That, at least, is where it started, with this bit of playfulness on Facebook:
(#1)
One among a great many available versions of Wading for Godot (like this one, hardly any have an identifiable origin, but just get passed around on the web, along with jokes, funny pictures, and the like: the folk culture of the net). I’m particularly taken with #1, as a well-made image and as a close reworking of lines from Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot:
A regular topic on this blog and AZBlogX, combining a semi-professional interest in facial expression with one in the creation and presentation of personas (using gay porn as an arena of study). And there’s holiday — Valentine’s Day — interest as well. Despite the topic, this posting is nowhere near as raunchy as you might have imagined — no street language — but there’s no denying that there’s a whole lot here about men’s bodies and mansex, so it’s probably not for kids or the sexually modest.
This posting is a version of a posting today on AZBlog X (“Sweetly Blissful VDay Muscle Daddy”), with naughty bits cropped from the images; they’re central to the gay porn, but not particularly relevant to my interests here.
… Before Swine(s), with language play. From 10/6/18, exploiting the ambiguity of /flu/ as flew or flu ‘influenza’; and two testicular cartoons, from 11/1/18 (nut sack) and (yesterday) 2/5/19 (go nads).
(There will eventually be reproductions of religious artwork incorporating images of naked boys, genitals and all — the boys represent the disciples of Christ, and the artwork is a giant fresco in a (Lutheran) cathedral. Ok, the images are from Scandinavia, where attitudes about such things tend to be much more relaxed than they are in Anglo-American settings, and the artist almost surely chose prepubescent boys to represent the twelve apostles because he viewed such boys as innocents, free from sin. (In my experience, this is not even remotely an accurate view of the emotional and imaginative world of prepubescent boys, but I think we have to grant the artist a right to his idealizations.) I’ve chosen not to relegate these images to AZBlogX, in the hope that on WordPress they fall under the Fine Art Exemption for genital nudity, while understanding that they would almost surely be unacceptable on Facebook. In any case, if such images distress you, read on about Hugo Simberg’s gloomy artworks and then bail out when I get to The Garland Bearers.)
Thanks to Bernadette Lambotte and Joelle Stepien Bailard on Facebook, I was made aware of the Finnish artist Hugo Simberg and one of his most famous works, the deeply enigmatic The Wounded Angel (1903):
(#1)
Another chapter in the Lives of the Gay Pornstars, this time the story of Greg Patton (with his sometime boyfriend Bobby Pyron), who performed in porn in the 1980s under the name Rod Phillips (while Pyron performed under the name Lee Ryder). This posting is not particularly lubricious, but it is about male sex workers and does refer to anal sex between men, so it won’t be to everyone’s taste.
My interest is in how these men managed their lives in the porn business (separately and together), how they balanced their everyday lives — Pyron had a passion for flower arranging, Patton for jewelry design (how queer is that?) — with their careers in porn, and (insofar as this can be determined) how they coped with growing up in a largely hostile straight world and managed relationships with their families. The central question — one that has dogged me all my life, from early childhood on — is:
How, in these circumstances, does an anomaly like me fashion a life that is both decent and bearable?
Well, not the actual penises, but the packages or pouches containing them, advertising them while technically concealing them. (Plus, butts too.)
All this in an Australia Day image found by one of my lgbt+ Facebook friends (who came across it in a “sports” group):
(#1) Comment from another friend in the lgbt+ group: “Smuggling budgies, I see”
I was cardioverted on Wednesday the 28th of November. It was supposed to take an hour to an hour and a half, but took more like 4 hours, though the actual cardioversion bit was only a few minutes. For a while I no longer experienced persistent atrial flutter or any atrial fibrillation (though I know this only by looking — frequently — at a pulse oximeter, not from monitoring my perceptions of my body, which has never once spoken to me about irregularities in my heartbeat).
From the Merriam-Webster Medical Dictionary:
verb cardiovert: to subject to cardioversion // cardioverted the patient to sinus rhythm
noun cardioversion: application of an electric shock in order to restore normal heartbeat
(A kind of cousin to the defibrillation you have become accustomed to seeing on tv medical dramas.)
Advance warning: if at any point in this posting, you feel the urge to suggest a line of medical diagnosis or to offer me advice about what I should be doing, stifle that urge. If you give in to it (despite your ignorance of a grotesquely complex medical history, some of it stretching back over 50 years), you will be introducing entirely unwelcome complications into a life that has been largely devoted to medical matters for many months now, matters that are driving me frequently to despair. You will be saying, forget about coping with things, listen to my ideas and respond to me; you will become another part of the problem.
I am not asking for help. I am not asking for advice. I am offering some explanation for my frequent inattention to this blog. And I’m telling you my story, for whatever use you can make of it for yourself. I’m also complaining, in the belief that complaining for its own sake, especially to people who are in no way responsible for caring for you, can be therapeutic. A sympathetic murmur is the most such complaints should elicit.
(This posting — about the male body and mansex in plain language — is entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest.)
(A version of my posting today on AZBlogX , “Offers: prone, supine, lateral”, with X-rated images either cropped or removed. Meanwhile, holiday postings continue: Santa Claus appears in #10 below.)
On this blog on the 29th, a piece “The side display”, about displays of the male body (especially in photographs — including four of Richard Vytniorgu, who will appear again below), primarily about the side display,
a standing posture, posed so that the display focuses on the model’s face and bare buttocks
concluding with mention of
horizontal body shots, with the model lying either in a supine display (face up, presenting the front surface of his body), or in a prone display (face down, presenting the rear surface of his body), or in a lateral display (lying on one side), with either the front or the rear surface of his body facing the camera.
These are just displays, depictions, which can serve many functions — as works of (male) art, as illustrations in clothing advertisements, as porn or advertisements for porn, as sexual advertisements.
But displays can be amped up from mere depictions, realizing their potential as offers of the body (and so as incitements to (sexual) action).
About presentations of the male body (so not to everyone’s taste) — in this case, in a side display: a standing posture, posed so that the display focuses on the model’s face and bare buttocks (everything else is lagniappe), as in Richard Vytniorgu’s 2018 Christmas card (the work of a professional photographer, reproduced here with permission):
(The title should be warning enough.)
Earlier today, I reported on Anthony Bourdain in Armenia on Parts Unknown, on this blog in “Yet another Switzerland”. Later in the series Bourdain and film director Darren Aronofsky moved on to Bhutan, in S11 E8 (first aired 6/24/18), where they encountered phalluses as a design element, almost everywhere. They also did a lot of eating and drinking, as here:
(#1)
And, being in a mostly Buddhist country, reflected on their places in the universe. But this is AZBlog, where the News for Penises is a regular feature, so that’s where we’re going. Fire up those phalluses.
