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Seduced and Abandoned

A lovely piece by Adrian Lobb on Fagburn’s Seduced and Abandoned, selected as one of The Quietus’s Top 40 Books About Music

The late, great Richard Smith was a wonderful writer with rapier wit combined with a lightness of touch, even as he tackled the heaviest of subjects. In this collection of essays, Smith covers a broad range of music – from Mixmaster Morris to the Happy Mondays, via R.E.M., Stock Aitken Waterman, RuPaul, The Kinks, Suede, David Bowie, Nirvana, Morrissey, Freddie Mercury and Erasure (spoiler alert, he’s not a fan) – looking at the many and varied way in which gay men create, shape and interact with pop music. Culture and identity politics, popular music as a platform from which to interrogate sexuality and gender, responses to the AIDS crisis and Smith’s own notes on camp and ‘ambisexuality’ are explored in a series of short but deep and loving essays that are serious but never sober. Playful, provocative, opinionated and profound, Seduced And Abandoned is a stunning collection of popular music writing (my copy has been overdue at the John Barnes library in Camden since May 7 1998, sorry), and highlights the huge vacuum left by former Gay Times and Melody Maker writer Smith when he died in 2017 aged just 49.

Many thanks to Zoot x

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Mark E. Smith: As If from Heaven

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Mark E. Smith: 1957-2018

Thanks for everything, Mark. I loved you so much x

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Mail Online: Are You Being Served?

Married imam 'is caught trying to meet 15-year-old boy for sex after grooming him on gay dating app Grindr - then says he fears being KILLED because homosexuality is against his religion'

Paedophile hunters have released footage which shows a respected imam allegedly trying to meet a 15-year-old boy for sex after grooming him with offers of money on a gay dating app.

The married father-of-five was snared by the vigilante group outside an address in Flixton, Greater Manchester, and was accused of traveling nearly an hour in the car to abuse the boy while his mother was at work.

'Justice Will Be Served' posed as a young boy on Grindr and filmed their encounter with the 45-year-old, who a mosque in Blackburn, Lancashire.

The man squirms as he is read messages which he allegedly sent to who he thought was the boy, but was in fact the paedophile hunters. He allegedly asked the boy 'how much' he wanted to perform a sex act after contacting the account on the gay dating app.

Interesting that the description "paedophile hunters" is taken at face value in this article. If you were genuinely concerned about paedophilia, why would you go on Grindr and pretend to be a 15 year old? Anyone who downloads the app is going to be well aware of what it is and what it's used for. Now, I'm no expert but surely paedophiles are more likely to use platforms where there's a high likelihood of coming across, you know, actual children? Of course, if you were disgusted by poofs and wanted to hound them under the pretence of moral concern then going on Grindr and posing as a 15 year old would be the obvious choice. The man accused above has apparently been released without charge, but now his name and face are all over the internet, his family have been informed and his life is probably ruined.

Besides the Mail Online and The Sun (and a slew of right wing sites and commentators), this wasn't reported anywhere else. But surely the fact that there's a group of vigilantes pretending to be a 15 year old on Grindr and hounding any gay man who arranges to meet him should be a concern to the gay media? Yet there's nothing at all on Pink News, Gay Star News, Gay Times, Attitude, etc, etc.

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Johann Hari: Connected!

In Sunday's Observer, an excerpt from disgraced journalist Johann Hari's new book Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions was published. Unsurprisingly, given both the author's previous and the grand claims of the book's title, quite a few people on social media weren't happy. The following day, Dean Burnett published this response in The Guardian: Is Everything Johann Hari Knows About Depression Wrong?

I do not know Johann Hari. We’ve never crossed paths, he’s done me no wrong that I’m aware of, I have no axe to grind with him or his work. And, in fairness, writing about mental health and how it’s treated or perceived is always a risk. It’s a major and often-debilitating issue facing a huge swathe of the population, and with many unpleasant and unhelpful stigmas attached. In recent years there have been signs that the tide is perhaps turning the right way, but a lot of work remains to be done. However, if you’re going to allow an extract from your book to be published as a standalone article for mainstream media with a title as provocative as “Is everything you know about depression wrong?”, you’d best make sure you have impeccable credentials and standards to back it up.

Let’s address the elephant in the room: Johann Hari does not have a flawless reputation. He has been absent from the spotlight for many years following a plagiarism scandal, compounded by less-than-dignified behaviour towards his critics. Admittedly, he has since shown remorse and contrition over the whole affair, but even a cursory glance online reveals he’s a long way from universal forgiveness. Logically, someone with a reputation for making false claims should be the last person making high-profile, controversial, sweeping statements about something as sensitive as mental health. And yet, here we are. It’s 2018 after all.

Still, Johann's got a lot of endorsements from sundry doyens in the mental health community, such as his old chum Elton John (who he's co-written at least one article with and who seemingly gives a puff quote for every book he publishes), Hillary Clinton, Naomi Klein, Adrian Lester, Laurie Penny, Jemima Goldmsith, Jimmy Tarbuck, Stephen Hawking, Kim Kardashian, Charlie Dimmock, Meryl Streep, Bobby Davro...

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Wikipedia: List of Parps

Wikipedia articles invented by a neural network.

Popal chickens

List of U.S. pants

List of the Hamburgers

List of bands with pies on them

Ant Fields are bear hair fetishism

This page is a very short article

Poople who don't have beer from sydney

Monster diseases

Goat that cookie

Near Dogs

Donkey words in the cartoons

Poople who woo wah the pilot

Death of chicken

What is the day

What fame butt

List of fictional characters with the ball

Who is not leaders

Beer for chickens

List of parps

Proper programming language

Turdis programming language

Article with a cat

Friends and existence

How to draw a coconut

Tree donkey

Category:People who can't speed

Wikipedia: the idiot's friend.

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R. Sewell: On Drella

"Few able men have had a more destructive influence on art, reducing it to the mechanical processes of the production line; few men have so far dulled the standards of aesthetic achievement on the one hand and aesthetic judgement on the other that any vulgar fool with access to a camera and a print shop can pretend to be an artist; no man has so exploited the business of self-publicity that simply being an artist has become more important than any work an artist may produce. That it is now possible for any witless schoolboy to declare himself an artist, though he cannot draw, cannot paint, cannot sculpt, is illiterate, inarticulate, ignorant and has no skills of any kind, is largely Warhol's work, his donation to posterity. He was, as Carl Andre observed, 'the perfect glass and mirror of his age, and certainly the artist we deserved'. Of himself he said, 'If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings, and there I am. There's nothing behind it' - yet we persist in finding what was never there."

- Brian Sewell, Tatler (1989)

Fagburn on Sewell

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Jodie Foster: #MeToo

"I'm not a sound bite person, I'm an hours person. I like to talk about things for hours. I'm not very good at 140 characters. I feel like it's such a complicated issue, and it is a watershed moment.

"It is an amazing moment in time and, you know, in order to do it justice, I think we need a bigger dialogue and a much more complicated dialogue. But this time is necessary and I'm really looking forward to what happens next, like all social justice movements. I think we're all looking forward to how we can heal, and we want to hear voices. We want to hear the other side as well, in order to really change things.

"Justice by Twitter is not the right way to go."

CBS News

Love Jodie.

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Joe Orton: Hammer House

Here is a great article by Fagburn detailing his visit to Orton and Halliwell's former flat. It appeared in the January 2005 issue of Gay Times. Click on each image to read each page.

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Deadline: The Singer Not the Song

A weird article - apart from the two instances of alleged rape by two different men at the start and end of the piece, the bulk details a year-long consensual relationship between two adults. Yet it's being shared around as though it's the height of gay debauchery.

Still, it's nice that prurient gawping at someone else's hedonistic (but - at least in this case - legal and consensual) sex life can nowadays pretend to have a moral purpose. How very Victorian!

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LCD Soundsystem: Dream Baby Dream

A stunning return to form, album of the year, etc, etc...

"The beyond great James Murphy - the most consistently stunningly brilliant and original musician of the last decade..." - Fagburn on James Murphy

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Joe Orton: Laid Bare

Thought this was a bit disappointing, really. It didn't add anything new to what was already known and there wasn't enough there to justify a new film. Most of it is reenactments of bits of the plays and some of Joe's diaries spoken by an actor trolling about. Worth watching, though. The best film on Orton is still the 1982 Arena documentary:

Several years ago, Orton and Halliwell's former flat came up for sale and Fagburn used the opportunity to go round and have a look.

It's tiny. You can see why Joe kept going out cottaging. And how Ken ended up - quite literally - driving Joe up the wall.

He used to say that he hoped one day the uncensored Orton diaries would be published/released. I have the vague memory that he thought we were never told the full truth about Orton's murder and certain revealing bits (perhaps alluded to in Halliwell's final note) were edited out.

Fagburn on Orton

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Gay Times: No Future

After former shop-girl Josh was promoted to editor and then summarily fired two weeks ago, the new relaunch edition of Gay Times has hit the shelves in a whirl of excitement and anticipation. Sadly, it’s a bit of a disaster. Look at the state of this:

NEWS NEWS! Absolutely nothing on that page is news. It's all advertorial. And the design! It's genuinely difficult to understand the thinking behind that. Is it satire or something? And the magazine is littered with errors. They have an art director and a design director, but apparently no sub-editor or proofreader. Out of 144 pages, actual writing makes up roughly 20 pages. About 80 are devoted to fashion and adverts. The rest is padded out with pictures. Piss poor.

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After Dark

70s US gay wank rag masquerading as an entertainment magazine for the blue rinse community*. Beautiful. *Bit like the opposite of most gay magazines, these days.

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Guy Burgess: Gay Communist Hero

Great BBC documentary on the iPlayer: Storyville - Toffs, Queers and Traitors: The Extraordinary Life of Guy Burgess

It made me rewatch the superb 1983 film of Alan Bennett's An Englishman Abroad with Alan Bates as Burgess. There's a copy on the tubes but it looks like it was recorded on a Super8 camera placed right up against the TV screen, so I won't bother linking to it. Here's some lovely screencaps instead...

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Gay Times: Vacancy

Good to see Patrick Smugtwit's award-winning journalistic technique of scrolling through twitter for offensive material has struck gold yet again. Surely another Pulitzer awaits Buzzfeed's answer to Woodward and Bernstein?

The Guardian: Gay Times sacks editor after antisemitic and offensive tweets emerge

"We need a new editor and one that shows we're inclusive and with it. Any ideas, chaps?" "What about that swarthy looking gal I sometimes see throwing shade around the office?" "Oh, that's Josh from marketing. He's so witty! Did you hear his one about disabled people?" "Does he have any experience in journalism?" "No, but have you seen her tits on twitter?" "Perfect!"

Eddie Mair interviewing Josh Rivers: "Were you chemically altered when you wrote these tweets?"

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Edward S. Herman: 1925-2017

Media critic and co-author of Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media.

Fagburn on Herman Edward S. Herman: Master of Dissent (fair.org) Fake News on Russia and Other Official Enemies: The New York Times, 1917-2017