I only learned of the existence of Blood And Steel when it was announced SRS were issuing it on DVD. At the time of writing it still doesn't have an Internet Movie Database entry despite this revival. Presumably that will be fixed soon but it shows how obscure this flick is. Blood And Steel was the working title for Bruce Lee's Enter The Dragon and this film, swiping that, is dedicated to Bruce Lee.
Shot in Buffalo, New York, the opening looks more like a regional horror with a woman in a swimming pool having her throat cut. Then a guy gets killed slasher style. Writer, director and star, Mark Swetland - playing himself - is the brother of one of the victims and he goes after the killers. The death of Swetland's screen sister at the get-go in this movie appears designed to resonate with Bruce Lee's sister - played by Angela Mao - committing suicide to avoid being raped by the bad guys early on in Enter The Dragon.
Swetland gets a lead via a photograph that a martial artist from a local dojo is involved in the murder of his sister. So like Bruce Lee busting up the Japanese dojo in Fist of Fury (Chinese Connection in the USA), he lays waste to this martial arts school with his kung fu skills.
Ransacking the fight school's office, Swetland gets a lead to an industrial company. Turns out both operations provide cover for drug dealing. The industrial company invokes the ice factory in Bruce Lee's The Big Boss (Fists of Fury in the USA) which is a front for an illicit drugs operation. Meanwhile the bad guys hire an outside fighter to take care of Swetland - just as Chuck Norris is called in by the gangsters in Way of the Dragon to deal with Bruce Lee.
The stakes escalate as Swetland attempts to free his kidnapped girlfriend, He defeats the martial arts killer hired to take him out in what looks like a school hall with a stage - guess there is no equivalent of Rome's Colosseum in Buffalo, the venue for the Bruce Lee/Chuck Norris fight in Way of the Dragon (although in reality and glaringly obviously mostly shot on a Hong Kong film set).
As the film is sprinting toward its finish, Swetland gears up in a yellow jumpsuit like Bruce Lee in Game of Death and besieges the bad guys' HQ. Of course, Swetland triumphs, avenging his sister's death and freeing his girlfriend. Imagine an all American college jock who is also a Bruce Lee super fan acting out his hero worship by trying to role elements from five Little Dragon flicks into a single script which he also directs and stars in, and you'll have a pretty good handle on this movie.
The martial arts and action stunts - some involving motorcycles fights/chases rather like those added to Game of Death after Bruce Lee's death - are surprisingly good for an American no budget flick. Swetland's Bruce Lee muggings during breaks in the fights are too restrained - he's too much the good guy college jock to indulge in nose thumbing levels of cockiness, although that has proved in the past to be a sure-fire route to Brucesploitation schlock of the first water.
In terms of content this would make the core of the Brucesploitation genre as I theorised it in my book Re-Enter The Dragon. However being core is also dictated to a degree by being known to Brucesploitation enthusiasts since genre is socially negotiated - and because it isn't, Blood and Steel slides back into being part of the periphery. That could change but there's a shortage of groovy seventies stylings on show here - it was made a decade too late - and I'd say this film will ultimately prove to be of more interest to those who dig American regional film than martial arts fans.
Chus Martinez has junked the discredited literary tradition of actually writing original material. They thought that with such great shit out there in the experimental and transgressive fiction worlds, they'd just hi-jack stuff that grooved them. So Chus gets their point of view over by re-arranging old schlock without the hassle of slaving long hours over a computer keyboard. Students of anti-literature will probably have long words for this kind of cut-and-paste book and they'll invoke everything from isms to hauntology. I would describe it as ripping the piss.
The story, as much as there is one, is about some old pornographer being harassed by a copyright enforcer and being kidnapped by hot young women. But don't worry, there isn't too much conventional narrative and before you know it, Martinez has lost the plot and digressed into providing a discography of records that promote conspiracy theories about JFK.
Lots of paragraphs I recognised - especially the utterly depraved and filthy depictions of sex - but often I couldn't name the source. Even using the helpful "You Have Been Reading' list on pages 128-135, I remained flummoxed about where some of the material originated. But then a lot of what's referenced at the back are records and TV shows. Given The Bastardizer is the most important novel about copyright since the Berne Convention was foisted on the world, infringement in left field rock and roll plays a big part in its body odour boogie. The message to the man and on copyright is 'burn, baby, burn'.
Of course Martinez is always getting into deep trouble for their plagiaristic antics and threatened with lawsuits. But any 142 page book that finishes with the words 'A5 Paperback 128pp' has got to be a winner! You couldn't make it up and Chus certainly didn't because they ripped it off! Each section is standout, since Martinez takes virtually every piece of avant-garde and pornographic trash you ever wanted to read, edits it down to a bite-sized chunk and re-uses it. Genius.
On the face of it mocking a load of famous literary works is a juvenile thing to do - but as burlesque it works a treat! The Bastardizer is essential reading. I ought to know, I published it and I wrote the introduction - although this initial section was plagiarised from one of my books without my permission, so perhaps I should sue! You ought to buy this novel while it is briefly available, since once some uptight literary estate takes it out of circulation, it'll be a gold-plated and unbelievably expensive collector's item!
Lynne Tillman, Alex Trocchi & Me [ 30-Jul-21 5:07pm ]I got asked to blurb the UK reissue of Lynne Tillman 's first book Weird Fucks a couple of days ago... which reminded me of what happened when I first attempted to obtain a copy....
A month or so after first meeting Lynne at a party in NCY in the spring of 1989, I was in Paris to interview Ralph Rumney about the Situationist show at the Pompidou Centre for Art Monthly. Rumney asked me if there was anyone in Paris I wanted to be introduced to and I said I'd really like to meet Gil J. Wolman, who I knew he knew. We just went around to Wolman's because he didn't have a phone but sadly he was out. Rumney suggested we try Jim Haynes who lived nearby, nice guy but hardly as exciting to me as getting to meet the man who'd made L'Anticoncept. We caught Jim at home and at that time he was making various literary works available by photocopying them individually when people asked for them. Weird Fucks was one of those books. I asked Jim to make me a copy of Lynne's novel and he looked around for the art work but couldn't find it. Embarrassed he'd mislaid the originals of the book I wanted, he insisted on giving me a copy of his autobiography Thanks For Coming published by Faber. It seemed like a day of disappointments with first not getting to meet Wolman, then not getting Lynne's book. However, later when I examined Thanks For Coming I discovered it reproduced a page from International Times that included a photograph of my mother at Alex Trocchi's 1969 Arts Lab event State of Revolt. Years later I discovered that Lynne organised the State of Revolt shortly after graduating from college and then moving to London..... So I unknowingly left Jim Hayne's pad with a little bit of Lynne's and my own family history crossing 20 years earlier.
MIKE: What writers and books inspired you to become a writer ?
HOME: It was never my plan to become a writer. As a kid I read a lot but I was much more into rock and roll and in particular glam rock than the idea of being a writer. At the start of the seventies my favourite band was T.Rex but I liked most glam stuff as long as it had a decent stomp from Sweet through to Iron Virgin. I'm old enough to remember when Rebels Rule was getting some heavy radio play and at the time I couldn't believe it didn't become a hit and Iron Virgin disappeared. The couple of years before punk was a bit of a desert as far as new music went - so I went backwards into northern soul coz I knew a lot of people into that but also British mod and what became known as freakbeat, I was listening to earlier Pretty Things and Downliners Sect in 1975. Back then I didn't realise my taste in northern soul was very mod orientated, more Twisted Wheel than Wigan, I only found out about those distinctions later. I got into punk in the summer of 1976 after seeing the Pistols on So It Goes, and immediately discovered Nuggets and all that USA porto-punk - I knew Lou Reed's solo stuff from the seventies but the Stooges, Patti Smith, Flamin' Groovies and MC5 were all new to me as a 14 year-old in 1976. But punk wasn't nearly as popular at my school as northern soul and then jazz funk for the hipster kids, or disco for those that just followed the charts.
As far as writers from that era go there were a whole raft of pulp writers doing everything from horror to youthsploitation but if I was gonna pull out one key influence it would be the Mike Norman hells angels books that I first read when I was 11 or 12, around the same time I was getting into kung fu films…. I was also reading a lot of Michael Moorcock but more Elric titles than Jerry Cornelius, I read Moorcock's more experimental stuff later.Of course loads of kids I knew read The Rats by James Herbert around 1974/5 that and the skinhead books were probably the biggest sensations in my milieu at the time. A lot of the white boys at my school were also into Sven Hassel but I didn't like nazi shit so I didn't read them and neither did the girls (although many dug stuff like The Rats). Some of the African and Afro-Caribbean kids at my school also read those books but the Muslim kids who made up about 25% of the pupils weren't interested in any of that stuff at all There's an interview with Mick Norman, his real name was Laurence James, on my website, coz the first four books he wrote are really important to me and he was also the editor for the earlier Richard Allen skinhead books. Sadly he died 20 years ago but I was glad I got to know him at the end of his life. https://www.stewarthomesociety.org/interviews/james.htm
MIKE: You seem to always have some kind of project on the go, are you type of person who struggles to take it easy or is it a case of stay busy to pay bills ?
HOME: I just like doing things so I don't really like to take it easy. I don't think making money is a good motivation for doing anything other than a 9 to 5 work, although its great if my stuff makes a few bob and I can continue to avoid a regular job…. But I'm curious about many things including exercise systems and I never have the time to try our all the fitness regimes that fascinate me coz generally I can't set aside more than a few hours a day to workout, although on the odd occasions I've gone on a sports holiday and done 6 or 7 hours a day of training I've really enjoyed it but of course you have to mix hardcore strength and cardio with gentler stuff like stretching, it would be counterproductive to spend that much time on nonstop weightlifting for a week or two!
MIKE I first read you back in 93, 94 Red London & No Pity but have not kept up with all your work through the years, what books of yours would you reccomend to people new to you ?
HOME: There is a lot of variation between the different books and which to recommend would depend on someones's interests and tastes. No Pity and Red London were part of a cycle of early books riffing on youthsploitation fiction - of those books the last Slow Death really puts a polish on what I was doing but in some ways Defiant Pose is my favourite and I think it has the single best scene, one where the Houses of Parliament are burned to the ground while the main character gets his cock out and recites an incendiary revolutionary tract. But it was 69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess that got the attention of the literary types as it's more experimental and shows my interest in writers like Alain Robbe-Grillet and Ann Quin. I'm very fond of Tainted Love which is fiction but closely based on my mother's life once she came to London when she was 16 in 1960 - she was working with the likes of Christine Keeler as a hostess at Murray's Cabaret Club before I was born, then involved in the early LSD scene but sadly died of heroin overdose in 1979. She packed a lot into her short but incredible life. I did her story as a novel so as to avoid problems with certain people who were still living but most of what's in it is true. I had to change a few things around to avoid libel problems as that one came out with a corporate publisher.
MIKE: I absolutely loved She's My Witch that I read around Xmas time , I think it's my favourite book of yours of ones I have read, can you tell us a bit about it ?
HOME: That came out of observing what was happening to people who'd been going to punk and garage rock gigs for a long time but I simultaneously wanted to do a story similar to my mother's but for a generation down. So rather than coming to London from South Wales like my mother, the main character Maria has come to London from Valencia - it's the same trajectory as my mother but a woman from my generation rather than the previous one. So instead of modern jazz and beatniks, the subcultural interest is punk rock. And there is an involvement with witchcraft rather than Indian gurus. I didn't make a big thing out of it in Tainted Love but one of my mother's favourite books was the BDSM classic Story of O by Pauline Réage AKA Anne Desclos. So while in Tainted Love my mother does high class hostessing, as she did in real life, Maria in She's My Witch is a former dominatrix. Over the years quite a few woman who've worked as a dominatrix have told me they like my fiction, so I've got to know a few. Recently I've been making art with Itziar Bilbao Urrutia, who as her name implies is from Bilbao and for a couple of decades has been the premier suspension bondage dominatrix in London. But I wrote the first draft of Witch before I met Itzi. The end of the story also parallels my mother's life, Maria dies from a heroin overdose.
In some ways Tainted Love and Witch addresses something that few punks wanted to deal with back in the seventies, which is how close a lot of what we did was to the earlier freak subculture, so I wanted to draw that out with stories of two lives a generation apart. I also thought it was interesting to address albeit obliquely the Ruta Destroy Valencia party scene of the post-Franco period. There's not much about it in English and it was nice to start to correct that. I was just struck going to punk and garage gigs in London a decade or so ago by how many people from the Iberian peninsula I met there who'd moved to London and who'd gone to all those amazing clubs to the south of Valencia back in the day. Of course there are loads of other subcultural scenes from that and other times which have been ignored. Just before I left school in 78 a few of the kids in my year who'd been very into northern soul were getting into the Britfunk scene and were moving over to being jazzfunkateers - that whole thing was huge around the same time as punk in the UK but its been largely ignored too, so it was nice to see a piece about it by Alexis Petridis in The Guardian last week.
MIKE: You edited Denizen of the Dead book which was great fun if you dislike gentrification, were you happy with that ?
HOME: When I originally had the idea for Denizen of the Dead I thought I'd do a novel based on these luxury investment blocks that are being built all around me and across London. But on reflection it made more sense to do an anthology with different writers because it was meant to be a form of protest and that should be collective. Novels are a lot easier to get attention for than short story collections but I think I made the right decision to do an anthology. I'm really happy with the book and I particularly like the fact it has the sigil spells in it, I worked with some witches to do a protest called Hex In The Park against gentrification in east central London in 2017 and when I said I was doing the book they said I had to have a spell against Neo-liberalism in it and they'd do it. That wouldn't have happened if I'd just done a novel on my own, so I'm pleased it panned out the way it did. Also if London had been gentrified in the late-seventies like it is now, we'd have never had those huge punk rock and Britfunk scenes, there just wouldn't have been the venues for them. Lower property prices do an enormous amount for creativity, gentrification kills it. There's some film of Hex In The Park on my YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/nYMQiBlY4eg
MIKE: I just started 9 Lives of Ray the Cat Jones, your latest book, tell us a bit about that ?
HOME: Many of my books are entirely made up but like Tainted Love that is based on a true story but done as fiction because it wasn't possible to get to the truth about everything to do with my mum's cousin Ray Jones. There are a lot fo criminals in my family but Ray is the most famous one. I hadn't intended to do a book about him but I was talking to the writer Paul Buck one day and he said he didn't believe the story about my relative's escape from Pentonville although he'd included it in his book The E-List about prison escapes. The version of the story Paul had came from Mad Frankie Fraser and I thought it was bullshit too, so I asked Paul why he hadn't researched the incident. Paul said he didn't know how to do that but I did, so I went back through old newspapers and of course it turned out the Frankie Fraser version was a pretty stupid exaggeration of a very successful escape.Another interesting thing about Ray was he was a burglar with left-wing views when most London criminals leaned to the right - maybe that's because like my mother he grew up in South Wales and came to London as a young adult. Anyway I found the books about crime in London in the 50s and 60s which mentioned Ray pretty fictional, so I figured I'd do the story as a novel. I had a fair bit of true material to work from including Ray's own outline of his life alongside newspaper reports of his court appearances going back to the early 1940s. I thought it was a story that needed telling. It originally came out in 2014 but it was soon out of print, so it's just been reissued. There aren't too many books about class conscious cat burglars so I'm proud to have done one.
MIKE: How have you coped with lockdown? Has it affected you much in terms of promoting your work, or has it been more of a pain to your social life ?
HOME: Worst thing about lockdown has been not being able to go out and do talks and readings coz I'd pick up money for that and sell a few books at the same time. Not being able to go out in person definitely has a negative effect on book sales, so that's a downer. And of course I miss all the beautiful people I used to encounter at garage gigs too! I've got a foldout weights bench and a load of weights, so I'm happy enough at home because I can workout - glad I got all that stuff cheap over the years coz lockdown really made exercise equipment expensive. My view of lockdown was it was an unfortunate necessity to halt Covid, I just think the UK government handled it really badly, they should have acted sooner and been stricter so that we didn't have to endure such long lockdown periods. Johnson and his cronies really need to be held to account for how badly they handled things, and those most directly involved in stupidity like the Eat Out To Help Out scheme really do deserve some form of punishment. It seems like they were more interested in corruptly handing out money to their posh mates than our welfare.
MIKE: What five albums would you grab if house was on fire? As you are a writer would you grab any books as well ?
HOME: Coz I've not been getting to any gigs due to the pandemic I'd go for all live albums right now…. which wouldn't necessarily be the case in other situations. So in a soul groove Aretha Franklin Live at Fillmore West and Major Lance Live At The Torch, Punk rock would have to be Jayne County Rock 'N' Roll Resurrection (Live 1980) and the Adam and the Ants In Bondage 1978-79 bootleg, for the live 1978 Marquee set included on it. I saw the Ants a load of times at the Marquee in 1978, as well as at other places but never saw them after the last appearance of the old Ants at the Electric Ballroom at the end of December 1979. They really were the best band regularly playing London back in 1978/9, so it's a real shame there aren't better recordings of some of those songs! Final album would have be to be a toss up between Slade Alive and Hawkwind's Space Ritual, which ever came to hand first but both are great examples of post-sixties but pre-punk rock and roll. Books? I'd have to save my sixties hardback and paperback copies of Terry Taylor's Baron's Court All Change - he was the inspiration for the narrator of Absolute Beginners by Colin MacInnes and was an incredible guy and friend of my mum. Baron's Court is about early mod culture at the end of the fifties/beginning of the sixties straight from the horse's mouth and published in 1961. it's also the first British novel to mention LSD!
MIKE: What are you working on currently ?
HOME: Well as I can't go out to get inspiration it's a lockdown novel about a guy going crazy in his one bedroom council flat in Islington…. while practising ninjitsu on Zoom and watching a load of old ninja movies. I've got another book called Art School Orgy finished but that has some legal issues so may be hard to get published immediately. Had the same problem with Denizen of the Dead, publishers really don't like any risk of legal action even if it's pretty unlikely. I'd like to be making some films too but that will probably have to wait until I can work with others on them, once we're on the other side of the pandemic.
MIKE: I read something about Joe England saying you inspired him, does it feel good to be passing the torch so to speak, not that you are coming to end of career ?
HOME: Always nice to be told you're an inspiration but especially by someone whose work grooves you! We all need to get ideas from somewhere, we're not creating in a vacuum. I got a load of inspiration from other writers too, so yeah the torch has to move on…. although I've no plans to stop writing for the time being I may shift to more non-fiction for a while. My last non-fiction book Re-Enter The Dragon: Genre Theory, Brucesploitation and the Sleazy Joys of Lowbrow Cinema came out in 2018, so it would be nice to follow that up with another film book…. but then my love of martial arts and exercise might also lead to some more sport orientated titles too.
This interview original appeared as a Facebook punk post.
She's My Witch by Stewart Home (London Books 2020)
This novel tells the story of a social-media driven romance between a Spanish Witch and a London born fitness instructor, in London between 2011 and 2014.
It moves through a background of the physical space of London, but more importantly through a re-imagined London-scape of memories, dreams, and reflections. The couple's relationship is shaped by overlays of legends and patterns and archetypal characters from the lovers' fascination with shlock music and exploitation cinema.
The narrative is punctuated with a sequence from the Swiss IJJ Tarot deck, in numerical order, each chapter is headed with the image of a Major Arcana Tarot card. It begins with The Fool and ends with the World.
In his lecture about the Tarot, Carl Jung noted that "man always felt the need of finding an access through the unconscious to the meaning of an actual condition, because there is a sort of correspondence or a likeness between the prevailing condition and the condition of the collective unconscious." Jung's experiments with divination were intended to accelerate the process of "individuation," the move toward wholeness and integrity, by means of playful combinations of archetypes.
In She's My Witch, the playful archetypes come from popular fiction, the dominatrix, the fitness coach, the ex-skinhead - and their reminiscences of Screaming Lord Sutch; the Angry Brigade and the Valencia Rave scene. As in a lot of Home's previous fiction, the plot is constructed around pulp archetypes, rather than individualised characters. For each reference there is an "occult" element. The themes are of "otherness": the underground world of secret knowledge that permeates an understanding of the hidden; the unofficial secret histories where identities are fluid, genders are blurred and shapes are shifted.
The witchcraft operates in a specific set of dates and times - a contemporary folk history post Rave and pre-Brexit - when social-media began to become paramount in shaping social interactions and bewitching collective unconscious.
As the mystical psychologist and filmmaker, Alejandro Jodorowsky, puts it, "the Tarot will teach you how to create a soul."
Stewart Home She's My Witch ISBN 978-0-9957217-4-6 (2020) London Books Paperback £9.99
This book review by Nigel Ayers first appeared in print in The Enquiring Eye: Journal of the Museum of Witchcraft & Magic, Issue 4, Autumn 2020. The magazine can be bought online here.
She's My Witch by Stewart Home can be bought online here.
Other reviews of She's My Witch included those at 3AM Magazine, The Morning Star and 3.16 Magazine.
B. From what I've heard, the English literary press is a little afraid of you. What was their reaction to the publication of Tainted Love?
H. I've got the press cuttings somewhere but I'd have to look them out. The book that really made a difference to perceptions of me as a writer was 69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess, which was my seventh novel. Tainted Love was my ninth novel but I was doing non-fiction books as well, cultural commentary on anti-art movements and punk rock. Before Dead Princess I just had a reputation as a troublemaker among literary types but when that book came out I got praised for having a subversive grip on literary form. Tainted Love is one of only two books of mine that was sold in English through a literary agent, so it was on a corporate publisher Virgin. I don't think people were really expecting to find me on that type of publisher or to do a book based on my mother's life. I don't remember much about the reviews but I do remember my agent saying Virgin had done a really good job of publicising the book which made me laugh. I don't think their press department knew what to do with me but they got some radio coverage on the BBC and even sent a new PR girl they'd hired to take me to the radio station… that was unusual too because I was used to going and doing those things on my own rather than than having someone from the publisher to hold my hand. Of course it is nice to have someone looking after you every step of the way but it isn't necessary. Anyway all the coverage the agent liked I engineered from my own contacts which were pretty good by that time, and of course because the press came through me it was positive. But even today I think a lot of literary types are still frightened of me - and also puzzled by some of my friendships with other writers because they don't understand what I have in common with say Lynne Tillman or Chloe Aridjis.
B. I can imagine many were surprised to read that Tainted Love's main character is your mother, Julia-Callan Thompson, although it's not exactly biographical. How much of the book is true, and how much is fiction?
H. As far as I can tell it's mostly true, the fictional element comes from me writing it in the first person as my mother to tell the story, although she is renamed Jilly rather than Julie because I'm treating it as fiction. About 20 years ago I did a lot of research into my mother's life and talked to everyone I could get hold of who knew her and was willing to chat. It was difficult to get people to go into any detail was her sex work, although it was obvious to me she'd been doing that. Her friends mostly didn't want to talk about that aspect of her life but I forced the issue with a few of them. With a lot of people I had to keep going back to them to get fuller stories, and of course in some instances it looked to me like they or their partners were also doing sex work but I wouldn't challenge the sometimes utterly unbelievable tales some came up with to show this wasn't the case.I was interested in my mother and not bothered about getting to the bottom of her friend's lives.
I spent years trying to get hold of Terry Taylor and when I finally did he was much more frank about my mother and sex work for the simple reason that I was, as he put it, hip enough to appreciate her. Of course there were variant versions of stories about my mother and instances where different sources or even the same source at different times told contradictory tales. I often had to make critical judgements about what was and wasn't true, on the whole those weren't hard calls as some sources were obviously more reliable than others. I also had my mother's diary, address book and some other papers that all helped. I've put some non-fiction about my mother and that probably gives a good idea of how I arrived at the version of her life-story I used in the novel. There was an enormous amount of research involved. In terms of the non-fiction about my mother maybe a good place to start is with The Real Dharma Bums (https://www.stewarthomesociety.org/praxis/dharmabums.htm) and to then move on to 2 Ladbroke Grove Hipsters of the 1960s (https://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/2009/03/18/grainger-trina-2-ladbroke-grove-hipsters-of-the-1960s/). Those are about the two great loves of her life. That said, I'm not claiming to be right on every detail of her life.
B. The novel portrays London's subcultures of the sixties in a different light to the usual - less sugar-coated if you will. Do you think that people often view the different subcultures of that era as having little to no correlation, when the reality was rather the opposite?
H. I think the problem is that people like things they can recognise and so they want a familiar story and recognisable names. But if you actually examine the historical evidence things turn out to be very different to the fairy-tales that are told again and again. That's obviously in terms of drug culture to take just one example. When I was looking into my mother's life I knew she knew Terry Taylor and I knew he'd been the real-life inspiration for the main character in Absolute Beginners by Colin MacInnes. Since Terry had written a book Baron's Court, All Change I thought I should read it and was really surprised to discover it was a lost classic about the birth of British mod culture. Now the standard understanding was that stylish mods took amphetamines and the sloppily dressed kids were into dope. But in Baron's Court it's the other way around and Terry obviously knew the score on that and was giving an accurate albeit fictional description of those scenes. Terry, my mother and various other characters were also connected to Victor James Kapur. Back then the story was Operation Julie in the 1970s was the first big acid bust in the UK. Talking to people from my mother's circle I got to know about the big bust of Kapur's two London labs in 1967, although no one I spoke to could remember the name of the chemist and I had to chase it up in old newspaper stories (which weren't hard to find). When I finally spoke to Terry Taylor, he of course remembered Kapur and was able to name him, but I'd identified the chemist from press reports by then. I brought the story of the UKs first major acid factory bust back into circulation in an essay I did for the book Psychedelic Art, Social Crisis and Counterculture in the 1960s edited by Christoph Grunenberg and Jonathan Harris in 2005. Subsequently it was taken up by Andy Roberts in his 2008 book Albion Dreaming: A Social History of LSD in Britain and has subsequently spread further. So now anybody who knows anything about UK acid culture knows Operation Julie wasn't the first major manufacturing bust but for about 30 years that fairytale was the dominant story in the media at least.
That said you can go to other areas of British subculture and discover the dominant stories about them aren't true. For example the idea that the skinhead cult started in the east end of London in 1969. Anyone who cares to look at photos of the Hounslow mod/skinhead band Neat Change can see a couple of members of this group were west London skinheads before they broke up in 1968, and their singer Jimmy Edwards told me they were skinheads in 1966! No one was much interested in that until I put an interview with Jimmy Edwards on my website in 2010 alongside some pictures of the band which I got from their guitarist Brian Sprackling, I don't think they'd been published before I put them on my site, they certainly weren't online. Since the band broke up in 1968, it's obvious they adopted the skinhead look before then and probably by 1967 and at a stretch in 1966 as their singer Jimmy Edwards claimed. Whatever way you look at it there is clear evidence there that there were skinheads in west London before 1969, so skinhead didn't originate in east London in the last year of the sixties as is so often - and completely wrongly - claimed. I only had small versions of the photos on my site but a few people picked up on what I'd done and reused them larger elsewhere (as I had bigger versions from Brian). The original interview I did with Jimmy Edwards is here, sadly he's not alive any longer: <https://www.stewarthomesociety.org/interviews/edwards.htm>
So the history of these subcultures is totally mythologised and most people don't understand much about their real evolution. They are more closely connected than many of those involved in them want to admit. In the late-seventies, I'd switch continually between punk, mod, rude boy and skin styles - I couldn't see the point of getting hung up on just one. Some where less fluid in the adoption of subcultures but. minority were like me. One of the reasons my book has the title Tainted Love is because when I was at school I had a friend whose older brother worked in a factory and would come home while I was hanging out with his sibling. In the mid-seventies a lot of the kids at my school were into boot boy culture which had evolved out of skinhead and suedehead, and although we were down south a lot of the boot boys were also into northern soul. My friend's brother really liked northern tunes and in the mid-seventies Tainted Love was considered a hot northern soul spin, although obviously later it became too well known to be considered very cool on that scene. Anyway, my friend's brother would come in from his factory job and put on a record and drink a cup of tea before going to tinker with his motorbike or whatever, and the record he put on most often was Tainted Love. The older brother had been adopted so I always associated that tune with kids who'd been separated from their mothers. But one of the oddities about my friend's brother was that apart from northern soul, he was really obsessed with the prog rock band Greenslade, so aside from some northern tunes, I first became acquainted with a some of the more obscure progressive rock bands because of him too.
B. In the book you state; "Anyone who thinks you can understand the history of London in the sixties by looking at the lives of Mary Quant, Twiggy, Bailey and The Shrimp, Mick Jagger, Michael Caine and Terrence Stamp, is sadly deluded". Could you elaborate on this?
H. History from below is always more interesting than the stories of so-called 'great' men and it usually is men, although I've quite consciously pulled out the names of some well-known women from the sixties. There's a much more interesting story to be told about the sixties than that to be found in the memoirs of the more prominent sixties figures and those who are impressed by them and write about that decade as if it consists only of them. That's partly why I wanted to tell my mother's story but as fiction, because biography and autobiography always and already is fiction. I also remember the sixties since I was born at the start of the decade and for me it wasn't all about The Beatles, I remember waiting for the bus to go to school when The Beatles broke up and some of the older kids were really cut up about it but I didn't give a damn coz I wasn't into The Beatles. In terms of media the sixties for me was much more about spy flicks and TV shows and stuff like that. I really used to love The Man From UNCLE, I used to stay up late to watch it when I was five years old. So there isn't just one sixties, there are many sixties that people experienced in London, and even more variations of the sixties experienced around the world. Nearly a decade after I did Tainted Love I wrote a book based on the life of my mother's cousin Ray The Cat Jones who was a well-known burglar who made a front page headline grabbing escape from Pentonville Prison in London in 1958. He was a lot older than my mother and his life covered a longer time period, but in my book he encounters my mother's world in the sixties and seventies and its completely alien to him and his experiences. His sixties is very different to my mother's sixties. But again it's a history from below and while The 9 Lives of Ray The Cat Jones is a novel and fictional, it's probably truer to life than vast majority of ghost-written criminal autobiographies.
B. Lots of celebrities appear, though many of them in very questionable situations. The John Lennon and Brian Jones cameos come to mind. Weren't you afraid of getting into legal problems?
H. I have my mother's address book and John Lennon is in it alongside a lot of other pop musicians and cultural figures, there are an incredible number of well known people in there - but I found the lesser knowns more interesting to research. One publisher rejected the book because they didn't like the stuff about Lennon which is as far as I can tell pretty true to life. I thought everyone knew Lennon could be a complete arsehole. However there were no libel issues with Lennon because the dead aren't protected by libel laws and he was dead long before I wrote the book.
There were two other figures I wanted to include from the pop scene of the sixties but both were still alive when I wrote the book - and still are now - I'd heard stories about them and my mother but couldn't use them because they are rich enough to sue and in England the libel laws are about protecting protecting the rich not the truth. One of them is nearly as well known as Lennon so including him would have been a huge risk and probably no publisher would have taken the book if I'd insisted he was in it. So Brian Jones was a substitute for these two figures and he behaves like Brain Jones - I read several books about him to get a grasp on that - rather than those he is a substitute for.
If you read the pop picker sections of Tainted Love and look at Robert Frank's Cocksucker Blues documentary of the Rolling Stones 1972 US tour, then you'll see how you might re-read the film to make it as true to life as my writing. There's a woman presented as a groupie but she's a junkie and to me looks like a pro. My impression is the managements and record companies preferred professional sex workers to groupies because they didn't expected to be treated as special or for some kind of lasting relationship to develop, so they were generally much less trouble than groupies. As a result pros would be put in for the band by those working with them because it was considered safe, and of course a lot of sex workers used drugs and would deal them on the side, so it was all handy. That's not to say the pop star in question necessarily knew they were dealing with a sex worker because they weren't the person parting with dosh for the service.
Eckhart Schmidt's 1982 movie The Fan doesn't deal with the pro side of things but it's a fictional exploration of just how badly things can go wrong with when a pop musician sleeps with a fan. I see fiction as a much more direct route and honest way to get to the truth in terms of individual lives than biography and especially autobiography where you couldn't substitute Brain Jones for those who are still alive and protected by wealth. Another figure I didn't put into Tainted Love because they were living when I wrote the book is Sean Connery. My mother claimed that the Bond actor paid for a good time with her when she was working as a hostess at Churchills in Bond Street in 1964. Of course, the fact my mother said this doesn't make it true but since it would be hard to prove one way or the other, it would have been tempting to use if Connery had died younger than he eventually did. That said, there's more evidence for the pop musicians than the actor.
B. The novel's timeline reaches the end of the seventies, with counterculture already fully amortised as a mass phenomenon. In your view, was it a failed revolution or just a by-product of the birth of the late-capitalist consumer society?
H. Elements of the counterculture were revolutionary but it wasn't revolutionary across the board, in fact it was quite a mixed bag but under capitalism we all reproduce our own alienation. I do think en bloc it was more than just a a by-product of late-capitalist consumerism, although the latter is characteristic of parts of it. But there's also a danger of fetishising the sixties and overlooking the flappers and cocaine frenzies of the twenties, or the Zoot boys of the forties.
B. The use and abuse of drugs is a recurrent theme in the novel and, for that generation, was more than just a hedonistic escape. The use of illegal substances is probably more widespread today than ever but detached from these countercultural or psychedelic values. What do you think about drugs and their relationship with counterculture?
H. Drugs were absolutely crucial to the counterculture, alongside sex work they financed a lot of it but of course they were more than that since there was a deep interest in expanding consciousness in parts of the beatnik and hippie subcultures. That's one of the things missing from the straighter parts of the revolutionary milieu, the understanding that mature communism isn't just about the return at a higher level of the anti-economic forms of primitive communist societies but also about reclaiming the characteristic modes of consciousness of such social forms, which we could say is characterised by shamanism. I'd agree drug use is more widespread today and also largely detached from a psychedelic desire to expand consciousness. My most recent novel in English She's My Witch addresses that in an oblique way, since the main character Maria is into both occult modes of consciousness and drugs but they are separate pursuits to her in a way they were not for my mother in the sixties. She's My Witch is very much an attempt to take a subcultural life-story that is similar to my mother's but a generation down so it is punk rock and witchcraft rather than beatnik jazz and Indian gurus that fire Maria's imagination. Despite my mother coming from South Wales and Maria in Witch from the mountains to the west of Valencia, they both end up in London and die prematurely from a heroin overdose. The style of the books is rather different but thematically they are very much linked but with the crucial different that in the earlier one an interest in drugs and expanded states of of consciousness are linked in a way they are not in the more recent novel.
B. Paradoxically, drug usage was utilised by the authorities to justify repression and abuse. The toughest parts of the novel are those in which police officers appear.
H. It was very hard to get out of my mother's friends how badly she was abused by the police. Terry Taylor had left London and wasn't in regular touch with her when that was happening, so I had to get it from other people. In Tainted Love I'm recording what I dragged out of people since they weren't too willing to tell me. But I don't think that level of abuse will surprise anyone whose been at the sharp end of London policing. Strangely at the end of September 2020 one of the most notorious of the bent coppers as far as the London counterculture goes, Norman Pilcher, put his name to a book called Bent Coppers: The Story of The Man Who Arrested John Lennon, George Harrison and Brian Jones, I haven't bothered to read it because while he tells of corruption all around him, he now claims he wasn't involved in it, which is a blatant lie. Nearly 20 years ago I asked to speak to one ex-cop who'd lodged a blatantly false report about my mother. He refused to talk to me but I hope I made this retired thug feel uncomfortable. I would have done the same for others if I could have got hold of them. I assume they're mostly dead now.
B. Tainted Love was published over 15 years ago. Do you think the sixties still have something to teach us?
H. Every age has something to teach us, so of course the sixties does too. As Marx famously said: "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living."
Interview by Alejandro Alvarfer. A slightly shortened version of this interview can be found in issue 7 of Bruxismo which at the time I of posting it here was still available for sale from the following link. https://colectivobruxista.es/producto/bruxismo7/?v=a33c1ea972fc
The core of this book describes working conditions in Bakkavor's food processing factories in West London, then moves on to describe how a Tesco distribution centre operates. The opening 100 plus pages are used to set the scene, then there is the central 180 pages, finally after a curious detour into 3D printer manufacture - and leaving aside an appendix - the last 50 pages deal with the question of revolutionary organisation. Cut into the descriptions of contemporary labour and class exploitation is much useful analysis and historical material:
The food and drink industry is the UK's largest manufacturing sector, accounting for 17% of the total UK manufacturing turnover, contributing £28.2bn to the economy annually and employing 400,000 people. And while a lot of fruit and veg is imported, the shelf life of freshly prepared products (FPP) means that outsourcing this work overseas is not possible. All the FPP found in the chilled section of our supermarkets comes from UK factories. Page 136.
People in Britain buy around 3.5 million ready-meals a day, which easily makes it the leading ready-meals market in Europe. Working hours are some of the longest in Europe, which perhaps explains the demand. Page 139.
Bakkavor is one of the biggest UK food companies you've never heard of. You've probably got a Bakkavor food item in your fridge, but you wouldn't know it because their name won't be on the packaging. They employ around 17,000 people across various sites in the UK and source 5,000 products from around the world to supply the largest supermarkets with their own-brand products - from salads, to desserts, to ready-meals and pizzas. Pages 147/148.
Bakkavor has an ageing workforce, the majority in the 55-64 age bracket. The next biggest age group was workers aged between 45-54, fewer again in the 35-44 age range. I think this was a huge factor in the docility of the workforce in general, even when the union was ramping up its activity. There was an aversion to risk, a palpable fear of going on strike, and a resignation that only comes with living a hard life with few victories. That isn't to say there weren't some older workers who were up for the fight. Page 155.
A toxic culture of disrespect pervaded the factories… All the stress and bad vibes understandably had a negative impact on peoples' mental and physical health. One guy dropped down dead in the smoking area. Another guy, a night shift hygiene worker, died in his late forties. A mild-mannered Polish guy from the maintenance department had a psychotic episode and climbed onto the roof, sobbing in front of his workmates. A young office worker who everybody ignored even killed himself. Others had strokes and panic attacks and were taken away by the ambulance, which came with depressing regularity. It wasn't just that they were old or smoked, although of course those were factors. I think it was also the type of work and toxic culture that drove people to their limits. Page 178.
The poor working conditions at Bakkavor, bad pay and struggles to improve it - alongside the unhygienic methods of food production - are described in detail. The switches from more objective analysis to an utterly subjective position and speculative assertion are sudden and frequent. Some might see this as a weakness but it is actually the book's strength. It's a rhetorical device designed to give those who haven't done these jobs a feeling of insight into them and a sense of empathy with those depicted in the book. Likewise if you have been employed in the industries described you might be drawn to a conscious embrace of the book's wider analytical perspective in part due to a sense of identification with the text's more subjective turns. Even even those who have not worked in these industries - or on some other factory floor - will recognise the social relations depicted from shops, offices and other places of employment.
In short Class Power On Zero Hours is worth reading for its central sections about food production and distribution. The opening and closing parts of the book may resonate with some but were less than thrilling to me. I found the initial section about west London especially tedious and almost gave up when I read the following sentence on the first full page:
Nobody on the London left had even heard of Greenford, not surprising due to its status as a cultural desert, in zone four on the Central line. Page 7.
I don't know - and don't care - if I'd count as part of what Angry Workers configure as the London left but I'd not only heard of Greenford, until lockdown I was going through it once once a month on my way to an extended training session the martial arts club I belong to has in South Ruislip. Likewise, I have two friends - one born in the same south-west London hospital as me - who work for Ealing council (pest control and a desk job); for those who don't know, Greenford is part of the borough of Ealing. While I passed through rather than went to Greenford and Park Royal growing up, I spent plenty of time back then in Hounslow which isn't so far away.
Ultimately the claim that 'nobody' was familiar with Greenford reveals Angry Workers' contact with the working class across much of London when its members first arrived here to have been rather limited. Other things they say point to the same conclusion. On the basis of what the collective writes it would seem that many of those they hung out with in London before moving to the city's west were students who'd come here to take university courses and who saw themselves as on the left but were clueless about about the place they'd relocated to. The text makes it clear Angry Workers went to great efforts to connect with the working class in west London, but leaves the impression they are still disconnected from it in other parts of the city.
The assertion that Greenford has cultural desert status appears obnoxious, racist and anti-working class: clearly not positions Angry Workers would want to be associated with even if what's quoted above might be (mis)read as linking them to views of this type. Bourgeois distaste for proletarian culture - sometimes expressed with the absurd assertion that the working class don't have a culture and exists in a 'cultural desert' - can be found among parts of what Angry Workers seem to be describing as the London 'left'. What 'the left' is and whether 'liberal' elements who want to transform everyone into a bourgeois subject are part of it might be seen by some as open to debate, although not by me. In odd places Class Power On Zero Hours lacks clarity in its verbal formulations but on the basis of the entire text, a generous guess would be it is the views of reactionaries who wish to demean working class immigrant communities that are being invoked in the statement about Greenford's cultural desert status rather than the Angry Workers collective itself believing this to be the case. That said, anyone who was born in the west or south-west of London or who has spent much time there can safely skip the early parts of this book. It is uneven but there is more than enough in its main section to make it worthwhile reading if you're consciously engaged in class struggle: or even if you're not, yet!
Finally, I really liked the solid pink inside covers of the book, so much so that I'm almost tempted to overlook the fact that this publication really cries out for an index. I'm unlikely to read the whole book twice but it would have been helpful to be able to find the parts I'm going to want to access again easily with an index.
The Lord Mayor is not to be confused with the much better known but politically insignificant Mayor of London. Freemasons were cunning like that, they installed themselves in an office few knew anything about but which had loads of power and money as well as a rigged election, while leaving millions of Londoner's to democratically put their cross against a dupe with a similar title and lots of visibility but little power. This meant that their World King AKA head of the Court of Aldermen would be left alone to plot in secret. When Boris told me this he also said he hoped people would not recall that he had once been Mayor of London but never Lord Mayor.
Even Johnson's close friend and fellow believer in the bleach cure Donald Trump had been ridiculed for confusing the Mayor of London and the Lord Mayor of London. Those colonials in New York and Washington might only have one mayor but mighty London had two! Boris confided to me he assumed most people were ignorant of the fact that he had been born in New York and wasn't really Lord Mayor material. He hoped no one would suspect he was anything but a true blue Britisher when he called heartily for his favoured brew of Watneys Red Barrel, a beer that had been initially tested on the public at the East Sheen Lawn Tennis Club in south west London. This was close to where John Dee had his home in the sixteenth century, explorer Richard Burton had his tomb and the 1970s punk rock band Subway Sect hailed from.
To tell the truth it wasn't just a desire to get stupid fresh with Catherine MacGuiness - and the multi-billion City's Cash sovereign wealth fund she jointly controlled with the Lord Mayor - that led Boris to turn down ordination into the Guildhall Lodge. He was also concerned that once he was buck naked and dressed in nothing but a blindfold during his initiation, he might be subjected to some indignity he wouldn't have stood still for if he'd been able to see what was going on. Not that there hadn't been lots of perversion when Boris had been a member of the Bullingdon Club at Oxford.
At the Bullingdon they'd hired prostitutes to perform sex acts for them, and then there'd been the time Boris had got so drunk that… Well he'd been so drunk he wasn't sure whether or not he'd taken a fresh corpse borrowed form the local morgue on a date to an expensive restaurant as a dare….. Returning to things that put Boris off becoming a fully paid up freemason, there was also the issue of what had happened to both his Ottoman great-grandfather and Roberto Calvi. Although he was not related to the latter, Calvi's death had been much closer to home. The body of God's banker, a top Italian freemason, had been found ritually strung up under Blackfriars Bridge. This was roughly half-way between Britain's Parliament where Boris was Prime Minister and the City of London's Guildhall HQ - where Lodge 3116 met without so much as having to pay to hire a room. Boris had a public image of being a powerful man but he wanted the keys to power that were actually held in the Guildhall. The City of London council got to send a Remembrancer to sit in the House of Commons and tell the government what the City thought of what it was doing, The arrangement wasn't reciprocal.
Returning to Ali Kema, he\d been assassinated during the Turkish War of Independence. Historians claimed Kema was bumped off for being a traitor to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's cause but Johnson knew that he'd been killed so that the Turkish state could lay its hands on his great-grandfather's stock of red mercury. Boris had been told this by the freemasons who had engineered his rise through the ranks of British politics in order to repay a debt their grandparents owed to Kema. Once Johnson's friend Donald Trump had blown their plan to use a bleach cure to rid the world of Covid 19 - by revealing it prematurely and thus having it ridiculed by the press - it seemed like his best bet for dealing with the virus was to lay his hands on his great-grandfather's stock of red mercury. As every alchemist knows, red mercury is a super rare substance that will cure cancer or boils or almost any other ailment, so why not coronavirus too? The problem was getting hold of the red mercury. When Boris phoned the Turkish Embassy in London to ask for it they told him he was an Islamophobic asshole who'd betrayed his Ottoman heritage. Ingrates!
In the meantime Boris had been passed 7,500 ring donuts that a food bank in his South Ruislip constituency had been unable to distribute to the needy and which would pass their use by date in a matter of hours. Some food processing plant in Greenford was donating what they couldn't sell, and there'd been a huge decline in demand for donuts since a rumour had gone around that eating them while talking on your smartphone caused Cover 19. More than 40 branches of Derek's Donuts had been set ablaze in the past two weeks and hundreds of supermarket workers whose stores sold the snack had been abused and threatened. Of course Boris had got all of his cabinet members to denounce as idiots those who claimed eating donuts caused Covid 19, and he'd brought in some top scientists too whose secret research proved the same thing. None of which stopped the anti-donut activists from promoting the conspiracy theory and denouncing his favourite delicacy as junk food for cops. When push came to shove the country needed donuts for its police force. They - Boris was never explicit when using this generic term whether he was invoking donuts or the police or both - were vital to the UK's infrastructure and without them the virus couldn't be beaten! Likewise, if the boys in blue weren't able to eat donuts in peace then Boris would never Get Brexit Done!
As he was chauffeured to number 10 Downing Street with his 7,500 ring donuts, Boris found himself getting all hot and sweaty. Something had come over him and he'd had one of those flashes of inspiration that were common to men of genius. He'd use the ring donuts to worship the goddess in her triple form - not the conventional maiden, mother and crone, but rather mouth, backside and naughty bits! Boris wasn't too good at maths - he couldn't even work out how many children he had - but he figured the 7,500 donuts would just about cover three out of seven external orifices for every woman he'd ever slept with. If he'd had more ring donuts he might have indulged himself with nasal sex too. Boris was going to work backwards and imagine doing gross and naughty things with all those he'd known Biblically until every last donut had been abused. Johnson had got as far as Jennifer Arcuri when Dominic Cummings burst in and caught Boris bollock naked rubbing a disintegrating ring donut up and down his manhood.
"That's a waste of good donuts that is!" Cummings spat as he took in the remains of several dozen ruined sweet fry cakes on the floor.
"A man with your surname ought to understand what it's like when I've got the horn," Boris whinged defensively, "and besides even a glutton like me couldn't eat 7,500 donuts with a use by date we'll have gone past at midnight!"
"The witching hour!" Cummings boomed. "That reminds me, those scientists you've got advising you on the pandemic have no respect. They may know about the laws of nature but I know about the laws of spirit, and that means I outrank them all!"
"That's well and good, but we must do something about the bad publicity my government is getting over a lack of personal protection equipment for health workers!'
"That's why I told you not to waste the donuts!"
"What have donuts got to do with PPE?" The Prime Minister wanted to know.
"We can turn them into PPE," Dom explained. "Let's string lots of donuts together to make protective gowns. Two rings fastened to each other will make fantastic googles."
"What about face masks, can we make donut face masks?" Boris asked excitedly.
"Don't be stupid," Dom chided, "anyone using donuts as a face mask would start licking off the sugar coating and then chewing on the cake. Donut face masks wouldn't last five minutes!"
The sugary smell of 7,500 ring donuts had attracted the attention of Larry the Downing Street cat who was mewling like a loon on the other side of the door. Boris let the feline into the room which was a mistake, since Larry was all over the stale fry cakes within seconds. Fortunately it was the ones Boris had used to frontage himself with that most interested the cat. These had traces of dead skin and even blood on them, since the sugar coating had caused a lot of friction when rubbed up and down the Prime Minister's love muscle.
Boris wasn't too hot in the fine motor skills department, in fact he probably needed testing for dyspraxia. Cummings certainly didn't want to risk being exposed as suffering form developmental co-ordination disorder and so his entrepreneurial bent led him to combine three economic sources that were of major significance to the UK - the charity sector's food banks for unwanted donuts, the government and immigrant labour. The Queensmead Sports Centre in South Ruislip's Victoria Road was closed due to the pandemic, and so Cummings decided to deploy it's unused gym as a base from which to make prototype versions of the ring donut PPE that would turn around the public's false perception of a poor governmental performance with regard to the current pandemic.
Dom hired a Gujarati woman from Park Royal who'd initially come to the UK to work at the mammoth hummus production part of Bakkavor's Cumberland site in Greenford. She was extremely nifty with a needle and regularly worked as a seamstress because it was difficult to live on the poor wages paid at local food processing plants. Before 24 hours had passed Johnson and Cummings had what they'd dreamed up the previous night, a medical gown and googles made of ring donuts! Well, the googles were made of ring donuts. At the suggestion of the seamstress, the gown had been fabricated from jam donuts since having holes the length and breath of the garment would have been a health risk to NHS heroes.
Although the donut PPE had been Dom's idea, Boris pulled rank and insisted that he be the first to try it out. Given it was made from literally hundreds of jam donuts, the gown proved to be pretty heavy but at least it was voluminous enough for a fatso like Johnson to wear. To keep Dom happy, Boris told him he was going to recommend his adviser for a Queens Award for Enterprise on the basis of his donut recycling activities in South Ruislip. The prototype PPE turned out to be perfect in every way, except for a slight tendency for the donuts at the bottom of the gown to fall off with a soft plop as Boris spun around in his triumph at having saved the National Health Service. That said, as libertarians he and Dom both knew that ultimately private health was much more efficient than haemorrhaging corporate profits to pay for public services. So once Boris had saved the NHS and after everything got back to normal in about 3 weeks time, he planned to abolish the NHS.
In his moment of glory for having saved the NHS, Boris decided to burst out of the gym and take a lap of honour on a Queensmead Sports Centre football pitch. After all he'd proved once again that England had won its wars - and the battle against Covid 19 was a war - on the playing fields of Eton! The fact that a fuckwit like Boris could get to be Prime Minister demonstrated that his parents had got real value for money when they'd paid for him to attend Britain's top public school. The fees were reassuringly expensive!
Two unfortunate things happened as Boris jigged across the football pitch. Firstly his smartphone rang, it was a call from a hefty female former professional kick boxer turned gym instructor with whom the PM was enjoying an intimate relationship.
"I found snot all over my dirty underwear when I was loading it into my washing machine just now. Have you been sniffing it again?"
This baseless accusation caused Johnson to sway and he'd never been a good runner at the best of times. He tripped over this own feet and fell to the ground. Seeing red oozing all around him, Boris thought he was a goner. While the British Prime Minister was able to pull the wool over his own eyes about his life ebbing away before him, he couldn't fool a passing swarm of wasps who knew that what Boris thought was his own blood was in fact strawberry jam. Recovering a slight semblance of sense at the sight of the descending wasps and wanting to save the prototype PPE, even if it was now squashed and in fragments, Johnson tried to shoo the insects away but this only made them angry. Boris quickly discovered that the painful pricks of failure were more or less equivalent to a dozen wasp stings.
In the interests of safety the plans for recycling donuts as PPE were shelved. It was back to the drawing board for Boris and Dom…. they still needed a way to demonstrate their political genius by defeating Covid 19.
The fact that so many are completely incapable of keeping a safe distance from strangers - and this extends well beyond the cops and amateur cops - illustrates how alienated people are. Half the population seem to have no awareness of their own bodies or whose in the street or supermarket with them. Meanwhile, the homeless and mad are becoming ever more desperate and have either given up on begging and can be seen huddled together in encampments on Tottenham Court Road and elsewhere, or else have become much more aggressive in their quest for money to buy food and alcohol. The homeless are supposed to be in shelters but most still seem to be roaming around, presumably preferring the relatively greater freedom of the streets to being locked up under lockdown. There's a shortage of many street drugs but the government recognise booze as an essential and so London's off-licences (liquor stores) are open. Anyone hoping to sleep on the streets probably needs a drink or two in order to nod off, while the rest of the population are also living out the insane nightmare that is late-capitalism and dependence on alcohol is one way of dealing with it.
Covid 19 has brought out the best in many people and the worst in others. There are wonderful community mutual aid groups doing shopping for the vulnerable and delivering presents to children. Meanwhile hysterical media coverage links burning telecommunications masts and infrastructure to ridiculous conspiracy theories about 5G causing Covid 19. At least one of the fires the press was wringing its hands over recently and blaming on anti-5G activists turned out to have been due to faulty equipment and not suspicious. The papers call those who oppose 5G idiots because the equipment that was maliciously targeted is largely 3G and 4G. Since no one has yet been charged with - let alone convicted - of these acts of arson against phone masts, the fact that it isn't 5G equipment that was torched might well imply those involved in the vandalism aren't opposed to 5G and had other motives. The links made in the press between this arson and anti-5G activism are at best speculative.
There are many reasons for setting telecommunications infrastructure alight but even when it's just teens doing it for kicks it doesn't follow that we shouldn't be thrilled by film and photos of the resultant fires. Baudrillard said more than 50 years ago: "Something in all (wo)men profoundly rejoices at seeing a car burn.." This rings true because cars are a symbol of possessive individualism and have wrought untold destruction on our planet. Given the negative social impact of smartphones - including but not limited to surveillance and an intensification of work - today nothing is more beautiful than a burning phone mast. Technology isn't neutral, it shapes societies and human relations, and so the health and wellness concerns of anti-5G activists aren't the reason I get a buzz when I see burning telecommunications infrastructure. Nonetheless media hysteria about torched masts and Covid 19 conspiracy theories mean it's now nearly impossible to have a nuanced conversation about the joys and broader political dimensions of such vandalism, why everyone should get rid of their smartphone or what's actually bad about 3G, 4G and 5G.
Under lockdown I like to run around the streets for an hour a day, since it's quite a kick to see most of the shops and all the restaurants in central London closed, and knowing that even if they were open I wouldn't be using most of them. I don't even miss the record and book stores I did sometimes visit before Covid 19. I totally dig jogging through Soho and Covent Garden to visit the places I went as a teen 40 and more years ago and to revel in the fact that the London I knew then has entirely disappeared, just as the hyper-capitalist London of the current millennium is about to disappear. A different and better world is not only possible, it is also very necessary….
A reply to the baseless accusations of Lee Holmes of Clones of Bruce Lee.
I've no wish to draw others into your attempt to create a spat, so I will not bother to cover all the issues raised by your brickbat on pages I do not run regardless of how obsessively you repost your rant on social media. Here no one else need be involved, unless they chose to involve themselves. So let's go through your preposterous claims. You write:
"I must say I am pretty annoyed at the reference to me in the book. The author seems to be obsessed with trying to put down other writers who have delved into this genre in some sort of attempt to make himself out as the more superior researcher."
Here's most of what I have to say about you: "Within Brucesploitation and the related Chansploitation phenomena, actors who copy and clone Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan make up one strand of these subgenres, but their importance can and has been over-stated. This is evident not just from the title of the book Here Come The Kung Fu Clones by Carl Jones, but also the UK fan site Clones of Bruce Lee run by Lee Holmes. Both Jones and Holmes treat Bruce Liang as a clone. My own view is that when Liang appears as Bruce Lee in The Dragon Lives Again (1977) he is there as an actor playing the Little Dragon in the underworld after death rather than a clone; this is emphasised by dialogue in the English dub addressing head on the fact that Liang doesn't look like Bruce Lee…. Movies such as The Black Dragon's Revenge (1975), with a narrative that revolves around a fictional investigation into the death of Bruce Lee, belong to the Brucesploitation genre without even featuring a clone so copyists are not essential to this film category. Lee Holmes on his Cloneswebsite at one time listed Black Dragon's Revenge supporting actor Charles Bonet as a Bruce Lee clone, but given this martial artist's karate leanings and rejection of kung fu, this is not a claim I take at all seriously. I would further argue that those who see figures like Bonet as clones do so because they approach Brucesploitation in thrall to the misleading idea that copyists define it. Tadashi Yamashita, sometimes called Bronson Lee after a character he played, is another example of a karateka I do not accept as a Bruce Lee clone; despite Jones and Holmes - among others - mistakenly asserting he is one."
Seeing this any intelligent reader will immediately realise that your claim that I want to pose as "the more superior researcher" is based on a basic category error. The passage above is focused more on interpretation than research and I certainly wouldn't damn myself with feint praise by claiming to be a superior theorist to you because you are not a theorist at all. Likewise your clumsy attempt at commentary on something you failed to fully understand might be cited as evidence that I am a superior writer to you; sadly your prose as quoted in the present paragraph is so clunky that this hardly requires pointing out. While I may be putting you down now for a ridiculously over-sensitive and stupid response to Re-Enter The Dragon, this was not what I was doing in the book when I laid out the differences between my positions on Brucesploitation as a genre and dominant discourse on it to date, of which your website simply provides an example. If you don't want your views of Brucesploitation to be met with anything other than agreement then you'd be best advised not to air them in public, or indeed private.
You write: "…who doesn't think that Fist of Unicorn should be categorised as Bruceploitation? This not some big revelation."
Newsflash for Lee Holmes, billions of people in the world have never heard of Fist of Unicorn or Brucesploitation, and it is therefore extremely unlikely they think a film of which they are unaware should be categorised as part of a genre they aren't familiar with. However if you look at what I say in regard to this in context then it is also obvious that I'm not claiming this as some 'big revelation' but rather deploying it as part of a broader argument: "I have seen it falsely asserted in a number of places - including Wikipedia - that Brucesploitation movies attempted to exploit interest in Bruce Lee after his death. Fist of Unicorn (1973) can and should be treated as part of the genre, and it was made and released before Lee died on 20 July 1973…" In case you want to check the Wikipedia entry, although it appears you don't bother to fact check anything very much (see below), there is an archived version of the page here: https://web.archive.org/web/20181102091239/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruceploitation
Incidentally if you think Fist of Unicorn is Brucesploitation then you implicitly support my argument that the genre predates the Little Dragon's death, and Wikipedia - among others - was wrong to claim it is made up of movies shot after 20 July 1973. Note that this Wikipedia entry opens with various errors I am attempting to correct in Re-Enter The Dragon: "Bruceploitation (a portmanteau of Bruce Lee and exploitation) refers to the practice on the part of filmmakers in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan of hiring Bruce Lee look-alike actors ("Lee-alikes") to star in many imitation martial arts films in order to cash in on Lee's success after his death." Alongside the dating error in this opening sentence, there are the misleading assertions that Brucesploitation is characterised by look-alike actors (or clones to use the term found in the title of your website) and about the geographical areas that produced such films (which, of course, also include The Philippines, Korea, Indonesia, Japan and the USA). The claim that Brucesploitation movies are 'imitation martial arts films' is particularly silly; in my experience most of those interested in the genre currently consider them to be actual martial arts films rather than imitation fight flicks. That said, such a slippage does serve to illustrate the damage the clone fallacy does to a proper understanding of the genre.
Wikipedia entries are highly ranked by search engines and are influential, therefore misconceptions within them and the sources they draw upon and link to - including in the instance of the one on 'Bruceploitation' your website - need to be challenged, which is what I've been doing. I would also point out that this Wikipedia entry has for some time contained a link to a review of the Carl Jones book Here Come The Kung Fu Clones that I wrote and published in 2012, and that my understanding of Brucesploitation has changed since then; although I would stand by the review's premise that Jones in his book was confused about the Bruce Le filmography - this is reiterated in less detail in Re-Enter The Dragon.
You say: "I also don't think anyone has ever said that Bruce Lee A Dragon Story is the first Bruceploitation movie, it is the first Bruce Lee Bio-pic."
The top two entries of the web search I just did for Bruce Lee: A Dragon Story (1974), both addressed the matter of it being the 'first' Brucesploitation movie. I got live links for Wikipedia and Hong Kong Movie Database but I'm providing archived ones here:
"Bruce Lee: A Dragon Story… is a 1974 Bruceploitation film starring Bruce Li…. The film is notable for being the first biopic of Bruce Lee (it was released the year following his death), the debut film of notorious Lee imitator Bruce Li, and the first film in the Bruceploitation genre."https://web.archive.org/web/20190626211837/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Lee:_A_Dragon_Story
"Bruce Lee: A Dragon Story is thought to be the first entry in the extraordinary genre of what are known as "Brucesploitation" films." https://web.archive.org/web/20120710022900/http://hkmdb.com/db/movies/reviews.mhtml?id=9646&display_set=eng
You say: "…how do you know my opinions on Bruce Leung Siu-Lung or Tadashi Yamashita and how they fit into Bruceploitation? I've never published a profile on them on my site. If you wanted my opinion on them, here is a radical idea, you could have just asked me!"
I assume it is narcissism that makes you think I'd be interested in your opinions. To clarify, I couldn't give a flying fuck about your opinions on Bruce Liang (AKA Bruce Leung Siu-Lung), Tadashi Yamashita, or anything else for that matter. My book dealt with Brucesploitation as a genre and that meant I needed to address the discourse(s) that create and shape it, and unfortunately your website is a part of this and is publicly accessible. On your site you have a page dedicated to 'lesser known stars of Bruceploitation', where you mention three major clones and go on to provide a list of others who were 'impersonating The Little Dragon'. You include both Bruce Liang (AKA Bruce Leung Siu-Lung) and Tadashi Yamashita on this list and therefore effectively treat them as clones. It would have been completely redundant to ask you about this because you'd already implicitly stated your position online. In case you've forgotten what's on your own website here's an archived version of the page: https://web.archive.org/web/20190819111923/http://clonesofbrucelee.info/enter-another-dragon/
You say: "And why would anyone classify Mission Terminate as a Bruceploitation movie? It is only included on my site due to the fact that it features Bruce Le and I cover his entire filmography."
If you cover Bruce Le's entire filmography why am I unable to find coverage of it all on your site? For example I can find nothing about Treasure of Bruce Lee or My Name Called Bruce.When I use the search engine on your site for these films it produces no results, see screenshots below. It's claims like this, which I'm unable to substantiate, that lead me to suspect you may be a habitual liar. Since I've never been able to find coverage of ALL Bruce Le's films on your site, your sorry justification isn't exactly convincing. There's nothing on the page containing the Richard Norton interview to suggest you see Mission Terminate as anything other than Brucesploitation. That page is archived here: https://web.archive.org/web/20190819112551/http://clonesofbrucelee.info/richard-norton/
Your homepage explicitly states: "This website is dedicated to Bruce Lee exploitation cinema, or 'Bruceploitation' as it has become to be known." This is at the top of the page in capital letters and it is therefore reasonable for anyone visiting the site to conclude that anything on it - such as the coverage of Mission Terminate - you consider to be Brucesploitation, unless you explicitly state otherwise. BTW: your sentence construction is shockingly bad and you really ought to rewrite the dreadful 'as it has become to be known' since this sloppy phrasing is very visible on the page. In case you've forgotten what's on your homepage there's an archived version of it here: https://web.archive.org/web/20190209093714/http://clonesofbrucelee.info/
You write: "I applaud anyone who goes to the effort to bring out a book on this genre that I love I just don't see why you think you had to include my name, and other writers (e.g. Carl Jones) in such a negative way to try make yourself and your book look better. As a fan and researcher of this genre for more than 30 years I wouldn't see the need to try and put down you in anything I write. My research into the genre consists of more than merely watching what i can find online or purchased from the poundshop and writing a basic plot line and sticking it in a book."
This self-refuting passage really made me laugh. You are attempting to put me down in your brickbat, and it is something you've written, so why pointlessly contradict yourself within it by rhetorically stating: "I wouldn't see the need to try and put down you in anything I write…" You appear incapable of making or sustaining a coherent argument or writing a well-constructed sentence. Likewise some of the absurd errors on your part addressed here rather belie your claims to have been researching 'this genre for more than 30 years'. It would appear that what you call 'research' consists mostly of spouting the first piece bullshit that enters your head and deluding yourself into thinking no one will notice you're utterly clueless. Likewise your claim that me 'putting you down' will make me or my book 'look better' is ridiculous, since you're a complete twit who is utterly incapable of making me or anyone else 'look better' by comparison. I also hope it's clear by now I wasn't putting you down in my book even if I am now. I'm doing that here to demonstrate the difference between civil critical engagement with your website - which is my stance towards it in Re-Enter The Dragon - and personalised refutation with humorous insults, which as I trust this reply illustrates is a style of address that I am also familiar with and that I can deploy as and when is necessary. It would be great if this eventually helped you to understand the difference between the two, although at present that seems rather unlikely.
You say: "And one final thought, I've never seen Bruceploitation spelt "Brucesploitation". I've no idea where you got that idea from."
No shit Sherlock! I discuss the variant spellings of Brucesploitation in Re-Enter The Dragon and if as you claim you've been researching the genre for 30 years then you really ought to have seen the spelling I use elsewhere. Either you're lying or you haven't done any serious research, or both. I'm going to give you one example of the Brucesploitation spelling being used here but you can find many more by doing a simple web search, assuming - of course - you're not too simple to use a search engine: https://www.grindhousedatabase.com/index.php/Brucesploitation
www.stewarthomesociety.org/blog
The main part of my website is here:
www.stewarthomesociety.org
And my censored YouTube profile is there:
http://www.youtube.com/stewarthome
YouTube actually removed a parody of a Fluxus film for violating their rules. This was a countdown from 10 to 1, no images in it at all, just numerals. Presumably the problem was the joke title 10 Erotic Movies - it had more than twenty thousand hits before being taken down by the authoritarians who run that platform. If YouTube won't allow a film like this, then Web 2.0 is a joke and we need to move on to Web 2.1, where we control the sites we're posting on!
However, you can listen to my punk rock slop and spoken word schlock, and even get free downloads, here:
http://www.last.fm/music/Stewart+Home
DAVID HOCKNEY'S ART SCHOOL DAZE Part 25 [ 11-May-14 12:01am ]A FIGGING FOR HOCKNEY TEACHES THIS BDSM FREAK THE VALUE OF THINKING WITH HIS DICK!
At the start of their second year Kitaj was doing very well at the Republican College of Art. Hockney wanted to see whether he could make a better fist of the new term at the RCA than he had of the last. He began with a much better chance of doing so, for he was thoroughly humbled. The discovery that he was not altogether such a hero as he had fancied himself, had dawned upon him very distinctly by the end of his first year as the full depths of his masochism had been revealed; and the events of the long vacation had confirmed the impression, and pretty well taken all the conceit out of him for the time being. The impotency of his own will, even when he was bent on doing the right thing, his want of insight and foresight in whatever matter he took in hand, the unruliness of his temper and passions just at the moments when it behooved him to have them most thoroughly in check and under control, were a set of agreeable facts which had been driven well home to him. The results, being even such as we have seen, he did not much repine at, for he felt he had deserved them; and there was a sort of grim satisfaction, dreary as the prospect was, in facing them, and taking his punishment like a man. Or at least like a girl since he most enjoyed bondage scenes in which he was made to put on dresses and act like a member of the 'weaker' sex.
Kitaj was so fully occupied with painting and a muscle-building regime that he'd taken up, that Hockney had scruples about demanding much of his spare time in the evenings. Nevertheless, the two men still wanted to enjoy some kinky sex together, and were able to do so both at the RCA and in their rooms. On the first day of term Hockney checked out the new first year students and had even sucked one of them off in the men's toilet at lunchtime. He hoped Kitaj would hear about this and would punish him severely for it. And that was precisely what happened towards the end of that first day back at college.
Hockney stood in the corner of a lecture room, his hands firmly planted on the top of his head, muttering at the injustice of it all. He knew that Kitaj was strict, but he was in his early twenties for fucks sake, a post-graduate art student, and he had been standing with a view of nothing but peeling paintwork for the last forty-five minutes. Hockney heard Kitaj step back into the room and the blinds of the lecture hall fell, leaving only the glow of the lights.
"Boy, what did you think you were doing?" Kitaj's voice was harsher than before, Hockney could tell this time he was in for it.
The sub's response came out as a mutter: "Nothing, it was just a bit of fun..."
"Just what? A Joke? I'm sure that fresher's orgasm wasn't a sarcastic orgasm, was it?"
"No," Hockney was sulking by this time. He was being spoken to like a child, it had just been guys messing around in the john, a quick blow job, and now he was taking a heavy wrap for it.
"No sir, is how you shall address me Hockney! I see it is not just your submissive peers you treat with such disrespect but even your master. Come over to the lecture desk."
Hockney walked over to the most imposing piece of furniture in the room as Kitaj instructed. He lowered his arms from his head and gave them a little rub to improve their numbed circulation.
"They tried punishing you with lines when you were at school I presume?" Kitaj snapped.
Hockney rummaged in his bag with one hand, thinking how cruel it was that his position in the corner had made his arms ache before the hours of endless, repetitive writing.
"And writing lines didn't make an impact on you I see" Kitaj continued as he sat down in a chair behind the lecture desk, "So instead of getting you to write out 'I must not suck fresher cock' a thousand times, I want you to bend over this desk, and we will see if I can't beat some discipline into you."
Hockney jerked his head up to look at Kitaj, and was shocked to see he was done up like a tranny. Kitaj was wearing make-up and a low cut dress, not to mention a sick stern kind of smile that made it clear that he was on some strict school-mistress trip. He even had on long false nails that had been painted with purple varnish! Kitaj hadn't looked anything like this when he'd left the room. It was sick, in anyone else the way Kitaj was done up would have looked like forced feminisation, but the dom was able to carry it off and retain his aura of authority and masculinity. Still being beaten by a top wearing a dress was a new level of humiliation for Hockney.
Hockney took his time bending over the desk, taking in Kitaj's female scent - a perfume he was unable to name - as he leant towards him. Kitaj stood and walked round the desk and out of Hockney's line of sight. The apprehension the sub felt was nearly unbearable and although it could only have been a few seconds it felt like minutes had passed before Kitaj spoke.
"Hockney, earlier today you seemed to think it amusing to suck some boy's cock without my permission." This was clearly a statement, not a question, so Hockney kept his mouth shut. "I think it is fair that you shall drop your trousers for your caning"
Before Hockney had time to refuse to comply, Kitaj pinned the sub to the desk with one hand. Hockney felt Kitaj's body against his own and a strange sense of arousal came over him as he once again took in his master's feminine scent. Hockney was thinking he shouldn't be turned on by this, a master who has dressed himself up in a frock, plastered make-up over his face and drenched himself in cheap perfume. It was a new low in Hockney's sexual fetishism.
Kitaj practically assaulted Hockney. The sub felt one hand undoing his belt, removing it and then Kitaj used a length of rope to tie Hockney's hands to a hook on the other side of the desk, stretching him across the wood and pressing his cock against it. Hockney clenched his legs together determined that Kitaj would not remove his trousers, but Kitaj's strength was astounding, probably the result of all the weight training he'd been doing. Hockney's overpants were at his ankles, and Kitaj ordered him to step out of them, his smalls did little to preserve his dignity. Hockney snapped his legs back together, determined that Kitaj wouldn't see through to his cock, which was, much to his great pleasure, rock hard. The reason Hockney had a stiffy was because he was completely vulnerable. He clenched his butt cheeks tight together in anticipation of the cane.
"Boy, I am going to give you eight strokes for your cock sucking antics. You are to count them and if you miss one I will start again. If you try to avoid your punishment by squirming, I will start again. Don't give me a reason to make this worse boy."
Hockney heard the cane before he felt it. A swoosh through the air then a thwack as it landed on his clenched buttocks. The pain took a few seconds to register in his brain, being felt as a tingle before it became a sting, and by the time the sub fully appreciated this agony it was every bit as bad as he was expecting. Hockney clenched his gluteus muscles to help him control himself and stay still. "One, sir," then "two sir," almost immediately after.
Hockney wasn't ready for the second stroke, he tensed up just as the cane hit, and Kitaj saw that all of Hockney's gluts had contracted. As both Hockney and Kitaj knew the gluteal muscles are a group of four muscles. Three of these muscles make up the buttocks: the gluteus maximus muscle, gluteus medius muscle and gluteus minimus muscle. The fourth and smallest of the muscles is the tensor fasciae latae muscle, which is located anterior and lateral to the rest. Without Hockney even thinking about it all of his gluts had tensed. Indeed even Hockney's hamstrings had contracted.
"Hockney, why are you clenching your buttocks like that? Does the caning hurt too much or are you daydreaming that you are performing squats with a heavy barbell across your shoulders?"
The sub wasn't fooled by the mock sympathy in Kitaj's voice and didn't answer.
"Do you know, boy, what they did to naughty boys who clenched their buttocks during a canning in the ancient world?"
"No sir."
"Let us have a little history lesson then…"
Hockney felt Kitaj getting up close and personal with him, and then pulling down his skidmarked knickers. Hockney tried to struggle against Kitaj but it was useless, the top already knew Hockney didn't have the best hygiene habits in the world, and was often reduced to boiling his shit and piss stained underpants in a pan to get them clean. When he did this, Hockney always feared a knock on the door from his landlady Mrs Longbottom. She would scream at him and yell that she ran a Christian house in which no man was allowed to boil his underpants on a hot plate since the smell was an affront to the dignity of upright and moral women of all classes.
Just as he tried to hide his underpant boiling activities from Mrs Longbottom, Hockney hoped to hide the fact that he now had a raging hard on from Kitaj. The top's false nails scraped against Hockney's cock as Kitaj pulled the sub's skidmarkded underwear down. But the dom didn't mention the state of extreme sexual arousal the slave just happened to be in.
Hockney wobbled as Kitaj pulled one of his ankles towards the leg of the desk and tied them securely together - the operation was then repeated on the other side. Hockney was trussed up like a turkey at Christmas and hoping he'd end up just as well stuffed. The bottom was unable to move his arms or his legs, but he could still clench his butt cheeks together. He heard the clink of Kitaj's high heels on the floor and the door opening, but not shutting. He was tied to a desk, naked from the waist down with the door open whilst Kitaj went out for what Hockney wrongly imagined to be a wank in the john.
Hockney had no idea how much time passed before Kitaj returned with what looked like a carved vegetable that had been shaped into a buttplug in his hand. Kitaj stood behind the sub and fondled his butt cheeks, spreading them apart.
"Relax, it will be worse if you don't."
Worse? Hockney wondered what the hell Kitaj was going to do with him. With one hand holding Hockney's arse cheeks apart, the top slipped something cold and wet into the sub's anus. Why was Kitaj doing that Hockney wondered? Then his bum started tingling, and the sub tried to clench his rim of dark pleasures tight to stop Kitaj pushing the unknown thing in any further. Despite Hockney's pitiful attempt to struggle against it, the strangely carved vegetable kept going in deeper and deeper. And while this was happening the tingling had progressed into a burning.
"This Hockney is called figging, the tighter you clench, the more it hurts and burns."
"What is it sir?"
"Ginger, four inches of it, freshly cut and shaped for your naughty little bumhole…"
Hockney winced as Kitaj stepped back to retrieve his cane, The sub had no choice now but to relax because the more he tightened his gluts and pelvic core the more the ginger burned him. He wondered how much the caning would hurt? Determined to stay relaxed, Hockney awaited the third stroke of his punishment. And it came. Harder than the last two on his now bare and figged bottom.
"Ahh shit, fuck, oahh, th-three sir." Hockney had been relaxed for the stroke, but then clenched on the ginger once he felt the pain of it, getting the worst of all worlds. And yet through it all his cock was throbbing, desperate for some attention. For a moment sexual desire took over from the agony.
"That was not three, boy, we had to start again, and your appalling language has done little to help you, counting is clearly too difficult for your hormone crazed brain to handle - that's right, I have seen how hard your little dick has got from me punishing you. Let's try it again, five more strokes."
Kitaj walked around to the desk, and shoved Hockney's filthy skidmarked drawers into the sub's gob. The smalls were wet with piss and shit and tasted dirty in Hockney's mouth, Before Hockney could consider using his tongue to push the underwear out of his north and south, they were taped firmly in place and he was instructed to remain silent.
The next three strokes came in quick succession, one after the other on the delicate fold between the leg and the cheek. That is to say he was being whacked on the gluteal sulcus, also known as the gluteal fold, the horizontal gluteal crease, or the fold of the buttocks. It is an area on the body of humans and great apes described by a horizontal crease formed by the inferior aspect of the buttocks and the posterior upper thigh. The gluteal sulcus is formed by the posterior horizontal skin crease of the hip joint and overlying fat, and is not formed by the lower border of gluteus maximus, which crosses the fold obliquely. It is one of the major defining features of the buttocks in both great apes and humans.
But Hockney was not giving much thought to anatomy. The sting of the cane mixed with the burn of the ginger, leaving him in a state of sexual agony. His anticipation of the next stroke forced his buttocks to clench hard around the ginger, intensifying the burning sensation and immediately making him relax in an attempt to dull the pain. Kitaj waited for that moment before he struck. This stroke came firmer than the previous three and was immediately followed by another swift blow.
As the sixth stroke came, Hockney's body thrust forward by the three millimetres available to it. The sub's knob, trapped between his body and the desk, rubbed pleasurably against the tough oak. Hockney let out a low moan despite the shit-smeared gag in his mouth. This cry articulated both pain and sexual arousal. Kitaj heard it and let out a disapproving chuckle. Hockney, meanwhile, thrust his cock against the desk in an attempt to gain some release from that hard and sexy surface.
As the seventh stroke smashed into Hockney's reddened backside, it greatly added to his sense of extreme sexual arousal, and all pain was washed away by the genetic urges coursing through his core. Hockney awaited stroke eight. The sub was unable to see his master, but he felt his hand, cold against his burning bumhole, making its way towards the ginger plug. And then the pain intensified. Kitaj was fucking Hockney's arse with the ginger, renewing the sensations that had begun to subside.
Then it finally came! The eighth and last stroke of the cane. It was, in fact, the eleventh stroke - and Hockney's arse burnt and stung like it had been attacked by a swarm of angry bees who believed their queen to be imprisoned in the sub's guts. The bottom's cock was hard and pressed against the art school desk.
Then Kitaj spoke. "Well done, boy. You dealt with that well in the end. Was it really worth making all that fuss over?"
Hockney tried to speak, but through the shitty gag his words came out as an incomprehensible murmur. He wasn't going to argue. His love muscle was too hard and his bulk ached for release too much for him to do anything. He simply found himself grateful for the restraints. They kept him from falling to the floor.
"However, I am disappointed at this." As he spoke Kitaj reached underneath Hockney and cruelly prodded his throbbing member. "It seems I have done little to teach you in the long term about the consequences of unauthorised cock sucking. It seems that no matter what I do you are only able to think with your dick..."
After the figging Hockney was convinced that thinking with his dick wasn't such a bad idea - since it opened up so many orgasmic possibilities. He even made a student painting on the theme entitled "Be A Man, Think With Your Dick" but unfortunately it has been lost to posterity.
DAVID HOCKNEY'S ART SCHOOL DAZE Part 15 [ 18-Jul-12 12:14am ]That evening Hockney found himself at "The Choughs" with half a dozen others. Patty was in the bar by herself, looking prettier than ever. One by one the rest of the men dropped off, the last saying, "Are you coming, Hockney?" and being answered in the negative. Kitaj had repeatedly told Hockney how pretty Patty was. At first the rubber slave had been worried by this but now he'd come up with a plan to eliminate her as a love rival. Patty may have been a girl but that didn't mean he couldn't seduce her and make her fall in love with him!
He sat still, watching Patty as she flitted about, washing up the ale glasses and putting them on their shelves, and getting out her work basket; and then she came and sat down in her aunt's chair opposite him, and began stitching away demurely at an apron she was making. Then he broke silence:
"Where's your aunt to-night, Patty?"
"Oh, she has gone away for a few days, for a visit to some friends."
"You and I will keep house, then, together; you shall teach me all the tricks of the trade. I shall make a famous barman, don't you think?"
"You must learn to behave better, then. But I promised aunt to shut up at nine; so you must go when it strikes. Now promise me you will go."
"Go at nine! what, in half an hour? The first evening I have ever had a chance of spending alone with you; do you think it likely?" and he looked into her eyes. She turned away with a slight shiver, and a deep blush.
His nervous system had been so unusually excited in the last few days by the fear that he was going to lose Kitaj's affections as they slowly turned towards this kitten, that Hockney seemed to know everything that was passing in her mind. He took her hand. "Why, Patty, you're not afraid of me, surely?" he said, gently.
"No, not when you're like you are now. But you frightened me just this minute. I never saw you look so before. Has anything happened to you?"
"No, nothing. Now then, we're going to have a jolly evening, and play Darby and Joan together," he said, turning away, and going to the bar window; "shall I shut up, Patty?"
"No, it isn't nine yet; somebody may come in."
"That's just why I mean to put the shutters up; I don't want anybody."
"Yes, but I do, though. Now I declare, Mr. Hockney, if you go on shutting up, I'll run into the kitchen and sit with Dick."
"Why will you call me 'Mr. Hockney'?"
"Why, what should I call you?"
"Hockney, of course."
"Oh, I never! one would think you was my brother," said Patty, looking up with a pretty pertness which she had a most bewitching way of putting on. Hockney's rejoinder, and the little squabble which they had afterwards about where her work-table should stand, and other such matters, may be passed over. At last he was brought to reason, and to anchor opposite this enchantress, the work-table between them; and he sat leaning back in his chair and watching her, as she stitched away without ever lifting her eyes. He was in no hurry to break the silence. The position was particularly fascinating to him, for he had scarcely ever yet had a good look at her before, without fear of attracting attention, or being interrupted. At last he roused himself.
"Do you know what BDSM is, Patty?" he said, sitting up.
"There now, I've won," she laughed; "I said to myself I wouldn't speak first, and I haven't. What a time you were. I thought you would never begin."
"You're a little goose! Now I begin then; what do you know about BDSM?"
"I know all about that. Your friend Kitaj was in here earlier on telling me all about your activities with him as a rubber slave!"
"What, Kitaj?"
"Yes, that's it; he was here about half-past six, and--"
"What, Kitaj here?" interrupted Hockney, utterly astonished.
"Yes, he's been here two or three times lately."
"The deuce he has!"
"Yes, and he talks so pleasant to aunt, too. I'm sure he is a very nice gentleman, after all. He sat and talked tonight for half an hour, I should think."
"What did he talk about?" said Hockney, with a sneer.
"Oh, he asked me whether I was a virgin, and if I had a boyfriend, and all about my sexual preferences, and made me feel quite pleasant. He is so nice and quiet and respectful, not like most of you. I'm going to like him very much, as you told me some time ago."
"I don't tell you so now."
"But you did say he was your great friend."
"Well, he isn't that now."
"What, have you had a quarrel?"
"Yes."
"Dear; dear; how odd you gentlemen are!"
"Why, it isn't a very odd thing for men to quarrel, is it?"
"No, not in the public room. They're always quarrelling there, over their drink and the bagatelle-board; and Dick has to turn them out. But gentlemen ought to know better."
"They don't, you see, Patty."
"But what did you quarrel about?"
"Guess."
"How can I guess? What was it about?"
"About you. Well we haven't yet but we will do when I see him"
"About me!" she said, looking up from her work in wonder. "How could you quarrel about me?"
"Well, I'll tell you; until I met Kitaj I though I was gay and then he showed me in BDSM there is no gay or straight. Now I want you to be my master. What do you think of that?"
They sat still for some minutes. Evil thoughts crowded into Hockney's head. He was in the humour for thinking evil thoughts, and, putting the worst construction on Kitaj's visits, fancied his master fancied Patty more than a man like himself. Hockney did not trust himself to speak till he had mastered his precious discovery, and put it away in the back of his heart, and weighed it down there with a good covering of hatred and revenge, to be brought out as occasion should serve. He was plunging down rapidly enough now; but he had new motives for making the most of his time, and never played his cards better or made more progress. When a man sits down to such a game, the devil will take good care he shan't want cunning or strength.
Hockney talked Patsy into putting on a record and dancing with him. They cleared some tables and waved their arms and legs around to Hound Dog by Elvis Presley.
"Thanks for the dance," Hockney blurted as the song ended.
"Hey!" Patty grabbed Hockney's arm. "You think I'm going to bite?"
She lifted her arms up as if to put them around Hockney's neck and waited. What could he do? He walked into her and put his arms around her waist as she draped her arms around his neck.
Although he preferred men Hockney was got an instant stiffy.
"Mmmmm," Patty cooed as she snuggled her chin on Hockney's shoulder.
He gazed for a moment at the metal stud in her tongue and thought you will be assimilated, resistance is futile. Patty squeezed even tighter. For a skinny girl, she sure seemed strong. She rubbed her pelvis against Hockney's, rolling his boner around between his upper thighs.
Then Patty's and Hockney's lips were pressing into each other. Hockney thought the stud on Patty's tongue felt weird every time his tongue slid over it.
"Let's go to one of the upstairs bedrooms!" Patty hissed
"Yeah, but what about Kitaj?" Hockney asked.
Patty rolled Hockney's boner against her crotch and said, "Forget Kitaj for now!" Then Patty stuck her tongue in Hockney's ear and licked all around the ridges for a few seconds. He almost had an orgasm just standing right there!
"C'mon! I promise you an hour of pleasure like you've never had and never will have again. Don't pass it up." Patty lisped
Hockney followed Patty up two fights of stairs to one of the pub's special rooms.
"Uh, mind if I use the bathroom?" Hockney asked pointing to the master bathroom through a door in the bedroom.
"Not that one," she said. "That's for women only. Use the one down the hall."
Hockney shrugged, wondering why an en suit room would have a women's only john; but he followed Patty's directions, took a shit, and returned to find her tall, skinny, ashen body already naked in bed. Her skimpy top, her black leather skirt, her fishnet stockings, and her shoes were in a pile on the seat of a chair in front of a wide sliding glass door that opened out onto a huge balcony. Hockney thought it odd he didn't see a bra or panties among the discarded garmentry.
"C'mon!" Patty said. "I've felt how big and stiff it is. Now I want to see my prize."
Hockney kicked off his shoes, removed his shirt, then his socks, and finally his pants. "Is this what you wanted to see?"
"Yeah! Bring it to me, baby!"
Hockney climbed into bed with Patty and they were immediately swapping spit, her ashen skin and black lipstick no longer a concern. His cock just needed to take a plunge -- nothing else mattered. He rolled her onto her back and began to suck her perky little titties. Her nipples were little more than tiny red pimples, but Hockney managed to give them a tad more fullness as she cooed, "Ooh!" and "Ahh!"
Hockney started to crawl lower, but Patty pushed him onto his side and said, "Want to fuck my mouth?"
"Wow!" Hockney gasped. Did she really mean that? Does she really know what it means to have a guy fuck her mouth? "Yeah!"
Patty rolled flat on her back, stretching her arms over her head, and said, "Go ahead! Have at me!"
"You really want me to?"
"Yeah! Like my mouth was a pussy. Go ahead! Don't hold back!" Then she faced straight up at the ceiling and opened her mouth wide.
Hockney couldn't believe it. He swung a leg over her head and settled onto her, facing her crotch. He slid his cock into Patty's gaping mouth, then slammed his pelvis down, pressing his crotch tightly to her lips, before she could change her mind.
Hockney felt his cock twist sharply at the back of Patty's mouth - as it slid past her throat and down her gullet. She began bucking wildly under him, nearly throwing him off her a few times. There was no way she was going to make him disengage before he was fully satisfied. He didn't even have to pump her mouth -- her strenuous gag reflex did all the work, milking his cock far more tightly than any pussy, hand, or asshole ever could.
"Oh! Oh! Oh!" Hockney groaned as he flooded Patty's throat with his spunk. Her continuing gagging and squeezing of his cock drew more cum from him than he could have ever produced with his own hands. He just kept coming and coming and coming,
Hockney pulled his cock out of her mouth and rolled off her, panting. After a few seconds, he sat up and said, "Patty! Wow!"
Patty didn't answer.
"My God! Patty! PATTY!" She was out cold. Hockney ran to the bathroom and found a cup. he filled it with water, ran back, and splashed it on her face. He slapped her face a few times and she started to cough and sputter.
"Patty! I'm sorry! I..."
"It's okay," she said and coughed for a while. Then she grinned wide and said, "But now it's my turn."
"What do you mean?" Hockney asked. "Now we fuck normally, right? But I don't think I have any more spunk left in me after that."
"No! Now I ride you and you make me come with your mouth."
"Sure," Hockney agreed
"You'll love this!" Patty pushed Hockney onto his back. In an instant she had straddled his head, hovering her ass just inches above his face. He was staring into in the thickest, blackest muff hair ever known to man. Her pussy was the merest slit between her twin mounds. And she had a little tattoo of a unicorn on the inner surface of her ass cheek with its horn about to impale her anus.
"Ready?" she asked.
"Yeah!" Hockney said.
Patty sat on his face. Hockney's nose was shoved up her asshole, and her pussy was pressed tightly to his mouth.
Patty squeezed Hockney's nose with her anal sphincter and said, "Make me come, Hockney. You're not taking another breath until I come."
Hockney felt Patty swing her legs straight out in front of her along the sides of his body. Her pussy mounds twisted his lips under her weight as she swung her legs around. The pressure on his face increased, and it quickly dawn on him that his visage was supporting her full weight. Despite her slight build, her full weight on his skull was crushing and painful.
Hockney slid his tongue up between her tight rubbery pussy lips and tasted the musky wetness within. He slid his tongue up and down her pussy and in and out of the hole a few times. Then he found her clit. He flicked it a few times with his tongue, then drew it into his mouth between his lips.
Hockney's lungs were already gasping for air, and so he tried to motion her with my hands to let him take a breath, but his arms were pinned at his sides under her legs. Hockney had no choice but to continue working her clit. With her clit pulled into his mouth, he swirled and flicked it with his tongue. She began to moan, "Oh! Ah! Ohhh! Aaaaah!" as Hockney batted her clit with his tongue.
Hockney was on the verge of passing out when Patty started to quake on his face and gushed a heavy stream of pussy juice into his mouth. Then the taste hit him. It wasn't pussy juice. She was pissing into his mouth as she came. Hockney struggled to get Patty to stop, but his head was pinned under her ass, and his arms were still pinned under her legs. Just when Hockney was on the verge of blacking out, Patty fell forward onto him.
"Whoa!" she said. "You're good!"
"Aaaaaah!" Hockney said, his mouth was full of pee and he couldn't say anything else.
Patty turned and sat up on Hockney's chest looking down at him.
"Ahhh! Ahhh!" Hockney said, pushing her to get off him.
"No! I'm not getting off."
"Ahhh! Ahhh!" Hockney said again pointing into his mouth. He so wanted to spit her waste out of his mouth.
"No, Hockney! Swallow it. I'm sitting right here until it's all gone."
So Hockney swallowed her filth.
"There," Patty said, "That wasn't so bad, was it?"
"But why'd you pee in my mouth? And why wouldn't you let me get up to spit it out?"
"I pee during powerful orgasms. And you gave me one of the most powerful orgasms ever!"
"I, uh, well..."
"And I swallowed your cum. So you can swallow my pee."
"I guess so..." Hockney figured Patty had a point there. Even though cum wasn't exactly waste.
"Besides, haven't you ever heard of water sports?"
"Well, yeah," Hockney said. "But to date I've only been a piss toy for men, and that's different."
"And what did it taste like to you?" she asked.
"It didn't taste like anything, really. I guess it wasn't so bad. But girl pee is still different to man piss."
"Kitaj told me about using you as a piss toy. He said he'd give you the idea that he fancied m. He wanted you to want to fuck me. And after I'd done the shag-nasty with you he told me to pass on the message there is no gay or straight in BDSM - only mind games!"
It was ten o'clock instead of nine before Hockney left, which he did with a feeling of defeat and tears in his eyes. Hockney walked quickly to Kitaj's pad. But Kitaj was out and the next day Hockney dared not go and confront him over Patty and his sexual orientation. Deeper and deeper yet for the next few days, downwards and ever faster downwards Hockney plunged, the light getting fainter and ever fainter above his head. Little good can come of dwelling on those days. He left off pulling himself off, shunned his old friends, and drank with the very worst men he knew in college, who were ready enough to let him share all their brutal fun.
Boshier, who was often present, wondered at the change, which he saw plainly enough. He was sorry for it in his way, but it was no business of his. He began to think that Hockney was a good enough fellow before, but would make a devilish disagreeable one if he was going to turn into a misery guts crying for attention by threatening suicide. But everything returned to normal when Hockney received a note from Kitaj saying he'd been a bad rubber slave but his phony punishment of banishment was over and now he must return to his master for a beating.
DAVID HOCKNEY'S ART SCHOOL DAZE Part 1 [ 31-Jan-12 7:35pm ]Republican College of Art was a moderate-sized art school. There might have been some seventy or eighty postgraduates in residence, when our hero appeared there as a freshman. Of these, unfortunately for the college, there were a very large proportion of the gentleman-commoners; enough, in fact, with the other men whom they drew round them, and who lived pretty much as they did, to form the largest and leading set in the college. So the college was decidedly fast.
The chief characteristic of this set was the most reckless extravagance of every kind. London wine merchants furnished them with liqueurs at a guinea a bottle and wine at five guineas a dozen; London and London tailors vied with one another in providing them with unheard-of quantities of the most gorgeous clothing. They drove tandems in all directions, scattering their ample grants, which they treated as pocket money, about roadside inns and London taverns with open hand, and "going tick" for everything that could by possibility be booked. Their cigars cost two guineas a pound; their furniture was the best that could be bought; pineapples, forced fruit, and the most rare preserves figured at their wine parties; they danced, slept by day, played billiards until the gates closed, and then were ready for vingt-et-une, unlimited loo, and hot drink in their own rooms, as long as anyone could be got to sit up and play.
The fast set then swamped, and gave the tone to the college; at which fact no persons were more astonished and horrified than the authorities of the RCA.
That they of all bodies in the world should be fairly run away with by a set of reckless, loose young spendthrifts, was indeed a melancholy and unprecedented fact; for the body of fellows of the RCA was as distinguished for restraint, morality and respectability as any in an art school. The foundation was not, indeed, actually an open one. St Martin's at that time alone enjoyed this distinction; but there were a large number of open fellowships, and the income of the college was large, and the livings belonging to it numerous; so that the best men from other colleges were constantly coming in. Some of these of a former generation had been eminently successful in their management of the college. The RCA postgraduates at one time had carried off almost all the art prizes, and filled the young contemporaries lists, while maintaining at the same time the highest character for manliness and gentlemanly conduct. This had lasted long enough to establish the fame of the college, and great lords and statesmen had sent their sons there; art masters had struggled to get the names of their best pupils on the books; in short, everyone who had a son, ward, or pupil, whom he wanted to push forward in the art world--who was meant to cut a figure, and take the lead among men of culture, left no stone unturned to get him into RCA; and thought the first, and a very long step gained when he had succeeded.
But the governing bodies of colleges are always on the change, and, in the course of things men of other ideas came to rule at the RCA--shrewd men of the world; men of business, some of them, with good ideas of making the most of their advantages; who said, "Go to; why should we not make the public pay for the great benefits we confer on them? Have we not the very best article in the educational market to supply - almost a monopoly of it - and shall we not get the highest price for it?" So by degrees they altered many things in the college. In the first place, under their auspices, gentlemen-commoners increased and multiplied; in fact, the eldest sons of baronets, even squires, were scarcely admitted on any other footing. As these young gentlemen secretly paid double fees to the college, and had great expectations of all sorts, it could not be expected that they should be subject to quite the same discipline as the common run of men, who would have to make their own way in the world. So the rules as to attendance at exhibitions and in the studio, though nominally the same for them as for commoners, were in practice relaxed in their favour; and, that they might find all things suitable to persons in their position, the kitchen and buttery were worked up to a high state of perfection, and the RCA, from having been one of the most reasonable, had come to be about the most expensive art school in the land (and the only one to take only postgraduates and have no undergraduates).
These changes worked as their promoters probably desired that they should work, and the college was full of rich men, and commanded in the college the sort of respect which riches bring with them. But the old reputation, though still strong out of doors, was beginning sadly to wane within the world of art. Fewer and fewer of the RCA men appeared in the Royal Academy summer show, and even less amongst the prize-men at that august event.
The inaugurators of these changes had passed away in their turn, and at last a reaction had commenced. The fellows recently elected, and who were in residence at the time we write of, were for the most part men of great attainments, all of them men who had taken their use of colour and boldness of line to the very heights of perfection. The electors naturally enough had chosen them as the most likely persons to restore, as tutors, the golden days of the college; and they had been careful in the selection to confine themselves to very quiet and studious men, such as were likely to remain up at Kensington Gore, passing over men of more popular manners and active spirits, who would be sure to flit soon into the world, and be of little more service to the RCA.
But these were not the men to get any hold on the fast set who were now in the ascendant. It was not in the nature of things that they should understand each other; in fact, they were hopelessly at war, and the college was getting more and more out of gear in consequence.
What they could do, however, they were doing; and under their fostering care were growing up a small set, including most of the sculptors, who were likely, as far as they were concerned, to retrieve the college's character. But they were too much like their tutors, men who did little else but work feverishly in their studios. They neither wished for, nor were likely to gain, the slightest influence on the fast set. The best men amongst them, too, were diligent readers of Eric Gill, and followers of Henry Moore; and this led them also to form such friendships as they made amongst out-college men of their own way of thinking - viz with high modernists, rather than the RCA fast set. So they lived very much to themselves, and scarcely interfered with the dominant party.
Our hero, on leaving school, having bound himself solemnly to write all his doings and thoughts to the friend whom he had left behind him: distance and separation were to make no difference whatever in their friendship. This compact had been made on one of their last evenings in Bradford. They were sitting together on a park bench, Ferrill Amacker splicing the handle of a favourite cricket bat, and Mark Berger reading a volume of Lautréamont's works. One of their tutors at Bradford School of Art had lately been alluding to 'the decadents' and the mysteries of man-to-man love and had excited the curiosity of the active-minded amongst his pupils about gay sex and beastiality. So Lautréamont's works were seized on by various voracious young readers, and carried out of the master's private library; and Mark was now deep in 'Les Chants de Maldoror" and the vagaries of shark sex, curled up on one end of the bench. Presently, Hockney heard something between a groan and a protest, and, looking up, demanded explanations; in answer to which, Mark, in a voice half furious and half fearful, read out:--
"There are some who write seeking the commendation of their fellows by means of noble sentiments which their imaginations invent or they possibly may possess. But I set my genius to portray the pleasures of cruelty! . . Cannot genius be cruelty's ally in the secret resolutions of Providence? Or, if cruel, can't one possess genius? My words will provide the proof; all you need do is listen to them, if you like..."
"You don't mean that's Lautréamont's view of humanity?"
"Yes! "
"What a cold-blooded old Philistine," said Hockney.
"But it can't be true, do you think?" said Mark.
And in short, after some personal reflections on Lautréamont, they then and there resolved that, so far as they were concerned, it was not, could not, and should not be true, that they would remain faithful, the same to each other; and the greatest friends in the world, through I know not what separations, trials, and catastrophes. And for the better insuring this result, a correspondence, regular as the recurring months, was to be maintained. It had already lasted through the long vacation and up to Christmas without sensibly dragging, though Hockney's letters had been something of the shortest in November, when he had lots of cottaging in Manchester, and two days a week at a steam bath that attracted the best looking men from the north west of England. Now, however, having fairly got to London, he determined to make up for all short-comings. His first letter from college, taken in connexion with the previous sketch of the place, will probably accomplish the work of introduction better than any detailed account by a third party; and it is therefore given here verbatim:-
The RCA, Kensington Gore, London.
February, 195-_
MY DEAR GEORDIE,
According to promise, I write to tell you how I get on up here, and what sort of a place London is. Of course, I don't know much about it yet, having only been up some weeks, but you shall have my first impressions.
Well, first and foremost it's an awfully idle place; at any rate for us newbies. Fancy now. I am in the studio twelve hours a week! Two hours a day; all over by twelve, or one at latest, and no extra work at all in the shape of still life, engraving, or other exercises.
I think sometimes I'm back in the lower fifth; for we don't get through more than we used to do there; and if you were to see the men draw nudes, it would make your hair stand on end. Where on earth can they have come from? Unless they blunder on purpose, as I often think. Of course, I never look at a model before I go in since unfortunately they are mostly female. I hope I shall take to making portraits of the men I pick up outside the local tube station; but you know I never was much of a hand at sapping, and, for the present, the light work suits me well enough, for there's plenty to see and learn about in this place.
We keep very gentlemanly hours. Wine every morning at eight, and beer every evening at seven. You must drink at least twice a day, that's the rule of our college - and be in gates by twelve o'clock at night. Besides which, if you're a decently steady fellow, you ought to dance at the union perhaps two days a week. Union is open all day and closes at eleven o'clock at night. And now you have the sum total. All the rest of your time you may just do what you like with.
I dare say after what I've written you'll say it tells you nothing, and you'd rather have twenty lines about the men, and what they're thinking about and the meaning, and the inner life of the place, and all that. Patience, patience! I don't know anything about it myself yet; you shall have the kernel, if I ever get at it, in due time.
Ever your affectionately,
D. H.
