(#1) Homer Simpson ejaculates
From the American tv show Psych, S2 E12 “The Old and the Restless” (2008):
Shawn Spencer: Can you check for a John Doe, please?
[Desk clerk nods, turns to her computer]
Shawn Spencer: Actually, can you check all the Does? Tae Kwon, Cookie, Play, Do-Si…
An extended play on the syllable /do/ in English.
If you think you can escape the Summer Song of 2017 — Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee’s “Despacito” (pop crossed with rap) — you’re probably mistaken. Yes, you can do the obvious: avoid Puerto Rico and Latino-heavy sections of the US, stay away from Mexican, Salvadoran, Cuban, etc. restaurants, all that sort of thing. But you could flee far away, to the Balkans, to Ireland, to Southeast Asia, to Hungary, and it will be in vain: the song will haunt you, in instrumental versions on piano, cello, violin, bamboo flute, oud, you name it; with words in French, Chinese, Gaelic, Croatian, Malay, whatever; performed by one man, one woman, two men, a man and a woman, on up to crowd-sized choruses; as heavy metal, as Romantic-style classical music, as jazz, and so on; as a sweet and softly romantic song, as hard-driving bump-and-grind music, as an enthusiastic anthem, or as flat-out parody; with fresh choreography in almost any dance style imaginable.
I didn’t appreciate the scope of the phenomenon until Kim Darnell sent me a video of Peter Bence (a 25-year-old Hungarian pianist and composer) doing a jazz-inflected piano version (channeling Keith Jarrett), and watching that led me to all this other stuff.
Yesterday, from Chris Hansen, this cartoon by Daniel Beyer:
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Chris’s comment:
It took me a minute to “get” it (I’ve been in England for a looooong time)
(Chris is an American long resident in England.)
Another exercise in understanding comics. In this case, requiring a crucial piece of knowledge about American popular culture.
(The title above and #1 below should clue you in on whether this posting is for you.)
Today’s remarkable find: a piece on the thump site on the 1st, “This Dance Troupe Performs with Lasers in Their Butts” by Ali Gitlow:
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Young Boy Dancing Group at “The Curves of the World”, curated by Mette Woller, Chart Art Fair, Copenhagen, 2016 (photo by David Stjernholm)
Three follow-ups to this morning’s gay Santa posting: earlier gay Santa postings on this blog; a 2013 Christmas bonus, with outrageous black gay Santas in an Alabama Christmas parade; and a link to a couple more Harry Bush cartoons / illustrations.
Probably since the beginning of time, people have made music using materials at hand: improvising percussion instruments, devices to modify or amplify the human voice, ways to create sound by blowing on pipes or making fibers vibrate. Here, two examples that have come past me recently: the ugly stick and the comb kazoo.
(Some vernacular sex talk along the way, so some judgment might be called for.)
It started with Dave Hause on ADS-L reporting this item from the seekingalpha site (with the crucial bit boldfaced below):
The next wave of media consolidation will surely be on investors’ minds today following AT&T’s weekend agreement to buy Time Warner. Discovery Communications (NASDAQ:DISCA), Scripps Networks (NYSE:SNI), AMC Networks (NASDAQ:AMCX), Lions Gate (NYSE:LGF), Viacom (VIA, VIAB), and CBS already had their tails in the air on Friday afternoon as merger talk between AT&T and Time Warner heated up.
Hause reflected:
I may be off but I would interpret “tails in the air” as cat body language, “sexually receptive.” Maybe less suggestively as “seeking a dominant partner.”
There are actually two figurative interpretations here: one alluding to cat body language (in which an upraised tail communicates contentment and confidence) and one alluding to sexual receptivity signals in mammals (in which females raise their tails — and, often, back up to males — to communicate readiness for coitus).
Meanwhile, figurative (both metaphorical and metonymic) senses of tail — ‘penis’, ‘vagina’, ‘buttocks’, ‘anus’ — impinge on both of these figurative uses of raise (one’s) tail and similar idiomatic expressions, like put/have (one’s) tail (up) in the air.
(Mostly about dance and male bodies.)
Passed through several Facebook sites, most immediately Michael Palmer’s, this fabulous photo of four dancers from the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, captured flying in mid-air:
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Other male dancers flying in mid-air were featured in my 1/10/16 posting “Dance Time”. All of these photos are tributes to the skill of the dancers, the choreographer, and the photographer, who undoubtedly had to have the dancers run through their performances many times to get these remarkable shots.
Coming by accident almost at the same time, an opera singer who’s a remarkable muscle-hunk (from Larry Schourup) and a ballet dancer with an equally notable male dancer’s physique (from Mike McKinley). Barihunk Craig Verm and ABT principal Marcelo Gomes.
Two recent items passed on to me by Mike McKinley: one a photograph of young male dancers at the barre, the other a video compilation of dancer Joseph Gatti in an assortment of his roles. The photograph, found on a Facebook page (where it wasn’t identified in any way: where? when? who are they? who was the photographer?):
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The Gatti compilation can be viewed here; it has some remarkable stuff.
