The foreshadowing, from my 7/31 posting “If you squint, you can see Switzerland”:
I have not celebrated Swiss National Day [August 1st] with any sort of Carnivalesque disorder, though I did decide to acquire a mid-sized Gay Pride flag to display at my condo, now that one of my neighbors in the complex has somehow surmounted the HOA ban on such displays with a big rainbow flag on a balcony and a Black Lives Matter sign on the street.
My intention was realized yesterday, with the arrival of this excellent 2×3 ft product of the U.S. Flag Factory:
(#1) (photos, at dawn today, by Kim Darnell)
Just the size I wanted, to fit this particular space. Hanging from a nail once used for Christmas wreaths, when those were one of the few allowable public displays in the complex. The flag’s on the gate to my front patio (you can see the light from my workspace, through the window), along the short entryway to my condo from the street. So it is indeed a public display, visibly celebrating gayness to anyone who walks by on the street.
(I wonder if it’s too generically celebratory, like the rainbow flag that the local Pizzeria Delfina flies above its door — and unlike the rainbow flags flown by some local churches, which are signs of sanctuary and care. Maybe I should get a plaque made for the door: GAY INSIDE. I wonder if I could get a welcome mat made with that on it.)
(Fit young men wearing nothing but scraps of the American flag pattern, so not for those who are modest about displays of the male body or offended by casual disregard for the flag, but there’s nothing actually raunchy here.)
In the great avalanche of underwear ads that’s been rolling over my Facebook — wretched excess, even for someone with my tastes — there came, this morning, this arresting JockStraps.com ad offering a JOR US flag bikini jockstrap (which looks like a (mini-)brief from the front) — plus one of the model’s armpits):
(Six male-male kisses, of different sorts and with different sociocultural meanings, plus a general suffusion of homoerotic content and undercurrents throughout, so this posting is not to everyone’s taste — but there’s nothing raunchy enough to make it plainly unsuitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
It started with a kiss in a poster (from Hana Filip on Facebook, long ago — 2/23/19) apparently signifying the union of the Soviet Army and Navy, but it turns out to be sheer invention, the work of the artist Igor Baskakov, whose specialties include a very uneasy blend of official Communism and high-commercial capitalism:
(#1) The caption: ‘Support/Strengthen the union of the Army and Navy’
Three things about this poster. First, it alludes to (as Hana put it) the fraternal socialist kiss trope, the most (in)famous of which is the kiss between Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev and East German leader Erich Honecker (1979):
… with vivid pops of genital color in their underwear, plus waistbands that celebrate peace and freedom, also exhibiting sharply differentiated roles in their relationship. Lots of stuff packed into just one Daily Jocks ad (for the Modus Vivendi Peace line of underwear) from 7/15. There will be plain talk about men’s bodies and mansex, so this posting is not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.
(Much about men’s bodies and mansex, in street language, so not for kids or the sexually modest; also about military displays for Independence Day, but that comes after the raunchy stuff — Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral.)
So we have the 4th of July as a celebration of commercial mansex (every holday is a sales opportunity): selling premium men’s underwear by hawking men’s bodies; and offering gay porn sales, usually with a holiday-themed image (naked bodies wrapped in the flag are a conventional presentation, but there are many other possibilities). From this year’s rich crop of ads, I’ve chosen one of each type: a holiday ad for DJX homowear in the Trough line; and an ad for the political-satire gayporn film Cauke for President from TitanMen.
Brought to me by Pinterest, a striking use of the Union Jack to clothe the model Iman and her husband David Bowie, who is sporting a major jack ‘penis”, ‘erection’ (GDoS: 1989 J. Morton Lowspeak … as in ‘I had a jack up to my eyebrows’). And a Freddy Mercury counterpart, with both the flag and the package.
So, as the UK sails away from the EU, we bid farewell to the striking tricolor British Jack that once flew over an empire and also to the strikingly engorged jacks of British flesh that once held sway over seas of music fans.
Small but entertaining little gifts for my Christmas, from Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky, Opal Armstrong Zwicky, Kim Darnell, and Maggie Ainsworth-Darnell — plus an excellent dim sum lunch at Tai Pan in Palo Alto for all of us, from Paul Armstrong.
Then: an out@in rainbow t-shirt from LinkedIn (where Kim works); a little plush wooly (spelling by the Douglas Cuddle Toy Co.) mammoth; a tote bag with an otter drawing by the artist rubyetc; and a bit of nearly indescribable Japanese kawaii that involves a little self-watering ceramic penguin that grows wild strawberry plants (Fragaria vesca) on its back, as here:
(#1) Chuppon self-watering animals and their plants: the Sea Friends dolphin/clover, penguin/wild strawberry, seal/basil, polar bear/mint
(Hunky male model in skimpy underwear and swimwear, comments on male bodies, but nothing X-rated — though not to everyone’s taste.)
It starts with the Daily Jocks ad on the 14th for its Underwear Club, featuring two shots of a Jor model I’ll call Carlos: in a tricolor “athletic brief” (red, white, blue, top to bottom) in the style called Navy; and in a differently arranged tricolor thong (blue, white, red, top to bottom) in the style called Frankie (perhaps to suggest France, whose flag is blue, white, red, left to right).
(The Dirk Diggler section has some plain talk about men’s bodies — penises here, penises there, penises everywhere — so some readers might want to skip that section.)
Yesterday morning, the cheap men’s aftershave of the 1960s, Hai Karate, with an ad campaign that’s hard to forget (nerdy guys karate-chopping away hot models who were irrestistibly drawn to them by the powerful fumes of their Hai Karate). And then this morning, at the tail of an elaborate character-rich dream, the dream me discovered he was actually the son of Dirk Diggler, the supremely porn-named porn star character in two movies (the mockumentary The Dirk Diggler Story and the dramatic narrative film Boogie Nights).
