Timeless Beauty

[Stormfront]

I think what makes this picture so haunting is that it could have been taken at almost any time in the last four thousand years - and yet for how much longer will we be able to see scenes like this one in our European homelands?

Tractatus Illogicus

Let's be realistic! Derek Jarman wouldn't have made Wittgenstein if the chap hadn't been a batty boy.

Not that it's a bad film. In fact it's probably one of Jarman's more watchable efforts - though to tell the truth it's the only Jarman that I've actually sat through all the way, so (to quote someone holier than me) who am I to judge?

It's not actually a biopic so much as a brief overview of some of the more pertinent facts about the man's life and work - pertinent that is in Jarman's mind rather than in that of his subject. And so we have a prepubescent and, at times, partially clothed Clancy Chassay as a Young Wittgenstein narrating a theatre-of-the-absurd-style "filmed play" featuring an Old Wittgenstein, played by Karl Johnson, performing little set-pieces from Wittgenstein's life as a young man in a slightly jokey, piss-take sort of a way. Chassay had previously been in Jarman's film War Requiem, so one can only assume that the old perv had taken rather a shine to him. But then with a script by Terry Eagleton one doesn't expect intellectual greatness, nor even an inkling of the spectacular lyricism of Wittgenstein's thought. And one doesn't get either either.

Wittgenstein himself was of course the last of the "great" philosophers - not so much in the sense that he was a man who produced good philosophy as in that he was a character whose life-story can be said to have encouraged a different way of looking at the universe. Where are the Kierkegaards and the Heideggers of today? Where have all the Kants and Hegels been since Wittgenstein's time? Where, for that matter the Rousseaus and the Descarteses? There have, if one reflects for a moment, been none.

There was actually rather more Wittgenstein-related fun to be had in a film I saw when it first came out in 2008 (but then never heard of again) called The Oxford Murders. It was set, coincidentally enough, in Oxford, and starred a post-Rings but pre-Hobbit Elijah Wood. It also featured lots of quotations from Wittgenstein, and seemed to be pitched almost as a pilot for an Inspector Morse-style TV-series - only of course I saw it at the cinema. In short, it was the sort of guff that would have had Douglas Adams turning in his grave. At the time I quietly thought it an overlooked geekgasm - almost as if the New Frodo had decided to take a leaf out of fellow hobbit Dominic Monaghan's playbook to do a bit of Hetty Wainthropp-style investigating, only instead of teaming up with John Thaw - with whom Monaghan had of course appeared in underrated WWII cozzie drama Monsignor Reynard - he'd plumbed for the Old Aragorn - Old Aragorn in this case being not Robert Stephens (already dead by that stage in his career) but John Hurt - at that stage still pre-Who.

Confused? Well, who knows?

Chocky

Chocky was one of those TV-series that I missed first time round but then felt somehow as if I hadn’t - like Bagpuss and The Magic Roundabout and, to a certain extent, most of the original run of Doctor Who. In fact, it turns out, I only really remembered a couple of bits of it, and they weren't even from the original series.

One thing I did remember very vividly was the title sequence. It turns out that the actual version I remembered was the one from second series, Chocky's Children, which was not actually based on any specific work by John Wyndham but which was distinctly "Wyndham-esque", doing its best to continue the story of the first series in a similar vein. (The only other bit I genuinely remembered was one episode from the third series.) The reason why I remembered this particular title sequence though was probably because although it started each episode with the same scary sci-fi music and creepy revolving geometric shape as the first series had,* it also had an ultra-creepy voice saying the name of the show. (Why? Why not for the first and third series? We’ll probably never know.)

Why don't I remember more? Almost certainly because that was all I saw. Again, why not more? Possibly because it was too scary, possibly because it was too scary and/or boring for my brothers (although “This is rubbish/stupid.” was a good catch-all definition when growing up for things that one didn’t want to watch - much better than to admit to being spooked)! Possibly because there was always something better/more important scheduled on BBC1 at the time! And possibly because tea was always ready at exactly the wrong time!

Anyway, such are the wonders of the modern DVD market. I don’t know why I bought the series on DVD as an Xmas present for myself this year. (Would a Chocky box-set have been a box of Chockies?) It’s possible that it was because Auntie was re-showing the Triffids series recently and I got a hankering for more Wyndham. It’s just as possible though that I noticed that Devin Stanfield from The Box of Delights (Auntie's Not-a-Box of Chockies) was in it and I wanted to check out the one other thing he’d been in before he chucked it all in and got a life.

So what (and who) was Chocky? On one level it was standard childhood wish-fulfillment about an invisible alien friend giving a boy called Matthew magic powers - more serious than most of the CFF stuff from the '60s and '70s, and sci-fi rather than straight fantasy, but at the same time very much proto-Harry Potter (though when Harry starts hearing voices in Chamber of Secrets it's a Bad Thing). ‘[L]ike a Children's Film Foundation movie directed by David Lynch’ is probably a good description, except that unlike the master of modern surrealism's work it's very much played for real. The invisible friend who helps you become good at cricket is standard fare. Good at art and maths as well though? Perhaps less so! But how many children in children’s fantasy stories end up being sent to therapy by their parents?

So despite the escapist premise, which normally means the kid and his friends end up getting their own back at the nasty parent(s)/teacher(s)/authority figures generally, Matthew's father in Chocky by the end has been read into what’s going on – by the eponymous alien herself, in person, no less. It’s an extraordinarily mature attitude for any children’s sci-fi/fantasy work to take, and to my knowledge quite unique. A slightly more mature alternative to the "kids get their own back"-meme, as in Alan Garner’s and Susan Cooper’s books, not to mention the 21st century’s own dear Harry Potter, is that the adults are completely left behind, whether physically or spiritually, permanently befuddled by phenomena that their children take for granted. Even C S Lewis didn't quite manage to solve this rather basic problem. (Prof Kirke in Wardrobe is, we later learn, simply a “grown-up” Narnia child himself.) Only Tolkien really escapes the trap. (The hobbits, although not technically children, do play that function, but their involvements in the wide world beyond the Shire do eventually lead to a wholesale change for the better in their own society.)

Matthew's mother as it happens is treated in a way that is arguably quite misogynistic – not to say anachronistic. But that only really underlines the "unusualness" of the relationship of the son with his father, because the man and the boy are in fact very good together. And ultimately it’s the sense that Matthew benefits personally from his extra-terrestrial visitation in a real, positive way – he ends up much closer to his adoptive father who encourages his emerging artistic talent – that is probably the most surprisingly affecting thing about it.

Another subversion of the wish-fulfilment trope – although here at least the fairy-tale logic is fairly tried and tested – is that it explores the potential negative consequences both to Matthew personally and to humanity generally of things suddenly going really well. For Matthew himself it’s his painting, and the downside is that he's treated as a child prodigy. For humanity generally it’s free cosmic energy and the global political ramifications thereof.

I haven’t read the book and don't know much about Wyndham's politics, so I can’t say what Wyndham would have made of the conclusion, but here the leftism is fairly standard - dull and tedious: in the end it's the energy companies (the nasty right-wing capitalists) – in cahoots, somewhat improbably, with Harley Street child psychiatrists – who try to banjax the free energy programme. I suppose they might. We don’t really find out the identities of the baddies in Chocky’s Children, but apparently they’re the same hyper-powerful bunch of private healthcare professionals as in the first series, who for some reason not only believe in extraterrestrials but also want to cover up their existence in order to protect the fossil fuel energy industry – and yet who can’t just pull themselves together and squish the little moppets that the aliens are working with. Fundamentally then, it's still the evil capitalists, who are trying to stop us getting Chocky's free energy. And then finally in the third series, Chocky's Challenge, it's the evil British military who are trying to exploit it.

It's not just the plots that are variable. The acting from the young prodigies themselves is decidedly hit-and-miss. In the first series, Andrew Ellams is utterly enchanting, throwing himself into the role with the mad passion that only a twelve-year-old boy can muster. His performance only really hits the skids in the second series when he’s placed opposite the girl who plays Albertine, his sidekick/prepubescent love interest. And by the third series, which he’s hardly in, he’s honed/confined his performance to little more than two facial expressions and a couple of costume changes. The sweetness, bumptiousness, cheekiness, pathos, alien weirdness and – perhaps most importantly – sheer energy of his performance in the first series all seem to have just vanished away, leaving a young actor who isn’t even embarrassed so much as bored. (He's now a secondary school economics teacher. Go figure!)

Why don’t we have shows like this anymore? I’m afraid the answer quite simply is because you just can’t get the boys nowadays. Or rather you can, but Auntie for political reasons is loathe to employ them. Good child actors are clever children and clever children tend to be rich and posh (and white - duh!). And that’s ironic, because in the days of Chocky and The Box of Delights children were cast because their parents were friends of the floor manager or the producer or whatever. The days of Jamie Bell and Asa Butterfield were still a long way in the future. And in any case, although she started out on telly, Pippa Hall’s magic has now moved on to the movies, and TV is left with ethnic children and the occasional pretty boy who can live in the hope of being the next Jude Law.

Devin Stanfield is the greatest loss in the second series. The new girl is simply rubbish. Most disappointingly of all, Matthew himself, who absolutely made the first series and single-handedly just about saved the second series, has by the third series been all but phased out. And having been the sort of boy in the first series who enthused about smashing teas and rides in police cars, by the thrid series he's become an utterly dull artsy type who wears a baseball cap (because he's been to America, and that's what Americans do). His multicultural replacements, moreover, are utterly abysmal even by multiculturalist standards - stereotypes imported into the story partly to comply with strict conventions of sci-fi that go back at least to the 1950s but mostly because of early-onset political correctness. The gook and the coon aren’t just embarrassing proto-PC cyphers – they’re embarrassingly poorly stereotyped proto-PC cyphers at that. (I suppose the most obvious lesson – that you try to be PC and end up being a bit racist, so what’s the point? - is a good one, but it's one that TV and film producers are never likely to learn.)

By the time the story of the third series has struggled to its abrupt conclusion, creepiness, subtlety and realism have all seemingly been ditched and the whole thing has degenerated into little more than a slightly posher (Oxbridge, doncha know!) version of The Tomorrow People (which was always a danger, to be fair, given Christopher Hodson’s work on both) – only set in the 1980s (with a female baddy who’s a cross between Mrs Thatcher and Princess Diana) and without the simmering latent homoeroticism. (Which, if you think about it, is all a bit of a shame!) Either that, that is to say, or an early version of The Sarah Jane Adventures!

Which is a pity, because generally the science-fiction element is sparse, and that makes it realistic, and that makes it scary. (With the honest exception of Predator, invisible aliens are the scariest sort for that very reason.) Even the technobabble in the second and third series is of a reasonably high standard. At the end of the day, after all, it’s Anthony Read, who's been much overlooked for his work on Doctor Who – seen today, somewhat sadly, as the filler between the “classic” Hinchcliffe era and that of ultra-groovy, post-modern, “famous” Douglas Adams.

The Cambridge thing is sort of interesting though. A little bit of Shada! A little big of East Anglian Puritanism! (Given the clean-cut, emotionally slightly dysfunctional atmosphere of the Fenlands, with its black-and-white morality and its commitment to excellence but to no particular purpose, one wonders what Doctor Who might have been like in the late '70s if more of its production team had been educated in the Thames Valley.) So too is the idea of replacing the original capitalist baddies with the British military. Sadly though, none of it is particularly well realised. (The military baddy himself is a two-dimensional buffoon who makes Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart seem like a tortured soul by comparison.) Nothing gets a chance to work itself out properly, and finally there's a lack of closure, just as there is in The Omen "trilogy". (The deus ex machina-solution at the end, albeit not quite as literal as in the final Omen film, is something else the two trilogies have in common.)

And yet despite all this the underlying problem is that Wyndham by this point has been left far behind, and any real chance of getting back to any his original ideas  has been all but exhausted. All-in-all, there's a sense of a show having parted company from its roots and ended up in a mess.

That's not to say that the "trilogy" over all isn't enjoyable. But it's the first series that is really very very good and promising, and that promise doesn't in-and-of itself demand sequels. All great children's stories end with a similar desire to know more - what happened to the kids later on, what would they have been like as adults? - and it's a problem that's not easy to get round. One solution obviously is actually to have the children grow up, and from Dickens to Narnia (and arguably Middle-earth) that can work. But what all great children's stories (and arguably all great stories) are really about is about "growing up", and part of growing up is learning to think for yourself.

Answering the question 'What happens next?' is what life is all about.

*Not to mention the weird Jor-El crystal head effect from Superman: The Movie - which then seemed to turn into a weird Easter-egg image – which was perhaps unfortunate, given that the show’s name!

Castle Rock Entertainment

Castle Rock Lighthouse

Weirdly enough…

Castle Rock Entertainment, which was founded in 1987, was named by Rob Reiner in honour of the Maine town that serves as the setting of several stories by Stephen King, after the success of Reiner’s film Stand by Me, which was based on The Body, a novella by King.

And King of course named his town Castle Rock after the Castle Rock in Lord of the Flies.

"Piss off, you little faggot."

If he weren't so adorable they wouldn't be tormenting him. But then adorable little boys' minds don't work like that - because they love it really.

Un Petit Chanteur à la Croix de Bois

by Otto Lohmüller

They're actually one of the three boy-choirs in Bad Tölz at the moment. The least attractively costumed of the three in fact will almost certainly be the boys from my old school. Ah well!

Boys

There's the witty boy and the pretty boy,
And the boy who oils his hair;
There's the catfaced boy, and the rat-faced boy,
And the boy with the bovine stare. 

There's the steamy boy, and the dreamy boy,
And the boy who is 'up to date';
There is the boy who mopes, and the boy who jokes,
And the boy who is always late. 

There's the tender boy, and the slender boy,
And the boy with limbs like a bear's;
There's the stoutish boy, and the loutish boy,
And the boy who slides downstairs. 

There's the cheerful boy and 'that fearful boy';
And the boy who deserves a flogging;
There's a boy with a heart and the boy who's too 'smart',
And the boy whose brain wants a jogging. 

There's the grass-green boy, and the bright, keen boy,
And the boy who is always blubbing;
There's the climby boy and the grimy boy,
And the boy who shirks his tubbing. 

There are many others, oh men and brothers,
And none are all bad, you bet;
There are boys and boys - yet, through grief and joys,
They are Somebody's Darlings yet. 

[The Boy's Own Reciter]

Bitter Fruits

A few years back, before the sun finally set on the great Bush Empire, a couple of blond twin munchkins from Carolina won a magazine's Best Lemonade Stand in America competition. The AP video is still on line here.

Sadly, it wasn't to last, as Iain Murray reported here. [H/T: Steyn]

Unlike Steyn and chums, I'm not an American. nor am I really on the same page as they with all the small-state, live-free-or-die stuff.

What does do my head in though is what sort of pervy weirdo gets his cheap thrills out of closing down a kid's lemonade stand?

(If I were feeling really nasty I might even suggest it had something to do with American policemen not being allowed to beat up n****rs any more.)

Alexandr Magala

The Daily Mail pretty much outdid themselves in the prurient hypocrisy stakes a couple of days ago when they "outed" Britain's Got Talent's popular sword-swallower as as a former male stripper. (And yes, men used to enjoy him, as well as women!)

Well here are some pics. He's from Moldova, and yes, he was very beautiful.

Small is beautiful?

Why exactly does Apple think that 12-year-olds need  a gay hook-up app?

When Distinc.tt was launched, CNET headlined with 'Apple approves "only gay social app for ages 12 and up"'.

Apple themselves, indeed, are hardly coy about what they're trying to do, describing it right up front on Distinc.tt's website as 'The first LGBT+ social network for people of all ages.'

And this, in case you were in any doubt, is against a lurid, multicoloured background of flashing under-age kiddie pics.

At the time, it must be said, this just seemed like a really, really bad publicity stunt. In practice though, it's gone largely un-remarked, and in future it will, presumably, be seen as quite normal for "gay" 12-year-olds who have been outed by their adoring parents to load up the app and get on with... whatever it is that Apple imagines gay 12-year-olds want to get up to.

In fact there had been consternation, amusement, alarm and resignation (seemingly on all sides) just three years earlier when a Swiss condom manufacturer announced that in future 12-year-old boys would be able to have their own brand of condoms. The Ceylor Hotshot apparently is a type of condom manufactured and marketed in Switzerland and specifically designed to fit the penis of a prepubescent child. Because, so the logic went, you can't get them started too young! If the little lads were doing it, they might as well be able to do it cleanly and without making themselves and/or their partners sick.

The big difference between Switzerland and England of course is that here it's still illegal for children under the age of sixteen to make love. In Switzerland it isn't, provided there isn't more than three years' difference between them.

But then what's the law got to do with it?

We've been told repeatedly that there is no "gay agenda". But it's genuinely difficult to see in what way shifting the social boundaries of what under-age sexual activities are or are not acceptable - and of course at the same time opening the good old Overton Window ever wider - can really be anything other than the gay lobby's much-vaunted "queering" of society.

It's already happening, and the vast majority of people neither know nor care.

Golden Childhoods

Everyone of my generation will know him as Perry White from the ("original") Superman movies (above). But Jackie Cooper was clearly one of those small stars of the big screen who'd been around for a very long time.

Back in the days when the world was still in black and white, in fact before anyone had heard of Shirley Temple or Mickey Rooney, Jackie was Jim Hawkins in Treasure Island. It's a fairly standard role for up-and-coming screen moppet-boys - a sort of Hamlet for boys - but one that virtually every grown-up former child-actor one can think of has had to get under his belt, from Kevin Zegers to Elijah Wood (or was he just Huckleberry Finn?) to Christian Bale (obviously!). His co-star, sharing the top billing (Ah, those were the days, before paedophobia!) was Wallace Beery, which gives you some idea of how the importance of a star's name has changed since then.

Jackie and Wallace were also together in the black and white version of The Champ, which was later remade by Franco Zeffirelli with Ricky Schroder as the little blond cutie. And of course Schroder too has gone on to "grown-up" stardom. Unlike Ricky, who is now "Rick Schroder", Jackie just carried on being Jackie. Clearly it was quite a different generation where it didn't hurt one's career to be associated with the glories a golden childhood.

HJs in Cologne

And of course it has to be the handsomest, blondest boy who leads.

'Jock'

by Alex Calder

When a little boy accidentally learns that his big boy hero likes... other boys!

(I just love the expression on the kid's face.)

The Wandervogel

Although even semi-respectable historians (the BBC's Laurence Rees, for example) try to link the Wanderwogel with the HJs, personally I can't really see the connexion. Apart from both being outdoorsy-type German youth movements, they really have nothing in common. The Wanderwogel were really proto-hippy, young ramblers, who merrily tramped about the beautiful German countryside with their guitars, singing songs about how lovely everything was and how young and handsome they were (or something!). They weren't known for throwing stones at Catholic priests, beating up Jews, informing on their parents or forming teenage SS tank divisions.

In fact the only thing they (probably!) had in common with Hitler's lads was a propensity for a bit of underage boy-on-boy action - and let's face it, adolescent adventures between friends after lights-out don't really compare with having to deal with the attentions of the pervert instructors of the notorious "Homo Youth".

Is this an actual uniform, or are these just normal German student caps?

Nazis with guitars? Now you've heard everything.

So who's first? If you played a stringed instrument you could just stand and watch, presumably.

Der Weg des Lebens

by Carl Bantzer

No, this isn't actually "Nazi", but it is a beautiful painting that's very much "of a type".

Ballet Boy

I'd love to know how this lad rates the new Spider-Man!

'Waiting for Beckett'

by Marc Paeps

[From Marc Paeps's website here]

The Winslow Boy

I wonder if anyone ever told Sir Nigel Hawthorne that if he played his cards right and behaved himself in front of the horses then eventually he'd get his very own young blond teenage boy in a smart naval cadet uniform.

Portrait of Father and Son Pietro and Mario Krohn

by Albert Gustaf Aristides Edelfelt

Luan and Noah

Beautiful German twins boys! These two are Luan and Noah Klose, with their father Miroslav. I think he plays football, or something.

He's actually a Catholic, from Silesia, so he was born in a part of what is de facto Germany that is now de jure in Poland. And at an early age he upped sticks, became a "German citizen" and is now a German sporting hero.

Good for him, I say. And it just goes to show that sometimes things can seem to sort of work out alright.