This only applies to those who use the LiveJournal Friends Page system to keep up with this diary.

I’ve just realised that the syndicated Atom feed includes all the diary entry’s text in one’s LJ Friends page, not just an excerpt and link like its RSS counterpart.

So if you’d like to follow this diary on your LJ Friends page with fuller entries, click here to add “dickon_atom” as a Friend. And make sure you de-Friend “dickon_rss”.

If, however, you’re worried about me posting long entries that rudely dominate your Friends Page (the next entry is full of DVD vidcaps), stick with the RSS feed, which acts as a kind of ‘cut tag’.

Sunday: to Rooz in Old Street for the first Fosca rehearsal of 2006. Kate plays my guitar on the bouncy “It Only Matters To Those To Whom It Matters”. So I can, well, bounce around the stage with just the microphone.

We also start work on “We See The World As Our Stunt Doubles”, “Come Down From The Cross, Someone Else Needs The Wood”, and new versions of “Confused And Proud” and Kate’s song “Evening Dress At 3PM”.

I dust off my sky-blue Cocteau Twins-esque chorus pedal, in the new Fosca spirit of attempting something dreamy but wordy. Rachel says we still sound like Orange Juice, though.

I like to think my vocals on “Cross” are quite Dean Wareham-y circa Galaxie 500’s ‘Strange’. That means nothing to many, everything to me. Mr Wareham’s voice on that song is a kind of existential boyish squawk, breaking up – cracking up – as it battles with a melody that’s clearly too high for him. I far prefer it to his later, lower & safer vocal performances. I remember how upset I was when the first Luna album came out (Luna being the band he fronted after Galaxie 500). He’d started singing within his range; perfectly in tune, but less exciting to my ears. I prefer the Icarus hysteria of his early singing style. It just has to sound confident enough, that’s the trick. Deliberate rather than a sheepish mistake. Like Mr Samuel Beckett said, ‘fail better’.

The hands that build Fosca:

Tom Edwards:

Kate Dornan:

Saturday is a traditional day for protest marches in London. I’ve been sitting here at my PC for some hours, shielded from the Highgate rain, engaged in a quiet sit-down protest of my own.

The Internet photo-hosting company Flickr recently deleted author Dennis Cooper’s account. They did so in such a coldly destructive and blanket manner that I feel a small boycott is in order on my own part. I have a paid Flickr account myself, so I’ve been carefully removing every single image in my account and re-hosting them elsewhere. It’s taken a while to sort through my old diary entries and change the image links, but I’ve done it all now. No more Flickr-hosted photos in my diary from now on, not if I can help it.

It’s a shame, as the service is otherwise very handy and user-friendly, which is why I happily bought a year’s paid account. Suffice it to say that I won’t be renewing the subscription. It’s like a stationer selling you a scrapbook, then suddenly taking it back after eight months of regular use and tearing up all the pages, purely because they didn’t like what you put in it.

I’ve stopped at deleting my own Flickr account altogether just in case I require it at some point. It’s like rebelling against Rupert Murdoch’s control of things: you’d be silly to boycott watching The Simpsons if you enjoyed it, just because it’s an essential part of the Murdoch empire. I try to use independent bookshops over Waterstones, Amazon and Borders, but it’s hard to ignore a franchise’s 50% discount of an indie bookshop price when you’re living on a limited income. You do what you can according to your own conscience and needs. Living entirely on principles is often a luxury lifestyle choice for those that can afford it.

A little backstory for the uninitiated. Dennis Cooper is an internationally renowned cult author of some decades’ standing. His novels (Closer, Frisk, Try, etc) are often visceral, explicit and darkly funny punk-rock tales of beautiful boys engaged in all kinds of masochistic sex-and-murder situations. Often the stories venture into impossible and surreal dream-like scenarios, continuing in the tradition of De Sade, Octave Mirabeau, William Burroughs, and so on.

His online blog is quite unique: stimulating, intriguing, personal, sometimes shocking, often inspirational. It tends to be illustrated with images of his selection. His readers are curious to know what goes on in his mind and what inspires him, so he obliges us. Some blog illustrations are found images, some are DVD vidcaps, some are from his own camera. At times he uses images which are what the Internet tellingly terms ‘Not Safe For Work’. (Who is this Mr Work person, and why must we care what he thinks, anyway?). It’s the use of others’ images rather than what they depict that is the Flickr reason for deleting Mr Cooper’s entire account, it seems.

In blogs, the use of images which technically belong to others is something that is generally not jumped upon, due to the free-for-all nature of the Web. Everyone does it, usually in the spirit of what magazines call ‘review purposes’. If the copyright holder minds, they should contact the blog author, not the host. The image is not the point – it’s the selection and juxtaposition that matters. Like DJ-ing or making a compilation CD to show the world who you are yourself, or the way you’re feeling, or discussing what interests you. DJs in small clubs don’t tend to pay PRS royalties to the artists whose work they’re spinning, but proper radio DJs do. Likewise Internet blogs versus published books. It’s all quoting and pointing, to make a point.

To put images into their online blog, many people use a third party image-hosting service like Flickr, because it’s terribly easy to use and organize. It now transpires that Flickr take their guidelines for content seriously enough to abruptly terminate Mr Cooper’s entire account without question. It’s so much not their stringent rules that offend me, but the thoughtless manner with which they applied them in this case, deleting everything regardless, including his own personally-taken photos. As the images had become an integral part of Mr Cooper’s blog, it’s difficult not to equate this act with at best nannyish ignorance, at worse vandalisation and book-burning.

Mr Cooper in his blog:
“I tried to reason with Flickr, saying they were destroying eight months of my blog, and that I would delete any offending images if they would just restore my account. But they refused. Honestly, I’m crushed by this. I started this blog casually, but it’s been my central artistic work for months, and now it’s all empty, a ghost, ruins. I’m pretty devastated by it. Silly as it may be, I’ve put a lot of time and energy and ideas into this blog, and to have all those months of work ruined is hard, very hard.”

Mr Cooper’s status as an internationally award-winning novelist, poet and cultural critic means nothing to Flickr. Thankfully, Flickr is not the world. DC DOES mean something to his many readers, students and admirers. The happy ending to this sorry incident is that many DC fans have been clever and kind enough to help restore his blog by pooling their own computer skills and resources.

To my friends out there who use Flickr I say: take heed.

Postscript: I learn later that today’s march in central London was for free speech; calling for freedom, tolerance and that particular quality lacking in Flickr on this occasion: reason.

At an arty event in a Kings Cross sex shop basement the other day, I noticed someone was handing round flyers for a one-off club night that plays Talulah Gosh, McCarthy and 1000 Violins.

BIG PINK CAKE: “A celebration of C86 with its befores and afters.”
Saturday April 8th, 8pm to 1am.
Free entry.
Venue: The Royal George, Goslett Yard, off Charing Cross Rd. Tottenham Ct Rd tube.

I receive an email from the Tate Gallery shop people. They’ve seen my earlier diary entry moaning about the lack of available postcards relating to the Gothic Nightmares show, and are happy to inform me that Fuseli’s Nightmare is now back in stock in postcard form. They even offer to send me a free card in the post, which is terribly kind.

Also, they point out that people can order ‘custom ‘prints’ of Tate Collection works that aren’t available as postcards, like the Blake ‘Satan’ I was keen on. Only thing is, prices start at £28.

It’s great when you get an email out of the blue like this from someone stumbling upon your diary.

According to the website statistics, this diary now receives 111,000 ‘hits’ a month, which boils down to 12,000 ‘visits’.

I finally go to see the film Brokeback Mountain and fail to understand what the fuss is about. I’ve read the Annie Proulx short story: unusually, you can read the story in less time than it takes to sit through the movie adaptation. Perhaps it’s because I already know the story, or perhaps it’s because it’s more about denial and frustration than love, but I leave the cinema unmoved to tears save for one moment: and that was the trailer for ‘March Of The Penguins’.

‘Brokeback’ starts brilliantly: the sexual tension between the two male leads in the first half-hour is truly astounding and genuinely sensual. After that, it becomes a slow, scenically attractive study of macho Mr Ledger’s failure to accept his feelings. He channels his frustration into manly violence and mumbling (I could have done with subtitles), while doe-eyed Mr Gyllenhaal flutters his long eyelashes at Mexican rent boys by way of compensation for Mr Ledger’s lack of commitment.

Mr G is more accepting of his nature: he knows the two men are meant to be together, but Mr L insists this is impossible. It doesn’t help that the latter is haunted by a childhood trauma, where he was shown the grisly results of a local queerbashing. He mumbles ‘If you can’t fix it, you’ve got to stand it’, which is also the last line in the Proulx story.

The movie starts out impressively as a celebration of the effect of Mother Nature (you come out whistling the scenery) upon Human Nature, suggesting that gayness is utterly natural and instinctive: literally as old as the hills. Those ‘purple-headed mountains’ in the hymn All Things Bright And Beautiful rather spring to mind. Less inneundo-minded, the implicitly Sappho-erotic ‘Picnic At Hanging Rock’ could also be compared. Ancient, magnificent, mysterious landscapes tampering with the emotional world of humans.

But then it becomes a rather depressing and old-fashioned tale about the need to deny such feelings once set in motion. It’s about homophobia, both internalized and institutionalised. It even has a very obvious metaphor for ‘closeted’ at the end. And yet, it’s been presented to the world as nothing to do with gayness per se. This is what really annoys me.

I appreciate that the producers have toned down the actual depiction of homosexuality in order to get as many people to see it as possible. I’m reminded of Quentin Crisp lamenting that The Naked Civil Servant had to be a TV movie, because a cinema release would have only been seen, as he puts it, ‘purely by gay men and liberals wishing to be seen going into and coming out of the cinema.’ For Brokeback, I would add to that list fans of male beauty and women fascinated with gay men (as long as they’re attractive): I noted most of my fellow cinemagoers were female.

To this end, Brokeback Mountain wants to have its gay protest cake and eat it. The boy-on-boy action and male nudity is kept to a curiously prudish minimum. The director, Mr Lee, seems more interested in showing us the breasts of the protagonists’ wives than the men’s own nether regions. Why?

All in all, it’s lovely to look at, and a pretty good adaptation of the original story… but one which isn’t all that original. Worryingly, I’m most reminded of the groundbreaking 1960 UK film “Victim” in which Dirk Bogarde plays a barrister blackmailed into revealing his love for a rent boy. It’s not a great film because it’s too aware that it’s trying to Do Good in its call for toleration. Likewise with Brokeback Mountain: at face value it’s smothered by its own message. But even this is smothered in turn by the presentation, distribution and promotional spin telling critics and moviegoers how to interpret the film. Don’t you dare call it a gay cowboy movie, they instruct, it’s more about love, pure and simple. Well, that’s at best missing the point, at worst a promotion of ignorance and negative connotations with homosexuality.

So you either adore Brokeback Mountain as a pretty romance, meaning you’re not paying too much attention. Or you realise what it’s actually about, and are then left feeling it’s a quaint period piece in the old-fashioned ‘gayness can come to no good’ ilk.

It’s certainly not a patch on Mr Lee’s other movies like the excellent ‘The Ice Storm’. Still, it IS much better than his previous opus, ‘Hulk’. Another movie with not enough gay sex in for my liking. And why did The Hulk’s trousers never rip off along with the rest of his clothes? Oh, I’ve stopped being serious now, haven’t I. Actually, did you know the reason for the 70s ‘Incredible Hulk’ TV series altering Bruce Banner’s name (as it was in the comic) to David Banner? Because the name ‘Bruce’ was thought to be… too gay. It all links, you know.

Anyone who calls Brokeback Mountain a ‘universal love story’ is in denial. About a movie about denial.

Monday: more Fosca recording with Tom. Song titles: “It Only Matters To Those To Whom It Matters”, and “Come Down From The Cross, Someone Else Needs The Wood”.

Tuesday: To see ‘Capote’ with Ms Shanthi. Difficult to come out of the cinema without speaking in Mr Hoffman’s cartoonish Capote voice; though if anything, Capote was more cartoonish in real life. Thought-provoking stuff about the writer as amoral magpie, secretly wanting their subject to die so they can get on with the immortalising in print. Biographers and their love-hate relationship with their subject. Gielgud told his official biographer to wait until his death before publishing. Of course, he then lived way into his 90s, outliving his peers (Olivier, Ralph Richardson) by some time. He was 94 when he played The Pope in Cate Blanchett’s ‘Elizabeth’. Just as well the biographer hadn’t died before him.

It’s hinted in the movie that Capote had a kind of platonic love for the convicted murderer he was writing about, and then just like Wilde’s “each man kills the thing he loves”, once he’d got the confession he wanted, he cut off contact. He wanted the young man to hurry up and be executed so his already publicly acclaimed book (In Cold Blood – excerpts had already been published) can be finished. We see him at a luxurious NYC bar, whining that the wait for his subjects to be hanged is ‘torture’.

We browse in Borders Books afterwards, and I note there’s a current non-fiction bestseller called ‘Stuart: A Life Backwards’, about the life of a homeless beggar. I bet the subject has died, I muse, and flick through the text to find out. Yes, yes he has.

Good, I say inwardly, it makes the book better. And now I feel the amoral magpie guilt myself.

Saturday night, and I’m meant to be seeing John Howard play at the Tavistock Hotel. Instead I get carried away drinking with lesbian friends in Soho and have to miss his set. Kirsten, Louise, Luke and myself start off at The Star Bar on Great Chapel Street, a very nice little candlelit cocktail bar with lots of old-fashioned metal ad signs on wooden panelling. It’s advertised as ‘mixed’ but is more for couples – female couples.

We then remove to the Candy Bar, the best known lesbian bar in London, mainly to show me what it’s like these days. I was last there circa 1999, when Debbie Smith was DJ-ing a night in the basement. Since then the place has had a complete refit, with a little entry hall where there’s a door charge (£6), and a relaxed upstairs seating area. A vodka and tonic is £5.50. The cliche was once that lesbians have a lot less money than gay men, and I used to think that the Candy Bar was for this reason an unpretentious and reasonably priced place to drink with Sapphic chums. That cliche can’t apply here anymore; I suppose it’s a kind of equality. It’s now just expensive to drink in Soho full stop.

Other changes: there’s a lesbian pole dancer in the basement area, but we don’t see her because it would require joining a huge queue on the stairs which runs all the way up to the first floor.

I think this wouldn’t happen with men, of either persuasion. They might want to see someone taking off their clothes to music, but I think they’d draw the line at being seen queuing up for ages for the privilege, especially after having already gained admission to the building. If you disagree, Dear Reader, do write in.

DE: Why are you queuing up just to see a pole dancer?
Girl in queue: Because it’s a pole dancer!

The other main shift since my last visit is what currently passes for the Lesbian Look here. Most of the Candy Bar customers are young women in trainers, blue jeans, studded belts, black halter tops, and long Alanis Morrisette-ish tousled hair. The short-haired, check-shirted butch androgynous look is very much in the minority. These girls aren’t ‘lipstick lesbians’ either, or even tomboyish; more like any jean-wearing girls you get in a straight club. Except they’re snogging each other. Actually, you get a lot of THAT in straight clubs too. I know it’s something I’m ranting on about a lot lately, but I do think it’s different for girls.

Girls are “bi-curious” – the connotations are empowering.

Boys are never bi-curious or even bisexual. They’re “confused” – the connotations are emasculating. Only boys sue the newspapers when they’re called gay.

Still, prices aside, the Candy Bar is perfectly friendly and a nice place to go. But next time I really must revisit the boys’ side of the Soho gay scene. Once I’ve taken out a loan.

My computer is playing up and keeps freezing (I think the technical term is ‘hanging’) so I have to turn it off and turn it on again to fix it. This is happening more frequently lately, often when playing music on iTunes or importing songs from CDs. Particularly annoying when I’ve written about 500 words in an unsaved diary entry.

Friday – to the Boogaloo for St Patrick’s Day. There’s one of those tacky spongy Guinness top hats in attendance. It’s fair to suspect anyone who wears such a thing is an absolute idiot, and probably about as Irish as me, ie not at all. See also jester hats or Santa hats at Christmas. People who think they’re terribly funny rather than tiresome. All the actual Irish people I know instead plump for a piece of real shamrock in their suit lapel. Some non-regular in the Boogaloo stares at my appearance as I walk past, and says to their friends, “Is he taking the piss?” No, I say inwardly, that would be the ones in spongy corporate top hats made for idiots.

The special guest artist playing tonight is Barry McGuigan, the famous Irish boxer. Who it turns out actually has a rather good singing voice. Though if he didn’t, who would dare tell him? So I watch him sing various well-known numbers by Squeeze, U2, Van Morrison, Beatles and the theme from ‘Footloose’. Some wag shouts out for ‘Eye Of The Tiger’. I bet Mr McGuigan’s heard that one before. I’d personally like to hear him do ‘So You Wanna Be A Boxer’ from Bugsy Malone.

I take a first drag on my cigarette holder (my smoking is still on-off, sad to report, but I welcome the public spaces ban that starts next year). I realise to my disgust that the crystal filter is used up. The taste of stale tar residue in the mouth is revolting beyond belief, and I have to go somewhere quickly to spit. Of course, as I rush into the men’s toilets, someone says hello. It’s Mark Beaumont, the NME journalist.

MB: Hi, how are you?
DE: (spits heavily into urinal)
MB: Oh, I get that a lot.

I return to the main pub room and am pleased to find an empty sofa seat. Then I realise why it’s vacated: the girl sitting next to me is being sick on the floor.

Troop off later to Nambucca for the club How Does It Feel, which has moved from the West End to Holloway Road. The place is absolutely packed. There are one or two of those dreaded spongy top hats in sight, but then this is the heart of Irish North London. I use the toilet there too, and some loutish London boy bursts in to announce, ‘Are we all having a good St Patrick’s night, yeah? I’ve got an Irish cousin myself, yeah? Let’s all get pissed!’

Some woman arriving on the door (as I’m chatting to the staff) also announces she is a 64-th part Irish or whatever, as if she’s hoping for a discount. Still, Ian Watson reports that he only gets one record request from someone who’s unaware that it’s the HDIF club night. He plays the Trashcan Sinatras’ ‘Obscurity Knocks’, an all-too-self-aware song title if ever there was one. It’s a very witty jangly guitar pop song from about 1988, and I suddenly remember they’re an Irish group. If you’re going to bang on about Irishness for one night only, a Trashcan Sinatras button badge would be far more cool than a ridiculous spongy top hat. He also plays some terrific songs by Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, The Hidden Cameras and the 60s Brazilian pop group Os Mutantes.

I say hello to David Barnett (now of Morrissey approved band The Boyfriends) and Rachel Stevenson and am bought one drink by a kind Morrissey fan who enjoyed what I wrote the other day about that Smiths book. We talk about how great ‘Ringleader Of The Tormentors’ is. My favourite song on the album is definitely ‘In The Future When All’s Well’.

Am later bought a second drink by a girl on the bar staff, because she says my hair reminds her of her absent boyfriend. Not me, just my hair. I sometimes wonder if I should just send out my hair to social occasions. It’s in danger of getting a solo career.

Walking back up the Holloway Road circa 2am, I step over a spattering of fresh blood on the pavement.

(Footnote: I’m later told that the Trashcan Sinatras are in fact Scottish, and not Irish. They hail from Glasgow.)

I now feel the urge to quote the lyrics to Dory Previn’s ‘Yada Yada La Scala’. She really is one of the lyric-writing greats in rock and pop: up there with Mr Cohen and Mr Morrissey in my book. Her best known song is ‘The Lady With The Braid’, which is included on Jarvis Cocker’s new DJ album, ‘The Trip’. But I feel ‘Yada Yada…’ works even better in a club, with its tragicomic-vaudeville oompah arrangement.

let’s stop talking talking talking, wasting precious time
just a lot of empty noise that isn’t worth a dime
words of wonder, words of whether
should we shouldn’t we be together
yada yada yada yada yada
let’s stop talking talking talking, taking up our lives
saying things that don’t make sense, hoping help arrives
curse my questions, damn your qualms
tomorrow they could be dropping bombs
and we go yada yada yada yada yada
so we sit at a restaurant table
discussing reasons we’re unable to commit. that’s not it
all i want is to please and enjoy you
what makes you think i’ll be out to destroy you
if you commit. that’s not it.
is it something you sense underneath my defenses that makes me a threat?
that’s not it. and yet… suppose that’s it?
i don’t want to think about that now
let’s stop talking talking talking, every lame excuse
justifying alibying listen what’s the use
the sparrow chirps, the chipmunk chatters
and we go on as mad as a hatter
and nothing at all gets said
talk to me please… in bed. where it matters.
talk to me please, in bed. where it matters.