(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.
(Mostly about dance and male bodies, with only a bit about language.)
From balletomane (and sometime dancer) Mike McKinley a little while ago, this wonderful photo he found on the Male Ballet Dancers Facebook site (where, as common there, the poster provided no information at all about the source):
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A beautiful male dancer performing a step in which he appears to be flying in mid-air, exhibiting great power and great grace simultaneously. You don’t have to be into ballet to admire his body and his performance.
Thanks to Google’s image source, I was able to identify the dancer as Jesse Inglis of the Compañía Nacional de Danza España, in a photo by Carlos Quezada. That search led me to three similar performances by other dancers and to a wonderful set of photos of a male couple flying together.
Listening to WQXR (classical music in NYC) last night, I though I heard the announcer explain that the next item, Tchaikovsky’s “Polish” Symphony (Symphony No. 3), was the only symphony to be written in a major key. Counterexamples crowded to mind like angry insects, so I decided I must have misheard. And indeed, what she said must have been something like “the only symphony he had written in a major key”. So: unique for Tchaikovsky, not for the music world as a whole.
But the symphony, rarely performed, then led me on to the world of dance, and George Balanchine.
