THE BRILLIANT CHRIS MORRIS: FOUR LIONS

I laughed out loud. I laughed convulsively. I didn’t pee myself with laughter, but I came very close. Chris Morris’ jihadi comedy, “Four Lions“, is an absolute delight. If you're offended by the very concept of a terrorist cell as a laugh riot, you probably shouldn't see the film. Or maybe you should. The very existence of “Four Lions” is an act of audacity; the fact that it's also smart, humane, and frequently hilarious is nothing short of a miracle.

The protagonists operate under the fierce conviction that scheming to blow stuff up makes them radical, world-changing martyrs. Never mind that their grasp of reality is so pathetic that they believe the Jews invented sparkplugs to control global traffic, or that the best way to construct a top-secret bomb stash is to order the ingredients on Amazon.


Chris Morris is still the most incendiary figure working in the British entertainment industry. Even if you have not read reports of “Four Lions”’ premiere at Sundance and you have experienced his stuff before, it should come as no surprise that he is reliably fearless and brilliant. In this satirical black comedy about Islamic suicide bombers, he crucially targets his sacrilegious energy not at all at the tenets of Islam – what could be more tiresome or irrelevant? – but simply at the activity of suicide bombing itself.

It is not treated with the cowed, shocked respect habitually to be found in drama or on the news, but rather cheerful scorn. This is a film in which suicide bombers are not martyr-warriors, or powerful enemies to be hated and feared, but ridiculous bunglers. In the tradition of Chaplin sending up Hitler, Chris Morris depicts a movement of violent idiots. In this film, everyone is stupid. The suicide bombers are stupid; the police are stupid; even the clever suicide bomber with the gentle, loving marriage and adoring son is stupid: in fact he is the most culpably stupid of all. And this never looks like a cop-out or a moral equivalence of stupidity, but the comic enactment of a generally degraded and absurd culture of paranoid futility.

The character of Omar (Riz Ahmed), vaguely the most intelligent of the gang, wants to train as a "proper soldier" at a mujahideen camp in Pakistan. (In a nice sardonic touch, the antimaterialist Omar works by day as a mall security guard.) The belligerent Barry, a Caucasian convert to the cause, proposes bombing a mosque "to radicalise the moderates." Faisal (Adeel Akhtar) knows a thing or two about munitions, but rather than blow himself up, he plans to create an army of bomb-carrying crows. And the oafish Waj (Kayvan Novak) has no plan at all beyond railing at the infidels who prefer McDonald's to the halal bucket at Chicken Cottage.

The filmmaking style is an extended series of sketches rather than a tightly plotted story. Omar and Waj spend time at a Pakistani training camp, but are kicked out for general incompetence. Barry, while participating "undercover" in a panel on religious tolerance, recruits a young hothead, Hassan (Arsher Ali), who seems to have mistaken being a jihadi for being a gangster rapper.

After the catastrophic visit to Pakistan, where they succeed in disgracing themselves utterly, (at the end of the film we learn that they have blown up their hero, Osama bin Laden) Omar and Waj return gloomily to find that loose-cannon Barry has presumed to make recruitments without clearing it with anyone else. So to reassert his authority, Omar initiates his own plan: they will blow themselves up at the London Marathon, where their silly novelty costumes will conceal the explosives; no one will search them and it will all happen on live television.

At what point does violence for a cause (which, deluded though they may be, these guys believe they're fighting for) lose its meaning and become senseless murder? For those of us watching in the audience, of course, the answer is simple: terrorism is always senseless murder. But as we watch these guys engage in elaborate mental gymnastics to justify their deeds, we get a glimpse of ideological obfuscation in action. "Listen to your heart," Omar counsels Waj, trying to psych him up for a dangerous mission. "My heart says this is wrong," responds Waj, to which Omar, thinking fast, replies, "What does your head say?"

Far from the cynical, nihilist satire its premise might suggest, “Four Lions” reads, in the end, as a passionate and bleakly funny brief against extremism in all its forms. One of “Four Lions”' subplots involves Omar's deeply religious, law-abiding brother, who visits Omar's house to scold him for giving his wife too much freedom. When Omar laughs it off, the brother responds sternly, "Joking is a sign of weakness." That axiom could be the reverse motto of this brave, brutal, often bloody comedy: It is in its willingness to laugh at the unthinkable that the film finds its strength.

The most uncomfortable aspect of “Four Lions” is the excruciatingly happy, healthy, fulfilled home life of Omar. Just as we have become accustomed to the idea that only idiots or creeps want to kill people by blowing themselves up, Morris coolly presents us with a self-evidently nice, commonsensical guy who loves his family, and whose irritation with religious pedantry is supremely sympathetic. And yet Omar – the cool one, the smart one – wants what all the idiots want. He is essentially no different from them and his wife never questions it, or tries to talk him out of it; there is no serious discussion of justification, of the west's mendacious war in Iraq, and there is no earnest debate of the elaborately written kind that would take up a good 10 minutes of a more serious type of film.

Four Lions takes the sick logic of terrorism to its logical parodic extreme. The film wisely doesn't try to explore the roots of religious fanaticism and how it can manifest as murder: Instead, it simply accepts the world as it is and focuses on the ridiculous. Morris’ film is brutally unimpressed with the moral idiocy of suicide bombing and suggests that the only sane response is derisive laughter.

SINISTER SENSES OF NURSERY RHYMES

I think that virtually all nursery rhymes and fairy tales originated before the era of Disney and the modern urge to sanitize the world. People used to have a more direct connection to the world, including unpleasant things like death and disease, and didn't feel it necessary to shield children from them.

However, during the era of Victorian prudery, many rhymes were re-written to make them safe for children. This often made them totally nonsensical.

There's something quite fascinating about nursery rhymes. On the surface, they're simple little songs with simple little words sung by children still basking in the light of their simple little lives. Yet scratch the surface of any nursery rhyme and you'll reveal a much more complex 'adult' history. These rhymes were often born out of a desire to instruct or teach, or to pass on a moral lesson. The rhyme “London Bridge is falling down,” is laced with the whispered notion that children were buried alive in the foundations of the bridge.

In the days when controlling naughty children was achieved through frightening them, I think that such a threat would probably have been effective.

But the superstition was based around the idea that 'primitive' cultures believed that a bridge would collapse unless the body of a human sacrifice were buried in its foundations.


Yes, the meanings and histories behind many nursery rhymes are sinister. The ancestor of Ring a Ring o Roses is the Black Death. There are many variations of the rhyme -- this is the version we used to sing.


Ring a-ring o' roses,
A pocketful of posies.
a-tishoo!, a-tishoo!.
We all fall down.




From Wiki.

“Many have associated the poem with the Great Plague of London in 1665, or with earlier outbreaks of the Black Death in England. Interpreters of the rhyme before World War II make no mention of this; by 1951, however, it seems to have become well established as an explanation for the form of the rhyme that had become standard in the United Kingdom. Peter and Iona Opie remark: "The invariable sneezing and falling down in modern English versions have given would-be origin finders the opportunity to say that the rhyme dates back to the Great Plague. A rosy rash, they allege, was a symptom of the plague, posies of herbs were carried as protection and to ward off the smell of the disease. Sneezing or coughing was a final fatal symptom, and 'all fall down' was exactly what happened. "The line Ashes, Ashes in alternative versions of the rhyme is claimed to refer variously to cremation of the bodies, the burning of victims' houses, or blackening of their skin, and the theory has been adapted to be applied to other versions of the rhyme. In its various forms, the interpretation has entered into popular culture and has been used elsewhere to make oblique reference to the plague.”

It does seem macabré, that generations of children sing this song, when you think that plague victims were dumped en masse in to open graves. Blackheath, a huge open space in South East London, was actually the site of what was once a mass grave during one particular plague epidemic - hence the name Blackheath, and perhaps also accounts for all those blood-chilling stories of people being buried alive, hands scraping hopelessly at the dirt, leaving behind their suffering ghosts to groan in perpetuity.


And then there’s Wee Willie Winkie. Who is this strange person running around the town in his night gown?


Wee Willie Winkie runs through the town,
Upstairs and downstairs in his nightgown,
Tapping at the window and crying through the lock,
Are all the children in their beds, it's past eight o'clock?







From Rhymes.org
“The origins of the words and lyrics to this nursery rhyme were to allow children to associate every day tasks with their own lives. Before the days of radio, TV and indeed the Internet and also due to levels of illiteracy within the population great reliance was made on the Town Crier who was paid to walk the streets crying out the latest news and information. 'Wee willie winkie' was a child's version of the Town Crier! The author of the nursery rhyme was William Miller (1810 - 1872)”

Perhaps Wee Willie Winkie is a counterpart to the Sandman.

The Sandman is a mythical character in Western folklore who brings good dreams by sprinkling magical sand onto the eyes of children while they sleep.

Traditionally he is a character in many children's stories, invoked to help (or lull) children to sleep. He is said to sprinkle sand or dust on or into the eyes of the child at night to bring on dreams and sleep. The grit or 'sleep' (rheum) in one's eyes upon waking is supposed to be the result of the Sandman's work the previous evening.


E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776–1822) wrote an inverse depiction of the lovable character in a story called Der Sandmann, which showed how sinister such a character could be made. According to the protagonist's nurse, he threw sand in the eyes of children who wouldn't sleep, with the result of those eyes falling out and being collected by the Sandman, who then takes the eyes to his iron nest on the moon, and uses them to feed his children. The protagonist of the story grows to associate this nightmarish creature with the genuinely sinister figure of his father's associate Coppelius. The complete, gruesome story is here;


Oranges and lemons
Say the bells of St Clements
You owe me five farthings
Say the bells of St Martins
When will you pay me?
Say the bells of Old Bailey
When I grow rich
Say the bells of Shoreditch
When will that be?
Say the bells of Stepney
I'm sure I don't know
Says the great bell at Bow
Here comes a candle to light you to bed
Here comes a chopper to chop off your head

Chip chop chip chop the last man's head!

From Famous quotes.

“The words and lyrics have been much loved by generations of British children. The place names relate to some of the many churches of London and the tune that accompanies the lyrics emulates the sound of the ringing of the specific church bells. The words of the nursery rhyme are chanted by children as they play the game of 'Oranges and lemons' the end of which culminates in a child being caught between the joined arms of two others, emulating the act of chopping off their head. The reason for the last three lines of lyrics are easily explained. The 'Great Bells of Bow' were used to time the executions at Newgate prison, which for many years were done by means of beheading. The unfortunate victim would await execution on 'Death Row' and was informed by the warder, the night before the execution ' here comes the candle to light you to bed' of their imminent fate and to make their peace with God. The executions commenced when the bells started chiming at nine o'clock in the morning. When the bells stopped chiming then the executions would be finished until the following day.”

We played this game of Oranges and Lemons at kids’ parties. Yes, it was fun but the anticipation of being the kid caught and the following, symbolic execution, was horrible.


There are a few explanations for the nursery rhyme, “Mary mary quite contrary.”





From Wiki.

“It is a religious allegory of Catholicism, with bells representing the sanctus bells, the cockleshells the badges of the pilgrims to the shrine of Saint James in Spain (Santiago de Compostela) and pretty maids are nuns, but even within this strand of thought there are differences of opinion as to whether it is lament for the reinstatement of Catholicism or for its persecution.

Another theory sees the rhyme as connected to Mary, Queen of Scots, with "how does your garden grow" referring to her reign over her realm, "silver bells" referring to (Catholic) cathedral bells, "cockle shells" insinuating that her husband was not faithful to her, and "pretty maids all in a row" referring to her ladies-in-waiting - "The four Maries".

These explanations vary; it is identified with Mary I of England for roughly the same reasons as with her Scottish counterpart.

The "How does your garden grow?" may make mocking reference to her womb and the fact that she gave birth to no heirs, or to the common idea that England had become a Catholic vassal or "branch" of Spain and the Habsburgs, or may even be a punning reference to her chief minister, Stephen Gardiner ("gardener").

"Quite contrary" could be a reference to her unsuccessful attempt to reverse ecclesiastical changes effected by her father Henry VIII and her brother Edward VI.

The "pretty maids all in a row" could be a reference to miscarriages as with the other Mary or her execution of Lady Jane Grey after coming to the throne.

"Rows and rows" may refer to her infamous burnings and executions of Protestants.

Alternatively, capitalizing on the Queen's portrayal by Whig historians as "Bloody Mary", the "silver bells and cockle shells" referred to in the nursery rhyme could be colloquialisms for instruments of torture.

I can vaguely recall my dad reciting "Who Killed Cock Robin" I remember feeling sad. It’s a bizarre story to have as a nursery rhyme -- the tale of a murder, and subsequent trial.

"Who Killed Cock Robin" is an English nursery rhyme, which has been much used as a

murder archetype in world culture.






Who killed Cock Robin?
I, said the Sparrow,
with my bow and arrow,
I killed Cock Robin.
Who saw him die?
I, said the Fly,
with my little eye,
I saw him die.
Who caught his blood?
I, said the Fish,
with my little dish,
I caught his blood.
Who'll make the shroud?
I, said the Beetle,
with my thread and needle,
I'll make the shroud.
Who'll dig his grave?
I, said the Owl,
with my pick and shovel,
I'll dig his grave.
Who'll be the parson?
I, said the Rook,
with my little book,
I'll be the parson.
Who'll be the clerk?
I, said the Lark,
if it's not in the dark,
I'll be the clerk.
Who'll carry the link?
I, said the Linnet,
I'll fetch it in a minute,
I'll carry the link.
Who'll be chief mourner?
I, said the Dove,
I mourn for my love,
I'll be chief mourner.
Who'll carry the coffin?
I, said the Kite,
if it's not through the night,
I'll carry the coffin.
Who'll bear the pall?
We, said the Wren,
both the cock and the hen,
We'll bear the pall.
Who'll sing a psalm?
I, said the Thrush,
as she sat on a bush,
I'll sing a psalm.
Who'll toll the bell?
I said the bull,
because I can pull,
I'll toll the bell.
All the birds of the air
fell a-sighing and a-sobbing,
when they heard the bell toll
for poor Cock Robin.


Although the song is not recorded until the eighteenth century there is some evidence that it might be much older. The death of a robin by an arrow is depicted in a stained glass window at Buckland Rectory, Gloucestershire and the rhyme is similar to a story, Phyllyp Sparowe, written by John Skelton about 1508.

The use of the rhyme 'owl' with 'shovel', could suggest that it was originally used in older middle English pronunciation. Versions of the story appear to exist in other countries, including Germany.

A number of theories have been advanced to explain the meaning of the rhyme.
That the rhyme records a mythological event, such as the death of the god Balder from norse mythology, or the ritual sacrifice of a king figure, as proposed by early folklorists as in the 'Cutty Wren' theory of a 'pagan survival'.

That it is a parody of the death of William Rufus, who was killed by an arrow in the new forest in 1100.

That the rhyme is connected with the fall of the government of Robert Walpole in
1742, since Robin is a diminutive form of Robert and the first printing is close to the time of the events mentioned.

More recently internet speculation has associated the rhyme with Robin Hood, largely, it seems on the basis of a shared name.

All of these theories are based on perceived similarities in the text to legendary or historical events, or on the similarities of names. Peter Opie pointed out that an existing rhyme could have been adapted to fit the circumstances of political events in the eighteenth century. As with many such theories there is no textual or supportive evidence that the rhyme is connected to the selected events, or that the phrase 'Cock Robin' was used before the rhyme was first published.

And there’s so many, many more. Little Jack Horner, There was a Crooked Man, Georgie Porgy, Jack and Jill, the list goes on and on…

I’m disappointed that I couldn’t really find any erotic origins for nursery rhymes.

Suite 101 gives the lyrics for the Nursery Rhyme Goosey goosey gander. I had some hopes for this one. Surely here there was steamy sex.


Goosey goosey gander,
Whither shall I wander?
Upstairs and downstairs
And in my lady's chamber.
There I met an old man
Who wouldn't say his prayers,
So I took him by his left leg
And threw him down the stairs.

But not so. The traditional interpretation of this rhyme regards it as an account of the religious upheaval in England during the sixteenth century.

The lady’s chamber is the private room of a high born lady. The lady in this rhyme, apparently had a ‘Priest Hole’ in her room to hide a Catholic Priest. A Priest Hole is a very small hidden room. Priest holes were necessary at this time because those found harbouring a priest were executed along with the priest.

The old man who wouldn’t say his prayers refers to the fact that Catholic Priests said their prayers in Latin instead of the using correct language for prayers which according to Protestants was in English. Those who did not ‘convert’ to the Protestant way were executed.

Of course, I could pick a Nursery Rhyme and give it an erotic reading, you can give anything an erotic reading. How about “Little Miss Muffet”? But it doesn’t really prove anything, other than that I’ve got a dirty mind.

THE BLOODY CHAMBER: ANGELA CARTER

It’s been a few years now, since I discovered Angela Carter. It was on a course about adaptations of novels into film. Fairly recently, Neil Jordan had released “The Company of Wolves,” from the Angela Carter short story of the same name. It’s a strange, haunting story -- a re-telling, if you like of the tale of “Little Red Riding Hood.”

Angela Carter's re-writes of traditional European folk/fairy tales bring with them dark aspects of the human psyche that would have existed in the oral tradition, but which became sanitised when written down in the 18th / 19th centuries as parables of instruction for children.

Angela Carter said of the “Bloody Chamber” collection. "My intention was not to do 'versions' or, as the American edition of the book said, horribly, 'adult' fairy tales, but to extract the latent content from the traditional stories and to use it as the beginnings of new stories."

Helen Simpson, writing in The Guardian 24th June 2006

“Angela Carter knew from the start that she was drawn to "Gothic tales, cruel tales, tales of wonder, tales of terror, fabulous narratives that deal directly with the imagery of the unconscious". She drew a sharp distinction between what she described as "those fragments of epiphanic experience which are the type of the 20th-century story", and the "ornate, unnatural" style and symbolism of her favoured form, the tale. When, in her second collection, “The Bloody Chamber“, she continued in this Gothic mode but with narratives suggested by traditional west European fairy tales, she found she had conjured up an exotic new hybrid that would carry her voice to a wider audience than it had reached before.”

The unity of the book, and the sustaining of the literary atmosphere, is created through the varied textual forms that Angela Carter chooses to chronicle. So, for her examinations here she hand-picks legends that have the strongest roots in sensuality... so we have vampirism, werewolves, feral children, and jungle beasts beguiling and defiling a succession of young women in a series of deeply emotional narrative episodes. Angela Carter has a grasp of poetic use of language and she has deft storytelling capabilities. Needless to say, the stories featured drip with a dense, erotic atmosphere that is occasionally overwhelming... though there is also a strong underlining of horror, tension and mystery; with the reader free to read between the lines and decode the various clues that Angela Carter layers within her work.

In “The Bloody Chamber” collection, Little Red Riding Hood (The Company of Wolves) is not saved by the woodcutter, but instead tames the beast by getting naked and giving vent to her awakening sexuality. Most of the stories in the collection focus on a girl on the cusp of womanhood, who steps off the path and is rewarded with the discovery of a sexuality that is not repressively phallocentric.

“The little girl burst out laughing, she knew she was nobody’s meat.”

Little Red Riding Hood doesn’t get eaten in Angela Carter’s telling of the tale, instead, the girl fucks the wolf. She rapes the wolf. After their savage fucking Angela Carter gives us an image that moves from the erotic to the pornographic in its imagery. Can pornography be beautiful? In this passage Angela Carter shows that it can.

“She will lay his fearful head on her lap and she will pick out the lice from his pelt and perhaps she will put the lice into her mouth and eat them, as he will bid her, as she would do in a savage marriage ceremony.”

In The Tiger’s Bride, Angela Carter retells the story of “Beauty and the Beast.” This is no Disney version. There isn’t a feeling of all being well, or happy ever after in this tale. But there is a sort of contentment. The heroine, in discovering the truth about the Beast, discovers the truth about herself.

This story takes us on a beautiful, shocking and often frightening journey into realms of innocence and sensuality that few literary works can equate. Angela Carter’s writing, here merges with poetry. Her words are economic, yet still she gives us vivid pictures.

“The candles dropped hot, acrid gouts of wax on my bare shoulders.”

Here she describes the trappings of luxury, the display of rich scenery in rich language.

“The Beast wears a garment of Ottoman design, a loose, dull purple gown with gold embroidery round the neck that falls from his shoulders to conceal his feet. The feet of the chair he sits in are handsomely clawed. He hides his hands in his ample sleeves.”
This is dark, musky writing. Is it bestiality? Perhaps. Or a wish fulfilment story for Furries?

The heroine describes her encounter with the Beast.

“He dragged himself closer and closer to me, until I felt the harsh velvet of his head against my hand, then a tongue, abrasive as sandpaper. ‘He will lick the skin off me!’
And each stroke of his tongue ripped off skin after successive skin, all the skins of a life in the world, and left behind a nascent patina of shining hairs. My earrings turned back to water and trickled down my shoulders; I shrugged the drops off my beautiful fur.”
In Angela Carter’s Beauty and the Beast, Beauty is transformed by Beast, not the other way round.

Helen Simpson, writing in The Guardian 24th June 2006

“The unnamed first-person heroine of The Bloody Chamber's title story appears at first to be a Justine-like sacrificial virgin in a white dress, routinely destined for immolation; however, she changes during the narrative, and finishes by escaping her inheritance - female masochism as a modus vivendi (and morendi) - after a full-scale survey of its temptations. The story is set in a castle on sea-girt Mont St Michel in fin-de-siècle France, with more than a nod to De Sade's cannibal Minski and his lake-surrounded castle with its torture chamber and captive virgins.

This story is also a version of the Bluebeard fairy tale that appeared in Charles Perrault's collection, where a new bride unlocks the forbidden room in her husband's castle to find the murdered corpses of his former wives. Perrault drew the moral that female curiosity leads to retribution, though in the France of his time, where death in childbirth was commonplace and four-fifths of the resultant widowers remarried, the bloody chamber might surely have been seen as the womb. In Angela Carter's 20th-century version, the menace is located not in the perils of childbirth, but in the darker side of hetero-sexuality, in sadomasochism and the idea of fatal passion.

Nearly all her writing is strikingly full of cultural and intertextual references, but this story is extremely so. It is an artfully constructed edifice of signs and allusions and clues. The Marquis, as he is called (suggesting, of course, the Marquis de Sade), is a parodic evil aesthete and voluptuary with his monocle and beard, his gifts of marrons glacés and hothouse flowers, and his penchant for quoting the juicier bits of Baudelaire and De Sade.

On the walls of his castle hang paintings of dead women by Moreau, Ensor and Gauguin; he listens to Wagner (specifically "Liebestod" - "love-death" - in Tristan und Isolde); he smokes Romeo y Julieta cigars "fat as a baby's arm"; his library is stocked with graphically- described sadistic pornography and his dungeon chamber with mutilated corpses and itemised instruments of torture.

In this heavily perfumed story, the Marquis' smell of spiced leather, Cuir de Russie, is referred to more than half a dozen times, reverting at the end "to the elements of flayed hide and excrement of which it was composed". Descriptions of scented lilies, "cobraheaded, funereal", smelling of "pampered flesh", appear nine times, their fat stems like "dismembered arms". The words "immolation," "impalement", "martyr" and "sacrifice" occur, motif-like, at regular intervals but, abruptly - rather too abruptly for some critics - on the last two pages of this novella-length story the heroine/victim is rescued from decapitation by the sudden arrival of her pistol-toting maman, who puts a bullet through the Marquis' head. Her fate is not immutable after all; she discovers that her future looks quite different now that she has escaped from the old story and is learning to sing a new song.


This book takes us on a beautiful, shocking and often frightening journey into realms of innocence and sensuality that few literary works can equate. Angela Carter’s talent as a storyteller and as a poet must not be under estimated. But that very talent is something of a sad reminder of just what a great talent we’ve lost. Thankfully, this book should succeed in opening our eyes to her genius, since it brilliantly demonstrates her various creative skills mirrored within each of these separate stories.

MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERY ONE!!!

MACBETH

It’s been a long time since I saw a production of William Shakespeare’s “Macbeth”. That was back sometime in the 1980’s, at the Royal Shakespeare Company, in Stratford-upon-Avon. Jonathan Pryce was Macbeth and Sinaed Cusak was his Lady. But even though it’s some 25 years since I saw the play, I hadn’t forgotten about the profound effect it had on me then, and still has now. Last night I watched the film version of Rupert Goold's production on television. If anyone missed it, you can probably watch it on BBC I Player -- but only if you live in the U.K.

So, yes Macbeth still effects me, and infects me. I turned off the T.V. last night feeling just a little grubby, as if I had been a party to something indecent, sacrilegious, obscene, as if I, like the characters had blood on my hands. Yes, there's something about the Scottish play that I find really gripping and horrible, but fascinating at the same time.

Rupert Goold's production of “Macbeth” was filmed on location at Welbeck Abbey, Nottinghamshire, and is set in an undefined and ominous country. The hauntingly atmospheric film offers a very 21st century allegory of war and the quest for power; it’s a dramatic and enthralling recreation of Shakespeare's claustrophobic and bloody tragedy.

Goold brings the action forward and the setting is a never identified central European country where things are on the verge of collapse. The production was filmed in the environs of the underground tunnels and rooms beneath Welbeck Abbey which gives the whole thing an air of intensity and unpredictability.

Patrick Stewart aka Jean Luc Godard, takes the lead role.

Adam Sweeting writes at “The Arts Desk”:


“Patrick Stewart and Kate Fleetwood, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth prepare for regicide.
Via the Chichester Festival and acclaimed runs on Broadway and in the West End, director Rupert Goold's Macbeth has made a sizzling transition to television. Set in an anarchic, war-torn Scotland and suffused with imagery of murder, torture and Stalin-style purges, it placed Patrick Stewart's thunderous central performance in a spinning black hole of evil, into which he is remorselessly sucked as the action develops.

We see Macbeth steadily torn apart by a maelstrom of ambition, conscience and destiny, the latter revealed in regular bulletins from the flesh-crawlingly sinister Three Witches. Nonetheless, even as torrents of spurting blood began to surge through the action like a Tsunami, Stewart never quite lets us lose sight of the brave and honourable qualities that once seemed to mark out Macbeth as a true leader, rather than a natural born killer.”

The play’s supernatural overtones make it particularly well suited to drawing out interiorised themes of damnation and delusion. Apart from some battle scenes and crumbly newsreel footage of Soviet armies marching through Red Square, the action is mostly located in a network of claustrophobic white-tiled bunkers and tunnels, which could have been an abattoir or a Victorian lunatic asylum. The scene is set with a maimed and bloody soldier being wheeled past on a gurney, just able to gasp out news from the battlefield, as the witches materialise as nurses in a hospital for combat casualties. However, rather than acting as angels of mercy, they briskly euthanise the wounded man and then rip out his heart for their ghastly black-magic rituals. The "hubble, bubble" scene was delivered as a mutated rap, with an electronic soundtrack and jerky, processed video.”

Eric Denby’s essay: “A Freudian Perspective on Lady Macbeth,” informs us;

“Three hundred years prior to Sigmund Freud, William Shakespeare wrote Macbeth , a tragic tale of where one’s unchecked and unadulterated desires can lead to. Lady Macbeth acts as a sophisticated Freudian id to Macbeth’s ego, taking action to reach her aims, with no understanding of the true ramifications of her immorality.

The concept of being the queen, and the immediate pleasure associated with it, turns Lady Macbeth into an uninhibited id, seeking only to achieve the crown with little care for the consequences. To accomplish this, she has to prepare herself; she needs to be strong, wilful, and manipulative, so that she can incite Macbeth into killing King Duncan. Lady Macbeth first appears in the play after receiving a letter from her husband detailing the witch's prophesies. There is little doubt in Lady Macbeth's mind that her husband will be King:

“Glamis thou art, and Cawdor, and shall be / What thought art promised” She is keenly aware of Macbeth's weaknesses, that he is;

“too full o' th' milk of human kindness”,

and though he doesn't lack the ambition, he lacks;

“the illness should attend it”.

Macbeth possesses courage, compassion, loyalty to the crown, and other traits that are not befitting a man that must take matters into his own hands. Lady Macbeth must, in essence, become the man of action. To do so she calls upon evil spirits to aid her:

“Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty.”

It is absolutely essential for her to be barren of female qualities – no compassion, no kindness, and no pity. She needs to attain a level of intense cruelty, eliminating all traces of womanhood, especially since Macbeth has some of those traits already.”


Kate Fleetwood plays Lady Macbeth with a psychopathic intensity. Without her Macbeth’s actions would have remained as an unfulfilled dream. She is the motivating force behind the tragic drama. It is through her that the seed germinates into a monster.

Macbeth contains some of Shakespeare’s most vivid female characters. Lady Macbeth and the three witches are extremely wicked, but they are also stronger and more imposing than the men around them. It is the sinister witches that cast the mood for the entire play.

Shakespeare has the witches speak in language of contradiction. Their famous line;

“Fair is foul, and foul is fair,” is a prominent example, but there are many others, such as their characterization of Banquo as;

“lesser than Macbeth, and greater”.

Such speech adds to the play’s sense of moral confusion by implying that nothing is quite what it seems. Interestingly, Macbeth’s first line in the play is;

“So foul and fair a day I have not seen”. This line echoes the witches’ words and establishes a connection between them and Macbeth. It also suggests that Macbeth is the focus of the drama’s moral confusion.

Adam Sweeting again;

“This production has suggestions of Hitler in his bunker, surrounded by trembling sycophants. But it is in his heart-of-darkness relationship with Lady Macbeth (Kate Fleetwood), her raven-black hair and harshly lit facial features these are elemental signs which emphasise her implacable willpower and ambition on Macbeth's behalf. However, while it is her tragedy to be devoured by the guilt which drives her to suicide, Macbeth finally appears liberated by the chance to revert to his warrior self and fight to the death.

Duncan is given the first word in this television version acclaimed production of Macbeth, not – as is more conventional – the witches.

We are given martial music, archive footage of Katyusha rockets and T-34 tanks, a close up of a clutching hand and then;

"What bloody man is that?"

as the king advances down the corridor of a chaotic front-line clearing station towards the stretchered figure of the Sergeant, that helpfully, garrulous casualty who brings us up to date with Macbeth's valour. And, if, on seeing this production of Shakespeare’s play you grumble at this point about Goold's peremptory excision of the supernatural in favour of applied historical concept, you probably won’t be grumbling for long.”

PONY PLAY

It’s a strange little fetish. At least I find it so. When I first heard about it, I giggled. How could dressing up as a pony be erotic? Yet for the men and women involved, it is all consuming; a raison d’etre. And to the uninitiated I think that all fetishes are strange when they are confronted with what turns some folk on.

From Wiki.


“Animal role-play may be either a non-sexual or an erotic sexual role-play (when it may also be called pet-play, pony-play, ponyism, kitten-play, or pup-play). In its erotic sexual role-play form, one or more of the participants takes on the role of a real or imaginary animal in character, including appropriate mannerisms and behaviour, and sometimes a partner will act as another animal, or, in a sexual context, may take the role of rider, trainer, or caretaker (or even breeding partner).

The principal theme of animal role-play is usually the voluntary transformation of a human being to animal status, and focus on the altered mind-space created. The most common examples are probably canids (pup, dog, wolf), felines (cat, kitten, lion) or equines (pony, horse). Animal role-play is also used in a BDSM context, where a person may be humiliated by being treated as an animal.




The origins of animal role-play and pet-play are probably various and diverse, again depending upon the participants involved. However, its origins are certainly influenced by costuming, fiction, myth and legend, role-play and psychodrama in their various aspects. The first commercial manifestation of this fetish was created by Simon Benson the founder of the Petgirls.com website.





Like much of erotic play and role-play, animal role-play in an erotic or relational context is entirely defined by the people involved and by their mood and interests at the time of play. It ranges from the simple imitation of a vocal whinnying of a horse to the barking, panting or playful nudging of a puppy, or playful behaviour of a kitten, to crawling around on all fours and being fed, or petted, by hand. (In the latter instance, its motives may be similar to those of age play, i.e. taking on a role that one feels spiritually appropriate or which allows for nurturing, and a change from usual roles in everyday life). To the greater extremes of dressing up as a pony in modified horse tack, masks, prosthetics and temporary bondage based body modification (such as binding the forearms to the upper arms and/or the calves to the thighs).




Public participation in human animal role-play is varied. A couple could inconspicuously role-play a silly but loving pet play scene in public, but it would look like one partner is merely stroking the other's neck innocently to the casual observer. In the case of many convention-going furries and some BDSM fetishists, one partner may wear a dog collar with a leash attached.


The reasons for playing such a character or animal can vary as much as the actual physical manifestations and intensity of the play. Some people enjoy being able to "cut loose" into a different, or more dynamic personality (e.g., Were-creatures or Catgirls; see other variations). In some cases, pet play is seen as a loving, quiet cuddling time where there is no need for verbalizations and the simple act of stroking, rubbing and holding the other partner is satisfying or reassuring in and of itself for those involved. For others, there may be a spiritual side to it. Some feel closer to their animal totem, while others may identify with something akin to a deeper side or part of their own psyche (see: Therianthropy). For still others, there is the experience of power exchange set up in a context or structure which they can accept. Clearly, again, it depends on the people involved and what they bring to it or take from it.


Pony-play is sometimes referred to as "The Aristotelian Perversion," in reference to legend that Aristotle had a penchant for being ridden like a horse. Ponies (people involved in pony-play) generally divide themselves to three groups although some will participate in two or perhaps all three:


Cart ponies: ponies who pull a sulky with their owner.

Riding ponies: ponies who are ridden, either on all fours or on two legs, with the "rider" on the shoulders of the "pony" (also known as Shoulder riding). Note that a human back is generally not strong enough to take the weight of another adult without risk of injury, so four-legged "riding" is generally symbolic, with the "rider" taking most of their weight on their own legs.

Show ponies: ponies who show off their dressage skills and often wear elaborate harnesses, plumes and so on.


It should be pointed out that each type of play can focus on a certain "strength" of an animal character. Pony play often involves the practice and training that a horse owner or trainer would put their horse through to learn how to walk, canter, etc., as modified for human limbs. Puppy play often can involve BDSM related discipline. Cow Play often involves fantasies of lactation and impregnation. The usual limits of safe, sane and consensual apply to role-play as much as any other activity between humans who accept and respect their partner's interests and limits. For most, this does not include bestiality.


One group, the LA Ponies and Critters Club, takes the community idea of BDSM animal role-play further by staging a mock foxhunt in local forested areas. These events bring together pony-players, puppy-players and their respective humans for a cooperative, community bonding activity. One of the canine players volunteers to be the “fox” and marks a trail in the forest. The other puppy-players form the pack of “hounds” that search out the fox and bark/howl to bring the pony-players and their “riders” to capture the “fox”.”

From Pony play 101.

“Trigger, The Human Equine is an interesting character. His dream is to live 24/7/365 as a horse and it looks as though that dream is coming true. To each his own. I do enjoy being human most of the time. It makes those trips into pony head space so much more special for me. Nothing is more boring to me than being hitched to a post and left to wait while my trainer is working with another pony. I don't resent it and I'm not jealous of the attention at all, it's just not very entertaining unless someone is grooming me, petting me, feeding me a treat or otherwise giving me something to focus on. I'm most likely to misbehave when I'm bored. Ponies are high-maintenance creatures! I can't imagine living 24/7 as a pony, but that's me.

Check out Equus Eroticus for further information and events.

I shall be cross posting this to Frequently Felt

BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ!!!! OOOOOOOOH!!

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopaedia.






Female hysteria was a once-common medical diagnosis, made exclusively in women, which is today no longer recognized by modern medical authorities as a medical disorder. Its diagnosis and treatment were routine for many hundreds of years in Western Europe. Hysteria was widely discussed in the medical literature of the Victorian era. Women considered to be suffering from it exhibited a wide array of symptoms including faintness, nervousness, insomnia, fluid retention, heaviness in abdomen, muscle spasm, shortness of breath, irritability, loss of appetite for food or sex, and "a tendency to cause trouble".
Since ancient times women considered to be suffering from hysteria would sometimes undergo "pelvic massage" — manual stimulation of the genitals by the doctor until the patient experienced "hysterical paroxysm" (orgasm).






Water massages as a treatment for hysteria c. 1860.


The history of the notion of hysteria can be traced to ancient times; in ancient Greece it was described in the gynaecological treatises of the Hippocratic corpus, which date from the 5th and 4th centuries BCE. Plato's dialogue Timaeus tells of the uterus wandering throughout a woman’s body, strangling the victim as it reaches the chest and causing disease. This theory is the source of the name, which stems from the Greek cognate of uterus, hysteria (ὑστέρα).

It was thought to be caused by sexual deprivation in particularly passionate women: hysteria was noted quite often in virgins, nuns, widows and, occasionally, married women. The prescription in medieval and renaissance medicine was intercourse if married, marriage if single, or vaginal massage (pelvic massage) by a midwife as a last recourse.






Advertisement from 1910.



A physician in 1859 claimed that a quarter of all women suffered from hysteria. One physician catalogued 75 pages of possible symptoms of hysteria and called the list incomplete; almost any ailment could fit the diagnosis. Physicians thought that the stresses associated with modern life caused civilized women to be both more susceptible to nervous disorders and to develop faulty reproductive tracts. In America, such disorders in women reaffirmed that the United States was on par with Europe; one American physician expressed pleasure that the country was ”catching up” to Europe in the prevalence of hysteria.



Rachel P. Maines has observed that such cases were quite profitable for physicians, since the patients were at no risk of death, but needed constant treatment. The only problem was that physicians did not enjoy the tedious task of vaginal massage (generally referred to as 'pelvic massage'): The technique was difficult for a physician to master and could take hours to achieve "hysterical paroxysm." Referral to midwives, which had been common practice, meant a loss of business for the physician.






A 1918 Sears, Roebuck and Co. ad with several models of vibrators.


A solution was the invention of massage devices, which shortened treatment from hours to minutes, removing the need for midwives and increasing a physician’s treatment capacity. Already at the turn of the century, hydrotherapy devices were available at Bath, and by the mid-19th century, they were popular at many high-profile bathing resorts across Europe and in America. By 1870, a clockwork-driven vibrator was available for physicians. In 1873, the first electromechanical vibrator was used at an asylum in France for the treatment of hysteria.

While physicians of the period acknowledged that the disorder stemmed from sexual dissatisfaction, they seemed unaware of or unwilling to admit the sexual purposes of the devices used to treat it. In fact, the introduction of the speculum was far more controversial than that of the vibrator.

By the turn of the century, the spread of home electricity brought the vibrator to the consumer market. The appeal of cheaper treatment in the privacy of one’s own home understandably made the vibrator a popular early home appliance. In fact, the electric home vibrator was on the market before many other home appliance ’essentials’: nine years before the electric vacuum cleaner and 10 years before the electric iron. A page from a Sears catalog of home electrical appliances from 1918 includes a portable vibrator with attachments, billed as ”Very useful and satisfactory for home service.”
Other cures for female hysteria included bed rest, bland food, seclusion, refraining from mentally taxing tasks (for example, reading) and sensory deprivation.

Over the course of the early 20th century, the number of diagnoses of female hysteria sharply declined, and today it is no longer a recognized illness. Many reasons are behind its decline: many medical authors claim that the decline is due to laypeople gaining a greater understanding of the psychology behind conversion disorders such as hysteria, and it therefore no longer gets the desired response from society.

Thanks to Jan Vander Laenen for telling me about the uterus/hysteria connection.

I shall be posting this on Frequently Felt.