Archive for the ‘mass media’ Category

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The unending cesspit of Jimmy Savile and the 1970s

Saturday, October 27th, 2012

I’d planned to write a blog about Max Clifford shooting himself in the foot over Jimmy Savile. I had the idea before I’d seen anyone else covering this but before I finished putting my piece together The Guardian run a story headlined: Jimmy Savile scandal: ‘celebrity hedonism no excuse for child abuse’ and straplined, ‘Child protection expert criticises Max Clifford for saying celebrities didn’t ask for birth certificates’. Paul Roffey may not say things the way I’d have formulated them but the points are basic and unfortunately still need laying out in this way because there are so many twerps around who can’t grasp the key issues.

There is obviously much greater awareness of paedophilia today but in the 1960s everyone knew about the age of consent and people were regularly tried for breaking the law over it. The fact that someone may have looked 16 or 21 if they were male may be mitigation but it is no defence. (Roffey tells The Guardian)

This is so obvious that it shouldn’t need stating. Nonetheless scumbags like Max Clifford make it necessary to do so since their arrant bullshit on the subject shouldn’t pass unchallenged. The rich and famous remain arrogant enough to think they can defend the indefensible – but we won’t let them get away with it!

Moving on, when I was sixteen in the late-seventies I had a female friend of the same age who a thirty-something photographer persuaded to pose naked. A twenty-something guy we both knew who worked in a punk record shop thought my friend was being exploited, so he told the photographer my friend was only 15. In a panic the thirty-something perv destroyed the prints and negatives he’d made of my friend (who’d actually turned sixteen a week so so before she posed nude for him). The photographer knew he’d get done if he was caught with indecent images of a 15 year-old and he’d asked my friend if she was sixteen, but our older acquaintance was more convincing when he falsely claimed she’d lied. The record shop assistant clearly had a better understanding of the nature of consent than the law – where there is a massive inequality in power relations there cannot be consent.

Around the same time various members of my male peer group (including me) were offered a hundred quid if we’d submit to being bum-fucked on camera. £100 was a lot of dosh to us back then and we were even told that our faces wouldn’t be on the films, only our backsides. We concluded that rather than being for our benefit this was to protect the pornographers making the movies – if we couldn’t be identified then no one would be able to prove that we were beneath the age of consent for gay sex in the UK at that time (as we were). In the late-seventies I found myself constantly proposition by older men as I wondered around London – and I was not only under the age of consent for gay sex, I also looked considerably younger than my actual age. The saddos hitting on me knew having sex with me wouldn’t be legal – but they didn’t care coz they thought they could get away with it. It was more usually men who I had to tell to fuck off as they harassed me, but I’d get just as pissed off with women who did it (and the oldest person to offer me money for sex as I came out of a punk concert was a female in her seventies – the men who did this were more usually in their thirties of forties).

The punk scene was full paedophiles and those attempting to exploit paedophilia for commercial gain. The Guardian may now be carrying on the whole relatively sensible articles about Jimmy Savile, but as recently as 10 April 2010 Alex Needham wrote in a laudatory blog about the punk poser Malcolm McLaren: “After managing the band Bow Wow Wow (and attempting to bring paedophilia into the mainstream via a magazine called Chicken), McLaren decided to make records himself. ” This is in an article with the strap-line: “The punk impressario’s stunts shook up pop music for ever. Here are some of the best.” Doh!

Not that The Guardian should be singled out for criticism on this score. The British tabloid press has way more to answer for since it played a role in turning Savile into an untouchable celebrity. Right-wing hack Garry Bushell has written for a range of the red tops, as well as involving himself with some of the more unsavory elements of the punk rock scene, and fronting his own really bad dumbcore band The Gonads. Bushell may or may not claim the following lyrics from his song I Lost My Love To A UK Sub are a joke, but nonetheless they ought to provide all the tabloids for whom he’s written with some food for thought:

My first love was a virgin only 13 years old/Till Charlie Harper grabbed on his pension day I’m told/He showered her with badges/He bought her lots of booze/And then showed her his warhead/Now don’t you think that’s crude?/He got her in a stranglehold/He got her in the club/Before I bleedin’ knew it I lost my love to a UK Sub…

Charlie Harper was the rather unlikely middle-aged front man to the punk band The UK Subs, and he had a reputation for bedding underage girls. Whether Harper’s unsavory reputation was deserved or not I’ve no idea, but when I hung around the punk scene in London in the late-1970s, Harper was widely perceived to be a dirty old man with a penchant for young girls. Bushell is playing off and celebrating Harper’s reputation for bedding jailbait, as is obvious from the large number of UK Subs song titles worked into his lyric. Towards the end of the song Bushell returns to the subject of grooming underage girls that is first addressed in the words quoted above (viz badges and booze): “Tank her up with vodka till the silly cow is sick/Take her in a stranglehold/Take her out the pub/Get back to your place and you’ll never lose your love to a UK Sub…” And for the benefit of those not familiar with all of the UK slang in the song ‘in the club’ (first verse) means pregnant, so this lyric is a very blatant paean to kiddie fiddling.

I’ll end by noting that while child abuse imagery could be found in various parts of the punk scene of the 1970s, it seemed to have the strongest appeal to those with far-Right leanings. Neo-Nazi punk moron Ian Stuart recorded a song on this subject called Jailbait with his band Skrewdriver in 1977:

Normal hair looks so good / Temptation think I should? / Jailbait, jailbait, jailbait / No one knows you’re sneaking out / Your old man would scream and shout / Jailbait, jailbait, jailbait / Just because you’re just fifteen / They can’t guess the things you’ve seen / Jailbait, jailbait, jailbait / They don’t want you getting pissed / Enjoying things that they have missed / Jailbait, jailbait, jailbait.

Again note the alcohol reference (‘getting pissed’) and the role this plays in grooming underage girls (and also boys in the case of many of those in the Skrewdriver entourage – such as fascist bonehead Nicky Crane who also wrote bad lyrics and drew crap record covers for the group). On a live recording of Skrewdriver performing Jailbat at The Marquee in London on 4 June 1977, Ian Stuart introduces the song by saying” “Right we’re going to do one about little girls….” in a leering voice, just in case anyone misses the fact that he fancies himself as a perv.

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

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Posted in mass media, music, True crime | 37 Comments »

Was Jimmy Savile A Necrophile?

Thursday, October 11th, 2012

One of the more surreal aspects of the unfolding scandal around media split-personality Jimmy Savile is the way British media reports of the disgraced disc jockey and TV presenter sexually assaulting young kids are finally being run so long after they did the rounds elsewhere (including on various nutjob conspiracy blogs). As soon as Savile died a slew of right-wing commentators felt free to put online stuff they’d have feared being sued about earlier. That said, the stories they tell had gone around the music business and elsewhere for years before they appeared in endless copy and paste jobs on web operations run by loonies who are deranged enough to believe that the Illuminati is something more than a very  minor secret society that was successful suppressed in the eighteenth-century! However just because these sites manage to grab the wrong end of the stick with regard to virtually everything they cover, that doesn’t mean that very occasionally they don’t get things right. And they may be more or less correct on most of what they have to say about Savile and his colleagues.

So this leaves me wondering whether there is more than a grain of truth in the decades old rumours that Savile volunteered as a hospital porter because it provided him with the opportunity to get it on with corpses (as well as to sexually abuse crippled children). The mainstream media hasn’t picked up on the necrophilia allegations to date but they are now repeating so much of what has been widely available on nutjob conspiracy blogs since Savile’s death a year ago that it seems merely a matter of time before they bite the bullet on this one too. It is less likely – but not impossible – that they will eventually repeat the allegations that former British Prime Minister Edward Heath abused kids at the same Jersey children’s home that Savile trawled for young victims.

Another peculiar aspect of the Savile scandal is that many commentators seem unable to understand why paedophilia is unacceptable. Acceptable sex is consensual sex. It should go without saying that consent is only possible when all those partaking in a sexual act enjoy social equality. Given the power differentials between adults and children, paedophilia can never be consensual and thus it should be condemned as an utterly inappropriate form of behaviour. So regardless of whether it is Savile, or his fellow Radio One DJ John Peel (or pop musicians like Gary Glitter and Jimmy Page), adults having sex with kids in their early teens is always abuse. Some John Peel fanboys seem to think he wasn’t a paedophile when he slept with young girls (and married a 15 year-old when he was 26) because he is their hero. Such posturing is absurd and illustrates a generalised inability to grasp the real issues.

Finally, the Savile scandal is yet another manifestation of the destruction of the status quo – and needs to be connected back to the ongoing scandals around banking, phone hacking and MPs expenses. The establishment is in ruins and Savile shouldn’t be treated as a rogue celebrity but rather as one manifestation of a more general malaise. Saville like John Peel and Alan “Fluff” Freeman (another dead former Radio One DJ about whom there are plenty of child abuse allegations floating around the web) were all recognised by the British honours system (with Savile himself also being close to various members of the British royal family during his life). This starts to create the impression that unless you are a kiddie fiddler you’ll never be offered an honour by Queen Elizabeth II. The class system still stinks something rotten and it is high time we not only stripped all royals of their titles and wealth, but did the same to every last member of the superannuated  establishment!

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

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Posted in culture gossip & parties, mass media, politics | 28 Comments »

From The Sex Life Of Jesus To The Innocence Of The Muslims

Monday, September 17th, 2012

Looking at press coverage of The Innocence of the Muslims (2012) I’m not particularly surprised I’ve yet to find any that compares the reception of this film to the reaction that greeted Jens Jørgen Thorsen’s attempts to make the movie The Sex Life Of Jesus in the 1970s. Before even starting to shoot his flick Thorsen’s found himself vilified in the media and banned from the UK and many other countries. Thorsen had planned to make the film in Britain but was forced to (temporarily) abandon the project under intense opposition from Christian morality campaigners like Mary Whitehouse, Queen Elizabeth II (the fundamentalist head of the Church of England, as well as head of the British state), then British Prime Minister James Callaghan, as well as the Archbishop of Canterbury Donald Coggan (Elizabeth II’s top Church of England hatchet man of the time).

The racist mainstream media in the Anglo-American world portrays Muslim fundamentalism as a major world problem, while mostly ignoring the fact that Christian fundamentalists are far more of a danger (they are clearly much better armed once you take into account the influence of the Bible belt on American mainstream politics &c., and they’re also yearning for Armageddon). Since ultimately fundamentalism is a global manifestation of an inability to deal with the complexities of the modern world, it is only to be expected that reaction to The Innocence Of The Muslims should mirror earlier reactions to The Sex Life Of Jesus.

Indeed during the 1980s there were ongoing petitions by US Christian fundamentalists arising from rumours that a film portraying Jesus as gay was about to be released. A number of sources suggest these rumours were based on a very partial knowledge of Ed D. Louie’s lost hardcore gay film Him (1974), which Al Goldstein described in the following terms in a review from his magazine Screw dated (29 April 1974): “The plot of HIM theoretically is about a faggot who is preoccupied with Christ and constantly has sexual reveries about balling that great Son of God.” Him was screened at the 55th Street Playhouse in Manhattan from 27th March to 23rd May 1974, and it possibly also played at a few other fleapit film theatres in American cities in the mid-seventies.

I’ve no idea if Jens Jørgen Thorsen was aware of Him, and if so whether it influenced his attempt to make The Sex Life Of Jesus. Due to pressure from reactionary Christian fundamentalists, Thorsen was unable to complete his movie about Jesus until the early 1990s, and when it was finally shot as Jesus vender tilbage (Jesus Returns – 1992) the script appears to have been drastically revised (to the extent that some maintain Thorsen never got to make the movie he’d proposed to shoot in the 1970s).

Thorsen was a leftist prankster and leading light of the Second Situationist International – and in many ways the reaction to his proposed film is more important than what he eventually made. I haven’t seen Jesus vender tilbage (and I’m not sure whether there is a version dubbed or subtitled into English), but I’ve been told by Danish speakers who have sat through it that it is awful. The films I have seen by Thorsen I’ve liked – his celluloid adaptation of Herny Miller’s Quiet Days In Clichy (1970) is a truly explosive marriage of avant-garde and exploitation cinema.

The producer of The Innocence Of The Muslims (Nakoula Basseley Nakoula) and his backers are exactly the type of right-wing extremist Christian nutjobs Thorsen exposed as reactionaries when his attempt to film The Sex Life Of Jesus was shut down by uptight scumbags ranging from Queen Elizabeth II on down. That said Nakoula’s project was in many ways subverted by those employed to carry it through. Director Alan Roberts is a competent low-budget exploitation film-maker. His work is lent a particularly surreal quality by the overdubbing of anti-Islamic elements not included in the original script and added after the end of his involvement in the production. The many commentators who say the film is bad or poorly made are simply bourgeois hacks whose judgements are based on the false ‘standards’ of high budget Hollywood ‘realism’. The Innocence Of The Muslims (or at least the nearly 14 minute long trailer for it available on the internet) shares many tropes found in the output of artists such as Mike Kelly or Paul McCarthy. Visually and in terms of acting this is not a bad film (if one judges it on terms other than those of Hollywood realism), what sucks about this production is the attempt to transform it into a racist rant via detournement through overdubbing.

The best element of The Innocence Of The Muslims is the manner in which its lack of realism destabilises meaning and forces the viewer to confront the issue of representation. The portrayal of Muhammad is so generic that he might as well be Jesus or Buddha or any other quasi-historical figure. This is not what the producer and his backers intended but then the real ‘meaning’ of the film no doubt escapes them. Likewise the prurience of the production clearly appeals to emotions the right-wing fundamentalist Christians who produced and support it probably wouldn’t care to admit they possess, but these are nonetheless integral parts of their personalities. This is what makes the bourgeois denunciations of The Innocence Of The Muslims as a bad piece of film-making all the more telling. It seems the privileged of the overdeveloped world would have preferred it if this production had succeeded as a piece of ‘realism’ and faithfully put across the message its producer hoped to convey – rather than undermining that message!

The Innocence Of The Muslims has a dialectical relationship to Thorsen’s Sex Life Of Jesus. As Marx observed in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, history repeats itself: “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” Marx also famously noted in A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.” In other words we won’t get rid of fundamentalism until we get rid of capitalism. The process of disalienation will render any and all belief in ‘God’ absurd!

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

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Posted in film, mass media, politics, porn | 21 Comments »

Dynamic Inertia – A Week Is A Long Time In Blogging

Sunday, January 8th, 2012

One time British Prime Minister Harold Wilson is often credited with coining the phrase ‘a week is a long time in politics’. When it comes to the internet things move even faster…. but the speed of these changes might be likened to ‘dynamic inertia’ (in both politics and blogging). The phrase ‘dynamic inertia’ has been used to promote the shake weight ‘exercise’ fad of recent years – and appears to have been coined for this purpose. Shake weights were marketed with adverts that featured women grasping these light dumbbell-like objects in their hands and jerking them about with their arms. The infomercials featuring this imagery went viral online because many saw in such hand and arm gestures a connection to onanistic sexual activities. There is now also a slightly heavier shake weight for men. The female shake weight has been marketed as trimming women’s arms and making them slimmer – whereas the manufacturers claim the male equivalent enables men to bulk up (although obviously what are essentially the same set of exercises cannot do both these things)!

Despite spurious claims by those marketing the shake weight, there is no scientific evidence to back up their assertions this expensive branded product is at all effective as an exercise aid. What the shake weight represents is a triumph of marketing over common sense – as do many other recent exercise crazes such as the power plate. Obviously any exercise is better than no exercise, but there are far more effective and less expensive ways to workout than using a shake weight or a power plate. What the people selling the shake weight have usefully done is provide us with a term to describe our current cultural condition. The phrase ‘dynamic inertia’ perfectly encapsulates the political and cultural situation we find ourselves in – which is no longer postmodern but has simultaneously failed to move on from the postmodern. This is a world in which capitalism (and thus official history) can only go backwards – and one where the products of alienated labour are still being falsely presented by our exploiters as having transformed themselves into ‘pure image’.

Obviously the only way to go beyond this post-postmodern condition is through the revolutionary transformation of capitalist social relations. This will be an overflowing in which we’ll be able to realise every aspect of ourselves as human beings, and together enjoy the wealth of this world in a truly collective fashion. Although it will number among the more minor benefits of communist revolution, I will at last be able to dispense with my spam filter, something I currently require to block ‘messages’ such as the following: “Discover The Untold Secrets Used By The World’s Top Cat Trainers To Make Their Kittens Listen To Their Every Command” (link removed). It should go without saying that we don’t want a society of ‘order givers’ and ‘order takers’ (or even one divided into ‘hep cats’ and ‘kittens’), we want a society of equals!

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

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Posted in advertising, mass media, scam, spam, Web 2.0 | 20 Comments »

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