¿Do you Remember the Days, long ago, when the Mob (or Organized Crime, or la Cosa Nostra) made what it honestly--well, sincerely-- believed to be Gay Porn Movies?

For a year or so in the late 60's or early 70's they began to make them--or to oversee the production of them--because (1) they wrongly believed that they, or their trusted minions and nephews and brothers-in-law, already actually knew how to make gay porn movies, and (2) they never doubted that they should at least be in the business of making them, because, as a matter of self-identification, that's what the Mob, even to itself, is all about: supplying cheapo, semi-legal, cheesy sleaze, wherever there's a market for it. Right? They were thus the first of the Established (Heterosexual) Powers to confront the fact that gay porn couldn't be manufactured and sold at the same old low-risk, high-profit margin that, say, the heterosexual "blue" movies shown in whore houses in Tijuana could.  It took them a while--about a year on the West Coast, and a little longer on the East Coast--to realize that they'd made a fundamental error of judgement. Gay porn, whatever it is,  is nothing like the straight porn they were used to and which they had helped to invent. So, pretty much, they gave up on it. And thank God for small blessings that they did: We saw no more anal sex scenes ending with shit and blood oozing from torn and ravaged butt-holes--which Mob bosses evidently sincerely believed to be the inevitable and natural concomitant of gay sex, and had thought that images of which would be an enticement, if anything, to those whom they considered, by definition, "fudge-packers" (the depressing heterosexual cutism for "shit-packers," i.e., male homosexuals).

Still, since the late 60's or early 70's (when the lid, so to speak, came off), and it somehow became obviously preposterous to treat more than a tenth of the population as criminals, for no better reason than that they insisted on having sex with one another, male-sex gay porn did not so much flourish as proliferate or explode. With the unintentional help of delusional feminists, such as Andrea Dworkin (shown above), who could see nothing in male homosexual pornography but their own slobberingly hysterical obsessions with heterosexual rape fantasies, gay porn at last became the focused visual objectification of men and of exclusively male sexuality (no women in sight) that its purchasers and admirers desired only that it should be.  But that said, it had no philosophy, no psychology, no raison d'être, and no extensive romantic history behind it comparable to the vast literature of heterosexuality.  Gay porn movies became simply a sequence of male-sex scenes, more or less adequately filmed (and in the 70's decidedly less than adequately), organized by tempo and number of participants rather like the scenes and acts of a baroque opera. Attempts at acting, interpretation, plot and (shudder) psychological motivation were tentative, few, and almost invariably ludicrous--with the single exception, that I recall, of a 1979  movie called The Idol, which managed, despite its blurry low-definition, to be an entertaining flick, with real characters and a plot, and at the same time to be, withal, good, objective male-sex pornography.  In the 80's and 90's film quality increased exponentially, and in the first decades of the Third Millennium, vestigial efforts at tradition-bound plotting and psychological typification were, mercifully, abandoned.

But then, last year, an Argentine director name of Mónaco brought out, through JackRabbit Releasing, a movie called Learning, in which:

"A deeply closeted, homeless, 20 year-old street urchin from a working class neighborhood in Buenos Aires, who's never had sex with another man, yet dreams about it all the time. Featuring gorgeous drone shots (I was wondering how they did it) of seedy ports, dangerous hookups, first-timer deep-gagging blowjobs, intense bareback fucking, nervous touching and groping, thigh-trembling oral cumshots...."

Like it is.  Like it really is.  No explanations necessary.

And then, this year, the same people give us Starving, nearly three hours long, and a fucking psycho/social/sexual cinematic masterpiece; with, if you're paying attention, a fascinatingly detailed plot.

How very interesting this is.  And still no girls.

So, let me just say that I don't really know very much about heterosexual pornography, but the little that I have seen strikes me as utterly distasteful.  It's not just the presence of girls and their gaping vah-jay-jays--though of course it is that.  Girls do ruin everything, but what makes heterosexual pornography unbearably unpleasant to me in particular is the tone of it--the sickening, tormented screeching, the horrific, wounded-sounding moaning.  And the men in it are really quite ugly. Besides all of which, heterosexual pornography (i.e., pornography with girls in it) in general seems to be some sort of grim, Ingmar Bergmanesque tragedy in which nobody smiles or laughs, or appears to be having a good time. Very like, if you'll forgive my saying so, heterosexuality itself.

L'Age d'Or, à Paris et à Londres

Curiously, this man, Dr. Samuel Jean Pozzi, known as 'Sam' to his friends in Paris (who must have pronounced it 'Samme'), was everything to the Belle Époque there that Jennie Gerome, Lady Randolph Churchill, was to that same glittering age in London:  The epitome of personal physical beauty (he gymmed), wit, charm, intelligence and good taste; who fucked everybody, apparently, that he wanted to fuck, with the unstinting approbation and approval of his many friends and acquaintances in Paris--just as the dazzling Lady Randolph did with the chosen ones of her lofty set in London.   The portrait of Dr. Pozzi ("chez lui"), painted in 1881 by John Singer Sargent, which now hangs in the Armand Hammer Collection in Los Angeles, was a sensation in its time, and still has the power to move--if one but notes the complementary teal-green of the subject's eyes and the splayed, elongated elegance of his hands and fingers...Bear in mind that the likeness of the visage and the presence of the subject was pronounced preternatural, more than photographic, indeed something more than life-like, by all who knew Dr. Pozzi, and saw this painting.  

'Tis pity that Sargent did not paint a portrait of Jennie like he did of her cousin-in-law by marriage, Consuelo Vanderbilt, Duchess of Marlborough--He might well have captured the pantherish aspect of her charm which was so often commented on by her contemporaries, but of which a little is evident even in her official portraits, like this one.  

In the news this morning the Brussells airport (3 bombs) subway (1 bomb) attack: 28 people dead...

So, were they aiming in a general sort of way at NATO?  Doesn't it have something of the odor of the CIA 1969, Piazza Fontana bombings in Milan?  

Then, half accidentally I discovered the existence of this book, written by a sort of Australian Jennie McCarthy, which tells children how lucky they'll be to contract measles.  Sic!

The comparison seems to be acquiring popularity: Hillary Clinton and Ilse Koch--I just saw it in 'Counterpunch' today

  It's inescapable once you see it.

So, does a 0.42% chance of Microcephaly for each Zika-infected pregnancy constitute a "Grave Risk"?

                                                                   Hell yes!

Of fucking course it does, considering the gravity, in terms of Human Misery, of any risk of microcephaly.  That small-seeming figure of 0.42% means that, out of every 10,000 pregnancies in Zika-infested areas, 42 are likely to be microcephalic.  That's a lot, and it's close to what we are now actually seeing (more than 5,000 cases of neonatal microcephaly, according to the International Business Times UK) in heavily infected areas of Brazil.  So, with Brazil poised on the brink of a reversion to 60's-style, Pinochet-like fascism (thanks to Dilma Rousseff's colossal ineptitude, which is perhaps only equalled by the magnitude of her corruption), where does opposition to abortion-in-case-of-foetal-malformation come from?  From the fucking goddamned Bishops of the Evil Roman Catholic Church!  Well, and doubtless from other various other corrupt troglodytic reactionary elements, of whom, throughout its history, Brazil has always had an embarrassing superfluity.  This lovely country, so rich in resources  and culture and a people more beautiful in their persons and more musical than any other in the world, is the prey of the most savagely benighted ruling class on the planet.  Bring back the Braganças!

Краснодарцы сожгли на Масленицу книги Генри Миллера

Who these fine, bare-chested young men are, are, self-described "Pagan anti-Librarians" from Krasnodar (Southern Russia) who conceive it to be their duty to burn offensive books (as anti-librarians are wont to do), in this case the collected novels of Henry Miller, which, they say, being just (heterosexual) filth from end to end, are uneditable.   Right on, O Revolutionary anti-Librarians! Might I suggest that their next bonfire include the works of William Burroughs, Anaïs Nin, and James Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake.  And maybe, while they're at it, Lady Chatterly's Lover and Lolita.  Nasty, heterosexual rubbish it all is, with no redeeming literary value, in my humble opinion. But I urge them, please, to except Howl from their holocausts, and Gilgamesh.  

At last, What we've always needed, but maybe didn't know we wanted: Steve Grand

A thoroughly gay, and absolutely (on the basis of his charm, talents and natural beauty) popular singer.  Funny how, in this madness of modern popular culture, Steve Grand can't quite be credited with having a beautiful voice or of possessing actual musical talent--hilarious (well, abysmally stupid) how those aspects of being a "vocal artist" are talked around--but his album/videos are "viral" and "number one on the charts."

And he has struck deep, deep into the heart of Pop Culture by issuing a Blog entitled "The Proof of Love is a thoroughly clean butt hole."

Getting Your Butt Pinched

The experience of American girls in Italy is that it is incessant and ubiquitous: anywhere and everywhere they go, throughout the long, roughly boot-shaped peninsula, some strange Italian man is going to grab a handful of one or another of their butt-cheeks and twist it. It's obviously meant, sort of, to be funny, and it's not funny--it hurts. It is something like--given the crowdedness of public spaces in Italy--the Italian version of cat-calling. The odd thing about it is that American girls seem to be the only victims of butt-pinching; Italian girls never get their butts pinched.  And why is that?--It's very simple: Italian girls wouldn't put up with it.

Fuck 'International Women's Day,' and, for the matter of that, Feminism.

If polite egalitarian humanism doesn't make you my moral and social equal, nothing will.  I can live with that.  Too bad if you can't.

Nancy "Don't touch the Dress!" Reagan is dead at 94

The smartest, by far, of Ronnie's wives, and the only one whose children were not fascist morons, she  was singularly lacking in cultural interests,

taste or character, or, let's face it, class, which deficiency was exemplified in her baffled frustration in trying to come to terms with Raïsa Gorbachev: "Who does this broad think she is?"

She got her nickname, "Don't touch the dress!" when as First Lady, not as wife of the governor of California--in 1982, as memory serves--she visited a day-care center in Los Angeles full of dirty, illegitimate little negro girls who ran up to the visiting white lady in the pretty new dress--and put their smudgy little hands all over it.

Abortion Right?

Surely, and exclusively that of the foetus bearer, until the third trimester.  After which, it's just a bit too much like the murder of an independent entity for my liking.  I certainly hope, however, that I'm not touching hands with the death-dealing Roman Catholic episcopacy of Brazil.

Remember King Idris (of Libya)?

Thanks to this man, the son of a goat-herder of Berber descent, who seized power, in what was acknowledged at the time (1969) to have been a "bloodless coup," we don't have to recall King Idris. But there are things about Libya under the leadership of his successor--a strange, visionary, exuberant, moralistic man--that we ought not to forget: That by the time (2011), when, targeting particularly the people and the infrastructure of Libya, NATO bombed Libya back to the Stone Age, it had the highest per capita income ($8315) of any nation in Africa.  Education was free and compulsory in primary through secondary school.  University education was free; as were housing, medical care and electricity. And, due to the largest irrigation system in the world,  called by its author, Gaddafi, the "Great Man-Made River," there was abundant fresh water, for all the citizens (and farmers!), such as there had never been before in the history of Libya (even when it was Carthage), and such as it will never be again--for the NATO bombers utterly, systematically destroyed it.  God fucking damn us and, most especially, Mme. Hillary Clinton.  May she fry in Hell forever!