(The Dirk Diggler section has some plain talk about men’s bodies — penises here, penises there, penises everywhere — so some readers might want to skip that section.)

Yesterday morning, the cheap men’s aftershave of the 1960s, Hai Karate, with an ad campaign that’s hard to forget (nerdy guys karate-chopping away hot models who were irrestistibly drawn to them by the powerful fumes of their Hai Karate). And then this morning, at the tail of an elaborate  character-rich dream, the dream me discovered he was actually the son of Dirk Diggler, the supremely porn-named porn star character in two movies (the mockumentary The Dirk Diggler Story and the dramatic narrative film Boogie Nights).

(#1) The Hai Karate logo: the kanji tō ‘east’ (as in Tōkyō) plus the rising sun of Japan

(#2) Mark Wahlberg as DD in Boogie Nights

The scent of Hai Karate. It’s not pheromones, but a citrus aroma suspended in alcohol, that drives the ladies crazy:

(#3) 1967 print ad; you can watch a 1970s UK tv ad with model Valerie Leon here

Hai Karate was a budget aftershave sold in the United States and the United Kingdom from the 1960s through to the 1980s. It was reintroduced in the United Kingdom under official licence in late 2014 by Healthpoint Ltd.

The fragrance was originally developed by the Leeming division of Pfizer and launched in 1967. As well as the original Hai Karate fragrance, versions named Oriental Lime and Oriental Spice were soon introduced. It competed successfully with such other brands as Aqua Velva, Old Spice, Jaguar, English Leather, British Sterling, Dante, and Brut before fading away in the 1980s.

Hai Karate is best remembered today for its television adverts and its marketing plan, with a small self-defence instruction booklet sold with each bottle to help wearers fend off women. In the UK spots, a stereotypical nerd covers himself in Hai Karate and is promptly seduced by a female passer-by played by British starlet Valerie Leon; similar ads ran in the US as well. All of the spots contained the catch phrase “Be careful how you use it”. (Wikipedia link)

The karate of Hai Karate is of course the name of the Japanese (originally Ryukyan) martial art:

(#4) kara te ’empty hand’

The hai of Hai Karate is the Japanese ageement particle, often translated as ‘yes’, but more accurately as something like ‘I agree with you, that is correct’.

And then there’s the red rising sun, as on the Japanese flag:

(#5)

Dirk Diggler and his diggler dirk. Yes, the name is totally loaded phallically — well, it’s a porn name in a parody of a porn biography, so what do you expect? (Wish I had remembered more of the dream, beyond the fact the other male character in it discovered that his actual father was someone at least as remarkable as Dirk Diggler.)

From Wikipedia:

The Dirk Diggler Story is a 1988 mockumentary short film written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. It follows the rise and fall of Dirk Diggler, a well-endowed male porn star. The character was modeled on American porn actor John Holmes. The film was later expanded into Anderson’s successful 1997 breakout film Boogie Nights.

Dirk Diggler (Michael Stein) was born as Steven Samuel Adams on April 15, 1961 outside of Saint Paul, Minnesota. His parents are a construction worker and a boutique shop owner who attend church every Sunday. Looking for a career as a male model, Diggler drops out of school at age 16 and leaves home. Jack Horner (Robert Ridgely) discovers Diggler at a falafel stand. Diggler meets his friend, Reed Rothchild (Eddie Delcore), through Horner in 1979, while working on a film.

Horner slowly introduces Diggler to the business until Diggler becomes noticeable within the industry. Diggler becomes a prominent model and begins appearing in pornographic films. Diggler has critical and box office hits which lead him to stardom. The hits and publicity lead to fame and money, which lead Diggler to the world of drugs. With the amount of money Diggler is making, he is able to support both his and Rothchild’s addictions. The drugs eventually cause a breakup between Diggler and Horner since Diggler is having issues with his performance on set.

After the breakup, Diggler tries to make a film himself, but it is never completed. He then attempts a music career, which is successful, but leads him deeper into drugs because of the amount of money he is making. He then stars in a TV show which is a failure, both critically and commercially. Having failed and with no work, Diggler returns to the porn industry, taking roles in low-budget homosexual films to help support his habit. On July 17, 1981, during a film shoot, Diggler dies of a drug overdose.

The film ends with a quotation from Diggler: “All I ever wanted was a cool ’78 ‘Vette and a house in the country.”

… The Dirk Diggler Story was expanded into Anderson’s 1997 breakout film Boogie Nights with a number of scenes appearing almost verbatim in both films. Two actors had roles in both films; in Boogie Nights, Robert Ridgely played The Colonel, a pornography financier, and Michael Stein had a cameo appearance as a stereo store customer. The main differences betweenThe Dirk Diggler Storyand Boogie Nights are the mockumentary versus narratives styles in the former and latter films, respectively; Diggler’s stint in gay porn in the first film versus his prostitution in the second; and Diggler’s dying from an overdose in the first film versus his happy return to his former roles and lifestyle in the second.

The mockumentary was generally not well reviewed. From the Doomrocket site, “Uncultured: The Dirk Diggler Story”:

Aside from also planting the seed for what would eventually become Dirk Diggler, Anderson introduces us to a beta form of the most lovable yet moronic sidekick, Reed Rothchild, played fucking flawlessly by (also unknown) Eddie Delcore. Although thirty-one minutes is less than little time to tie in much beyond a surface story, it is inferred that Dirk and Reed had a romantic relationship and, in the ten minutes that Delcore is on screen, there is absolutely no doubt that this gigantic man loves Dirk. Deeply. Without question, Delcore is the show stealer, and his interpretation of Rothchild is respectfully reflected in John C. Reilly’s later depiction.

(#6) Eddie Delcore as Reed Rothchild

… As for The Dirk Diggler Story: the writing, the direction, acting, editing, what-have-you, well… it’s shitty, all of it.

On the second version, in the Wikipedia summary:

Boogie Nights is a 1997 American drama film written, produced and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. It is set in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley and focuses on a young nightclub dishwasher who becomes a popular star of pornographic films, chronicling his rise in the Golden Age of Porn of the 1970s through to his fall during the excesses of the 1980s. The film is an expansion of Anderson’s mockumentary short film The Dirk Diggler Story (1988), and stars Mark Wahlberg, Julianne Moore, Burt Reynolds, Don Cheadle, John C. Reilly, William H. Macy, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Heather Graham.

Despite its impressive cast, I was repelled by the moral universe of Boogie Nights. Not about the world of porn film-making — I write about that all the time, with considerable sympathy for the people who make their living in the business, and an analytic eye for the genre, but also with clarity about its pitfalls and failures. But about its combination of titillation and cheap moralizing. In considerable detail, from The Stranger website on 10/12/16, in “Jamie Hook on Boogie Nights: America Fears Cock”, 25th anniversary, originally published 10/16/97:

In the press kit for Boogie Nights, Mark Wahlberg informs us, “I put the script down and thought, ‘Well, this guy is a genius.'” Newsweek speaks of “A filmmaker with an enormous talent for making movies”; Filmmaker calls the movie “a virtuoso accomplishment.” Perhaps it’s Oscar time for Marky Mark, whisper others. Behind it all, the prodigal director: Paul Anderson, 26-year-old genius. Jesus Christ, what a sad nation.

Boogie Nights tells the story of lonely dreamer Eddie Addams (Wahlberg), a boy with little more than a huge cock to guide him through life. No less an authority than his mother tells us he’s stupid, in case we’d had doubts. But Eddie is a tragic hero: he’ll be someone, you just wait.

Sure enough, his huge cock soon attracts the attention of Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds), a soulless, cauldron-born producer, who gives his magnificent member a purpose in life. The cocaine and money start flowing; Eddie renames himself Dirk Diggler, and starts using his huge cock to fuck porn stars (Julianne Moore, Heather Graham) in dirty movies. His cock is big and tireless: soon he is Dirk Diggler, Millionaire. He owns a mansion and a yacht.

Ah, but we know Anderson is a genius. He is therefore loathe to ignore the precedents of Sophocles and Aristotle: Pride goeth before a fall, and so fall Dirk must. In the movie’s Oedipal second act, we follow Dirk to his tragic fall, in a pickup truck in a West Hollywood parking lot, washed up, coke-addled, trying to inflate his huge cock for $10 for what appears to be a damn queer. The monument will not be erected and so Dirk must be brutally fagbashed by bullies. Then: the requisite bloodbath, and a happy ending. Applause, critical praise — fucking dipshits.

What makes Boogie Nights worth leaving the country for is the terrifying smugness with which it slouches toward simple moralizations. In its heart Boogie Nights holds a cold, twisted chastity, redolent of repressed puritanism and abject judgment. When Interview magazine calls it “one of the most morally responsible films of the decade,” we should pause to question what indeed that morality is.

It is worrisome that the only “sex scene” in an epic about sex is dumped on Nina Hartley, a true-life porn star; it is distinctly grotesque that her action merits her being the first in the film to have her head blown off in a two-for-one plot point and act of Holy Retribution. Her death is merely the first in the film’s drunken weave down the moral high road. If not death, it’s drug addiction, or poverty, or a beating. The message writ large in lightning: Slutty Behavior begets Misery, Pain, and Death.

Boogie Nights is a shining example of the mediated experience Hollywood is so good at delivering to an opiated nation. You may be titillated by the premise, aroused by the faux porn, caught up in the heady, cocaine-drenched flush of success… but then you will be whisked into dysfunction, massaged into guilt, beaten into submission, and finally cleansed by the Holy Water of the Happy Ending.

And there’s a final insult: We never see cock. Not Dirk’s, not anyone’s. We should. The entire movie is about how far a huge cock can get you. By god, it should fill the wide-screen, it should blast off into the auditorium in Surround Sound — but it never happens. Americans, it seems, fear cock. Thus, a two-point-five-hour epic about a huge cock ends in a flaccid shot of a counterfeit. It’s fake: a piece of wax, poorly grafted onto Marky Mark’s little motivator. A dildo. A red herring.

Don’t see this movie. Don’t advance the march of darkness. Instead, go straight to Starlight Video, Capitol Hill’s newest and friendliest (outside Toys in Babeland) adult video store, specializing in vintage smut. Sergio, the owner, didn’t think much of Boogie Nights either, but he will gladly guide you to a film called Eruption. Filmed on Hawaii and starring the legendary John Holmes as an insurance agent gone bad, the film features gloriously bad acting, pointless and aimless action sequences, and a more honest, if less recognizable, boogie soundtrack. It is stupid, but it is not evil. And, in a curious way, it is real, at least in one significant aspect: John Holmes really did have a huge cock.

(There are sandpenises, but the gay porn ad is penisless and amiable, though extremely heavily muscled. So raunchy but goofy; use your judgment.)

Late August, and summer is drawing to a close in the Northern Hemisphere. Three things: botanical markers of the end of the season; for some, the last occasions for holidays on the beach (this will yield another bulletin in the endless News for Penises series); and for many, back to school (in this case, celebrated by a TitanMen sale on gay porn — put some mansex in your backback, boys!).

Plants that say summer’s ending. Two that have sprung up in my neighborhood: fall-blooming anenomes (Anemone hupehensis) and (pink) naked ladies (Amaryllis belladonna).

In my 8/30/14 posting “anemone”, A. hupehensis, to go along with the anemones of spring, A, blanda, and the anemones of summer, A, coronaria:

(#1)

The plant has a basal clump of foliage from which 2-3 ft. flower stems arise in late summer.

And from my 8/8/15 posting “Two in bloom”, about Amaryllis belladonna:

(#2)

I know this plant as naked ladies or pink naked ladies. The appearance of the flowers is a sign of autumn, a sign that summer is coming to an end. I was familiar with it from Ohio, and hadn’t realized for some time that it grew around here [in the Bay Area of California] as well, and on the same schedule. Its leaves appear in the spring and then die down, and the bulb lies dormant until late summer, when the leafless flower spikes appear.

Last days at the beach. If your household doesn’t have members who are are already back in school (Palo Alto schools started last Tuesday), the last weeks of August are a time for one last fling at the beach. Where you could indulge your artistic inclinations by building sandcastles. In whatever form pleases you.

Which brings us to today’s News for Penises (hat tip to Kim Darnell): in this brief Comedy Central video, castlebuilder Craig exults in his anatomical fantasies. The initial shot:

(#3)[The text] It takes a million years for a mountain to crumble into sand, but it takes me just over an hour to turn all that sand into one big penis.

Or, in this case, into a family of sandpenises, making a formidable phallic fortress.

(The video is available on CC’s Facebook page, at at least two addresses, here and here. The sandartist isn’t identified in any way beyond a first name, Craig. It’s a total piece of fluff, but entertaining.)

Get your queer ass back to school! That’s the TitanMen exhortation for the season. But entirely amiable:

(#4) Notice that they are still on the beach — a rocky beach, but a beach

Coverage of New Rules in my 5/12/18 posting “For Mothers Day”, with a (crucially cropped) sex scene between Voss and Caber. The cover of the DVD for the flick:

(#5) Two monstrously muscled, sexually versatile hunks, who go at it like crazed mink sexbuddies

And now they’re ready to go back to school, back to the rigors and the challenges of the Muscle Academy:

(#6) (See my 9/19/19 posting “Disney meets Tom of Finland”)

(Men, in skimpy underwear, projecting steamy homo-desire; compact captions of puzzling free poetry; reflections on playful fetishwear. No X, but not to everyone’s taste.)

From Daily Jocks yesterday, continuing a mini-series with models who aren’t your standard high-butch Euro muscle-hunks, this time featuring a young man I’m calling Jo Flamingo.

(#1)

Muscle Twinko his
Marco Harness
Flamenconess
Flamingolous

The ad copy (untouched by any editing from me):

Get on board with The NEW Nautical Collection! This exciting new print features Flamingos on top of blue and white stripes.
The collection features a Swim Brief, Harness & two Briefs (including one with a cheeky low cut rear!) you’ll be the hit of every party in any of these.

(#2)

jo flamingo and the
flaming flemings

jo joe flamengo
in go pinko tinkle
bell ballston blackie
bitch slappin tickle is
butt tingle is nuts

(On flamenco, flamingo, and Fleming, see my 2/11/14 posting “flamenco”.)

The languidly seductive guy on the right has a supertight butch haircut and facial hair — but all in pink, like his lips. These guys are definitely not your grandfather’s underwear models.

The homowear. Sexy playful pinkness. Swim brief, harness, brief, and “half moon brief” — the last (combined with a shoulder strap harness on the middle guy in #2) unremarkable from the front, but notable from the rear (below, on a standard swimmer-body Euro-guy model):

(#3) Party time at Cleft House!

Then there ‘s the Nautical harness, a “poly span” (polyester spandex) fabric garment similar in form to a bulldog harness, also sharing one of its functions, displaying the wearer’s pecs and especially his tits. Otherwise it’s essentially decorative — not that there’s anything wrong with that — not much use for restraint or for hitching up with other fetishwear.

A classic leather bulldog, with standard gear (framing majorly hard tits, plus a sweet ingratiating smile):

(#4)

And then an intermediate bulldog in neoprene — tight and constraining, but without any rings or other connectors:

(#5)

(#4 and #5 crotch-cropped so you can focus on the men’s upper bodies.)

That’s the portmanteau in yesterday’s Luann strip:

voluminous + voluptuous, probably with a bit of sumptuous mixed in — but certainly ample heft combined with sensuousness. Not a waif, and not any typical fashion model.

(Hat tip to Benita Bendon Campbell.)

The three lexical contributors, from NOAD:

adj. voluptuous: 1 (of a woman) curvaceous and sexually attractive. 2 relating to or characterized by luxury or sensual pleasure: long curtains in voluptuous crimson velvet. ORIGIN late Middle English: from Old French voluptueux or Latin voluptuosus, from voluptas ‘pleasure’.

adj. voluminous: (of clothing or drapery) loose and ample.

adj. sumptuous: splendid and expensive-looking: the banquet was a sumptuous, luxurious meal.

voluptuous alone carries most of the import of volumptuous: voluptuousness requires a body with enough substance, enough padding, to be curvaceous, and also a body that is sensual to the eye and to the touch, like velvet.

The word from predators, in this Jake Likes Onions cartoon (by Jake Thompson):

(#1) Title: “Maybe he’s running from the truth”

Predator 2 omits the what of what the hell (in a Wh, or constituent, question What is that guy doing? with the question word what emphatically extended by the expletive the hell).

About the syntax, and then about the strip and the artist…

(Hat tip to Melinda Shore.)

Truncations, front and back, conversational and conventionalized. Material at the margins of sentences, front (initial) or back (final), is often omissible in informal conversation — because it’s predictable from the remainder of the material in the sentence or from context (and, especially for initial material, because it’s both semantically and phonologically light). Typical (attested) examples:

initial truncation [aka initial material deletion]: Turns out that, again like Stonewall, someone is making a movie about it. [omitted: it]

final truncation [aka just truncation]: England expects, Jones. [omitted: every man to do his duty]

Many truncations are nonce omissions, off-the-cuff, spur-of-the-moment events, crafted to save effort for the speaker while still getting the intended message across to the addressee, who has to work out what the speaker was getting at; that’s surely the case for the England expects example. Call these conversational truncations.

But through repeated use, some truncations can become conventionalized for some people: they no longer require calculation on the part of such people as speaker or addressee, but are just new linguistic forms for them, new constructions (or idioms). Brief discussion in my 3/29/18 posting “Bits of culture”, with the examples of the development from as far as X is concerned / as far as X goes by truncation to as far as X, which is then conventionalized as a topic-restricting construction on its own; and from no matter what X is by truncation to no matter what X, which is then conventionalized as a concessive construction on its own.

This conventionalization seems to be in progress for the truncation of what the hell/fuck questions (in what I’ll call the QuEx construction, for short), as in the cartoon. And in this 3/26/13 posting “Truncated what the fuck“, about an example from an interview that has

the fuck standing for what the fuck.

… I don’t recall having seen or heard this truncation before, and it’s hard to search for without picking up lots of occurrences of the full idiom. (Similarly for the hell as a truncation of what the hell.)

Searching is indeed difficult, but I’ve managed to find one more the hell example, from the CHEEZburger site:

(#2) Title: “The Hell Is That?!”

The 2013 posting goes on to distinguish truncated QuEx (TruncQuEx) from another expletive-initial construction, used for dismissal or denial, as in the defiant response The hell/fuck I will! (I’ll call it NoWayF for short).

The constructions (untruncated) QuEx and NoWayF in a 12/27/17 posting “Expletive syntax: I will marry the crap out of you, Sean Spencer”, in an inventory of constructions using expletives:

6. QuEx: interrogative postnominal expletive. An interrogative (not relative) word (not phrase) with a postmodifying definite expletive (the hell / heck / fuck / shit) or locative PP (in (the) hell / on earth / in the world):

e.g., What the fuck / the hell / in hell / on earth were you thinking? I wonder where the hell / the shit / in the world I put my glasses.

There is a modest literature on this fascinating construction.

5.  NoWayF: dismissal/denial the hell/fuck, modifying a following elliptical clause. The pattern is: the Ex + Pro Aux (with VPE), conveying ‘no way Pro Aux, Pro Aux not’:

e.g., the hell you are ‘no way you are, you are not’, the fuck he will, the hell they can

There’s a large collection of examples (from 1845 through 1998) in GDoS

[Note. Both TruncQuEx and NoWayF are main-clause phenomenon (not generally acceptable in embedded clauses); as a result, they’re essentially restricted to sentence-initial, not merely clause-initial, position.]

[Further note. There’s another path for the development of TruncQuEx, regardless of its position within sentences: what I’ll call the Generalized Jespersen Cycle, generalized from the history of negation in several languages. Brutally simplified from the history of French:

(a) ne marks plain clausal negation; (b) emphatic negation is marked by ne plus one of several emphatic extensions; (c) the particular extension pas ‘(a) step’ becomes specialized in this emphatic function; (d) pas is increasingly reanalyzed as the primary marker of clause negation; (e) ne becomes optional.

Then the new primary negator will itself pick up emphatic extensions, and the cycle turns on.

From Tracking Jespersen’s cycle (by Paul Kiparsky & Cleo Condoravdi), in M. Janse, B.D. Joseph, & A. Ralli (edd.), Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference of Modern Greek Dialects and Linguistic Theory (Mytilene: Doukas, 2006):

Observation of such patterns of change in Germanic and Romance negation led Jespersen (1917 [Negation in English and Other Languages]) to posit a historical process of repeated weakening and reinforcement now known as JESPERSEN’S CYCLE, which he summarized as follows:

. . . the original negative adverb is first weakened, then found insufficient and therefore strengthened, generally through some additional word, and this in turn may be felt as the negative proper and may then in the course of time be subject to the same development as the original word. (Jespersen 1917:4)

The development of TruncQuEx could be seen as parallel, with the emphatic (expletive) extension coming to be reanalyzed as the primary subordinator, so that the Wh element is omissible.

(I’m not offering this proposal as a competitor to the initial-truncation proposal, but rather as a possible reinforcement of it.)]

Jake Thompson and his cartoons. Thompson has been drawing the Jake Likes Onions webcomic for several years (and is now being carried by GoComics); check out his website, or follow him on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook. And consider his book:

(#3) Note the stick-figure faces

His cartoons are often darkly funny and sometimes raunchy. Three further examples. First a penguin toon that’s really about guys (and butt sex):

(#4) Title: “penguins are just like us”

Then Thompson’s version of Labels Are Not Definitions:

(#5) Title: “Labels are bad”

And a strip on one of the senses of straight:

(#6) Title: “Okay less straight than that”

From NOAD, the run-down on senses of the adjective straight and the relevant entry for the adverb straight (with the relevant senses boldfaced):

adj. straight:1 extending or moving uniformly in one direction only; without a curve or bend: a long, straight road. [with various specialized uses] 2 properly positioned so as to be level, upright, or symmetrical: he made sure his tie was straight. [with various specializations] 3 [a] not evasive; honest: a straight answer | thank you for being straight with me. [b] simple; straightforward: a straight choice between nuclear power and penury. [c] (of a look) bold and steady: he gave her a straight, no-nonsense look. [d] (of thinking) clear, logical, and unemotional. [e] not addicted to drugs. 4 [attributive] [a] in continuous succession: he scored his fourth straight win. [b] supporting all the principles and candidates of one political party: he generally voted a straight ticket. 5 (of an alcoholic drink) undiluted; neat: straight brandy. 6 (especially of drama) serious as opposed to comic or musical; employing the conventional techniques of its art form: a straight play. 7 informal [a] (of a person) conventional or respectable: she looked pretty straight in her school clothes. [b] heterosexual.

adv. straight: …3 [a] correctly; clearly: I’m so tired I can hardly think straight. [b] honestly and directly; in a straightforward manner: I told her straight — the kid’s right.

#6 uses sense 3b of the adverb, which is based on sense 3a of the adjective.

Note on graphic style. For the most part, Thompson’s artwork is detailed and wonderfully textural — except that almost all of his human faces are crude stick-figure faces: in #1, dramatically in #3 and #6.

I’m once again afflicted by spam comments — thousands a day — from a source that creates sender names by pairing random names from some gigantic database. Today’s most entertaining combo is Dong Goodwin, a personal name (from a Chinese surname) with inevitable phallic associations in English, plus an OE surname meaning ‘good friend’. So a nice mixture of louche and earnest.

From my 2/18/13 posting “dong”, on the (orig. US) slang dong ‘penis’: OED2 suggests, very tentatively, a connection to Edward Lear’s nonsense verse “The dong with a luminous nose”.

GDoS has it instead as an abbreviation of ding-dong (US) ‘the penis’ (but gives no etymology for that), with its first cite for ding-dong: 

1905-07 ‘Old Gingerbread’ in Bawdy N.Y. State MS. n.p.: One hand grasped a knife, and the other my old ding dong, / And off came old gingerbread nine inches long.

Then PADS in 1944 and cites from texts in 1958 and thereafter.

For dong in texts, GDoS antedates OED2’s 1939 (Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath), with

c.1890 ‘The Bastard King of England’ in Bold (1979) 23: On Philip’s dong he slipped a thong.

Both dong and ding-dong lend themselves to word play (for instance, Long Dong Silver), and can be alluded to by mentions of dongles, Hostess Ding-Dongs, Ding Dong School, of course the Lear poem, etc.

From Wikipedia on LDS:

Long Dong Silver is a retired porn star known for his large penis.

Famed for the apparent size of his penis, reputedly 18 inches (46 cm), he appeared in several pornographic movies in the UK and US during the late 1970s and early 1980s. However, photographer Jay Myrdal has revealed that although Silver “was immensely endowed… a good nine or ten inches,” the penis featured in his porn shoots was faked.

… plus — surprise! — reflections on occupational labels and on limericks.

(There will be discussions of male genitalia and mansex, but no X-rated images; these are isolated in an AZBlogX posting yesterday, “Dave the Robot takes pen in hand”. The posting below isn’t couched in street language, but it cites some street language, some of the limericks are dirty, and other parts of its content might be unsuitable for the sexually modest or for kids.)

The XBlog posting begins (#1 and #2 there) with a drawing — entitled “Bros” — of two naked men whose penises are embracing. Cropped here to show the sketchbook style (a kind of deliberate artlessness) of the drawing:

(#1)

Then on to the artist, who has achieved some sort of fame via raunchy sketches on Instagram featuring genitalia and bodily fluids.

From my XBlog on the “Bros” sketch, its imagery and the terminology it might suggest:

Gay swordplay taken to a new level. Or holding dicks, a step up from just holding hands. They seem to be cock bros. Cock buddies. Dick besties. (None of these compounds has made it into the slang dictionaries, though Urban Dictionary has an entry for dick brothers, for two men who have fucked the same woman.)

Then from the Happy Mag site, in “Fuck the Instagram police: David the Robot earns his followers by drawing dicks” by Paul Maland:

Have you ever wondered what life would be like if your school-mates that excelled at doodling doodles in their workbooks stuck it out, and even went on to achieve artistic fame?

David The Robot, real name David Marie, is an Instagram based cartoonist and illustrator out of Perth. Dave’s crude drawings of willies and other-worldly misadventures have taken Instagram by storm, netting him over 100,000 followers, and even a few account suspensions along the way.

A tradesman by day and notebook illustrator by night, Dave’s work has come to life off the page in recent times, landing on tattooed skin and inside the walls of gallery exhibitions.

We had a chat with the artist to get a sense of what makes the creative within him tick, and how his poo, bum and wee art fits in with the world around him.

What would happen if that kid etching dongs into school desks never stopped? Behold the crude magnificence of David the Robot, Instagram’s dirtiest illustrator.

(From its site: “Happy is an Australian based online music and youth culture magazine focussed primarily on independent news, reviews and feature articles.”)

Two flags here. First, the word tradesman in the Happy piece — DtR’s own characterization of his day job — which led me to ask my Aussie and Aussie-knowledgeable friends on Facebook:

if a young guy from Perth says that he works as a tradesman, what kind of work does he do?

Second, since this question used the expression a young guy from Perth, it led quickly to a side discussion of limericks with the first line

There was a young man from Perth

But before I go on to these spin-off topics, a bit more on DtR’s sketches. His Instagram site has a huge assortment of these, in several styles. Two of these are reproduced in my XBlog posting: in #3 and #4 there — meticulous b&w sketches (of a penis machine and a penis creature).

Most of his work would not pass muster for WordPress or Facebook, but here’s a quick sketch of a male “Perv Couple” that will do:

(#2)

(No, I don’t know the significance of the signature KEW on DtR’s drawings.)

tradesman. I had two senses of this noun in my active vocabulary: someone in the skilled trades (plumber, electrician, welder, carpenter, etc., which call for special training and in the US generally require a license); or (especially in the UK) a shopkeeper, especially a small shopkeeper). Maybe DtR was referring to one of these, maybe to some third thing.

[Digression on categorization. One widespread system of everyday categorization of occupations — not categorizations for administrative purposes or technical studies in sociology, but the categorizations that ordinary people use in everyday life — has a rough major division into three, which have come to be labeled blue-collar, pink-collar, and white-collar. The blue-collar category is significantly split in two, manual labor vs. skilled trades (however these are labeled); and the white-collar category is also significantly split in two, commerce (sometimes known as business or, yes, trade) and the professions.

As is customary with everyday categorizations, the boundaries between categories are often unclear (though their prototypical membership is much less variable), and the match between ordinary-language labels and the categories is often complex.]

I hoped that the Macquarie (Australian dictionary of English) would be helpful in DtR’s use, but no. My 1981 edition gives four senses:

tradesman: 1. a man engaged in trade.  2. a shopkeeper. 3. a craftsman. 4. one who calls on private houses to deliver goods.

So: both of the senses I knew, plus (roughly) ‘delivery man’, and that first sense, which is just the basic semantics for a N + N compound with elements trade and man, so it embraces everything that comes under the heading of trade. That includes the basic nouning of the verb trade — trade  ‘exchange of one thing for another’ — plus all of these senses from NOAD:

noun trade: 1 [a] the action of buying and selling goods and services: a move to ban all trade in ivory | a significant increase in foreign trade | the meat trade. [b] dated, chiefly derogatory the practice of making one’s living in business, as opposed to in a profession or from unearned income: the aristocratic classes were contemptuous of those in trade. [c] North American (in sports) a transfer; an exchange: players can demand a trade after five years of service. 2 [a] a skilled job, typically one requiring manual skills and special training: the fundamentals of the construction trade | a carpenter by trade. [b] (the trade) [treated as singular or plural] the people engaged in a particular area of business: in the trade this sort of computer is called “a client-based system.”. [c] British [treated as singular or plural] (the trade) people licensed to sell alcoholic drink. [d] informal a person in gay male sexual encounters who is not penetrated sexually and usually considers himself to be heterosexual.

Plus trade as a short form of the gay slang rough trade ‘rough or lower-class men sought, and sometimes paid, as casual sexual partners by more privileged or affluent men’ (NOAD). So far as I know, tradesman is not used as an occupational label in either of these sexual senses, though there was a certain amount of guffawing on Facebook about the possibility that DtR was a stud hustler.

Eventually, Facebook exchanges with Wufkey Crosby (from Melbourne) and Jason Parker-Burlingham (originally from Brisbane) narrowed things down to an occupational category that seems to be specifically Australian, though it’s related to the ‘skilled tradesman’ or ‘craftsman’ categories above. It’s a skilled-trade occupation plied by largely self-employed assistants or small contractors. Jason: “everything from housebuilding to landscaping to electrical or plumbing would be on the cards”. It’s an occupation, not just an activity (so it’s like being a handyman in the US, but full-time and more institutionalized), and a tradesman in this sense might hope that with success they could move from being an employee to having employees of their own.

It’s enough of a thing in Australia that it has its own Aussie diminutive: tradie. Kyle Wohlmut supplied a link to a Perth Now story of 8/2/18, “Wombat attacks tradie in Bathurst”, beginning:

If you were to rank dangerous Australian animals, wombats would rarely come to mind, if make an extended list at all.

But a tradie in New South Wales learned very quickly that the docile marsupial has plenty of bite.

And in a Google search on {Australian tradesman Perth}, Aric Olnes found a  ComparetheTradie site that advertises:

(#3)

QUALITY TRADIES UNBEATABLE PRICES – ON DEMAND FOR YOU
We connect you to professionals available to do your job on your terms

On the limerick watch. Google searches netted three limerick families, one of which is in the G. Legman collections (I: The Limerick, 1964; II: The New Limerick, 1977):

family A: afterbirth:

There was a young man from Perth
The nastiest/dirtiest bastard on Earth
When his wife was confined
He pulled down the blind
And devoured/gobbled/ate up the whole afterbirth
/ And licked up the green afterbirth

(underlined variants are those in Legman I:789)

There was a young man from Perth
The sickest motherfucker on Earth
He ate out his mother
And cornholed his brother
Then dined on his wife’s afterbirth

Legman II: note p. 653 has this development of I:789:

We pity those two men of Perth
Who had crab, clap and syphilis from birth.
Said one to the other:
“Alas, my poor brother,
We’re the rottenest bastards on earth!”

family B: birth:

There was a young man from Perth,
Who was born on the day of his birth.
He was married, they say,
On his wife’s wedding day,
And died when he quitted the earth.
/ And he died on his last day on earth.

There was a young man from Perth
Naked at time of his birth
Determined to see
The same new ditty
In the time he has left on this Earth

family 3: surf:

There was a young man from Perth
Who thought he knew how to surf
He stood on the board
And tripped on the cord
Now his feet stay firmly on earth

Then from Legman, his other Perth limericks, the first and third involving men in Perth, the others involving young women in Perth rather than men:

I:215

There was a young fellow of Perth
Whose balls were the finest on earth.
They grew to such size
That one won a prize,
And goodness knows what they were worth

I:885

There was a young virgin in Perth
Swore she’d do it for no one on earth,
Yet she fell without scandal
To a red Christmas candle
And was always less choosey henceforth.

II:20

There was a young lady named Bower
Who dwelt in an Ivory Tower.
But a poet from Perth
Laid her flat on the earth,
And proceeded with penis to plough her.

II:1590

There was a young maiden of Perth
Whose vagina was sealed up at birth,
All because her fond mother
Feared some man or other
Would carnally alter her girth.

II:1704

There was a young lady of Perth
Who said, “Lord! I’m increasing in girth!”
And her lovely young figure
Got bigger and bigger
And BIGGER — till after the birth.

And then on Facebook, an assortment of limerick lines from various posters:

AMZ:

An artist and purveyor of mirth

Who was well aware of his worth

Ned Deily

By day called a tradesman. But at night he amazed ‘em, with shows of his impressive girth.

Michael Newman:

Who was very unsure of his worth

Who was only a few years from his birth

Who suffered much too long from dearth

Who was born on the Forth of Firth

Who didn’t like living on Earth

Who lived a long life of mirth

(Hunky men in skimpy underwear, but otherwise not alarming. And it will take you to some surprising places.)

Today’s Daily Jocks guy, for Marcuse underwear, with the ad copy (lightly edited):

(#1) Marco Brown, the pool boy with a white thong in his heart

Sporty & sexy, the premium Egoist collection from Marcuse will give everyone around you wild thoughts. Available in 2 colors [white and navy] and 3 styles, jockstrap, [bikini] brief & thong.

The first of the Three Marcos. On to the others…

(On the underwear from the Australian firm, see my 9/8/15 posting “Marxuse”, about Marcuse swimwear and underwear and the Marxist Herbert Marcuse.)

(#2) Marco Red, a lean and hungry man in the Navy

(#3) Marco Blond, a tall blond man in one white brief

The Three Marcos, or as they are known in their native Italian and Spanish (they are all bilingual), respectively I Tre Marchi and Los Tres Marcoses.

Outside of their modeling careers, after dark, they become the fabulous Three Marcusites, originally billed as The Three Marquesas (It. Le Tre Marchese, Sp. Las Tres Marquesas) — before they settled on their signature drag, black gowns with marcasite and silver jewelry.

The gowns. Marcusite Brown, the most traditionally minded of the three, has chosen this wonderful classic ball gown in black:

(#4)

The more daring Marcusite Red has gone for this slinky sleeveless off-the-shoulder, slit-skirt number:

(#5)

And the boyishly playful Marcusite Blonde has opted for an outrageous creation with a mermaid-theme bosom

(#6)

I’m sorry to say that there are as yet no videos, or even photographs, of the Marcusites in action — they’re justly famous for their over-the-top versions of traditional murder ballads and their offshoots, like “Frankie and Johnny”  (“He was my man, but he done me wrong”), the Rodgers and Hart “To Keep My Love Alive”, and the Beatles song “Rocky Raccoon” — since they perform only for small select audiences in private.

Linguistic digression.

It. marchese ‘marquis’ pl. marchesi; marchesa ‘marchioness’ pl. marchese

Sp. marqués ‘marquis’ pl. marqueses; marquesa ‘marchioness’ pl. marquesas

Then on the English, from NOAD:

noun marchioness: [a] the wife or widow of a marquess. [b] a woman holding the rank of marquess in her own right. ORIGIN late 16th century: from medieval Latin marchionissa, feminine of marchio(n-) ‘ruler of a border territory’, from marcha ‘march’ (see march²).

noun march², pl.noun (Marches):  [a] a frontier or border area between two countries or territories, especially between England and Wales or (formerly) England and Scotland: the Welsh Marches. [b] (the Marches) a region of east central Italy, between the Apennines and the Adriatic Sea; capital, Ancona. Italian name [pl.] [Le] Marche. dated

Gemological digression. From Wikipedia:

The mineral marcasite, sometimes called white iron pyrite, is iron sulfide (FeS₂) with orthorhombic crystal structure. It is physically and crystallographically distinct from pyrite, which is iron sulfide with cubic crystal structure.

… In marcasite jewellery, pyrite used as a gemstone is termed “marcasite” – that is, marcasite jewellery is made from pyrite, not from the mineral marcasite. … Marcasite in the scientific sense is not used as a gem due to its brittleness.

On the name, from NOAD:

ORIGIN late Middle English: from medieval Latin marcasita, from Arabic marqašīṯa, from Persian.

More on the jewelry, from Wikipedia:

Marcasite jewelry is jewelry made from pyrite (fool’s gold), not, as the name suggests, from marcasite. Pyrite is similar to marcasite, but more stable and less brittle. It is frequently made by setting small pieces of pyrite into silver. Cheaper costume jewelry is made by glueing pieces of pyrite rather than setting. A similar-looking type of jewelry can be made from small pieces of cut steel.

… Marcasite jewelry has been made since the time of the Ancient Greeks. It was particularly popular in the eighteenth century, the Victorian era and with Art Nouveau jewelry designers.

When Prince Albert died in 1861 Queen Victoria entered a period of mourning, requiring her entire court to wear black and avoid opulent jewelry. Marcasite became popular as an understated alternative for the nobility.

Memory of my teenage years: my mother was fond of marcasite jewelry, so my parents’ costume jewelry shop carried a good bit of it. Such a contrast to the gaudy rhinestones. I admired it as jewelry, but liked it even more for its chemistry.

The jewelry. The Marcusites have chosen marcasite and silver jewelry to suit their gowns. For Marcusite Bown, just a heavy intricate ring:

(#7)

For Marcusite Red, this necklace with matching earrings:

(#8)

And for Marcusite Blonde, an especially bold ring and a bracelet (one worn on each wrist), leaving her remarkable cleavage unencumbered by jewelry,

(#9)

(#10)

But the food. Enough of fashion and music, let’s talk food. The mention of the (Le) Marche region of Italy led me immediately to thoughts of Ada Boni’s Italian Regional Cooking —

(#11)

and its chapter on Umbria and the Marches. (On Boni, see my 10/4/13 posting “Marcella Hazan”, with its section on her.)

The regions within Italy:

(#12)

This map converted into a quick food guide:

(#13)

From Boni’s book, on Umbria and the Marches, a page with a touristic photo of the Marches and some regional food:

(#14)

From the text, a bit about the wines of the region, which I mention here because Verdicchio is an occasional theme on this blog:

(#15)

On chicken Verdicchio at Felicia’s in North Boston (ok, over 50 years ago; don’t look for it now):

on 12/10/11, “Chicken verdicchio”

on 1/8/18, “Another visit to Felicia’s”

Think sautéed chicken breast, artichoke hearts, mushrooms, garlic, capers, lemon juice, and, of course, Verdicchio, on thin pasta, garnished with chopped flat Italian parsley, lemon slices, and some grated parmesan. I am salivating.

It begins with this photo, sent to me by a gay friend who found it, unattributed, on a hot-men website; found it, um, moving; and thought I would too:

(#1) Filed under “Hunks at play”, though the hunks don’t seem particularly playful

They are, first of all, hunks. The photographer’s gaze dwells on their bodies, presenting them as desirable pieces of meat. Then, they are sullenly inexpressive, not playful at all, despite the fact that they’re messing around on a boat.

I thought I recognized the style and the content as well, and I was right: Bruce Weber, a photographer who has played a major role in making homoeroticism — crudely, men as meat — a thing in the ad world (women as meat in ads has a much longer history). “Hunks at play” is actually Weber’s “Capri, Italy 1994”.

From my 1/25/13 posting “Bruce Weber”:

On AZBlogX, a posting about photographer Bruce Weber, the man who (among other things) made homoeroticism a central feature of men’s clothing ads. It’s on my X Blog because three of the six images there (from Weber’s book of male photography Bear Pond) show full frontal nudity.

The other three are of hot male models in their underwear.

Homoerotic photography of men in pairs or larger groups comes in many flavors: men in competition, in athletics or fights; men bonding as buddies, arms around each other; men sexually engaged with one another; men at play, horsing around.   The group portrait in #1 comes closest to the last type (a genre I’m fond of); for some examples, see my 10/24/16 posting “Naked boys playing at liberty”, featuring photos from Shoreleave, by Anthony Kennedy; shots of the Warwick Rowers; and some not fully identified photographs.

Weber can do playful (while not slacking on homoerotic), as here:

(#2) Hunk mounted on his toy zebra

He can do intensely steamy couples, as in this ad shot for Gianni Versace:

(#3)

And he can do buddies, in ths case with some athletic competition thrown in (in a jauntily homoerotic Abercrombie & Fitch ad):

(#4)

“Kyle and Lane Carlson (born December 24, 1978) are identical twin brothers known as the Carlson Twins. The Carlson twins work together as male fashion models.” (Wikipedia)

The Carlson twins doing intense and impassive:

(#5)

Looking at portrait photos.

Every portrait works in triplicate: depicting the sitter, revealing the photographer and reminding the viewer of a shared humanity. (Teju Cole, NYT Magazine)

Virtually all of Weber’s photographs are posed — the subjects are posing (rather than caught unawares), in positions chosen by Weber. They’re portraits, some informal (giving the impression of life captured on film, as in #1 and #4), some formal (clearly arranged for the camera, as in #3 and #5). In either case, there’s a question about how we look at the portraits and what we see there. What traits, identities, attitudes, and so on were the subjects projecting? Which of these was the photographer aiming at? And what do we find when we bring our own experiences, expectations, and judgments to the photographic record?

Like any other kind of portrait, a photographic portrait is an artistic construction, subject to all the complexities of contexts, intentions, and interpretations that attend all portraits. But especially clouded by our inclination to see photographs as slices of reality and so to judge them as we would assess people in front of us. (Making such judgments is incredibly complex in real life, but then the camera’s eye intervenes between the subjects and our own eyes.)

And so to Teju Cole in his On Photography column in Sunday’s NYT Magazine, “There’s Less to Portraits Than Meets the Eye, and More” (on-line on 8/23), about this portrait photo:

(#6) “Young Man at a Tent Revival, Brooklyn, NY, 1989” (photo by Dawoud Bey, from Stephen Daiter Gallery and Rena Bransten Gallery)

We tend to interpret portraits as though we were reading something inherent in the person portrayed. We talk about strength and uncertainty; we praise people for their strong jaws and pity them their weak chins. High foreheads are deemed intelligent. We easily link the people’s facial features to the content of their character. This is odd. After all, we no longer believe you can determine someone’s personality by measuring their skull with a pair of calipers. Phrenology has rightly been consigned to the dustbin of history. But physiognomy, the idea that faces carry meanings, still haunts the interpretation of portraiture.

The reason for the temptation is obvious: Faces are malleable. A smile is intentional and might indeed indicate happiness, just as a furrowed brow might be proof of a melancholic temperament. But we also know that emotion is fleeting and can be faked. We thus shouldn’t really trust whatever it is a photographic portrait seems to be telling us.

This is not to deny any of the wonder or gratitude you feel before a superb portrait. Sometimes this response is amplified when it’s a portrait of someone not famous, a face that isn’t burdened with predetermined knowledge. I’m looking at one such image in Dawoud Bey’s magnificent career retrospective, “Seeing Deeply” (2018). In the book, this black-and-white photograph is given a full page. The format invites contemplation, and this should be mentioned because what we see in a photograph is connected to its material circumstances: An exhibition print of the same image would give one impression, a magazine reproduction would be another, a digital file meant to be seen on a computer or hand-held device is something else again. The warm tone and low gloss of this photograph in this book are calming. A boy stands alone before a tent and some chairs. We don’t know who he is, and the caption doesn’t help much: “Young Man at a Tent Revival, Brooklyn, NY, 1989.” The surprising detail there is the date, as this picture looks as if it could have been taken at any point in the past century. It is strangely timeless, with his attire somewhere between formal and casual, the slim dark tie and serious black pants contrasting with the baggy pale-colored plaid shirt.

I want to fall back on old ways and say that the gentle arch of the boy’s left eyebrow seems to mark him as an ironic sort, or that the symmetry of his features make him both trusting and trustworthy. But really, that would be projecting. What we can really say is that there’s something poignant about the way the skinny tie is tucked into the skinny belt and the way the numerous verticals in the picture — the tent poles, the ropes of its rigging, the legs of the chairs in the background, the tie, the lines of the shirt and finally the boy himself — all seem to be tilting just off true.

The picture wavers in tremulous equilibrium. Even the boy’s head is cocked to the side. Quizzically? Or is he simply at his ease? I don’t know. But the cumulative effect is endearing. There’s a boy, and his appearance is dense with a life that we can only guess at. There’s faith in it (it’s a revival, after all); there’s probably hope, too. But what we can be surer of is that there’s love: the love with which Dawoud Bey has seen the elements of the moment and captured them for posterity, and the love with which, almost three decades later, I am looking at this portrait in a book.

Very briefly on Cole, from Wikipedia:

Teju Cole (born June 27, 1975) is [a Nigerian-]American writer, photographer, and art historian.

Cole is the author of a novella, Every Day is for the Thief (2007); a novel, Open City (2012); an essay collection, Known and Strange Things (2016), and a photobook, Punto d’Ombra (2016; published in English in 2017 as Blind Spot).

And on Bey:

Dawoud Bey (born 1953 [as David Edward Smikle]) is an American photographer and educator renowned for his large-scale color portraits of adolescents and other often marginalized subjects. In 2017, Bey was the recipient of a “Genius Grant” from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. He is a professor and Distinguished Artist at Columbia College Chicago.

… A product of the 1960s, Dawoud Bey said both he and his work are products of the attitude, “if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.” This philosophy significantly influenced his artistic practice and resulted in a way of working that is both community-focused and collaborative in nature. Bey’s earliest photographs, in the style of street photography, evolved into a seminal five-year project documenting the everyday life and people of Harlem in Harlem USA (1975–1979) that was exhibited at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1979.

… Of his work with teenagers Bey has said, “My interest in young people has to do with the fact that they are the arbiters of style in the community; their appearance speaks most strongly of how a community of people defines themselves at a particular historical moment.”

… with a note on the pronunciation of botanical names.

The crucial moment came in a re-run showing of the Rizzoli & Isles episode “Love the Way You Lie” (S3 E12, first aired 12/4/12), when the Boston detective (Rizzoli, played by Angie Harmon) and medical examiner (Isles, played by Sasha Alexander) pondered the significance of the fact that they had identified some pollen as coming from Solidago macrophylla, with the species name macrophylla pronounced /ˌmækroˈfɪlǝ/ (with primary accent on the third syllable). I was startled by the pronunciation: it’s Greek ‘big leaf’, so surely it should have the accent on the second syllable (as in thermometer, Hippocrates, etc.), something on the order of  /mǝˈkrafǝlǝ/, and the writers had just gotten it wrong.

But no. The writers did their homework, and I was the one who was wrong.

The point is that though macrophylla is solidly Greek, it’s a term from botanical Latin — all taxonomic names are in principle some kind of Latin, whatever their source — and in Latin macrophylla gets accented on the penult, because the penult is heavy (thanks to that double ll). Well, these names get pronounced in a conventional anglicization of Latin — a pronunciation scheme that’s not a lot like what many people would have learned in Latin classes — but the placement of primary accent is relatively straightforward (on the penult if it’s heavy, otherwise on the antepenult).

/ˌmækroˈfɪlǝ/  still sounds weird to me, but there it is.

In any case, about the plant, from Wikipedia:

(#1)

Solidago macrophylla, the largeleaf goldenrod or large-leaved goldenrod, is [a] North American species of herbaceous perennial plants of the sunflower family. It is native to eastern and central Canada (from Ontario to Newfoundland & Labrador) and the northeastern United States (New York and New England). Some of the populations in Québec and Labrador lie north of the Arctic Circle.

Solidago macrophylla is a perennial herb up to 105 cm (42 inches) tall, with a thick woody rhizome. Leaves can be up to 15 cm (6 inches) long. One plant can produce 110 or more small yellow flower heads, mostly on short side branches.

Goldenrods are appropriate for the season: they flower in late summer and early fall. S. macrophylla is a wildflower / weed, but there are also handsome garden cultivars. On this blog, from 9/11/15, “Golden yellow for the end of summer”, on goldenrods (and ragweed and “September Song”).

And then about the tv show. From Wikipedia:

Rizzoli & Isles is a TNT television series starring Angie Harmon as police detective Jane Rizzoli and Sasha Alexander as medical examiner Dr. Maura Isles. The one-hour drama is based on the series of Rizzoli & Isles novels by Tess Gerritsen. It premiered on July 12, 2010, and aired 105 episodes in seven seasons, concluding on September 5, 2016.

On the two principals:

Angela Michelle Harmon (born August 10, 1972) is an American actress and model. She was a professional model before gaining international fame for her roles in Baywatch Nights and as New York A.D.A. Abbie Carmichael on Law & Order. She also starred as Detective Jane Rizzoli on the TNT series Rizzoli & Isles. (Wikipedia link)

Suzana S. Drobnjaković Ponti (born May 17, 1973), known by her stage name Sasha Alexander, is a Serbian-American actress. She played Gretchen Witter on Dawson’s Creek and has acted in films including Yes Man (2008) and He’s Just Not That Into You (2009). Alexander played Caitlin Todd for the first two seasons of NCIS. From July 2010 through September 2016, Alexander starred as Maura Isles in the TNT series Rizzoli & Isles (Wikipedia link)

Cop shows and detective dramas very often feature a pair of central characters, who are depicted as contrastive in various ways (they’re male and female, black and white, of different nationalities, of different ages, of different temperaments, of different hair colors, whatever). Rizzoli and Isles contrast in temperament and hair color, but most prominently in social class: Rizzoli is working class Boston Italian, Isles upper middle class WASP.

Also notable in the ensemble cast are the luminous  Lorraine Bracco (Sopranos, Goodfellas) as Angela Rizzoli, Jane’s mother; and the adorable Jordan Bridges (of the Bridges acting family: Lloyd, Dorothy, Beau, Jeff, and Jordan) as Francesco “Frankie” Rizzoli Jr., Jane’s cop brother.

One publicity photo of Harmon as Rizzoli and Alexander as Isles (of many similar photos):

(#2)

The characters are displaying the insignia of their occupations — the detective’s badge, the M.D.’s lab coat and ID badge — and in the show they are formidable professionals (Rizzoli is sharp and tough, Isles is deeply knowledgeable and brusque in her judgments), but in publicity shots they’re presented as hot babes: it’s all about hair (lots of it) and cleavage. They look like high-class hookers in Boston P.D. costumes.

Contrast this with a publicity photo for Jordan Bridges as Frankie Rizzoli:

(#3) (on the t-shirt: PROPERTY OF BOSTON POLICE DEPT. ATHLETICS DIVISION)

His other publicity shots have him in uniform, all buttoned up in blue. I note that the shirtless Bridges is decidedly yummy; I’ll just leave this little gender presentation critique at that.

(Men in skimpy underwear, but nothing actually scandalous. And there will be folk music, of a sort.)

It’s Labor Day, and you’re a guy, and you want to do something to celebrate working people (beyond enjoying the three-day holiday weekend, a product of the union movement). What to do?

Daily Jocks has your number: you’re hankering for a jockstrap, right? A really fine union-strong jockstrap:

(#1)

LABOR DAY FLASH SALE
Get 20% off ALL Jockstraps for the next 24 hours!
Shop over 150 Jockstraps from all your favourite brands…

Sgt. Helsi, the Jumping Jack Flash, says:

Join the jockstrap army and see my world!

We are the jockstrap army
Every one of us with a basket
We all hate pants and shirts and shoes
Men: ready, aim, and flash it!

Raw recruits testing the gear:

(#2) BuzzFeed video here: Men wearing high-fashion jockstraps for a day

For the army’s marching song, compare these verses from Tom Lehrer’s “We Are the Folk Song Army” (from That Was the Year that Was (1965)):

We are the folk song army
Every one of us cares
We all hate poverty, war, and injustice
Unlike the rest of you squares

… So join in the folk song army!
Guitars are the weapons we bring
To the fight against poverty, war, and injustice
Ready, aim, sing!

(You can listen to  a concert performance of the whole song here.)

From Chris Zable on Facebook on August 3rd, a photo from her family’s holiday in Florida, with her comment:

(#1)

“Spotted this little lizard with a bright blue tail on a fence rail at the Tallahassee Museum. Much of their space is a zoo of local native species in generously-sized enclosures that are just fenced off bits of native habitat. We saw pumas, red wolves, and foxes among other critters.”

As good a photo of a blue-tailed skink as any you can find on the net. To come: on skinks; on the “Blue Tail Fly” song; and on my gay highjacking of the song, as “Blue Tailed Skink” (with skink as a portmanteau, skank + twink) — taking things far from Chris’s original child-friendly travel report.

Skink things. From Wikipedia:

The (American) five-lined skink (Plestiodon fasciatus) is a species of lizard endemic to North America. It is one of the most common lizards in the eastern U.S. and one of the seven native species of lizards in Canada.

… Other common names include blue-tailed skink (for juveniles) and red-headed skink (for adults). [With, of course, blue-tail skink as a t/d-deletion variant of blue-tailed skink.]

… The American five-lined skink is small to medium-sized, growing to about 12.5 to 21.5 centimetres (4.9 to 8.5 in) total length. Young five-lined skinks are dark brown to black with five distinctive white to yellowish stripes running along the body and a bright blue tail. The blue color fades to light blue with age, and the stripes also may slowly disappear. The dark brown color fades, too, and older individuals are often uniformly brownish.

… The range of the five-lined skink extends in the north to southern Ontario, Michigan and eastern New York. The western border is in Minnesota, Missouri and eastern Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas. These skinks tend to be most abundant on the coastal plain in the southeastern United States and along the Gulf Coast.

Skinks avoid predation by shedding their tails (which will then grow back) and by biting (they’re not venomous, but they can inflict some pain). They’re often kept as pets; you feed them small insects, spiders, and mealworms.

“Jimmy Crack Corn”. From Wikipedia (with an exceptionally long and detailed discussion of the song and its interpretation):

(#2) A Chainsawsuit cartoon (one of a number of strips by Kris Straub; this one is a gag-a-day three-panel strip), from 3/5/10:, with the follow-up: … and I loved him

“Jimmy Crack Corn” or “Blue Tail Fly” is an American song which first became popular during the rise of blackface minstrelsy in the 1840s through performances by the Virginia Minstrels. It regained currency as a folk song in the 1940s at the beginning of the American folk music revival and has since become a popular children’s song. Over the years, several variants have appeared.

Most versions include some idiomatic African English, although sanitized General American versions now predominate. The basic narrative remains intact. On the surface, the song is a black slave’s lament over his white master’s death in a horseriding accident. The song, however, can be — and is — interpreted as having a subtext of celebration about that death and of the slaves having contributed to it through deliberate negligence or even deniable action. [You can listen here (#3) to a performance by the great bluesman  Big Bill Broonzy (born Lee Conley Bradley, 1903 – 58):

(verse 1:)
When I was young I used to wait
On the master and hand him his plate
And pass the bottle when he got dry
And brush away the blue-tailed fly

(chorus:)
Jimmy crack corn, and I don’t care
Jimmy crack corn, and I don’t care
Jimmy crack corn, and I don’t care
My master’s gone away

… [The fly] is possibly the blue-bottle fly (Calliphora vomitoria or Protophormia terraenovae), but probably the mourning horsefly (Tabanus atratus), a bloodsucking pest with a blue-black abdomen found throughout the American South.

… The chorus can be mystifying to modern listeners, but its straightforward meaning is that someone is roughly milling (“cracking”) the old master’s corn in preparation for turning it into hominy or liquor. There has been much debate, however, over the subtext. In the 19th century, the singer was often considered mournful and despondent at his master’s death; in the 20th, celebratory: “Jimmy Crack Corn” has been called “the baldest, most loving account of the master’s demise” in American song.

(Meanwhile, the title “Jimmy Crack Corn” has been the vehicle for play — on each of its three words.)

On the appalling black, or mourning, horsefly (Tabanus atratus), from the BugGuide site:

(#4)

Females feed on mammalian blood; males, which lack mandibles, feed on nectar and plant juices … Especially prone to attack cattle and other livestock.

… Does not often bite humans but leaves painful memories when it does. Can transmit bacterial, viral, and other diseases such as surra and anthrax, to humans and other animals through its bite.

The effect on livestock can be a serious problem. Blood loss and irritation from the flies can severely affect beef and milk production, as well as grazing. Livestock usually have no way of avoiding the painful bites, and millions of dollars have been spent trying to control these pests.

The gay BDSM version. Shift fly to skink, interpret skink as skank + twink, adjust the words of the first verse to keep the rhyme, but keep the slave and master relationship.

twink is an old acquaintance on this blog, but I haven’t looked at skank. From NOAD, which puts the currently more widespread sense first:

noun skank: North American informal [a] a sleazy or unpleasant person. [b] derogatory a promiscuous woman: the office skank.

And from GDoS, with senses in their order of development:

skank 1 (orig. US black) ‘an unattractive, easily available woman’, from 1966 on, and 4 (US campus) ‘a repulsive person of either sex’, from 1988 on

On to the blue-tailed skink, that skanky twink:

(#5) Skinky working the street, after Jimmy brushed him away from M

And here’s Jimmy, happy slave, alone with M in the old days:

(#6)

When I was young I used to wait
On the master and hand him his plate
And pass the bottle for him to drink
And brush away the blue-tailed skink

But now M has gone away, taken in chains, and Jimmy is his own master. He’s grooming Skinky, taming the vicious bitch. Soon S, born anew, will beg to be collared and caged; will wait on Jimmy, hand him his plate, and pass the bottle for him to drink; and will celebrate with him the humiliation of M and the disappearance of the blue-tailed skink. The world turns.

… and a bad grandpa pun, in the One Big Happy from 8/14:

(#1)

(The characters, left to right in the first and last panels: the neighbor boy James; the son of the OBH family, Ruthie’s older brother Joe; and Joe’s grandfather.)

Grandpa reproduces a bit of culture lore, about liaisons between housewives and milkmen. The boys are no doubt somewhat vague about what would be involved in a woman’s running off with the milkman. But, more pressingly, they don’t know what a milkman is: the N +  N compound is scarcely transparent semantically, so unless you’ve actually had milkmen in your experience, tales of women and milkmen are just baffling.

The pun. On the idiom throw oneself on the mercy of the court ‘beg for clemency’, with quart (of milk) vs. court.

The boys just disregard grandpa’s egregious pun and focus instead on what’s important to them: the milkman mystery.

The milkman figure. From Wikipedia:

(#2)

A milkman is a delivery person who delivers milk, often directly to customers’ houses, in bottles or cartons.

Milk was delivered to houses daily in some countries when a lack of good refrigeration meant milk would quickly spoil. Before milk bottles were available, milkmen took churns on their rounds and filled the customers’ jugs by dipping a measure into the churn. The near-ubiquity of refrigerators in homes in the developed world, as well as improved packaging, has decreased the need for frequent milk delivery over the past half-century and made the trade shrink in many localities sometimes to just three days a week and disappear totally in others. Additionally, milk delivery incurs a small cost on the price of dairy products that is increasingly difficult to justify and leaves delivered milk in a position where it is vulnerable to theft.

Milk deliveries frequently occur in the morning and it is not uncommon for milkmen and milkwomen to deliver products other than milk such as eggs, cream, cheese, butter, yogurt, or soft drinks.

In some areas apartments and houses would have small milk delivery doors. A small wooden cabinet inside of the residence, built into the exterior wall, would have doors on both sides, latched but not locked. Milk or groceries could be placed in the box when delivered, and collected by the homeowner.

… In 2005, about 0.4% of consumers in the United States had their milk delivered

… The frequent deliveries by milkcarriers to homes during the day has led to a high level of familiarity with many homemakers — often female — which has made the occupation a central figure in numerous milkman jokes.

On to the milkman joke. Again from Wikipedia:

(#3)

In English-speaking culture, a milkman joke is a class of joke exploiting fear of adultery and mistaken paternity. This class of jokes has its roots in the early part of the 20th century, prior to the regular availability of milk in supermarkets. At that time, milk in glass bottles was delivered directly to customers’ houses by milkmen, generally in the morning (at which time empty bottles were also collected). Men were commonly the main financial supporters of their families, and a man’s wife tended to remain at home to care for their children and home. As the milkman would visit the home at a time when the husband would be away at work, this created an opportune situation for adultery.

Similar jokes referring to other professions, such as postmen, plumbers, pizza delivery drivers, and swimming pool cleaners, are also known. [As I’ve noted in other postings on this blog, pizza boys and pool boys are staple figures of gay porn.]

The Blunt Card in #1 tackles the paternity theme directly. There’s also a rich vein of humor, including cartoons,  working the adultery theme: while the husband’s away, the wife and the milkman will play. One from Playboy (and Punch) cartoonist Erich Sokol (1933 – 2003):

(#4)

Sokol. A major exponent of the 1950s-era pinup drawing, his work is populated by extraordinarily busty young women (most of them topless, with very perky nipples) and resolutely horndog men. His men are often feckless and foolish, his women are frequently more than mere objects of male sexual desire, as here:

(#5) “Sometimes I think I’d like to move to another city and start all over as a virgin”

Bonus: Max Cannon’s Milkman Dan. From the far reaches of the milkman world:

Max Cannon’s Red Meat is an independent comic strip begun in 1989. It appears in over 75 alternative weeklies and college papers in the United States and in other countries. Since 1996, it has been available for reading on the web.

… [among the recurring characters:] Milkman Dan – The local milkman; eccentric and hostile towards people and animals, especially Karen, a neighborhood child. Constantly battling against sobriety. Dan also dresses as a cow in the part of McMoo, the anti-drug cow. (Wikipedia link)

Karen’s tag line is “I hate you, Milkman Dan.”

(#5)

(Not suitable for Facebook, because double entendres and incidental naked men, but not actually X-rated. Mostly about food.)

Fruit cream tarts, one with pansy. Plus a little Echeveria plant. These are more birthday presents from the 6th, from Juan Gomez and the aging care company he works for (a big tart — not merely una tarta, but un tartone — plus the little succulent) and from Kim Darnell (a cute fruit cream tartlet with a pansy).

Background. I’d intended to use this posting to plug into a thread on the categories and labels in the domain of quiche, flan, tart(e), torte, pie, cake, and bread. Earlier postings:

on 4/29/18, “All the dessert world is not either cake or pie”: on cake, pie, clafoutis, flan

on 5/3/18, “CAKE-PIE II”: on cake, pie, fruit pizza, pizza, pizza dolce / Italian cheesecake, cheesecake, deep-dish pizza, spanakopita, pizza blanca, meat pies

But there’s quite enough birthday-present material for a substantial posting, so I’ll put off CAKE-PIE III for a little while longer

The gifts. Un tartone (with the Italian augmentative suffix –one):

(#1)

A small Echeveria, seen here against the background of naked-boys-playing photographs on my living-room wall (I live in a visually rich home environment):

(#2)

(The Warwick Rowers photo on the right is one of three photos that got me sent to Facebook jail for posting adult nudity; the famous Burt Reynolds Cosmo centerfold was another. I will post separately about FB’s algorithms and its enforcement of its Community Standards. Here I note that I will no longer post links on FB that take readers directly to one of my blog postings; instead I’ll post instructions for finding the posting, so that images like #2 will never again appear on my FB timeline.)

And the tartlet, with pansy:

(#3)

(If you’re objecting, as several people have done to me, that that’s no pansy, it’s a Johnny Jump Up, hold the thought; I’ll get to the naming issue in a bit.)

Fruit tarts. A fruit tart (tarte, tarta) has three layers: an open crust shell (many possibilities for the makeup of the shell); a creamy layer, either a custard (in particular, pastry cream, as in the tarts above) or heavy cream and mascarpone whipped together, or a layer based on cream cheese; and a top layer of fresh fruit (either plain, as in #1, or coated in sugar syrup or a fruit glaze, as in #3).

Fruits customarily appearing in/on tarts include strawberries, blackberries, raspberries, blueberries, kiwi fruit, grapes, pineapple, pitted cherries, and Mandarin orange sections.

On pastry cream and its relatives, from Wikipedia:

Custard is a variety of culinary preparations based on a cooked mixture of milk or cream and egg yolk. Depending on how much egg or thickener is used, custard may vary in consistency from a thin pouring sauce (crème anglaise) to a thick pastry cream (French: crème pâtissière) used [among other things] to fill éclairs. Most common custards are used as desserts or dessert sauces and typically include sugar and vanilla. Sometimes flour and corn starch is added as in pastry cream or crème pâtissière.

Custard is usually cooked in a double boiler (bain-marie), or heated very gently in a saucepan on a stove, though custard can also be steamed, baked in the oven with or without a water bath, or even cooked in a pressure cooker. Custard preparation is a delicate operation

The double entendres. #3 is a fruit cream tart with pansy, four sexually loaded items packed into a small space: fruit, derogatory slang for ‘male homosexual’; cream, slang for ‘semen’; tart, derogatory slang for ‘a woman who dresses or behaves in a way that is considered tasteless and sexually provocative’ (NOAD), ‘slut’, ‘prostitute’, ‘male hustler’, or ‘promiscuous homosexual, gay slut’; and pansy, derogatory slang for ‘male homosexual’. So #2 is an especially well-chosen birthday present for your favorite homo / fruit / pansy / queer / queen / fag. I was touched by the thought.

Bonus double entendre. Around the time of my birthday, a gay friend reported on Facebook that he’d had a visit from a young man who “fed me a creamy dessert he made himself”. Yum.

Pansies. Pansy is the common name for Viola tricolor var. hortensis. The garden pansy, as here:

(#4)

Meanwhile, a widely used common name for the wild form of V. tricolor — a common European wildflower with small flowers — is Johnny jump up; the flowers are indeed tricolored, with several variants:

(#5)

From Wikipedia:

It has been introduced into North America, where it has spread [and is often grown as a garden flower; the Gamble Garden in Palo Alto has lots of them]. It is the progenitor of the cultivated pansy, and is therefore sometimes called wild pansy; before the cultivated pansies were developed, “pansy” was an alternative name for the wild form.

But for those who have Johnny jump up as the name of the plant in #3, that name will take precedence over pansy as its name, with the result that for them, unmodified pansy will refer only to the hortensis variant. (Some botanists appear to be inclined to insist on using the common name pansy to refer to both plants, on the grounds that they’re the same species; but I don’t think the rest of us should assent to botanists stipulating common names.)

So: depending on how you think about these things, the tart in #3 either has a (kind of) pansy on it, or it has a wild pansy on it, or it has no kind of pansy on it, but instead a Johnny jump up (in which case one of the double entendres mostly vanishes).

(Earlier on this blog, in the 6/2/17 posting “Pride Time #1: the pink and the purple”, there’s a section on Johnny jump ups.)

The gift Echeveria. By now, Echeveria species are old friends on this blog; in particular, see my 3/1/17 posting “Two notable plants”, with its section on the genus. Of rosette-leaved succulents with many species. A sampling of six (one of which already has an offshoot, or pup):

(#6)

Amiable plants, easy to care for, with pretty flowers on surprisingly long stalks; I have two different species (neither of them the species in #2) blooming on my patio right now. As for identifying particular species or cultivars, I’m pretty much an idiot.

(Hunky male model in skimpy underwear and swimwear, comments on male bodies, but nothing X-rated — though not to everyone’s taste.)

It starts with the Daily Jocks ad on the 14th for its Underwear Club, featuring two shots of a Jor model I’ll call Carlos: in a tricolor “athletic brief” (red, white, blue, top to bottom) in the style called Navy; and in a differently arranged tricolor thong (blue, white, red, top to bottom) in the style called Frankie (perhaps to suggest France, whose flag is blue, white, red, left to right).

(#1) Carlos flagging Dutch?

(#2) The national flag of the Netherlands

(#3) Carlos flagging Yugoslavian? Or differently oriented French?

(#4) The Pan-Slavic Flag, which served for a while as the national flag of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (adopted in 1918) — with later variants for other incarnations of Yugoslavia and for the various Yugoslav republics

(#5) The French tricolor

Background fluff from DJ (punctuation as in the original):

JOR Underwear & Swimwear, is a Colombian underwear and swimwear brand, which offers you the best products in price, quality, design and comfort!

Though the garments in #1 and #3 appear not to have been intended (at least primarily) as reproductions of flags, JOR/Jor is in fact into flags. Their Pride swimwear:

(#6)

[Brief digression. This would probably be the place to observe that Speedo-style swimsuts for men are designed to do two things: to put as much as possible of the wearer’s naked body on display, as an object of admiration and/or desire; and to highlight as much as possible of the remainder, to call attention to the two sexual foci of the male body, his genitals and his buttocks — but without actually exposing them. The swimsuit in #6 performs these functions admirably, while simultaneously flagging GAY in bright colors.]

Another JOR flag swimsuit:

(#6)

The ad copy:

The Germany Swim Brief by JOR is a patriotic look perfect for lounging by the pool, splashing your friends or showing off that sexy bod in the surf. The quick dry microfiber fabric forms a sleek, body-defining fit and features the colors of the German flag:

(#7)

In fact, the Underwear Expert site reported (in “Shake Your Flag For Jor Countries Swimwear” on  5/20/14) that

Jor Countries Swimwear is now available in briefs and shorts ($39.90) with flag motifs. Russia, Union Jack, Germany, Colombia, Mexico, Italy, and France’s flags just for you. Whether you’re actually showing off the same country as your passport, or just feel like an homage to the romance of the old country — you can’t go wrong with these.

One part Olympic, another part chic, a third part national fetish — most men can find a way to wear these not just with confidence but pride. And let’s face it, some of these flags are pretty damn cool. Made out of 84% nylon and 22% spandex for all your comfort needs.

One more appearance of our Carlos, waving his Colombian flag and his Colombian ass:

(#8)

The flag by itself:

(#9)

Homowear bonus: flagging maple. JOR seems not to have embraced the Canadian flag yet, but another company, Cover Male, has rushed in to fill the breech, exploiting the red maple leaf as a design element in a variety of ways. Among their offerings:

(#10) The boxer swim trunk, with flanking maple leaves

(#11) The boxer swim trunk from the rear; the leaf marks the spot

(#12) The boxer trunk underwear, with balls wrapped in maple leaves

(#13) The bikini brief, with framing maple leaves

All very entertaining, but I miss Carlos and his many moods. Proud gay warrior Carlos, intense and challenging; broadly smiling homeboy Carlos; contemplative German Carlos; sexy-buddy Dutch Carlos; and, my favorite, Carlos #3, all blue, white, and red, staring expectantly into his gay Colombian future, with his hot French boyfriend on the Montenegran coast.

(Men’s bodies and mansex in plain talk, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)

It began with a recent TitanMen (gay porn firm) sale, with this come-on photo (cropped here for modesty):

(1) Luke Adams in the embrace of Jesse Jackman

From  my AZBlogX posting “Fall facework” earlier today:

The focus here is on Adams’s expressive face: slackly open mouth, narrowed eyes, furrowed brows — a combination of gestures that can express ecstasy, pain, or surprise.

Facial expressions are sometimes hard to read, or even inscrutable. This particular expression is Adams’s “He’s screwing me and it’s fabulous” face, but you might not guess that right off. On AZBlogX, you can see him doing the face not only with Jackman (#1 there), but also with Anthony London (#3), Liam Knox (#4), and (from the side) Diego Sans (#5). Otherwise, he smiles beautifully, a lot, as here:

(2) Adams displaying his smile, and other assets

(Stats on Adams in the XBlog posting.)

Adams does have a pain face, which you can view here:

(3) Cropped from #6 on AZBlogX, where you can see that Adams is in fact being flogged (by Christian Wilde)

Here his eyes are tightly squinched shut, and his mouth is open but rigid, tense like his eyes.

Both his pain face and his sexual-ecstasy face involve the knitting or furrowing of his brow(s); note the idiom to knit / furrow one’s brow(s) ‘to tighten one’s eyebrows in intense concentration, anger, anxiety, or disapproval’.

Bonus. Looking for illustrations of this facial expression, I stumbled across a Jackman — not Jesse, as in #1 above, but Hugh. On the general principle that almost any day can be improved by a bit of Hugh Jackman (hey, he dances and sings!), here’s his browformance:

(3) HJ, emoting — but what emotion?

(Discussion of men’s bodies and mansex in very plain terms, photos of naked, though not quite X-rated, men, so not at all for kids or the sexually modest.)

Liam Riley, actually an ubertwink we’ve seen before, but now — to celebrate the completion of a “Twinks” Page on this blog (with links to postings on twink as a body type, a persona, and a sexual identity) — viewed in conjunction with his CockyBoys stable-mate Levi Karter.

Levi and Liam, Levis and lace, (more) butch and (more) femme, twink and near-twink (more muscles, swimmer body type). Both playful, affectionate, and (professionally) adorable. And competitors in the Ace Ass department.

For comparison: Levi left and Liam right:

(#1)

(Note that although Liam is the more femme of the pair, he has the unquestionably male butt — a tight  bubble butt of the sort rarely seen on women — while Levi has a longer, fuller butt (and somewhat wider hips), which though identifiably male (hey, it’s mine!) comes closer to the female norm.)

Front views, so you can more easily compare their body types:

(#2) Liam, effete twink, inclined towards lace (note shaved armpits)

(#3) Levi, muscle twink (or swimmer-type near-twink), inclined towards Levis (and with unshaved armpits, displayed in #4)

(#4) Levi in video action with Arad WinWin

Background on CockyBoys from Wikipedia:

CockyBoys is a New York City-based producer of gay internet pornography. Managed by CEO Jake Jaxson and his two partners, RJ Sebastian and Benny Morecock, the site has drawn attention from both inside and outside the adult industry for blending arthouse erotica and experimental film with mainstream-style genre films.

… Though CockyBoys primarily releases content through its website, the studio also manufactures a popular DVD line through EuroMedia Distribution. In addition to digital media, CockyBoys partnered with [book publisher] Bruno Gmünder in 2014. [See my 2/14/16 posting “Two books of male photography”.]

On Liam, from my 2/12/16 XBlog posting “Liam Riley, power bottom twink”:

He’s very much a twink: cute, very young-looking, completely smooth body, slender and slight of build (5’7″, 120 lbs., 28-inch waist), with a feminine rather than rugged face.

On Levi, from the p.r. copy on the CockyBoys site:

Levi is from Paraguay but moved to small-town Ohio when he was very young. He still has a lot of pride for his home country, though, which you can tell by the big tattoo on his back. Levi’s known he’s wanted to be an adult model for a long time, and started out as a gogo boy shortly after he turned eighteen. He’s also very athletic thanks to working out at the gym all throughout high school — he even did some back flips for us when we met him. Sexually, Levi’s versatile and had his first boyfriend when he was a freshman in high school.

And on the two CockyBoys together, in an XBlog posting yesteday, “Levi and Liam”, with five images:

Both young, smooth-bodied, and sexually enthusiastic (cocky in several senses), but nicely contrasting. Liam — who’s been featured before on this blog — is definitely a twink, almost invariably a bottom, and flirts with effeminacy, while Levi has a more muscular, swimmer-type body, bills himself as versatile (he’s been fucked by almost everybody in the business, but then he’s fucked a lot too), and presents as entirely masculine, but frankly gay and sweetly amiable. They’re both playful and affectionate, and make a cute couple.

The photos:

#1 The video “Meeting Liam”, with a shot of Liam kissed and fucked (Reverse Cowboy) by Levi

#2 Levi displaying his body (cropped above)

#3 Liam displaying his body (cropped from an earlier XBlog posting)

#4 Levi, smiling happily, fucked (Reverse Cowboy) by Arad WinWin (cropped above)

#5 Liam, ecstatic, fucked (Reverse Cowboy) by Dillon Rossi

In addition to exploring twinkishness, the XBlog posting focuses on facial expressions in mansex (in particular, the Ecstatic face of pleasure and the smiling Good Buddy face) and on sex positions (Reverse Cowboy requiring a certain amount of agility, strength, and balance).

Bonus, from the Paper website on 2/13/15, “Get In Bed with Cockyboys Porn Stars Levi Karter and Liam Riley” by Mickey Boardman:

(#5)

Liam Riley and Levi Karter, two of gay adult film company Cockyboys most adorable stars, spend a lot of their work hours in bed. And now they’re about to show us just how versatile they are in the sack with their new talk show. In Bed With Levi and Liam premieres on Valentine’s Day and the boys guest will be porn star James Deen (no relation to Paula). Who knows what can happen when these two raunchy rascals get rolling.

Oh yes, Levis and lace. An allusion to the many square dance clubs of this name in the US. Levis for the gentlemen, lace for the ladies.

Passed on by friends on Facebook, a French dildo / vibrator in the shape of La Tour Eiffel:

(#1)

Yes, you can pleasure yourself (vaginally or anally) with a replica of this world-famous landmark. While enjoying its punning name (La Tour Est Folle lit. ‘The Tower is Crazy’, but see below — with the pun pairing Eiffel – est folle).

On the dildo. Product descriptions from the maker:

Velvet feeling – 7 functions vibrating module – 100% silicone (free of phtalates) – The Frenchiest sextoy in the world

A monument of eroticism The most phallic of monuments has at long last been moulded into an ergonomic and hypoallergenic wonder. La Tour est Folle is a sex toy like no other! A one-of-a-kind object that combines eroticism, a souvenir of Paris and design. La Tour est Folle is 100% made in France, right down to its box. It is the crazy invention of artist, Sébastien Lecca, the sensual projection of a playful and provocative vision of a universally famous icon that never fails to stir the imagination.

Available in pink, purple, black, and gold.

Basic information from Wikipedia on the monument:

(#2)

The Eiffel Tower [La Tour Eiffel] is a wrought iron lattice tower on the Champ de Mars in Paris, France. It is named after the engineer Gustave Eiffel, whose company designed and built the tower.
Constructed from 1887–89 as the entrance to the 1889 World’s Fair, it was initially criticized by some of France’s leading artists and intellectuals for its design, but it has become a global cultural icon of France and one of the most recognisable structures in the world. The Eiffel Tower is the most-visited paid monument in the world; 6.91 million people ascended it in 2015.

La Tour Est Folle takes us by association to the play, film, and musical La Cage aux Folles (and their offspring the film The Birdcage). Highlights:

The 1973 play and 1978 film, from Wikipedia:

(#3)

La Cage aux Folles is a 1978 Franco-Italian comedy film and the first film adaptation of Jean Poiret’s 1973 play of the same name. It is co-written and directed by Édouard Molinaro and stars Ugo Tognazzi and Michel Serrault.

Like the play, the film tells the story of a gay couple – Renato Baldi (Ugo Tognazzi), the manager of a Saint-Tropez nightclub [La Cage aux Folles] featuring drag entertainment, and Albin Mougeotte (Michel Serrault), his star attraction – and the madness that ensues when Renato’s son, Laurent (Rémi Laurent), brings home his fiancée, Andrea (Luisa Maneri), and her ultra-conservative parents (Carmen Scarpitta and Michel Galabru) to meet them.

The 1983 musical, from Wikipedia  (with a digression on folles):

(#4)

La Cage aux Folles is a musical [original Broadway producton in 1983] with a book by Harvey Fierstein and lyrics and music by Jerry Herman. Based on the 1973 French play of the same name by Jean Poiret, it focuses on a gay couple: Georges, the manager of a Saint-Tropez nightclub featuring drag entertainment, and Albin, his romantic partner and star attraction, and the farcical adventures that ensue when Georges’s son, Jean-Michel, brings home his fiancée’s ultra-conservative parents to meet them. La cage aux folles literally means “the cage of mad women” [masc. fou, fem. folle ‘crazy; crazy person’]. However, folles is also a slang term for effeminate homosexuals (queens). [There was a West End production and a number of Broadway revivals.]

And the 1996 film. Again, from Wikipedia:

(#5)

The Birdcage is a 1996 American comedy film directed by Mike Nichols, written by Elaine May, and starring Robin Williams, Gene Hackman, Nathan Lane, and Dianne Wiest. Dan Futterman, Calista Flockhart, Hank Azaria, and Christine Baranski appear in supporting roles. It is a remake of the 1978 Franco-Italian film La Cage aux Folles
… Armand Goldman is the openly gay owner of a drag club in South Beach called The Birdcage; his partner Albert, an effeminate and flamboyant man, plays “Starina”, the star attraction of the club…

Today’s Zippy, a Bill Griffith bulletin on the art world:

(#1)

Along the way, we get a connection between surrealism and magic realism, Picasso as a cartoonist, and a note on the convention that cartoon characters don’t age.

On the artist, from Wikipedia:

Ivan Le Lorraine Albright (February 20, 1897 – November 18, 1983) was an American magic realist painter and artist, most renowned for his self-portraits, character studies, and still lifes. His dark, mysterious works include some of the most meticulously executed paintings ever made, often requiring years to complete.

… Albright focused on a few themes through most of his works, particularly death, life, the material and the spirit, and the effects of time. He painted very complex works, and their titles matched their complexity. He would not name a painting until it was complete, at which time he would come up with several possibilities, more poetic than descriptive, before deciding on one. Such an example is Poor Room – There is No Time, No End, No Today, No Yesterday, No Tomorrow, Only the Forever, and Forever and Forever Without End (The Window), the last two words actually describing the painting (it was as such the painting is generally referred)

Referred to in the cartoon, Albright’s Picture of Dorian Gray (1943-44): From the Art Institute of Chicago site:

(#2)

Ivan Albright painted this lurid portrait for the Oscar-winning movie adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s 1891 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. In Wilde’s tale, Dorian Gray commissions a portrait of himself as an attractive young man and later trades his soul for an ever-youthful appearance. As the still-handsome Gray leads an increasingly dissolute and evil life, his painted representation rots and decays, revealing the extent of his moral corruption. Albright’s renown as a painter of the macabre made him the ideal choice of Albert Lewin, the director of the movie, to paint the horrific image of Gray. Although the movie was shot in black and white, Lewin filmed the painted portrait in color to emphasize Gray’s shocking transformation.

Referred to in the Wikipedia entry, The Window (1942-43, 1948-55, 1957-63):

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And Albright’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony (1944-45):

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(Discussion of the St. Anthony theme to come in a little bibliography below.)

On-line photographic reproductions can’t begin to do justice to these remarkable paintings.

On magic(al) realism in art. (Putting literary magic(al) realism aside here.) From Wikipedia:

While the term magical realism first appeared in English in 1955, the term Magischer Realismus, translated as magic realism, was first used by German art critic Franz Roh in 1925 to refer to a painterly style also known as Neue Sachlichkeit (the New Objectivity), an alternative to expressionism championed by fellow German museum director Gustav Hartlaub. Roh identified magic realism’s accurate detail, smooth photographic clarity, and portrayal of the ‘magical’ nature of the rational world. It reflects the uncanniness of people and our modern technological environment. Roh believed that magic realism was related to, but distinct from, surrealism, due to magic realism’s focus on the material object and the actual existence of things in the world, as opposed to surrealism’s more cerebral, psychological and subconscious reality. Magic realism was later used to describe the uncanny realism by American painters such as Ivan Albright, Peter Blume, Paul Cadmus, Gray Foy, George Tooker and Viennese-born Henry Koerner, along other artists during the 1940s and 1950s. However, in contrast with its use in literature, magic realist art does not often include overtly fantastic or magical content, but rather looks at the mundane through a hyper-realistic and often mysterious lens.

German magic realist paintings influenced the Italian writer Massimo Bontempelli [1878-1960], who has been called the first to apply magic realism to writing, aiming to capture the fantastic, mysterious nature of reality.

Coming up now, an inventory of my postings on magic realism in (mostly American) art. A large number of the magic realists I’ve posted about are gay men. This is not just a reflection of my interests (though there is that): a great many magic realists are (or were) in fact gay men. (There are straight men, like Albright, and women, like Frida Kahlo, but there’s a preponderance of gay men.) The attractions of magic realism might have to do with gay men’s engagement with what I’ve called the subterranean world of male homosexuality, an emotionally fabulous place (however gritty it might sometimes be in real life) that transcends the bland surfaces gay men must present to the world for their own safety.

from 3/28/11, in “Magic realism”: first in a series of postings on magical realist art: on Jack Frankfurter

from 3/31/11, in “George Tooker”: the magic realist artist; influence on him of magic realist Paul Cadmus and social realist Reginald Marsh

from 4/2/11, in “The Torment of Saint Anthony”:

[from an NPR Morning Edition Saturday story on George Tooker:] In 1946, near the start of his career, Tooker painted Children and Spastics. The work shows a group of boys menacing a trio of gay men. It’s “one of the cruelest paintings” Tooker made, says art historian Robert Cozzolino. The artist was commenting on “things that he had witnessed or what he had felt people were capable of.”

Tooker channels Michelangelo’s The Torment of Saint Anthony with a Renaissance technique that comes in part from using egg tempera paints — a painstaking technique favored by the early masters.

[from Wikipedia:]The Torment of Saint Anthony is the earliest known painting by Michelangelo, painted after an engraving by Martin Schongauer when he was only 12 or 13 years old… It shows the common medieval subject, included in the Golden Legend and other sources, of Saint Anthony being assailed in the desert by demons, whose temptations he resisted; the Temptation of St Anthony (or “Trial”) is the more common name of the subject. But this composition shows a later episode where St Anthony, normally flown about the desert supported by angels, was ambushed in mid-air by devils.

[AMZ:] In Tooker’s painting, instead of devils, the tormentors are children, three gay men replace the figure of St. Anthony, and the event takes place on a city street rather than in mid-air.

from 4/21/11, in “Robert Vickrey”: the magic realist artist

from 7/16/11, in “Two deaths in the arts”: painter and photographer T. Lux Feininger

from 1/11/13, in “Realism plus”: a Zippy strip on Griffy’s favorite artists:

The artists Griffy is drawn to are all what you might think of “realism plus” artists: like Griffith in his cartoons, they create realistic depictions, but infused with extra content (allegorical, magical, self-mocking, absurdist, etc.). Hence the title “Realistic expectations”.

… Griffy’s favorites include several “magic realists” — Hopper, Tooker, Cadmus — people who probably wouldn’t turn up near the top of other people’s lists of great artists.

from 3/22/13, in “Surrealists”: connections to magic realism

from 1/12/15, in “More homoerotic magic realism”: Igor Sychev

from 1/13/15, in “Bernard Perlin”:

[from an obit in the Telegraph:] After his wartime experiences Perlin’s delivery turned towards Magical Realism, an informal school with an artistic lineage that can be traced from Frida Kahlo to Edward Hopper. His aim was to capture an “everyday magic” powered by both realism and surrealism.

from 7/25/16, in “George Platt Lynes and Jared French”: and their circle, including Tooker and Cadmus

In today’s comics feed, the One Big Happy from 10/4, in which Ruthie mondegreens:

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Yes: the song “We’re Off to See the Wizard”, from the 1939 movie of The Wizard of Oz, with we’re off (mis)heard as Rolf.

On the name, from Wikipedia:

Rolf is a male given name and a surname. It originates in the Germanic name Hrolf, itself a contraction of Hrodwulf (Rudolf), a conjunction of the stem words hrod (“renown”) + wulf (“wolf”).

So ‘wolf of renown’, or ‘famous wolf’. Then, if your personal or family name is Rolf (or some variant) or Rudolf / Rudolph, the wolf is your onomastic totem animal, available to you “off the shelf”, should you choose to use it. (Since Arnold is, roughly, ‘strong as an eagle’, my onomastic totem animal is the sea eagle, though I haven’t adopted it.)

That brings me to one notable bearer of the name. From Wikipedia:

Ida Pauline Rolf (May 19, 1896 [in the Bronx] – March 19, 1979) was a biochemist and the creator of Structural Integration or “Rolfing”.

… Rolf graduated from Barnard College in 1916 … In 1920, Rolf earned her PhD in biological chemistry under the supervision of Phoebus Aaron Theodore Levene, of Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons. … After graduating, Rolf continued to work with Levene at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York City.

… Structural Integration (or Rolfing) is a type of manual therapy that aims to improve human biomechanical functioning as a whole rather than to treat particular symptoms. Rolf began developing her system in the 1940s. Her main goal was to organize the human bodily structure in relation to gravity. Rolf called her method “Structural Integration”, now also commonly known by the trademark “Rolfing”.

(#2) 1989 edition of the book Rolfing

Structural integration is a pseudoscience and its claimed benefits are not substantiated by medical evidence.

And then to a play on the name Rolf, suggesting the growl of a dog. From Wikipedia:

(#3) Rowlf at the piano: risible, irenic, and musical

Rowlf the Dog is a Muppet character, a scruffy brown dog of indeterminate breed, though part Corgi, with a rounded black nose and long floppy ears. He was created and originally performed by Jim Henson. Rowlf is the Muppet Theatre’s resident pianist, as well as one of the show’s main cast members. Calm and wisecracking, his humor is characterized as deadpan and as such, is one of few Muppets who is rarely flustered by the show’s prevalent mayhem. He is very easy going and a fan of classical music (particularly Beethoven) and musicals.

Rowlf is one of the clearly adult Muppet characters. Since he’s given to deadpan wisecracking and loves show tunes, we can speculate about his sexuality (though the Sesame Street people just hate it when people do that).