My First New Year Card

Albert Gleizes - Composition 1937 - 1938

 

Long Live Sincerity

Because with the depth to which
kitsch has penetrated popular culture
the sincerity with which it is delivered,
whether it is faked or real,
is what makes that kitsch endurable,
though what would be even better
would be an inclusive sense of humour.

The Isolation And Bravery Of The Bearded Lady

A still from 
Tod Browning's
1932 film 'Freaks'

    As a gay man I liked bearded men well before I was able to say that I liked them, and make personal the reasons why I liked them. When I was growing up the accepted markers for masculinity, when I was growing up were the ability to be drunk and demonstrate to the credulous, particularly yourself, that you were sober. 

  As 'an out gay man', aged thirty, I regrew the beard that I first grew as a teenager, and with the 'coming out' came feel that my beard was integral to me, an active expression of my character. The beard has remained an active part of my character over the three decades of 'being out' in which my character has changed.  

  When blogging and Tumblr came along two decades later I started a beard blog. Here it is. Over the ten years plus since I have never stopped putting more beards up. I have never given Tumblr's digital censor much work to do. If what I had was 'a fetish' then it was a remarkably polite as a fetish. I never saw the point in getting pushy about what I liked. I preferred to let the accumulated oddity of the large and singular collection of images explain me, and let any fetish labelling quietly put itself in lower case before appearing to be relatively normal; nothing to frighten the right wing 'normals' with.

  But one minority area to do with my appreciation of beard culture always always confounded me. Generally I am blind to the attractions of women. Their appearance does nothing for me. I like how women are more oriented more consensus than men often present themselves as being, but being fair is not the same as being fun. I was, and am, the same with women as I am about men, including bearded men, in drag. Drag only seemed okay to me if it was done uncompetitively and just for fun. And yes I have been there and it was not a T shirt that I got after and kept either.

  I was blind to that rare handsomeness that happens in bearded women. Allow me to correct that blind spot, somewhat. The above image is from that most celebrated and notorious of films, Todd Browning's 'Freaks' (MGM 1932) where a troupe of real circus actors acted in a horror film that looked all too real, and blurred too many lines between reality and fantasy to be a mere entertainment. Bearded women have to brave in ways I never had to be when I grew my beard as part of my renewed public identity; their beard 'outs' them in a way that they have to be careful how to own the resulting public profile. 

  It is not surprising then that historically they often became circus attractions. They got an income, had somewhere to live, and had their community with the circus troupe, who were self contained and in spite of being midgets and having all sorts of physical differences from normal full height human beings were adults with capable adult minds who valued their autonomy. That they played up their physical differences in public for show and for money, well they had to. How else would they survive outside of being institutionalised by a misbegotten science which mangled the public understanding of mental health, and lied about what genetics actually were to grotesque degree? Such mental health experts and geneticists as there were would have locked up all the dwarves etc without looking at them, and labelled them 'defective' based what other people said about their appearance.

  Finally, Empress of The Blues, Bessie Smith, who I had a voice, a skin tone, physical strength, and an appetite for life that was much fuller than any beard man I could imagine, did the same as those circus troupes of dwarves and other human misshapes, if you will pardon the expression. When she had earned enough she bought her own luxury railway carriage in which she travelled to avoid the outright racism of hotels, who would refuse her entry and where they let her play would have humiliated her by making her play to white only audiences. 

  The road is fine place to live and work if you are an outsider, long may it be there for outsiders who need the income, and the space it gives them away from 'normal' society, particularly for outsiders like bearded ladies.   

My Fourth Christmas Card Of 2022

'Untilted' an undated artwork
by Liam Warr

 

The More We Search The Past, The More We See The Future

Ninety Years ago the Soviet Union
under then-new leader Joseph Stalin
started to electrify Russian factories,
and collectivised farming in Ukraine.

Between them, the oppressive Soviet State
and a feckless and untried Soviet agri-science
created what became The Holodomor in which
millions of Ukrainians starved as crops failed,
those who survived it felt that they were unlucky.

How bad was it? Ukrainians cooked and ate
their domestic pets and even boiled shoe leather,
and, shoeless, searched for something more to eat.

What we see now under a newer Russian Czar
is not on the scale of absolute suffering of the past,
there are several differences between now and then.
What we see now is played out through a divided media,
amid new divisions in world energy politics,
but the suffering and deaths remain real enough
whether they are of unprepared Russian conscripts,
well motivated Ukrainian soldiers or civilians.

Whether it is more of The Holodomor
or the start of the third World War 
matters not, the upheavals of the future
are going to be global and painful
and make the rich richer and the poor poorer,
where the poor remain glad to be alive at all. 

My Third Christmas Card Of 2022

'Black Sun' painted in 1969
by Alexander Calder  

Godwyn's Law Updated ?

In the American real-time media
and English language youtube
Donald Trump, the 45th president
of the USA, once the great white hope
and now future has been,
is more mentioned than ever.

How long will it be
before he supplants Adolph Hitler
as the person to mention,
in pursuit of winning a weak argument,
as perpetuated by Godwyn's Law?