Arnold Zwicky's Blog

(Men’s bodies and mansex in plain language, so not for kids or the sexually modest. This is a guest column by my sexy alter ego Alex Adams.)

A prequel to AZ’s Pentecost Sunday (5/31) posting “The death of images”, in which “My tv has died” called up Frank O’Hara’s poem “Lana Turner has collapsed!”, and he folded those two things into a poem of his own, with bodybuilder, gay pornstar, and underwear model Arad Winwin as some glue to hold it all together.

But, you ask (quite reasonably), of all the hot musclehunk tops in the whole gay porn world, how did Arnold come to select this particular one, Arad? Arnold had, after all, been being serviced with deep satisfaction by others of Arad’s carnal brotherhood, with Arad barely on his horizon — but then, whoa!, Arad popped up in a 5/25 Daily Jocks cock-tease ad for a Pump! underwear sale, and refreshed our  memory and our desire. So we took him in.

The guy was undeniably really hot. But was he actually Arad, or merely some Aradesque look-alike?

Alex reflects:

— If the latter, I’d have to negotiate a whole new sexual relationship with him. What do you like to / want to do?, as we say in queer trick-talk. (Everybody sucks cock, and I’m enthusiastic about both giving and getting, but fucking is what this is about; I’m mostly a happy pussy boy, but with a guy who’s more of a bottom than I am, or just happens to need to get fucked at the moment, I’m totally up for that. But I have to know. I need to be what he needs me to be.)

But let me show you my man Aradesque. First, a cock-tease shot:

(#1) From a 5/25 DJ mailing

The face struck me immediately as Arad’s, and I knew Arad did a lot of high-homo underwear modeling.

More followed. The third in the series presented him offering his ass:

(#2) In bottomless boxer briefs

And the fourth (from 5/30) has a different cock-tease:

(#3) Tweaking a tit

In comparison, the original Arad, in an Andrew Christian crotchless brief:

(#4) Arad plays with himself

Yeah, Aradesque has the face, with the same facial hair and pretty much the same haircut, but:

• • Aradesque is hairy-chested, while Arad is always completely smooth (I assume this is his natural state, not the product of constant maniacal shaving)
  • Aradesque has elaborate tats, on his chest, belly, thigh, and left arm from wrist to shoulder, while Arad has one relatively modest tat, on his lower left arm
  • Aradesque has nicely fit legs, while Arad has seriously muscular bodybuilder legs
  • Aradesque has a lean athlete’s trunk, making a V, while Arad has a square and solidly muscular trunk
  • Aradesque has earring studs in both ears, while (so far as I can tell) Arad ‘s ears are always studless

Aradesque is definitely hot, and the DJ ads present him so intensely that you can almost smell his crotch (an effect the PUMP! staff were surely aiming for), but he appears not to be Arad. So I’m going to have to negotiate having sex with him from the ground up. Maybe we could arrange a three-way with Arad.

And now I hand this back to Arnold.

Arabesque. Aradesque, Arabesque, let’s go to the beach. From NOAD:

noun arabesque: 1 Ballet a posture in which the body is supported on one leg, with the other leg extended horizontally backward. 2 an ornamental design consisting of intertwined flowing lines, originally found in Arabic or Moorish decoration: [as modifier]:  arabesque scrolls. 3 Music a passage or composition with fanciful ornamentation of the melody. ORIGIN mid 17th century: from French, from Italian arabesco ‘in the Arabic style’, from arabo ‘Arab’.

Sense 2 is the one I’m after. I spent some time in my teenage years creating Moorish patterns using graph paper (with small cells) and high-quality colored pencils. I remember them fondly, but they seem to have disappeared in the five moves I’ve gone through since then. I even composed some Albéniz Iberia-style piano music.

But, from Wikipedia:

The arabesque is a form of artistic decoration consisting of “surface decorations based on rhythmic linear patterns of scrolling and interlacing foliage, tendrils” or plain lines, often combined with other elements. Another definition is “Foliate ornament, used in the Islamic world, typically using leaves, derived from stylised half-palmettes, which were combined with spiralling stems”. It usually consists of a single design which can be ’tiled’ or seamlessly repeated as many times as desired. Within the very wide range of Eurasian decorative art that includes motifs matching this basic definition, the term “arabesque” is used consistently as a technical term by art historians to describe only elements of the decoration found in two phases: Islamic art from about the 9th century onwards, and European decorative art from the Renaissance onwards.

Two illustrations from the Wikipedia piece (there are better available, but only for payment, apparently):

(#5) “Complex Mughal arabesque pietra dura inlays at Agra Fort”

(#6) “The French sense of arabesque: Savonnerie carpet after Charles Le Brun for the Grande Galerie of the Louvre”

Poetic/sexual bonus. In the earlier posting, ths note:

[My own poem is] loosely modeled on the O’Hara, capturing somewhat the feel of his onrushing, discursive poetry — plus the flagrant gay carnality of some of his poems.

But I gave no carnal examples. For this, go back to my 12/25/11 posting “Poet among the painters”, with (among other things) a discussion of “Une Journée de Juillet”, a little hymn to the pleasures of gangsucking and to its restorative powers on a hot sticky summer day in NYC. Notably:

The sun beams on my buttocks
as I outdistance the crowd. For a
moment I enter the cavernous vault
and its deadish cold. I suck off
every man in the Manhattan Storage &
Warehouse Co. Then, refreshed, again
to the streets! to the generous sun
and the vigorous heat of the city.

This entry was posted on June 1, 2020 at 11:30 am and is filed under Art, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Poetry, Underwear. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.