(About art, not much about language.)
This morning I passed on to my grand-daughter a nice wooden box with this image on its cover:
Opal translated the name of the press as ‘Eight Crazy Press’ (but without enlightenment, and I still don’t know the source of the name), and she worked out that the image was an ad for a place called Bottom of the Hill (which I recognized as a famous San Francisco music venue and bar). Turns out the whole business is a San Francisco thing.
(About my life, but with a linguistic hook.)
Back on December 30th I recovered my living room. For four months, my (nominal) living room had functioned as my bedroom: I slept, sitting up, in a chair (a recliner), and the coffee table next to it served as my bedside table, covered with all the things that would normally have been kept in my bedroom; meanwhile, my (nominal) bedroom served as a kind of storage room for stuff that had to be moved out of the rest of the house (to accommodate the family and friends who were helping to care for me).
Though there were places for a few people to sit in the room I was sleeping in, the function of the room was clear to visitors, who were a bit disconcerted by the arrangement. (By the way, for a considerable part of this time I was living in my bathrobe, or just a t-shirt and sweatpants, which functioned like pajamas, so I looked a lot like a man in his bedroom, whichever room I was in.) I’ll go through some of the history in another posting, but my immediate interest here is how to talk about these things. What goes along with the labels living room and bedroom?
(About photography rather than language.)
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.
(Not about language.)
On AZBlogX, three substantial postings on gay watersports (the sexual fetish, not the athletic competitions). These postings look at the Gayland (fantasy) version of these practices and also at the real-life practices (the roles, routines, and rituals that organize this sexual subculture). The first prong is a kind of literary analysis, of the sort I’ve used in talking about Gayland in other postings; the second is a kind of anthropological analysis, of the sort I’ve used in talking about the customs and practices of the (real-life) gay baths in other postings.
(On male art, not really about language.)
Is it porn or is it art? Is this an exclusive choice?
Around the Globe, another in a succession of books of pornstars as seen by male photographers — a kind of crossover genre, using obviously beautiful male bodies in artful compositions, in this case by Benno Thoma (see earlier X Blog posting here). A set of shots on my X Blog here, including a contrast between Thoma’s presentation of model Brandon Manilow and a flat-out porn presentation of the same man’s body.
Over on AZBlogX, another entry in the long series on male photography: on Benno Thoma, with six examples of his work (on my X Blog because three involve full frontal nudity) and a gushing review of his work from the site Gay Influence: Gay & Bisexual Men of Importance.
(About art and the body, not much about language.)
Over on AZBlogX yesterday, I posted a substantial piece on male nudes, reporting on an exhibition of them in Vienna that excited considerable controversy, due to a Pierre et Gilles poster used in advertising the show; the poster showed three young men, naked from the knees on up and facing the viewer, and the objection was to the public depiction of their penises. (Those penises, plus some others from Pierre et Gille and one in a sculpture by Ilse Haider, are why the posting went on my X Blog rather than this one; like some Austrians, WordPress has a horror of the penis.)
I then went on to look at a deeper objection to penises in art: an objection to *erect* penises. Hard cocks are apparently by definition inflammatory and cannot be displayed with serious artistic intent. There’s a small list of exceptions to this generalization: in particular, folk art, comic and fantasy art, and (overlapping with these categories) art showing erect penises *detached* from a body (here we sing King Missile’s 1992 song “Detachable Penis”). The remaining examples seem subject to constant pressure to re-label them as pornography rather than serious art.
From Jess Anderson on Facebook, this mock pharmaceutical ad for the drug Viacura:
Scientific name: Mycoxaphlopin
(About male art, not mostly about language, though taxonomies figure prominently.)
Max Vasilatos has been sending me postcards from a collection of Kinu Sekigushi’s Manga Boys cards (2005), from his Manga Boys book of 2004. KS is a gay French artist living in Paris, apparently self-taught, creating manga/anime — sensual, homoerotic images — outside of the Japanese yaoi tradition of manga, but clearly influenced by it, as well as by the conventions of American comics (link). He draws very masculine young men in close to equal sexual relationships (though b/t coding — roughly “bottom” vs. “top”, see here — is almost inescapable in these matters), young men of complex racial/ethnic identity (as this is represented in the comics).
