The Fire’s Out, Honey: Homophobia in the Gay Community

‘No Camp puffs…I’m begging you.’ ‘I don’t deal with silly little fags.’ ‘If you’re a screaming queen…FUCK RIGHT OFF.’ ‘Straight acting ONLY. And I mean STRAIGHT ACTING. Otherwise, jog on. ’ These are all direct quotes.

‘The Hottest Place to Snog is Dubai!’ Erm, No it Isn’t

The Blob is back — though this time it’s coated in gold.

Culture police: I’d like to report a mass-robbery. And the primary culprit is Dubai. That pre-pubescent…

Dogme Never Dies, It Haunts Everything Else

Seventeen years ago, two Danish filmmakers, Lars Von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, started a movement known as Dogme95 — translated as ‘dogma,’ and the year of its birth, 1995. The movement quickly spread from Denmark to Argentina, the States…

Breathing and Smoking: the Ins and Outs

Sometimes, when the mind is vulnerable and the body is weak, breathing comes to the forefront of my concerns. I concentrate on breathing, on the ‘in-out’ — the most vital, base instinct of mankind; a need more natural even than eating, unavoidably defining…

Dazzle Painting: The Art of War

‘Out at sea is a ship. Like everything else in the world, she is to the eye a combination of lines and angles. In which direction is she heading? North-northwest, you say. How do you know? You judge the course chiefly by the motion of the superstructure, a thing that bears…

Running With Wolves: A New Conservation Paradigm

Firstly, I must apologise for the disparaging comments made about urban pumas in my last article. I was mistaken in believing that my primeval aversion to large predators was shared by my conservationist colleagues; many of whom have expressed a…

On Tweeting

I find it hard to tweet. This is such a laughably self-involved sentiment that my first reaction after typing it is to delete delete delete. In fact, I’m even trying to distance myself from the implications of what I’m saying by calling attention to the fact I’m saying it in the first place. Insufferable…

Locating the Freak

It was only around 1847 that the term ‘freak’ became synonymous with human corporeal difference. It was also in the 1840s that notions of ‘the norm’ emerged. It was given impetus by the Belgium statistician Adolphe Quetelet who developed the concept of the ‘average man.’ This represented a new…