David Bowie seems to have a considerable following in Russia, to judge from the Pinterest materials about him, for instance this album:
(#1) Дэвид Боуи: David Bowie in Cyrillic transiteration
Боуи gets the [wi] of Bowie just right, but to Latin-alphabet-oriented eyes that уи looks like YU [ju], so Боуи looks like Boyu: Boy oh Boyu!
(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.
(Archive news for penises.)
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).
Today, August 1st, is the National Day of Switzerland, a day to fly the big square flag:
(#1)
On the flag and on the holiday, to come. But first, a query to readers. I ask that you respond only to this e-mail address: arnold.zwicky@gmail.com (so that I don’t have to try to collate responses sent to seven or eight different places). And I ask that you read the query and guve your immediate reaction to it (without looking things up or consulting other people or musing about what the “right” answer would be). Below the fold:
More Pride flags, all transformed versions of existing X Pride flags, for various values of X having to do with gender or sexuality. Transformed by Laurie Raye by superimposing images of the starry sky on them. So the now-standard six-stripe Pride flag becomes:
(#1)
CK special for Pride Month:
(#1)
(#2) Pride Trunks
In five neon colors: pink, yellow, lime green, aquamarine, dark blue.
Earlier today, in “Maple Donuts, coffee shops, and unapologetic identities”, besides those three things I looked at the American flag and what it might mean to those who fly it: for some, it’s a symbol of reflexive patriotism, tied to “pro-gun, pro-life, pro-military, pro-God, and pro-conservative” stances; for some, it represents a history of racial oppression and exclusion; for some, it evokes the sacrifices of those who have fought on the American side in wars; for some, it’s the visual equivalent of the slogan E pluribus unum; for some, it suggests the threats of a police state; and on and on. There’s a physical form (the stars and stripes, in particular colors, arranged in a particular way), and then there are many meanings, sometimes combined, sometimes in contention.
That’s the way of symbols. What a symbol means to someone depends on their experience with it, their experience of how it has been used.
Just so with the lgbt pride flag.
