Robert Desnos: "I have dreamed of you so much"

My translation of "J'ai tant rêvé de toi."


I HAVE DREAMED OF YOU SO MUCH

I have dreamed of you so much that you are losing your reality.

Is there time to reach your living body, to kiss the voice so dear to me as it springs from your mouth?

I have dreamed of you so much that my arms, accustomed to lying folded on my chest from embracing your image, would perhaps no longer bend to the shape of your real body.

For, faced with the actual appearance of the one who haunts me and who has ruled my days and years, I would, without a doubt, have also become an image.

O, scales of feeling….

I have dreamed of you so much that, without a doubt, there is no time for me to wake.  I sleep standing up, the body exposed to all the shapes of love and life—and to you, the only one who counts for me now.  I can no more touch your forehead or your lips than those of a stranger passing by.

I have dreamed of you so much, walked, talked, slept with your image, that there is nothing left of me, perhaps for now and ever, but to be an image among other images, a hundred times more shadow than the one who walks and will continue to walk brightly across the sundial of your life.

Translated by D. LeH. Sweet

American Voices: Hemingway

A sample essay for my undergraduate course, "American Voices."


INDIAN GIVING 

He bent over the Indian woman. She was quiet now and her eyes were closed. She looked very pale. She did not know what had become of the baby or anything.

            “I’ll be back in the morning,” the doctor said, standing up. “The nurse should be here from St. Ignace by noon and she’ll bring everything we need.”
            He was feeling exalted and talkative as football players are in the dressing room after a game.
            “That’s one for the medical journal, George,” he said.  “Doing a Caesarian with a jack-knife and sewing it up with nine-foot, tapered gut leaders.”
            Uncle George was standing against the wall, looking at his arm.
            “Oh, you’re a great man, all right,” he said.

In this passage from Ernest Hemingway’s “Indian Camp”—one of the opening short stories in his debut collection, In Our Time (1925)—the reader immediately senses the feeling of accomplishment experienced by a skilled doctor after successfully performing a life-saving operation in unfavorable circumstances.  The life of a Native American woman is in jeopardy due to complications during labor.  But she is rescued and her child safely delivered thanks to the intervention of Dr. Adams, the father of the young Nick Adams, a character in the story who appears throughout In Our Time at different stages of his life. 

            As in many of Hemingway’s stories, the language and sentences of “Indian Camp” seem very simple at first, though some words and references require clarification.  The first reference that might draw one’s attention is “St. Ignace,” the French name of a Catholic saint—St. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus, or the Jesuits—which is used in the story to identify a hospital or charitable institution in the area.  Next is the word “Caesarian,” which obviously refers to the operation being performed on the Native American woman (or “Indian” woman) in the story.  Like the name of the hospital, a “Caesarian” or “Caesarian section,” is named after an eponymous figure—in this case, Julius Caesar—someone who was supposedly delivered as a child by the same method being used by Dr. Adams (in antiquity the mothers always died, however).  Finally, in the very same sentence in which “Caesarian” appears, the reader notices the “nine-foot, tapered gut leaders,” a more obscure, technical term that refers to the kind of front line attached to the bait in fly fishing and which is here being used as a substitute for conventional surgical thread.  It was made of cat gut, a strong fiber that was harder for fish to sever when they bit on it.  This reference to fly fishing might also be an indication of why the doctor, his son, Nick, and his brother, George, happened to be on the lake when the woman in the Indian camp was giving birth. 

            So what, exactly, is being said in this passage?  The brief, opening paragraph presents the doctor standing over the sleeping figure of the woman after he has successfully performed the delivery of her child.  She is unconscious and exhausted.  Her paleness suggests how close to death she has come, but might also seem ironic, as she is a Native American, the opposite of a so-called “pale face,” a term that was supposedly used by “Indians” to refer to white people, but which, as an English expression, was actually only attributed to “Indians” by whites—the people whose arrival in the New World ensured that native peoples such as the pregnant woman would be living in such places as the “Indian camp” or shanty town in which the reader finds them.  Nonetheless, the exhausted woman now seems at peace after her ordeal, if also oblivious to her child and her surroundings.   On straightening up, the doctor states that he will be back in the morning and that a nurse from St. Ignace will arrive by noon with more medical supplies, presumably better ones than those available during the actual delivery. 

At this point, the reader comes to a crucial statement in the passage.  Having successfully completed his mission, the doctor feels “exalted” and “talkative,” much as a football player might feel after a successful ball game.  Hemingway’s comparison of the doctor to athletes talking in a locker room after winning a game is significant, both in this particular story and in the collection as a whole, partly because it zeroes in on the heightened emotions experienced after performing a task, sport, or art very well and shows the exhilarating sense of empowerment such an achievement brings, especially one that is accomplished with difficulty or at great risk.  Dr. Adams’ successful operation is clearly such an example, though in most circumstances the procedure would be considered routine.  The doctor makes this clear by calling it “one for the medical journal” and describing the extreme conditions in which he managed to pull it off—using a common jack-knife and sewing up the mother with gut leaders.  As mentioned above, the fishing leaders were made of gut, which was also used to make strings on a guitar or tennis racket, for instance.  There might also be a funny pun here, considering that the “gut leader” is also being used to sew up a woman’s belly or “gut.” The doctor himself becomes a sort of “gut leader,” using his best instincts (another connotation of “gut”) and meager resources to prove he is a master surgeon. 

Finally, the doctor’s brother, George, is seen standing against the wall and looking at his arm, which was previously bitten by the woman in her agony, an act which caused him to call her a “damn squaw bitch,” thus highlighting, perhaps, some of the racial antagonisms that remained between whites and Native Americans at this particular juncture of American history (to say nothing of gender antagonisms).  George confirms that his brother is indeed a “great man.”  In this way, the passage puts a point on the earlier references to other great men in history, like St. Ignatius or Julius Caesar, though it does so in a subtle, indirect way.  (Note that in the process, women’s roles—even in losing their lives while giving birth—are subtly disparaged.)  Ironically, his success as a doctor cannot prepare Dr. Adams for the surprise awaiting him and everyone else when they discover that another, very bloody, operation was being performed in the upper bunk of the same bed at the same time as the Caesarian section being performed below:  the husband of the “squaw” is found with his throat slit open, an apparent suicide.  No longer feeling exalted, the doctor now regrets having brought his young son for this lesson in human endeavor and survival.  With the suicide it has become a much darker lesson about death, desperation, and maybe injustice, too—not exactly the lesson one might want a son to learn at such a young age (though the doctor was willing enough to risk letting him see a mother die). 

            What carries over from this passage to the collection as a whole is the theme of performing well, showing one’s skill or mastery under pressure, but also showing a determination to adhere to a code of excellence even in situations of great stress and potential disaster.  In doing this, one avoids emotional sloppiness, false sentiment, and making pledges one cannot keep (I think this may be the reason Dr. Adams tells his son earlier on that the woman’s screams are not important, though it seems a rather heartless thing to say).  Everything depends on knowing the rules of the game or the techniques of one’s art, and although winning brings a feeling of exuberance, one might just as easily lose according to the same rules by which one sometimes wins.  The references to football and fishing are simple indicators of fairly ordinary activities or items.  They imply that if one adheres to the rules of the game, remembers one’s training, or simply applies one’s knowledge as best one can (even in unusual circumstances), one is likely to come out a winner. 

But even great persons can fail in the best of circumstances; human beings and society are such that even those with the best of intentions can often go wrong or lose heart.  Life itself is sloppy and people inscrutable, their motives unknowable.  One cannot say why the husband of the Indian woman killed himself:  “He couldn’t stand things, I guess,” says Dr. Adams later on.  Some things can’t be stood:  whether it is the screams of a woman in labor or the injustice of living in an Indian camp utterly dependent on one’s white masters.  Later, Nick Adams will fight in the trenches in the so-called “Great War” of Europe (1914-1918).  Yet no matter how much integrity or faith in his cause an individual soldier might have, many will come away with the sense that the entire conflict was a farce revealing the hollowness of “great men” and the great myths (of God, country, and honor) such men foist upon the rest of society.  In retrospect, the war will seem more like an act of collective madness or suicide.  After returning home from Europe, Nick seeks isolation from the messiness of social entanglements and tries to find solace in the simpler values of being a good sport, as shown on the “big two-hearted river” where he fishes for trout at the end of In Our Time.  At one point the text indicates that he is trying to recuperate the old feeling of performing well, of winning fair and square, in a sport that pits one against another, or a lone man against a river.

The theme of good sportsmanship also suggests a sort of writer’s code or “aesthetic” that Hemingway consistently adheres to, an aesthetic that demands clarity and honesty and disdains flashiness and rhetoric—false drama.  His stories present, with a stark simplicity and realism, difficult truths and lives that do not lend themselves to the sort of moral commentary or grand pronouncements many seem to demand of fiction.  Instead, his stories quietly ask the reader to judge the situation based on the facts of the case, on the most direct or fitting description in a clear and simple language.  It is a language that means more by saying less—though in saying less, it also risks incomprehension, risks provoking the stupidity of the crowd.

Princes and Painters in Mughal Delhi 1707-1857

The Asia Society Museum, February 7 – May 6, 2012


MUGHAL MINIATURES AND ENGLISH ENLARGEMENTS

Embedded within The Asia Society website is another site for the “Princes and Painters” exhibition of miniatures and other artifacts of the late Mughal dynasty.  The site is worth studying before visiting the exhibition because by doing so one won’t have to read the long texts that accompany the works, having learned about their historical context in advance.  But without this historical foregrounding, the crux of the exhibition—the transition from late Mughal to early British patronage of the arts in India in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries—might very well be missed.  So rather than getting a major headache from reading too much in a dimly lit space, one can enjoy the minor headache of looking exclusively at the art—objects well worth close scrutiny. 

            The historical information can’t be ignored because, in the end, there is an amazing, mind-altering lesson to be learned from the exhibition: a historical lesson rolled into a paradox and bound up in a contradiction.  As the various scholars, curators, museum spokeswomen and spokesmen seem at pains to inform us (including guest curator William Dalrymple, author of City of Djinns and White Mughals, art historian Yuthika Sharma, and Melissa Chiu, director of the museum), the works on display were never considered the apogee of Mughal artistry or brilliance.   Although this attitude is occasionally borne out by the work on display, it is also thrown into doubt at others, as if the Peacock Throne of artistic truth had suddenly been wrested from the clutches of common sense and turned over to the conceit of scholars, who turn out to have been very wise after all.  

            In the first rooms one is treated to a résumé of works of the early Eighteenth Century.  Many of these were produced by the same ateliers patronized by the great Mughal rulers of the preceding century, rulers who combined the despotic genes of the Mongol Khans with the Persian Timurids (eponymous descendants of Tamburlaine, as popularized in two tragedies by Christopher Marlowe).  Every student of world history will remember Babur, Humayun, Akbar the Great (religious syncretist and builder of uninhabitable pleasure domes like Fatepur Sikri), Jahangir, and of course Shah Jehan (builder of the Taj Mahal, the Red Fort, and other architectural wonders), culminating in the loathèd Aurangzebe (also popularized in the English theater, this time by John Dryden on rather positive terms).  Although Aurangzebe is usually dismissed as a religious zealot, a cultural helot, and a ruthless expansionist, some of the first works to be seen in the show were created under his patronage of the Delhi workshops.  Indeed, their visual eloquence undermines the conventional wisdom that he was little more than a philistine and a murderer (to his credit, he merely imprisoned his father—and that in the Agra Fort just across the river from his beloved Taj Mahal).  Perhaps the most exquisite example is the equestrian portrait of the aging emperor, holding a spear and wearing a scimitar under his patterned green tunic as he sits, in profile, astride a pale horse with black mane and hooves, the cream-colored haunches elegantly curved like a pair of italic parentheses, as a young attendant raises a fringed parasol from behind the horse to shield the old pillager from the setting sun, signified by orange wisps of cloud against a grey background.

            What followed Aurangzebe’s reign was a period of rapid and violent transition, punctuated by more murders, imprisonments, court intrigues climaxing in at least one quick blinding, some very slow starvation, and the complimentary strangulation of various Mughal potentates at the bequest, it would seem, of two fraternal wazirs, as the painted record implies (though the curators offer no definitive conclusions about that).  Nevertheless, the grand ateliers continued to commemorate the intervening episodes with consummate grace, courtly episodes in which power was passed on from ruling emperor to favorite grandson, for instance, in the form, say, of a pretty sarpech:  a pearl ornament pinned on a turban.  The formal representation of this scene at the court of Bahadur Shah I (r. 1707 -1712) seems to capture a world of ritual exactitude and barely-repressed chaos, with the emperor presiding on his dais as four rival sons sit cross-legged at his feet on a rich Persian carpet.  In another work, Grand Wazir Khan and his attendants sit debating in pajamas among pillows and bolsters while musicians perform in the foreground as one or two officials in white skirts enter from the right looking like whirling dervishes, except that they are not whirling.  It’s like a modern sleepover in which all the guests are bearded officials, except at this pajama party the interiors are elegantly decorated with niches and vases, the furnishings quaintly rendered out of perspective.  

But there are other genres of works, including such things as elephant fights for the entertainment of Emperor Muhammad Shah I (r. 1719-1748) who is shown in profile and well-protected from the mammoth fury below in his high window perch.  One supposes these fights were the Mughal equivalent of the bear-baiting being done at the same time in monarchical England, which also liked to indulge in cruelty to animals.  Other more delicate genres include Hindu themes, notably represented in the so-called ragas or raginis, male and female inflections of painterly modes related to music and dance, much as Poussin might paint a picture in the Lydian, Phrygian, or other such mode associated with Hellenic forms.  In one particularly charming work, a beautiful lady, clothed in sheer garments revealing breasts and thighs, visits a Saivite shrine (that looks remarkably mosque-like) to leave an offering at an almost miniscule lingam, while an austere yogini looks on.  The painting seems a tribute to Mughal tolerance, but an acknowledgement, also, of a desire to reduce the signs of cultural difference to a minimum.

            As one studies these exquisite, almost jewel-like miniatures, one imagines the vast wealth of India waiting to be snatched up by some very shrewd and enterprising scoundrels. 

Enter, the British East India Company!  Their representatives’ names seem pregnant with imperial know-how while concealing a remarkable virtuosity at assimilating Mughal tastes (if partly for the purpose of extirpating the dynasty):  Sir David Ochterlony, a Boston Tory transferred to the eastern colonies, Sirs Charles and Thomas Metcalfe, the lordly William Frazer of Inverness, and finally Colonel James Skinner of Scottish-Rajput descent.  Of the many adventurers who fled Britain for the colonies, not a few of these eccentric “Residents” went perfectly native before it would be considered a sure symptom of the heart of darkness.  Yet four of the aforementioned gentlemen seem to have done so with consummate aesthetic judgment (indeed the portrait of the youthful Frazer by Henry Raeburn on loan from the Met bespeaks the young man’s unmistakable self-confidence and sense of entitlement).  Admittedly the early commissions by British patrons reflect conventional Mughal-style formatting and imagery with the awkward addition of some bicorned British officer at an otherwise average-looking imperial durbar.  But when we come to the selected works of the Frazer Album, an illustrated book commissioned by Resident Ochterlony’s assistant and eventual replacement, the viewer finds himself or herself curiously unsettled by a surprising fusion of representational impulses derived from East and West.  Two illustrations leap off the walls of the exhibition:  the first, a meticulous rendering of a village in Rania, the home of Frazer’s Indian mistress and Anglo-Indian children.  The painting seems to combine elements of the Mughal miniature tradition with a new desire to catalogue the ordinary details of rural life, a kind of primitivist minutia that only makes sense when we learn that Resident Frazer, as intimately involved as he was with the people of the region, also sometimes exacted from his painters a visual inventory of a landscape’s taxable properties, from chimneys to water buffalos.  But an even more extraordinary work is found in the group portrait of tax collectors and village elders accompanied by Frazer’s secretary and scribe, seated a little to the right of the others.  The miniature portraits are rendered with an amazing artistic sensitivity that conveys extraordinary psychological depth, though the mostly anonymous faces of the collected “Zumeendars in Cutcherry” stare blankly out at us from a lost world, rarely glimpsed but for Frazer’s efforts to make a visual record of the lower strata of Indian society in the early Nineteenth Century.  Whether for posterity or revenue assessment, it hardly seems to matter.  We end up feeling strangely indebted to these thrifty, cross-cultural cads.

            One of the principle painters in the employ of Colonel Skinner (a sort of courtly warlord and go-between of mixed heritage for the East India Company and Mughal dynasty in its last spasms of expediency) was Ghulam Ali Khan who added a martial weightiness and panoramic breadth to the representation of Skinner’s rather self-important diwans and regimental parades at Hansi.  The assimilation of English tastes seems virtually complete in a beautiful watercolor landscape by artist Mazhar Ali Khan depicting the scruffy outskirts of Old Delhi, or “Shahjahanabad” as it was called in 1845, with the walls of the Red Fort spreading like a knotted ribbon on the horizon with the minarets and domes of the Jama Masjid to the west, a grand mosque of Mughal construction which can still be visited by almost anyone between the frequent calls to prayer.  The most interesting works to follow are the great pre-Mutiny maps and 360-degree panoramic views of Delhi, also painted by Mazhar and probably commissioned by Thomas Metcalfe whose private bungalow is identified among others (in both Urdu and English) in the Civil Lines neighborhood, recently constructed to the west of the fort.  An elegant and extensive scroll map along with Felice Beato’s photographs of the city provide a record of what remained after the British siege in 1857, a city whose elite quarters were “tragically dynamited” the following year, as the curators inform us.  The exhibition concludes with an overview of the Mutiny itself and the fate of the last Mughal emperor, Zafar, famously pictured in captivity, a broken man lying in bed and smoking a huqqa, his glassy old eyes peering out at us or perhaps only at the photographer’s contraption before him. 

            But not to fear—New Delhi will soon rise up with the help of Edwin Lutyens, and so on and so on.  The Mughal Period is over; it will take another century before Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovski will arrive to redeem the country...

            The exhibition also includes illustrations from the Tashrih-al-aqvam album, an “ethnograpthic, biographic, and topographic” study of the different Hindu castes, occupations, mendicant groups, Indian religions in the Delhi area, and several princely families, the list goes on, all translated into Persian by Skinner and illustrated in an awkward attempt at realism that, frankly, reminds one of the American primitivists—i.e., anatomically inaccurate and basically amateurish.  Here the fusion of cultural tendencies seems to go astray and leaves one wishing the Delhi masters had taken some courses at the Royal Academy.  But despite this rather flat conclusion, the show is amazing.

            The exhibition will close very soon (May 6, 2012), so make a point of visiting this weekend.  Also visit the Asia Society Museum exhibition website before you go:

            http://sites.asiasociety.org/princesandpainters/
 

Charles Baudelaire, "L'Invitation au voyage"

Translation and parody


       INVITATION TO A VOYAGE                 L'INVITATION AU VOYAGE

              My child, my sister,                                       Mon enfant, ma soeur,
              Imagine the pleasure                                     Songe à la douceur
          Of living there together,                               D'aller là-bas vivre ensemble!
              Loving at leisure                                          Aimer à loisir,
              Loving and dying                                         Aimer et mourir
          In that country that you resemble!               Au pays qui te ressemble!
              Its dripping suns                                           Les soleils mouillés
              Its changeling skies                                      De ces ciels brouillés
          Have no less charm to my mind                  Pour mon esprit ont les charmes
              Than the mystery                                          Si mystérieux
              Of your cunning eyes                                   De tes traîtres yeux,
          Shining through their tears.                         Brillant à travers leurs larmes.

          There, all is order and beauty,                     Là, tout n'est qu'ordre et beauté,
          Rich, calm and sensual.                               Luxe, calme et volupté.

              Luminous furnishings                                  Des meubles luisants,
              With the polish of years                               Polis par les ans,
          Would adorn our chamber;                         Décoreraient notre chambre;
              The rarest orchids                                         Les plus rares fleurs
              Mingling their perfumes                               Mêlant leurs odeurs
          With a vague scent of amber,                     Aux vagues senteurs de l'ambre,
              The ceilings, coffered,                                  Les riches plafonds,
              The mirrors, deep,                                        Les miroirs profonds,
          The splendor of the Orient;                         La splendeur orientale,
              Everything would speak,                              Tout y parlerait
              Secretly to the soul,                                      À l'âme en secret
          In its gentle, native tongue.                         Sa douce langue natale.

          There, all is order and beauty,                     Là, tout n'est qu'ordre et beauté,
          Rich, calm and sensual.                               Luxe, calme et volupté.

              See upon those canals                                  Vois sur ces canaux
              Those tethered vessels                                 Dormir ces vaisseaux
          In a wandering mood;                                 Dont l'humeur est vagabonde;
              To satisfy                                                     C'est pour assouvir
              Your least desire,                                         Ton moindre désir
          They have sailed from the edge                  Qu'ils viennent du bout
                              of the world.                                                   du monde.
              The setting suns                                           —Les soleils couchants    
              Redress the fields,                                       Revêtent les champs,
          The canals, the entire city,                          Les canaux, la ville entière,
              With hyacinth and gold.                              D'hyacinthe et d'or;
              The earth drifts off                                       Le monde s'endort
          In a warm luminosity.                                 Dans une chaude lumière.   

          There, all is order and beauty,                    Là, tout n'est qu'ordre et beauté,
          Rich, calm and sensual.                              Luxe, calme et volupté.


          (Translated by D. LeH. Sweet)                  Charles Baudelaire

  GETAWAY ADVERTISEMENT

          Sister, brother,
          Mom and dad!
     Wouldn't it be great to get away?
         To eat at leisure,
         Rest and play!
     In a country we've never been to?
         Coaxing a suntan
         Under a brazen sky?
     For me it’s nearly as terrific
         As your astonished eyes
         When you weep for joy!

     Here, it’s all beauty made-to-order,
     Deluxe suites! Voluptuous babes!

         The poolside bars
         Named for Bollywood stars
     Seem exotic but also like home.
         The ‘rents will drink rum
         While we kids have our fun
     Tapping icons on iphones with minutes that roam.
         There’s cable TV,
         Free soap, Jacuzzi,
     And a fridge packed with liquors and beers.
         The coolness of the tropics
         Guarantees some hot optics
     As native calls ring in our ears.

     Here, it's all beauty made-to-order,
     Deluxe suites! Voluptuous babes!

         Look at those catamarans go!
         Hang-gliders lifting like snow.
     I’m in flying mood, how about you?
         To satisfy
         Your every whim
     Surfers draw them like gulls from the blue.
         With a smirk and a snort
         At a line, or retort,
     We’ll flip the skateboard of the world around,
         And stare down the sun
         As he sets at a run—
         My sister, lover,
         Your brother and other—
     Then we’ll burn our green gold on the town.

     Here, it's all beauty made-to-order,
     Deluxe suites! Voluptuous babes!

     
                                        D. LeH. Sweet

Stephen Lennhoff, "Rhythm & Blues"

Film Review


BOY-O-RAMA

Why Rhythm & Blues hasn’t become a cult classic by now should be a mystery to anyone interested in the gay scene and its cultural by-products. A hilarious send-up of the world of male escorts in 1990s London, Rhythm & Blues (2000) was released around the time of the feel-good musical comedy Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and perhaps suffered by comparison. Originally attacked for bucking the trend toward uplifting, heart-warming stories that seem moralizing today, Stephen Lennhoff’s street-smart spoof replaces syrupy piety with pure camp and a dash of raw Warholiana—while also avoiding the soft-porn diversions of a Bruce La Bruce. Oddly enough, the film (already ten years old) evokes such classic 1970s heterosex comedies as No Sex, Please, We’re British! and the Carry On series with their stock-in-trade of sex-crazed pranksters played by the likes of Kenneth Williams and Leslie Philips (famous for that lecherous “helloooo!” line).  But in Rhythm & Blues the heroes are all poofters, the dialogues are cleverer, and the plot is smartly stepped-up with queer twists and cheeky tweaks à la John Waters.  And while no Divine graces its scenes with her raunchy magnetism, an irresistibly silly cast of characters takes up the slack, enjoying a fun-filled romp through the world of rent-boys, sex shops, bad art collecting, and other crimes against respectability.

When pretty-boy John (played by Paul Blackthorne of “24” and “ER” fame) shows up one day in the classic cruising grounds of a London cemetery, he is immediately sized-up by two outrageous drag queens who’ve already staked their turf.  But the new kid on the block wants to make a bigger splash.  Before the queens can get their chops in, John has teamed up with Byron (Ian Henderson), a motor-scootering skinhead and hustler who persuades his new friend to join the Boys Galore Escort Agency, in dire need of “a few good men.”  The desperate proprietors Mitzi (Gary Fairhall) and Bethsheeba [sic] (Sue Tilling) are quick to recognize John’s earning potential.  Within minutes, John and Byron are dispatched to the London mansion of one Bad Daddy, the agency’s most extravagant and beloved customer (Angus MacInnes of Hellboy, Witness, Star Wars).  Meanwhile, a murderer has claimed a second victim from London’s club scene, grabbing the headlines and spreading fear through the gay community.  Who might the murderer be?  Rest assured, the sex-workers at Boys Galore have all been thoroughly vetted!  But there’s something about Bethsheeba’s latest recruit—too perfect by half—that worries her.  If only she could put her finger on it….   

            Later, Bad Daddy holds court in a sumptuous setting of fine antiques, objets d’art, first editions, and two intimates: his full-time partner, French puppeteer and would-be designer Jean-Claude and an ex-RAF officer named Harold, starved for new blood but looking for love.  Byron’s and John’s arrival prompts a very fine discourse from Bad Daddy on the culture of rent boys, or what he calls “rhythm and blues”:  an exchange system in which rich, cultured men like himself raise up the more beautiful, teachable boys from the flotsam of everyday life.  John seems ideally suited for Bad Daddy’s pedagogy, while Byron, with his rough-trade manners, is beyond hope.  “Stop interrupting me!”  Daddy finally shouts in the midst of his squabbling company, “Can’t you see I’m pontificating?  Do people interrupt the Pope when he pontificates?  This is MY Vatican!”  Ignoring him, Byron leaves the room to go to the toilet where he promptly shoots up. 

A wild night of frivolity, drugs, private avowals and promised favors ensues. John struts his stuff in a private photo shoot and discusses philosophy with Harold (What IS better?  Blakean friendship or Nietzschean will to power?)  More rent boys are required; the agency is short, but some new boys are quickly rounded up, interviewed, and delivered to Bad Daddy’s badass address.  This doesn’t prevent a progressive gay activist from trying to spoil the fun, but he’s quickly identified and rejected once Mitzi and Bethsheeba ferret out his hostile views of the British Monarchy.  There’ll be no political interrogation of this agency’s swanky clientele! 

And still another gay man’s mutilated body has popped up!  Could it be the work of John—that seductive philosopher?  Or Byron the addict (done because they was too menny)?  Or perhaps Bad Daddy himself, indulging his cynical erotics of “rhythm and blues”?  But now it’s time for a puppet show: the ridiculous “Garden of Love,” Jean-Claude's unintentionally funny allegory of failed artistic pretentions.  The pageant elicits only eye-rolling and yawns from the party until the unexpected arrival of Byron, who, in a violent, drug-induced fit, attacks the puppets—and DROPS DEAD!  Now the fun really begins!

Promoted as a film “with the good taste not to have any,” one could also say that Rhythm & Blues has the good sense to keep us guessing and amused with its boisterous mix of ribaldry, irony and grace.  With a deft, witty script by Michael Jones and original songs by Marc Almond, Rhythm & Blues offers a refreshing, yet sly, tribute to sex, friendship, and male beauty that almost any fairy-minded person will enjoy.  The film deserves a second look.