Salon.com > Mark Simpson

The pop star who hated sex

Fri, 30 Apr 2004 20:00:00 +0000

Of all the attention Steven Patrick Morrissey has garnered, he is perhaps best known for not doing the nasty. His abstinence is seen as symbol, proof and cause of his eccentricity. After all, in an age utterly obsessed with and possessed by SEX, such party-pooping is inconsiderate, anti-democratic, downright unhealthy, and, well, positively sinful. And in a pop star who hasn't been knighted and whose main audience isn't grandmums, it's actually heretical.

As Oscar Wilde put it, celibacy is the only real perversion; and in Morrissey's eyes, this was a good enough argument for practicing it. Like any form of Utopianism, reinventing sex requires you to renounce the thing you want to reinvent. Paradoxically, although celibacy is perhaps the least innocent sexual option -- renouncing sex makes everything sexual -- publicly it provided Morrissey with the innocence he needed to carry off his seductive-seditious project.

Who’s the hunted now?

Fri, 23 Apr 2004 22:17:00 +0000

In the seven years since she died in a high-speed car crash in a tunnel in Paris, the pictures of the bafflingly mangled black Mercedes that ferried Diana to her death have become almost as famous as its most precious passenger.

Looking at the pictures, snapped at night with flash photography (like many of the pictures of Diana), it's difficult not to wonder at how such an expensive, glamorous, chauffeur-driven, bodyguard-accompanied limousine could end up such a shapeless mess -- or how such a mess could have been a car at all, let alone such a famous one. To wonder how a limo whisking someone from the Paris Ritz could have turned so suddenly into a hearse. To wonder just how mangled the expensive, glamorous Diana was.

But of course, no matter how hard you look at the picture, you can't see her -- she has already been whisked off to the hospital where she would die soon after from "internal injuries" (something we know she had been suffering from for many years, and they were not caused by any car accidents). Until this week, Diana's expiring body is literally obscene -- "off scene" -- in a way that much of her life was not.

MetroDaddy speaks!

Mon, 05 Jan 2004 21:00:00 +0000

In July of 2002, Mark Simpson introduced Salon readers -- and the U.S. -- to his impeccably turned-out love-hate child the metrosexual. Here is his definition from that now infamous article: "The typical metrosexual is a young man with money to spend, living in or within easy reach of a metropolis -- because that's where all the best shops, clubs, gyms and hairdressers are. He might be officially gay, straight or bisexual, but this is utterly immaterial because he has clearly taken himself as his own love object and pleasure as his sexual preference. Particular professions, such as modelling, waiting tables, media, pop music and, nowadays, sport, seem to attract them but, truth be told, like male vanity products and herpes, they're pretty much everywhere."

Heard the one about Prince Charles and the valet?

Wed, 19 Nov 2003 21:00:00 +0000

"Infamy! Infamy! They've all got it in for me!" So shrieked the much-loved camp English comic Kenneth Williams, in his role as Julius Caesar fleeing dagger-wielding assassins in the 1964 British comedy classic film "Carry On Cleo." Given the alleged camp carryings-on at Buckingham Palace, the heir to the throne of England, Prince Charles, probably knows how Kenneth felt. Oo-er! I mean, what it felt like to be in his position ... Er, that's to say ... Oh, flippin' 'ell, just gag me with a court order, somebody.

You can't understand anything about the British psyche until you've seen a "Carry On" movie. No less than 30 of these cheap but insistently cheerful films, which made a dirty joke out of every human vanity (and need), were made between 1958 and 1978, with such saucy, sodomy-fixated titles as "Carry On Cruising" (1962), "Carry On up the Khyber" (1968), "Carry On Camping" (1969), "Carry On at Your Convenience" (1971) and "Carry On Behind" (1975). These hymns to the single entendre -- for the British there is only one hole, and it's the wrong one -- and orgies of cross-dressing are still played in constant rotation on TV (the cult 1970s BBC TV series "Are You Being Served?" is one example of an unofficial spinoff, and Mike Myers' "Austin Powers" is another, more lucrative one). Every now and again there is a disastrous attempt to resurrect the series -- the latest, "Carry On London," is due to start filming soon. The British are intimately attached to their sexual repression, especially now that they are officially liberated. Like a famously constipated Kenneth Williams -- whose favored catchphrases included "'Ere! Stop messin' abaht!," "Ooh! Matron!" and "Trouble with the bum, you know" -- they can't quite let it go.

Beckham, the virus

Sat, 28 Jun 2003 19:41:00 +0000

It hasn't been like this since the death of Diana. Britain has been suffering from a national nervous breakdown ever since David Beckham, handsome icon of the Manchester United soccer team, announced last week that he was leaving to play for Real Madrid. The Sun, the most popular tabloid, set up a Beckham "grief helpline" and claims it has been swamped with calls from distressed fans. One caller said he was considering suicide, while several confessed that they were so upset they couldn't perform in bed. A man who has "Beckham" tattooed on his arm threatened to cut if off. "I cried myself to sleep after hearing the awful news," said grandmother Mary Richards, age 85. A London cabby, ever the voice of reason, asked, "Has the world gone mad? He's only a footballer!" But he was mistaken. A footballer is the least of what David Beckham is.

Why doesn’t America love Robbie Williams?

Wed, 30 Apr 2003 20:00:00 +0000

It's tough growing up British. Not just for all the obvious Austin Powers-esque reasons, such as our medieval dentistry, endemic mold problems and epidemic dandruff, but for something much more existential. The British are great and enthusiastic believers in Original Sin. In Britain, would you Adam and Eve it, we devoutly accept that we are all Fallen, all doomed before we are born, that no child however lovely and chuckly and pink-skinned is born innocent.

Of course, since we liberated the monasteries, Coalition-style, back in Henry VIII's time, and became nominally Protestant for tax reasons, we don't call it Original Sin anymore. We call it the class system (though in New Labor Britain you will be reported to the police if you mention it). And we don't talk about sinners anymore, just wankers. You see, whichever class you happen to be born into in Britain, it will be the wrong one. Granted, some are wronger than others, but even the most privileged classes are the wrong ones -- to everyone else. Moreover, whatever class you are born into, your destiny, your happiness, your salvation, is not your property and certainly not your right. If you try to escape your British birthright by becoming something you're not, then you will be Found Out, and everyone will point and laugh and call you a wanker.

Capt. Kirk’s bulging trousers

Wed, 26 Feb 2003 21:00:00 +0000

The first thing that greets me is Capt. Kirk's package. Jim's intergalactic manhood is clearly, alarmingly outlined against the fabric of his tight 1960s-cut black trousers, dressing very much to the left. I assure you I wasn't looking for it -- it just loomed up like a de-cloaked Romulan Bird of Prey. It shouldn't be surprising that James Tiberius Kirk, the famously gung-ho Starfleet commander, went commando, boldly swinging where no man had swung before. Maybe that, as much as his twinkly mascara'd eyes and his captaincy of the fastest, flashiest vehicle in the galaxy, the USS Enterprise, was the secret of caddish Jim's phenomenal success with lady humanoids and aliens alike.

Indubitably, as his first officer might have said, raising one angled eyebrow: This was the crucial difference between the sweaty, highly Freudian original "Star Trek" series and the sexless, sweatless, p.c. "Star Trek: The Next Generation." Can you imagine Jean-Luc Picard not wearing spotless knickers with a built-in containment field, changed twice a day and incinerated after use?

Meet the metrosexual

Mon, 22 Jul 2002 19:00:00 +0000

David Beckham, the captain of the England soccer team at this year's World Cup in Korea and Japan -- quite possibly the most famous and photogenic soccer player in the world -- recently posed for a glossy gay magazine in the U.K., just before leaving for battle in the Far East.

Well, you can imagine the outcry. The leader of England's courageous lads tarting around in a pooftah magazine? Handing our enemies such an embarrassing pink stick to hit us with when the nation is girding its manly loins? Well, actually, apart from a few predictable but strangely muted snickers in the tabloid press, the sensation was that there wasn't a sensation. It was entirely what the British public has come to expect.

You see, "Becks" is almost as famous for wearing sarongs and pink nail polish and panties belonging to his wife, Victoria (aka Posh from the Spice Girls), having a different, tricky haircut every week and posing naked and oiled up on the cover of Esquire, as he is for his impressive ball skills. He may or may not be the best footballer in the world, but he's definitely an international-standard narcissist, what would once have just been called, in the Anglo world at least, "a sissy." Hence in that World Cup game against Brazil that kicked England out of the tournament, Becks was the only English player not to be upstaged aesthetically as well as athletically by the Latins.