Although a religious man, Moufid begs to disagree with certain of his countrymen in Iran: in his view, what consenting adults do privately nothing concerns us, no matter whether we disagree or disapprove – unless others be harmed. And provided whatever it is, remain strictly private.
Again, Moufid’s lifelong practice of ballet dancing is not, perhaps, an activity that would necessarily win him influential friends back home in Ispahan. But, as a respectable family man with three young sons, uninformed criticism of the ballet leaves him cold.
That said, there are lines, heavy black lines, to be drawn.
Owing to circumstances back home, not to speak of being chunky, Moufid has never attained a level above that of rank amateur: he can turn but a meager two pirouettes, teeters like a ship at sea in adagio passages Samodurov in Ashton’s “Devil’s Holiday”), and balks at every double cabriole (Jacques d’Amboise, Moudfid’s hero, at 0,04 and 0,38 seconds), nor does his batterie (at 0,10 and 0,14 secs.) exceed the Royale.
Therefore, standing in awe before those who can, he appreciates the efficient, understated approach taught by the Opera School at Paris, which has historically eschewed flim-flam and parasitical gesture, to focus on getting the essentials right.
Moreover, as Moufid dislikes sport, particularly professional sport, it will be no surprise to learn that he had been ignoring the ghastly goings-on at the Paris Olympics, between wasting billions in public funds, setting up 44,000 (sic) cages along pavements, bringing in 1,700 foreign policemen including the Shin Beth, the Israeli equivalent of MI5, to maintain “order,” and banning the Russians – for starters.
It now transpires that the opening “celebrations” if that is the word, were so appallingly indecent, indeed openly Satanic, that the Olympic Committee has yanked the broadcast from Youtube, a number of countries have censored the images, while Catholics, Orthodox and Muslims abroad are simply flabbergasted by the madness on display.
Turns out that the “celebrations’” artistic director, a certain Thomas Jolly, whom no-one has ever heard of but who is now presumably giggling all the way to the bank, has a Wikipedia entry as long as your arm and seems to have specialised in a) plugging-oh-so-quietly into the Great and Good and b) weird productions of what he calls “Shakespeare” lasting 13 hours at a stretch. Not to be outdone by Marina Abramovic’s Balkan Baroque perhaps?
Anyway, Moufid may dislike sport, but he does keep his nose to the grindstone on World Events. This morning, as he perused SONAR 21, Larry Johnson’s newsletter-cum-broadcast, he suddenly came across this, as part of a mimed parody of The Last Supper.
To the right of the two teenies in red, the er, inadequately-covered individual in black mini-shorts happens to be German Louvet, principal dancer of the Paris Opera. At first, I thought it a hoax. Unless I be greatly mistaken, it is not ; friends in France have just drawn to my attention that the individual with whom M. Louvet is involved, Pablo Pillaud-Vivien, refers to this on his unfortunate X account as a “Magnificent Last Supper.”
It gets worse. On the X account of LeDirectInfo—scroll down), one sees M. Louvet suddenly turn towards the small child at his left, and staring at him, slowly, deliberately mime the gesture of slitting a throat.
According to third-party posts on Twitter account of the Swiss anthropologist Jean-Dominique Michel, this gesture is known to the satanic paedophile milieu as a symbol for child-murder.
Try to shovel this one under the rug.
Now, in 1997, Patrick Dupond, Ballet Director at the Paris Opera, was demoted and then fired for far less: he went AWOL to sit on the Cannes Film Festival Jury rather than dancing his appointed rôle in a ballet.
These friends have also drawn the new Section 222-32 of the French Criminal Code to my attention:
“Exhibitionism (l’exhibition sexuelle) imposed upon others, in a place in full sight of the public, is punishable by a sentence of up to one year’s imprisonment and finds of up to 15,000 Euro.
In the light of M. Pillaud-Vivien’s plainly excellent connections, reward rather than prosecution will likely follow. By the way, on that same Twitter account, Pillaud-Vivien refers to those Frenchman who wish to prevent persons suspected of violent propensities (known as “fichés S” or suspect to State Security) from standing for election as “Nitwits” (“cons”—a notoriously coarse term in French)—because “the S lists are s’posed to be secret.”
This, in relation to the June Parliamentary elections, where a fellow by the name of Raphael Arnault, who apparently appears on three separate police agencies’ “S” list, was actually elected MP in the Vaucluse département on the France Insoumise slate.
Well, Col. Tony Shafer is wont to cheerily refer to the French as “Surrender Monkeys.” For those of us out here on the wrong side of Europe, the surrender is plainly to something rather grimmer.
