Tuesday 27 January 2009

Boy-on-Jewboy Action!

Holocaust Memorial Day is of course one of those special days when antiwar pricks try to pretend that the Jews were and/or are really just as bad as the Nazis. I thought I'd celebrate kind by going all broad-minded and tolerant and linking to the story of Aryan beauty Matt Damon sticking it to that no-good Jewish schmuck Bill Kristol. Apparently they're going to have a debate - which should be fun.

Of course it could be even more fun if they just skipped the debate, and we could watch Matt whup Kristol's ass the same way he did with stoopid kike Brendan Fraser in that really cool movie.

Sunday 25 January 2009

Der Held und seine Kinder

[H/T: Tribunus]

Before it's too late?

Gay paedophiles are targeting primary schools now. The Daily Male broke the news this week, but a short trip to the organisation's own website (here and here) confirms their analysis of what's going on.

Sex before eight? Indeed!

UPDATE: The Telegraph is just one 'paper amongst others carrying news of children who were taken away from their grandparents, who were "too old" (i.e. too old-fashioned), by social workers and placed with gay paedophiles.

Disgusting isn't the word for it, so much as deeply, deeply depressing.

Saturday 24 January 2009

'How can the light that burned so brightly suddenly burn so pale?'

Was it Simon or was it Garfunkel that did the original for Watership Down back in the 1970s?

Either way, this vid rather supports my maxim that anything a man can do a boy can do better.

Friday 23 January 2009

Selfishness

'Self-love, my liege, is not so vile a sin, as self-neglecting.'

[The Dauphin, in Shakespeare, Henry V, II.iii]

I went black this morning and now I'm blue. I was feeling gloomy and depressed, but now it's the weekend, and now I'm really just wondering what I want to do with this blog next. In reality I'm probably going to need feedback from other interesting people if I'm going to be able to go on writing. I need controversy and argument. I also need approval and people saying nice things. And I can't really run on porn alone.

Yes, I've been masturbating in the last few days. Not a lot - maybe just four times in two days, and not at all since. But it's still a manifestation of the old vicious circle - depression and self-abuse chasing each round and round in a horrific dance between cause and effect. And here of course, like the classic masturbator (as C S Lewis describes him, for example) I'm turning in on myself, cutting myself off from the outside world.

For me, it has to be said, a good day is a day when I see a boy smile (and, maybe, I get an erection). A bad day is a day when I end up alone and morally constricted, full of fear and guilt and, in a word, "stress". One thing I've noticed about myself recently is the way my jaws often seem to be jammed together, even when I'm sleeping. Perhaps it's trying to maintain "self-control"!

Or is it all just selfishness?

Back in the Black!

I've just changed the template for this blog back to the old minima dark format. It reflects my general feelings of gloom and despondency at the moment. What with the black spastic now in charge in Washington, family illness and breakdown, global economic crisis (which is worse in Britain than almost anywhere else, thanks to eleven years of crazy-kid Socialism), not to mention the sodding rain...

Thank God it's Friday!

Thursday 22 January 2009

Perhaps not undeserved, but certainly unjust!

OK, I know, as an Englishman I do still sort of think of Oz as being one giant prison-island. At the same time though, even the lurid media descriptions of this man's "crimes" (below) make it hard really to understand why he's now going to be cooling his heels in some antipodean slammer for 10 months.

Child-porn downloader 'didn't realise it was a crime'

Christine Flatley
January 19, 2009 02:15pm

A FATHER who downloaded 30,000 child pornography images and videos did not realise it was against the law, a court has been told.

Brian Raymond Bowden, 44, was surprised when police charged him with using a carriage service to access child pornography and knowingly possessing child pornographic material, the Brisbane District Court was told today

Prosecutor Anthony Gett said Bowden told police he knew it was a crime to abuse children, but did not realise he was breaking the law by possessing images of such abuse.

The court was told police found almost 28,000 images of children being abused on Bowden's computer when they searched his home at Carina in Brisbane in July 2007.

Bowden also had more than 4700 videos stored on the computer's hard drive.

Mr Gett said some of the videos and images featured babies being abused, and others featured sadistic acts and bestiality.

The court was told Bowden had downloaded the files between March 2005 and July 2007.

The father of two pleaded guilty today to the charges and was sentenced to two and a half years' jail.

He will serve 10 months behind bars before being released on a good behaviour bond.

[heraldsun.com.au]

In my opinion, either pornography and sodomy should be completely legal or they should be completely illegal. Personally, as it happens, I'd be more than happy to go along with banning all of it. But there is genuinely something horrifically unjust about the way that such things are currently completely legal for some people but not at all legal, and with stiff penalties attached, for others.

And both sides of any debate over morality and "free speech" ought to be able to agree on that.

Brent Corrigan

Brent Corrigan is a beautiful young man [H/T: Shini], and he's one of the best gay porn stars ever. Men have killed (literally) to get hold of him.

He was still a child when he appeared in his first porn feature Every Poolboy's Dream. It's now a gay classic, but its distribution was pulled when it was found that Brent had lied about his age. So it's now doubly precious, in that not only does it feature Brent being sodomised when he was still a beautiful kid by man wearing a condom but it's also now extremely rare.

Would I like to see it? (Would I?)

Wednesday 21 January 2009

The Corruption of Language

One of those things I find genuinely very hard to understand about the way that paedophilia is dealt with in our culture is the common inference throughout the mainstream media that paedophiles hurt and harm children. I don't say 'sexually abuse' children, but 'hurt and harm'. There is in fact quite an obvious difference. The deeper inference seems to be that paedophiles don't actually like children at all, and the implication from that is that deadbeat dads up and down the country (and deadbeat mums, for that matter) can demonstrate their love and commitment for the children they hardly ever see by going on protest marches orchestrated by pornographic magazines such as The News of the World, screaming "Pedo scum!", and calling for the restoration of the death penalty for anyone who, er, actually likes children.

Because the truth of course is that paedophiles do like children. (The clue is in the term itself - that is if you have even a passing familiarity with Greek.) Yes, paedophiles like children a bit too much, and they like them in the wrong way. But the general way that 'paedophile' is used in the media to mean 'scary pervert who wants to kidnap, rape and murder your 10-year-old' is quite simply a corruption of our language by a media-Establishment that is itself both sick and twisted. In fact, off the top of my head, of all the lurid and sensationalised media accounts of paedophiles who have had sex with children and then gone on to murder them I'd be surprised if I couldn't count the actual number, on both sides of the Atlantic, on the fingers of one hand.

Not that gay paedophiles are the only group of men who are often portrayed by the media as hating what they actually quite like. To take another example, how about, er, heterosexual men - or "gynophiles", as we should perhaps call them? Last year a spoof beauty pageant held at the prestigious London School of Economics led to bitter accusations from all the ugly unpopular girls at the college feminists on the campus of 'misogyny' on the part of the organisers. I mean, Huh? OK, maybe beauty pageants aren't really my thing (although even I thought the girls in the photos looked very nice). But don't men go to beauty pageants because they like women? How on earth does liking beautiful women make you a misogynist?

And so it goes on. The latest warped reversal of moral polarities I've noticed comes from the BBC (second only to The Times when it comes to reproducing the Establishment "line" on any subject!) in one of its crime drama series, in which that august bastion of fairness and tolerance attempts to demonise pro-life campaigners. Apparently if you're opposed to murdering unborn babies you're also into kidnapping and torturing them, not to mention a spot of murdering of your own! And yes, I know, we actually saw this sort of thing six years ago, when Auntie turned the very first episode of her disgusting (and embarrassingly pro-Establishment) spy-series Spooks into a crack-brained propaganda video in which pro-lifers were depicted as terrorists. (Not that their weren't real terrorists running aroung the UK in 2002, but this was before the 7/7 attacks, when MI5 was still pursuing its famously successful "softly, softly approach"! Let's be grateful that so much has changed since then!*)

Basically, it's not just sexuality that the media (in my view deliberately) just do not get. It's procreation in general. The reasons for this I think are interesting, and they should certainly inform any true debate over what it means to love boys, and how and why. But the corruption of language and the corruption of the media (and language itself is the most important medium of all) are phenomena that we need to be aware of, just as we need to remember that those we rely on to maintain and defend the values of truthfulness and honesty, often whether they mean to or not, are very seldom on our side.

*And here's hoping some of my readers can spot irony when they read it!

'My name is James Tiberius Kirk'

Well, having fulminated against modern Hollywood, it's worth bearing in mind that there are still one or two things that the bastards sort of get right when they put their minds to it.

Bad Omens

I started watching the 2006 re-make of The Omen on TV, partly because I thought the boy was cute and partly because I couldn't believe it was anything like as bad as it was supposed to be. Well, the boy is nice. He's got blue eyes, at least. Apart from that though he's no great improvement on the boy in the original. For all that individually they do nothing but change, boys as a generality are essentially changeless and timeless.

Everything else, of course, does change - at least in the sense that things in general naturally decay and degenerate. And so the Omen franchise started out well, carried on being entertaining with its first sequel and then clearly lost its way. This evening indeed it wasn't long before I was longing for all the things, large and small, that made the original a classic. Where was Patrick Troughton as the priest? Where was Gerry Goldsmith's Oscar-winning score? Where was the deft, spooky direction of Richard Donner? Where was Gregory Peck, for that matter? Liev Schreiber (however his name is supposed to be pronounced) actually seems like a perfectly serious, competent actor, utterly baffled here by a director who doesn't have a clue. But what's with the bizarre, unfunny in-joke of having Mia Farrow as the evil nanny? In fact, what's with the unfunny in-joke of the whole sodding thing? At one point I was even pining for Guildford Cathedral. (Well, I do pass it every day on my way to work!)

At 10 o'clock then, I gave up and switched over to the News. (The new President of America is of course a good deal scarier than anything Hollywood could come up with nowadays.) So for all I know they might have changed the ending. But I don't really care. I mean, who did they expect to watch this rubbish? People who thought the original was so good that there really ought to be shit version just to balance things out? Perhaps you're supposed to watch this version first, so that all the gruesome accidental killings (which are all exactly the same in this one, except that they aren't actually frightening) won't be quite as exciting when you watch the old version!

The sad thing of course is that the original Omen is not that great. Yes, it's spooky enough to entertain, but it lacks the theological and political authenticity that it would have needed genuinely to get under the skin. Compared with this slick, modern, whole-heartedly fantastical version, the 1970s original has a kind of unnerving gritty realism - even the bits that are noticeably stagey and Pinewoody. (Was it actually filmed at Pinewood? Dunno!) The new version's problem is that follows the conventions of modern Hollywood to the letter, never deviating towards the real world in the slightest.

To take just a couple of examples, Patrick Troughton's priest in the original wore a clerical suit. Why? Well, that's how Roman Catholic priests in the 1970s dressed - or at least the more old-fashioned ones in the English-speaking world did. Similarly, of course, Guildford Cathedral back then was clearly considered a very normal modern church (i.e. normal for people who still went to church). In the new version, Pete Postlethwaite's hammy, not to say pantomime replacement wears a soutane and a Romano hat. Why? Because that's what proper Catholic priests wear in proper horror movies! (Don't you know anything?) And of course in an age when people only go to church to get married and buried, and when churches only appear on celluloid in gangster flicks and horror movies, you've got to have a proper gothic church with pointy bits and everything. That's how it goes.

Bearing such details in mind though, it quickly becomes clear why nothing in this film feels remotely realistic - let alone frightening. The first rule of any ghost story, let alone of a horror movie, is that there has to be at least the conceit that the events described or portrayed actually took place - or could actually take place. Both Frankenstein and Dracula, after all, were epistolary novels, purporting to relay real events, and the reason why the Francis Ford Coppola movie versions of the 1990s failed to thrill and chill was because they bore no relation whatsoever to the imaginary real worlds described in their source materials.

The problem with this new re-make of The Omen is that the only world it does resemble is the imaginary world that most modern movies are set in. For example there's one scene in the film that's set in a zoo: it may well, for all I can remember, have been in the original (my mind plays tricks), but here it feels curiously like an homage to the opening of the first Harry Potter film. And that imaginary Chris Columbus version of reality, in which English schoolboys all wear caps (and according to which American kids in the late 1980s still dressed in the same clothes their parents wore at their age in the 1950s) is about as near to reality as this movie-world gets.

Hollywood's big problem is that its movies are all about the Hollywood version of reality. Its horror movies aren't remotely frightening because they've got nothing to do with us, in the real world. Are we really to wonder that fewer and fewer people seem to want to watch any of Hollywood's modern output - with the exception of its out and out fantasty stuff, which (naturally enough) it actually does reasonably well?

And should we not worry that it is now the darlings and luvvies of Hollywood (led, apparently, by the clownish George Clooney) who, with their brainless puppet President now safely installed in Washington, will be calling the shots in the "real world" for the next four (possibly eight!) years?

Monday 19 January 2009

'Far Away'

It's odd to think that the theme tune to an award-winning Japanese TV-drama miniseries has become the bestselling signature-song of a (real) boy band from South London. The Japanese, like the Russians (and in fact most of the rest of the World), are obviously less paedophobic than we are in this country, and the boys themselves have been a huge hit over there. (Back in Blighty most people have probably never heard of them.)

On the other hand 'Far Away' was written specifically for them and their voices. It's not actually in Japanese (it's in English and Latin). Arguably it belongs to them as much as to anyone. It's the first thing I ever knowingly heard them sing, so I think of it as their "breakthrough" piece.

It was also judged sufficiently good for them actually to sing it at a Papal Mass in New York last year. (Actually I don't know whether to laugh or cry at that, considering it was probably the only even vaguely tasteful thing on the menu.)

It is very sweet.

Gay Republicans for Prince Harry!

OK, I've always been slightly sweet on Prince Harry. As a boy he was a red-headed little angel and regular posh scamp. Normally of course men don't do much for me, but now that he's a bona fide hero as well - as well as being third in line to the throne - well, why not? Yes, I was a bit shocked about that costume. (The swastika! With the uniform of the Afrikakorps! Does the lad know nothing?) But I'm prepared to accept that it was just a bit of fun, and not intended to be historically accurate. (Much like Schindler's List, I suppose!)

Even before he came back from fighting the good fight in Afghanistan, Prince Harry was "Britain's Pin-Up Prince". The OMG blog a couple of years ago was just one blog that got excited by pics of him with his shirt off. Then after Afghanistan of course even the blogsphere's "liberal" elements (i.e. the same sorts of people who were into yummy little Tom Daley, although not literally, one hopes) all enjoyed at least some of the pics of the soldier prince on active service in far off lands. The blog When Only Hot Will Do had a nice post about him here. The blog AskaGayMan.com didn't even have to be asked. Even the Miami Herald took an interest.

And now comes the news that even homo-Nazi Peter Tatchell may have been, er, "turned" by this young man's charms.

Mr Tatchell, who is a gay rights campaigner and a leading member of Republic, heaped rare praise on our twenty-four-year-old Prince describing him as "liberated and enlightened" after Prince Harry was filmed kissing and licking a male Army friend. For in that video, obtained by The News Of The World newspaper, Prince Harry is caught on a night out with friends in which he mouths to one soldier: "I love you" before kissing him on the cheek and also licking his face. Another extract from the tape shows our Harry asking a colleague how he felt after an Army exercise, adding: "Gay, queer on the side?"

In his press statement Mr Tatchell said he had no problem with Harry's use of the word "queer" and praised his show of affection. Mr Tatchell said: "For him to happily give his soldier friend a public kiss and lick his face strikes me as rather liberated and enlightened - for a straight man. If only more heterosexual men were relaxed about same-sex affection like Harry, the world would be a better place. The context and intention of words is crucial in deciding whether they are offensive or not. I don't find anything objectionable about the context in which Harry used the word queer."

In a statement Neil Welton, the leader of Monarchy Wales, said he was "delighted" that such a prominent member of Republic's team was now backing Prince Harry. He urged Republic's Campaign Manager, Graham Smith, to publicly state whether he agreed with Mr Tatchell's assessment of Prince Harry as "liberated and enlightened". Neil added: "Last Monday morning, Graham Smith of Republic was describing Prince Harry as a disgrace and unfit to be a possible future Head of State. By Wednesday afternoon, Peter Tatchell of Republic is describing Prince Harry as liberated and enlightened. Which is it? Are they having a laugh? They can't have it both ways."

[The Monarchist]

In the absence of any pics of Prince Harry "having it" both ways, here are his old Afghan pics again. Enjoy!

You'll never read the bitchfests about Chelsy Davey the same way again!

Sunday 18 January 2009

Ender's Game: Battle School #2

Some unlabelled examples of Ferry's superb artwork from the second installment of Ender!

Click to enlarge.

Ender's Game: Battle School #1

Well, I thought I might as well re-launch this blog with it's new Ender-theme in style. These are the opening pages of the new comic-book adaptation of Ender's Game, published by Marvel Comics. Obviously it's hugely truncated, but at the same time it's very competently done and, more importanly, it's exactly how I imagined it. Card's own oral puff for the series is here.

The artist is actually a Spaniard called Pasqual Ferry, and the standard is quite obviously a good deal higher than that of the average US comicbook in the tradition of Josh Kirby et al. (There are couple of his rough sketches here and here.)

It has to be said, there's something bittersweet about the fact that the aliens are now called "formics".

Click to enlarge!

Chaeronea Revisited

Whoah! Now that's freaky. The Order has just been refounded, seemingly by someone else keen to share with the world his fondness for "boys". (So far there've been a couple of pictures of men and an unfunny vid of a man sexually abusing himself, but I suppose it's early days hours yet.)

And all power to the elbow of the enterprising 46-year-old male from Blackburn who's taken over my old URL on blogspot. (Good to see the old can-do Lancastrian spirit isn't all gone - yet.) What exactly he thinks he's doing there though I don't know. (He even has an advert asking requesting material.)

I, of course, started this blog (which was then there) about two weeks ago, and if I'm honest I did so mainly because I didn't want to visit dodgy "boylove" websites anymore - and now that I look back on it I can honestly say "not that I ever did want to visit such sites" - although I do still like boys. So far I've been pleasantly surprised to find that I haven't been deleted and that there are even some bloggers out there who think the same way I do.

Which is nice!

Saturday 17 January 2009

Some brothers do 'ave 'em

Now Under New Management

Yes, rumours of this blog's death have been greatly exaggerated. On the other hand, I do rather feel as if Mary Whitehouse has been round, given that I've now been over the whole thing with a scrubbing brush. My attitudes and beliefs about my subject matter haven't changed much, but I really do hope that this way I'll be able to avoid deletion.

So, I've left Montague Summers and the Order of Chaeronea behind, not to mention Uncle Monty and his genteel Lake District sin bin. My new Internet ID is, er, myself, but with a touch of Orson Scott Card (whose books I am currently reading as a shield against some of the awfulness going on in the "real" world).

I do like the ending to 'The Selfish Giant' a lot, even if it was (bizarrely enough) used as a leitmotif for the gruesome Stephen Fry biopic of Wilde. I thought having it in the bar on the right might be a bit much, except that it does seem to fit the whole Ender mythos. The stupid giant and the kid who saves mankind are clearly both important Jungian archetypes. No great writer can ignore either of them for long.

Wilde's Children

Oh this is utter rubbish. Of course Oscar Wilde liked children. Anyone who's read his children's stories will know that. They were after all, his only genuine stab at great literature, including some genuine religious work.

Similarly no one can really doubt that he also had sex with children. In Victorian London it was perfectly normal for rentboys to be children - or "underage", as we would (hypocritically) say nowadays, even though it's now legal to have sex with children over the age of sixteen. The Law, moreover, often knew when to turn a blind eye to such goings on - at least until Wilde came along and mindlessly trampled on the polite but convenient hypocrisies of Victorian morality.

But why would anyone pretend that he didn't - unless they're trying for some reason to deny their own interests and at the same time maintain the reputation of one of their own saintly gay martyrs. The Law nowadays may be less hypocritical (moderately!). But where it is still hypocritical it is a good deal more brutal.

Wednesday 14 January 2009

Der Rote Baron

I just found some "old" pics of Matthias Schweighoefer in my collection. But given that his big break in English-language cinema hasn't even been released in this country yet, here it is instead (or the trailer, at any rate). I suppose the younger version of the eponymous hero (or villain, if you're British) probably doesn't last much longer in this movie than Affleck and Hartnett's prepubescent alter egos did in Pearl Harbor. But all-in-all this film does look very nice.

Game for it!

Huzzah! A friend has written to me with news that the much vaunted movie of Ender's Game gives one grounds for hope. Having seen Hollywood recently rip the heart and soul out of one of my favourite children's books (i.e. The Dark is Rising, by Susan Cooper) and then defecate on the remains (i.e. they turned it into this) I'm intensely suspicious.

In fact the bastards almost have a scorched earth policy towards classics nowadays. Clearly there are some movie execs who would rather rush out a shite version of a kids' classic than let the title go to another studio that might wait a couple of years (or decades!) and then do it better and more lucratively. (Just consider the early treatments for a Lord of the Rings film, think what we were spared, but also consider that an even crummier and more rushed version of Tolkien even than Peter Jackson's effort would have been nowhere near as aristically - i.e. financially - rewarding.)

Who would my Ender be? Answer: I wouldn't have just one. I'd have a regular army of Enders from the age of six (when the story kicks off - and I use the phrase advisedly) through to sixteen. It's an approach that can work. Anyone who's seen the TV-version of the life of J M Barrie (which was vastly superior to the drippy Depp and Winslett version) will know what I'm talking about. Ideally though they'd all be cast by Pippa Hall (i.e. she who discovered Jamie Bell, David from I am David, the Narnia kids, the pretty/ugly boy in Eragon, and most recently the chillingly good Asa Butterfield in The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas) - and if we have to have an English Ender then so what? Beware the long shadow of Jake Lloyd!

And the director? Well, it's got to be Spielberg! Hasn't it? Just provided that he get's back to where he was with Minority Report, with maybe a dash of Empire of the Sun! And who knows? We could end up with the next Christian Bale as a souvenir!

Game on!

But is it right?

A good question the Dancing King raises over on his blog, but which should concern anyone posting pretty pics of almost any sort on the 'Net (quite apart from copyright considerations) is, quite simply, "Is it right?" Well, I'm still half-expecting Google and Blogger at the end of the month to wet themselves, take this blog down and delete my account. But quite apart from the madcap neo-prudery of the net-head generation, some of whom now see Wikipedia ("-pedia"! Geddit?) as a threat to the world's morals (but not gay marriage, or killing unborn babies, or terrorism, all of which are quite legitimate subjects for blogging)... Quite apart from them, the question remains. Is it right?

Morally, of course, it actually depends on what precisely you're doing. Are you just looking at pics of boys, lets say in swimming trunks (or "speedos", as they're called in the rest of the world)? Or are you doing so with lascivious intent? A man who looks at a women lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. Just follow the logic. Are you looking at these pics because you want to get an erection? Or are you looking at these pics (and posting them, for that matter) for other reasons, albeit in the full and certain knowledge that you and/or others will almost certainly get erections as a result?

Morally this is actually quite a subtle distinction. It's an important one though, and all sorts of important geo-political events can hinge on it. Is it wrong for a pilot to drop a bomb if he foresees a strong likelihood of civilian casualties, and so on? Unfortunately a lot of modern people just don't view the world in moral terms - just in an extreme Calvinist sort of way, taking no account of motive and only considering actions in terms of net material benefit.

My answer is of course that it's good to like boys. Indeed, it is our positive duty not just to "like" them but to love them, and that is why I post pictures of them here - because unlike the love of the angels human love has physical elements to it, and boys are physical creatures (and unusually so, maybe). Fully human love, as I have tried to explain in my various posts on the subject, cannot exist in some disembodied state. The main purpose of this blog is of course to "blog out" my thoughts and feelings about children, boys, sexuality, morality, and whatever else comes into my head. Its secondary purpose though is to encourage men to love boys in a world in which men have no interest in children in general or in boys in particular.

As far as I am concerned, a few unintended (even if not unforeseen) "consequences" (i.e. going on "down there") of posting pics here is but a small price to pay for the good I hope may come of it.

Tuesday 13 January 2009

The Four Loves: 3. Affection

As it happens I'm hardly in an emotionally fit state to write about this vast and complex topic. This is not got to being particularly heartfelt or well thought out, therefore, but here goes.

Just as friendship can best be thought of as the love of equals, with birds of a feather flocking together and so on, affection can best be thought of as love between those who are not equal. Yes, children and parents are the best example, but I think one could just as easily make a case for children and hamsters, or masters and servants, or doctors (and nurses!) and their patients. This is the love that tugs at the "heart strings". It's the aching, visceral sort of love that one feels when a little boy falls over and grazes his knee, and when large blue eyes well up with tears. But of course it's also the love of giggles and tickles and hugs. And it's the love of someone smaller and weaker than yourself as he falls asleep in your arms.

Now, there are a couple of points that simply have to be made, and they both have to do with men (i.e. "and women"). More specifically, they have to do with the fact that just as friendship is a masculine sort of love, with men being more gregarious than women (from the boardroom to the clubroom - and indeed to the male-only sauna) so affection is thought of traditionally as a female virtue rather than a masculine one. There are, I think, two reasons why this is the case.

My first reason is, I imagine, pretty controversial, and it goes as follows. The four different loves affect different parts of the human body in different ways. To be more specific, three of the four loves affect the human body, with charity not necessarily affecting the body at all. In saying that, I am of course taking it for granted that the soul, wherein the love of the reason and the will that I call charity resides, can (continue to) exist outside of the human brain. If you don't accept such a (very ancient) philosophical premise, then let us say that charity is the love of the head rather than of the heart. The loves of the heart, then, are friendship, which is purely a love the heart, and sexuality, which is a love of, er, "down there"... and affection, which comes between friendship and sex and whose "seat" resides in between the loins and the heart. I think of affection as being chiefly the love of the tummy, in fact. It's the "butterflies in the stomach"-feeling you get when a beautiful eleven-year-old laughs at one of your jokes. It's that silky feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when you noticed that a toddler has wandered off near a main road.

Where I'd get even more controversial is in diagnosing women as more prone to these feelings than men due to their different sexual physiology. From Hippocrates to Freud, the notion that women's emotions are affected by their uteruses has certainly been accepted by men, even if women themselves are nowadays less than happy to be thought of as being more prone to emotion. Indeed the modern term 'hysteria', as popularised by Freud, comes from the Greek hystera 'womb'. Whether there is much validity in this psychosomatic theorising, of course, I don't know. But what we do know is that women do like children more than men do, and they do spend a lot more time carrying them around with them (e.g. before they're born). To a certain extent it's more natural for a woman to clasp a child to her tummy than it is for a man to do so. And so on.

Now for my second reason, which is if anything even more controversial! And that is that I think the proximity of the viscera to the pudenda is such that the two sorts of love can frequently overlap and become confused. Or at any rate they can in men, whose visceral capacity to love is often overlooked in favour of his sexual capacity. This confusion is then compounded by society's ever deepening paedophobia and paranoia about sex and children (and reproduction, though that's for another time). Another problem (again, for anoether day) the increasing masculinisation of men. (Should come as news to the sort of American "conservative" who thinks the big problem with the modern world is that we've all gone a bit too girly!) Here of course Freudian psychoanalysis actually hasn't helped at all. Freud's crucial mistake was to think that friendship and affection were outgrowths of sexuality. A good enough theory, except that it was (Ahem!) bollocks. Specifically, it was completely backwards. Friendship, affection and sexuality are all part of a single emotional continuum. But sexuality itself is just one part of a larger human capacity, and that is the human capacity to love.

Examples from literature? Actually there are a couple I can think of off the top of my head. One is of course Lolita - on of very few genuine pedo classics. (I haven't read Death in Venice - quelle horreur! - but I have been told by those who have that in that work the man's interest in the boy is not erotic.) A non-pedo example of what I'm talking about would be in Graham Greene's little book The Heart of the Matter, in which the troubled hero falls in love with a sickly, vulnerable young woman who is young enough to be his dead daughter (as in Death in Venice - or at least the film-version) and then finds himself, without fully realising it, drawn into an adulterous relationship with her. How many men, I wonder, have caught sight of Macauley Culkin's bouncing blond bangs and felt not just natural affection, which is bad enough in today's butch and brutal world, but also inklings of something deeper still - which in today's atmosphere of paedophic paranoia actually frightens and disgusts them? (The fear nowadays amongst men is I think quite genuinely that if you like little boys then you must be a pedo - almost as if giving in to the one emotion will automatically open the floodgates to erections and precum whenever there's a kid in the room.)

For men, then, affection is "woman's love" in much the same way as friendship is a masculine sort of love. Whether sexuality is more masculine or feminine, of course, which arguably boils down to whether men or women are "sexier", I certainly am not qualified to say. The Victorians thought (or like to think) that women were less sexual than men (except of course for those harlots and strumpets who weren't, and so on). But given how immodestly most woman nowadays dress (even when compared to modern men, at least once the sun comes out), I'd be surprised if anyone really contended that nowadays.

Of course, one final point could do with being made once again. It is quite easy to have friendships and affections that are not loving. We do, however, still think of them as being friendships and affections, in much the same way as an excitable schoolboy might say that he "loves" chocolate eclairs, or indeed just as a dirty magazine might talk about "making love" when in fact what it's talking about has nothing to do with marriage, or indeed reproduction, and really consists of little more than a man masturbating inside a woman's vagina. (Languages other the English, which is in a fact an amazingly supple and subtle language, do not even make the distinction between "like" and "love".) The reason for this, quite simply, is that man is what C S Lewis (in his essential work The Screwtape Letters) calls a "hybrid" being. He is part spirit and part animal. It is possible, therefore, for his animal side to have appetites for various things without there being any rational element that directs him towards the wellbeing of that object. A dog likes his Pedigree Chum just as surely as he likes his pedigree chums. But he has no rationality directing him to treat one any better than the other. There is nothing going on his doggy brain more complicated than a series of Pavlovian conditioned responses.

For a love to be fully human, therefore, it needs emotion but it also needs reason. A man who just goes around "having sex" without thinking about it is, I think we can all agree, simply acting like an animal, not a human being. And irrational friendships and irrational affections can wreck a life just as surely as irrational sex can. But I would also stress the opposite point - that there is something not altogether human about pure, cold charity. It's all very well for angels, perhaps. But God Himself took on human flesh in order to love us with a human body. With true humanity comes human flesh and human complexity. For me, friendship, provided it is rational friendship, is deeper and more human than mere charity. (Personally I can't stand "charitable" people. They're snooty and stuck up and insufferable and priggish. Uncharitable people, on the other hand, in my experience tend to be fun to be with and just generally nicer human beings.) And in the same way affection is deeper, fuller and more human than mere friendship.

All of which leaves the deepest, fullest, most human - and most complicated! - form of love still to come!

[Golly! Looking at the time, I just noticed it's taken me an hour and half to write this post. I suppose time flies when you're really concentrating on something.]

Monday 12 January 2009

'The Lost Chord'

By the immortal Arthur Sullivan!

Sullivan actually wrote 'The Lost Chord' on the death of his brother. The real reason I chose it for this evening is that this evening I received some very sobering news from my mother about her health. It's nothing to panic about, but it is going to be mean quite a lot of difficulty over the next few months.

I suppose it might seem vain to ask my readers to pray for my mother - especially given that I don't want to say what her real name is.

On the other hand the Grace of God is the one commodity we can have in this world that we can know will never be wasted. As the great English poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson puts it, 'More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of.'

UPDATE: According to this vid's YouTube label this is actually Peter Auty - the original boy who sang the "Walking in the Air" song from The Snowman (i.e. before Aled Jones, who just happened to scrub up slightly better, really made it his own and the never looked back).

Saturday 10 January 2009

The Four Loves: 2. Friendship

Now it starts to get complicated.

I started with charity because charity is the purest form of love, and that means that it is the simplest. It is the sort of love that is purely intellectual. It aims purely at the good of another person without any "good feeling" going with it - or, if you like, without any feeling of fondness or sexuality coming back, as it were, as a "reward". The purely charitable man is motivated purely by a sense of duty towards his fellow creatures and towards his Creator. As St Paul puts it, he is completely selfless.

The other possibility, of course, is that such a pure, dutiful, selfless man doesn't really exist. That's not to say that there aren't charitable people out there. (I like to imagine that there are.) But their motives are not purely charitable. When they act to help their fellow human beings, in reality they have all sorts of emotions "mixed in" with their charitable motives. A man who collects for babies in the Third World will most likely have feelings of compassion, and quite possibly affection, for those whose plight he wishes to relieve. I have been told that most people who are involved in charitable work will have take an interest in the cause (whether it be cancer of cystic fibrosis or homelessness or famine relief or whatever) because they have a sister or brother or child or aunt or parent who has been affected by the issue that they are interested in. Or, indeed, because of a friend!

Lewis is his usual acute self when he points out that the Ancients (that is to say our ancestors, or at least our intellectual forebears) prized friendship far more highly than we do today. In fact nowadays it sounds quite incongruous to talk about friends "loving" each other. Yes, I dare say that once a year, or once in a lifetime, stout-hearted, salt-of-the-earth American men, after a long night of comradeliness in a bar or tavern, might slap each other's shoulders and say "Gee, I love you guys." (C'mon! I've seen Cheers. I know these things go on.) But Englishmen certainly don't behave like that. In fact it would positively turn our stomachs to say anything of the sort.

In the good old days, the symbol of all four types of love, from time in memorial, was always the kiss. Husbands and wives kissed (incuding in bed!). Parents kissed their children and vice versa. Friends of the same sex kissed on meeting and parting, as they did in England in the Middle Ages, as they still do in some European countries, and as is still the normal custom in the Arab world. Indeed "liturgical" kisses, including when venerating holy objects and relics, was a wholly unremarkable part of mainstream religion. Nowadays, of course, the kiss is almost totally sexual: kisses have vanished from most modern religions (just as religion itself is vanishing from public life in this country, just as it did long ago in America and France), a man who kisses another man will get old-fashioned looks in the street (and quite possibly some unwelcome attention from other men), boys resent being kissed even by their own mothers, and a man who kisses a boy can expect a knock on the door from the local constabulary.

What friendship and the other two loves do still have though, I think, is emotion. The seat of the emotions is the heart. And the heart has always been, at least in the Christian world, the principal symbol of what we call love. In Christianity even the love of God is represented by a heart, and this is because it is the essential tenet of Christianity that God became Man and created for Himself a human heart with which to love the human race. It is the heart that is the source and summit of the "good feelings" that one has when one is with one's friends. (Arenaline, dopanine, serotonin? Don't ask me to be exact, but I'd have thought that all these and more have their parts to play, pumping around the body and into the brain, during a great night out with your mates.) Similarly, the heart is also there to power the deeper, more visceral feelings that one has towards one's children, not to mention the sexual feelings one has towards one's spouse, fiancée, "bit on the side", or whatever takes your fancy.

Well, all this really goes for "love" in general. Friendship, specifically, is the simple feeling of enjoying being with people one likes. Man is a social animal, and so to a certain extent it is natural for him to enjoy being with other people. To those who would agree with Jean-Paul Sartre that 'Hell is other people' I can only say 'Just try a couple of weeks of loneliness and you'll soon change your mind!' Friendship is often called brotherly love, because it is the sort of love that ought to exist between brothers. (Don't come to close to me and my brothers, but never mind.) It also exists between sisters, though for certain genetic and evolutionary reasons it is more evident between men. (Genetically women are more heterogenous than men, and as such they are less gregarious: boys tend to have groups of friends or gangs, girls tend to have "best friends" or "girlfriends" - and of course if a boy has a boyfriend then he's a whoopsie - and so on.)

There are a couple of important points that are worth making about friendship or brotherly love as a masculine phenomenon. The first regards its military role, and it is this. I have been told by those who have experienced it (and I have read it as well) that in the Army, in a war, when one engages with the Enemy, one immediately forgets politics and religion, one forgets wives and sweethearts. One even forgets one's country. One even forgets oneself. When the Enemy attacks, a man fights back not to defend anything else, or even himself, but to defend the man next to him; and he will perform the most phenomenal acts of bravery purely for the sake of his comrades in arms. He might not die for his country, or even his wife and family. But an officer will die for his men, and a man will die for his mates. And greater love hath no man.

The other point, which follows from the military aspect of "brotherhood", is that friendship has provided the key theme of the greatest works of art our species has ever produced. The oldest story in the world is that of Gilgamesh and Enkidu. (See the pic at the beginning of this post.) The first and greatest work of actual literature in the western canon, twenty-seven centuries old and still a damn good read, is a work that we nowadays call The Iliad but which the ancients would have thought of as the Menin or The Rage of Achilles. Contrary to modern popular belief, that poem is not really about the Siege of Troy (or 'Ilium'), but about the emotional life of its greatest hero, who is Achilles. It is about how Achilles, driven by lust and pride, leaves the Trojan War, deserting the Achaeans (or 'Greeks', as they're nowadays known), and about how the death of his best friend Patroclus convinces him to return to the field of battle. (And no, I don't have much time for the fairly distasteful fifth-century Athenian re-interpretations of the poem, with which we are still very much lumbered to this day - see here, for example - that make out that Patroclus was really Achilles' boyfriend/"young friend" and that the whole thing is really about sublimated homosexuality. There's certainly no evidence for that sort of interpretation in Homer.)

If you want to understand the true meaning of friendship then you could do worse than to start with Homer, go on to Beowulf, and then just work your way on through all the great epics of our culture. (And have a look at the Holy Bible as well, why not! It's all good stuff.) But you'd do better simply to have friends. Friends are those who are your social, intellectual and physical equals, whose company you enjoy, whether physically or intellectually (through truly the two cannot be separated), but purely for it's own sake - and whom you can trust. There is nothing more (nor less) to it than that.

The most important point that has to be made about friendship, however, is that true friendship, (or true "brotherly" love) is complex. It is not purely physical but has to have an element of the first sort of love (that is to say charity, or intellectual love) "inside" it, so to speak. Charity, in fact, is the sine qua non not just of friendship but of all the other sorts of love as well. As St. Paul puts it, even acts such as giving up one's life for others or giving money to the poor are morally worthless unless they are done out of charity. In reality, I like to think that they are, even though of a necessity it is a charity that is normally "mixed in" with the other emotions.

In fact charity forms the basis of friendship just as friendship forms the basis of the other two loves. And how this works we shall I hope see in due course.

The Four Loves: 1. Charity

OK then! Let's start simple and get complicated!

Charity (caritas in Latin, agape in Greek) is the highest, purest, simplest and oldest form of love. It is older than the human race. It is as old as the Universe itself. It is also, arguably, the reason why the Universe was created in the first place. It has nothing to do with emotion - or, to be more accurate, it can exist without emotion. Is a product of pure reason and pure will. It is the love that the Angels have for each other, for their Creator, and for us human beings. It is the love that the Creator Himself has for all created things. And it is the highest duty that we human beings can ever possibly have.

To be honest, the classic text on charity is still St. Paul's, so having made my preliminary remarks I think I'll leave the rest of this post to him.

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing. Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away. For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away. When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.

[I Corintians 13]

The other virtues will one day pass away. So will the other sorts of love. But the pure love of the mind, the love of reason and will, will endure forever.

Friday 9 January 2009

"Boylove": A Clarification

Actually I'm not sure I can clarify this, because I'm not entirely sure what the word means in the first place. There are however two quite distinct possibilities.

The first (and, I'm sorry to say, the most likely) is that 'boylove' is a straightforward euphemism for 'pederasty'. 'Pederasty' is defined, at least by my dictionary, as the act of anal intercourse between a man and a boy. In other words 'boylove' is just a nice word for "going-all-the-way" gay sex with boys. The English word 'pederasty' comes from the Greek word paiderastia, meaning literally just that. Pais is 'boy' - in Athens the passive eromenos - and the erastes was the older male gay lover. And no, I have very little time for those who want to redefine 'boy' as meaning 'adolescent male' or even 'young man' (as indeed puer means in Latin). You only have to look at the Athenians' own depictions of classical pederasty to know that however old these lads may have been chronologically (e.g. possibly as old as fourteen) they still had prepubescent bodies, with no hair on their undeveloped 'nads, and no doubt they had lovely singing voices as well.

This pederastic "love" was specifically "sexual". It was eros. But there is of course the second, slightly more humane meaning of 'boylove', which would be something along the lines of 'love for boys, not necessarily sexual in nature'. Personally I would add to that what is to me quite an obvious rider, which is that since love precludes sexual abuse then true love of boys cannot be sexual - or at least not deliberately. (And I mean to come back to that last point later.) For the truth is that for the Ancient Greeks there were at least four different sorts of love. Everyone is familiar with "sexual" love, and everyone has heard of "Platonic" love (which for some reason always puts me in mind of old queens and fag hags). But when it came to love in the ancient world there was far more to it even than this.

To my mind the best modern work on love, or at any rate the most user friendly, is C S Lewis's little book The Four Loves. It is short and (of course!) highly readable. It is not perfect, by any stretch of the imagination. But Lewis does himself great credit not just by successfully identifying that there are four "loves", but also in being able to say what they are. He falls down though in three important ways.

The four loves, to use Lewis's (Greek) terminology, are sexual love (eros), affection (storge), friendship (philia) and charity (agape). So far so good! Lewis's first problem though is that he doesn't seem to realise that all four are in fact merely expressions of the same phenomenon. (I got into trouble with the Dancing King earlier this evening - or yesterday evening, even - for writing that it doesn't matter so much in what way love is expressed - which ended up almost looking as if I was endorsing saucy shenanigans providing that they're done "for love", which was precisely the opposite of what I meant.) His second failing, interestingly, is that he doesn't put them in any particular order: he doesn't distinguish between the higher and the lower loves, and more importantly he doesn't realise that there is a spectrum between fullness (i.e. with eros at one end) and purity (i.e. with agape at the other). Most irritatingly of all, his definitions of the four loves, and a lot of the examples he gives, are hopelessly wide of the mark.

Well, Lewis started writing an essay about love and ended writing a book. And obviously love is a subject that has kept religion, literature, art and (obviously) music going since the Dawn of Man. But to give some very brief examples...

The "school" of love, by which I mean the environment in which man learns to love (and if he doesn't learn it there then he may never learn it) is the family. The first love a boy learns is brotherly love, which is the love of friendship. It is the simplest and purest sort of love he can learn. Slightly more complicated is the love he then learns for his parents, which is the love of affection. And finally, when he reaches full maturity, he will learn the love of marriage. (Once again, I'd make the point that he should. Clearly though, many men never do.) Here then we have fraternal love, filial and/or parental love, and finally marital love. This is important to bear in mind because once these loves are established in their proper, family contexts then the true meaning of a man's love for a boy (and, if it is true love, vice versa) ought to become clear. This love is the love of a parent for its offspring. It is the love of the child for its mother and father. (It is "storgic".) It is not the love of husband and wife for one another. (It is not erotic.)

Obviously I'm going to have to come back to this, because so far it can't have made a great deal of sense. But I would finally (for tonight) point out one important point about the Greek word storge ('affection'), which is that it doesn't just mean affection of parents for children (which is essentially the same as the affection that children themselves have for small furry animals). It can also have a "sexual" meaning, and the close connexion between affection and sexuality is amply borne out both in literature and through a bit of basic amateur pop psychology. That does not, however, mean that the two sorts of love are the same, because they are not.

But more of this some other time!

Thursday 8 January 2009

The Hooded Man

Normally when I blog my blog entries almost write themselves. And so blogging about boys is easy, considering how much I think about them all the time.

At the same time, of course, it has to be said, I do start a lot of blogs which then peter out because my interest in a subject gets "blogged out". Once I've got my thoughts on a subject I'm interested in out onto the Internet I sort of "get it out of my system". And then I think of a neat title for a new blog, a new web-ID to go with it, and I'm off.

This evening I took a small trip back to my own childhood, watching the DVDs I got for Xmas (actually my own present to myself - Heh, heh, heh!) of Richard Carpenter's superb TV-version of Robin Hood from the 1980s. At this point, I am of course assuming that Americans have a vague idea who Robin Hood was, or at least what and who he was supposed to have been. (I.e. a Saxon outlaw living in the forest with a band of "merry men", robbing from the rich, e.g. especially the Norman invaders, and giving to the poor, e.g. other Saxons.) What he is, to this day, is of course the great hero and mystery figure that every boy has been at some point before he reached adolescence. He's part of our culture, he's part of our mystical and legendary inheritance, and he's part our childhood.

Carpenter, in his version, called Robin of Sherwood, did various interesting things with the legend. To my knowledge, indeed, these have all impacted to greater or lesser extent on how other filmmakers have approached the character and his story. It's now de rigueur, for example, to have an "ethnic" character in Robin Hood's band - although whereas nowadays this is in order to fulfil various politically correct ethnic quotas, in Robin of Sherwood it was actually quite unpremeditated and in fact at the time quite natural and logical (as is explained by in the commentaries on my DVDs).

Of the two most important "innovations" on Carpenter's part though, one was the element of magic. Almost as if using up various leftover MacGuffins from the King Arthur legends (including magic swords and magic arrows, with Herne the Hunter standing in for Merlin the Magician, and indeed, in a later episode, the Round Table itself), the sword and sorcery stuff gives the 1980s Robin a mystical kick that very few others can have had.

The other, conversely, is a deliberately gritty realism. No doubt this was partly a function of early budget restrictions, and partly indeed a function of fashionable modernist naturalism. But what it did, more importantly, was it grounded the magical elements of the story in what was credible and recognisable (always essential in fantasy!). At the same time it also the show a sense of historical authenticity (e.g. with a lot of filming taking place in authentic medieval buildings, not to mention, er, authentic English forests) and of contemporary relevance (e.g. especially Ray Winstone's portrayal of Will Scarlett as a sort of medieval football hooligan).

For me, most importantly of all, it wired directly into my preteen heart and soul, and in an extraordinary way it never really left. Every few years I still find the old Sherwood Forest whimsy comes upon me - and then it's off to the thirteenth century, Nottingham, the greenwood... and the Hooded Man!

Wednesday 7 January 2009

Some "Alternative" Scouts

Well, there are no pics this evening, due to some "internal error" at Blogger. Apropos of Scouting (i.e. in my last post), tonight's vid is of some "alternative" Scouts. It's from the superb paedophile film Der Unhold. If you like this sort of thing, there's plenty more were it came from.

Tintin's not gay

Oh, fuck off, Parris, you odious old queen!

Matthew Parris used to go cruising on Clapham Common near where I live. For all I know he still does, though I've never actually seen him there. In any case though, it's an almost unbearably sad, lonely sort of passtime - lonely in the sense of being surrounded by lots of other desperate, dysfunctional men of all ages, wondering around in circles, never talking to each other or having meaningful human contact. But then meaning is something that Matthew Parris clearly has little familiarity with.

Like the vast majority of gays, Parris is of course a closet pedo. Yes, he'd be happier with himself (and a less unbearable person to others) if he admitted it, if only to himself. As it is, of course, he can't (because paedophilia is of course "wrong" - and so not like homosexuality at all!). What we have to put up with, therefore, are things like this in this morning's Times (Yes, them again!), in which he tries to "out" the famous Belgian children's strip-cartoon character Tintin as gay. As usual, this is what psychologists call projection: not so much "takes one to know one" as "takes one to wish the other one was one - even if he's not". In fact I vaguely wonder if Matthew Parris the hack was quietly taken with Matthew Parish the actor, who played the boy-reporter on stage in the acclaimed theatre-version at the Young Vic.

As it happens, of course, Tintin is not gay. He's just a boy. And in the very last Tintin book, Tintin and Alph-Art, he actually has a girlfriend, in the shape of one Martine Vandezande. (Personally I'd have warned him off, but what can you do?) Parris, unfortunately, who doesn't know much about Tintin or human nature (especially his own), clearly wants to tell us about all his secret sexual fantasies about Tintin. But he can't (as I said), and so he has to let "it" leak out in this sort of thing, and he dresses it up in a joke article with lots of amused irony. At least, one assumes he's joking. (Rupert Murdoch's other British daily - which is also the country's most popular straight porno mag - gives Parris a little, er, puff, which is not a far cry from their "Ten Ways to Spot a Poof"-genre of earlier years.)

The sad thing is that taken together the Tintin books make up a hugely important part of European boy-culture. Partly this is because they're the sorts of books that every boy should be allowed to read and enjoy. But partly also because of their huge moral seriousness. The best story, Tintin in Tibet, is quite explicitly a love story between a boy and younger boy (between Tintin and Chang - named after the author's real-life best friend). But it is also about love between a boy and a man (Tintin and Captain Haddock). It is this sort of love that "gays", with their Wagnerian renunciation of true love, cannot really understand.

There is something deeply revealing about the homosexual condition (or perhaps I should say the "gay-pedo-in-denial"-condition), with all its hypocrisies and neuroses, that Matthew Parris cannot cope with this sort of thing. Yes, it's sad the Parris knows nothing about the Roman Catholic Scout movement in Belgium (and later France), which really laid the imaginative "ground" that Tintin as a character grew out of. In fact he knows nothing about religion (being an atheist) and nothing about Scouting - apart from the usual gay innuendo, which they of course always hotly deny is paedophilic.

In reality the Tintin books are a wonderful and beautiful expression of the nobility of Scouting, of friendship and intelligence and hard work, and most of all of boyhood itself. Men who liked boys once understood all of these things implicitly. Matthew Parris, sad to say, will probably never understand them.

[No pics for this, yet! Apparently there's an "internal error" going on! Finally! Only twenty-four hours late!]

Tuesday 6 January 2009

Robin Schlotz

The Queen of the Night's famous aria from Mozart's Die Zauberflöte is one of the most engaging pieces in the whole of classical opera. It's also one of the most difficult to sing, and normally only professional (lady) divas at the height of their careers even attempt it.

This wonderful little German lad has it off more or less pat.

OK, he's not perfect. But if he hits those high notes and you don't have chills running up and down your back, well, let's face it, this blog ain't really for you.

The Pedo Terrorists (and if you believe that you'll believe anything)

How bloody silly can you get? When the story of al-Qa'eda working with paedophiles on the Internet was first "leaked" to The Times last year I was tempted scoff, except that it seemed so ludicrous, and so obviously a piece of Government propaganda that I didn't even bother. I mean, after all, who in his right mind would believe this sort of rubbish?

Well, the Times report was actually put together by four different people, which rather makes one imagine they came up with late one night in the pub. The alternative possibility, which is more sinister, is that this was a genuine kite the Times was trying to fly. On whose behalf? Take a wild guess! (The [London] Times, for those that don't know, is a British 'paper that always supports the Government of the day, irrespective of whichever political party is in power.) Hilariously (or disturbingly) it's now been picked up by another of the Labour Government's poodles The Daily Mirror.

One of the team behind the Times piece was Richard Owen. One of the two names at the top of the Mirror report is Nick Owen. Coincidence? It's possible, I suppose. But is it more likely than that there are Muslim terrorists out there in cyber-space trying to avoid the attention of the online fuzz... by pretending to be paedophiles?

The funniest thing about the Times report is the it specifically excludes the possibility that they're not pretending. The Italian "anti-terror magistrate" Stefano Dambruoso has the money-quote.
I would exclude the idea that they have paedophile tendencies. The most you can attribute to them is a relationship between men and women different from that of us Westerners, in which — as in many parts of the Arab world — wives are often very young girls of 11, 12 or 13 who because of family negotiations are given in marriage to men much older than them. But that is not paedophilia, it is a question of Arab culture.
Riiight!

Can we can back to you on that one?

Monday 5 January 2009

Return to Innocence

Now here's a movie I actually have seen. Return to Innocence is a good film in that it bravely makes a procative but important point. It's disappointing though in that it then doesn't really try to answer its own rhetorical question. And what it does instead is at time toe-curlingly embarrassing.

The point, which is perhaps rather too obvious even before the story has really got started, is that it's the men who care about boys the most who are most likely to be unjustly fingered for child molestation - with all the grisly and unnecessary penalties that go with it. After all, you'll probably not be done if you're genuinely innocent - at least not in this country - but you'll almost certainly lose your job and your reputation, quite possibly your marriage as well, and you'll never work with kids again.

All perfectly true, and indeed a dilemma that makes for a good drama! Celeb paediatrician and not-gay married man and father of boys gets stung by his yummy thirteen-year-old boy-patient. Unfortunately what we're then treated to is a quite straightforward courtroom-drama runaround. In true Perry Mason-style the dénouement hinges on a piece of evidence that only comes to light right at the last moment. And in fact we never actually find out what really happened. (The boy had a man's love-juice in his drawers - but we're not told whose or how it go there.)

What adds insult though is that the filmmakers here aren't quite sure what the difference is between a film that is "edgy" and taboo-busting, and one that is just vaguely distasteful. The attempts to be "frank" and "honest" and "graphic" in some of the descriptions of what did go on this boy's bedroom(s) are so misguided that at times they border on the comical. In fact the editing at the points where the actors start discussing "masturbation" and "semen" and "fellatio", and so on, is so hamfisted that the audience is left in little doubt that no children were actually present when these parts of the drama were being filmed. (Think of cutting in the Little Britain sketches of the Tory MP confessing all in front of the Press and his family.)

In much the same way, there's one bit when the hero of the story is arrested at his home in the company of his buck-naked little boy, who's just been skinning dipping and who promptly drops his towel in front of the politceman. Is this even supposed to be funny? If not, then why not? What might have made it unintentionally funny is that the lad in question is quite clearly wearing a rather fetching pair of Fruit of the Looms. When one then reflects that the director seems to have been so paranoid about being fingered for kiddie-fiddling himself that he even left in an obvious goof to let his audience know that no children were enjoyed harmed during the making of this picture, then suddenly the film starts to seem a good deal less bold and groundbreaking.

The attempt to make the hero into a "liberal" paediatrician is morally defensible but dramatically misguided. How is any normal audience supposed to warm to this man if even I didn't? And we're not talking about some sort of lovable curmudgeon with a heart of gold played by Sir Ben Kingsley, simply because the acting in this film is nowhere near good enough to pull off that sort of thing. The boy in question is certainly attractive, but even he's not really believable. (OK, I don't actually know that many sexually abused adolescent boys. But how difficult can it be for a boy simply to play... a boy?) And the ending is overly soppy and sentimental.

Yes, the "good pedo" is a character with a lot of dramatic potential. And in fact there are a couple of wonderful films such as The Man without a Face and The Ogre (both made before this film and at about the same time as each other) that do feature pedos (in all but name) who are nevertheless sympathetic and even heroic. Return to Innocence, for all its slighlty mealy-mouthed little sideline defences of intergenerational "sexual relationships" and even "boylove" doesn't even go that far. (That's bl for "research" purposes, by the way - and apparently that works for scoping out kiddie porn as well, provided the local fuzz are playing ball.)

This is film that could have been braver - but also it could have been just plain better.