Some background: Russ Meyer (the director of this film) started out as a glamour photographer and nudie film maker in the 50s, and became probably the best known softcore auteur. His earlier film, the black and white Faster Pussycat Kill Kill, often makes it into best of lists.

Roger Ebert was the film critic for the Chicago Sun times for approximately 1 billion years - according to his wikipedia he had ‘an intimate, Midwestern writing style and critical views informed by values of populism and humanism.’ Which I think means middle brow.

To give you an idea - here’s a section from one of his reviews, film title redacted: ‘[film] surrounds them with a story that’s marred by sophomoric satire and cheap shots. The director is either denying the strength of his material or trying to defuse it by pretending it’s all part of a campy in-joke…characters use lines with corny double meanings and solemnly recite platitudes.’

Crazily, he’s not actually talking about the film he wrote here, he’s talking about Blue Velvet. He was notably very hard on anything transgressive, campy or queer which is extremely interesting to bare in mind while watching this. He’s still one of the best known film critics and just like Russ Meyer he’s also known for loving… boobs.

So Valley of the Dolls is a 1967 drama film based on the 1966 book of the same name, it’s kind of like if A Little Life was about women - 3 young women one played by Sharon Tate attempt to navigate showbiz and get addicted to dolls - no not that kind - barbituates. It was critically panned upon release but did well at the box office and has since become the originator of a holy trinity of camp classics beloved by gay men alongside Mommie Dearest and Showgirls, films about women suffering horribly.

Because of the box office success a sequel was planned but the original script was scrapped and Russ Meyer, fresh off the success of his nudie film Vixen, was given the task of turning the sequel in to “an R film smashing against an X rating”. Meyer called up his buddy Roger Ebert - they shared a mutual interest - to write the script.

So 2 straight boob enthusiasts attempt to pastiche the kinds of films that become camp classics while not so innocently stumbling into territory they don’t understand, resulting in the transcendent pure camp that can be reinterpreted by a queer audience

It has the four quadrant appeal of films from this era - a bit of schmaltzy romance, comedy, melodramatic tragedy alongside the sleaze of Russ Meyers exploitation movie background - drawing from sexsploitation, blaxploitation and Nazisploitation (double as a trigger warning)

Meyer intended the film to ‘simultaneously be a satire, a serious melodrama, a rock musical, a comedy, a violent exploitation picture, a skin flick, and a moralistic expose (so soon after the Sharon Tate murders) of what the opening crawl called ‘the oft-times nightmarish world of Show Business’”.

It parodies a bunch of stuff i have and haven’t seen but still recognise - kinda like watching stuff thru the proxy of the Simpsons. The genres it parodies barely exist anymore!

So why has it outlasted some of the cultural products it was mocking? Anything spoof shows the workings of the creative process - it’s a meta textual form and when the spoof is of another art form it reveals the artifice. You have to work to watch and understand what it’s parodying and the tones it’s hitting.

I love films where the direction works counter to the script - Roger ebert says Russ Meyer took his direction seriously and solemnly, not allowing the actors to play for comedy, earnestly discussing character motivation. This creates an interesting uncanny tone which allows the film to operate on these two levels of camp - the effective parody requires a serious understanding of melodrama, and the scattergun approach allows for happy accidents. The film was also shot on existing Hollywood sets, due to budget constraints, allowing the film’s strange scenarios to play out in the same settings as big hollywood melodramas of previous years.

John Waters notes this and tips his hat to a flouncing skipping scene in the movie which he recreates in Polyester- which is very kind of him since Roger Ebert always trashed his movies.

He does note, and I agree, that this script is the only worthwhile thing Ebert ever wrote, and it could’ve got a bit tooooo stupid and mean if Russ Meyer’s direction didn’t help the lesbian storyline become genuinely moving despite its rote template nature.

The movie attempts to satirise a cultural moment as it happens, touching on Phil Spector and the Manson murders, the death of hippie culture, as many films at the end of the 60s did. This also struck me this time, how stagnant much of our popular culture can feel now - for all the anti woke backlash, we aren’t even getting stupid1 exploitation films2 about blue haired septum piercing terrorists? Why isn’t Lil Uzi Vert in a movie?

Another way the film tries to get with the times is with depictions of queerness so soon after the productions code ended - with a pastiche production code structure where everyone returns to societal norms.

When it comes to queerness in this movie…I’m not just talking about lesbians anymore. The movie contains some extremely important trans representation, which also solidifies this film’s importance to me and the magic of its pure camp/intentional camp dialectic.

Because it seems like the two straight male authors of this movie weren’t intending to say anything important (good or bad) about transgender, to me they accidentally create an extremely unexpected (and not just because of the reveal trope) trans character. A gay / gay coded character who, due to the late reveal structure, gets to be as full a person as anyone is for the majority of the runtime. Which is pretty impressive in this madcap movie of paper cut out tropes.

SPOILERS AHEAD

Tune in next time for more fake popstar chat!

xo

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Updates

• Launch event for Michelle Tea’s CLOWNS anthology at Bard Books Thursday 16th alongside Sophie Robinson and Jake Hall - 7-9pm

• I’ll be teaching at Estuary Dreams Academy this Autumn, open call for applications for this free experimental film and digital arts programme opens Friday 17th! The last edition produced some amazing work, get in to it

• Jaw Filler has been spotted at Artwords Bookshop, Pages of Hackney, Gay’s the word, ICA bookshop, among other luminary retail establishments in London. Grab one while ya can, tell ur friends, tell ur library, tell ur local bookshop, tell ur nan etc

• Keep your eyes peeled for exciting announcements (new film project!) coming soon in the next month or so…

On July 7th I’m introducing Beyond the Valley of the Dolls for Sarah’s queer film society Funeral Parade at Prince Charles Cinema. This opportunity to think big thoughts on BtVotD arrived at the perfect time as I’d already been writing something about fake/fictional POP STARS. It’s in the water - The Moment :/ Queens of Drama (link????) Mother Mary :( K-Pop Demon Hunters (I haven’t seen - SORRY I’m not a truncle yet) and Lauren John Joseph’s second novel Lean Cat, Savage Cat (more on this later…)

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I started compiling a list of favourites to work out WHY I’m so drawn to the fictional pop star and realised this list could be eternal - I love musicals - so I’ve A) decided to make this a SERIES and B) set myself some parameters. Only FAKE pop stars allowed. Thereby, biopics, star vehicles, and traditional movie musicals are OUT. I’ve given some leeway to films which feature a star singing their own music but not necessarily playing themselves (e.g. Jimmy Cliff in The Harder They Come, Hazel O’Connor in Breaking Glass) so This Is Me…Now is notably absent due to its status as autofiction. I’ve taken a loose definition of ‘Pop Star’ but tended towards the back end of the 20th century, otherwise this essay would be full of Judy (which ain’t such a problem but - I’ll get to her another time!)

Looking through my personal canon I realise I like works where an irl analogue is possible, but it’s not strictly 1:1 for a famous star. For example, I think TRAP was very effective in giving us Lady Raven, not afraid to be a teeny bopper fave, where other pop stars (even closest comparisons Taylor Swift or Olivia Rodrigo) want to at least APPEAR to be edgy, raunchy AND music journalism approved. Let’s be real. It’s 10 year old girls and 35 year old gay men at those concerts!1 Plus, I loved the detail where gay pop star the Thinker (played cheekily by Kid Cudi) hits on Josh Hartnett, the serial killer - that would’ve been my way out of the stadium. The insane poptimism of a stan twitter hive solving a straight male abduction case…maverick genius… Hitchcock WHO?

In The Idol, the analogue wants to be Britney, Madonna, etc (it’s giving Great White Hope) but the timing is off. If she’s making a comeback at age 23 in 2023, and was at her peak a few years ago (2018? 2019? 2020? COVID???) her nearest irl analogue is like…Billie Eilish? Olivia Rodrigo? Pink Pantheress? (I can’t even begin to think about Sabrina Carpenter. I refuse) The thing is that pop is always weirder than we imagine (brother-sister machinations, hey mama lesbian with a boyfriend) even when it’s boring (speak UP queen and get a new producer!!). To the extent that people get far too excited when a blonde-ish white girl comes along and can do choreo (or even when she can’t - previous Sabrina Carpenter refusal). Implicating myself here, I find myself defending Tate McRae even though Sports car aside she only lets me down (side note - there’s not many things that get me more emotional than seeing a preteen gay boy bursting with joy while watching a grown woman do sexy choreo, perhaps…on a gay male backing dancer. It just reminds me that identity is so complique. Gays invented heterosexuality after all. They will never get ahead of us!).

The Idol exists inside the Sam Levinson-verse, somewhere even more tedious than the Tarantino-verse (one wonders which historical wrong was fixed by flame thrower to get us to Euphoria Season 3), so I enjoy it on the level of a really expensive version of a play you make with your cousins, which is basically what it is. For me it works because the weird nostalgia is in-built, she’s a flop but the song is catchy (suspiciously Diet Pepsi - maybe it was just ahead of its time!) Everyone has to pretend Troye Sivan is good at singing, JENNIE2 is there (kinda) and the random Bananies and Avocadies singer girl is the kind of thing music industry people are looking for (SAD!)3

I like fake pop stars where the music is GOOD or at least workable. I hate Gaga’s A Star Is Born but she almost made it in here for the strength of : “why dya come around here in them jeans”. Miley’s turn in Black Mirror strikes a similar bizarre anti-pop music / misunderstanding of music industry exploitation tone but - Head Like A Hole hyperpop remix bangs. The fact that it bangs, and Gaga’s pop tracks are better than Jackson Maine’s songs, undercut the weird pro-rock/country thesis of ASIB and the Black Mirror episode. Miley’s later NIN impersonation at a pub(?) at the end SUCKS. Trent Reznor was popular enough to be pop, and famously, genre alone didn’t save him from label fuckery or addiction. I wonder what Miley thinks of it now she’s back making Debenhams changing room music.

This is one of the winning features of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls - it not only has catchy, well performed and convincing Swinging Sixties bops, it has a sweeping theme song John Waters calls Douglas Sirk-worthy (I’m inclined to agree!)

Come along on the 7th July to hear me yap more about it <3

& tune in next month for a continuation of this deepish dive in to the fake pop star

COMING UP NEXT:

more on BtVotD/STEVE in Privilege by Peter Watkins/Phantom of the Paradise/Velvet Goldmine/Hedwig and the Angry Inch/Juliette Lewis’ PJ Harvey impression in Strange Days/Magic Spot/Babymother/Megalopolis’ Vesta Sweetwater (lol)/The Apple/The Harder They Come/Wish You/Rock of Ages/Josie and the Pussycats/Perfect Blue/Stardust Brothers/Breaking Glass/YA novel I read as a teen called Guitar Girl/Lean Cat, Savage Cat/Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said…and more

Send me your favourite fictional pop stars PLEASE <3

UPDATES

• Jaw Filler second print run is out - buy it now! Also, if you want to support your local bookshop AND me and Charlie, you could ask them to order it in to buy. If you’re a real mazzbian4, you could ask your local library to stock it!

• CLOWNS anthology edited by the inimitable Michelle Tea is out in the UK 16th July and I have a short story included. It’s a playful reimagining of the time the dyke project disrupted a TERF meeting at UCL last year. It’s only slightly more bizarre than what actually went down. I also hate to admit that I was in the ‘sports wave’ not the ‘clown wave’ and while it was fun to blow whistles and give Julie Bindel a red card it was mainly because I wanted to look hot in sportswear (I don’t do sports and think they should be banned for everyone, cis and trans). How should I have known every hottie under the sun would soon be running off to clown school?

Enjoy!

SENSITIVITY READER

An expensive car chase between 2 of the most famous transgender people on earth.

Camera tightens on transgender person as they make quips over the steering wheel. This is the opening sequence, so it needs to show us this person is trans because film is a visual medium. Before the inciting incident the camera tilts to show top surgery scars, visible through white tank top made transparent with glycerin sweat. The scars offer a little intimacy to the viewer - it’s like they donated to the crowdfund. But these scars were paid for with residuals from famous transgender person’s child acting career, after a lengthy legal battle with their parents, then digitally enhanced by a group of non union VFX artists.

The car with the second transgender person flips up and rolls sideways across a freeway (actually the M8 as it slices through Glasgow) barrelling over lesser cars with lesser people in them. The actor is tossed around and groans and moans in an imperceptibly expensively trained voice. The car lands with a metallic crunch, the score swells, and she drags herself from the wreckage, tuck in place. The brand deal she secured from this part enabled her to book in for lower surgery but she pushed the date when her agent urged her to take a 3 episode arc on an Apple TV show, then the strikes started. A hand extends from outside the frame. It’s the other transgender person. He pulls her into the centre of the frame, the most radical action he could take, and they kiss. It has all the right passions of Old Hollywood because this man is gay, and standing on a box.

Vin Diesel walks into the shot and places a gnarled hand on his shoulder. Even at the height of fantasy and both of their respective careers, they are not the protagonists.

Nevertheless, lots of people praised their inclusion, including many transgender people who hate eachother’s films. Parts of it were even written by transgender people whose careers and class backgrounds left them relatively ill-equipped to speak to the most pressing issues facing transgender people today, such as what to do in a car crash. Instead, they ended up airing many petty intra-community grievances, and ideas built up from being part of too many corporate inclusivity initiatives. For example, it probably seemed strange to audiences at the suburban multiplex that the latest Fast and Furious featured a t4t sex scene wherein the fagdyke boy was penetrated by the female penis of his dykefag girlfriend. If nothing else, these just didn’t seem like the type of transgender people who would be part of a multi racial illegal car racing heist team. But what do I know? I don’t know how the subaltern fucks, I just work here. (If you know, please reach out. I could get you a consulting fee).

Vin Diesel had read the script, as had the director, as had the other screenwriters, as had the executives, as had I. They all thought it was pretty weird, but how were they supposed to know how we did it or not? They thought it was weird anyway. It is weird, and our job is to normalise it through the most expensive and powerful machines of empathy generation known to man.

The week the movie came out my own mother called me and she said - I love you. I love you and I understand now, and I’m sorry.

It went something like this:

MOM
I saw your movie

ME
Oh?

Pause

MOM
I liked it…I…I told the cashier
(laughs)
My…my…daught-

Pause

MOM (CONT’D)
my…child worked on this movie.

Pause

MOM (CONT’D)
well, I’m very proud of you…son

ME
Thanks Mom

MOM
Are- are you still there?

Pause

MOM (CONT’D)
You do know I love you, don’t you? I…I know I haven’t always been-

ME
It’s ok Mom

MOM
No, no…it’s not. I…I’m so sorry

Pause

MOM
I think it was the movie, I didn’t…I didn’t understand before but that boy was so wonderful…when he added the rocket launcher to the suspension of that SUV…I thought, well, if my Megan can be like that then what the hell am I so worried about?
(laughs)

ME
It’s Luke, Mom

MOM
Like Granddad?

ME
Yeah, like Granddad.

MOM
Oh…Luke…that’s wonderful

ME
I love you, Mom.

MOM
I love you, Luke

END.

Updates

• Pre-order Jaw Filler online - the second print run is ready to be sent out so you shouldn’t have long a wait <3

• If you need it quicker buy Jaw Filler at the Page Masters Book Fair in New Cross 2-3rd May!!

• season 2 of Virgin Island j dropped, flagged to me by Ana & gay cousin El. I proselytised a bit too much about season 1 because I found the sad awkward men endearing, perhaps due to my limited interactions with them irl. Then I reflected that giving a bunch of men (even if autistic, lacking self esteem etc) a milfy fuck toy to validate them is perhaps not a good idea. Giving anyone this asset is not a good model for future relationships! On the plus side, loads of the women went gay and one of the ‘guys’ went non binary, yay! But this isn’t exactly a fix for straight male angst - we can’t all be women and nonbinary (sound off in the comments!) and the manosphere has exploded even more since last year. My instagram reel algorithm (which is usually tap choreo and corny lesbian memes) can’t protect me anymore. Thankfully only the 2 sweetie pie (ish) guys returned for the reunion ep so my watch was not very fraught. But I remembered the troubling guy who felt entitled to sex with his sex surrogate (I mean, I can see the confusion) and had to learn to take a no. A positive lesson, extremely troubling to watch! And what will happen when the participants are unleashed on people who aren’t paid and trained in woo woo sex studies? It made me feel sad about people’s first stumblings in to sexuality, the default hostility, bravado, shame and lack of communication that mark many a first (straight, but not always) sexual encounter. The series does nothing to debunk the concept of ‘virginity’ itself which is kind of hilarious to watch - they have the boys out here learning how to eat pussy then the 2 power milfs being like ‘yes, you are still a virgin’. Excited to find out if they’ve innovated there - this year certainly has more gay people for better or worse!

• I am feeling out what works for me re: substack - don’t want to inundate you with posts and I certainly don’t want to be cranking them out either. I’ll probs land on once a month or max once a fortnight. Unless I find myself with too many opinions about Virgin Island to contain…

• On a day like today (yesterday) consider making steps towards organising in your workplace (even if it seems small, insignificant, scary, annoying or boring!) <3

Soap operas and soap-inspired works have inspired the tone of my films a lot - even thought I didn’t grow up with the classics (Eastenders, Corrie, Hollyoaks). I kept abreast of Gossip Girl and 90210 via 123movies on my laptop, but that’s that classic divide between British soaps (calamities affecting mostly working class people) and American soaps (calamities affecting mostly RICH sexy people). I’m doing research for an exciting collab with xyz projects and found myself mentally compiling my fave soapy moments. I haven’t waded in to the realm of the telenovela, despite being a childhood Ugly Betty stan, because I don’t know enough of the form - although special mention to La telenovela errante by Raúl Ruiz and Valeria Sarmiento (yes, I will be linking to wikipedia. A peek behind the curtain, if you will).

Here are some of my fave soapiest soaps and soap inspired works:

Personal Problems

Bill Gunn (of Ganja & Hess fame) directed this meta-soap-opera written by Ishmael Reed. It follows the life and loves of a nurse living in Harlem. It’s gentle and ambling and strange, made dreamier with early videocassette recording.

It was originally made to be broadcast on PBS (which I love! Just like a real soap! Mass art!) but was never picked up. This was a running UNpersonal problem - Bill Gunn’s intended first film Stop! was X rated and shelved, only existing as a video rip - I’m sure someone is working on this and I hope I can see it in its full glory one day (if this is you hmu plz). Watch Personal Problems here or - I torrented it

Our Friends in the North

Do you want to watch a show where a key plot point is whether a member of the Militant Tendency can win a Labour safe seat in Newcastle in the 70s?

Do you want to see Christopher Eccleston, Mark Strong and Daniel Craig in a bouncy blow out and mutton chops?

Do you want to see Gina McKee weep because of the mould in her substandard council accommodation?

Do you want to see Malcolm McDowell build a Soho porn empire?

Do you want to see somewhat hacky and melodramatic renderings of the youth crime moral panic of the 90s which continued apace in the 2000s? (10 year old boy steals a car and crashes it on purpose while Common People blares)

Metrosexuality

Everyone I show this to is like WHY haven’t I heard of/seen this before??? It’s just that good. One has to wonder - is it that queerness AND blackness was too much for millennial Channel 4 execs? Was the straight male facial hair too dynamic? Was it the crashout of Channel 4’s 90s experimentalism? Was it the title? Is calling it Metrosexuality akin to Born in Flames’ climactic destruction of the World Trade Centre pre 9/11?

I’m sure I’ll write more on this one day so I’ll leave it at that for now. If you haven’t seen it yet - run, don’t walk.

Twin Peaks

What can one say about Twin Peaks? Let’s listen to my good Judy and collaborator Charlie Markbreiter, who watched it for the first time last year while we were working on Jaw Filler (which…has its own soapy moments!)

Riverdale

Now that we’ve covered Twin Peaks let’s get on to the real shit. Yes, I am a Riverdale defender. People laugh at what they do not understand, because they do not want to FEEL! Read those lines back about the highs and lows of high school football, and you will feel America scream.

The mid season 2 to season 3 run (start at the serial killer, go past the jingle jangle epidemic stop after the climax of Chad Michael Murray’s cult) shows Archie becoming a vigilante fascist in a way that I think is genuinely compelling! His bestie Jughead goes on hunger strike and locks himself to his old school to protest it being turned iNTO A PRISON and Archie and the wrestling team break up the picket in the name of law & order. To me, Riverdale is one of the only concurrent mass works of culture to deal with the first Trump era in any kind of interesting way. Not sure what’s going on season 4 onwards I did not watch to the end. Even I have my limits.

It’s called political art - heard of it?

Poly II: Plan for a Revolution in Docklands

This film by Blaize Kirschner and David Panos draws inspiration from Polly (1728), the censored sequel to John Gay’s popular The Beggar’s Opera (1727), the basis for Brecht’s Threepenny Opera. Gay(gay-lol)’s original opera was SO popular (they had MERCH) and was within the genre of ‘satirical ballad opera’ which was in itself SO popular (although only limited records of Gay’s take on the genre remains) indicating in turn the popularity of the Italian operas whose forms and tropes were being satirised. The Beggar’s Opera sets new words to popular songs of the time (ALERTA ALERTA I’m about to mention pantomime again) just like Katie Price doing Hot To Go as a panto dame. The Beggar’s Opera was partially inspired by legendary thief Jack Sheppard, the inspiration for Confessions of the Fox. It all comes back to trans smdh.

John Gay’s Polly is set in the West Indies and sounds dubious (racist) but fascinating - brings me back to thoughts I had in a previous substack about England’s relationship to its colonies as an extension of itself and an outer border reaffirming its own identity. I keep coming back to this book The Politics and Poetics of Transgression which outlines further this identity of the Other defining the identity of oppressive core, informed by Said’s Orientalism. I chatted with Edmund Ogawa Hardy (creator of the amazing Negative Worlds) who’d heard a recording of Polly and said it was a bit washed up and none of the satire pointed at colonialism, which is a shame! Polly II attempts a bit of this by having Carribbean (& white cockney) characters as Robin Hood style pirates / saboteurs who are considered somewhat reactionary by the other revolutionaries of this drowned docklands world. It’s complicated and I’m not sure it totally lands within the short runtime, but I’d rather a complication that misses than no attempt at all.

Here’s the artists’ spiel: “Polly II imagines a future insurrection against poverty, displacement and judicial terror, drawing on current anti-gentrification struggles and eighteenth-century accounts of East London’s radical working class, anti-colonial uprisings in the Caribbean, and their connections through revolutionary movements across the Atlantic. Realised with a cast of local amateur actors and housing activists and replete with DIY special effects and musical interludes”

I loved one scene in particular - set in a community centre at a public consultation for a new housing development (are you noticing a theme?), where the self styled community leader is also crooked. The attendees argue. Meanwhile water from the flood starts to creep slowly across the floor. The attendees scrape their chairs cacophonously to escape. It ends in a singalong with all attendees mopping up the flood water.

Tracey Rose The Cockpit

Tracey Rose’s work is part of 123 movies exhibition at 243 LUZ (on til 18th April) where I also have a DVD of my films including Poppets my soapiest short (shameless plug). I’ve only seen excerpts of Rose’s work so don’t miss the chance to see it in full! (unless I’ve posted this too late - which is likely)

Acorn Antiques Victoria Wood

My favourite Victoria Wood moment is Staying In, featuring Jim Broadbent as an archetypal Northern Playwright. But a special mention to Acorn Antiques for spoofing a certain kind of slow stuffy British soap with goofs galore. It partially satirises Crossroads, which also inspired Isabel Waidner’s latest, As If. One of the doubles in the novel is a former soap actor in a show called People Live, People Die, People Live As If They Were Dead Already. The novel gestures to a particular trajectory for white working class British actors of a certain age - admiration for Gary Oldman as Joe Orton, a bit of Angry Young Man theatre, a Mike Leigh if you’re lucky, maybe a Ken Loach too if things line up, then 10 years in the soaps. Waidner’s character fumbles the bag and gets booted directly from the National Theatre to a journeyman acting career in PLPDPLAITWDA.

Normalerweize - In This Godforsaken Place

‘In This Godforsaken Place’ is a spoof soap opera within the Danish satirical sketch show Normalerweize by Lærke Winther and Anna Neye, recommended to me by art school bestie Martin Essemann. I love the tone, the repetition, the quivering mouth acting. I find it AFFECTING! Quivering mouth acting in a middle brow tasteful drama where everyone is wearing COS type clothes makes me want to throw something at the screen. Quivering mouth acting on a soap opera makes me feel ALIVE! The end starts to recall Ming Wong’s Life of Imitation. A melodrama list would be a whole other thing so I’m putting a pin in this!

Rehana Zaman: Some Women Other Women and all the Bittermen

I saw this while a student at UAL and thought it was amazing! I still think it’s amazing. The simple juxtaposition of 2 forms of labour that are often cynically deployed against each other (white working class man in traditional industry versus feminised migrant worker in work defined as ‘low skill’) works so well without further exposition. Plus, the soap is very well rendered! You have to know a form to pastiche it properly. Watch via Zaman’s website.

Updates:

• Charlie & I were among three fabulous winners of the Hodler Prize for our novel Jaw Filler (pre-order it - second print run shipping soon!) which among other things means Ottessa Moshfegh read and liked our book! slay! Now can someone advise me on crypto - do I buy a job lot of testosterone from the dark web for the coming storm? sound off in the comments <3

• watch me, Bri & Munesu perform Plot Hole at Big Throw #3 SET Social 23rd April

• I’m doing something new for Mica’s performance night 24th April (yup, 2 nights in a row!!! eeekkk!!! for real though I actually love performing and would like to do MORE…act in stuff…and more readings too. hmu. all the world’s a stage…)

I got on this track chatting to Sarah about David Lynch for her screening of Fire Walk With Me with htmljones. Then chatting with my girlfriend Catherine about the protest chant ‘[insert politician] see you in The Hague!’ How the satisfying end word skews so close to see you in Hell! Wanting some earthly reckoning for evil deeds. I find myself calling it evil. Looking at Keir Starmer, David Lammy, the more full throated rhetoric of the Israeli government and its genocide of Palestinians. Evil. I’m not religious, but I’m sure I’ve inherited some Catholicism. No Catholicism tho (in the tone of no homo) I don’t want to be part of this weird new wave. Catholicism is not cool tbh (although obviously don’t be Protestant!!!) and trans people need to stop becoming altar boys etc imo (is this a thing? I assume so) Then again I don’t want to swing too far and end up all Richard Dawkins New Atheist (some say this is one of the predecessors of the (evil?) Terfism plaguing this (evil) island - whereas woke pope did eat pasta with the dolls so, much to consider).

I watched the film Evil Does Not Exist with my pal Charlie (producer of Hormonal) recently and it reminded me of attending zoom consultations for planned new developments in my hometown during Covid. The original plan, laid out by an (evil) Labour councillor, was to bulldoze half the town centre and throw up multi story flats - with the aesthetics of a luxury development. I’m so used to being against luxury flats that I was reminded by aforementioned gf that we should WANT nice flats! And the luxury flats that are built are usually not even that nice or big, they are just expensive. A friend told me they walked around the hallways of one of the horrid new-builds in Elephant and Castle (RIP - evil) and all of the letterboxes were clanging around because the wind whipped right through the building. It’s not luxury, I remind myself to refuse their branding. A cgi (now ai probably) rendering of a yuppie fantasia on a slice of hoarding does not luxury make.

Anyway, I was peripherally part of a campaign against this planned gutting of the town centre. We faced much talking down from various Basildon political figures, (including a Tory who addressed me as Young Man and thought we’d find it encouraging when he said back ‘home’ in Northern Ireland he’d be in the DUP) held our own meetings, canvassed, stood anti-redevelopment candidates (who got a respectable portion of votes!) In the end, tories won over Labour in the local elections with promises to scrap the plan. Years later, parts of it are still going ahead. Colourful murals cover buildings soon to be pulled down, courtesy of a carpetbagging arts initiative.

In Hamaguchi’s film, the intentionally futile performance of a public forum gives way to a fable-like moment of undeniable manual brutality. Overall the movie left me cold but the ending stuck with me - maybe it did reveal that famous evil behind the banality of a town hall meeting, a public consultation. Having a consultation to discuss doing something evil, which you are going to do anyway. It’s this seedy sheen that makes me want to call evil re: figures like Lammy. I get a bitter taste in my mouth thinking about his instrumentalising of grief around Grenfell for his personal brand, and his current unrepentant bloodlust, his imprisonment of Pal Action protesters, letting them starve.

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I heard Nick Smith speak of his work, partially inspired by his job as a property inspector, for a sharing at Studio Voltaire. When speaking about class and the built environment he quotes, and notes its potential for controversy, a phrase from John Cooper Clarke: “Never mind what’s going on in Nairobi, concentrate on what your local council are doing”. It made me think of the ways I try to make political change on my own small (rented) patch of soil, how Zelda spoke of battling Basildon council to grow the grass at the local park a few biodiverse inches taller. If we can’t control the grass in our own park, what hope have we globally? she asked at a Directions Bas event. And yet - the Labour councillor unseated by his Basildon tower block hubris ended up doing (probably evil) development deals in Africa between his stints in local government. People in the imperial core have always been intimately entangled with the Global South in mundane (evil) ways. When I researched pantomime for Principal Boy, I read about Victorian pantos that dramatised real battles in India, featured imaginary African tribes holding signs saying ‘Hi Mother!’ to the Queen.

More recently, I watched Industry and the episode in Accra almost made me think I understood business - and then I finally finished watching Our Friends in the North, thanks to a very stubborn flare up. In the 1996 tv serial, the Labour Party cosies up with a development company to throw up substandard flats in Newcastle, which grow black mould. The company is then allowed to swan off round the world, obtaining contracts for buildings in Saudi, across former British colonies. The council foots the bill for the Newcastle flats to be refitted and people rehoused, only after years of pressure.

I’m thinking about evil because I’m also thinking about the devil. He(?) keeps cropping up in an idea for a film I’m working on, and I worry it’s a big thing to take on. One of thee original IPs. What do I think of him(?) is he(?) a trickster, misunderstood? What does a deal with the devil entail? One such contemporary trans take on this classic is Grace Byron’s Herculine, where (SPOILER!!!!!) trans women on a separatist commune get shortchanged by their deals with demons, which turn out to be something of an MLM run by the HBIC Ash, the nameless protagonist’s ex-girlfriend. Of course, the devil would outsource!

Such outsourcing recalls parallel scenes in The Secret Agent (also SPOILER!!!!) the first: a businessman haggles with two hitmen, ending back at the price (60000) he started. Later, the hitmen haggle with a labourer and task him with their dirty work. He stays firm in his price (a lowly 4000) and even kills his outsourcing employer (hurrah!!) before (we assume) he or someone else finishes the job off screen, landing with a dull thud, a newspaper article on the computer screen of a contemporary researcher.

Is the English devil sleek in a consultancy way or is he a Reform small business owner brawler? Is he the horrific combination of the two - the posh boy in downward drag? The true brute? Do I have to read the bible? I do want to get round to it. I’ve read sections and I admire its pacing - rapid! But I already stated my queasiness around religion. Am I scared of invoking the wrong thing, or accidentally summoning Lucifer himself!?

In my research I watched two versions of Dennis Potter’s Brimstone and Treacle. Both are striking and unnerving, but the 1982 Sting version takes out much of the political message of the original 1976 Play for Today, which went unaired til 1987 because it was deemed too disturbing. I stroke my chin at this because the sexual violence in the 1982 version is arguably more graphic and includes nudity. Briefly, (SPOILER!!!!!) Brimstone and Treacle follows a demon in the guise of a young white man who inserts himself into the home of a middle class north London suburban couple whose daughter Pattie has a kind of unresponsive wakefulness syndrome after a car accident. She requires constant at-home care. He rapes her. The demon worms his way into the hearth of this English home through quickly spinning a line that he was a potential fiance to their daughter Pattie. The mother is quick to go along with his story - the notion of Pattie in bed, paralysed, while her mother imagines her wedded off to the demon, strike at the deep seated sexism and ablism of the time. In the Play for Today, he takes a different tack in seducing the father. This version includes characterisation of the father as a National Front member, cracking anti black and anti Irish jokes. The demon laughs along with him and leads him further to the conclusion of his politics - the deportation and, if this doesn’t ‘work’, genocide of Britain’s Black population. The father dithers and stammers, says steady on a minute.

Potter pairs well with Lynch, that other big daddy of Evil™️. Lynch has a reputation for political ambivalence, even Reaganism. On my recent Twin Peaks and Fire Walk With Me rewatch, I found myself surprised at how many overt instances of political rhetoric I encountered. There’s his slightly hamfisted defence of Indigenous Americans’ right to their land, the evil of the white man. There’s the famous ‘Fix your hearts or die’ line at the defence of (regrettably) super cop Denise. There’s the evil lurking in the heart of the American nuclear family in Leland Palmer/BOB. Watching again, I agree that characterising this as demonic possession is a canny way to tell a survivor-centered story, and whatever mistakes made in the series are rectified in Fire Walk With Me. In the end, Laura is with the angels (there’s religion again - beige middle America Protestant aesthetics rendered sublime). Pattie, perhaps miraculously, exits her paralysis to alert her parents of her assailant, and remember her father’s hypocrisy. There are no angels, just a tacky picture of Jesus - but divine intervention is implied. I’m not Rosalia or Bjork, I think it’s up to us - but I do see the appeal! In Twin Peaks The Return, Lynch spends a lot of time outlining the post recession decline of the iconic small town USA he created those decades before. Key moments of garmonbozia occur on a housing development full of identikit beige bungalows - desolate. The business decisions, the zoom consultations, the corruption that magicked them into being hum off screen like the score. Laura Palmer screams. She wasn’t with the angels after all.

Like Fire Walk With Me, Brimstone and Treacle is not subtle. In Jennet Thomas and Sally O’Reilly’s episode of ART FICTIONS podcast, (side note: come to BIG THROW on April 23rd, Sally and Jennet’s event at SET Social) they point to the significance of the demon swinging his feet out of bed in the morning and landing hairy and gnarled on the 70s thick pile carpet. Someone else would not do this. Someone else would be subtle, hint at it. But what use is good taste in the face of evil?

This brings me back to thoughts of Palestine and Mohammed el Kurd’s Perfect Victims, on the way brushing against an antisemitic trope when discussing the actions of the Zionist entity is taken more seriously than the ACTUAL (EVIL) the Zionist entity is doing. Rhetoric is taken literally (do you want to throw Israelis in the sea?) action is erased from the narrative (the literal slaughter of thousands of Gazans). It’s absurd in the way (evil) can be.

In Night Night Fawn, Jordy Rosenberg tooled himself with satire in the quest to meet a certain kind of Zionism where it lives. Not the rabid kind, the endemic uneasy kind. He wants to match absurdity with absurdity. We’re at the whims of an oppressive first person narrator - Barbara Rosenberg, a staunch homophobe who once lived in an apartheid state and sent her child to its army for gender correction (crazy move - butch lesbians are addicted to joining the army, the police & Donald Trump’s security team). In the vein of Jonathon Swift, we stay inside the absurdity of evil and the oppressor class (Rosenberg as a White American Jew, Swift as an Anglo-Irishman), deepened by the knowing humour of a trans person writing a trans/homo/phobe. It’s funny rather than grueling - perhaps its true power lies in its broader audience, those on the Barbara Rosenberg continuum.

Satire and absurdism are forms I also find myself turning to - at least that’s what my artist statement says.

Recently, I made a film with Whitechapel Gallery’s youth collective Duchamp and Sons. Over the course of 4 months, we experimented with different film and performance techniques then condensed our ideas and shot something. The idea bubbled up into a media satire. Alan Partridge was name checked. The collective spoke of the high drag of right wing news presenters. At first I was surprised - these gen alpha kids watch the news?? I don’t! Then I remembered maybe there is still a monoculture. TVs play the news in cafes salons pubs homes across the country. Taxi/uber/bolt drivers mainline LBC. Bits are clipped and reposted on TikTok (probably - I am too old to use it I decided, which is sad because part of me thinks I’d be really good at it) the young people were adept at the tone deployed by hacks from the BBC and GB news. At first I had trepidation about using broad satire alongside earnest engagement with the issues we’d talked about - Palestine, Sudan, Venezuela, housing crisis, protest restrictions, censorship, cost of living crisis, artists pay. But - what can I and Whitney Houston say - the children are the future. Making the film challenged me to think about the balance of satire and sincerity in my own work. What am I actually satirising? Is the humour endearing my target? Is it too obvious? Is it too obscure? Is there actual heart, blood sweat and tears in this or am I floating above it looking through a monocle and saying ‘I say!’

Last year I had an aesthetic crisis (if I told you about my aesthetic crisis last year you may be eligible for compensation). I was fretting over whether my work was meaningful in the face of such politically dispiriting (rise of fascism, genocides across the world) and mobilising (the Palestinian struggle, the solidarity shown by workers across the world, the left movements less bedraggled than the UK’s) times. I also thought fuck it my art is not activism does it need to mean anything, in fact perhaps it shouldn’t have to mean anything, how do I make sure it is meaningless despite being an Identity Haver™️, and I swang from one extreme to the other til I was snapped tf out of it by my collaborators Munesu and Bri. Then I accidentally made work that was still very clearly about being trans. But that’s a story for another day…

Come up and see me sometime:

• Dublin - Jaw Filler & Persona launch with TITE 14th April

• Go see a DVD of my film works at 123 movies exhibition, 243 LUZ, Margate until 18th April

• Big Throw at SET Social 23rd April

• Mica Georgis’ performance night at the Florence Trust 24th April

Jaw Filler extracts & links:

• Them.us Jaw Filler extract

• Joyland extract

• Pre order the second edition of Jaw Filler, my neonoir novel ft. Charlie Markbrieter via Montez press £15/$20

P.S. All thanks to Adwoa Owusu-Barnieh, wonderful assistant civic curator at Studio Voltaire, for reminding me of the faggy powerpuff girls devil