Archive for November, 2019

Kind Hearts and Coronets

November 30, 2019

Or, Art and Artifice

In the most recent New Yorker (the 12/2/19 issue), a review by Anthony Lane of the 1949 film Kind Hearts and Coronets, in a new print, now showing in NYC. Lane’s last paragraph:

If you are unfamiliar with “Kind Hearts and Coronets,” the question is not whether making the trip to Film Forum [209 W. Houston St. in Greenwich Vilage, showings of KH&C 11/27 through 12/5] to see it is worth your while. The question is how stiff a penalty should be levied upon you by the City of New York should you fail to do so. My personal view is that a brief prison sentence would not be too harsh. There really is no excuse.

Anthony Lane has spoken; listen to the man. (Sadly, I have had to resign myself to watching a DVD of an earlier print.)

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All thanks to HomoEros

November 28, 2019

(This posting is about homoeroticism — for Thanksgiving, but still — and though the language isn’t raunchy, I’ll be writing about men’s bodies and mansex, and that isn’t suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)

Just when I’d fallen to musing that the net was bringing me nothing fresh from the bounty of its homoerotic resources to be thankful for this Thanksgiving — both men’s premium underwear companies that traffic in borderline-hardcore images in their ads and also gay porn companies that offer every manner of flat-out celebratory mansex in theirs were doing replays of their best hot stuff from past years, all of which I’d already posted about here — just then, Lucas Entertainment (high-end gay porn guys) came up with a totally new hot item, released just three days ago, for its Black Friday sale; and almost at the same time, Tim Evanson posted to Facebook with J. C. Leyendecker’s cover for the Saturday Evening Post for Thanksgiving 1928, framed as a bit of history-clash humor (Puritan soldier, weapon on his shoulder, and a modern warrior, a college football player in a holiday game, confront each other aggressively) but also giving off a cascade of homoerotic undertones.

Both the Leyendecker cover (below) and one of the ads (also below) for Lucas’s Barebacking in Public — in which (according to the publicity) “Dan Saxon pounds Gabriel Phoenix on Fire Island”, before they go on to flip roles — turn crucially on the intense content of the men’s facial expressions. These are gifts.

All thanks to HomoEros, who rules the domain of intimate connection, affectional and sexual, between men, and has granted us these gifts.

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Thanksgiving sacks of cement

November 28, 2019

A Thanksgiving cartoon by graphic designer Matt Reedy, requiring crucial background knowledge for understanding:


(#1) From Reedy’s pages of Den of Apathy prints (riffs on popular culture) on Etsy: WKRP “As God As My Witness, I Thought Turkeys Could Fly” (an 11×17 print is on sale there for $15)

A completely wordless cartoon (just the helicopter, the plummeting turkeys, the cityscape in the background) might not have worked, but “Cincinnati” is enough to make it the composition into a funny cartoon — if you know the background. “Thanksgiving” would work instead (with the same proviso). Or both: “Thanksgiving in Cincinnati”.

If you know Reedy’s title, you have even more of the story, but you still need to know how all these parts fit together, though you might reasonably infer that someone has dropped turkeys from a helicopter in the belief that they could fly, and that’s funny in itself. For the whole story, WKRP is crucial.

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At the onomatomania dinette

November 27, 2019

Today’s Zippy is set in the Ghent neighborhood of Norfolk VA of a few years back, in a Do-Nut Dinette — whose name throws Zippy into a fit of onomatomania (aka repetitive phrase disorder) compounded with Spooner’s affliction (compulsive exchange of word elements in phrases):

(#1)

(Separately, there’s the use of dinette to refer to a diner, as a type of restaurant.)

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Dancing against homophobia

November 27, 2019

(Not about language, unless a sprinkling of French counts. Instead, cute guys dancing acrobatically and affectionately with one another.)

Today’s touching bulletin from the quartier français of Homotopia: a performance that is all at once hot, sweet, tender, and earnest, to benefit the fight against homophobia, on the French reality tv show La France a un incroyable talent. An introductory shot of Guillaume (on the left) and Arthur (on the right):


(#1) “Une magnifique prestation pour la lutte contre l’homophobie” par les danseurs-acrobates Guillaume et Arthur

You can watch the performance here (set to Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”).

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Annals of art: statues of the iron prince

November 26, 2019

Today’s Zippy takes us to Alma AR, where Popeye rules with cans of spinach:

(#1)

This Popeye, who claimed to be the true Popeye and to be carved of wood (all others — especially the one in the cartoons — being mere dissemblers, pretenders, imitators), this grotesque figure, in fact of fibergass over papier-mâché, once stood tall in Alma AR, but has apparently wandered off, to be superseded by a harder, even more massive, Prince Popeye (invigorated by green iron but actually composed of bronze), the new lord of the Ozark Empire of Chenopodia.

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Annals of art: Thiebaud’s Thanksgiving turkey

November 26, 2019

On the cover of the 11/25 issue of the New Yorker, Wayne Thiebaud’s “Stuffed”:

(#1)

Accompanied by a cover story by Françoise Mouly from 11/18/19, a charming interview with the 99-year-old artist.

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Revisiting 38: More male beauty

November 25, 2019

A return to the subject of my 3/10/16 posting “Male beauty”, on cultural categorizations of attractiveness and masculinity, primarily as evidenced in facial characteristics. Adding to the mix (a) yesterday’s posting on my man Jacques Transue as a young “dreamboat” (“Him, 55 years ago”); and (b) repeated passing references here to the Clint Eastwood of the tv series Rawhide (1959-66) as “young and beautiful, but ruggedly handsome”.

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Him, 55 years ago

November 24, 2019

(A personal posting, not about language, and only glancingly about gender and sexuality.)

From Virginia Transue today, the photo of my man Jacques H. Transue (1942-2003) from his Haverford College yearbook in 1964:

Virginia had just discovered that tons of yearbooks were available on-line, so she searched and found this — which I had never seen before.  Virginia (the widow of Jacques’s older brother, Bill) described it as “one of the dreamboatiest photos” she’d ever seen, a judgment I’m inclined to agree with (but then I’m wildly prejudiced).

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NOOKY at Poundland

November 23, 2019

On the shelves at the Poundland on the London Rd. in Brighton SX, for £1, this item that Lynne Murphy came across recently:


(#1) She posted her astonishment yesterday on Facebook at finding BLUE PILLS FOR MEN — called NOOKY! — at Poundland, of all places, in there with hair gel and the like

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