Under Embargo Until 26.01.2025 23:53: Smoke Rings
Dreaming of Pierre Clementi, reminiscing with Karl Glusman
Alex wanted to rewatch Malena. Andreas The Piano Teacher. Philip wasn’t listening, concentrating on sketching a replica of The Secretary DVD poster using Anna’s eye pencils. Two long legs wrapped in stockings, hands clasping at the ankles. He widened his eyes as he did light touch ups, something in his memory jolted by his own work. Anna insisted we need to watch The Dangerous Sex Date and Anatomy of Hell just to see Rocco Siffredi’s dick. Stefan and the girls were too lost in their conversation over cigarettes on the balcony to respond. L and Billy in the bathroom together and apparently deaf. Guessing they were comparing sizes. Once again talking to breeze blocks. We settled for rewatching Belle de Jour, accepting we’ll all watch whatever we want by ourselves in the evening. Here we were again, all ten of us, but this time it was Pierre Clementi’s every single move we followed.
“If you want,” one of us would whisper at random points throughout the film, “I won’t charge you,” the other would follow.
Stefan stood up and began mimicking Marcel in his first scene. Hand on his loosened belt, one heavy and assured step at a time. He stood in front of me: “Let’s get to it.”
I smiled then turned my gaze back to the screen and Pierre Clementi’s teeth.
Phillip carried on, progressively shaving one of Anna’s pencils into extinction. Lines and lines and lines and in the end he somehow brought them together to mirror me, writing my name under the figure he drew. Caught in a moment of rest, when I’ve trailed off somewhere far away in my mind, imagining the future and the past. I was lying on the sofa, one foot on the floor, the other raised and tilted on the cushions.
Minutes to go before the film is over, Andreas has his turn to break the silence.
“Do you think Jesus Christ was pissed off dying without fucking first?”
Baby Pierre Clementi wasn’t what I had in mind when I signed up for Christina Newland’s Visconti season. This might be the longest I’ve ever spent at the BFI outside the LFF. Films I’ve watched: Ossessione, La Terra Trema, Rocco and his Brothers, The Leopard, The Damned, and Ludwig. A young Pierre Clementi appears in Visconti’s adaptation of Tomasi di Lampedusa’s only novel as Francesco Paolo, one of the Prince’s sons, all cheekbone beauty and a playful demeanour foreshadowing roles to come. Every Visconti film is an endurance test, almost by default two and a half hours long at a minimum. In his films, men are agents of desire - walking erections frankly - capturing male transgression and sex hunger while reflecting the effects of a shifting world.
So, Clementi back on the brain.
I remember three years ago MoMA showed the films he directed to coincide with the English language publication of his memoir, A Few Personal Messages. His films are diaristic, capturing life around him, and poetic, fever dream experiments. I remember working long days for frieze week and heading to the BFI at night for a very forgettable edition of the festival, bar Mia Hansen-Løve’s One Fine Morning, which Norman and I could not stop talking about.
I remember fifteen years ago there was a Clementi retrospective at Anthology Film Archives. I was back home, straight out of my first year at university and bored out of my mind. I had long lost contact with everyone I had first watched Belle de Jour with. I asked Mark, who was in the year above me in high school and whom I’d occasionally hang with when we were young and both out of other options, for a ride to the amphitheatre to have beers after sunset overseeing the town. Two cans in, we disappeared behind the pine trees. I watched Wheel of Ashes, then fell asleep watching The Diary of an Innocent Boy later that night, the start of an aborted personal film festival. I didn’t finish that film until 2023 in a double bill with Belle de Jour I watched with Norman.
He played Christ and The Devil, innocent and deviant, charming and dangerous, the outlaw, the rebel, the rock-n-roll star. He’s the personification of the 60s, retroactively referred to as an embodiment of the sacred and the profane, like he’s been dreamed up into existence by Pasolini. The 60s ended and in 1972 Clementi was arrested on charges of drug possession and spent seventeen months behind bars in Italy. What came out of his experience in prison was the memoir. I remember I haven’t read it. I do not remember why.
Philip spent half an hour trying to show me how to blow smoke rings, but it all came out as a puff of air.
“Draw your tongue at the back of your mouth…No, no, no, stick your lips out into an ‘O’…You gotta go faster, pick up the pace…You’re hopeless!”
We were sitting on his bike, in matching socks, shorts and t-shirts of blue, black and blue again. It was still too cold for our attire but we were ready to get rid of winter at the first sight of sun. We were sat facing each other, my legs over his thighs and dangling on both sides.
“Is it just me or is the earth calling out for our feet, anticipating we’ll slide off and crash off to one side?”
He double checks the packet between us for a last cigarette and crunches it in his fist.
“I’ve no idea what you’re on about.”
He pulled me closer a moment later when I felt a shiver on my spine and draped me with his denim jacket.
We hadn’t seen each other in almost three months, typical start to the year. The days are too short, it is too cold and school’s on so by the time he’d ride over he’d need to head straight back.
“It was mad! He sported a raging boner in front of the crowd…I’m not kidding, he was hard as steel in his speedos when he dived in.”
He was telling me everything I missed over the last three months and kept returning to the subject of Andreas taking part in the epiphany in January.
“He said he’ll blend with the riff raff to show them at last what a real man should look like.”
He put on a pair of white speedos to show off and dove right in the sea as soon as the priest threw the cross in the water.
Philip and the lads all drove there together and Andreas changed in his speedos in the car, prepped behind the blinds for his big appearance.
He was angry at just how out of shape most of the men were.
“What’s the point of doing this if you’re 55 and fugly?”
I didn’t think he needed an answer, so I looked into the distance, spotting multiple rooftops I recognised across town. It was mostly all the places I had had sex in. That’s S’s place. That’s K’s. A and K live in that one there. I thought of pointing them out to him, something more to share since last time we saw each other, then realised he doesn’t know any of these people and their names would be meaningless to him.
“Why don’t we go knock on all their doors and I can see who they are,” I imagined him responding, “then I can judge if they’re fit or not and whether we can all fuck together.”
I exhaled as if I had just taken a puff in.
“But how did he stay hard? Wasn’t it freezing?”
“To be fair, he lost it as soon as he went in the water, but he was still at half mast when he rose out of the water. He followed through on what he said last year.”
Andreas was a good swimmer, so the entire event was over in under three minutes. He emerged out of the water like a sea god in his white speedos, kissed the cross and climbed out. The lads gathered around him, hard pats on the back and slaps and kisses on the head.
“It was talk of the town immediately, everyone was pushing to get to the front, to see the dude with the huge cock that retrieved the cross.”
Philip said that Andreas was surprised at how light it was to retrieve, imagined the material would be heavy to warrant a genuine competition and genuine bragging rights.
The clergy weren’t impressed. Neither were the bunch that clutched their non-existent pearls. “You know, the people who haven’t had sex in the missionary position while looking away from each other during the junta.”
Towel wrapped around his shoulders, Andreas hopped in his trousers and they were off to his place.
“You missed out on a dissolute day!”
Somehow, the best parties were always the ones I missed out on.
Fifteen years later, I can’t look away from Karl Glusman in Please Baby Please, I too want to lose control. He’s one of the few actors working today making interesting choices, from Gaspar Noe’s Love to The Bikeriders. His take on a greaser and gang leader is a queered up one, played somewhere between Marlon Brando’s Stanley Kowalski and a Tom of Finland character. That he is billed in the trailer as “The Irresistible Karl Glusman” is a wink of sorts from the director letting prospective viewers know that she’s in on the fact that he’s drop dead gorgeous.
Please Baby Please is a take on the B movie, a take on the musical, and a take on the experimental films you see at film festivals. Its internal compass is unclear. It’s about bisexuality and about the confines of heterosexuality and marriage and how we all, no matter how normie we might be, need an element of danger. Or rather, how we’re all willing to give into danger when he has the face and body of Karl Glusman, choosing to either be him or be with him.
So, I’ve been thinking about the leather jacket-clad Karl Glusman in his Johnny Strabler cap, and I’ve been thinking about greasers and bikeriders and how we just don’t have much a bike riding culture in London even though the lads riding said bikes have allegedly become the #1 crush for people who are really into books.
I’ve been thinking about Karl Glusman and I remember me and Phillip climbing on the back of Andreas and Alex’s motorbikes. I remember the wind on my skin, the smell of petrol and the exhaustion fumes, I remember us not wearing helmets, I remember Alex speeding, I remember my arms wrapped around his waist, I remember his scent, Jean Paul Gaultier, which was what we all wore, blended with our own unique signature of sweat and teen hormones. I remember our boxer shorts frothing over our trousers.
I’ve been thinking about Karl Glusman in his skintight white mesh tee and I remember Anna: “I want a man that will hit me then fuck me like his life depends on it…and me.” I remember her saying she masturbated to the poster of Marlon Brando in The Wild One she had plastered opposite her bed. I remember texting her at the beginning of my final year in high school, the first time Mark and I went out for beers: “I sat on his motorbike and instantly got turned on.”
That day Philip and I had sex three times. Our small abs, just about beginning to show if we flexed hard, were glued together. Our lips were chapped from going down on each other. We forgot our socks on and had our caps on backwards, hair sticking with sweat underneath. I ran out of condoms, so we decided to go out. We put on each other’s trunks. Both our t-shirts were dirty from roughhousing out and about on his bike.
We split the largest popcorn at the cinema and only then realised we hadn’t eaten all day. At intermission, we decided we can’t be bothered to go back. We stepped on our cigarette buds and went home and watched The Dreamers again. We wanted to see Eva Green dangle a cigarette at the edge of her mouth and that scene where Louis Garrel sits at the kitchen table wearing only his green jacket. Stefan was so obsessed with Theo, he had been on a mission to find a jacket like it, showing sales assistants at every store a printed still from the film but turned empty handed each time. We left the film playing at a low volume and had sex again but couldn’t finish.
The week after we met up at track and fucked until our legs ached and we had to ask Alex and Andreas to pick us up on the mopeds.
January is the month I focus on my body and collect bruises like medals, a garden variety attempt at a stronger physique. So I’m jumping boxes and lifting barbells and once again trying - and failing - to maintain the perfect posture for every exercise. I’m pushing and pulling and running on treadmills and I think of the most exhilarating cigarettes I’ve ever had and all the beds and beaches I smoked them at. I’m sweating at an underground room full of other men perspiring and I’m thinking of this year’s annual New Year’s Day expedition to the RA and the sculpted figures on show by Michelangelo, the muscles on their backs and their thighs which look like they’d tear open the threads of any modern day pair of trousers. I’m thinking about the RA and their choice to put on a dick measuring contest between Michelangelo and Leonardo (and Raphael, sort of) from c. 1504, but somehow produced a substandard exhibition. I’m thinking about nudity; nudity in film and how the intimacy coordinator lot where unhappy with Anora and won’t rest until there is no sexy films in the world and I’m thinking about nudity in books and how I’ve bought so many books (full of sex scenes, if my research hasn’t failed me) in December I still haven’t read.
Andreas’ comment came back to me when earlier this month I spent an afternoon with The Escaped Cock, a novel by D.H. Lawrence that along with some of his lesser known books, like Mornings In Mexico, I found in secondhand shops but never got around to reading till now. It’s a story only someone as horny as Lawrence would dare write, in which he narrates what happened to Jesus Christ after his death and resurrection. The answer could only ever be rejecting the role he had in life and discovering the joys of sex:
“He felt the braze of his manhood and his power rise up in his loins, magnificent.”
“The shock of desire went through him, shock after shock, so that he wondered if it were another sort of death: but full of magnificence.”
“His death and his passion of sacrifice were all as nothing to him now.”
The Escaped Cock was the author’s preferred title for the story (usually published as The Man Who Died). I remember reading in a Lawrence biography that said Lawrence insisted the title wasn’t a pun for Christ’s sexual awakening. I remember being told trying to decipher authorial intent - especially once the author is dead - is pointless. My interpretation is that Lawrence was a walking erection himself and thought the resurrection would unavoidably see Christ discovering his own: “I am risen!”
We’re five years away from the centenary of his death, which I foresee will be celebrated not dissimilarly to Franz Kafka’s in 2024 (that is if Brits choose to fund literature for a change).
READ IT BEFORE THE FILM ADAPTATION DROPS: “…the blind, frightened frenzy of a boy's first passion. Quick and frenzied his young body quivered naked on hers, blind, for a minute. Then it lay quite still, as if dead. - D.H. Lawrence, The Escaped Cock
A very serious discussion at quarter to 11 the night after Epiphany:
“Can you filter Mubi films by length?…of dick?”
“Now that’s a metric I can get behind.”