Archive for the ‘Art’ Category

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Ganymede in fur

September 25, 2021

(Relatively decorous text about decidedly indecorous sexual relationships, plus female nipples. So you might want to use your judgment.)

A 9/21 e-mail ad for a fall 2021 sale of Titan gay porn: the carefully composed background image of Man and Boy — presumably, a still shot advertising one of the 1000+ porn flicks on sale — exhibits a double vision of sexual dominance and submission:


(#1) Zeus and Ganymede, powerful man and beautiful boy (in modern gay terms, Daddy and Boy), OR Severin and Wanda, slave and his dominatrix (in modern gay terms, the Slave / Masochist, call him Servo, and the Master / Sadist, call him Domino)

Zeus and Ganymede is what we expect in a coupling of adult man and young boy, so older Servo with beautiful young Domino is a reversal of age expectations. But the older man is slipping his hand into the boy’s underwear, to minister to the boy’s penis; the boy is smiling knowingly at us, his audience, with insolent pleasure; and the boy is wearing a fur coat — together signaling that we have in fact stumbled upon a scene from the queer edition of Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs.

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Posted in Art, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Movies and tv | Leave a Comment »

9/9: not a non-event

September 9, 2021

(Astonishingly, this silly posting will devolve into references to male pubes (NOAD entertains both /pjúbìz/ and /pjubz/ as pronunciations, by the way, so do as thou wilt) and photos of hunky young men stripped down to them, so it’s not to everyone’s taste.)

It is once again Negation Day, a festival for semanticists, also customarily the day for the annual convention of No Joke, aka the Society for Language Play.

This year, the semanticists will gather en masse at the Square of Opposition, where a statue of Larry Horn, caught in mid-smile, will be unveiled; and in collaboration with the No Joke meeting, there will be staged performances of Monty Python’s “Argument Clinic” sketch. Then, as usual: a clinic for those suffering from overnegation and undernegation; and a bazaar where shoppers can rummage for negative polarity items and reinforcements for their everyday negatives. (Just Don’t Do It: because of ugly incidents in the past, metalinguistic negatives have been banned from the festival site.)

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Posted in Art, French, Idioms, Italian, Metonymy, Music, Puns | 3 Comments »

The flowers that bloom on the 6th, tra la

September 6, 2021

My birthday — 9^2, 3^4 — rolls around again, in its relentless way, and people are sending me flowers. Well, electronic images of flowers. (Meanwhile, I’m wearing my, sigh, gay dinosaur t-shirt, and I had coffee ice cream for lunch dessert, because it’s my favorite and because 9/6 is, whoopee, National Coffee Ice Cream Day, as well as AMZ’s and the Marquis de Lafayette’s birthdays, 1940 and 1757 respectively.) Today, three floral compositions:

— a sidewalk-crack garden (on the street in Dovercourt Village, Toronto), posted by Randy McDonald on his Facebook page on 9/3 and sent to me by e-mail on 9/4 to cheer me up (despair lurks in doorways, ready to pounce on me and rob me of joy): cleomes and snow-on-the-mountain

— from Benita and Ed Campbell (outside of Denver), a Jacquie Lawson electronic birthday card, “Golden Chain”: laburnum (yellow), drumstick alliums (purple and blue), plus seven parrots and a peacock

— from Rod [Williams] & Ted [Bush] (in Oakland), a different Jacquie Lawson card, “Birds and Flowers”: an arrangement of flowers to be identified, plus several little chirpy birds, with the accompaniment of a much-abbreviated orchestral arrangement of Chopin’s Grande valse brillante

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Posted in Art, Holidays, Language and animals, Language and plants, Music, My life, Photography | 4 Comments »

From the culture desk: images

September 3, 2021

Or: Pomodoro will get you Bellows, and Monet too. (Backward in time ran the artists until reeled the mind.)

A passing mention of Arnaldo Pomodoro recently — I don’t even remember where — took me immediately (but electronically) to the Columbus Museum of Art, where back in the 1980s the artist installed one of his Sfera con sfera sculptures in a prominent place (the central  courtyard of the museum, as I recall), where I visited it often, to admire it: big, solid, reflective (both literally and figuratively), complex (worlds within worlds).


(#1) Sfera con sfera in Trinity College, Dublin

Searching on Pomodoro and the CMA together then brought me to the Joy of Museums site for the CMA, which promised a Virtual Tour of the museum — but offered only thumbnail sketches of three of the museum’s holdings, not showing them in their settings or giving the history of their acquisition. (The site does offer whatever documentary footage already exists about the museum, but it doesn’t create its own tours of museums.)

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Posted in Art, My life | 8 Comments »

A stone solid pro

August 31, 2021

(Largely about male prostitution, so distasteful to many, but not, I think, actually over any lines.)

A stone solid pro, a street hustling boy, plying his trade for a better grade of customers, comfortably indoors, in his sexy Water Briefs, at a pool bar:


(#1) [from the Daily Jocks e-mailing of 8/30; ad copy:] Skip through the beach club line ups and go straight to the pool bar in the new PUMP! Water Briefs. The wide waistband on this low-cut cut brief gives you comfort at the waistline. The customised multi layered leg elastic offers the ultimate support and accentuates the butt.

You don’t see an impudent cruise face like — not his real name — Joe Dallesandro’s every day. For the use of his body and his company, you pay $400 (cash) an hour (extra for a few special services), plus the cost of a hotel room at the beach club’s hotel and the expense of a background check on you (he’ll give you references from his regular clients, and, as part of the background check, he has ways of getting references from your previous escorts — JD’s an independent contractor, and a sharp businessman; don’t let that boyish face fool you).

Most high-end hustlers make contact with new johns electronically, but, having come up from working the street as a sassy teen — risky  but thrilling — JD still prefers the physicality of face-to-face negotiation. That also allows him to show his skills at figuring out your desires and fashioning himself into the man who will satisfy them. The cruise of death is just an opening gambit, a kind of best guess as to what you need; experience tells him that most men, especially successful and powerful men, want to be dominated and used.

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Posted in Art, Facial expressions, Gender and sexuality, Idioms, Male art, Movies and tv, Music, Parody, Photography | Leave a Comment »

Jock Robin

August 15, 2021

(Jockstraps and plays on cock ‘male bird’ vs. ‘penis’, but no more than that.)

A note from the annals of (homo)masculinity, inspired by this Cellblock 13 Tight End jockstrap in robin’s egg blue, offered relentlessly on my FB page recently:


(#1) In design and material, an entirely conventional jockstrap, calling up your standard locker room, but in a very pretty color (robin’s egg blue), which seems to make it homowear, rather than than gymwear

Sometimes a guy just wants to look pretty, but apparently a robin jock — especially from Cellblock 13, which specifically designs for and markets to gay men — marks you as a fag. A tough, muscular, athletic fag, perhaps, but a fag nonetheless; in that case, you’re a butch fag. (I post fairly often on butch fagginess; frankly, I enjoy the mixed signals, which many read as dissonance.)

(Of course, you could also be a straight guy who likes pretty clothes and doesn’t mind being taken for queer, so you might well turn to Cellblock 13 for your jockstraps (and more).)

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Posted in Art, Gender and sexuality, Language and the body, Language of children, Language play, Masculinity, Poetry, Puns, Signs and symbols, Underwear | 3 Comments »

Hopper, Woodstock, & LaBelle

June 30, 2021

… purveyors of riffs on the arts. The principal riffee: panel 1 of the Peanuts cartoon of 8/29/93 (yes, 1993):


(#1) Hat tip to Jeff Bowles on Facebook on 6/28, where readers noted that though panel 1 was on one theme and panels 2-10 on another, they were both about art

Panel 1 is the big riff, cartoonist Charles Schulz’s reworking of that parody magnet, Edward Hopper’s painting Nighthawks, featuring Snoopy’s best buddy, the little yellow bird Woodstock, as the late-night diners, the nighthawks.

And then from the title of the painting, my little riff, an association from Nighthawks to Nightbirds, bringing in the title of a Patti LaBelle song (and the album it comes from).

Finally, the main part of #1 is a story of artistic creation — with Snoopy as the artist, Woodstock as the subject, and Woodstock’s chick as the audience for Snoopy’s portrait.

Nighthawks as a parody magnet. Attracting parodies in the fashion of Wood’s American Gothic, Munch’s The Scream, the Mona Lisa, and of course The Last Supper. The original:

(#2)

Postings on this blog about parodies of it:

— from 9/9/12, in “Nighthawks”, a collection of parodies

— from 12/26/13, in “Santa art”, an Ed Wheeler parody

— from 5/30/15, in “Earworms, snowmen, and parodies”, a Bob Eckstein parody

— from 12/29/18, in “Nighthawks in search of an artist”, a Bill Whitehead parody

— from 1/2/19, in “Nighthawks on New Year’s”, an Owen Smith parody

— from 4/17/19, in “The last Peepshow”, with Peeps parody dioramas of The Scream, Nighthawks

— from 7/3/20, in “Nighthawks in a time of coronavirus”, still more parodies

Nightbirds. From Wikipedia:

Nightbirds is an album by the all-female singing group Labelle [headed by Patti LaBelle], released in 1974 on the Epic label. The album features the group’s biggest hit, the number-one song “Lady Marmalade”

You can listen to the track here.

The beginning of the song:

Nightbird fly by the light of the moon,
Makes no difference if it’s only a dream.
Released, relive, just for the day,
It’s the nightbird’s way.

Posted in Art, Music, Parody | 6 Comments »

Phosphorus and Hesperus

June 2, 2021

(Folded into this posting there will be some discussion of male-male sexual acts, and paintings of these, so the posting isn’t suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)

🐇🐇🐇 To greet the new month — Pride Month, though that’s no doubt an accident — my Facebook ads on 6/1, yesterday, included one new to me, for art.com, offering giclee or canvas prints of Evelyn De Morgan’s 1882 painting Phosphorus and Hesperus:

(#1)

An embodiment of complementarity: two half-brothers (sharing their mother, Eos), one (Phosphorus) lighter haired, eyes open, facing up, bearing a flaming torch aloft; one (Hesperus) darker haired, eyes closed, facing down, holding a cold torch pointing down; with their arms intertwined and their bodies aligned complementarily, in a 69, or sideways astrological Cancer, or yin-yang pattern (with Hesperus as yin, Phosphorus as yang).

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Posted in Art, Astronomy, Myths, Names, Philosophy, Portmanteaus, Reference, Signs and symbols | Leave a Comment »

The Ecstasy of St. Atlas

May 24, 2021

(Much about men’s bodies and sex between men, in plain language — not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)

An ad on my Facebook page yesterday, with (as caption) its teaser copy:


(#1) Now selling the Cellblock 13 Atlas Jockstrap / Harness at Jockstraps.com. If you are looking for a light-weight, affordable elastic harness and jock then check out this all new product

The model’s body and face, the (bulldog) harness, and the jockstrap are all hot (in my view as an appreciator of the underwear ad genre). But then the lines the harness and jockstrap form in the photographer’s composition make for a pleasing abstract composition on their own. And the model’s posture, his gestures, and his facial expression are all satisfyingly packed with allusions to art, both high art and popular art.

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Posted in Art, Clothing, Facial expression and gesture, Gender and sexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Masculinity, Underwear | 1 Comment »

A free cartoonist in Paris

April 27, 2021

Today’s Zippy strip has Griffy (Bill Griffith’s counterpart in the strip) drawing up a cartoon storm in fin de siècle Paris, in competition with a disdainful local painter (call him PP, for peintre parisien):

(#1)

Their dispute is about cartoons, in terms familiar to Griffy:

… but is it art?

(here, asked about cartoons). PP emphatically says no, calling them “gaudy daubings … dégoûtant!” — while Griffy returns the insult by referring to PP’s work as “post-fauvist, pre-cubist, elitist scribbling”, while Griffy’s own work “recognizes th’ absurdity of life”.

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Posted in Art, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Pop culture | Leave a Comment »

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