On the other hand, Hulu has Beach Rats (2017) that I just watched,

Which is a perfect story/movie about a gay young man (with a girl friend) coming of age (having sex with older men) among straight buddies who don't know he's gay.  The only way you can tell that it has a female director (Eliza Hittman) and camerawoman is these ladies' obvious professional obsession with the young male form--and the overall conciseness and neatness, and brisk, narrative flow of the movie.  So, maybe...Well, I've made a point--no doubt a bigoted and illogical point--of never watching movies about gay men made by women ("Nicole Noelle"), or, for that matter, of watching gay porn made by drag queens (Chi Chi LaRue)--and of boycotting, with rude and villefying terms of rejection, male homosexual pornography written by Lesbians (Mary Renault and Marguerite Yourcénar).  Could my proud tower be crumbling?  ¡Oh nooooo!

Anyway, it's a very good movie, both in itself and as an accurate and timely docudrama of where and to what shameless complexity the Gay Rights Revolution (completely won and accomplished, and having swept all before it) has brought us.  My lofty, misogynist phallocentrism may be getting vaginal smutches on it, but I'm very proud indeed of the society which has come so far in its civilized, tolerant inclusiveness, and which is now, happily, a home and a haven to strong and beautiful men, young and old, whom a few decades ago it would have execrated as loathsome outcasts and pariahs.

Netflix is trying to kill me, or to turn me into a mass murderer....

The movies that Netflix  says are right up my alley--"Just for you, Anatole"--are, maybe, what I'd watch if I were going to rent a hotel room in Las Vegas and start shooting people in the parking lot beneath my window (my reason being: If this is what human beings are like ¿Why not?).  I can't imagine how Netflix has formed this abysmal opinion of my taste in cinema.  Today, for example, somehow--I must have misclicked--I found myself past the opening credits and into the most irritating, nauseous chick-flick ever made: Abzurdah.  Jesus Christ.  Like I, happy, dismissive misogynist that I am (I, who threw popcorn at the screen when duped into viewing Adèle H.), am going to care about another dip-shit female's descent through obsessive stalking into abject anorexia?!?!  Are they trying to punish me?  Why would they suppose that I, who've watched all the Kurosawa movies they have in stock, would want to watch utterly vapid movies with perfectly insipid female protagonists?

I am old. Having observed in my youth the dire, demeaning and ridiculous consequence to those who persist in old age in pursuing the pleasures of the flesh, I have, like the poet Horace, renounced having sex since I was 50 years old (now a quarter century ago); giving thanks for my deliverance from a cruel and capricious master (Eros)....

Still, though of course it's nobody else's business, I do try to ejaculate once a day, since I have heard and read in several reliable sources that this is necessary, or at least advisable, for good health in men of all ages--and I thank the gods that the proliferation and refinement of visual and written pornography over the last twenty years has enabled me easily, and with very little effort, to sustain my healthful regimen. And so, as men do when their basic needs and wants are well provided for, I have (after thoughtful and grateful genuflections to Filesmonster.com, and to Asstr.org) got on with my life, and pretty much forgot about it (sex, I mean).

Lately, however, as I have been adjusting and regulating my intake of Adderrol (delicious amphetamines to which I've been addicted now for some dozen years), basically by not taking my daily time-released capsules over the weekend, and sleeping straight through from Friday night to this morning, rising only to defecate, urinate and drink tea--for the first time in, I think, decades--dreams of delightful homo-sex have come to me unprompted and impromptu (like nothing I've seen or read about), and totally unlike one another, yesterday and today, sometime between four and five O 'Clock in the morning.  Yesterday's dream is already a little dim and fuzzy; but it seems to me it involved a high school baseball team.  Today's dream, still vivid in my memory, was of a man, still much my junior at forty-five or fifty years of age, with a sparkling wit, and a virile member the size of my forearm, which I successfully and repeatedly fellated.  It was like pornography, only better.

Gays, Bis, L's?--let's have a little talk

"Tock," as we pronounce it in the Far West.  While we Gay Men are grateful to our relationship-obsessed Sapphic Sisters (Lesbians)--without whose insistence on "same-sex marriage" (which the lumpen heterosexual bourgeoisie understood, even though we gay men didn't quite: We went along with it, all the same, and pretended it was our idea too) there would never have been a successful Gay Rights campaign--it must be said, in all honesty, that Gay Men and Lesbians are absolutely nothing alike. For one thing, however successful "same-sex rights" has been (Vs. "gay rights"), there are about a third as many Lesbians as there are male homosexuals.  Hearing this makes some Lesbians angry--the ones who feel they must be equal to men in everything, even in numbers.

But come now, Ladies.  The Revolution is over, and we've won--we've both won; we've all won.  It's time to loosen up  a little on those ties, real and imaginary, that bind us.  We neither of us, for example, have any connection, physical, emotional or ideological, to (delusional) "trans-people": Let them go--under the bus, or the train, if that's where they're headed.

And for pity's sake, now that you've got your precious state-sanctioned, same-sex "marriage," could you just stop with your absurd/hysterical and physiologically impossible demands for female equivalents of such peculiar features of male sexuality as ejaculation and the prostate gland?  If you "squirt," you're pissing; if you have an extra-clitoral "orgasm," you're being ridiculous.

Magic?

What we don't believe in, of course.  But which we know (somehow) would operate by rules and laws of its own, if it did exist, just like the empirical, number-based science of our own, existent universe.  Therefore, we can conclude--and do conclude--that a plurality of universes is conceivable, and that Magic itself is thus barely and provisionally possible.  That is the substratum of disbelief which, deliberately suspended, makes it possible for us in good conscience to enjoy A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Fairy Queen--and which enjoyment it annoys us to defend, as our Gallic cousins (the Frenchmen among us) are always requiring us to do.

The Lord of the Rings, books and movies...

I've just seen all three movies of the Peter Jackson trilogy on YouTube, binge-watching, comparing it with--and judging it against--the printed works of J.R.R. Tolkien, which, thanks to constant re-reading (maybe, at a guess, 50 times) throughout my life, I bear with me in memory and can summon for perusal within myself virtually verbatim--even Tolkien's dreadful, flat, mediocre poetry.  Because, apart from the poetry, I have never enjoyed reading, and re-reading, anything so much (except, well, let us not be forgetting Voltaire, Racine, Pope, T.L. Peacock, E.F. Benson, and P.G. Wodehouse). I think we must agree, Jackson & Co. did catch the heroic (though, as Ebert said, ultimately silly) spirit of The Lord of the Rings, although of course he did what he could to spoil it (as modern feminist mores require) by over-emphasizing the female characters--particularly Arwen.  I am reminded of the ladies that I have known who frankly, indeed quite obscenely, have not given a rusty fuck that Shakespeare's female characters were all originally played by boys, and have plainly said that the very idea of such "authenticity" infuriates them.  And having seen Dame Judith Anderson play Medea and Lady MacBeth, I must admit that they have reason, or at least maenadism, on their side.

Yet there are those, male and female, but mostly the latter--among whom, notably, my friend Kristen--who find nothing of value, interest or charm in TLOTR, not even in the enchanting first chapter (the Birthday Party) of The Fellowship of the Ring.  Kristen says simply, "I don't like those guys," and will say no more.  Jeez.  I suspect that her disaffection is based on (1) The utter maleness of the author's point de vue (I mean, the man wrote it for his grown sons), and on (2) the centuries (nay, millennia) old perspective of scholastic culture which lies 7/8ths submerged within it, but perceptible in the pedantically perfect correctness of diction, style, grammar, spelling and vocabulary which glitters razor-sharp and treacherously barbed,   scarcely concealed beneath the author's wizard's cloak of colloquial affability. In a word, I suspect that Kristen hates Tolkien for precisely the same reasons that I love him--and that I fiercely hate and utterly despise, for that matter,  J.K. Rowling.  The prose stylist, I mean of course, not the person.  But still.  One thing women are incapable of understanding, and should just leave the hell alone, is Magic.

Latin Language Spoken Example 4 - Octavian

The people, producers and actors, who made this have my whole-hearted gratitude and admiration.  The young (18 years old he was then, as I recall) Octavian is just spectacular, and very much as he must in fact have been--I love the way he pronounces "etiam" and "servus."  In the comments I notice that this very plausible reconstruction of the phonetics of classical Latin hurts modern Italian ears (to whom, not unnaturally, it sounds "Germanic") and that others say it's Spanish-accented; even as, according to my my own best efforts at re-creating it, it probably sort-of was.

Up betimes...

Today I must meet with the ministers of state who dispense the peculiar terms under which I inhabit my spare but well air-conditioned apartmentino amidst the splendors of Waikiki.  So carefully I have managed my sleeping hours for a couple of days, and painstakingly allotted myself just the right full amount of amphetamines and lovely lovely full pint of second flush Ruby Darjeeling tea, that I face today's exigeant agenda undaunted; planning to be back here well in time (1:00 p.m.) to admit my maid, the incomprehensible Estrella (who, despite her name, speaks no Spanish) to do my dishes and wash my bedding.  Ha ha.

So I'm lucky--So?

So Hay Golpes en la Vida, tan fuertes ya no sé, but not just now, not to me.

The point you have to grasp, immediately the prodigality of the Big Bang penetrates your consciousness, is that everything subsequent to the instant of the Big Bang has been Entropic:

Stars, galaxies, quasars, black holes--everything represents a slowing down, a cooling, a progression from greater to lesser forms of energy.  I think it important to realize that even the laying down of strata of limestone is entropic; that every one of the tiny animals, whose compacted exoskeletons make up the mass of limestone, was once a living creature, with as much right to live and enjoy life, while alive, as any other creature.

--dont chacun a été dans son temps un être vivant.

Mozart, Fugue in C Minor for two pianos, K. 426 (1783)

Hideous! Fiendishly ugly! Max Reger--nay, Arnold Schoenberg himself--never wrote anything more brutally unmusical.  I don't think this can be taken as anything but a kind of joke on Mozart's part: a sort of Musikalischer Spass parody of the Art of the Fugue; rather as if Mozart were contemplating the unmusical possibilities of the Bachian counterpoint that he had only recently come to be acquainted with.

P.S.  Just listened to the (probably original) arrangement of this for string orchestra, which is much easier on the ears.  Also, playing for myself, on my little electric piano, the Bach-like fugue (K. 394), which has its deliberate uglinesses, but does not entirely lack charm, shows how this could lead to some of the more wonderful contrapuntal passages of Mozart's late-late manner--I am thinking, of course, of the last movement of the (rather neglected) viola quintet in E Flat, K. 614.

Arrival of the Queen of Sheba

These gentlemen do a bang-up job of rendering a joyous and splendid  version of a quintessentially joyous and campy piece of music--the best, for sprightly, but not rushed, tempo, and perfectly articulated parts, that I could find on YouTube.  I could find nothing in history, or on the Internet, however, to indicate how the original Queen of Sheba was supposed to "arrive," or what she looked like in so doing, at the beginning of the third and last act of Handel's oratorio Solomon.  As I remember from my youthful (King James') Bible studies, the Queen of Sheba described herself as "dark, but comely," as, I think we can all agree, this mannequin-lady is.  And, my notion is, that, as a queen arriving (in what is basically a static baroque opera), she needs to have feathers (nodding plumes) on her head, and be wearing a hoop skirt (and supplemental draperies), and, in general, be moving like a tall ship under full sail, gliding over rolling billows--which I'm sure this handsome Negress could well portray.

It's not as if I had too many friends and could afford to lose some,

But I discovered a few months ago that a woman--Irish Catholic--with whom I've been mostly friends since the late 60's believes in the existence of the Devil (or won't say that she disbelieves in Him).  And she bade me find out what Pope Francis says (and has been saying all his life) about Satan.  And I did, and was appalled, astonished and sickened.  So, after an increasingly acrimonious exchange between me and my former friend, today, I sent her this:

"Rose,

You're right.  Instead of arguing and cajoling--though I wasn't really sure what your beliefs might be (and I didn't know until, at your instance, I researched the matter, what Pope Francis believes, and I thought I should tell you what I'd discovered)--I should have obeyed my inner voice, which told me: Anybody who believes in the existence of the Devil (and that's 57% of Americans) is an idiot.  In fact, anybody who doubts that the Devil does not exist is an idiot.  And there's no point in trying to reason with idiots.  The analogy that occurs to me (of trying to reason with those incapable of reason) is wrestling with swine: they think you're being mean to them or trying to fuck them.  Go in peace.

Anatole"

Ah, Superbowl!

I'll have to back up a bit for this...Nothing, I think, could be more uninteresting than a sport or game played by those who have made playing it their profession.  In this I am happy to contradict the experience and the enthusiastic opinion of professional sports fans, and perhaps of most of humanity, of the past three millennia.  But, stubbornly, I repeat, nothing is more intrinsically and utterly boring than a kids' game played by bought and paid-for professionals--not chariot racing, not hockey, not soccer, not basketball, not baseball, and especially not football or rugby.  I do not know, and I do not care, which teams of the National Football League are playing against one another in today's "Superbowl"--and for the matter of that, I don't rightly know what the "National Football League" is.  And I don't want to know. 

If there is one idea, one concept, that a liberal societal acceptance of the standard normal deviance of male homosexuality has brought with it, and which now, inexorably, permeates and informs Occidental Civilization, it is:

Despite what men suppose about themselves, that: no one (neither heterosexual, nor homosexual, nor bisexual) is truly responsible or accountable for his own actions, desires or aversions.  The fictive Little Man (homunculus) inside our brains, usually envisioned as sitting just behind our eyes, who claims, or whom we suppose, to control us, does not exist:  We will do what we will do, love what we love, and hate what we hate, regardless of whether we deem we ought, or ought not, to do so.  In ceasing to make, or in forebearing from trying to make, male homosexuality and heterosexuality a matter of conscious choice or volition, we, the Societies of the West, have, in the view of the Third World societies of Asia, Central Asia (and Russia), and Africa, cut ourselves off from conscience itself, and, hence, from all morality.  Those primitive cultures, you see, even as we used to do--and as hoary, conservative social institutions among us still do in places where the Enlightenment has not penetrated, such as Red States, and in places like Italy, where the Whore of Rome still holds sway--still believe in the power of the Little Man inside each of us to mold us, control us, and to hold before us the image of God (as revealed in their various "holy" scriptures) which they believe that we ought always to venerate. And so the Death of God, proclaimed so despairingly 150 years ago by Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, has culminated in the Death of God Within Us. And perhaps, with the excision of that moribund engrafted parasite, we shall witness the genesis of genuine universal consciousness (of which, of course, the free Internet is the prototype).

Note that I am careful to say nothing in this regard about women or Lesbians--because, for all I know, they commonly do not have, and never have had, fictive Little Men behind their eyes inside their brains. In fact, I very much doubt that they do or ever did.  And it is not to be forgotten that women and Lesbians had absolutely nothing to do with the creation of the free Internet, and that they are still maladroit and awkward users of it, and seem scarcely even yet to understand what it is.

Anent Black History

The usual, correct, meaning of History is a narrative of events that is recorded, not "made" or "created."  If that means that Black History can't be written, because there's nothing to record--So be it. Certainly, it is largely true of the history of Black people in sub-Saharan Africa, who, before they learned to write of such things, experienced wave after wave of tribal expansion, enslavement, pestilence, famine and mass murder; without ever, so far as is known, having developed a song-form, or a verse-form, and without having learned to dress stone, breed animals selectively, or canvass votes for an election. 

The same might be said of Blacks in Europe and the Americas--were it not for jazz and the genial exceptions of Gottschalk and Scott Joplin and, I think, Duke Ellington, whose 'rags' and whose 'Deep Purple' I passionately admire.

What is imputed, by those who so ingenuously propose that the history of negroes be written  or recorded by the same persons who make or create it, is that there can be no deliberate marshalling of facts in an objective narrative of events in any history--therefore, one might as well begin, and end, with totally biased and vainglorious bombast, designed to impress, exalt, and/or execrate, without thought or consideration given for the persuasions of reason or rational discourse. Everything must bleat or howl or whimper like the mindless orations of Martin Luther King--and unlike, that is to say, the envenomed, calculated polemics of Louis Farrakhan, which are full of bitter truth and vitriolic wisdom, the meaning of which, if you listen close, is murder to the state. Why ever did Jedgar Hoover ignore Farrakhan and concentrate his malice on poor, stupid, basically harmless Martin Luther King?  Personal envy, no doubt (for Hoover, despite being a monster of incredible evil, was not really very intelligent)--Hoover was envious, that is to say, probably, of the size of King's penis, and, in a general way, of King's sexual vitality.  It's fairly certain that King never understood Hoover's murderous animus towards him, and could not have understood it, even if Louis Farrakhan had explained it to him: "He thinks I'm a communist?"

A brief, shy, almost hesitant knocking at my door...when I opened it, the messenger was gone, and there, on my doorstep, wrapped with extraordinary, hermetic care:

300 grams (a little over a hundred dollars' worth) of Arya Ruby Darjeeling Tea--of which just now I am imbibing the magnificent, rich, heady and exquisite first cup.  Worth every penny.