Today’s ad mailing from the Daily Jocks homowear company came with an artistic allusion (plus some fairly routine ad copy):
(#1) [ad copy:] 20% OFF – FETISHWEAR Welcome to The DailyJocks Backroom, from harnesses to wrestling suits, check out some of the most intimate products from your favourite brands including DJX, Nasty Pig & many more
It’s a grease monkey homage! To the Herb Ritts oeuvre, specifically to Fred with Tires, Hollywood 1984.
On the Stanford Linguistics weekly newsletter, the Sesquipedalian, this morning (timestamped 7:36 am):
Artifact of the Month: Zwicky’s Linguistics Quilt
In the spirit of reminiscence, this month we bring you former Adjunct Professor Arnold Zwicky’s linguistics-themed quilt, composed of 12 t-shirts from different linguistics events…
(The quilt, and its component parts, can be viewed in my 12/11/19 posting “The linguistics quilt”.)
My Monty-Python-dense response (which the Sesqui might or might not choose to print, but you, my readers, can see it here):
(References to man-on-man sex, in very plain language, will slide by every now and then, and I swear a whole fucking lot. I realize that the posting is also astoundingly long, complex, peculiar, and deeply passionate. Still, I plead: Gentles, do not reprehend. / If you pardon, we will mend.)
Once again, my plans for a day’s postings have been utterly defeated through an accident of experience — in this case, what happened to be playing on my night-time Apple Music when I arose very briefly for an old man’s piss break just after midnight on Monday (4/18).
Bright and, oh Jesus, joyous. (Joy is a huge thing in my life, right up there with playfulness and sexual pleasure.) Solid Baroque. Oh, in English, and it seems to be about happiness. Must be Henry Purcell; bright joy was one of his musical things, and he did it magnificently, again and again. (A moment’s pause here to express gratitude for a world that has Purcell in it.)
Yes, of course, The Fairy Queen (or as Purcell had it at the time, The Fairy-Queen; just to note that these fairies might be playful, but they’re also creatures of power). Specifically, the ravishing “They shall be as happy as they are fair”. (In fact, the adjective ravishing came unbidden along with the music, so it’s a morning name for Monday. The adjective puckish would certainly have been à propos, but that didn’t come to me until much later in the day.)
Now: there’s the title of this posting, from Gilbert & Sullivan. Then, after dwelling some more on Purcell I’ll go on to Jeremiah Clarke, Mendelssohn, and Shakespeare, wrapping up with the gay musical Were the World Mine as a bonus — plus a whole lot of stuff about my life along the way.
Some close analysis, and some reflections, on the Jacquie Lawson animated greeting card “Easter Morning”, that I posted about yesterday, in “Sheep grazing among the Paschal roses”. There I looked at purple hellebores (and some other other crucifixion-symbolic flowers) and at Bach’s aria “Sheep May Safely Graze” (a performance of which accompanies the animation).
Now about the details of the animation’s images (especially, but by no means only, the plants).
From my old friend (of 60+ years now) BBC — Benita Bendon Campbell, aka Bonnie Campbell — yesterday, a Jacquie Lawson electronic greeting card “Eastern Morning”, full of symbols of the holiday (including many plants, hellebores among them) and accompanied by a particularly bright orchestral setting of Bach’s gorgeous aria Schafe können sicher weiden (“Sheep May Safely Graze”). Solid delight.
First, some plants. Then the music.
What I posted to Facebook on 4/8, on the occasion of Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation as an Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court. My follow-up said that, yes, the reference was to Agee (the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, on which more below) and added:
I can’t begin to say how pleasing KBJ’s appointment is to me.
To amplify a bit. This is not the Promised Land, but it is nevertheless a Big Fucking Deal. One of the things about my hero John Lewis that moved me especially was that he truly believed that we could reach the Promised Land in this life (not in an afterlife on Jordan’s other bank) — just not in his life, it would take some time. [More below on Lewis and this astonishing bit of faith on his part.] Meanwhile [Lewis believed], we have to keep moving on the path. KBJ is a highly visible step on the path, and that’s a big thing, a moment of joy.
(References to male bodies and man-on-man sex, but in decorous language, because the raunchy stuff isn’t the point. But it’s all there, with a (carefully doctored) photo, so some readers might have qualms.)
Yesterday’s discourse on art, triggered by an ad for a gay porn DVD — in my posting “Three men at play” — ended with a fugitive memory:
I had this vague feeling that the arrangement of the [three] bodies [in the gay porn shot] was an allusion to some piece of art (a statue or a painting); it struck me as somehow familiar.
But what piece of art? I was at a loss.
Now one reader has provided the actual source, and another has provided the piece of art that I dimly and inaccurately sort of had in my mind when I asked the question. So, the real thing and the bad (but entirely relevant) guess, and more than that no one could ask for. Artistic satisfaction is mine.
(It’s actually about the art of photography, but showing men’s bodies and man-on-man sex and discussing these in street talk, so it’s not appropriate for kids or the sexually modest.)
The Falcon / Naked Sword store DVD sale ad of 4/9 offers an artful posing of three beautiful male bodies elegantly engaged in a sexual encounter, with their three weighty cocks arranged in counterpoint to the arrangement of the bodies. The ad, with the cocks and balls fuzzed out for WordPress modesty (the actual ad can be viewed in my AZBlogX posting of earlier today, “Three men, three cocks”).
(#1) Penectomized but still stunning: left to right, Jimmy Durano, Luke Milan, and Angel Rock in Alpine Wood Part 1 (Falcon Studios, released 5/15/14); Rock is about to give Durano a pre-fuck kiss; meanwhile, Milan (kneeling between the two standing men, his eyes closed in pleasure) is about to take Durano’s cock into his mouth
(Warning: as is my way, a soupçon of smart-ass street talk.)
Two on gendered topics, plus another cartoon that’s incomprehensible unless you recognize one of its elements (and only incidentally has a gendered bit in that element).
Masculine identity for young teens in a One Big Happy (a re-play from 4/26/10 in my comics feed today); a display of femininity in today’s Rhymes With Orange; and then, in today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, on the equipment needed for a night lighthouse (with an incidental display of maleness).
(Men’s bodies and a wide variety of man-man sexual acts, plus bondage and pain, mostly in street language, so thoroughly inappropriate for kids and the sexually modest. Many readers will find the pain stuff decidedly ouchy; grit your teeth and push on through, that’s what all the sub boys do.)
In my mail a few days ago, an ad for a new subscription gay porn site, Bondage Bros, including the arresting photo below of two young men in gear for rough sex: a sub man negotiating over the pain, humiliation, restraint, and verbal abuse that his tough dom will mete out to him in their encounter — but especially the pain, which the sub appears to be looking forward to with some (possibly pleasurable) apprehension.
