Sexy Sailors

This famous photograph of two sailors kissing was originally taken in San Diego, California in 1942. It's currently owned by the notorious Kinsey* Institute.

This cropped version was used by Gran Fury's ACT UP “Read My Lips” campaign.

There is of course a perfectly sensible reason why the two young gentlemen are normally only shown from the waist up. Suffice it to say that are very much "for real" and they're very much enjoying both themselves and each other.

*Yes, it's the same Kinsey who collected that "interesting" data about prepubescent boys having multiple orgasms.

Grosse Pointe Cool

Between punk and the millennium, between T-2 and The Matrix, between the golden age of action movies and the post-9/11 rebirth of high fantasy... there was an oddly sleepy sort of time called the 1990s. Action comedy Grosse Pointe Blank very much represents the better end of that particular market. (Please don't ask what was at the other end.)

John Cusack is there. He's still pretty much got it. In fact he's as good as he ever was. And as a leftover 1980s teen heartthrob par excellence (albeit better known to "my" generation as that guy from The Grifters and Wesley Crusher's dead older brother in Stand by Me), he fits his role perfectly. He's now doing the quintessentially cool amoral 1990s thing - which is of course contract killing. (Hey! After the '80s even Bond was little more than a hitman - witness Dalton and Brosnan in Living Daylights and World is Not Enough!) And indeed 1980s top funny man Dan Ackroyd is there too, also great as ever (and even getting a throwaway Ghostbusters-type line about astral projection and telepathy).

So if you ever wondered what happened to John Hughes' kids, well, they got hip, they got cynical, they got cool... and they warmed up for Fight Club ("I don't think what a guy does for a living reflects who he really is", "You can never go home again, but you can shop there.") and (of course, "killing a lot of people"!) American Psycho. (Did mini-marts even in the '90s have Blistex and Trojan condoms on the front counter? Funny how it's always the most recent past feels the most alien!)

So Cusack plays a hitman called Martin. He wears black. His surname is 'Blank'. Get it? He's not a real person. He's a Man in Black. (This was the era of classic X-Files, remember, and before Men in Black the movie! In fact his secretary - played gloriously by Cusack's own sister - even has Scully's outfit and hairdo.) But is he also firing blanks - metaphorically in as much as he wants to quit the cool job that he's now too cool for? (I do really like Blank's office though. In those days even "old school" could still be cool!)

The actual gags though are also fired off thick and fast, and a surprising number are palpable hits. An assassin who sees a shrink was way ahead of Analyse This (and a much gentler but more incisive dig at the post-'80s "kinder, gentler" 1990s craze for counselling and "caring"*). And the one-liners are smart and daring. Greatest disappearing act since white flight? (WTF? Couldn't get away with that nowadays!) Live and Let Die on the soundtrack? Cheeky! The Story of a Mediocre Genesis? Nice!

And that Kipling quote is way, way deep!

*In reality it was little more than the boomers' moving on from their '80s physical exercise loopiness to trying to fill the spiritual void a decade later with neo-Freudian, New-Age bullshit.

Stars and Stripes?

J. Allen Hynek presents... (?)

How many "serious" sci-fi movies and TV-series about space aliens are there really?

My list goes something like this:

• The Outer Limits: 'The Bellero Shield' (1964) à Betty and Barney Hill abduction à The UFO Incident (1975)  à Travis Walton abduction à Fire in the Sky (1993)
• Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
• E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
• Starman (1984)
• Flight of the Navigator (1986)
• UFO Abduction (1989)
• Communion (1989)
• Fire in the Sky (1993)
• The X-Files (1993-)
• Roswell (1994)
• Dark Skies (1996-7)
• The Outer Limits: 'Beyond the Veil' (1997)
• The Shadow Men (1997)
• Taken (2002)
• The Outer Limits: 'Dark Child' (2002)
• Alien Abduction (2005)
• The Fourth Kind (2009)
• Race to Witch Mountain (2009)
• Dark Skies (2013)
• Alien Abduction (2014)
• Extraterrestrial (2014)

'The Blue Cloth', by Maurice Heerdink

(via The Blue Cloth – The Maurice Heerdink Gallery)

(via Literary Magazines for Socialists Funded by the CIA, Ranked - The Awl)

For the lolz!

On this day in 1944, an experimental Nazi V-2 rocket reaches an altitude of 176 km, becoming the first man-made object to reach outer space. The German rocket technology would be crucial for the post-war Soviet and American space program. Crucial for the Cold War as well. pic.twitter.com/KFsg6LleyI

— Klaas Meijer (@klaasm67) June 20, 2021

Twelfth Night

I'm sure we all have our personal "strangest thing about the last four years" - as if it wasn't strange enough to have a literal gameshow host as President of the United States (following on, it has to be said, from the son of the last President but one in the year 2000 and then, in 2008, a turd in a suit). To my mind, looking back, the weirdest political development in my own life was that the best political analysis I could get suddenly seemed to be coming from Pat Buchanan.

Well perhaps no longer! In reaching its apogee and/or nadir (depending on your political tastes) of its glory/horror on the Feast of the Epiphany this year, the Trump tenure at the White House suddenly seemed to shift back into normal focus. Pat Buchanan's somewhat hysterical take on the Trump "insurrection" is here. Mark Steyn's wryly cynical but spot-on analysis, on the other hand, is here.

So was this really another "color revolution" or not? Because clearly that was the idea, not so long ago. Trump was going to try to cling on to office and then be chased out of the White House by a surprisingly well organised "spontaneous" mob of Antifa, BLM and other, er, "colored" people. The American secret state and its various "civil society" offshoots have been doing this sort of thing all over the world for years. In 2020 they were just going to bring that magic home.

In the event, of course, it wasn't quite like that. Trump and his people wised up very early on, the election proved much trickier to rig than was thought (though not impossible, apparently!), Trump made it clear that he would be out in time for his opponent to take up occupancy but would not stop protesting that he'd been robbed, and then the mob that ended up storming Washington turned out to be his one, not that of the "revolution".

Interesting then that Juan Guaidó, the intended beneficiary of the Deep State's most recent "democratic revolution", which was supposed to happen in Caracas, has himself condemned the Trumpists' counter coup de theatre!

El ataque al Capitolio 🇺🇸 es a la democracia. Mis pensamientos con sus ciudadanos y funcionarios que sienten atacada la raíz de su país

La fortaleza de la democracia radica en la solidez e independencia institucional, en el vigor de su entramado social y la consciencia ciudadana

— Juan Guaidó (@jguaido) January 6, 2021

Which, as RT has pointed out, is a bit rich given some of the dodgy shit he's pulled over the years. And yet there he is on Twitter, lining up with the rest of the Pax Americana's slimy quislings to condemn exactly the sort of behaviour that he and his supporters have themselves been guilty of purely because this time it was the other side doing it.

Not that one need think too hard about why he is distancing himself from Trump! Officially he's still America and Britain's man. But with the ink scarcely dry on the Brexit deal he's been unceremoniously dumped by the European Union, and Biden now may well be thinking (and I use the term as one of art rather than exact scientific description) of scrapping the Venezuelan operation altogether. 

Role reversal has been a standard trope of Twelfth Night celebrations since time immemorial. I suppose the "mainstream" just weren't expecting quite such an obvious one this time round.