Theater, Movies, Art and Literature

50 years have just passed since the very gay Pier Paolo Pasolini's last film Salo, or as it is often referred to as The 100 Days of Sodom, was premiered. Based on the writing of the Marquis de Sade it is as usual with Pasolini highly erotic, yet also as described by The Guardian as a "terrifying masque about fascism and compliance, an accounting of both sides of the totalitarian coin. Like De Sade’s own writing, it’s about power, not pleasure: who possesses it and whom it destroys. It’s an apocalyptic masterpiece that remains unbearable to watch." It was so shocking it was banned in the UK for 25 years. The Marquis de Sade had written the book while imprisoned in the…

It seems slightly strange that one of the screen's major icons died 70 years ago just before his third and last movie appeared. I had never seen Rebel Without A Cause until this afternoon when it was shown on a True Visions channel. I had looked forward to it but was perhaps a bit disappointed, both with the movie and with James Dean. Natalie Wood's character also seemed to me two-dimensional and more than a little unbelievable. Inevitably it is dated and the post-war rebel image of the younger characters seemed tame - at least when you compare it with, for example, the gang warfare in the 1960s West Side Story. The concept of teenagers as a class of their own was still r…

While we focus in The Beer Bar on the death of the Swedish actor from Death in Venice, another popular actor has passed away, one who excelled in a totally dfferent genre. Asked to name the most famous TV comedy series of the 1970s, most will probably name Fawlty Towers with the dithering, accident-prone John Cleese trying to manage a small hotel. Partnering him was Prunella Scales as his much more practical wife, Sybil. A consummate actress, she was 93 and had been suffering from dementia for many years. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the airing of the first Fawlty Towers series. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjd0yn5gyndo

A splendid new book featuring a gay historical figure who himself may not be very well known but who played a massive role in the life of a King. When Queen Elizabeth I was on the throne of England, the country was still torn between the two main religions: the long established Catholicism and the relatively new English version of Protestantism established by her father King Henry VIII. Those intent on ensuring the abolition of Catholicism had one basic fear: that there was a rival Catholic claimant to the throne of England. When Henry divorced Elizabeth's mother, Anne Boleyn, some considered the marriage had never happened and therefore that child was illegitimate. …

Tomorrow the great Luciano Pavarotti would have been 90 years old, had pancreatic cancer not ended his life in 2017. As one major conductor claimed, Pavarotti's was a voice you might chance to come along once in a century. At the start of his career he was hailed as a new superstar of the opera world. Every opera house wanted him. But two men changed all that. As a new book points out Backstage With Pavarotti And Other Egos: Disasters On The High Cs, his manager, a New York agent named Herbert Breslin, was one of the most loathed men in the music business. One conductor called him "the biggest barracuda in the fish tank." But he was street smart and knew how to make stars…

I am sure like many, I flip through youtube videos quite frequently. Usually I am looking for specific videos or specific content. Occasionally I come across something so special it virtually takes my breath away. I am a particular fan of voices, loving opera, musicals as well as some pop. Rarely, however, do I come across any artist who has the technique to combine all three. Perhaps once every five years or more. This week I have been literally blown away by a voice that is, to me, totally unique. Dimash is a young 31 year old singer from Kazakhstan, not a country particularly known worldwide for its vocal talents. This young man, though, is the exception, a totall…

Another bit of culture! One art form that has never really interested me much is ballet. I have seen not more than half a dozen in a lifetime of theatre going, but to be fair each has been rather special. At university I had to spend two months studying in Vienna. The legendary pairing of Rudolph Nureyev and Dame Margot Fonteyn were dancing the ballet Giselle at the Opera House. I managed to get a standing ticket. I was never a Nureyev fan, but the way he used the stage as virtually his home and had the audience in the palm of his hand was remarkable. At the start of my career I went to see a short ballet/dance at the Royal Ballet choreographed by one of the great c…

I once wrote a piece about the gay novelist Christopher Isherwood whose best known work today must be his Berlin Stories which form the basis for the play I Am A Camera which in turn forms the basis for the musical Cabaret! An Englishman, Isherwood had emigrated to California at the outset of war. Enjoying Valentine's Day on the beach in 1953 he struck up a conversation with a particularly handsome young man, Don Bachardy. Isherwood then was 48: Bachardy 18. This was an era when being gay was against the law in California. But the law had never meant much to Isherwood, one of the century's most famous gay icons. Another gay icon and eventual California neighbour…

Visiting a Broadway show has been a part of many tourists' experience when visiting the Big Apple. The most expensive ticket used to be for a popular opera at the Metropolitan Opera House. Comparisons now are quite difficult as many opera tickets are booked up to a year ahead. Looking at the website today, there are tickets for productions like Carmen or Don Giovanni at the end of this month where the best available seats are less than $100. Naturally they are about the worst seats in the House as the best would probably have been around $350 if purchased in late 2024. Popular musicals have been another high ticket purchase. I have seen many in my time since I was 17…

Can it really be that the stage musical Les Miserables opened in London 40 years ago? And that it has been running in London, New York and many other cities around the world. This is a show that has now been seen by more than 130 million people, has played in 57 countries and been sung in 22 different languages. And that is before we look at the numbers from the successful movie version. The extraordinary thing is that the show almost closed after its first few weeks in London. When the large envelope landed on London producer Cameron Mackintosh's desk, he was somewhat dismayed to see it contained some cassette tapes of another musical - yet another musical. As a suc…

Oscar Winner Dame Julie Andrews was 90 yesterday. Virtually born on the stage, she was taking part in British music hall entertainments before her teens. Encouraged by her step-father to take voice lessons, it was eventually realised that she possessed an extraordinary 4-octave vocal range. By the time she was 20 Broadway had beckoned and she became a star playing Eliza Doolittle in Lerner and Lowe's magnificent musical My Fair Lady. When it came time to make the movie, she was the obvious choice for Eliza - to all but the studio head Jack Warner. He believed the film needed a more obvious star and chose Audrey Hepburn instead, even though she could not sing and Eliza's s…

She was probably best-known for playing the snooty, snobbish housewife Hyacinth Bucket (which she ensured would be pronouned "bouquet") who wished she belonged to the upper classes in the BBC hit television series Keeping Up Appearances. But Dame Patrica was much more than a BBC sitcom actor. Indeed she was one of Britain's finest, most versatile and perhaps least known actors. Her Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest at the Savoy Theatre in 2001 being one of her finest and most famous roles. She had performed a wide variety of classic roles and had been a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Since she took part in few movies, she is sadly less well know…

When I was visiting Bali regularly in the early 1980s, I based myself in Ubud, a town where art had flourished for many deacdes. There were artists working in other towns but it was Ubud which inspired a number of western artists to visit and make their homes there in the 1920s and 30s resulting in the development of a more naif form of painting. The main one we know of today is almost certainly the German painter and musician, Walter Spies. After a spell living iin Java, he moved to Bali in 1927 and spent most of the rest of his life there. As his art grew in popularity, he formed a co-operative of young Balinese artists who continued his style after he was forced to lea…

The above is the subtitle of a book published last week with its main title The Last American President. I guess most readers here will not feel the need to read this short new book as much has already been commented here. But it has received extremely good reviews. Not having read it, here is the opening blurb - "The Last American President rips open America's wounded democracy to expose a terrifying truth: Donald Trump isn't an anomaly—he's the inevitable product of a system engineered to fail. This searing investigation reveals how a man forged by childhood trauma, pathological narcissism, and calculated cruelty didn't hijack democracy—he was handed the keys by th…

Some weeks ago I moaned when I described not following Warren Buffet 17 years ago when he purchased a 10% stake in the Chinese battery and occasional car maker BYD. It cost his company $230 million. Slowly Berkshire Hathaway has been selling that stake and as of this week has zero shares. The amount of profit made is 30 times its investment - $7 billion! He walks away with a mega-profit as BYD's capitalisation hits $135 billion and its battery-driven cars outsell Teslas around the world. Another investment for those with mega-funds at their disposal, if they can be found, is a violin. This can bring you loads of profit. Not just any old violin, though. A Stradivarius…

He was one of the greats, part of a generation of American movie stars whom everyone knew and whose movies include some of the best-known. Can we ever forget Butch Cassiday and the Sundance Kid or The Sting? At a time when Trump is dragging US politics back into the gutter, we surely remember how Robert Redford inspired us along with Dustin Hoffman in the movie version of the classic Bernstein and Woodward's All The President's Men which showed how Nixon disgracefully also corrupted the system. Later in his career Redford spent more time as a director. His movies were perhaps less well known, although like All The President's Men, Quiz Show with the great British act…

The star of the movie The Wrong Paris, Pierson Fodé, is a perfect 10! Jesus Christ, I could not believe what I was seeing. It should be illegal for him to put on a shirt... 😍

Wow. Another great, and extremely hot dark comedy now playing in a theater near you (hopefully) is Twinless. There's even a gay sex scene involving gorgeous heart-throb Dylan O'Brien. And it has a 97% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. What more could one ask for?

It seems like it's been almost a year since On Swift Horses came out, but it was in theaters for such a short time that I missed it. I've been checking every week to see when it'd make it to streaming, and it finally showed up on Netflix. Super-hot Jacob Elordi (from Saltburn) stars, as well as two other hotties, Diego Calva and William Poulter. I confess that I find William Poulter unusually sexy, although I thought he looked like a homely kid as a child actor 15 years ago in those Vacation movies. It's the Neville Longbottom effect; one never knows when an ungainly-looking child will turn into a handsome man. Elordi and Calva: William Poulte…

I have read today an article about this new book Lower Than The Angels. I have not read it myself yet and so I will merely quote parts of the article. I see it is available on amazon and there are more comments there. The book is the last in the Guardian article to be reviewed. Jesus never mentioned homosexuals, masturbation or the role of women in social, let alone sacred, life. Yet that hasn’t stopped millennia of godly scholars and lay Christians acting as if he had. According to these finger-waggers, extrapolating from biblical apocrypha, exegesis and their own personal fantasies, women are either morally superior or corrupt whores. Likewise, same-sex love is at …

We just saw a movie we loved, Potato Dreams of America, which is a dark-humor autobiographical movie which portrays director Wes Hurley's migration from Russia after the fall of the USSR to the US. The director as a teenager is played by very hot actor Tyler Bocock, although he was 29 when the movie was filmed (he's 33 now). There are even some racy scenes with that actor, including full nudity. The movie has 91% on Rotten Tomatoes, and it was one of the favorite movies I've seen so far this year. There is also a short movie called Little Potato, in which the director and his mother simply describe the events portrayed in the longer movie. The 14-minute short is available…

Older guys like myself may recall (dimly or otherwise) the 1950's-60's era of muscle magazines. Here is a nice article from the New Yorker looking back to that time: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/the-secrets-of-physique-magazines

As I believe many people are aware, the annual Edinburgh Festival now underway is not only an occasion for the high arts. There is at virtually the same time a Fringe Festival which attracts thousands of performers presenting all manner of shows and events. Last year there were 51,446 performances of 3,745 events from 60 different countries. The satirical evening "Beyond The Fringe" presented in 1960 launched the careers of Dudley Moore, Peter Cook, Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller when all were recent University graduates. It started the satire boom in the UK and was way ahead of its time. It then went on to long runs in both London and New York. Although it was in …

I suppose many of us who think of Terence Stamp remember him as the transexual Bernadette in the 1994 camp movie "The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert" in which a group of gay guys cross Australia in a bus. I can still remember him in his breakthrough role as the handsome young Billy Budd in the 1962 movie of that name for which he earned an Oscar nomination. He then became well known as part of the swinging 60s in London often seen dating a number of well known models and actors, including Julie Christie. His 1965 movie as a creepy loner in the psychological thriller "The Collector" who captures a girl and keeps her captive in his basement turned out to …

Looking through a list the other day, I was pleasantly reminded of David Henry Hwang's fascinating play based on real life subjects, M. Butterly. Friends took me to see it on Broadway all the way back in 1988 with John Lithgow and B.D. Wong in the cast. I always wondered why any actor would choose to be known by his initials rather than his full name - until I saw the play, that is. The extraordinary thing is that the play is based on the real life story of a married French civil servant René Gallimard who is posted to Beijing in the early 1960s when his wife has to stay in France. Fascinated by Beijing Opera, he finds himself falling in love with a Chinese Opera sin…