I’ve always liked Edmund White’s refusal to get with the contemporary gay hypocrisy program and shrewishly condemn promiscuity in the hope that this will deliver lots and lots of wedding presents.  In contrast to that pasteurised movie Milk, which lied shamelessly about gay men’s sex lives in the 1970s to make it easier to lie about their sex lives today, White, a veteran gay-libber who first started libbing around that time – in bath-houses, back rooms and along the piers – insists on telling it as it was, genital warts and all.

That said, I’ve frequently found his work to be insufferably gayist.  Edmund is a five star, old school gay chauvinist – so literally fucking proud to be gay and so obsessed with ‘coming out’ (and attacking those that refuse to join his party) that sometimes I just want to slap him.

Which is why I laughed out loud when frail old Gore Vidal, veteran dissenter from the orthodoxies of sexual identity politics, recently reached out of his wheelchair and did just that, repeatedly, in The London Times.  Asked about White’s fictionalised portrayal of Vidal’s letter-writing relationship with the Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh in the play ‘Terre Haute’, The Gore lambasted White for portraying him as ‘another queen’, only writing about how ‘being a fag is the greatest thing on Earth’ and – in a fantastic phrase that will stay with White forever, like an immortal red handprint on the side of his face  – ‘vulgar fag-ism’.

Probably it was the ‘vulgar’ part that stung White most (his prose, especially the earlier efforts, sometimes looks as if it’s been fisted by a thesaurus) and provoked the bitchy response in an interview in Salon this week (‘Edmund White comes out swinging’).  Ed describes Gore as a ‘nasty, awful man’, claims sorrowfully to have tried to help him in the past by inviting him to dinner to introduce him to ‘cute boys’, very kindly reminds us of his great age, the fact that he’s wheelchair-bound, his alcoholism, his loss a few years ago of his life-long companion, practically spelling it out for us in a campy stage whisper: Bitter. Old. Queen.

But apparently this isn’t enough.  He also tells us that Vidal is a ‘complete lunatic’ and that ’it doesn’t bother me what he says about me.’  Yes, dear, but if it doesn’t, why go on so? And on, and on….

‘I don’t know what he’s famous for anywhere, really, because I think those historical novels are complete works of taxidermy. Nobody can read those. “Myra Breckinridge” was funny but light. The essays are what everybody defends — but a friend of mine who did a volume of the best essays of the 20th century said they’re all so topical that they’ve all aged terribly. I don’t know where his work is.’

Ed, sweetie, even if everything that you and your terribly important literary friends have to say about that ‘nasty awful man’ were true, bitter old alcoholic crippled Gore would still be ten times the writer you are.

And, oh, about 100 times the man.

Mark Simpson on the ‘English Whitman’ (Independent on Sunday, 5 October, 2008 – unedited version)

On his 80th birthday in 1924, five years before his death, the socialist Utopian poet, mystic, activist, homophile, environmentalist, feminist and nudist Edward Carpenter received an album signed by every member of Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour Cabinet. Glowing tributes appeared in the socialist papers as well as the Manchester Guardian, the Observer, the Evening Standard and even the Egyptian Gazette. He was hailed by the philosopher C.E.M. Joad as the harbinger, no less, of modernity: ‘Carpenter denounced the Victorians for hypocrisy, held up their conventions to ridicule, and called their civilisation a disease,’ he wrote. ‘He was like a man coming into a stuffy sitting room in a seaside boarding house, and opening the window to let in light and air…’.

In the early Twentieth Century Carpenter was a celebrity, a hero, a guru, a prophet, a confidant: an Edwardian Morrissey, Moses and Claire Raynor in one. Multitudes of men and women – but mostly young men – had beaten a path to his door in his idyllic rural retreat-cum-socialist-boarding-house in Millthorpe, near Sheffield to sit at his vegetarian, be-sandled feet, or take part in his morning sun-baths and sponge downs in his back garden.

Soon after his death, however, his charismatic reputation faded faster than a Yorkshire tan. By the middle of the century he was the height of unfashionability, and regarded by many on the left as a crank. When that manly Eton-educated proletarian George Orwell decried the left’s habit of attracting ‘every fruit juice drinker, nudist, sandal wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist and feminist in England’ everyone knew whom he was dissing.

Today, despite his extensive writings, despite – or perhaps because of – the way many of his causes and indeed much of his lifestyle have become mainstream, and despite the brief renaissance of his works with the gay left after the emergence of gay lib in the 60s and 70s – a movement which he appeared to predict – and a hefty, worthy and yet also fascinating new biography by the feminist historian Sheila Rowbotham (Edward Carpenter: A Life of Love and Liberty; Verso) notwithstanding, it sometimes seems as there’s almost nothing left of Ted, as his friends called him, save his beard and sandals (he seems to have introduced sandal-wearing to these shores). He’s become the Cheshire cat of fin de siècle English Utopianism. In fact, one could argue, and I will, that the thing that connects most of us with Carpenter today is EM Forster’s arse.

George Merrill, Carpenter’s uninhibited Sheffield working-class partner touched Forster’s repressed Cambridge backside during a visit to Milthorpe in 1912:

‘…gently and just above the buttocks. I believe he touched most peoples. The sensation was unusual and I still remember it, as I remember the position of a long-vanished tooth. It was as much psychological as physical. It seemed to go straight through the small of my back into my ideas, without involving any thought.’

[galleryInspired by Merrill's tykish directness, Forster, went home, sat down on his probably still-tingling buttocks and wrote the first ‘gay' novel Maurice, which famously featuring a love-affair between Scudder the sunburnt and impetuous groundsman Alec and the uptight, middle-class Maurice. Though it wasn't to be published until after timid Forster's death, DH Lawrence saw the manuscript and was himself touched: Lady Chatterley's Lover is in many ways a heterosexualised Maurice. And of course, when Maurice was made into a film in the 1980s starring James Wilby and Rupert Graves succeeded in making millions of rumps, male and female, tingle at a time when homosexuality, as a result of Section 28 and Aids had become a major cultural battleground.

Before Merrill, Edward Carpenter’s buttocks had been touched by the American sage Walt Whitman and his passionately romantic poems about male comradeship, frequently involving working men and sailors, whom he travelled to the US to meet (though it is unclear whether here the touching was literal or metaphorical). Carpenter became a kind of English Whitman figure, though more outspoken on the subject of toleration of same-sex love than Whitman ever dared to be in the US – though alas, not nearly as fine a poet (another reason why his work hasn’t endured).

Lytton Strachey decreed sniffily that Alec and Maurice’s relationship rested upon ‘lust and sentiment’ and would only last six weeks. Whatever Merrill and Edward Carpenter’s relationship was based on – and Robotham argues that it was rather complicated and not what it appeared to be – it lasted nearly 40 years, and was an inspiration to many.

Carpenter was nothing if not sentimental, when he wasn’t being just patronising. He described Merrill as his ‘dear son’, his ‘simple nature child’ his ‘rose in winter’ his ‘ruby embedded in marl and clay’ and delighted in Merrill’s lack of guilt about ‘the seamy side of life’. Raised in the Sheffield slums and without any formal education Merrill was almost untouched by Christianity. On hearing that Jesus had spent his last night on Gethsemane Merrill’s response was ‘who with’?

It was Merrill’s – and the innumerable other working class male lovers that Carpenter had both before and after meeting him – lack of ‘self-consciousness’, or perceived lack of it, that attracted Carpenter, who was born into an upright upper middle class family in Hove, Brighton (and it was his sizeable inheritance that financed his purchase of Milthorpe and his comradely life in the North). He was drawn to the working classes because he saw them as rescuing him from himself – as much as he was rescuing them.

‘Eros is a great leveller, Carpenter wrote in The Intermediate Sex. ‘Perhaps the true democracy rests, more firmly than anywhere else, on a sentiment which easily passes the bounds of class and caste, and unites in the closest affection the most estranged ranks of society’. He observed that many ‘Uranians’ ‘of good position and breeding are drawn to rougher types, as of manual workers, and frequently very permanent alliances grow up in this way.’

It’s worth pointing out that even Wilde and Bosie’s relationship, which was to cause Forster and many other homosexuals at that time such grief, was based on their mutual enjoyment of rent boys. Carpenter disapproved of such exploitation, but it’s not impossible to imagine Wilde, or one of his characters, jesting that people like Carpenter were socialists only because they didn’t want to pay for their trade.

Robotham to her credit doesn’t shrink from pointing out the limits of Carpenter’s socialism: ‘Carpenter never queried his own tacit presumption that the lower classes and subordinated races were to be defended when vulnerable and abject but treated with contempt when they sought individual advancement.’ To this it could be added that if Carpenter succeeded in abolishing class, then with it would be abolished the interest in the working classes of men like Carpenter. Each man kills the thing he loves.

What though was working class youth’s interest in Carpenter? In a word: attention. It seems they were flattered to be singled out and treated with casual equality by a gent, and an attractive, charming one at that. One young lover wrote of Carpenter: ‘You feel inclined to get hold of him as a boy would his mate’ and talked of his ‘Handsome appearance – his erect, lithe body, trim and bearded face, penetrating eyes and beautiful voice.’ Carpenter was to continue attracting young working class men to his door well into silver-haired old age.

Carpenter had a contradictory view of homosexuality, seeing those exclusively attracted to their own sex as psychically androgynous ‘intermediates’ like himself who were ‘born that way’ – but also as harbingers of a new age, the cultural ‘advance guard’ of socialism in which a Utopian androgyny would be the norm. Not everyone shared his enthusiasm for a future world of Carpenters. George Bernard Shaw for one was enraged by the idea that ‘intermediacy’ should be recommended to ‘the normal’ as the desired way to be.

EM Forster described Carpenter’s mysticism as the usual contradiction of wanting ‘merge with the cosmos and retain identity’ at the same time. This in fact described pretty much everything, from Ted’s attitude towards comradeship and homosexuality, class and socialism, and even Millthorpe where he would write standing in a sentry box in he had built in his garden while his ‘retreat’ was overrun by guests.

His championing of androgyny and female emancipation also had contradictions. Robotham describes his horror and disgust at the androgyny of a Siva statue he witnessed on a mystical visit to India as being ‘akin to the disgust he had felt at seeing the female nudes in a French art gallery…’. For Carpenter, ‘acceptable femininity consisted of lithe gay men and supportive, tom-boyish sister figures.’

Carpenter’s works were taken up by the gay libbers and New Left in the 60s and 70s partly because of his rejection of male and female sex-roles and also because of his proto-gay-commune lifestyle in Millthorpe, with his open relationship with Merrill (and also several local married men). For Carpenter, the personal was political long before it became a lapel button.

But in the 1980s gay lib was replaced by gay consumerism, ‘intermediates’, particularly many working class ones keen to advance themselves, turned out to be the vanguard not of a back-to-basics socialist Utopia but of High Street Thatcherism. The mainstreaming of ‘lifestylism’ happened largely because it was divorced from politics – and Carpenter – and became about shopping. Which would have horrified Ted who had an upper middle class disdain for ‘trade’ (the shopkeeping kind).  Lord only knows what he would have made of the consumer androgyny of the metrosexual.

Perhaps the most lasting and pertinent thing about his life is a question: How on Earth did the old bugger get away with it? How did he avoid a huge scandal? How did he end up so lionised in his old age? Especially when you consider what happened to Wilde?

The answer is probably the same reason for his lack of appeal today. His prose now seems often strangely precious and oblique and replete with coy, coded classical references. Worst of all for modern audiences, he necessarily downplayed the sexual aspect of same-sex love. His most influential work ‘Homogenic Love’, published in 1895, the first British book to deal with the subject of same-sex desire as something other than a medical or moral problem, rejects the word ‘homosexual’ ostensibly on the grounds that it was a ‘bastard’ word of Greek and Latin, but probably because the Latin part was too much to the point.

Class helped too: when the police threatened to prosecute some of his works as obscene he was able to scare them off with an impressively long list of Establishment supporters. Even his live-in relationship with Merrill was often seen as one of master and servant (and in fact that’s how Merrill, who was financially dependent on Carpenter, was legally described).

ESP Haynes suspected that Carpenter might not be as simple as he presented himself, that his mysticism ‘gave him a certain detachment which protected him against prosecution as a heretic’. To which Rowbotham drily remarks: ‘As for the non-mystical Merrill, he just tried out the idealistic admirers’. (Or as that Northern prophet Morrissey was to sing many years later: ‘I recognise that mystical air/it means I’d like to seize your underwear.’)

Whatever Carpenter’s survival secret, it’s rather wonderful for us that he did, and although his haziness may be part of the reason he fades in and mostly out of consciousness today, as Robotham concludes her sympathetic yet clear-eyed study: ‘One thing is certain, this complicated, confusing, contradictory yet courageous man is not going to vanish entirely from view.’

Mark Simpson is mystified by the aim of a book that obscures its author’s own status – and anxiety

(Originally appeared in the Independent on Sunday, 07 March 2004)

‘Oh, god! Alain de Botton! Do you know how rich his family is?! His dad owned Switzerland!” This, or something very similar, is what almost every fellow scribbler exclaims when this “popular” philosopher’s name is mentioned. Which is rather frequently, because Mr de Botton, damn him, is a bestselling author whose books get made into TV series. In their eyes, his crime is two-fold: in a world where most writers find making a grubby living a terrible, degrading struggle, a living and more has already found de Botton, and (even worse) he appears effortlessly to command riches, attention and respect on his own account when he doesn’t even need them!

I have no idea how much inherited wealth Mr de Botton does or does not have at his disposal, but a glance at the press cuttings reveals that his late father, Gilbert de Botton, owned a successful investment company which was sold in 1999, a year before his death, for £421m. His step-mother, Janet (née Wolfson) is an influential collector of modern art and heiress to Great Universal Stores: she was recently listed by The Sunday Times as the 12th richest woman in the UK, just after the Queen and four places above Madonna.

Now, mentioning any of this is terribly vulgar I know, especially when talking about a man who has staked his own claim to fame and status on being – as his jacket blurb describes him – “genuinely wise and helpful”. Someone who, moreover, gives every impression of being incredibly nice and incredibly embarrassed, if not actually apologetic, about their privilege and success. Nevertheless, I feel in my unhelpful and unpleasant way that this tastelessness is rather germane to a book called Status Anxiety.

Precisely because the author is such a polite, learned and charming writer with a fine appreciation for history, literature and the arts which he is so very generously keen to share with us, he never explicitly touches on the subject of his own status, or his own anxiety about what the world thinks of him. Despite the fact that he must be entirely and painfully aware of exactly what people whinge about when his name is mentioned, and that it has probably ever been thus since Harrow. This is a shame, since it would have made his beautifully written but bafflingly pointless and aimless book, which claims to deal with something as real and worldly and dirty as status, rather more readable and infinitely more relevant.

As part of my job description I should here tell you what this book is actually about, but I’m afraid I can’t help you there. I can tell you that the blurb says it is a book about the anxiety of being thought “winners or losers, a success or a failure”, that it is neatly divided into two sections, one entitled “Causes”, with appetising chapter titles such as “Lovelessness” and “Snobbery”; and “Solutions” with chapters titled “Art”, “Christianity” and, of course, “Philosophy”, and that it has lots of illustrations. But I can’t for the life of me say what it all amounts to. I’m not too troubled by this though: if the professional thinker Mr de Botton hasn’t taken the time to figure it out, why should I?

All the same, Status Anxiety is not without rationale. It seems to be a pretext for de Botton to witter on about almost anything that takes his charming fancy and share his wide reading and impeccable tastes with the less fortunate. Status Anxiety parades, ever so benignly, his status and the reader’s anxiety. Occasionally he has something to say rather than report, such as the insight: “Rather than a tale of greed, the history of luxury could more accurately be read as a record of emotional trauma.” Well yes, but who would be interested in reading it?

It’s difficult not to overlook the irony that one of the few commodities that money isn’t supposed to buy is “wisdom”, and that this is the very commodity that Alain de Botton is in the market to sell. I suspect that there is another level of irony here, that part of what people buy when they buy de Botton is the smell of an expensive education, the aroma of a well-stocked library and the time and security to enjoy it, a life relatively free of the material anxieties that plague most people. A life free of the anxieties of, well, life. Readers of de Botton don’t aspire to be wealthy, which would be vulgar; they aspire, much like my writer friends who resent him, to be born to money; to be post-money. “The consequences of high status are pleasant,” writes de Botton. “They include resources, freedom, space, comfort, time and, as importantly perhaps, a sense of being cared for and thought valuable.” You could replace the words “high status” here with “money” and not change the sense of that sentence – and in fact make it rather more sensible.

The book itself is a gorgeously produced item: the luxurious paper, the recumbent white space, the richly redundant illustrations (aristocratically illustrating something from the text that didn’t need to be said, let alone illustrated). It is eminently desirable. The inside jacket copy tells us that “every adult life is defined by two great love stories. The first – the story of our quest for sexual love – is well known and well-charted. The second – the story of our quest for love from the world – is a more secret and shameful tale.” In other words, the publisher wants us to think that Status Anxiety is sexier than sex.

So the cover features a tall skinny lady in high heels and miniskirt holding a shiny and sharp-looking trowel behind her back. Alain de Botton’s name appears next to the shapely shins, and you find yourself wondering if it is him in drag (the lady is headless). Alain/Elaine is standing over a fat yellow garden hose that is ejaculating water over the well-kept moneyed suburban lawn; the hose snakes saucily (desperately?) across the inside cover and across the rear jacket and rear inside cover. Clearly the publisher doesn’t believe for a moment that status anxiety is a sexier subject than sex and is instead frantically trying to sell us subliminally a book about castration anxiety.

Perhaps, as the reactions of my resentful scribbling pals – and my own uncouth review – illustrates, being born to a wealthy father can be rather castrating; how to assert your own status in a world where most things and values, as de Botton admits, are now bestowed by money? What is left in the way of achievements for you to acquire? Well, you could always try becoming a popular philosopher….

But I can’t leave you without mentioning the endearingly silly graphs and tables of blindingly brilliant banality. My favourites are two graphs on p.207 titled ” How we imagine satisfaction after an acquisition or achievement” and “What in fact happens after an acquisition/achievement”. The first shows a steep, surging rise in the level of happiness over time which then levels off; the second shows a steep rise followed by a precipitous, drooping fall. This latter image may or may nor be an accurate plotting of the impotence of worldly goods to satisfy, but it is an entirely accurate and scientific depiction of the effect of buying Status Anxiety.

Copyright Mark Simpson 2008

Mark Simpson goes on a top secret mission to the bottom of the garden

(Originally appeared in the Independent on Sunday, 14 March 2004)

I never had an Action Man (G.I. Joe to Americans). He was for sissies. I only garrisoned my bedroom with tiny non-moving, non-camp Airfix soldiers I’d painted myself. Naturally, this didn’t stop me playing endlessly with the famous male doll when I visited my mates. My best chum had the Eagle Eye Action Man with working combat hang-glider – which is why he was my best mate. When he finally realised my real affections lay not with him but his 12-inch piece of moulded plastic, he dumped me in a fit of understandable pique.

It was my parents who had planted the suspicion of Action Man’s masculinity in my head and turned me into a closeted Action Manophile: “No, Father Christmas won’t be bringing you one of those dolls, Mark.”

“He’s not a doll!! He’s a soldier!!”

Of course, they were entirely correct in their concerns. Despite his butch trademarked name and rugged camouflaged gear, he was clearly Passive Man, as was betrayed by the advertising copy that shrieked at you to: “Move him into action positions!” Action Man: on land, on sea, and legs in the air.

My parents, though, were being more practical than prejudiced. They knew that once he entered our house, he’d take over. They knew this because my older sister had had a Barbie doll, made by the same company that made Action Man. The dolls themselves were a loss-leader – it was the apparently infinite outfits and accessories they demanded that were the real agenda and the real money-spinner.

NG Taylor, author of ‘Action Man: on land, at sea, and in the air’ obviously had less cautious parents; that, or several paper rounds. Splendidly pictured on the back of his book in a forest setting with moustache and camouflaged shirt, peering through field binoculars, he has been collecting Action Man since 1966. He has kept in impeccable, quartermasterly condition almost every outfit and accessory ever produced for the little plastic man. Hence perhaps the mention of his wife in the introduction.

Even if you have never understood the appeal of Action Man, this book will make you fall in love with him faster than Action Man would take to strip down a Stirling submachine and reassemble it – if he actually had any fingers. Taylor has photographed him in more than a hundred different outfits, all in “real-life situations”, from “frozen Alps to tropical seashores and jungles”. That this probably means from his backyard in January to Skegness in August only makes the tableaux all the more fetching.

Perhaps because, unlike Jean Paul Gaultier, I think that the only men who look good in a kilt are Scottish football fans and trained killers, my personal favourites are the breathtaking photos of AM sporting the Argyll and Sutherland Highlander full dress uniform. Photographed on a craggy moor, or perhaps atop a rockery in Taylor’s local park, Action Man with his tasselled sporran and polished tunic buttons is a vision of pint-sized, manly pride and gorgeousness that I defy anyone to not be moved by.

The photos themselves with their saturated colour, grass and stones a bit too big, buttons, stitching and zips a little outsize, are subtly evocative of the innocence of childhood. But while the glorious outfits are the main objects of attention, it is Action Man who is the star. This book proves him to be an incredibly versatile actor, one who puts most of today’s Hollywood males to shame. The Tommy pictured in brown battledress is a Cockney sparrer who might cook you up a brew while whistling Colonel Bogey. The German Stormtrooper’s chin and jaw is Germanic and brutal beneath his square helmet, his eyes those of a merciless Aryan killer. The easygoing Action Sailor snapped by the sea in adorable blue denim bell-bottoms and shirt with cap is about to cadge a fag or a pint and tell you a dirty joke. The French Foreign Legionnaire in his white képi and cobalt blue greatcoat has a haunted look about the eyes that makes you want to buy him a Pernod or three.

In fact, AM’s face is exactly the same in all these pictures. It’s moulded plastic, after all. And yet, magically, his face seems to take on an entirely different aspect, character and romance according to the angle at which it is photographed, the outfit, the nationality and the background.

No doubt this is down to Taylor’s skill, and also the fantasies we – or is it just me? – project on to the different togs. But I also think this fetish has a life of its own. I’m convinced that AM’s face actually moves when you’re not looking: that pouty mouth with the jutting lower lip, those brooding eyes gazing forward to the world of masculine adventure which is never coming. He must have practised it in the mirror when we were all asleep.

Butchness may require paralysis of the facial muscles, but it’s a very calculated kind of paralysis all the same.

Copyright Mark Simpson 2008

By Mark Simpson

The makers of BBC2’s ‘The Tudors’, know which side their Irish buns are buttered. They recently announced that Jonathan Rhys-Meyer’s Henry will not be allowed to get fat in the third series, currently in production.

In case anyone’s interested, the actual, historical Henry VIII became a big porker in later life and needed a crane to hoist him on to his poor horse.  Quite rightly, the makers of ‘The Tudors’, now half-way through its second saucy series, have decided that Henry’s historical obesity is a little bit too proley for BBC 2.  “We still want him to be appealing,” explained Morgan O’Sullivan, an executive producer. “We don’t want to destroy his good looks. An exact portrayal of Henry is not a factor that we think is important.”

No, what is important today is that HD Henry be shaggable.  In TV’s TudorWorld, no king can expect to hold the loyalty of his subjects if he doesn’t look like he would serve them faithfully in the bedroom.  In other words, TudorWorld is a lot like the one we live in.  As Rhys-Meyers put it himself, actors ‘don’t get famous for being pug ugly, do they?’

They certainly don’t.  And I certainly don’t tune in to ‘The Tudors’ for the dodgy history, or the campy script (Henry to Thomas More, author of Utopia: ‘Your ideas are a bit… Utopian’).  Nor, frankly, for Rhys-Meyer’s acting – though admittedly there is some enjoyment to be had in watching the wife-axing Pope-baiting founder of the Royal Navy and in fact England as we understand her today played as a young Captain Kirk with anger management issues.

No, the only thing I really want to see him do with his pouty face with that Billy Idol perma-sneer is snog.  Oh, and spasm during those orgasmic close-ups.  Which is fortunate, because both these things happen about every three minutes.

Maybe the Tudor thermostats were set too high, or maybe it’s those leather pants, but even when he’s not snogging or coming, he seems to be allergic to shirts.  On the rare occasion he has to wear one he seems unable to button it up.  Which is probably just as well, as the naughty lad would only stain it.

Yes, there are lots of comely, busty ladies in TudorWorld and their bodices keep ripping, and Jonathan keeps shtupping them.  But the fact that they’re usually rather better actors than him just underlines the fact that HD Henry is the real sex-object in his sex scenes, whichever wench he’s deflowering.  His tits and ass are always the first out and the last in, and the widescreen camera makes sure his body is always, very vulgarly, on display. In fact, Rhys Meyers’ looks more rent boy than royalty.  Maybe that’s why his King of England speaks – on the rare occasions when he doesn’t have his mouth full of wench – like an escort ordering in a posh restaurant (which he is – it’s called BBC2).

Besides, the lovely young ladies in TudorWorld are outnumbered by the number of slutty young males in tights, every one sporting one of those cloney, immaculately trimmed Beckhamista beards no self-regarding metro can be seen without (Henry Cavill of course could wear a Yak on his chin and still be smoothly irresistible).  And while the occasional plain woman appears to be tolerated in TudorWorld, plain men who don’t happen to be smelly old Chancellors or Archbishops most definitely aren’t (and even they usually end up in The Tower).  And the ancient Holy Father, played by a surprisingly-still-alive Peter O’Toole, appears to have had more bad plastic surgery than Joan Rivers.

Unlike the bigger-budget, better-directed and scripted ‘Rome’, which in its Imperious second series almost succeeded in convincing you that its very trashiness and tartiness was probably the truest, most accurate thing about it – that Ancient Rome really was like this – ‘The Tudors’ is just Footballer’s Wives in codpieces.  Or, what is the same thing, Footballers Wives for BBC2.

Copyright Mark Simpson 2008

“Where are we going on our Honeymoon then, Adolf?” “Stalingrad.”

This month sees the 65th anniversary of Il Duce’s ignominious downfall after over twenty years as dictator. Given the revival of this pop star politician’s back-catalogue in present-day Italy, where the new mayor of Rome sings his praises, I thought I’d post this review of both his oeuvre and a fan’s revisionist biography which first appeared in the Indy on Sun a few years back.

Comedian in Jackboots

by Mark Simpson (Independent on Sunday, 29 June 2003)

“I grabbed her on the stairs, threw her into a corner behind a door and made her mine,’ wrote Mussolini recalling one of his teenage wooings. ‘She got up weeping and humiliated and through her tears she insulted me. She said that I had robbed her of her honour. It is not impossible. But, I ask you, of what honour was she speaking… She wasn’t in a sulk with me for long…. for at least three months we loved each other not much with the mind but much with the flesh.’

Benito happened to be describing, in typically Nietzchean poseur stylee, the ravishing/raping of a peasant girl neighbour, but he would have liked us to believe that he could also have been describing his seduction of Signora Italia, whom he famously ‘made his’ during his March on Rome in 1922 (which, actually, was not a march at all but a jolly day out on the train).

This more famous affair not much of the mind but of the flesh ended up lasting over twenty years instead of three months, cost Italy rather more than her honour and some tears – eventually involving a hairy threesome with Adolf Hitler – and did not end until Il Duce (along with his real-life mistress of the moment) was summarily executed by Partisans in 1945 as he tried to flee to Austria disguised as a German soldier, in something of a crimine di passione. Although Italy, like the peasant girl of his memoirs was the victim, it’s not entirely clear that Signor M was quite the towering studmeister he presented himself as being or more of a jumped-up gigolo eagerly playing the role that history paid him to.

Italia, victim or no, did love him. After sanctions were imposed to punish Italy for his unprovoked and mass-murderous invasion of Abyssinia in 1935, Il Duce called on Italians to donate their wedding rings to him – in exchange for steel ones – and other gold to help the invasion effort. Astonishingly, hundreds of thousands of Italians heeded the call from the reverse Midas, and handed over 33,622 tons of gold for steel, literally marrying their leader and providing the dowry themselves.

To be fair, it wasn’t just the Italians who couldn’t resist Mussolini for the first decade or so of his dictatorship. Mussolini was the first pop star politician in the age of mass communication and had a global, frenzied fan-base. The American poet Ezra Pound was besotted, Cole Porter penned a song which helped turn his name into a superlative, ‘You’re the top!… you’re Mussolini’ (the Duce-worshipping lyric was actually written by PG Wodehouse for the London version of ‘Anything Goes’). Pope Pius gushingly IX described him as a ‘man of Providence’. Before he left the Italian Socialist Party, even Lenin spoke approvingly of him. Once he became a bulwark against Bolshevism, The Times and the Daily Mail heaped praise on this ‘great politician’ and ‘foreman’ of the Italian people. Winston Churchill, that great and uncompromising defender of Parliamentary democracy and scourge of tyrants, was a passionate admirer of the original Fascist dictator he dubbed ‘the Roman genius’: ‘What a man! I have lost my heart!… he is one of the most wonderful men of our time,’ he sighed in 1927, providing an early inspiration for the character of Jean Brodie.

In fact, the only other anti-Bolshevik who was hotter for Mussolini than Churchill was an ambitious former Austrian Corporal chancer kicking around Bavaria who desperately wanted to be like his Italian ‘man of steel’. He insisted on eating in Italian restaurants and wanted to know everything about his fave popster Il Duce. ‘He seemed like someone in love asking news about the person they loved,’ recalled one SS Colonel. Hitler made many requests to meet Mussolini but the would-be groupie was continually rebuffed by a Mussolini who was not keen to share the Fascist limelite. Until, of course, Hitler became German Chancellor in 1933. Observers noted that, on meeting Mussolini, the future merciless master of Europe had tears in his eyes. Afterwards he had nothing but praise: ‘Men like that are born only once every thousand years,’ he exclaimed. ‘And Germany can be happy that he is Italian and not French.’

Mussolini’s verdict was less rhapsodic: ‘He’s mad, he’s mad…. Instead of speaking to me about current problems… he recited to me from memory his Mein Kampf, that enormous brick which I have never been able to read.’ Nicholas Farrell, who clearly is one of Mussolini’s growing number of contemporary fans, makes much in his biography ‘Mussolini: A New Life’ (Weidenfeld & Nicholson) of the bald big head’s (as the Partisan who arrested Il Duce called him) dislike of Hitler, both to distinguish Italian Fascism from National Socialism – which was, we can all agree, rather nastier – and also to portray the forthright blacksmith’s son Benito as more sympathetic. Personally, however, I found myself rather touched by Hitler’s crazy devotion to Mussolini, which long outlived the Italian windbag’s usefulness and always surpassed his merits.

Mussolini’s ranting about Hitler, on the other hand, while very funny, seems almost, dare I say, unkind, or at least bitchily ungrateful. Worse, it merely supports the prevalent post-war perception of him as a comic, impotent buffoon that Farrell is so keen to puncture. Mussolini is undoubtedly more likable than Hitler; but he’s also, for that reason, more contemptible too. At the news of Mussolini’s daring ‘rescue’ by German troops from the mountain prison he was incarcerated in after being deposed in 1943, Hitler, bless, was as ecstatic as he was at the fall of France, stamping and dancing on the spot. When Mussolini realised that the men who had arrived in gliders were Germans rather than English he exclaimed, like some Latin Alf Garnet or Sidney Trotter, ‘That’s all we need’. As the pictures taken (for propaganda purposes) during this operation show, the diminutive ‘Roman Genius’ being bundled by towering blond Nazi Special Forces into a tiny Stork aeroplane ready to whisk him off to Hitler’s Hideaway, was definitely not a master of events by this time; he was a situationist comedy in jackboots.

Even though he probably deserves less than most other historical figures I can think of, it’s impossible not to suppress a certain amount of pity for poor Benito by this time. You see, I suspect that he was beginning to realise that Adolf was behaving rather like another Austrian in his life called Ida Dalser, an old flame who used to regularly show up shouting, ‘I am the wife of Mussolini! Only I have the right to be near him!’ Once in power Mussolini would lock Dalser up in a lunatic asylum in Venice where she remained until her death, a prisoner of love. In a strange case of poetic-romantic justice, Hitler was to effectively lock Mussolini up with him in his own asylum until Mussolini himself expired – also a prisoner of love.

After his death, Mussolini’s widow Rachele was determined to have the pocket Caesar to herself as well, despite the fact that he famously met his end with his mistress. She claimed to have received a letter from him just before his death: ‘… I ask you to forgive all the bad things that I have involuntarily done to you. But you know that you have been for me the only woman that I have truly loved. I swear to you in front of God… this supreme moment.’ Conveniently, she said she had subsequently destroyed the letter after ‘memorising’ its contents.

Farrell has drawn on newly discovered letters to write a book that sometimes seems like a 477 page version of that phantom letter to Rachele, albeit written in the style of a Sunday Telegraph editorial, or Spectator column. For Farrell, the Fascist bully boy who abolished democracy in Italy, invaded Ethiopia, Greece, France, Russia and Yugoslavia for no particular reason other than he thought he could get away with it (and made a terrible mess of every campaign except Ethiopia where bombers, tanks, poison gas and half a million men were deployed against tribesmen), who sold Italy to Nazi Germany for the price of the Prussian goose-step (he made his short-legged Fascisti practice it to ludicrous effect) giving Hitler the green light for his European war and the apocalyptic conflagration that followed, was actually a hugely talented, likable, big-hearted giant of a man who, unlike his “cynical” and “ruthless” leftist opponents (whom he had his Blackshirts beat, shoot or incarcerate), always had Italia – his one true love’s – best interests in mind, but who made just one small, involuntary, entirely understandable error in regard to the Second World War that was, anyway, really that nasty wop-hating knee-jerk anti-Fascist Anthony Eden’s fault.

Perhaps I exaggerate. Perhaps I have even caricatured the author. But Farrell, in a revisionist history which is not entirely without merit, has caricatured himself rather more. He is even pictured on the jacket sleeve in a black Fedora, a black shirt and black leather jacket. The text tells us that since 1998 he has lived in Predappio in the Romagna ‘where Mussolini was born and is buried like a saint.’

Mussolini, in other words, is still a prisoner of love.

© Mark Simpson 2008

Mark Simpson on the Cold War with Cuddly Toys

(Arena Hommes Plus, Spring 2008)

The titanic Superpower confrontation of the early 1980s between the Soviet Union and the United States saw the deployment of several new and terrifying strategic weapons systems, including Cruise Missiles, Pershings, SS-20s, B1 Bombers, SDI/Star Wars. But undoubtedly the most powerful, most feared and most sophisticated of these weapons systems was a smiley cuddly toy called Misha.

Unleashed at the height of the Cold War, at the Moscow Olympics of 1980, boycotted by the US and her allies because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Misha the bear cub, or to give him his full, chilling title, Mikhail Potapych Toptygin, left the West completely defenceless. A triumph of art, marketing, propaganda, and plush toys, Misha appeared on hundreds of different badges, in plastic, porcelain, rubber and wood. He was the most commercially successful and thoroughly exploited Olympic mascot ever. It took Communists to realise the merchandising potential and political power of fluffiness.

To understand the scale of the Soviet triumph that was Misha you have to look at (gingerly, through your fingers) what went before: 1968 Grenoble’s Winter Olympics ‘Schuss’ or ‘skiing sperm’ as it came to be known, Munich 1972’s radioactive Wiener dog, and Montreal 1976’s black beaver Amik, a turd tastefully tied-off with a chocolate-box ribbon.

Misha, who became the smiley, irresistibly furry shape of Brezhnevism, was a labour of love. Famous children’s illustrator Viktor Chizikov took six months to perfect him, drawing over one hundred variations. His big dark wide eyes, trusting smile and irresistible cuddliness inverted the Western view of the USSR and Russia as a scary, slavering, lumbering beast. Misha’s humane, friendly face foretold the arrival five years later of that other cuddly Mikhail, the one with that adorable birthmark on his forehead.

The US, understandably panicked by Red Misha, commissioned their ideological department, known as Disney, to come up with a response to this strategic threat. Sam, a bald eagle, the national symbol of the US (and also of the USMC, which the previous year had invaded Grenada), wearing a natty stars and stripes (Capitalist?) top hat and bow tie, was rolled out as the official mascot for the 1984 LA Games. Although better than most mascots, Sam was rather less lovable and much crasser than Misha, and in this Cold War of cuddly toys it was generally agreed that the USSR had won.

The end of the Cold War proper shortly afterwards, and the non-ideological nature of the Games that followed, meant that mascots once again reverted to their pre-Misha harmlessness and tackiness. 1988 Seoul’s ‘Hodori’ looked like Tony the Tiger with tassels. OK, but not Grrrrreat. Better than most, 1992 Barcelona’s sniggering surreal dog ‘Cobi’ was unloved at first but won many over in the end. The Sydney Olympics in 2000 featured a Platypus, an Echidna and a Kookaburra that appeared to be a rejected Aussie kid’s TV line-up (and were in fact rejected by the Australians). Athens in 2004 deployed Athena and Phevos, gods of wisdom and light, who might have been formidable if they hadn’t been rendered in Playdough by an angry two year old.

The undoubted nadir was Izzy (from ‘Whatizit?’) in Atlanta 1996, an ‘amorphous abstract fantasy figure’. Izzy was an aesthetic tizzy who only symbolised how the post-ideological world had no place for iconography or, for that matter, humanism. The End of History meant not only dreary Olympics, but a wider culture lacking a sense of importance or purpose. Worst of all, it meant really daggy mascots.

But now, eighteen years on from Moscow, another Communist giant is hosting the Games, determined to exploit them for every last scrap of propaganda. Consequently they threaten to be the most spectacular yet. The Soviet Union may have been consigned to the dustbin of history, but the country it taught how to organise a proper flag-waving parade, the People’s Republic of China, goes from strength to strength, dividend to dividend – and wants the world to know about it. Everything, from the Stadium to the stickers, is going to be a huge, fluttering statement.

The Games might officially hark back to the freedom-loving ideals of Ancient Greece, cradle of democracy, but it takes a good old-fashioned totalitarian state to show us what they really mean: Ideology and iconography plus choreography.

And all these things come together in… fluffy toys. Undoubtedly, China’s ‘Fuwa’ mascots for 2008, impish energetic cartoons based on popular Chinese animals, have been given more thought than all the ones since Misha put together. That there are also five of them, the most ever, is a reminder of China’s populousness, its dynamism, and its new-found Capitalist wiliness: five mascots = five times as many sales opportunities. And you can be sure these mascots, like everything else theses days, are made in China. (They will also be official: China, the home of cheap knock-offs is cracking down hard on Olympic cloning.)

Beibei the fish symbolises water, prosperity and swimming. Jinjing the Panda: metal, happiness, weightlifting and judo. HuanHuan the (Red!) Olympic Flame: fire, passion and ball sports. Yingying the Tibetan antelope: earth, health, track and field events. Nini the swallow: wood, good Fortune and gymnastics.

A collision of Chinese astrology, Communist ideology and Sino hegemony, perhaps these mascots – with their ‘superpowers’ – symbolise a little too much. Their names also spell out ‘Beijing welcomes you’. Or is it ‘Welcome to a Chinese 21st Century’? The elemental nature of the Fuwa mascots also looks like an augury of the future: given its recent phenomenal growth China may one day monopolise these resources.

The flame of the fluffy marketing and ideological triumph of the Moscow Olympics has been passed on to Chinese Communism – which, unlike the USSR, is still around today only because it effectively went Misha back in the 1980s, now doing Capitalism and consumerism better than the West. Being very, very careful, of course, not to allow the emergence of a Misha Gorbachov: instead at Tiananmen Square the leadership crushed its own people like they were… toys. Rather than granting human rights, China set about making everything the world wanted – and at a snip.

So I predict the Fuwa, or Chinese Spice Girls, will be a great success with kids and adults around the world, and cause China to open a couple of dozen more power-stations, as well as paying for at least another aircraft carrier.

Especially Jingjing the giant panda – Misha with Chinese characteristics.

Special thanks to Jo-Ann Furniss

By Mark Simpson (Independent on Sunday, 21 Jan 2008)

Every child wants to be a zookeeper when they grow up. To run a place where everything is in its place, and has nothing to do but eat, shit and breed – to your timetable. Maybe it’s a yen for revenge on the parents who brought them into the world without asking their permission first, or maybe it’s just because children are all little dictators with a peaked-cap fetish.

Most though abandon these zoo fuehrer dreams when they actually grow up. Not so Desmond Morris. Impressively, this former curator of mammals at London Zoo, doesn’t make do with animals: with best-selling books such as The Naked Ape and Manwatching, this world-famous zoologist has managed to become head keeper at his very own human zoo.

And to be honest, the world evoked in his latest book The Naked Man, ‘a study of the male body from head to foot’, sounds like a place I’d quite like to visit – but only because I’m something of a nostalgic.

Morrisland isn’t just a zoo, you see. It’s also a historical theme park. In Morrisland, millions of years of evolution, red in tooth and claw, have brought us right up to… the suburban 1950s (the decade Morris graduated). In Morrisland ‘long-term pair bonding’ is the universal norm and there’s no need for a Child Support Agency or Asbos or turkey-basters since: ‘Powerful paternal feelings are unleashed the moment a human father holds his new baby in his arms and in the years ahead he will devote a great deal of time and attention to the rearing of his offspring.’

In Morrisland, where everything happens according to the zoo-keeper’s plan, women are 7 percent shorter than men so that their nose will reach inside a man’s hairy armpit, because sniffing his manly, rugged ‘pheromones’ makes her happy and want babies. And, of course, no Western man would shave his armpit. Only ‘members of the homosexual community or the bondage/sadomasochistic communities’ would do that.

By far the biggest attraction in Morrisland is sexual certainty. Within this fenced-off space the distinction between ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’, ‘homosexual’ and ‘heterosexual’, is unclouded by all those unnatural modern trends. ‘As nature intended’ is a favourite phrase, one which appears above the entrance gates. In Morrisland, men are men – and there’s a strict golf club dress code. ‘Acceptance of male earrings still tends to be limited to those worn by the younger, more flamboyant males, largely from the world of sport, music and showbusiness,’ you’ll be glad to hear. Male bracelets are simply effeminate. And men only shave their legs – ‘sacrificing their masculinity’ – to swim or cycle faster.

In today’s fallen world, an older man might be called a ‘slaphead’ by unruly yobs – but safe inside Morrisland you’ll find yourself properly respected: ‘it is obvious that baldness is a human display signal indicating male seniority and dominance. It typifies the virile older man…’ (There’s no author photo on the dust-jacket, but a quick Google search confirms that Desmond is completely ‘virile’.)

There is trouble in the Garden of Desmond, however. Apparently ‘A few men – narcissist or masochists – have opted for nipple rings.’ But at least it’s only ‘a few’ – and they’re all deviants. Meanwhile, serpent-like ‘Gay designers’ ‘ignoring male preferences’ attempt to introduce ‘effeminate new leg fashions’. Fortunately, these fashions prove as sterile as the gay designers themselves: ‘they may have looked amusing on the catwalk, but they have never made it to the high street. Crumpled trousers and grubby jeans still reign supreme in the world of the manly male.’

In Morrisland there does exist however something called a ‘‘six-pack’ chest’ – though ‘few are prepared to make the effort to create it.’ Perhaps because a ‘six-pack chest’ would require not just regular visits to the gym, but also substantial surgery.

Surprisingly, that terrifying 21st Century male phenomenon I’ve been blamed for siring myself – metrosexuals – are allowed in Morrisland. But only those whose heterosexuality is beyond question and ‘are well-known as tough, masculine sportsmen and as famous celebrities… so, for them to become fastidious and fashion-conscious creates no confusion.’ Well, that’s a relief.

Non-celeb metrosexuals don’t exist in Morrisland, because ‘if an unknown heterosexual male were to display over-groomed, narcissistic tendencies, his sexual preferences would be automatically misread by anyone who met him.’ Which would, it goes without Mr Morris saying, be the worst thing that could possibly happen to a man and would render him completely emasculated and ridiculous. ‘This limits,’ explains the human zoo-keeper, ‘the metrosexual category to famous celebrities who are already publicly recognised for their heterosexuality.’

Clearly, not many of those High Street sales of male cosmetics which have increased by 800% since the year 2000, have been made in Morrisland. Though I do worry that the cover model for Morris’ book, an anonymous, headless, naked, smoothly muscular, young male photographed from behind in that sensuous-shadowy advertising sex-object way – offering us his arse – has been bingeing on metrosexual products. I sincerely hope his heterosexuality is already very publicly recognised.

As you may have guessed, Mr Morris has a problem with homosexuality. Throughout his book ‘manly’ means ‘heterosexual’, unmanly means ‘homosexual’ – and vice versa.

But it’s not a personal problem, it’s a scientific one, you see. In a final chapter called ‘The Preferences’ devoted not in fact to the preferences but rather to explaining/pathologising male homosexuality, he writes, ‘Viewed purely from an evolutionary standpoint, there is only one valid biological lifestyle for the human male and that is heterosexual.’ In other words, evolution, like zoo-keepers, doesn’t like waste and wants you to reproduce early and often.

But I can’t help but wonder why, if God/Darwin/Morris didn’t want men to get shagged, why did he give them such itchy prostate glands? And if every sperm is sacred, why did he put their hands at crotch level?

Des’ explanation for exclusive homosexuality (exclusive heterosexuality needs no explanation apparently – and bisexuality isn’t discussed) is, like much else in his book, charmingly mid-Twentieth Century: at puberty some boys fail to move out of the long all-boy social phase of childhood – and also boy-boy ‘sex play’ – and switch into dating girls and home-making, because they have become ‘too attached’. I personally don’t mind the arrested development explanation of homosexuality: I think it rather romantic (like Morris, I attended a boy’s boarding school). I’m not entirely sure though that I’m that much more immature than someone who never gave up wanting to be a zoo keeper.

In conclusion, Morris makes a final impassioned plea for tolerance and acceptance of difference and human variety: ‘Isolating homosexuals as though they are members of some exclusive club does them no favours’.

So true. Unfortunately, this is exactly what the The Naked Male does. Morris’ human zoo separates ‘homosexuals’ and ‘heterosexuals’ with barbed wire – and electrifies the fence.

© Mark Simpson 2008

Eminem is overweight, addicted to drugs, suffering attacks of pneumonia, struggling with a heart condition, is a virtual recluse surrounded by parasitic hangers on and can’t write any new music, according to the Sun and his estranged mother’s new book.

Worst of all, Marshall Mathers, now aged 35 is ’spotty’ eats ‘fatty food’ and has even let his bleached blond hair grow out. Now that is really tragic.

OK, so he’s going through a bad time at the moment, and spent Christmas in hospital with life-threatening illnesses, but there’s really no excuse for such sloppiness in a man these days is there?

Even his beloved daughter Haile appears to be deserting him: now 12, she is reportedly becoming more independent and no longer so keen on staying in and being being doted on by her daddy-mommy. And who can blame her if he’s got spots and needs a bleach job?

The Sun prints a still taken from one of Marshall Mather’s videos spoofing a fat, late-period Elvis who also took ‘traditional black music to the mainstream’ and points up the ‘irony’ of it all, how an obese Elvis locked himself in his Graceland mansion, surrounded himself with parasitic hangers-on and ‘died of a heart attack, aged just 43, after years of drug abuse’.

Well, now, it would be entirely churlish of Em not to complete the eerie parallel and die of a heart attack himself, wouldn’t it? (Note to Em: don’t wait til you turn 43 before helpfully dropping dead on the john as the Sun will have forgotten all about you by then.)

Unmentioned however is the main and most striking paralell between Elvis and Em: two Southern boys who loved their Mommas. And boys, who, in their own ways, never quite got over that - and certainly never grew up. The article does though quote some lines from his prescient song ‘Role Model’ that hint at this pathological Momma Love: ‘I’m bout as normal as Norman Bates, with deformative traits/A premature birth that was four minutes late’.

Norman Bates, some of you younger readers probably need to be told, was a 1950s Hitchcock psychopath (played by a homosexual actor) with multiple personality disorder (Slim Shady? Eminem? Marshall Mathers?), who kept the preserved body of his murdered mother in his basement and dressed up in her clothes to slash ladies he fancies to death with a large knife. Seeing as Em has rapped about slaughtering both his ex-ex-ex-wife Kim ‘the only woman I’ve ever loved’ and his smothering mother, the ‘New Elvis’ was clearly living at the Bates Motel instead of Graceland, at least inside his Gothic head.

As this bilious piece of mine below from 2003 shows, the ‘New Elvis’ turned into the old ‘Old Elvis’ some time ago. (And if you want to understand my disappointment, read this.)

Though in the pic used in the Sun (above) he appears to have turned into Boy George.

His majesty the baby

Isn’t it about time Eminem grew up? Mark Simpson on the rapper who elevated spoilt tantrums into an art form

Independent on Sunday, 27/04/2003

A few years ago a pasty-faced, bleached-blond, underfed white boy rapper arrived on the scene waving a chainsaw who, thrillingly, seemed to hate everyone, especially himself. He took pot shots at all kinds of pretension and bullshit, including the fame that he had achieved for himself and the industry that had made it possible.

Although he was a white rapper, he was decidedly no Vanilla Ice. In fact, there was nothing vanilla at all about this scatologically talented, potty- mouthed misanthrope who sounded like Bugs Bunny crossed with South Park’s Cartman on crystal meth. He was hailed by some as the “new Elvis”, and although the comparisons were full of hubris, like Elvis he had taken a “black” music form and made it his own, and in the process fashioned a new kind of pop. In this instance one which seemed genuinely, dangerously, neurotically interested in words and narratives. For the first time in years, people began talking, arguing and even demonstrating about a pop star.

Marshall Bruce Mathers III, alias Eminem, alias Slim Shady, was the evil, comical, candy-buzz of consumerism laced with melt-in-your-mouth cyanide, promising a little indigestion in a saccharin-sweet, always smiling, aspirational pop industry of boy blands and Britneybots. On his smash-hit work of Gothic genius The Marshall Mathers LP (2000) he famously sneered, “You think I give a damn about a Grammy? Half you critics can’t even stomach me…”

And then in 2001 he appeared on the damn Grammys, in that very disturbing duet with the evil fairy godmother of showbiz pop blandness, Elton John. Millions of viewers were treated to the sight of Slim Shady conscientiously sucking the Grammys’ cock while a pink-polka-dotted bewigged Elton sucked his (Em later claimed he ‘didn’t know Elton was gay’). For his consummate skill at controlling his gag reflex, Em was awarded some Grammy consolation prizes for which he was gosh-awfully grateful. Countless other awards came his way, eliciting various other embarrassing, actressy acceptance speeches in a hip-hop stylee.

Then last year at the MTV Awards, when some audience members booed him, he accused “that girl” Moby of being behind it and threatened to beat him up. This was greeted with many more boos from MTV’s liberal-leaning great and good, and Em, seeing his career slipping away, ended up humbly apologising and mumbling something about attending “anger management classes”. So it was official. Em was just like all the other “faggots” he’d berated so profitably on his records: he only wanted to be liked. It was all about suckcess, again. It was just more showbiz bullshit.

Meanwhile, the critics lauded Em’s mediocre Marshall Mathers follow-up album The Eminem Show, full of empty vanity, forced, phoney politics and pompous 1970s guitar riffs, especially in famously “street” publications such as the Guardian. Maybe I’m just bitter because I feel betrayed, but it seemed that everyone wanted you to know how much they liked Eminem – and how cool, ironic and post-PC that made them. As a final confirmation of his total tiredness, his awesome over-ness, the tedious, toothless autobiographical flick 8 Mile (complete with a Be Nice To Fags public service announcement) which merely showcased his sullen, scrawny lack of charisma, saw the “new Elvis” being hailed now as the “new James Dean” on the front page of the rebel-loving hipster organ the Daily Telegraph. As a sign of the accelerated times we live in, the New Elvis had become the Old Elvis in the space of two years.

Oh, and by the way, Eminem, the voice of teenage angst, is actually 30. If you ever felt that Em was reminiscent of a Harry Enfield character, Nick Hasted’s biography will confirm your suspicions. Em himself seems to know that the Kevin-ish sullen stares, hissy histrionics and spiteful tantrums he has based his career on are essentially childish, and has been shaving a couple of years off his true age, like an ageing rent boy, for most of his career. Until, that is, his estranged mother – damn you, bitch! – “outed” his real date of birth recently. That’s the terrible thing about mothers: they are the original Women Who Know Too Much. No wonder he’s said he wants her dead.

Much as I’d like to be able to add Nick Hasted’s book ‘The Dark Story of Eminem’ (Omnibus) to the long list of embarrassing examples of molesting dad-culture rubbing up against Em’s “enormous pop culture talent” and “credibility”, it’s a largely clear-headed assessment of his career, his strengths and weaknesses, as well as something of an expose of the inevitable deceits this artist famous for reckless “truth-telling” has disseminated.

We learn, hilariously, that little Em was a quiet, shy, sensitive child who liked to colour pretty little pictures, which he would plead to be sent to his absent, deadbeat dad who never once attempted to get in touch with his son. As he grew up, an only child, Marshall’s rage ended up directed towards someone within reach: his single mother, Debbie Mathers-Briggs. As we all know, he has accused her, over and over again, of neglecting him. She denies this: “The real problem is not that he had a hard time, but that he resents I sheltered him so much from the real world… I was an over-protective mother who gave him everything he wanted and more.” It’s perhaps self-serving but quite convincing, not least because Em is still bitching and moaning about her neglect into his fabulously wealthy and famous thirties.

So when Mathers-Briggs recalls: “I got kicked out of stores because he’d be like the spoiled brat, lying in the aisle, arms and legs spread open”, it’s impossible not to cackle. After all, little Em managed to turn flailing and screaming about the world in general, and women in particular, not giving him enough attention into a spectacularly successful, attention-seeking career. In an early sign of his Springer-esque instincts, he has bragged how he would tape his mother throwing him out of the house to play to his friends to convince them “how crazy she was”.

Hasted, who did not have access to what Freud might have termed His Majesty the Baby himself, or his fractious family, has assiduously digested the clippings, piecing together a more consistent narrative than most of us have gleaned from the public slanging matches in the tabloids and in Em’s songs. Hasted also assesses the oeuvre, giving credit to Mr Mathers’ real talent, but also not quite letting him off the misogynistic hook with his “Ha-ha I was only kidding ladies, you know I love you” routine at the end of songs about butchering his ex-wife in cold blood in front of their daughter, and analysing his all-important, all-consuming relationships with the women in his life: his mother, his daughter Haille that Em keeps telling us he loves so much, and his ex-ex-wife Kim (since the book was written they are reportedly very much in love again and living together with Haille – the whole family admiring Em’s sweet “Kim: Rot in Pieces” tattoo over breakfast). My abiding impression is that, alas, Em doesn’t hate everyone, just women – and mostly because he is so pathetically dependent on them. Which isn’t exactly very special.

Hasted also visits Mathers’ home town of Detroit and discovers that Em’s background was not quite so white-trash as he has made out – more blue-collar and semi-suburban. Less productively, he spends rather a long time standing in the playground where a young Marshall was allegedly thrown by a bully head-first into a snowdrift (Marshall was a favourite target of bullies, and it’s easy to see why), re-imagining the seminal incident which prompted the song “Brain Damage” and caused Em to be hospitalised for several days. His mother apparently had to nurse him for many months afterwards. (Probably, it seems to me, another reason he hates her: bad enough to be of woman born once, but twice….)

In fact, Em’s fame appears to have been based on the murder not of ex- wives but of mommy’s little boy. Em’s first album, Infinite, now airbrushed out of history by Em, while critically well-received was apparently too sensitive, romantic and polite to be a commercial hip-hop success, especially with the suburban teen white boy audience who buy hip hop to piss off their nagging feminist moms and keep them out of their bedrooms. In other words, the don’t-give-a-fuck, mother-hating, wife-murdering, potty-mouthed – and smash hit – Slim Shady persona conceived (“while I was taking a shit”) after the failure of Infinite, seems to have been all about… giving a fuck.

There never was any Real Slim Shady.

© Mark Simpson 2008

by Mark Simpson (Independent on Sunday, 23 Sept 2007)

The Chippendales have a lot to answer for.

Big hair atop even bigger pecs. Acres of shaved, orange manflesh bordered by white cuffs and red bow-ties. Rictus grins doing high kicks in black bulging Spandex. Medically-dangerous galvanic pelvic thrusting. Female GERREMORFFFFFFFF!!! hysteria. Not to mention those dangerous oily patches on the floor of the Queen Vic after amateur male stripper night.

Forget Reagan, Yuppies or Madonna, the greatest and hottest product of the 1980s, that decade of unbridled appetites, was hot pectoral muscles basted in baby oil.

If ever you needed proof that women have no taste in men you just have to look at the tremendous, ear-splitting, panty-moistening, glittery global success of the Chippendales, a dance troupe presenting a vision of the male body as a cross between a dancing bouncer in a thong and an especially orange department store perfume demonstrator. Mind you, they also prove how men have no taste in men either – the Chippendales were the pneumatic offspring of a man. A man who seems to have had a lot to answer for on his own account.

‘Do you know anyone who would want to kill Nick DeNoia?’ asks the cop investigating the murder of the choreographer who ‘basically invented the Chippendales’ in the prologue to ‘Unzipped: A True Story of Sex, Drugs, Rollerskates and Murder’ (Canongate), David Henry Sterry’s account of his time as the male strip troupe’s roller-skating MC. ‘Do you want the short or the long answer?’, Sterry replies. Of course, we get the long answer, which is Sterry’s personal memoir, which, disappointingly, is more about Sterry than DeNoia.

The short answer, well-known because the sensational case was widely-reported and spawned at least one TV doc, is that Nick DeNoia was sent to the big dance studio in the sky by a hit man hired by his Indian business partner Somen Banerjee over an argument about who owned the lip-smackingly lucrative touring rights to this troupe of fritzed faux-flashers (faux because they never actually let you see the goods). Banerjee was caught trying to put a contract out on some other associates and committed suicide in prison before being found guilty so that ownership of the company would pass to his family. (I told you that male stripping was a very serious business.)

The long answer, ‘Unzipped’, with its stories of ‘$‘ (as Sterry denotes money) drugs (the strippers were apparently selling them to the punters) and backstage blow-jobs (some lucky, lucky ladies did get to handle the goods) and bust-ups (the ‘Men of Chippendale‘ were very, very bitchy), is enjoyable, funny, and almost as meticulously choreographed as a Chippendale show. Sterry writes about his 80s life with the Chippendales in the kind of pulpy fashion that is required these days, along with a large admixture of self-loathing and self-mockery.

He keeps referring to himself as the ‘ugliest man at Chippendales’, and laments his ‘invisibility’, and seems to have only garnered one blow job, which was only offered because the girl wanted an introduction to one of the strippers (it ended abruptly when the girl was nearly ill). We also get some flashbacks to an unhappy childhood. This is his Sterry’s second memoir: his first, ‘Chicken: Love For Sale on the Streets of Hollywood’, was an account of his time as a teenage gigolo in LA – a job he was introduced to by his boss at the fast-food join he fried chicken at. For someone who isn’t a looker, not very… appetising, Sterry seems to have made something of a career out of the sale of manflesh.

The real star, however, of ‘Unzipped’, as Sterry’s prologue more or less admits, isn’t Sterry, or the male strippers, or even the sozzled screaming ladies clawing and biting at the ripe manflesh jigging around in front of them, but Chippendale choreographer Nick DeNoia, ‘silver fox in cashmere clothing, combination queen mother and charismatic dictator’, a man that Sterry himself seems to love as much as he hates. DeNoia’s theatrically sadistic swishy Sergeant Major way of publicly humiliating people is, as he puts it himself, ‘Faaaaaaaaaaaaab.U.Lous’..

DeNoia’s sharp queer eye is literally what made the Chippendales. While the Chippendales’ ‘bottom line’ was all about pleasing the ladies and prying open their purses – the top line was about pleasing DeNoia by showing him your buttocks, which he seems to have pried open with his eyes. Little wonder that at Chippendales ‘the notions of hetero-, homo-, and bisexuality seem hopelessly outdated. Gay? Straight? Seems like under the right circumstances everybody’s capable of doing anyone.’

Wannabe Chippendales had to submit themselves oiled up in a thong to the pointed gaze of DeNoia, a critic who makes Simon Cowell look like someone you’d like to share a pint and your problems with. In fact, if DeNoia were still around today Cowell would be his Louis Walsh.

One NY Latino guy dares to turn up a little overweight to a ‘viewdition’. DeNoia, standing ominously behind him, grabs his love-handles and squeezes, painfully. ‘That. Is. Un. Acceptable…’ he decrees. ‘The Men of Chippendales are not fat. It’s disgusting, it’s laziness, it offends me. Do you think a Lady wants to come to Chippendales to see a pudgy, fat little fuck? Helloooooooooooo?’

The Latino doesn‘t seem to mind. He just smiles and replies: “Hhhey, tha’s jus’ more of me to lub!.”

DeNoia is impressed by the man’s spunk – ‘I like spunk’ – and commands him: ‘Go. Leave. Make yourself beautiful. Call me.’ Which is, from DeNoia, a tender dismissal indeed.

Twenty years on, in a world conquered by metrosexuality and covered in baby oil, we can see that men did indeed make themselves beautiful. Terrifyingly beautiful. Being ‘lubbed’ in a thong is what men seem to aspire to today. DeNoia’s heavenly – or hellish – cellphone must be ringing off the hook.
Copyright Mark Simpson 2007