Archive for August, 2024

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Four models and a film-maker

August 3, 2024

It begins with an arresting photo on Pinterest yesterday showing two beautiful young men in each other’s arms:


(#1) From the Fashionably Male website, “STOP & STARE Alexan Sarikamichian New Work: Agus & Adriel” on 9/26/17 — a fashion spread by the film-maker AS featuring two beautiful young models, Agustin Bruni and Adriel Pino, presented as in a bromance in which the young men “experiment with new feelings about sex, brotherhood, camaraderie”

AS is then the thread leading to the third male model, Severiano Astrada, a hunky young man projecting a tough-guy exterior as the main character in AS’s short film Severiano (2018); and to the fourth, Roman Stubrin, sometimes playful, but mostly offering an unsettling gimlet stare, intense and riveting — in an AS / Benjamin Baccetti film project (in progress) focused on him, and in an extraordinary 2024 fashion piece about him on the Spanish fashion site Fucking Young!

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Posted in Clothing, Fashion, Gender and sexuality, Language and the body, Masculinity, Movies and tv, Photography, Shirtlessness, Spanish, Underwear | 1 Comment »

Private Magritte’s disavowal

August 3, 2024

It’s been a while since we contemplated a Magrittean disavowal, in the tradition of the Belgian surrealist’s paradoxical Ceci n’est pas une pipe, so today’s absurd Wayno / Piraro Bizarro strip is a welcome addition to the genre:


(#1) Surrealistic clandestine warfare (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)

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Posted in Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Paradoxes, Quotations | Leave a Comment »

The eminence grise of underwear models

August 2, 2024

(Underwear model leaving only a bit to the imagination, with a sprinkling of the F-word in the text, so not to everyone’s taste)

The story begins with 7/23 e-mail from Bill Stewart (a friend who frequently appears as a character on this blog), asking me, about this photo of a silvering model hawking GYM brand jockstraps on Jockstraps.com:


(#1) BS > AZ: Do you know who this hot guy is? — to which BS followed up on 8/2: Brain fog has cleared —  Colby Melvin

Oh daddy, hot silver daddy,
I love you in that deep blue jock
And I need you so bad

Indeed very hot; Bill suspected at the outset that the guy was too expensive for him, and that was surely the case when he was available as a rent boy, back when he was a feature at gay parties; and probably still now, when he sells himself virtually on the OnlyFans site while continuing to act in gay porn: 16 episodes of Raw Fuck Club and in such videos as Power Play (2022), Big Load Movers (2022), Sweat. Fuck. Repeat (2023), and Fan Male (2023). He’s an admirably hard worker, thoughtful and self-reflective, and he’s turned himself around after an incandescent youth fueled by drugs and alcohol; he’s still a sex worker, not always an easy career, but he seems to be on top of things. He’s even engaged to another man, Todd Wing, who is (like CM) also an amazing muscle-hunk (photo to come).

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Posted in Facial expressions, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Underwear | 1 Comment »

The feminine gaze on brute masculine power

August 2, 2024

Encountered on Pinterest this morning, the photographer and film-maker Jem Goulding. A characteristic photo:


(#1) A powerful male body, photographed as if in a chance snapshot of everyday life (with an inscrutable backstory)

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Posted in Art, Gender and sexuality, Lexical semantics, Masculinity, Photography | Leave a Comment »

Fresh Cream Tasting

August 2, 2024

(Utterly unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest)

E-mail this morning from the Gay Empire site with a video on demand sale, including, from the Fuckermate video site, the kitchen-sex scene “Fresh Cream Tasting” (2021) — that is, of course, cream ‘semen, cum’ — pairing Gianni Maggio and Jonas Brown, with this arresting ad:

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Posted in Effeminacy, Facial expressions, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and food, Language and the body, Language of sex, Masculinity | Leave a Comment »

Watt, Ware, Wynn, and Y.A.

August 1, 2024

🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit to inaugurate August (inaugurust?) — and 🇨🇭 🇨🇭 🇨🇭 for Swiss National Day (yes, I am wearing my Swiss-flag gym shorts): happy 733rd birthday, Helvetia! — Uri! Schwyz! Unterwalden! — plus the Zwicky family canton: Glarus! — imagine the bunnies of August bounding over the Alpine meadows of the three Urkantone from 1291

But now for something completely different. A cascade of puns on names in the joke form I’ll call WoF?, abbreviating Who’s on First?, after the exemplary Abbott and Costello comedy sketch. In a Pearls Before Swine strip of 7/31/22, revived on Facebook yesterday (another 7/31):


(#1) WoF? now transported from baseball to football — in the NFL, with the four wh-question words of the gridiron: Watt, Ware, Wynn, and Y.A. (while Pig takes the role of the calmly explanatory Abbott and Rat the role of the increasingly confused and enraged Costello)

I’ll take an amused look back on WoF? cartoons on this blog in a moment. But first some notes on the comedy sketch that’s the model for this strip — noting that the cartoons have to achieve their effects through static text and drawings, while the comedy sketch is performed in real time by human actors deploying a rich stock of vocal and gestural resources. So on the one hand, though you might think of the comic strip as just a frozen, stripped down version of the live sketch, you could also view the strip as a highly artful joining of text and image using minimal resources (inspired by the live sketch but not attempting to reproduce it), as the comic counterpart of a graphic novel.

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Posted in Chemistry, Holidays, Jokes, Language and sports, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Music, Names, Puns, Switzerland and Swiss things | 2 Comments »

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