him being whacked by the parental slipper for his misdeeds. This was long gone, of course, by the time the TV series premièred in the mid-1980s. Langley says that the punishments sent two clear messages to the millions of children who followed the comic strip: that misbehaviour carried consequences and that corporal punishment was futile. Dennis simply became more ingenious in the pursuit of naughtiness!

It’s all gone, punishment, delinquency, all the endearing naughtiness has gone, all of the trademark things that made Dennis Dennis. Oh, no, we can’t have children being shown a bad example. And this for me is where the condescension comes in, the assumption that children are another species, that they can’t distinguish between right and wrong, that if shown a negative example they will simply follow on mindlessly; that they cannot see Dennis simply as an object of harmless entertainment.

The irony is that as Dennis and Walter merge into an anodyne oneness, safe, washed-out, harmless, real delinquency, real harm in the real world, has become increasingly malign. It’s a complete inversion of reality: speak no evil, see no evil, hear no evil, and evil will go away. It does not work like that. The menace, sad to say, is no longer Dennis.

Superman the fascist

Moral panics are as old as civilization itself. Socrates was executed for ‘corrupting the minds of the young’, a perennial fear among the old, among those who have reason to fear. Socrates was a threat to any kind of self-satisfied gerontocracy, but moral panics have alighted on far more innocuous things than his demanding dialectics; things like comic books!

I’m continually indebted to the stimuli I receive from other bloggers, paths opened before me that I might not otherwise have explored. Jeremy Janson drew my attention recently to an article in The Washington Post by George F. Will, published towards the end of last month. It concerns a case before the Supreme Court, a challenge to a law passed in California banning Postal 2, a violent video game.

Lawyers acting for the games manufacturer are arguing that this ban violates the First Amendment, guaranteeing free expression. They have also, rather ingeniously, drawn the justices' attention to previous moral panics over cultural ephemera, including one in the 1950s over comic books. The whole thing is just so amusing, an insight not only into the character of moral panics, the absurdity of moral panics, but also into American cultural history.

In the early 1950s American legislators were so concerned over what was referred to as ‘juvenile delinquency’ that the Senate even established a sub-committee to look into the problem. Comic books, read by an estimated 90% of children, were quickly singled out as a possible contributor to the phenomenon.

It should not be assumed, though, that this was just more evidence of prejudice and conservative reaction against popular culture. The Senators would have been able to draw on sociological support for their deliberations, including the work of one Frederic Wertham, a political progressive. A psychiatrist by profession, he had previously opened a clinic in Harlem, which he named after Paul Lafargue, Karl Marx’s son-in-law, the man responsible for translating the old beast’s Das Kapital into French, “thereby facilitating the derangement of Parisian intellectuals”, which Will offers as the sting in the tail of the scorpion!

Since 1948 this fellow had been campaigning against comic books, in 1954 publishing a book entitled Seduction of the Innocent, suggesting a causal connection between them and the desensitisation of young criminals – “Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic book industry.” I find it difficult to believe, but this tendentious, pseudo-scientific rubbish quickly became a best seller. It was even praised by C. Wright Mills, left-wing sociologist and the doyen of progressive thought at the time.

So, would you like to know what concerned Wertham the most? Was it pulp fiction horror comics? Was it ghouls and vampires? Yes, but his targets also included Superman. Superman! Gosh, if one were to choose an archetype for the all-American ideal one could do no better than alight on Superman, clean-cut, decent and horribly goody-goody! Not so, said Wertham: in his ongoing fight against the bad guys Superman paid no attention to due process, which made him a “crypto-fascist.” And as for Batman and Robin, they demonstrated “homoerotic tendencies.” Absolutely, it could not be clearer: the older man and his little chicken!

It’s all terribly droll, but just as the Fatty Arbuckle scandal had been responsible for a crackdown on movie makers in a previous generation, lurid suggestions like this quickly impacted on the comic book industry. Hill says that more than a dozen states passed laws restricting the sale of comic books and some civic groups even staged book burning sessions, I suppose reducing that ‘crypto-fascist’ Superman to ashes.

As movie producers previously adopted their own standards of censorship in response to the political climate so, too, did comic book publishers. But silly panics of this kind are most often replaced or sublimated by other panics. By 1956 the hysteria over comics had been replaced by Elvis and his pelvis!

Will concludes his article with some pertinent observations about Progressivism in general, which he defines as a “faith-based programme”, a secular substitute for the religious admonitions of a previous age. Though Progressivism is a uniquely American intellectual and political phenomena it belongs to a wider current, to what I would refer to as the fascism of the left, the fascism of any philosophy based on the belief that people can be made perfect through the actions of the state. At the one extreme there is the attempt to modify action by censorship; at the other there is eugenics and the sterilisation of ‘bad stock’, a programme that at one time united people as diverse as Adolf Hitler and H. G. Wells.

The silliness of celebrity

So you think celebrity is a modern phenomenon, well think again! Celebrity has always been with us to some degree or other. In the Middle Ages the cult of saints was big business, for the monasteries and cathedrals who needed relics to attract cash-bearing pilgrims, and for those freelancers who sold such holy artefacts on the open market, bones, hair, pieces of the true cross, if there was a demand there was a supply.

The ingenuity was really quite impressive. Jesus had ascended whole into heaven, so there was nothing left to turn into relics: no bones, no hair, no nails, no skin - nothing. Ah, but wait, hold there a moment on the question of skin. Jesus was born a Jew, and like all Jewish babies…yes, that’s right; there was a lively trade in Holy Foreskins! Foreskins, in the plural; what, there was more than one? Indeed, because relics, like Biblical loafs and fishes, were liable to multiply.

Then the Enlightenment dawned, the rosy light of the Age of Reason thrown into the dark corners of superstition. Oh, but, like nature, the human imagination abhors a vacuum. New devotional objects had to be found, new forms of secular worship. The cult of the saint is dead; long live the cult of the artist! A lock of Saint Cecilia’s hair may no longer be in much demand, so let’s have that of John Keats’ instead, a new object of sacredly profane devotion.

The November issue of Standpoint had an interesting exchange of views between the historian Tim Blanding and the critic Jonathan Bate on the place of Romanticism in contemporary culture, touching on this question, the question of artistic celebrity, amongst other things. In passing Bate mentioned the replacement of the cult of saints with the cult of the artist; I’m simply adding a little flesh to the skeleton.

It’s important to understand that this is not just about things, about the veneration of objects associated with a particular person, but about life stories, about biography. A great part of western literature before the Enlightenment was made up of devotional literature, particularly accounts of the lives and alleged miracles of the saints. And then there is the early form of autobiography in Saint Augustine’s Confessions or, still later, Saint Teresa’s Life of Herself. The essential message of both of these is not vanity, of course, but the discovery of God.

The break comes with the Enlightenment, with Romanticism in particular, where man, and I do mean man, becomes the measure of all things, not God. With this in comes vanity, immense vanity; in comes Jean Jacques Rousseau, the architect, in so many ways, of a new mode of thought based upon egoism and self-celebration. In place of Saint Augustine’s Confessions we have Rousseau’s Confessions. In place of religious experience comes worldly experience.

I should make it clear that I have a particular contempt for Rousseau as a man and as a thinker, the man who turned Reason into a religion, a shabby prophet, a harbinger of a new Promised Land, Moses to Robespierre’s Aaron. But there is, I suppose, a brutal honesty to his autobiography, the same brutal honesty that Saint Augustine displayed in his, honesty, though, without redemption. Rousseau gave away all five of his illegitimate children (he does not even trouble himself to record their names) to a state orphanage, a virtual death sentence at the time. Never mind that; for the real child he gave us the ideal: he gave us Emile, full of advice on how to rear children in the best manner possible. Never has hypocrisy been more blatantly displayed.

To be fair Rousseau is not the only monster of egoism - Lord George Byron, another celebrity of the Romantic age, was just as bad - but he is the original, the prime example of bad faith. In general I have ambivalent feelings about the whole Romantic movement, fascinated and repelled at one and the same time; fascinated by the nobility of Goethe, repelled by the degeneracy of De Sade. Oh, yes, he’s part of the Romantic Movement and the cult of secular celebrity too. My view here is not a second-hand one, believe me; for I walked in to Justine and 120 Days of Sodom and walked out again just as quickly. I simply don’t have the nose for this sort of thing, and I’ve you’ve read these books, even only glanced at them, you will know exactly what I mean.

And so it has gone on, the cult of celebrity, the celebration of the self, through Romanticism into the modern age, gone on in tighter and tighter, ever diminishing circles, from the ridiculous to the even more ridiculous, from Rousseau to Paris Hilton! Lord, what fools these mortals be!

Saint John Lennon – a modern parable

There was an article in last week’s Spectator by Michael Henderson (Imagine There’s no Lennon), written to mark what would have been the singer-songwriter’s seventieth birthday but for his assassination in New York in December 1980.

I can recognise the significance of The Beatles as a band and the importance of Lennon’s collaboration with Paul McCartney in the composition of some memorable tunes, though I never really warmed to their music, the music and the preoccupations of my parent’s generation. That doesn’t really matter; as light entertainers they were incomparable. The trouble is they, particularly Lennon, began to see themselves as something more; as the voice of a generation, as the avatars of the age, as the conscience of the world. In this they became both laughable and ridiculous, an example for people even more deluded and conceited than themselves.

In 1972 Paul McCartney, now post-Beatles and performing with Wings, his own band, produced a song called Give Ireland back to the Irish, a comment on the political troubles of the day in Northern Ireland, in which he had clearly cast Britain in the part of the ‘imperial’ aggressor. It was banned by the BBC for political reasons though, as Dominic Sandbrook says in State of Emergency, they might have done better to suppress it for crimes against musical taste. “Great Britain you are tremendous”, McCartney witters on “”And nobody knows it but me, but really what are you doing in the land across the sea.” Protecting the Unionist majority against the atrocities of the Provisional IRA, is the simple answer, though clearly too complicated for McCartney.

And then there is Lennon, bad to begin with, even worse after the absurd Yoko Ono, that talentless self-promoter, took hold of him. Now the hectoring and the shouting began, in such ‘masterpieces’ as Give Peace a Chance and Woman is the Nigger of the World. But the worst piece of messiah-speak has to be Imagine. I’ve written about this dreadful ditty before, a piece in which I concluded;

On a wider point for me Lennon the message, as opposed to Lennon the medium, is all wrong. When I was in my teens his song Imagine came top in a list of the hundred greatest pop songs. I hate it, I absolutely hate it; I hate the lazy, utopian sentiments behind it, this Communist Manifesto turned into a lullaby. I don’t need to imagine what Lennon-world would be like; I saw traces of its aftermath in a land scarred forever by Year Zero and the ‘brotherhood of man.’ No hell below us; just hell on earth.

Henderson stresses that while Lennon cannot be blamed for every banality spewed out by the likes of Bono or Richard Gere (he forgot to mention Saint Bob Geldorf), the moral infantilism and the obsession with public virtue unleavened by private examination is a process that he began. I fully agree that, as a political figurehead, or symbol of rebellion, John Lennon was a poor joke, a ‘working class hero’ who could lecture the world about peace from the comfort of a bed in the Amsterdam Hilton. No wonder they wanted to crucify you, John; I would.

As a postscript, Henderson’s article was followed up this week by a reader’s letter;

Further to Michael Henderson’s excellent article about sanctimonious pop stars…I remembered that story about Bono saying at a concert that ‘Every time I clap, a child dies in Africa.’ A member of the audience shouted: ‘Well, stop f***ing clapping then!’

It’s time these clots were put back in their place. Let’s have no more tiresome twaddle.

The heart of a heartless world

I meant to write something earlier in brief tribute to Norman Wisdom, the British comedian and actor who died earlier this month aged ninety-five. An all round performer in the tradition of vaudeville, he is probably best known for a series of films he made in 1950s and 1960s, in which he starred as the hapless Norman Pitkin.

His comedy is that of a different age, a simpler and more naïve age. In a sense Wisdom and Pitkin were one and the same, the little man, a modern Chaplin, continually struggling against the pompous and the inflated, fighting against impossible odds with infectious optimism, defeated at one moment, triumphant at the next, always irrepressible. In The Art of Donald McGill, an essay on bawdy seaside postcards, George Orwell makes the following observation;

I never read the proclamations of generals before battle, the speeches of flihrers and prime ministers, the solidarity songs of public schools and left-wing political parties, national anthems, Temperance tracts, papal encyclicals and sermons against gambling and contraception, without seeming to hear in the background a chorus of raspberries from all the millions of common men to whom these high sentiments make no appeal.

This, for me, is Pitkin, the universal common man, always heroically unheroic. I would have said that his comedy was uniquely British, a manner and a style that did not travel well. But it did travel and to some of the most unusual places. There was perhaps no place more unusual in Europe than Albania under the communist dictatorship of Enver Hoxha. Almost every ‘decadent’ western influence was banned, anything that made life pleasurable.

Pitkin made it across this cultural cordon sanitaire. Given what Orwell says, I would have assumed that his style of comedy, a hymn to individualism and non-conformity, would have been completely taboo in any kind Stalinist utopia, but apparently the humourless and literal-minded Hoxha saw it as a parable on the ‘class struggle.’ It doesn’t really matter, though, for in their sterile lives the Albanian people found a new hero in such movies as A Stitch in Time and Trouble in Store. Pitkin became a huge hit, giving Wisdom an enduring cult following. On his death the present Albanian prime minister sent condolences on behalf of his nation to the actor’s family.

Wisdom, once asked to explain his popularity in Albania, said that he thought it was because his films, amongst other things, were free of sex and violence. I don’t think that’s the explanation at all; I imagine the Albanians would have delighted in a spot of sex and violence if they had been allowed to see such things. No, his appeal went deeper. What was it? In April I wrote a blog called The Dictator and the Clown in which I made the following points about Albania, Hoxha and Wisdom;

Almost any kind of foreign literature or media was banned, with the odd exception of old British comedies starring Norman Wisdom. It’s impossible to fathom the minds of dictators, but one would have thought that Wisdom, who often played the little man at odds with authority, would be as unacceptable as Sancho Panza. But, for whatever reason, he made it across the cultural barrier, becoming the much beloved ‘Mr Pitkin’, the character he played in his earliest movies. Wisdom became, if you like, the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. His comedy was the opium of the Albanian people.


The heart of a heartless world; I can think of no better epitaph.

Be seeing you

Portmeirion is one of my favourite Welsh villages, except for the fact that there is nothing Welsh about the place and it’s not really a village at all but an incredibly surreal resort and hotel! It’s certainly in Wales, in Gwynedd, to be precise, though it’s oddly out of place, beautifully situated, as it is, on the Dwyrd Estuary.

I've stayed there and I just love the design, the layout, the atmosphere and the setting. Designed and built by Sir Clough William-Ellis supposedly in the style of an Italian village it resembles no Italian village that I’ve ever seen, no, not even Portofino! But it has a generally exotic atmosphere suggestive of different worlds and distant places, a kind of Platonic Mediterranean settlement, an ideal, if you like, in stone. I was there under a leaden sky, not a southern one, which simply added to the charm and general sense of unreality.

It’s an inspiring place. It inspired Noel Coward to write Blythe Spirit while he was staying there. Film makers have used it as a location, no doubt because it is here and nowhere at one and the same time, suggestive of different times and other dimensions. It was used once in an episode of Doctor Who, the long-running BBC sci-fi series.

However, it’s probably best known as “The Village” in The Prisoner, a 1960s spy drama starring Patrick McGoohan, a show which subsequently inspired a cult following. Portmeirion still hosts annual fan conventions and not far from the entrance there is a shop, once serving as McGoohan’s home in the show, which sells Prisoner souvenirs. I’ve seen a couple of episodes of the series and while it was probably quite innovative and challenging for the day it seemed to me like so much hyper-active nonsense, George Orwell by way of Magical Mystery Tour, the sort of thing that I’m sure went down very well in the swinging psychedelic sixties!

I’m not going to go over the plot in detail, and I’m sure some of you may know the general premise, if not from the original then from a recent remake. In short it concerns an agent who resigns from his job suddenly and without reason, only to find himself captive in a mysterious community, a sort of upmarket holiday camp where everyone is simply known as a number. There the authorities try to extract any residual secrets from McGoohan, known simply as Number Six. Refusing to give away anything, and asserting that he is not a number but a free man, he attempts to escape only to be pursued by – wait for it – a giant balloon!

Still, for all its nonsense, the producers could not have chosen a better setting for their bogus metaphysics, a dream within a dream. If you've never been do go. I’m sure you will love the place as much as I love it. Be seeing you. :-)

Beautiful and sad

I was sent a video by my friend Rehan today on You Tube, a wonderful song called Where do you go to my lovely? It’s both beautiful and sad, particularly the last few lines. I’ve been listening to it on and off for most of the day.

You talk like Marlene Dietrich
And you dance like Zizi Jeanmaire
Your clothes are all made by Balmain
And there’s diamonds and pearls in your hair, yes there are.

You live in a fancy apartment
Off the Boulevard of St. Michel
Where you keep your Rolling Stones records
And a friend of Sacha Distel, yes you do.

You go to the embassy parties
Where you talk in Russian and Greek
And the young men who move in your circles
They hang on every word you speak, yes they do.

But where do you go to my lovely
When you're alone in your bed
Tell me the thoughts that surround you
I want to look inside your head, yes i do.

I've seen all your qualifications
You got from the Sorbonne
And the painting you stole from Picasso
Your loveliness goes on and on, yes it does.

When you go on your summer vacation
You go to Juan-les-Pines
With your carefully designed topless swimsuit
You get an even suntan, on your back and on your legs.

And when the snow falls you're found in St. Moritz
With the others of the jet-set
And you sip your Napoleon Brandy
But you never get your lips wet, no you don't.

But where do you go to my lovely
When you're alone in your bed
would you Tell me the thoughts that surround you
I want to look inside your head, yes I do.

You're in between 20 and 30
A very desirable age
Your body is firm and inviting
But you live on a glittering stage, yes you do, yes you do.

Your name is heard in high places
You know the Aga Khan
He sent you a racehorse for Christmas
And you keep it just for fun, for a laugh ha-ha-ha

They say that when you get married
It'll be to a millionaire
But they don't realize where you came from
And I wonder if they really care, or give a damn

But where do you go to my lovely
When you're alone in your bed
Tell me the thoughts that surround you
I want to look inside your head, yes i do.

I remember the back streets of Naples
Two children begging in rags
Both touched with a burning ambition
To shake off their lowly brown tags, they try

So look into my face Marie-Claire
And remember just who you are
Then go and forget me forever
But I know you still bear
the scar, deep inside, yes you do

I know where you go to my lovely
When you're alone in your bed
I know the thoughts that surround you
`Cause I can look inside your head.

A Soldier's Song

It’s December 1862, the last day of the year. The American Civil War has been underway for more than a year and a half with no decisive breakthrough. In Tennessee, in the western theatre, the Union and Confederate armies gather late in the evening, ready to do battle the following day in the Stones River Valley around the small town of Murfreesboro.

Camped only a few hundred yards apart, the soldiers shout defiance at each other, urged on by their bands, the Northerners playing such songs as Yankee Doodle and Hail, Columbia, the Southerners responding with a barrage of Dixie and The Bonnie Blue Flag. But then one of the bands strikes up Home, Sweet Home, a popular and melancholic tune of the day. At once both sides, North and South, start to sing, overwhelmed by the occasion, all enmity set aside in mutual longing.

There are universal sentiments, longings for home, and peace and love that can unite enemies, even, with the example I have in mind, across a language barrier, even across national boundaries. In 1939 a German singer by the name of Lale Anderson recorded one such song, a tune based on a poem called Das Lied eines jungen Soldaten auf der Wacht (The Song of a Young Soldier on Watch), written during the First World War This song is better known to the world as Lili Marleen.

Initially it enjoyed only limited success, I suppose because the time was not yet right for its sweet and gentle melancholy, the thoughts of a soldier recalling his love back home. But in 1941 the German radio station in Belgrade started to play it regularly, broadcast across the whole of the Western Desert, where the Africa Korps was locked in duel with the British Eighth Army. The lovely opening words had an immediate impact on the German soldiers;

Vor der Kaserne,
Vor dem grossen Tor,
Stand eine Laterne
Und steht sie noch davor,
So woll’n wir uns da wiederseh’n,
Wenn wir bei der Laterne steh’n,
Wie einst, Lilli Marleen,
Wie einst, Lilli Marleen.

Even Hitler, not noted for his taste in popular music, was said to be impressed, saying that “this song will not only inspire German soldiers, it might even outlast us all.” The even greater surprise is that the tune quickly became just as popular on the Allied side as the Axis, a universal anthem of love and homesickness. Although the British authorities, alarmed by its reception, fearful that it would undermine morale, initially tried to dismiss it as a song about a prostitute it’s lasting popularity resulted in an English version, which opens with the same sentiments as the German;

Underneath the lantern by the barrack gate,
Darling I remember the way you used to wait;
'Twas there that you whispered tenderly,
That you lov'd me, you'd always be,
My Lilli of the lamplight,
My own Lilli Marlene.

The one person that it did not impress was Doctor Goebbels, head of German propaganda, who found it ‘morbid’ and ‘unheroic’. Radio Belgrade was ordered to stop playing it, the original master was destroyed and Andersen arrested. But then came the letters to the radio station, not just from Africa but across the whole of occupied Europe, from German soldiers, unaware that it had been banned, requesting that Lili Marleen be played again. Such was the demand that the Propaganda Minister’s interdict had to be overturned.

It continues to stand as the song of the universal soldier, a lasting tribute to simple human values. For once Hitler was right.

By God's Tongue!

People familiar with Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales may recall some of the oaths favoured in the Middle Ages, usually based on some aspect of the divine anatomy – “God’s teeth”, “God’s bones”, that sort of thing. It rather makes today’s’ favoured forms of swearing repetitive and rather bloodless in comparison!

In the July issue of the BBC History Magazine John Spurr looks at profanities from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, showing what they reveal about society at the time (“Damn your blood”- Swearing in Early Modern English). I noted with interest that anti-swearing statutes passed in the time of James I and George III made a distinction between swearing and cursing. So when one King John of Colne Engaine in Essex swore by “God’s blood” that he would be avenged on the local church wardens and “bade a pox on them” he was guilty of both swearing a profane oath and of cursing!

The profane oath was really a reflection, a negative reflection, of that most solemn legal oath ‘so help me God.’ In the late seventeenth century John Bunyan, author of The Pilgrim’s Progress, was complaining of vain swearers, who “tell their jesting tales, and lies, and then swear by God that they are true.” In the previous century a Protestant pastor reported the situation in verse, showing that not much had changed since the days of Chaucer;

Some swear by God’s nails, his heart and his body
And some swear by his flesh, his blood, and his foot
And some by his guts, his life, and heart root,
Some other would seem all swearing to refrain
And invent idle oaths, such as is in their idle brain:
By cock and by pie, and by the goose wing
By the cross of the mouse foot and by Saint Chicken
And some swear by the Devil in their blindness.

It’s the sheer variety that amuses me, not just those mentioned by the pastor but oaths by idols, by the mass, by our Lady, saints, birds, beasts, real or not! Moralists were shocked but for some there was a clear logic in their hostility to profanity, as eighteenth century authorities made clear;

For from a custom of swearing men easily slide into perjury, and how can it be consistent with reason that a man who hourly invokes God by rash and vain swearing should boggle at a false oath, whenever his lust, his covetousness, his revenge and his ambition prompt him to it?

The battle between the ‘cavalier’ swearers and the ‘roundhead’ righteous would seem to me to be indicative, at a low level, of a growing fracture within the general community from late Tudor times onwards; between those who held to profane tradition and those who wanted a moral revolution. The Godly, as Spurr writes, became intolerant of any form of swearing outside of the law courts and some of the more extreme sects, including the Baptists and the Quakers, refused even to swear in that setting.

And heaven help any public figure who broke the moral code. In 1654 the MP Henry Glapthorne let rip, swearing by "God's wounds, by Good's blood, by Jesus Christ, by the eternal God, God confound me body and soul, God damn me, the Devil fetch me, God refuse me." The Devil did not fetch him and God did not refuse him - his constituents did: they successfully petitioned for his removal from Parliament as a "common curser and a swearer" who was not "fit to be a law-maker and a parliament man for them."

It's a mark of how much things have changed since those days that oaths by God or Christ are now considered to be fairly mild. The racial and sexual terms that are now considered offensive - I admit with ever decreasing effectiveness - would not have bothered the people of Tudor, Stuart and Georgian England. In other words they would not give a fuck about fuck. :-)

The Sexiest Love Song Ever written

There is a feature on Serge Gainsbourg today in Seven, the Sunday Telegraph's art's magazine. A musician, painter, photographer, writer and all round bad boy, he is still an iconic figure in France, his homeland, almost twenty years after his death. A former French president even described him as a descendent of the poets Apollinaire and Baudelaire. After all these years tributes in packets of Gitanes cigarettes and and bottles of Pastis, his favourite vices...sorry, high among his favourite vices, are still left on his grave.

In England he is known, if he is known at all, for one thing and one thing only, a song called Je t'aime, moi non plus (I love you...me neither). The unusual title comes from a quip by Salvador Dali about Picasso: "Picasso is Spanish, so am I. Picasso is a genius, so am I. Picasso is communist, neither am I".

A duet, it was originally written for Bridget Bardot, his then girlfriend, but she asked him not to release their version because she was married, and not to him! He agreed but that same year, 1969, he met and fell in love with Jane Birkin, a young English actress some twenty years his junior. Their duet went on to become a sensation when it was released as a single.

The song is structured as a dialogue between two lovers during sex. Even in these more sexually liberated times it still has a slightly sensational quality. Then it was predictably condemned by the Vatican and banned by the BBC, old Auntie, still the arbiter of British sexual morals. The relationship between Gainsbourg, not just middle aged but fairly ugly, and the young and beautiful Birkin was also an occasion for comment, with The Times saying "To see them together is to believe again in every fairy story ever written".

The two went on to have a daughter together, Charlotte. This week Birkin will open a Parisian park in memory of her former lover, with a Boulevard Gainsbourg following later this year. An exhibition of photographs featuring Gainsbourg is presently on show in Antwerp and there are plans to bring it to London next year.

I think the story of Gainsbourg and Birkin is like that of Abelard and Heloise, one of the great tributes to love, dryly Platonic in the first case, magnificently sensual in the second. I have not the least doubt that Je t'aime, moi non plus is one of the sexiest, most moving tributes to physical love ever written. It makes me tingle, it truly does.

Je t’aime je t’aime
Oh oui je t’aime
- Moi non plus
- Oh mon amour
- Comme la vague irrésolue
Je vais, je vais et je viens
Entre tes reins
Je vais et je viens
Entre tes reins
Et je me retiens

- Je t’aime je t’aime
Oh oui je t’aime
- Moi non plus
- Oh mon amour
Tu es la vague, moi l’île nue
Tu vas, tu vas et tu viens
Entre mes reins
Tu vas et tu viens
Entre mes reins
Et je te rejoins

- Je t’aime je t’aime
Oh oui je t’aime
- Moi non plus
- Oh mon amour
- L’amour physique est sans issue
Je vais je vais et je viens
Entre tes reins
Je vais et je viens
Je me retiens
- Non ! maintenant viens...

Imagine

There was a feature article in Saturday’s Daily Mail on the Beatles, this year marking the fiftieth anniversary of the band’s formation in Liverpool in the summer of 1960. A few days before this BBC4 broadcast Lennon Naked, a drama starring Christopher Eccleston in role of John Lennon.

Although I was certainly familiar with the Beatles’ music when I was growing up for me they belonged to a different age: there and not there, innocent, rather silly and awfully dated. I can recognise the unique talents of the song-writing partnership of Lennon and McCartney, musical giants compared with so much of the Jedward-style pap that’s on offer today. Even so I find the fanatical adulation that the band conjured up wholly bewildering. Perhaps it was just the sign of a time that in my mind’s eye I see through the medium of black and white news footage.

And then there is John Lennon, a man with an acid wit, a man with huge creative talents, a man…with a chip on his shoulder as big as all of Merseyside. Christopher Eccleston was certainly good in the part, though, to be frank, he seemed just a bit too ancient to be playing the mop-head of the early 1960s. But, my, was this really what Lennon was like, this self-absorbed, selfish, conceited, egotistical bore and, what is worse, a humourless egotistical bore?

One has to be careful with biopics as they are a little like biopsies: even if wholly accurate one is merely shown a limited cross-section. Lennon Naked, presented as part of the BBC’s fatherhood season, was really about abandonment, about the trauma Lennon suffered for most of his life after being deprived of both his father and his mother at an early age. The legacy was one of anger, particularly with his father, as the drama showed at length. Yes, I can see that in Lennon’s case that the child was truly the father of the man; I can see that he felt betrayed. Even so I found this bitter, ranting, cruel, cynical and puerile man really quite repellent as he was depicted. In the end he treated his own son Julian no better than his father had treated him.

On a wider point for me Lennon the message, as opposed to Lennon the medium, is all wrong. When I was in my teens his song Imagine came top in a list of the hundred greatest pop songs. I hate it, I absolutely hate it; I hate the lazy, utopian sentiments behind it, this Communist Manifesto turned into a lullaby. I don’t need to imagine what Lennon-world would be like; I saw traces of its aftermath in a land scarred forever by Year Zero and the ‘brotherhood of man.’ No hell below us; just hell on earth.

Pagan Born

I mentioned some time ago that my favourite band by far is Inkubus Sukkubus, the pagan rock group formed in the late 1980s by Candia Ridley, Tony McKormack and Adam Henderson. Candia is such a lovely person – yes, I have met her – and a beautiful singer. The music is just so good and the lyrics of their songs just so exciting. I can listen to them endlessly; I do listen to them endlessly because they help me concentrate while I am writing.

I love all of their songs though I would include All Along the Crooked Way, Wytches, Beltane, Samhain, Supernature, Heart of Lilith, Love Spell, Corn King, Belladonna and Aconite and Pagan Born high among my favourites. I’ve been following the band since I was in my early teens. I have all of their albums and I’ve been to so many concerts with other witches, wizards, pagans and free-spirits of all kinds. Pagan born, oh, yes, pagan born. :-)

A rhythm stirs within the earth
That tells all nature of a birth
A return to light, return to life
And lead us from this darkest night
God of the Sun, now have you come
Your reign of light has just begun
Though all must die to be reborn
Return now on a bright new morn
My lord applauds my Pagan ways
And in my heart he'll always, always stay
Pagan Born!
Pagan Born!
Woe ooh Pagan Born!

In winter's cloak we've sheltered long
Waiting for spring's sweet song
Tho' warmth we found beside the hearth
Its glow could not break through the dark
I look toward the fiery sky
And know that your return is nigh
Though I shall fall as the harvest corn
It is my fate, I'm Pagan Born!
My lord applauds my Pagan ways
And in my heart he'll always, always stay
Pagan Born!
Pagan Born!
Woe ooh Pagan Born!

My lord applauds my Pagan ways
And in my heart he'll always, always stay

My lord applauds my Pagan ways
And in my heart he'll always, always stay
Pagan Born!
Pagan Born!
Woe ooh Pagan Born!

Boy's World

One of my favourite literary genres is the essay and my favourite writer in that genre has to be George Orwell. I’m thinking in particular of his piece on Boy’s Weeklies, a brilliant exercise in cultural sociology which reveals so much about a particular set of attitudes, of a past that is indeed a foreign country.

The parameters of the world he describes had been set even before the First World War, in the kind of fiction offered by the likes of G A Henty, Herbert Strang, Percy F. Westerman and Robert Leighton. The themes these authors preferred - tales of individual heroism against a late imperial setting- can be found in the publications Orwell discusses; weeklies like The Boy's Own Paper (which my father remembers with some fondness!), Pluck and The Boy's Friend.

So, the generation of 1914 grew up against the kind of plucky and chivalric sentiment expressed by Henry Newbolt in Vitaï Lampada, with war depicted in a uniquely English way as a game of cricket;

The sand of the desert is sodden red-
Red with the wreck of the square that broke
The gatling's jammed and the colonel dead,
And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.
The river of death has brimmed its banks,
And England's far, and Honour a name,
But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks-
"Play up! Play up! And play the game!"

For some the actual experience of war, the unheroic ugliness of the whole thing, did nothing to moderate these fictional depictions. In 1915 Captain F. S. Brereton published With French at the Front, whose hero, Jim Fletcher, could have leaped straight out of the pages of Henty. He is killed in a German attack, calling on his men to fight "for the sake of old England." Inspired by his example the Tommies fight on "the thin khaki line of heroes, the cool, calm, cherry sons of Empire", beating back the Hun. It's romantic; it's glorious: it's a lie.

Brereton went on treating the war through a prism of rosy and heroic optimism. In his 1917 novel Under Haig in Flanders he paints a nice and cosy picture of life at the front, where the Tommies feed on "frizzling bacon, not to be beaten anywhere, bread that might have graced the table of a Ritz hotel, and jam that would have been the envy of any housewife." He goes on to depict the Battle of the Somme, with the great blood-letting of 1 July, one of the worst days in British military history, described as a "triumph for the Allies and a bitter blow to our ruthless enemy."

This kind of literature, and much more besides, clearly has a propaganda purpose, intended to attract more and more young men to the front with a promise of high adventure. The reality must have been truly shocking. But even after the war, when no further purpose was served by these fairy tales, the genre continued, largely unaffected by the revelations of Robert Graves, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. Brereton's novels remained in print throughout the inter-war period, and were popular as school and Sunday school prizes.