I don’t think we’re quite ready for a revolution yet, but maybe one day and for now we have Tracy:-

He said I want to live as an honest man

To get all I deserve and to give all I can

And to love a young woman who I don’t understand

Your Highness, your ways are very strange.

(And my sincere apologies to anyone who read the post’s title and thought they’d get a Pat Benatar video – maybe some other time.)

This was published somewhere, but I can’t remember the gory details and aren’t fussed enough to get up and check my records.

Enjoy.

LOVE, AND WHAT IT MEANS

            Amanda cried after they slept together for the first time. She didn’t mean to but she couldn’t prevent herself, the emotion was so overpowering, and he held her tight, on his face a look of such concern.

            ‘What is it? What’s the matter?’

            She shook her head, wiped her eyes with the back of a hand.

            ‘After all I went through with Geoff I thought I’d never enjoy making love again.’

            ‘What…?’ He stopped, unwilling to ask about things that had happened in her marriage, territory she had always made clear to him was strictly off limits, but the question hovered there in the room like a dark cloud. She saw that he needed to know and if she didn’t speak now it would always lie between them. Better then to get everything out in the open and exorcise its hold over her.

            And so she told him all about the whips and the handcuffs and the knotted silk scarves, about the golden showers and the anal sex and the beatings, all the things that had been done to her and left an imprint on her mind, scars that would take years to heal.

            He listened patiently, incredulity and disgust on his face, but when she had done Amanda looked into his eyes and saw there a sick fascination that was new and yet, somehow, familiar.

            ‘How could you let him treat you like that?’ he asked, unable to keep the note of condemnation out of his voice.

            ‘I loved him,’ she said, and knew that he wouldn’t understand.

            He touched his lips to her forehead, the most tender of kisses, but he would not meet her eyes and there was a catch in his voice when finally, as she had known that he would, he asked her, ‘Do you love me?’

This is Bethnal:-

ITEM: I’m gutted. Last week I found out that the women in Ben Dover’s films are not actually bona fide members of the general public, but actresses. (For those not in the know, Ben Dover is a porn star who goes out with a video camera and asks complete strangers to have sex with him.) So, it appears that creepy middle-aged men are not irresistible to members of the opposite sex after all. Who’d have thought it? As I said, I’m gutted – it was something I was kind of depending on. Oh man, this is almost as bad as when my mum told me there was no Santa Claus. It was the absolute low point of the eighties for me.

ITEM: It’s only been a week, and I’m fed up with the cold weather already. The osteo-arthritis in my thumb is playing up and I’m shivering as I leave the heating off as much as I can in an attempt to keep the fuel bills down. In people over fifty, liking winter weather is either the first sign of senile dementia or means that you have an executive position on the board of a power company. Will all those people who keep blathering on about how scenic it all looks kindly take a hike, preferably to the North Pole.

ITEM: I had a very strange dream. I was lying in bed, and Spider-Man was stuck to the ceiling up in the far corner of my room. He dropped down and grabbed hold of my foot and tried to pull me out of bed, but gave up when I kicked out. Then he removed his mask (he looked just like the actor Tobey Maguire) and pulled my fawn polo neck over his head. That was when I woke up.

It reminded me of a Spider-Man story I read years and years ago, and which really choked me up at the time. He was in this boy’s bedroom and chatting to the little fellow, and the boy asks if he can see his face so Spider-Man takes his mask off and tells him his real name, and inside you’re screaming, ‘Spidey, don’t do it! You’re putting the kid’s life in danger!’. Then the last panel of the story shows Spidey webswinging away from a white building, and there’s a sign saying Cancer Ward, or something like that.

So, either my subconscious is telling me that I’m seriously ill, or sending a subliminal message that it’s past time for me to wipe those cobwebs off the ceiling in my bedroom. I think I’ll go with option two.

I also had a dream in which I was nekkid and doing sex stuff with a woman I hadn’t seen in over seventeen years and never particularly fancied even back then. I discussed this with Miss P, and we both agreed that you never seem to have sexy dreams that involve people you fancy. Now why is that I wonder. I’m sure the psychologists have an explanation for it.

ITEM: Strange things continue to arrive in my Inbox. Last week Google alerted me to the existence of a Peter Tennant who ‘has been a dairy farmer all his life with a passion for Clydesdale horses.’ Apparently he’s ‘still game’, whatever that means. The Internet – it’s like the multiverse, but with free porn and funny cat pictures. If I get a Clydesdale horse will this other Peter Tennant cease to exist?

And only yesterday a spammer offered to add three to four inches to my penis. Like I don’t trip over enough already.

ITEM: This morning I entered a contest to win a romantic night away for two in a luxury hotel. Part of the prize was a complimentary £100 wine voucher, to go with the free meal. In pondering which of my female friends to invite to accompany me should I be fortunate enough to win I almost immediately zeroed in on the only one who doesn’t drink. Make what you wish of my motives…

The Imaginary Girlfriend would be no good at all – she drinks like it’s going out of fashion.

Oh, and here be spoilers. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

House on Haunted Hill (1959)

Vinnie plays millionaire Frederick Loren and along with his wife Annabelle throws a party at the allegedly haunted house of the title, inviting an assortment of oddball guests (a test pilot, a gossip columnist, a secretary, a psychiatrist) to spend the night there for the sum of $10k each. The guests arrive at the house in funeral cars, and as the servants depart it is locked up tight, becoming a prison in all but name. Soon after the ‘supernatural’ events begin, with one young woman driven close to madness and Mrs Loren apparently killing herself. Of course appearances are deceptive and something else entirely is going on. Vinnie has matinee idol good looks here, and there’s some delicious dialogue between him and his termagant wife, as they play a game of cat and mouse with each other. But, while the concept is intriguing, with its echoes of “The Haunting of Hill House”, this is a film where you really have to not just suspend disbelief but tear the definition out of the dictionary. So much seems silly, not least the presence of a pool of acid in the basement, and the way in which the ‘ghost’ manifests. Don’t get me wrong - it’s all great fun, with some neat tricks along the way, such as the tiny coffins containing guns, but not to be taken seriously. And I imagine modern day sfx experts feel embarrassed for their predecessors when watching this.

The Abominable Dr Phibes (1971)

Vinnie is older and wiser, and horribly disfigured as the eponymous Anton Phibes, who has the good fortune to be both wealthy and talented in many disciplines. With the aid of the statuesque Vulnavia he visits Biblical plagues on the ten members of the surgical team who failed to save the life of his beloved bride. Again, this is a film that is impossible to take seriously, but redeemed by the way in which it eschews all attempts at realism and just goes wonderfully, gloriously over the top. The baroque come art deco sets with their distinctive colour schemes, combined with the funereal strains of Phibes’ organ, offer a treat for the senses, and with odd touches of humour, such as the band of mannequins who accompany the organist. This is very much a black comedy, seen most obviously in the elaborate death scenes, with the various victims falling prey to locusts, rats, boils etc, each murder enacted with a gleeful invention. In fact, given the presence of Phibes, with his mask and broken voice, and the nature of the killings, I think you can find in this film a forerunner of the “Saw” franchise, though there is to it, despite all the nasty death, a feeling of innocence that later films don’t have. If “Saw” is torture porn, then perhaps this is the seaside postcard equivalent.

Dr Phibes Rises Again (1972)

He’s back, and how (and, to my shame, for many years I thought this film was titled “Dr Phibes Rides Again”). Having wreaked his revenge and outwitted the law at the end of the last film, Phibes heads off to Egypt in search of a magical underground river that will revive his deceased wife and confer immortality on them both. Already prepared and waiting for him is a tastefully decorated home away from home built into the side of a mountain, complete with organ. But other parties have thrown their hats into the ring, including an archaeologist who appears to have already mastered immortality, and now needs another infusion from the river to sustain his life, while hot on the heels of everyone are the forces of law and order. The stage is set for some suitably macabre mayhem in the Egyptian desert, with Phibes and Vulnavia wheeling out their latest death dealing devices. Highlights include the murderous mannequin musicians, a person size vise and a deadly combination of mechanical snake and exploding telephone. Admittedly some of the novelty has worn off, and the plotting is even more absurd, but Vinnie is as over the top as ever and there’s enough juice left to carry it through to an ending in which our hero and his lady swan off into the sunset, or something like that. Egypt wasn’t this much fun again until Indiana Jones came along.

The Pit and The Pendulum (1961)

I absolutely adore the Corman/Matheson adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories, and this is one of my favourites, actually improving on its source material (which isn’t much of a story at all, if we’re honest). Vinnie plays Don Medina, the son of a Spanish Inquisitor, who has a complete set of torture instruments hidden away in his cellar, including the infamous pendulum of the title. Always a bit unstable thanks to the family history, he is haunted by the idea that his dead wife was buried prematurely, and the arrival of his English brother-in-law, who simply won’t accept the ‘official’ account of his sister’s death, finally pushes him over the edge, with the help of the wife, who isn’t really dead but planning on eloping with the family doctor after her husband has been driven to suicide. It all leads up to the finale in which, adopting the persona of his father, Vinnie cranks up the pendulum and looks to visit sweet revenge on the one he considers to have done him wrong. There’s more than a bit of “House on Haunted Hill” reprised in this, with the alliance between Vinnie’s wife and doctor, but this time around he himself is an innocent victim of their duplicity, and the family history provides a convincing psychological backdrop to Don Medina’s madness. It really is a first rate film all round, with lavish Gothic settings created on a shoestring budget and a lurid colour scheme, solid script and acting from all concerned, especially Vinnie, and the torture implements, not least the pendulum itself, create a genuine sense of expectation and tension. The best moment of all though is the closing image of Barbara Steele’s desperately pleading eyes, as she is left alone in the dungeon, trapped in the iron maiden. That’ll teach her to cheat on Vinnie.

The opening line pretty much lays out the agenda – ‘I have named each of the doctor’s instruments’ – implying both that the first person narrator is a patient of some kind on whom surgical procedures are enacted, and that his mindset is slightly outside of the norm, unless your norm happens to involve naming inanimate objects.

What follows confirms this impression, with the narrator operated on while an audience of students watch what is happening, and further elaboration on his giving of names and distinct personalities to the surgical instruments – ‘Jones is an enigma. It is not possible to know him the way one might come to know a consistent fellow like Macintosh.’ And as the story progresses this quality of Jones (described as ‘spiraling like a corkscrew’) is further expounded on, with the statement that ‘Jones is an aesthete and an artist’, and the strong suggestion that the narrator identifies with Jones, feels himself also to be creative and not at all like the common herd.

We are never told exactly what is being done to the narrator or why, though context is suggestive. The narrator is not treated with respect, the orderlies taking bets on whether he will bleed or not. He is restrained and ‘kept apart from the others’ in a chamber that ’is six feet wide by eight feet deep’. And in one section he ruminates on how ‘some females have even sought to destroy me’, describing their gender as ‘vipers and lower creatures’ and saying how he was ’accused of trespass and worse’. The narrator blames everyone except himself for his plight, with the closest he comes to accepting responsibility the comment that ‘the fault lies not in my stars, but in my cognitive architecture’. And the implication seems to be that the surgeon is attempting to change his ‘cognitive architecture’.

And then something goes wrong at the facility where he is being held, and the narrator escapes, on his way to freedom picking up the surgical instrument that he refers to as Macintosh. He comes to a place where a young woman is seated alone on a bench, her attention focused on her mobile phone (and the narrator doesn’t appear to know what a mobile phone is), and there is the suggestion that the narrator is contemplating an attack on the young woman, though actually his intent is never pinned down and perhaps all the more chilling for that ambiguity.

Eventually what holds him back is loyalty to Jones, who he left back ‘at the institute’. His penchant for giving personalities to mere tools reaches its apex with ‘Dare I indulge without him? He would surely be stricken and dismayed to miss out. He would not say so much – he is as well mannered as he is sensitive – but he need not say a word, because I, in my heart, would know.’

Fear of Jones’ disapproval causes him to stay his hand, concluding ‘it would be so easy. And so empty.’

And this, almost, is when the story ends, with the student walking away ignorant of her narrow escape.

So what’s going on here?

There are lots of obvious genre tropes, as for instance the doctor experimenting on a patient, the escaped lunatic, the killer who doesn’t really know what he is doing, and in the anthropomorphism of surgical instruments there is more than a hint of the way in which weapons are treated in much heroic fantasy (e.g. Elric’s sword Stormbringer, Arthur’s Excalibur). Given the repeated surgical procedures, it’s tempting to conjecture that the narrator is actually a Frankenstein style creation, and certainly there are echoes in his ‘confrontation’ with the student of the scene where the monster indifferently throws the child into the water in Whale’s film.

More apposite I feel, is the idea that the narrator is a criminal, one who preyed on women, and the doctor is trying to alter his ‘cognitive architecture’ so that he becomes harmless. The procedure appears to have been only partially successful – parts of his memory have been destroyed, as witness his unfamiliarity with mobile phones and ignorance of where he is – but his murderous instincts haven’t been eradicated so much as directed into other channels.

Killers dehumanise their victims, so that they can easier enact their crimes, but something almost the reverse seems to have happened in this scenario, with the anthropomorphism of the killer’s potential weapons, to the point that he sees them as possible collaborators, and has bonded so strongly with the absent Jones that he needs his approval to attack the female student. And yet, we are free to conjecture that things would have gone otherwise had he escaped with Jones in his hand rather than the dull Macintosh (a bureaucrat, rather than an artist, and apparently murder is an aesthetic act for the narrator).

The last line of the story reads ‘I cringe and turn away.’ Implicit in that is a degree of self-loathing, a subliminal recognition that he has been neutered, however he deludes himself with talk of Jones. He cannot act without the approval of inanimate objects, just as Alex in A Clockwork Orange is conditioned to feel nausea every time he hears Beethoven, but as a side effect of the process rather than its intention.

It’s a strange and curiously effective story, one that doesn’t spell everything out or take a strong moral position on the ethics of what is being done to the narrator, leaving the reader to fill in the gaps and draw his or her own conclusion, and all the more effective for that.

Let the show begin!

Well, actually we’ll begin furreal tomorrow, as I’m knackered. I’ve spent the day looking for a Valentine card for The Imaginary Girlfriend, and became so paralysed with fear of making the wrong choice that I seem to have returned home with four different cards, but all of them in their individual ways carrying a heartfelt but somewhat needy plea for the recipient to sleep with the sender.

Erm…

So anyone out there want me to send them a slightly rude Valentine card?

That offer is open only to the girls. I’ve no objection in principle to sending cards to guys, but my puckish sense of humour doesn’t really fit into a guy on guy scenario.

About a dozen years ago a friend sent me a birthday card fully laden with love and kisses, only she’d lost my address and so looked it up in the phonebook, which is why the card ended up with a Peter Tennant in the next village over, whose girlfriend was not amused. Poor guy phoned me up and got me to explain to his lady .

Anyway, here’s Alice:-

I used to love Alice Cooper, and I guess I still do, though there are times when I have problems with the whole playing golf thing.

One Halloween I may have traumatised some local trick or treaters by opening the door while ”I Love the Dead” was on the stereo.

At least I think that was what made them go so pale.

That’s all folks!

Suddenly we’ve gone straight to DEFCON One, and there is a stream of abuse screeching out of the phone involving terms such as ‘liar’, ‘hypocrite’ and worse, the kind of language you usually hear only in reference to a politician up for re-election.

(I may be exaggerating slightly – well, a lot – for dramatic effect.)

The crux of TIG’s complaint is that I have remarked on occasion how she is the only woman I desire, and I’d have to say that this is completely unfair as she fancies no end of men and has never hesitated to tell me about them.

In fact there are times when I believe that the only criteria for TIG to find a man desirable is that he isn’t me.

Anyway, when the storm abates slightly and I manage to get a word in edgeways, I tell her that with the other woman my interest was only sexual but with her ‘it would be making love’.

Now I thought that was a tolerably good save in the circumstances, but mock gagging sounds from the other end of the line suggest otherwise.

Okay, John Cougar Mellencamp has the mic:-

It occurs to me that the song/video could easily be about TIG and myself.

Only I’m not Jack, and her name isn’t Diane.

And we’re not American, or sixteen.

(We weren’t that young even when we first met all those years ago.)

And I never wanted to be a football star.

So, nothing like really.

Except…

This one time I did playfully pat her bottom, just as Jack does with Diane in the video.

It was the highpoint of our relationship, a plateau from which we’ve steadily been drawing back ever since, to the point where there’s hope we’ll bump into each other again on the far side of the world.

Oh yeah, life goes on.