"One is starved for Technicolor up there"(*)

I'm sure you enjoy watching classic films as much as I do: all that directorial craft, thespian talent, literary screenplays, dazzling technicolor and not a CGI in sight. But that's usually the good, remaining and oft repeated stuff on classic film channels.
This week we treated ourselves to two gems:
The Day of the Jackal (Fred Zinneman, 1973): A suave, urbane, ruthless and completely amoral Edward Fox taking the lead in this really superb political thriller as a sort of inverse Roger "The Saint" Moore character. It really gets very nasty as he kills off anyone who is in his way or even on his side but threatening to blow his cover en route to assassination of President De Gaulle.
The film's pace is relentless and not a frame of it is boring. I simply loved the Technicolor look of 1970s Paris and I was surprised at how it actually still looks largely like that today. Inserting film action flawlessly into a real "Liberation Day" parade without the help of any computer graphics was European film making at a high point.
Favourite bit of dialogue:

The Jackal: Half a million. In cash. Half in advance, and half on completion.
Montclair: Half a million francs?
The Jackal: Dollars.
Montclair: Are you mad?
The Jackal: Considering you expect to get France in return, I'd have thought it a reasonable price.

Marnie (Alfred Hitchcock, 1964): Speaking of amorality, how is this one for utterly shameless male predator behaviour? Sean Connery (great body, nasty face and American-leavened Scottish accent) blackmailing a mentally ill criminal Tippi Hedren into marrying him, heaven only knows what for. A great advert for heterosexual marriage (not!) as from the outside all looks hunky-dory. Ingmar Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage had nothing on Hitchcock!
I can remember watching this film when I was very young - maybe 12 or so - and could only remember the sailor's tight whites he struggled out of to avail himself of the services Marnie's mother offered, and his black-haired arms. Amazing the things that impress you at a young age!
Favourite bit of dialogue:

MARNIE: You Freud, me Jane

Totty award: Bruce Dern as the sailor, of course.

(*) Quote from A Matter of Life and Death

Queerisms

The queerisms are now quite a large collection on the Queerclick site (NSFW).
Which one is your favourite?
The one on the left had me laughing. It means:

euph. To masturbate. From the US baseball player Carlos Zambrano, who was put on the Chicago Cubs injured list because of a wrist injury caused by spending four hours a day on the internet "emailing his brother".

The Profanisaurus is a more general slang dictionary, in the inclusive sense that it also (mostly) carries heterosexual terms, but also great fun.

Sports worth watching: naked football

The Four Things Meme

I got tagged by First Against The Wall:

Four jobs I've had:
1. Anarchist radio announcer and collective politburo member (7 years)
2. Research assistant into TQM (total quality management) applicability in secondary schools (11 months) - needless to say it wasn't, and it didn't
3. Stock processing at a fantastic record store (1 day a week, for several years)
4. Monitoring radio and television news and current affairs (10 years) - a "Winston Smith 1984" job if there ever was one like that. Loved it though!

Four movies I can watch over and over:
1. Screamplay: pure genius
2. Some Like It Hot: pure fun
3. The Night of the Hunter: pure horror
4. The Honeymoon Killers: pure lunacy

Four places I've lived:
1. Ghent: born there, moved age 5
2. Antwerpen: two southern suburbs, age 5 to 29
3. London: three East End flatshares, age 29 to 32
4. Auckland: three downtown flats, age 32 to 42

Four TV shows I love:
1. The Green Room
2. Shameless
3. The Kingdom (Lars von Trier)
4. Blackadder

Four places I've vacationed:
1. Gran Canaria
2. Norway
3. Luxembourg
4. Rarotonga

Four of my favourite dishes:
1. Pasta (any kind as long as it has a yummy creamy sloppy sauce sticking to it)
2. Crepe pancakes (with Nutella, Kahlua-flambed banana and cream)
3. Mussels and chips - with mayonnaise
4. Champagne

Four sites I visit daily:
1. News: BBC, Google NZ and Google Belgie
2. Blogs: JoeMyGod, Public Address, Oh La La Paris - really all the sites in the right hand column
3. Arts & Letters Daily
4. Worldskins

Four places I would rather be right now:
1. Palm Beach, Waiheke Island: no clothes no hassle beach
2. Madrid, Spain: if only it was near the sea
3. Edinburgh, Scotland: in a parallel universe this would be home now
4. Paris, France: kicking myself for not visiting sooner and more often

Four bloggers I am tagging:
1. Peter at DubDotDash
2. Mr BerlinBear at The Capital Letter
3. Paul at Buggery.org
4. Sangroncito

Bafta awards

It was good to hear that the uphill gardeners beat the constant one in the BAFTAs, but I'm still unsure whether I'm going to watch it.

Proof found there is no gay interior decorator gene

This had me amused all weekend: Lurid Digs: horrifying gay amateur interiors. It's a site that collects gay personal ad photographs (you can submit your own too) and their queer style experts discuss not so much the meat on offer as the interior decor the personal photographs are set in. Amazing what those pictures reveal not by ludicrously posing unclad but by the style of their living and bedroom room furniture and furnishings. An absolutely fun site, though not worksafe. You'll never look at another personal ad ever in the same way again, at least you won't ignore the decor.

Tip from Starrfucker

It's a football thing

It makes you wish American comedy was always that funny.

Flying gay

There is an interesting call for a boycott of Emirates Airlines because its owner (the state of Dubai, part of the United Arab Emirates) has sentenced eleven men, arrested last year after allegedly attending a 'gay wedding party,' to five-year terms for homosexuality and one-year sentences for obscenity, according to reports from Abu Dhabi.
It seems a fair call for a boycott, but one needs to be consistent too.
Places with popular airlines don't always have the right attitudes towards deviant sexuality. For example, Singapore's penal code is hardly liberal towards gays.
Or Fiji and most Polynesian islands who were rid of their easy-going sexual and sensual attitudes by generations of missionaries, so Polynesian Airlines and Air Pacific are out too.
I'm sure you could find dozens of other examples to avoid, so best to stick with Air New Zealand since we don't want to fund that fundie Ocker John Howard and his Qantas either.

Generation Knows Nowt

This week's episode (on NZ's C4 TV channel) of "South Park" was one of the weakest I have seen. It just didn't make any sense and wasn't even funny. The premise was that when a Woodstock-type revivalist concert is being held in the town, the resident vigilante Cartman made it his mission to kill all the hippies - even without the help of the two Vietnam vets, who, in their time, actually would have killed some given half a chance. The Woodstock generation reviving their youth are now all in their sixties and therefore would not have sons in the 8th grade, like our cartoon heroes. Instead the hippies would have been their grandparents, despite most parents in South Park looking suspiciously aged. I guess it's a case of Parker & Stone rebelling against their own parents, sort of 40 years later.
Slayer or any other death metal music didn't kill any hippies, what sort of distorted subcultural history is that?
No, to its credit, C4 TV provided the right answer after South Park the same night: the episode of the "Classic Albums" series featured "Never Mind the Bollocks" by The Sex Pistols, hippie killers par excellence, and not so much an album as a Communist Manifesto-esque death knell to mid-1970s rock music.
Hippie drugs like heroin did kill some punks, Sid Vicious among them, but then that Spungen woman - and by extension American drug culture - was the hand behind it.
John Lydon was gloriously funny, as ever, and still sarcastically biting on Malcolm McLaren, but overall all the punks seemed to have mellowed in old age (see Julie Burchill). I even notice that when looking in the mirror at myself.

Defend free speech

Some people put the case for mocking religion and defending Western civilisation much better than me: Christopher Hitchens, Ibn Warraq and The Economist.

Material girl living in a material world

There is really nothing more boring than beauty pageants of any gender, so the election of Miss Belgium was not to be any different. But no, something on the news about the winner this year caught my attention and it was not the allegations of vote rigging by her sponsor buying SMS votes.
Instead I was intrigued by her comments after she had won. Normally winners endlessly waffle on about bringing peace to the world, solace to suffering children and heart attacks to Miss World judges, but our newly crowned girl, Virginie Claes, does not want a bar of all that nonsense. No, all she looked forward to was getting her hands on the prize that came with the title: a cool convertible Peugeot car.

You go, girl!

Public service announcement

The thing you always wanted to know but were too afraid to ask about when you were young and horny: yes, jizz clogs pipes.


This gem is from Davezilla.

Sex in the news

News item:

Two bisexual Premiership stars made some VERY dirty phone calls—using a mobile as a gay sex toy. The players—one capped several times for England—were caught on camera cavorting with a pal well known in the music industry in a homosexual orgy that will shock soccer. The three men—who cannot be identified for legal reasons—are pictured wearing just vests and boxer shorts as they tackle each other in ways fans never expected.

For the fashion-illiterate among you: a vest is a wifebeater. A very fashionable item, unlike the boxer shorts.

In the astonishing pictures Player A—a household name who has a reputation as a rebel on and off the pitch—shoves his mobile down his boxers. He performs a sex act with it which is too obscene to be described here.

Oh, please, we're all consenting adults here, you can tell us. I remember a performance artist here in Auckland during a gig shoving his mobile phone up his arse and then asked a member of the public to call his number. Great fun!

Then Player B calls his number to make the phone vibrate. Player A is also pictured on the bed while Player B—a multi-million pound goal-scoring mid-fielder—kneels to perform oral sex on him. Meanwhile the music man can also be seen leaning over the pair, kissing and caressing the footballers, who play for different sides.

If you're familiar with the tribalism of English football, you know you are only allowed to kiss your team mates, full on the lips, perhaps even with tongues, to congratulate him for scoring a goal. Kissing a member of the opposite team is tantamount to treason. So this episode of the orgy will have fans seething - never mind the arse phone games, I'm sure most football fans have thought about doing that at one time or another.

Soon it was like something out of a hard core porn film.
"One (Player A) lay on the bed while his mate (Player B) knelt down beside him and gave him a **** ***. Soon his (Player A's) face was contorted with pleasure. "When all this was going on, the music bloke was leaning all over them both, kissing and stroking every bit of flesh he could get to.

Why the asterisks? Don't these tabloid editors know we are adept at word sudoku? And doesn't the hack know how pleasurable a blow job is since he's surpised at the contorted faces (it's called "sex face" on Big Brother)

"You can see he's urging (Player B) to ring him. He must have had the vibrate alert on. (Player B) then gets out his phone and rings him again and again while (Player A) closes his eyes." In the set of images Player A seems to be the leader in the hardcore sex games while the music man is mainly content to watch.
"They were so relaxed with each other it looked like this wasn't the first time," said our source. "It wouldn't surprise me if they'd had each other's numbers before."

Well, it all sounds they had a thoroughly good time, away from the stress and pressures of the football field and footballers' girlfriends, able to relax in a truly manly atmosphere. One thing though: I don't think they wil invite the one back who took and then sold the pictures to the newspaper. But I bet the News of the World hack would love to join in one day.

News item via Oh La La Paris.

The Big Gay Out

On Sunday, the annual gay jamboree, a.k.a. the Big Gay Out, took place here in Auckland. It was again a fun day for the whole family and a chance for the non-family crowd to get a look at their trade past, present and, hopefully, future, in bright daylight. There is a photo gallery of the event here.
Even the Christian fundamentalists, who always love to attend events like this - heaven knows why - had a laid back air about them, unlike previous years. We actually didn't get much beyond the beer tent, as usual, and completely ignored the events at the main stage where, apparently but I had to read about it, various politicians again sermonised and barbed each other. All so very last year.
I did see National Party leader Don Brash strolling past the merchandise stalls and he was completely and unsurprisingly ignored by everyone around him. Our Glorious Leader Helen was not there because she was on a leftwing party stint in South Africa, where she sat next to and watched Tony Blair squirming about the British troop abuse video. Which, I bet, was much fun!
The only political point I felt like making was buying a large cone at the Danish Ice Cream cart.

Headhunters

We just got back from a well-deserved holiday-ette in New Zealand's Deep North, somewhere around Whangarei, where we stayed with our good friends Christopher and Robert on their estate - converted woolshed, actually - in the middle of nowhere surrounded by acres of exotic forests. A few days of indulgences of the foodie and imbibing kind with little in the way of distractions such as TV or radio or newspapers or internet.
I did do some reading, a novel called "Headhunters" by John King. I didn't expect much in terms of literary quality, in-depth characterisations and spellbinding plotlines, and I wasn't disappointed, but it was a mildly interesting and occasionally funny insight on how the other half lives - as in straight urban working class male with nothing but booze, soccer and birds on the brain. I presume it's the demographic for magazines like Loaded and there was certainly nothing metrosexual about the lads. If I were to let my queer eye roam over their lives I would certainly encourage them to have more actual sex with women rather than with their palm, but there's nothing new in the observation that males have more sex using their imagination rather than their genitals.
The story sort of wandered all over the place and after the initial interesting premise of a "Sex Division" where men score points according to what they got their sex partners to perform on them, it fizzled after not many pages as only one of the contestants was any good in the bird scoring department. And even he, Carter, the Unstoppable Sex Machine, never got it on with anyone more interesting than slappers "who have been servicing three men a week for the last 10 years".
I suspect a gay version of the "Sex Division" wouldn't work very well competition-wise, because it would be too easy for everybody involved, despite no handbags for easy point-scoring!
Still, it was interesting to read how straights and I really live in parallel universes and I thank the godess every night I wasn't born straight.

A female review of the book is here.

As long as I have a face he'll have a place to sit

Tom Boonen is a favourite cult figure for most young people in Flanders, a survey found. They thought he was cheeky, sexy, media-friendly and, of course, a world champion cycling, who can't stop winning.

They've run out of hairless boys too

Following the international spat about the Mohammed cartoons in Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, other European newspapers have been following suit in breaking an attempt to classify them as "blasphemous" by the religion concerned.
Muslims have called for a boycott of Danish products, so no more Danish bacon for breakfast, Hans Christian Andersen bedtime stories and Lego sets for the kiddies, and a supercool B&O sound system is now off their Christmas list - or whatever the Muslim equivalent of that.
Those desert religions should learn that their medieval religious canon is a rich source for lampooning and humorous comment from rational folk who can't be stopped to take the piss out of superstition and ignorance, such as Intelligent Design (adhered to by more than only Christian sects, Darwin is anathema in Islam too).

Thinking a bit more about this particular cartoon, I think it's a bloody good one for Islam, because it can be read as Mohammed disabusing all those misguided suicide bombers, and telling imams to stop indoctrinating potential recruits with promises of unlimited sexual success. If only sexual frustration among Moslim guys could be tackled. There are plenty of earth virgins who would want to put out.

And the Oscar Goes To The Straight in the Corner There Because We Couldn't Find Any Takers Without Beards

It seems there is no end to the accolades bestowed on the cowboys' love story, what with all the Oscar nominations. It used to be that gay actors got Oscars for playing straights (Hello, Rock) but now the tables have turned, even though it still remains to be seen whether playing fag on screen actually does anything for your star status or bankability.
And I'm just a little bit concerned that both actors in Brokeback Mountain have made sure they have also appeared in very heterosexual roles this season - to compensate for the career risk-taking, perhaps? Or just to make sure they are really, really not homos, thank godess. Heath Ledger in Casanova, only notable for the amount of cleavage shown by the women throughout the film, and Jake Gyllenhaal in Jarhead. The latter one is of course highly dubious: the film's premise of bored, half-naked marines lying around in the desert does not augur well to qualify as a hetero movie, but in my experience for a more cinematically satisfying one.

Underpants

David Beckham is spending £1,000 a month on underpants he only wears once and then he throws them out. Isn't this both sheer stupidity and a huge waste of resources?
David got his priorities all wrong. Instead of relying on his ball skills to provide for himself and wife and family in old age, he needs a far better source of income and do what any reasonably fit but financially hard-up man does: auction off your used underpants.

Hat tip via Oh La la Paris