Archive for the ‘Signs and symbols’ Category

Underwear wolves

November 28, 2023

And now for something completely different. On 10/31 it was densely nerdy marveling at the words calceology, telamon, and hallux — I should probably have issued a technical-linguistics warning on that one — but today it’s underwear models (in a Daily Jocks e-mail ad from 9/26) wearing minimal tighty-whities that display the carnal attractions of their bodies, fore and aft, in intimate detail, hot stuff definitely calling for a male-sex-content warning. And then there are racy bonuses: the male couple in the ad is interracial, and the one presenting as a receptive / bottom is celebrated as an equal partner to the one presenting as an insertive / top.

Just to remind you: these are photos of male models playing characters in a sexual story (loosely playing with the image of a wolf pack) for a receptive audience, a story that’s intended to be at least sexually pleasing — or, better,  actually arousing — to this audience and thereby to sell more of the company’s wares (DJ is an Australian company, here selling items from The Pack underwear company, distributed by Dragon Label Limited in Hong Kong). I’ve given these characters Italian names: Nero ‘black’ (note: in Italian, Nero is pronounced roughly like English neigh-roe) for the black receptive partner (who brings his tight muscular buttocks and its anal prize to the encounter, plus a focused and open facial expression) and Lupo ‘wolf’ for the white insertive partner (who brings his crotch and its genital prizes to the encounter, plus a decidedly feral facial expression, at least in the first of three photos).

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Der Vogelfänger bin ich ja

November 20, 2023

Or, in rhyming colloquial English:

I’m Papageno, that’s my name,
And catching birds, well, that’s my game!


Nathan Gunn as Papageno, clutching his magic bells

And he more or less literally animates the Mozart / Schikaneder (think: Sullivan / Gilbert, Rodgers / Hammerstein, McCartney / Lennon) opera Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) — since he’s on the scene and in the action during most of the opera’s duration; and since he brings common, earthy, fallible, playful, humane depth to the work. The other characters are mostly otherworldly beings of one sort or another, or the presumed central human characters Tamino and Pamina (“a prince on a quest” and “a princess in distress”, according to the screen characterizations in the 2006 abridged video version of the fabulous 2004 Julie Taymor production at the Metropolitan Opera Company), who are earnest but rather cardboard idealizations of humanity (though they are humanized as much as possible in the Taymor production’s performances).

Zauberflöte is a fairy-tale opera with a familiar schematic story line, in which someone achieves a much-sought goal (love; entrance into the adult world; admission to some desirable association, band, or circle; whatever) by enduring probative tests, trials, or ordeals. T&P do that, but kids nevertheless seem to think — as I do — that the opera is about Papageno, who brought T&P together in the first place and then gets dragged along with them, serving as an unwilling hero in their ordeals but in the end failing to undergo the trials of fire and water (instead he gets his mate, Papagena). I doubt that any child seeing the video identifies with either T or P; but Papageno is a great kid, one of them: silly, error-prone, adorable, sometimes scared shitless, a sturdy friend, and a hell of a lot of fun.

It also has two prominent subtexts, which work together to support the theme of brotherhood that runs through the opera: Freemasonry and the Enlightenment ideal of the brotherhood of all humanity.   Many people will experience a performance of the opera without appreciating either element of its late-18th-century European intellectual and political context, and children will surely not get any of this (they will instead have their own understanding of what’s going on, and that’s fine; after all, there can be 17 ways of looking at a blackbird), but it’s especially relevant to the Taymor production because that production is richly overloaded with symbolism for both subtexts — which children will experience as the ways and forms of a strange but delightful imaginary world (imaginary worlds being a central element of childhood experience).

I write this after having watched the video again, twice, and of course seeing lots of things I hadn’t seen before, thereby complicating my intentions of reporting a lamentable memory lapse on my part. But I’ll press on.

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Contra mundum

October 19, 2023

Glimpsed on Pinterest a little while back, this MMS (male-male sex) painting, Contra Mundum by Fyodor Pavlov: a pair of young men kissing, seductive male buttocks highlighted, their Edwardian-picnic amour unfolding beneath the point of a potent abstract phallic design, the down-pointing triangular shape of the male genitals (often given physical form as a hanging bunch of grapes, here as a cluster of leaves on the tree that shades the young men’s secret tryst):


(#1) Packed with further details worthy of comment, among them: the dark-light (paired with dominant-submissive) contrast of the two men, the overarching U of the tree’s branches complementing the cupped U of the submissive man’s body, the red of the strawberries against a mostly b&w composition, the stuffed bear, the vibrant green of the men’s sweaters, the neck of the wine bottle poking out from the confines of the picnic hamper, the phallic reeds on the far shore of the lake

Things to comment on: picnics; contra mundum; and the artist. This turns out to be quite a lot.

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Green grow the pickles, O

October 13, 2023

This remarkable photo left me dumbstruck yesterday when Monica Macaulay passed it along on Facebook, having gotten it from the Art Deco FB group on 10/10:


The Pickle Sisters, a vaudeville group from the 1920s (photo: eBay.com)

[Here I repeat a note from the last posting I was able to manage, the 10/7 posting “THE shirts”, six days ago:

Note: this is massively a Mary, Queen of Scots, Not Dead Yet posting, indeed something of a celebration of my being able to post anything at all, not to mention through enormous pain in my swollen fingers. But no details about any of that here; at the moment, I truly am pleased to be still alive and want to show that I can manage a posting.

This caution applies fully to this Pickle Sisters posting.]

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Come back to the street, Wiener honey!

September 22, 2023

A gift for today’s equinox (the autumnal one in my hemisphere), from the AP News site yesterday: “Hot dog! The Wienermobile is back after short-lived name change”:

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Some names are just the wurst.

Just four months after announcing that the hot dog-shaped Wienermobile was changing its name to the Frankmobile, the one-of-a-kind wiener on wheels is reverting to the original.

Oscar Mayer announced Wednesday on Instagram that the Frankmobile is toast. The Wienermobile rides again.

The name change announced by The Kraft Heinz Company in May was meant to pay homage to the brand’s 100% beef franks and their new recipe.

For fans of the original name, the change was, frankly, ridiculous.

“It’s been a franktastic summer!” the Instagram post said. “But like you, we missed this BUNderful icon. Help us welcome back the Wienermobile!”

Oscar Mayer was headquartered in the Wisconsin capital, Madison, for nearly 100 years before it moved to Chicago in 2015. The first Wienermobile was created in 1936, and it has gone through several iterations since then.

Now, the everyday name for the foodstuff is hotdog. The name wiener is slang, rather playful in tone, coming with suggestions of both dachshunds and penises. The name frank (short for frankfurter) seems to be primarily a commercial term, lacking in any kind of soul. Wienermobile is a delightful name — funny, cute. Frankmobile has none of that. It’s hard for me to understand how Oscar Mayer got that so wrong. But now they’ve reversed their course, and the beloved Wienermobile is back on the roads

Now, some history, plus some puzzled notes on how Oscar Mayer labels its two main products, the pork-based (and no-beef) sausages and the all-beef sausages. They are, first of all, wieners, always. Then things get complicated.

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Japanese symbolic culture, inscribed on León’s arm

September 8, 2023

About my friend (and former caregiver) León Hernández Alvarez (hereafter, LH) and the tattoos covering his left arm, from wrist to shoulder, reflecting his deep sympathy with the symbolic culture of Japan. Here’s LH in a face shot that will serve as an introduction to his text (as I edited it for compactness) taking us on a tour of the ink, along with seven photos he took to accompany the text (as I cleaned them up for presentation here):


(#1) LH showing off the arm (and the muscles he’s developed at the gym)

After most sections of LH’s text (which I’ve boldfaced), there’s some background material about the things depicted in the tattoos, with some photos from real life.

I hope to post separately about LH, including some about his personal qualities, but here I offer four important pieces of biographical data: LH is in his early 40s, he’s Mexican (here on a work visa), he has an MBA and a previous history working in business in Mexico, and (like me) he’s gay.

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The news for penises: the Buffalo Bills original logo

September 5, 2023

From cartoonist Bob Eckstein’s The Bob newsletter of 9/5 “Back to School BONUS EDITION”, in a section on “The Worst NFL Logos” (published in Run Your Pool), about the original Buffalo Bills logo:


The original Buffalo buffalo

The old water buffalo was so unassuming, so unexpected, you thought, watch out! What are they up to? It was the only sports logo with the outline of genitals. With the understated white dot for an eye, I contend it was sport’s funniest logo … ever. We lost that.

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From the annals of NGN statuary

August 21, 2023

NGN: Not Genitally Nude, used for sculpture in which male genitals are not displayed — but just barely, usually in ways that call attention to the genitals. Surprisingly common in monumental and memorial statuary of earnest intent, and therefore easily found in the Washington / Baltimore area, which is pretty much blanketed by sculpture of this sort.

Today’s example — brought to my attention by Jeff Shaumeyer — is located in the very heart of memorial-historic D.C. It’s also a seriously crowded work of art, with eight different figures arrayed around it: the Battle of Gettysburg victor General George Meade as the central figure on the front, a winged male figure of War as the rear centerpiece, and six other allegorical figures in between these two. Detail of the Meade side:


(#1) Photo from Wikipedia

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The vipers of Santa Clara County

August 19, 2023

I wrote on Facebook a little while ago:

Just heard on a tv public service announcement from Santa Clara County: … Watch for walkers and vipers. (Ah, that must have been: bikers. Fortunately, vipers are sparse in the county.)

Follow-up: there seem to be plenty of Dodge Vipers in the county, also Pit Viper Sunglasses. And we have the Silicon Valley Vipers quadball team. According to the US Quadball site: “quadball is a mixed gender contact sport with a unique mix of elements from rugby, dodgeball, and tag”. (Until 2022 it was known as quidditch. Yes, that quidditch. Players must have a broomstick between their legs at all times. I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP.)


Logo of the Silicon Valley Vipers quadball team

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White does Black

August 19, 2023

(It’s Tom of Finland, with man-on-man sex, and — not shown, but plainly inferrable — penises of monumental size, all discussed in street language, so massively not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)

Well, that’s the straightforward reading of the page for August in my 2023 Tom of Finland calendar. And certainly White Guy is sliding his absurdly thick cock deeply into Black Guy’s ass, but a look at BG’s posture and facial expression suggests that if he had enough control of himself to speak, he’d be proclaiming something like “Damn, that’s fiiiine!”

So maybe WG is doing BG, and enjoying it, but he’s not fucking BG harshly and pitilessly, like an eagle taking a rabbit. Maybe he’s mostly doing it for BG, giving BG the fuck that he wants, even serving him, out of brotherly affection. Doing him a solid.

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