Cruel World Festival 2025

It seemed like the universe was conspiring against me when I attended the Cruel World festival for the third time this year. Everything from the weather (unseasonably cool and rainy) to my plane (late) to my bus (also late) to my Airbnb (disgustingly dirty) went wrong. I even showed up late to see the first act I was interested in, Midge Ure, because I read the schedule wrong. (Fortunately, I’d already seen him in New York). Festival security even confiscated my umbrella at the entrance! 

And I’ll explain why that was a problem.

You see, I’d been planning this trip for several months! The one day I needed the weather to be good, it sucked! Several British performers even apologized for “bringing the British weather.” 

And I have a history of bad weather with Cruel World.

The first time I attended the festival, two years ago, Iggy Pop’s set was cut short and Siouxsie didn’t perform at all because of “dangerous” weather (i.e., lightning). 

 And I’m still pissed off about it!

After I was at the concert for about three hours, the rain stopped. Still, three hours of steady drizzle can be pretty fucking annoying!

In spite of the rain, I was happy to be among my people: fans of ’80s music. I even shed a tear, ironically, during Midge Ure’s “Dancing with Tears in My Eyes.”

Some other things I made note of:

• Alison Moyet lost weight!
• The Buzzcocks performed without their original lead singer Pete Shelley, who died in 2018. (Original member Steve Diggle handled lead vocals.) They tore through their set so fast, it was if they were hoping that people wouldn’t notice that the guy singing wasn’t Pete Shelley.
• Madness sounded great and their saxophonist, Lee Thompson, took off his clothes.
• Devo has great visuals.
• The Go-Gos have great harmonies, but they played a different arrangement of “Our Lips Are Sealed,” one of the greatest pop songs ever written. (I suppose bands get tired of playing even great songs.)
• Bernard Sumner of New Order may have a limited vocal range, but the band makes up for it with innovative synthesizer and drum machine programming and by using the bass as a lead instrument.
• I was pleasantly surprised by some bands I haven’t seen before (Blancmange, OMD).

On a more positive note, I finally figured out where the Rose Bowl's free shuttle buses are, so I didn’t have to walk a mile (to avoid congestion pricing) and then wait a half hour for a Lyft. 

If I come back next year, I’ll stay at the Airbnb I stayed at last year (which was immaculate). 

And maybe, if I’m really lucky, it won’t rain.

Midge Ure

Blancmange

Alison Moyet

OMD's Andy McCluskey

OMD's Paul Humphreys

Madness

Devo

The Go-Go's

New Order

Synergy

Today’s word is “synergy.”

You see, in an ideal world, one thing is supposed to promote another thing and so on and so on and so on. Just like that that old shampoo commercial.

For example, if you like my blog, on Saturday, May 10 at 9pm, I’m kicking off the fourth year of my monthly stand-up comedy show, Eat Drink Laugh, at Pangea.

Advance tickets available here:

https://cur8.com/23871/project/131620

If you like that, you can watch some of my old stand-up comedy sets, song parodies, short films and my one-man show, "Take My Job, Please, Confessions of a Stand-up Doorman" (a.k.a. "Doorman Confidential") on my YouTube page, here:

https://www.youtube.com/paulhallasy1

And did I mention that I wrote a screenplay called All the Bands in the '80s, which I’m trying to get produced?

It’s coming soon to an Indiegogo site near you, but in the meantime, here’s a trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFwwiOl5WAU

But if you really want to know my back story, I suggest you read my book, New York Trilogy,

which you can buy here:

https://www.iuniverse.com/BookStore/BookDetails/112312-New-York-Trilogy

And if you liked my book, you might want to take the audio walking tour of the East Village I created, New York Trilogy: A Walking Tour, which you can buy here: https://voicemap.me/tour/new-york-city/new-york-trilogy-a-walking-tour

And there you have it! The complete Paul Hallasy/Gay Curmudgeon experience!

Now go wash your hair!

The New Hunks

There’s been a recent spate of movies that put women and female sexuality front and center: Babygirl, The Substance and Anora.

At the same time (and what’s equally noteworthy), is that there’s been a new crop of young male actors who are often the objects of female (or gay male) attention and who defy the muscular stereotype of yore.

In Babygirl, Nicole Kidman plays a powerful executive who falls under the spell of a kinky young intern, played by Harris Dickinson. While it’s somewhat shocking to see an A-list actress like Kidman completely naked (see also Demi Moore in The Substance), what may be equally noteworthy is the attention paid to Dicksinon, particularly in an extended slow dance scene to the tune of George Michael’s “Father Figure.”

Harris Dickinson in Babygirl

In Queer, Drew Starkey is the object gay writer Daniel Craig's attention. I’ve already written about how the camera lingers over Starkey’s naked body, illustrating Craig’s desire.

Drew Starkey in Queer

The New Hunk is tall and lean (and occasionally tattooed), unlike the steroid-enhanced gym bunnies of just a few years ago. (Hi, John Cena!)

Of course, the prototype of the New Hunk may be Jacob Elordi, who burst onto the scene in Euphoria and subsequently was the obsession of the nerdy character played by Barry Keoghan in Saltburn. (To be fair, Keoghan’s character in the movie is actually bisexual.)

Jacob Elordi in Saltburn

What’s also notable about this new crop of sexually frank films is that many of them were directed by women (Babygirl’s Halina Reijn, The Substance's Coralie Fargeat, Saltburn’s Emerald Fennell) or gay men (Queer’s Luca Guadagnino*). They also tend to be produced by upstart, independent companies like A24 and Neon.

All of these films represent a welcome departure from the typical heterosexual male point of view.

*While Luca Guadagnino has been in a long-term relationship with Ferdinando Cito Filomarino, he has not publicly identified his sexuality.

My Problem with Bill Maher

I was afraid to watch.

Even before I saw last Friday’s episode of Real Time with Bill Maher, the comments I was reading on social media about the fact that Maher had met with Donald Trump and had Steve Bannon as his guest gave me pause.

But I had to see it for myself.

I’ve been a longtime fan of Real Time. Since it first began on HBO, it’s been “appointment television” for me and—full disclosure—I even submitted a writing package to his producers. But lately I’ve been having mixed feelings about the show. Some of Maher’s guests (Benjamin Netanyahu, Elon Musk, and the aforementioned Steve Bannon, to name a few) have been what I would consider to be beyond the pale. (Steve Bannon just got out of jail, for God’s sake!) Real Time has become the talk show equivalent of Dancing with the Stars: where disgraced politicians and other public figures go to rehabilitate their public image.

Sure enough, after his opening monologue (which, I must admit, made me laugh a few times), Maher had a direct-to-camera discussion of his meeting with Trump, in which he basically said that Trump in private was not the crazy person he often appears to be in public.

Two questions:

What difference does it make that Trump isn’t crazy in private when his public behavior directly led to the January 6 insurrection, among other things?

Secondly, what did Maher hope to accomplish by meeting with Trump? What did he think would happen? That Trump would apologize for his behavior and correct course? (Trump did admit to Maher that he lost the 2020 election—in private—but, significantly, has still refused to do so in public.)

Or, as some have suggested (and I have theorized), was he just trying to avoid being targeted by Trump as others, such as ABC and CBS, have been? (I just read that Maher was being sued for defamation by right-wing lunatic Laura Loomer.)

In normal times, I would admire Maher’s attempt to be “fair and balanced,” but these are not normal times. Trump is in a category by himself in terms of his lies, corruption and the damage he has done to this country, and he’s remade the entire Republican Party in his image.

If you want to have a conservative viewpoint on your show, how about inviting Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger? (To be fair, Kinzinger has been on his show.) I’m sure I might disagree with them on many policy issues, but at least they’re not crazy! Any Republican with a spine has either left the party or left politics altogether. That’s why it’s impossible to treat Maher’s meeting with Trump as if it were normal.

Whether it’s the economy (on-again, off-again tariffs), foreign policy (cozying up to Putin while alienating our allies), the environment (eliminating clean energy initiatives while cozying up to the oil and coal industries) or civil liberties (disappearing legal residents of the United States without due process and attacking law firms, universities and now even private citizens who served in his first administration), every day seems to bring a new disaster. (And don’t get me started on Trump’s cabinet, all of whom were chosen solely for their loyalty to him.)

But here’s the thing. Sometimes Maher is funny and sometimes he does get it right on the issues. I don’t want to make this a test of ideological purity, but I’ve noticed that Maher doesn’t like being contradicted. (He has a severe blind spot on the war in Gaza, to state just one example.)

But I can sympathize with the position Maher finds himself in as a comedian.

As a comedian myself, I have often struggled with how to talk about Trump (or whether to talk about him at all) because practically every action he’s taken has been catastrophic, and there have been so many of them.

I’ve enjoyed James Austin Johnson’s Trump impression on Saturday Night Live, just as I enjoyed Alec Baldwin’s before him. So, it’s not impossible to joke about Trump (and I love a good impression).

But lately I find Rachel Maddow’s withering sarcasm to be, perhaps, more appropriate.

THREE-YEAR ANNIVERSARY Eat Drink Laugh at Pangea, Saturday April 5 at 9pm

I know what you're thinking. "Hey, Paul, how come you haven't done any actual writing lately?" Well, what do you think stand-up is? You think I make that shit up onstage?

Besides, I need to put asses in seats. Fifty seats, to be precise. (OK, 40. Ten of those seats are reserved for comedians.) And this blog has gotten 166,922 page views as of this writing. So, if all of you show up, I could sell out Pangea 3,338.44 times! That's 278.20 shows, or enough shows for the next 23.18 years! (Granted, not all of you live in New York City. And I wouldn't want to fly, what with Elon Musk firing all our air traffic controllers. But I digress...)

And, oh yeah, it's Eat Drink Laugh's THREE-YEAR ANNIVERSARY! So there's that. And I hear that "Cher" will be making a special appearance. In fact, there'll be two "Cher"s!

So get your asses down to Pangea next Saturday, April 5 at 9pm! All 50 of them!

I mean, 40.

Advance tickets available here: https://cur8.com/23871/project/130494

A Letter to the New York Times

To the Editor:

“These Days, It’s ‘Sexy’ to Be a Republican” is one of the most nauseatingly tone-deaf articles I’ve ever read, even by the Styles section’s admittedly low standards.

Is it “sexy” to cut off funding for USAID, as Trump has done, consigning thousands of poor people to certain death?

Is it “glamorous” for Musk, an unelected private citizen, to arbitrarily fire hundreds of career civil servants and shut down vital government agencies?

Is it “cool” that there have been six plane crashes since Trump took office, that he’s fired people from the already understaffed FAA, that he’s endangered our lives and national security with his cabinet appointments and foreign policy decisions, and that he continues to break the law and violate the Constitution, even as a convicted felon?

I’m not surprised that the people mentioned in this article are all under 30. That means they’re all too young to remember a world before Trump (let alone Nixon and Watergate).

And how could any self-respecting gay man support Trump when he’s made a career of scapegoating trans people?

God help us!

Paul Hallasy

New York, NY

Eat Drink Laugh at Pangea, Saturday, March 1 at 9pm

Oh, hey, it's me again. I'm producing/hosting a stand-up comedy show called Eat Drink Laugh at Pangea on Saturday, March 1 at 9pm. It's the perfect antidote to the shit show we're witnessing on a daily basis. And you know I'll have something to say about that as well!

Eat Drink Laugh at Pangea, Friday, January 24 at 9pm

Oh, hey, all you 150K+ readers. You might be interested to know that I’ve been producing/hosting a monthly stand-up comedy show called Eat Drink Laugh at Pangea since April, 2022. If you like my curmudgeonry on the page (OK, screen), you’ll love it on the stage!

Oh yeah, I’m also looking for a producer/investors for my screenplay, All the Bands in the ’80s, but that's another blog post!