… and the stages of shirtless Kellan Lutz.
A little while back, I stumbled into watching the 2014 The Legend of Hercules for the, omigod, second time. Starring an immensely muscled Kellan Lutz as the great hero of myth, embedded in a famous stinker of a movie whose faults are at least in part linguistic. Though it does offer tons of glistening male flesh for aficionados.
(#1) Exhibit #1: Lutz as Hercules
On February 24th, in the posting “Computer annals: Reyes Korzybski and the avalanche of spam”, I confronted thousands of spam comments a day from a single site, which used some huge database of names to concoct senders’ names on the spam. That posting was about the name Reyes Korzybski.
The avalanche of comments spam vanished not long after this, so for a period the flow of comments spam dropped to its customary hundreds a day. But then a few days ago a fresh spate began, bringing me (among thousands of others) the name Zane Grills.
Which suggested Zane Grey and grills of various kinds and led me to playful POPs (phrasal overlap portmanteaus) of a specialized sort: name chains (posting here). So I descended to the silliness of the Grey brothers: Billy Zane Grey, Billy Joel Grey, and Fletcher Christian Grey.
(This posting has reproductions of art works in which penises and female breasts are exposed. My belief is that these works — now on public display in mainstream art museums — fall under the Fine Art Exemption to the ban on such images on WordPress, Facebook, Google+, and elsewhere.)
A follow-up to yesterday’s posting “Annals of shirtlessness: French neo-Classicism”, whose centerpiece was Bouguereau’s Dante and Virgil, featuring two shirtless, in fact naked, men in combat. The painter was heaviy focused on the female form, so his treatment of the male nude is of some interest. On Facebook, Corry Wyngaarden then supplied another Bouguereau example:
(#1) Bouguereau, The Remorse of Orestes (1862)
(with drapery cunningly concealing the man’s genitals, making the painting acceptable for exhibition at the Paris Salon; in intent, this is not a cock tease, but a modest cover-up). The Bouguereau Orestes led me immediately to John Singer Sargent’s Orestes Pursued by the Furies (1921). And from there to Sargent‘s treatment of male nudes, in a set of drawings and paintings kept secret during the painter’s lifetime — sexually explicit, homoerotic works.
From Rebecca Wheeler at the Musée D’Orsay in Paris, this gigantic neo-Classical painting by William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905):
(#1) Dante et Virgile (en enfers) / La Barque de Dante (1850)
Nasty, brutish, and naked.
Back on December 17th, my posting “Xmas follies 2017: the shirtless men of the season” featured (in #1 and #2 there) pole dancer Domenico Vaccaro, engaging in an activity that is both sport — there are competitions — and art form — performances are scored on aesthetic criteria as well as on the achievement of specific moves. Think of it as ballet with a prop, a prop that allows a dancer to fly suspended in mid-air. Male pole dancers frequently perform shirtless, so they also show off their full bodies, which are aesthetic objects in their own right.
And now, thanks to Kim Darnell, another male pole dancer, the Hungarian Peter Holoda, a great pleasure to watch in action. In a still shot:
(#1) You can watch here a piece of a stunning performance by Holoda to music from the film Schindler’s List, played by Holoda’s frequent collaborator, cellist Tina Guo
(Shirtless guy, sexual slang, lots of sexlube, suggestive naming, but nothing truly hard-core.)
Yesterday’s Daily Jocks ad, for Amity Jack products:
(#1) Model in jock strap applying BANG Oil from Amity Jack
Trade names Jack and BANG, both chosen to suggest uses for the company’s main products, sexlubes for gay men: to jack oneself or another guy off, to bang a guy.
From the annals of tv watching: Eddie Cahill as Tag Jones in season 7 of the sitcom Friends (and then as Det. Don Flack in CSI: New York); and Lucas Black as Special Agent Christopher LaSalle on NCIS: New Orleans. Both men are strongly physical actors with mobile expressive faces and both smile amiably a lot — they are really cute guys — and both do notable local accents: EC white working-class NYC in CSI: New York and LB white NOLA in NCIS: New Orleans. Both accents build on the actors’ native varieties — EC’s NYC and LB’s Alabamian — but with crafting (quite considerable on LB’s part) to fit their characters.
Since my middle name is Melchior, I was hoping for gold on Epiphany morning, but what I got was a primo sex dream — my attempts at programming sex dreams never work, they always turn into convoluted dreams about linguistic analyses, so yesterday’s dream was a great gift — featuring Joey Tribbiani as a fabulously slutty (also sweet and goofy) gay pornstar. Not Matt LeBlanc, but his character Joey Tribbiani. So I woke with a hunky funny Joey on my, um, mind.
(#1) Joey practices making love with a pineapple (video here)
That’s Matt LeBlanc playing Joey. My dream had Joey playing a stud named Rocco. In a threesome with me and my boyfriend, whose dream name I don’t remember, but he was played by my guy Jacques. Together, between nearly non-stop bouts of noisy public sex, we saved all the gay pornstars of the world from annihilation by an evil army. With the help of a lot of undercover agents, most of them women. But the three of us studs had the big weapons.
It was all deeply satisfying, with victories in battle and ragingly hot sex. Also a lot of fun, with horseplay and banter, and (thankfully) without the Friends laugh track. Also without the Epiphany gold befitting the white-bearded King of Persia, but then you can’t have everything.
The morning began with:
Xenophon Bellerophon
Two Ancient Greek names — the philosopher, historian, and soldier Xenophon and the mythical hero Bellerophon — together making a line of trochaic tetrameter (when the secondary accents on phon are treated as accented in the poetic line).
As a linguist, I had hoped that the phon in these names would be the Greek ‘sound’ stem, so that Xenophon would be equivalent to an English noun xenophone, referring either to someone who speaks a foreign language (parallel to Anglophone and Francophone) or to a non-native sound, from a foreign language (like the voiceless velar fricative [x] in relatively German-faithful pronunciations of the noun Bach in English).
But apparently not (though the etymologies of the names seem to be uncertain). My hopes are dashed.
On this blog on 11/17/15, “The House of the Writhing Pun”, I wrote about “The House of the Rising Sun”, with Wikipedia notes on the folk song and a link to The Animals’ 1964 recordng of it; and added this note about the meter of the text:
Common meter: four lines of iambs, alternating tetrameter and trimeter: 8.6.8.6. With the 2nd and 4th lines rhyming, An enormous number of texts — “O Little Town of Bethlehem” and “Amazing Grace”, for example — can be sung to this tune.
I hadn’t realized that one of these possibilities had been realized by serious musicians until this morning, when during hours of Christmas and Jesus music, public radio station KRCB in Santa Rosa CA broadcast a Blind Boys of Alabama recording of “Amazing Grace” (the text) sung to the tune of “The House of the Rising Sun”. Really quite moving. You can watch a live performance of it here.
