My Life My Way

May 15, 2024

From Alexander Chee’s cheemobile Instagram page on 12/11/20:

My latest obsession: My Life My Way, a Japanese gay magazine published from 1977 – 1982, with a stunning visual style and illustrated covers all drawn by a single artist, Joji Takeuchi. I love the commitment to the humor and the style.

Insofar as we can tell, the men on the covers are American — natural models for a public gay life not easily available in the Japan of the period — so they are fantasy figures of gay masculinity, not portraits from life. I’ll exhibit four of the covers below.

As for the content of MLMW, I’ve found no sources on how it presented gay life in Japanese to a Japanese audience, or in fact on how issues of the magazine were distributed.

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From the annals of attentional focus

May 14, 2024

The Zits strip of 5/12, in which Jeremy invests an enormous amount of time and attention devising a remarkable hammock leisure environment for himself — something really important to him — while neglecting to wash any of his dishes, not even rinsing out his cereal bowl — something routine and of no significance to him. His attentional focus in on the cool stuff, the stuff he cares about, while he neglects the everyday stuff, which he views as just a nuisance (well, to look ahead, it’s just a nuisance because it’s a woman’s job):

There seem to be (at least) five elements — they’re all of highly context- and culture-bound and they’re often at odds with one another — that can contribute to the personal value of a task to someone doing it and can therefore engage their attentional focus:

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CHE for the ESC win!

May 14, 2024

Very briefly noted, a celebratory moment in two of my worlds — the Swiss diaspora and the gender & sexuality sphere — because CHE (Latin Confoederatio helvetica ‘Swiss Confederation’) is the winner in the 2024 ESC (Eurovision Song Contest); and because the winning performance was an extravagant production about the singer’s realizing and embracing their non-binary identity.

The facts in a nutshell from the Wikipedia page on the singer:

Nemo Mettler (born 3 August 1999), known mononymously as Nemo, is a Swiss singer and rapper who plays the violin, piano and drums. They represented Switzerland and won the Eurovision Song Contest 2024 with the song “The Code”, giving Switzerland their first win since 1988

And a p.r. photo of Nemo looking bigenderously beautiful:


The hyperkinetic performer caught in repose (photo: SRF / Ella Mettler)

jackery at the jackery

May 13, 2024

(Playing around with English morphology and male masturbation, so not to everyone’s taste)

It all started with a chance encounter with an ad for Jackery portable power stations, like this one:

(#1)

Given the orientation of my imagination, I was immediately taken to the idea of jackery ‘male masturbation, jacking off’, at places especially devoted to the practice, jackeries (aka jack-off / jerk-off / JO clubs). Clearly not what the Jackery Company had in mind, but where did they get their name?

From the “get to know Jackery” page on the company’s website:

(#2)

Jackery was established in 2012 and co-founded by a former Apple senior engineer and a CEO called Z Sun, a pioneer in the field of Li-battery technology. The original founder developed a battery jacket for the Apple iPhone, which is where the name Jackery comes from.

… Jackery makes portable power stations, solar panels, solar generators, and accessories for the outdoor and mobile market, but they are best known for their portable power stations.

So Jackery has the derivational suffix –ery  (denoting ‘a place where some occupation, trade, or activity is carried on’) attached to an abbreviated form of jacket, referring to one of the company’s first products.

The details of words with the the noun-forming derivational suffix –ery are not at all straightforward, full of oddities of history; it’s not a particularly productive suffix. But there’s enough there that you can play with it.

On to this interesting messiness in some detail, and moving from battery jackets to male masturbation.

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Blutonic dialogue

May 13, 2024

In today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, a Blutonic dialogue: an encounter in which a young woman discusses a platonic relationship with an apparently tamed (and clearly dismayed) incarnation of the villainous and brutal Bluto from the Popeye comics and animations:


(#1) A pun on platonic relationship (NOAD: adj. platonic: (of love or friendship) intimate and affectionate but not sexual) (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)

Wayno’s title: “The Mistaken Mariner” — simple friendship not being what Bluto had in mind.

Meanwhile, there’s my Blutonic dialogue, a pun on Platonic dialogue:

Plato wrote approximately 35 dialogues, in most of which Socrates is the main character. (Wikipedia link)

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“A place for us to see each other”

May 12, 2024

(Some photos of male bodies and allusions to sex between men, but no naughty bits and no street language — just not to everyone’s taste)

The end tag to a New York Times story, “At Frieze, Photographer of Gay Life Seeks ‘a Place in the Sunshine’: Stanley Stellar has documented gay New York, on the streets and in his studio, for decades. Now he steps onto his biggest stage”, by Erik Piepenburg, on-line on the NYT website on 5/3 (in print on 5/4); from the story:

From May 1-5 [AZ: yes, the event is now over; my life has been difficult, and I’m doing the best that I can], Stellar will step onto possibly his biggest stage when Kapp Kapp, the queer-centered TriBeCa gallery run by the twin brothers Sam and Daniel Kapp, shows his work at Frieze New York, the annual international art fair that returns to the Shed at Hudson Yards.

On view will be 15 of Stellar’s “Piers” photographs: assertive portraits and lazy-day snapshots of the mostly gay men who claimed the decrepit West Side piers as social and sexual turf in the 1970s and ’80s. Many photographs will be shown in color for the first time; “Stanley Stellar: The Piers,” a related book of photos, has been reprinted timed to the fair.


(#1) “Piers Roof July 1, 1978”

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The gay handshake

May 11, 2024

(It’s about men going down on men, in street language, so not for kids or the sexually modest)

A subtopic extracted from a posting (in preparation) on Stanley Stellar’s career in male photography (previous posting on this blog: on 5/8 in “Stanley Stellar’s couch”), during which he has amassed a trove of tens of thousands of photos, almost all set in NYC (and is still at it). One part of his work is devoted to depicting the beauty of the male body; for this he solicits men to pose for him (that’s why his e-mail address is on his website). These men are of various sexualities.

The remainder of his work he thinks of photographing the gay community:

— chronicling Pride parades (in all their complexity)

— showing street life in gay neighborhoods and at locations of gay sociability — both places populated by an assortment of lgbt+ people, plus some others

— and recording the places of cruising and tricking for men who have sex with men: what I’ve called the subterranean world of sex between men in public

This subterranean world: cruising spots in public parks, the famous trucks in NYC’s West Village back in the day, gay baths and sex clubs, t-rooms (mensrooms repurposed for sex between men), and so on — including Stellar’s special province, the West Side piers in NYC. All places where sex between men (especially cocksucking, which is quick and easy, and requires no special preparation or clean-up, so can be smoothly managed pretty much anywhere) is available in spaces that are in some sense public and are open to other like-minded men but are carefully concealed from outsiders (hence, subterranean).

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Annals of verbing: to get storrowed

May 10, 2024

A brief Friday delight, to which I was alerted by Gadi Niram on Facebook: a passive-only verbing based on a proper place name. In today’s CBS News from Boston, the story “3 trucks, including one from Trillium Brewing, get “storrowed” in one day on Storrow Drive”:

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L’affaire Haspelmath / Beyoncé

May 9, 2024

An astounding story of linguistics in the public eye that begins with Beyoncé’s name being added to the new edition of the Larousse dictionary, an event that so impressed the BBC that on 5/2 they approached the distinguished German linguist Martin Haspelmath to comment on it, a request that MH found utterly bewildering (as did pretty much everyone who knows MH and his work — his meticulous scholarship — and Queen Bey and her work — her extraordinary voice and her presentation of herself as a flaming-hot sexual being). In fact, the more you know, the weirder it gets.

Eventually, as a genuine éminence grise (I was born in 1940, MH in 1963, and QB in 1981, so we’re dealing with three generations here), I undertook to recount some of my experience in being interviewed by the media; I’ll re-play this below. But first, an enormous amount of background.

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Stanley Stellar’s couch

May 8, 2024

This is a reposting, on this blog, of the complete content of a 5/2/11 AZBlogX posting “Stanley Stellar’s couch”, original link:

http://arnold-x-zwicky.livejournal.com/29466.html

The 2011 posting includes a link (still valid) to Stellar’s own website, which is packed with wonderful content and kept up to date, and even includes his gmail address, so that he can make himself available to men interested in being photographed by him.

Today’s blast from the past is relevant to the current moment: the 2024 edition of the international art show Frieze New York (May 1-5, 2024) included 15 historic photographs by Stellar reproduced for the first time  in color. As reported in the 5/4 New York Times:

Titled “The Piers: In Color,” the queer-centered TriBeCa gallery Kapp Kapp presented Stellar’s Kodachrome vision of New York City’s west side piers of the late 70s through 80s, a pre-AIDS paradise mostly remembered in black and white. Stellar’s color photographs recall a vibrancy and texture often omitted from visual history.

More Stellar in a posting to come. In this one it’s just the couch.

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