?

I used to swim at the public baths, with its completely unisex changing facilities; separate men’s and women’s showers, obviously, but apart from that, just a great prairie of slam-door cubicles. Now I use the pool at the local gym, and the men and women change communally, but in total seclusion from each other. These are some of the things I see men do, when amongst men only:

* use the puny hairdryers to dry all body areas. Under the arms; between the toes; across the hairy chests and backs. One massive regular pulls open the waistband of his briefs, sticks the nozzle of the dryer right in there, and wiggles it around a bit as a sort of finishing flourish.

* preen, epically and unselfconsciously. This really surprised me, and I think I’m quite vain. I get mesmerised watching all the dudes make imperceptible changes to their very short, gelled hairdos before the mirrors. Quite a few arrive, get half undressed, and then just stand there for ages looking gormlessly at their muscles, or their nipples, or whatever, I don’t know.

* make noises in the showers. They’re not communal here; it’s a series of individual cubicles with opaque curtains arranged around the sides of a square room. You walk in and look about for a free one, and you hear these strange, mournful sounds. People forgetting themselves and letting go in a tiny semi-private space, I suppose. Deep sighs, little whimpers, low moans. Sometimes it sounds as if you might pull back a curtain to see what’s wrong and find a beautiful, dying foal under the shower instead of a lonely, nude man wringing out his swimming trunks.

Looks I’ve been looking at

skin girls, 1979

I keep homing in on him in bookshops lately. Collar under, collar over, spotted tie, lopsided round neck, peek of braces.






























Friends tell me there’s nothing to admire about Vincent Gallo, but I like everything he does.















Nanette Newman in The Rebel













Bangles, skinny tie, big hair, and so on.














Fabio Testi

Rock Hudson, Poundland

Come here to the sofa at once and join me on the horizontal to watch my important collection of films.

First: Embryo, a tremendously stupid medical thriller starring Rock Hudson, Barbara Carrera, Roddy McDowall and Diane Ladd, which I bought at Poundland last year.

Poundland is where I go to buy Brylcreem, and sometimes biscuits, but I also use it to expand my cinematic horizons. Because what happens if you only watch what you’re advised to? You carry around this burdensome, deforming notion of Good Taste all the time, and you get all het up about whether you’re watching the right things, and whether you’ll be capable of saying something interesting about them when you’re asked at dinner parties. I get invited to surprisingly few dinner parties, but even if that all changes and I end up doing them every night of the week, I doubt anyone will ever solicit an opinion about Embryo from me. So if you read on, don’t be expecting much help with the dinner parties.

What’s far more likely is that you’ll be scarred with an indelible mental image of Rock Hudson toilet-training an adult Barbara Carrera, because that notion does crop up during my evaluation of the film.

It’s amazing how someone can implant an idea like that in your head, and it proves almost impossible to dislodge. It could be this scenario of Rock Hudson painstakingly toilet-training Barbara Carrera, or it could be something closer to home. I still think that I may have ‘child-bearing hips’, for example. One day when I was in the Fourth Form, I was waiting in the lunch queue outside the Dining Hall, and a boy called Ben Mayes walked up to me and said quite casually, “Hah, you’ve got child-bearing hips.” Looking back, I doubt he had any idea what ‘child-bearing hips’ might be. I expect he’d just heard his Mum saying it, and inferred somehow that it would be a pretty disillusioning thing to say to a pubescent boy. In fact, I am pretty much straight-up-and-down in the hip area, and always have been. But I do look at myself in the mirror sometimes, even all these years later, and wonder.

So anyway, that’s what may be in store once I get started on Embryo.

Just setting the tone.