Letter From An Alien: Nothing But Trouble

That’s another fine mess you got me into, Stanley! But it was worth it. Because: Male Impersonators,  Metrosexy and Anti Gay. ‘If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.’  -  Oscar Wilde

Letter From An Alien: A Dangerous Method

Some notes on seeing A Dangerous Method: I hate Keira Knight­ley usu­ally but I thought she acted quite well in this. I liked how her con­tor­tions of emo­tional pain were exactly the same expres­sions in tone, as when she was approach­ing orgasm due to the beat­ings from Jung. The por­trayal of female masochism as a result of [...]

Letter From An Alien: It’s Over, Roland

http://www.towleroad.com/2012/02/a-marine-comes-home.html This photo has gone viral recently. It was first posted on a ‘Gay Marines’ FB page and has since been sent round the internet, with the tagline ‘Gay Marine Comes Home’. You know me. I am an out and proud ‘homophile’. I am bordering on being a homo myself.  My blog archives are full [...]

Letter From An Alien: All You Need Is Me

I thought I had read all Mark Simpson’s blog, and heard all Morrissey’s songs, but this one passed me by till now. All You Need Is Me. http://www.marksimpson.com/blog/2007/10/17/all-you-need-is-me/ Apart from the fact Moz’s 2007 (?) performance on a chat show confirms my belief he has become a ‘psychotic lounge singer’ I couldn’t help but smile [...]

Say Something

  Your silence is deafening… Fade-out fading / fade-out Painful ordeal in which the loved being appears to withdraw from all contact, without such enigmatic indifference even being directed against the amorous subject or pronounced to the advantage of anyone else, world or rival. – Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse   h/t @fennerpearson    

The Closer I Get

Mark Simpson’s 1996 book, Its A Queer World, begins with an enigmatic dedication: ‘For M – (whether he wants it or not)’. The line, ‘whether he wants it or not’, reminds me of the 1994 Morrissey track – The More You Ignore Me, The Closer I Get. The particularly resonant part of the song is: I [...]

Letter From An Alien: Subject/Object/Narcissist?

In Barthes’ Lover’s Discourse he says that the ‘amorous subject’ suffers from an overload of empathy. In one sense it is the opposite of narcissism as the amorous subject focuses on the ‘loved object’ more than himself (Barthes always uses ‘he’ and ‘him’) but in another sense ‘love’ in the constructed sense of the word, [...]

Letters From An Alien -Facts and Fictions

‘In a work of nonfiction we almost never know the truth of what happened. The ideal of unmediated reporting is regularly achieved only in fiction, where the writer faithfully reports on what is going on in his imagination. When James reports in “The Golden Bowl” that the Prince and Charlotte are sleeping together, we have [...]

For The Love Of Men

Mr Simpson: You know, reading Male Impersonators made me quite angry.  http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/offer-listing/0304328081 It seemed very ‘fresh’ even in 2011. That’s to your credit- I mean History of Sexuality still seems ‘fresh’. But part of the reason both books do is that really, the ideas in them have not been taken on board or developed by [...]

After Adorno: Letter To Simpson

On March 18th, 1936, from London, England, Theodor Adorno, Marxist Cultural Philosopher wrote to his friend, Walter Benjamin, another Marxist Cultural Philosopher: ‘If today I proceed to convey to you some notes on your extraordinary study [‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’], I certainly have no intention of offering you criticism [...]