(Hunky men in minimal swimsuits, but nothing actually X-rated. The posting is about the presentation of self in photographs, via clothing, stance, gait, facial expression, gaze, and the like. Not much about language here.)

11/9 Daily Jocks sale ad for Marcuse underwear and swimwear:

(#1) Come Wander With Me

He came from the sunset
He came from the sea
He came from my sorrow
And can love only me

He said, “Come wander with me, love
Come wander with me
Away from this sad world
Come wander with me”

The garment. It’s the Marcuse Arrest Me swim brief, available in at least the following colors: in lime, pale blue, white, grey, red, black, marine (blue), pastel green, yellow, orange, pink, blue.

The DJ ad offered:

20% OFF MARCUSE THIS WEEKEND

If you want to look good and feel great, you might not be able to resist the sexy designs and enhancement features of a pair of Marcuse underwear or show off by the pool with a pair of their very low rise swimwear

Super low swim briefs for people brave enough to bare some skin and look super sexy! Simple design with embroidered gold Marcuse logo at the back.

The model in #1 appears to be striding out of the surf. He’s loose-limbed, very loosely (as well as minimally) clothed, with fly-away hair and a complex expression: narrowed eyes, slack open mouth, maybe half-smiling, maybe flirting, maybe teasing, maybe cruising. More on reading faces in a moment, but right now study the way his body is presented, and compare it to a standard presentation for men in premium homowear — here’s another model, posing statically in a different color of the Arrest Me swim brief:

(#2)

#1 is (staged as) informal and unposed, while #2 is a male-art formal portrait, with the subject holding a conventional pose I’ve called pitsntits.

The facial expression in #2 is also conventional, a variant of the Cruise of Death, a penetrating, dominating stare. In #1 we get something more like a snapshot taken unawares, and the model’s face can be read in many ways; it’s intriguing in a way that #1’s is not (I’ve posted dozens of underwear ads with facial expressions like.#2’s).

The background. Nevertheless, #1 probably isn’t just an informal framing; it’s likely an allusion to the landmark gay porn film Boys in the Sand, and more indirectly to the whole mansex on the beach genre of male art, gay porn, and gay cartooning.

On the first, see my 9/25/15 posting “Boy in the sand”, about a DJ TeamM8 swimwear ad, with an AZ gay-erotic poem; also about Cal Culver / Casey Donovan in Wakefield Poole’s Boys in the Sand, where the central character rises naked out of the sea.

On the second, see my 6/30/17 posting “In the dunes, in the dunes”, with a take-off on the song “In the pines” and some reflections on the genre of mansex in the dunes, on the beach.

The song. The accompaniment to #1 above is (verse 1 and the chorus of) the song “Come Wander with Me”. Despite appearances, not actually a folk song, but instead a haunting folk-like song written for a tv show. From Wikipedia:

“Come Wander With Me” is the final-taped episode of the American television series The Twilight Zone. (The Bewitchin’ Pool, however, was the last to be broadcast.) This episode introduced Bonnie Beecher in her television debut.

… The “Rock-A-Billy Kid”, Floyd Burney, arrives at a small town in search of a new song. …  Next to a lake, he encounters the singer, Mary Rachel, who reluctantly plays a song for him about two [doomed] lovers who meet in the woods.

(#3) The Bonnie Beecher recording

The singer. And a note on Beecher, from Wikipedia:

Bonnie Jean Beecher (née Boettcher, April 25, 1941), later known as Jahanara Romney, is an American activist and retired actress and singer.

Bonnie Jean Boettcher was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota to Art and Jean Boettcher. She knew Bob Dylan during his early career, and may have been the inspiration for his song “Girl from the North Country”. Some of Dylan’s earliest recordings were recorded at her Minneapolis home in 1961.

… Beecher married Wavy Gravy (born Hugh Romney) in 1965; the couple has one child. She has worked as Administrative Director (under the name Jahanara Romney) of Camp Winnarainbow since 1983. Her husband (under the name Wavy Gravy) serves as director of the camp, which is located near Laytonville, Mendocino County in Northern California.

A Warwick Rowers 2018 tree decorating scene:

(#1)

Artfully decorated tree, artfully posed naked athletes casually working on the tree, displaying their attractive bodies while incidentally managing not to show any banned bits.

Over the years, the Rowers and their photographers have polished these presentations into an art form, projecting muscular masculinity, sexiness, and playfulness while going about their daily lives, airily not appearing to notice that they are stark naked while slyly just barely avoiding exposing any part of their junk to the camera. Little masterpieces of negligent cock-teasing.

They then sell tons of calendars and use the money for an assortment of excellent causes.

Periodically, but erratically and inconsistently, their images are censored (usually by algorithms, sometimes by employees making lightning judgments) on one platform or another, Facebook and Instagram in particular. I’ve had grief over these two:

(#2) Horseplay: men in action, naked, but somehow not exposing their junk

(#3) Self-consciously posed with genital-shielding props

The ways of social media are often inscrutable.

(Mesh Man in his underwear, leading us in many directions, but with plenty of sexual content — not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)

From the 12th: Mesh Man returns to the Daily Jocks underverse, flogging their fabulous Varsity Mesh Shorts, flaunting his famous receptive organ — he’s all man and a foot deep — kneeling with feeling in #1 and flashing a finger gun to his fans in #2:

(#1) Party shorts! (see the ad below) — I go down on one knee to go down on my guy

(#2) Always open for business® — and I got a gun cocked for you, too

I used to stand and watch him every day
He was always smooth and cool
I used to love to hear the people say
He’s a regular posing fool
But I’ve noticed in all the reports
When he took his bow
To the crowd and the town
The crowd went crazy
And the house came down
When Daddy wore his
Varsity
Mesh
Shorts

(Hat tip to Billy Green, who had no idea what I was going to do with this.)

Alas, we have no photos of Mesh Man when he was still the laddish Butt Boy, always poised to take care of his bad boy buddies. But here he is back on 2/13, in the posting “Mesh Man: Always Open for Business®”:

(#3) In an especially satisfying sexual liaison, Iron Man’s semen transformed the superhero into Mesh Man, now known as one of the Underverse’s stellar receptives

Earier this month, MM briefly explored hs penetrative side in a ad for Helsinki Athletica, which I recorded in my 4/9 posting “Athletica Sport Dick, how I admire thee”:

(#4)

Even in his Varsity moments, MM occasionally offers front as well as rear:

(#5) The Varsity Field Mesh jockstrap in white

The ad text:

VARSITY MESH RESTOCK! Our top seller of 2019 has been restocked, both sexy and preppy, Varsity prides itself on a great range of basics and statement pieces designed for every guy’s wardrobe. Jockstrap, Jock-Thong, Mesh Shorts, Mesh Singlet. All available now in Black & White.

… Mesh Shorts: Introducing the all new Varsity Mesh Collection!  These party shorts are made from a high quality Nylon mesh that is form-fitting to accentuate your curves. They are perfect to wear over the Varsity Field Underwear, or if you’re daring enough, nothing at all!

Where this will go now: to a personal note on MM’s body; to the source of the snatch of song above (“Very Soft Shoes” from the Broadway show Once Upon a Mattress), with notes on the formulaic expression dancing fool ‘fool for dancing’ and on Daddy/Boy relationships; to the squatting-kneeling postion or posture in #1 (with a wide range of uses, at least six, most (but not all) having to do with submission); and to the metaphorical chain “my finger is my gun is my cock”, as in the finger gun gesture in #2 (which leads to a Mexican standoff scene from US tv’s The Office and to Robert Mapplethorpe’s penis photography).

Got it? Hang on to your program, ’cause it’s time for the show.

A personal intro. I find the photos of MM, especially #2 and #4, moving and hypnotic; I keep coming back to gaze at them with great aching pleasure — because MM has the thin lean muscular body with long torso — the swimmer’s body — of my man Jacques, the male body I’ve been most familiar with in my life (even more than my own), in every detail, from the 26 years we were linked, so my ideal of a desirable male body. Essence of Jacques, with a version of J’s smile in #2, and even an updated edition of J’s 1970s hair in this classroom photo:

(#6)

I love this photo because it conveys his physical presence in the context of the man passionately engaged in his calling. This earlier beach photo strips things down to his body, but still conveys a persona in his half-smile:

(#7)

MM is not only an incarnation of this body type, but he also projects an amiable playful persona, so of course I’m crazy about his image.

The body type is well represented in the underverse, in men’s premium underwear ads –many in my earlier postings, though the genre tends towards bodybuilder types. And of course, in actual swimmers, like this one:

(#8)

And in the occasional pornstar, like this one cropped from the Lucas Studio ad for the Fourth of July in 2017:

(#9)

The Varsity Mesh Shorts song. This is an only slighty altered version of “Very Soft Shoes”, sung by the Jester in Once Upon a Mattress in loving memory of his father, who was a dancer. From Wikipedia:

(#10) Theatrical poster for the 1959 Broadway original, with Carol Burnett as Princess Winnifred, Jack Gilford as King Sextimus the Silent — and jazz and ballet dancer Matt Mattox as the Jester

Once Upon a Mattress is a musical comedy with music by Mary Rodgers, lyrics by Marshall Barer, and book by Jay Thompson, Dean Fuller, and Marshall Barer. It opened off-Broadway in May 1959, and then moved to Broadway. The play was written as an adaptation of the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale The Princess and the Pea.

… Initial reviews of the play were mixed, but critics and actors alike were surprised by the show’s enduring popularity. Once Upon a Mattress is a popular choice for high school drama programs and community theatre groups.

(#11) “Very Soft Shoes”, from the original 1959 Broadway cast recording

The song comes in two parts, the first establishing the context:

I am far from sentimental or romantic
And I like to think I’m strictly up to date
But at times the dancing gets a bit too frantic
In these hectic days of 1428
So indulge me as I pause to raise my chalice
To a quaint and charming dance they used to do
In the days when my dear father played the palace
Back in 1392
My dad was debonair and quite as light as air
In his
Very
Soft
Shoes
How he could dip and glide
And skip and slip and slide
In his
Very
Soft
Shoes

Then the main story (the part I’ve riffed on):

I used to stand and watch him every day
He was always smooth and cool
I used to love to hear the people say
He’s a regular dancing fool
He barely touched the ground
And never made a sound
But I’ve noticed in all his reviews
That when he took his bow to the crowd and the crown
The crowd went crazy and the house came down
When Daddy wore his
Very
Soft
Shoes

The boldface material is stuff I’ve altered: I removed one couplet completely; made other changes to take the song out of a court context where a man dances for an audience and move it to a context where he poses for an audience, eliciting pleasure in the desirability of his body; and further sexualized things by replacing the soft shoes by mesh shorts, thereby shifting Daddy towards a gay Daddy/Boy interpretation, rather than a literal father/son interpretation.

Daddy/Boy relationships come up on this blog regularly, especially around Fathers Day. See, for example, my 6/21/15 posting “My hard-on belongs to Daddy”, and note this explanation from the GameLink gay porn emporium:

Gay daddies are older men with big hard cocks. Older men with the authority to be the boss and the equipment to make you like it. (link)

MM is an instance of an apparently paradoxical variant, the Amiable Bottom Daddy, but the species is fairly well attested, in real life as well as in gay porn (in an earlier life, I played this role on occasion). Daddiness is a matter of who’s in charge, not (necessarily) who does the fucking — a psychological arrangement, not an anatomical one.

Then, in the midst of “Very Soft Shoes”, there’s what I took to be a formulaic expression dancing fool ‘fool for dancing, someone who is devoted to dancing’ (playing on two senses of fool), which I altered to posing fool.

As I say, I took dancing fool to be some kind of fixed expression; posing fool was interpretable to me, but it sounded to me like a novel, creative extension of a fixed pattern. And, indeed, when I took the expression to the American Dialect Society mailing list, Ben Zimmer searched up some notable examples of dancing / dancin’ fool:

“The Dancin’ Fool”, 1920 silent comedy film (link); “The Dancing Fool”, 1932 animated cartoon with Betty Boop (link); “Dancin’ Fool”, 1974 song by The Guess Who (link); “Dancin’ Fool”, 1979 song by Frank Zappa (link)

What I had not thought about was the role of the head noun fool in all of this. On ADS-L, Garson O’Toole summarized some results from the slang dictionaries: HDAS with:

fool n. a person who is excessively dedicated to a given activity. — usu. constr. with prec. ppl. [1875 in DAE: A Fool for Luck.] 1913-1915 Van Loan Taking the Count 176: He’s the fightin’est little fool ‘at ever pulled on a glove. . . . 1953 I Love Lucy (CBS-TV): I’m a dancing fool!

And GDoS with:

fool n. 3. anyone excessively enthusiastic about a given activity or topic; thus dancing fool, singing fool; often found as a fool for … 1887 [US]  in Overland Monthly (CA) July 66: That air that fiddlin’ fool, Pete Dobine.

Some of this is boiled down in NOAD‘s entry:

noun fool: [a] a person who acts unwisely or imprudently; a silly person: what a fool I was to do this. [b] historical a jester or clown, especially one retained in a noble household. [c] informal a person [AZ: excessively] devoted to a particular activity: he is a running fool. [d] archaic a person who is duped.

Sense b is highly salient in the Mattress context, since the character who sings “Very Soft Shoes” is a jester, that is, a fool-b. Meanwhile, the subject of the song is a fool-c, as I noted above.

In modern usage, fool-c seems to occur in two patterns:

PRP (compound) pattern: V-prp fool — dancing fool, singing fool, running fool above (a compound, but with afterstress  (a dancing FOOL) rather than the forestress of ordinary N + N compounds, like a DANCING lesson, DANCING shoes)

FOR (prepositional) pattern: a fool for N — which the Merriam-Webster Online dictionary takes to be an idiom:

— a fool for idiom — used to say that a person likes or loves something or someone. He’s a fool for candy. I’m a fool for you. [The N can of course be a gerundive nominal: a fool for dancing.]

Both patterns deserve further study. The compound pattern does seem to very strongly prefer gerundive nominals as first elements; things like He’s a candy FOOL ‘he’s excessively fond of candy’ would appear to be very rare. That’s an empirical question, but one hard to investigate, since text searches can’t pick out the expressions with both the right prosody and the right interpretations.

The prepositional pattern is a bit easier to investigate, though you have to winnow out other senses, as in He’s a fool for several reasons and He’s a fool for profit (meaning that he works as a fool to earn money). As a start, I looked at all the relevant fool for examples on this blog (before this posting). As it happens, the topic of excessive enthusiasm for something is likely to come up on this blog specifically in connection with affection and sex, as here:

Long-time readers of this blog will know that I am a fool for kisses (link)

originally a genuine country boy, clever and sweet, but largely unschooled, also a fool for mansex (link)

Often as he offered his dick for sucking, Locke was a fool for cock, an ubercocksucker who loved to take loads in his mouth (link)

Though there is one musical example (referring to shapenote songs):

I’m a fool for trumpets, and angels. (link)

And, in my files of material for future postings, at least one sexual example with a gerundive nominal:

[gay pornstar and landscape architect] Marcus Iron is a fool for sucking cock, especially at glory holes

But to return to my original concern: it’s now clear to me that the PRP pattern occurs with a considerable range of Vs, but still dancing fool seems to be a very frequent collocation, something more like a cliché than an actual idiom.

Squatting-kneeling in #1. On to postures / positions and their social meanings. The overarching observation is about kneeling of all sorts; from Wikipedia:

Socially, kneeling, similar to bowing, is associated with reverence, respect, submission and obeisance, particularly if one kneels before a person who is standing or sitting: the kneeling position renders a person defenseless and unable to flee. For this reason, in some religions, in particular by Christians and Muslims, kneeling is used as a position for prayer, as a position of submission to God

(Such a posture might of course be chosen for utilitarian reasons, having to do with its suitability for particular actions.)

What we see in #1 is one variant of a posture combining kneeling (with one leg) and squatting or crouching (with the other). A posture noted on this blog in my 4/21/19 posting “Let’s have a kiki … in me”:

(#12) Kiko in a squat/kneel — squeel, I’ll call it — position in a Barcode Berlin ad, differing from MM’s position on several dimensions [added 4/30: on some of these dimensions, see Note 1 in the comments]

Squeeling is the position for, at least:

(a) genuflection, as part of Christian religious practice

(b) kneeling in honor of a fallen comrade on the battlefield

(c) getting knighted

(d) “taking a/the knee” in protest of injustice

(e)  shooting a rifle, as one of the standard positions

(f) fellating a standing man, as an alternative to a two-knee kneel

[added 4/30: one further squeeling activity: (g) proposing marriage; see Note 2 in the comments]

Squeeling: genuflection. From Wikipedia:

Genuflection or genuflexion … [from early times] has been a gesture of deep respect for a superior. Today, the gesture is common in the Christian religious practices of the Anglican Church, Lutheran Church, Roman Catholic Church, and Western Rite Orthodox Church. The Latin word genuflectio, from which the English word is derived, originally meant kneeling rather than the rapid dropping to one knee and immediately rising that became customary in Western Europe in the Middle Ages. It is often referred to as “going down on one knee” [the caption for #1 exploits the ambiguity of going down] or “bowing the knee”.

Nice cartoon by Bill Abbott, showing an employee genuflecting before his employer in an office, with the boss saying,“Rise. Genuflecting was only required during internship.” (Using the cartoon requires a fee, so I’m describing it to you.)

Squeeling: honoring the fallen dead. On the website of the All Classics, Ltd. company, which supplies (among other things) custom bronze statues:

(#12) “Life-Size Kneeling Soldier Memorial Statue” (4 ft. tall) — on sale for $13,000

Squeeling: getting knighted. From an unidentified print-maker, this scene to stir the imperialist British heart:

(#13) Queen Elizabeth I knighting Sir Francis Drake on board the Golden Hind at Deptford in London on 4 April 1581; from Illustrations of English and Scottish History (1882) (Getty Images)

Squeeling: taking a knee in protest. Not so much a gesture of submission, but an unmistakable rejection of the gesture of standing for the playing of the national anthem before sports events.

(#14) Eric Greed and Colin Kaepernick of the NFL’s 49ers taking a knee in 2016 to call attention to systematic racism and injustice in the historical treatment of people of color in the US [added 4/30: see note 3 in the comments]

Squeeling: the kneeling position in rifelry. Entirely utilitarian, this one: the kneeling position steadies the arm holding the stock of the rifle. From the Peterson’s Hunting site:

(#15) One of the three basic positions: prone, kneeling, standing

Squeeling: giving a standing blow job. An alternative to two-knee kneeling when fellating a standing man. The standing blow job is usually understood as submissive for the cocksucker — it’s configured as a kind of worship — but it also has its utilitarian side, since the act requires no furniture and can easily be performed almost anywhere.

Usually, the cocksucker does a two-knee kneel, but the position is somewhat unsteady (a cocksucker will often steady themselves by holding onto their man’s hipbones) and can be tiring on the cocksucker’s thigh muscles. A squeel can alleviate both problems, as in this scene of automotive fellatio in the great outdoors (dick suppressed to satisfy the modesty of WordPress and social media):

(#16)

(#17)

So much for MM squeeling in #1.

I’m a desperate man … send fingers, guns, and penises! (with apologies to the late Warren Zevon). In #2, still displaying his muscular buttocks, MM is standing, and flashing the (raised) finger gun gesture, in which an index finger symbolizes the cock-and-gun gun complex, sometimes the gun, sometimes the cock; and sometimes the gun symbolizes the cock, but sometimes the cock symbolizes the gun. (I owe the idea of the complex to Robert Mapplethorpe’s 1982 photograph Cock and Gun — which I cannot of course show you here, though you can view it cordoned off in a carnal ghetto with the similarly themed Jack walls, #833 (also from 1982) in “The Mapplethorpe gun file” on AZBlogX.)

On the finger gun, from Wikipedia:

The finger gun is a hand gesture in which the subject uses their hand to mimic a handgun, raising their thumb above their fist to act as a hammer, and one finger extended perpendicular to it acting as a barrel. The middle finger can also act as the trigger finger or part of the barrel itself.

It is also sometimes used by placing the “gun” to the side of one’s own head in, in one’s mouth, or under the chin, as if committing suicide, to indicate a strong desire to be put out of one’s misery, either from boredom or exasperation, or to express one’s dislike for a situation. In addition, it can also be used as a way to say “hey” or “what’s up” to friends or acquaintances. It can be used as an insulting gesture, as to suggest your brain should be blown out of the back of your head.

(#18) Rowan Atkinson’s tv character Mr. Bean performing the upraised variant of the finger gun (as in #2), preparatory to lowering the weapon and firing it

Children, teenagers, and teacher’s assistants have occasionally been punished or removed from school for making the gesture. In some cases, this was because authority figures interpreted it as a signal for threatening real violence, while in others they interpreted it as unacceptably supportive of gun violence in general.

MM’s finger-gun performance in #2 can be seen as an offer to use his gun-cock on you, or as an appreciation of gun-cocks, modeling how you might use this one on him. Either way, he’s amiable.

Finger guns can easily be put to playful purposes. They can, for example, be used to create make-believe Mexican standoffs, as in this finger-gun “Standoff” scene from tv’s The Office (US):

(#19) S6 E10 (11/12/09), “Murder”

On the Mexican standoff, from Wikipedia:

A Mexican standoff is a confrontation in which no strategy exists that allows any party to achieve victory. As a result, all participants need to maintain the strategic tension, which remains unresolved until some outside event makes it possible to resolve it.

The term Mexican standoff was originally used in the context of using firearms and today still commonly implies a situation in which the parties face some form of threat from the other parties [OED3 (Dec. 2001) has its first cite from 1876]. The Mexican standoff is a recurring trope in cinema, in which several armed characters hold each other at gunpoint.

… A Mexican standoff where each party is pointing a gun at another is now considered a movie cliché, stemming from its frequent use as a plot device in cinema. A famous example of the trope is in Sergio Leone’s 1966 Western The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, where the titular characters played by Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef and Eli Wallach face each other at gunpoint.

Mapplethorpe on the cock-gun complex. Mapplethorpe’s preoccupation with penises, especially erect ones, resulted in a huge assortment of photographs, some now quite famous. The two cock-gun photographs in my AZBlogX posting of yesterday (#2 and #3 there) are from the same 1982 shoot: #2 is a close-up, with the subject naked; #3 is a mid shot, with the same subject clothed, his erect penis protruding from his open fly. My comment there:

Symbolism, sure. But is the gun a symbol of a penis, or is the penis a symbol of a gun? (The dangerous dick. It can kill.)

The gun in both is a very small revolver (considerably smaller than the cock in the photos) of odd appearance (but then I’m an idiot about handguns):

(#20) The gun in Mapplethorpe’s cock-gun photos; I suspect it of being a toy gun

Also on AZBlogX is a Mapplethorpe cock-gun photo I can display here:

(#21) Patrice, N.Y.C. (1977): The penis as gun, but sheathed in its holster.

My 4/22/19 posting “The Easter egg in the salt mine” took off from this archive photo used in an Economist article:

(#1)

The article tells us nothing about the provenance of the photo or about the scene represented in it, though in the context of the article, we’re invited to suppose that the photo shows us the retrieval of Raubkunst, art seized by the Nazis from Jewish families during World War II. From which we guess that the soldier is an American G.I., the time is 1945, and the locale is one of the Nazi storage places for stolen art, perhaps even one of the celebrated salt mines used for this purpose. (All of this is assumption and guesswork, not a single actual fact in the pack.)

The painting in the photograph is in the courtly style of the 18th century — I speculated on what the scene might be — but not one famous enough to be identified through various sorts of searches.

Then in a comment, John Baker came to the rescue, enabling me to make substantial advances: the painting is a Fragonard (apparently a minor one) — as it turned out, one recovered by Americans in a gigantic hoard of Raubkunst in Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria (the fantasy castle Ludwig II built for Richard Wagner).

John wrote:

using Tineye.com, I was able to find the original picture on Getty, which says the painting is by Fragonard

And I replied:

I now have some material on Neuschwanstein and the Monuments Men [details below], thanks to you. I’ve tried to identify the specific Fragonard, but the man was regrettably prolific, and this painting seems never to have been well-known. In the process, I’ve discovered that Fragonard in bulk is very very hard to take.

Now the details. Information from the Getty Images file:

Painting Uncovered

May 1945: A US Army soldier unwraps an old master painting by the 18th century painter Fragonard. This along with other art treasures was found at Neuschwanstein Castle, Fussen, Germany, where the Nazis kept treasures stolen from throughout Europe during the Second World War. (Photo by Horace Abrahams/Keystone/Getty Images)

The castle:

(#2)

(This was Ludgwig’s idea of a fairy-tale castle, and now it’s everybody’s.)

Fragonard. From Wikipedia:

(#3) Fragonard, The Musical Contest, 1754–55 (Wallace Collection, London)

Jean-Honoré Fragonard (4 April 1732 – 22 August 1806) was a French painter and printmaker whose late Rococo manner was distinguished by remarkable facility, exuberance, and hedonism. One of the most prolific artists active in the last decades of the Ancien Régime, Fragonard produced more than 550 paintings (not counting drawings and etchings), of which only five are dated. Among his most popular works are genre paintings conveying an atmosphere of intimacy and veiled eroticism.

Scanning through dozens and dozens of reproductions, in (fruitless) search for the painting in #1, has left me sated for life with Fragonard’s overheated, mannered painting.

The Monuments Men. The photo in #1 shows a scene from the immediate post-war efforts at rescuing stolen art. The “Monuments Men” who did this work were military officers wth art-historical credentials. The larger retrieval program (Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives) became famous though a 2014 film. From Wikipedia:

(#4) A theatrical poster

The Monuments Men is a 2014 war film directed by George Clooney, and written and produced by Clooney and Grant Heslov. The film stars an ensemble cast including Clooney, Matt Damon, Bill Murray, John Goodman, Jean Dujardin, Bob Balaban, Hugh Bonneville, and Cate Blanchett.

The film is [very] loosely based on the non-fiction book The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History by Robert M. Edsel and Bret Witter. It follows an Allied group from the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives program that is given the task of finding and saving pieces of art and other culturally important items before Nazis destroy or steal them, during World War II.

Now for a historical account by archivist Greg Bradsher on the National Archives blog on 9/1/15, “The Monuments Men in May 1945: Buxheim and Neuschwanstein”:

Schloss Neuschwanstein, two miles east of Fussen, a picturesque little town, some 80 miles south of Munich, in southern Schwabe, Bavaria, had been a central Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) repository for looted cultural property. A considerable bulk of this material, including the most important, had since been removed to other repositories, most notably to the salt mine at Alt Aussee in Austria. Still, it contained a large amount of ERR loot which if not the very best was still important – pictures, furniture, a large amount of silver and fine jewels.

… The route from Augsburg took [the “Monuments Men” James J. Rorimer and John D. Skilton, Jr.] some 50 miles southwest to Memmingen. There they stopped and learned that a couple of miles away in the Carthusian monastery at Buxheim activities had taken place in connection with shipments of works of art from France and other countries. They set out immediately for Buxheim. 

As they entered the monastery they found an incredible collection of loot. In one of the rooms they found an item marked on the back in red with the collection number of the former owner David-Weill, and just below this in black, the letters ERR, followed by numbers. According to Skilton, this was, as far as he knew, the first time a member of the MFA&A staff had actually seen the ERR marking. The corridors were stacked with pre-19th Century furniture. There were ethnographical materials from Russian museums – Kiev in particular. In one enormous hall there were piles upon piles of oriental rugs, tapestries and textiles. Many bore tags with the names of the original owners. They found 72 packing cases with 158 paintings, including those by Boucher, Nattier, Watteau, Fragonard, Delacroix, Goya, David, Lebrun, Reynolds, Gainsborough, and Renoir.

The next morning they set out on the 45-mile drive from Buxheim to the “the fairy-like castle of Neuschwanstein.” Planned by Ludwig II, the mad King of Bavaria, the castle, Skilton observed, occupied “the entire summit of a lofty peak rising abruptly from the valley floor like an island in a sea of mist-hung mountains.” At Fussen, they met with the Public Safety officer of the local Military Government detachment and then continued on their way to the castle.

“If we had been astonished at Buxheim,” Skilton wrote, “we were overwhelmed by the stupendous collection at Neuschwanstein.” At the castle, according to Rorimer, “Works of art were everywhere, most of them marked with Paris ciphers. Confusion indicated that this repository was being emptied when the Nazis had vanished a short time before the arrival of our troops.” Besides the confiscated paintings from France, there were 1,300 paintings which had been sent there by the Administration of Bavarian Castles. These were from the Munich museums, the Munich Residenz, and the private collections of the royal Bavarian Wittelsbach family, and had been deposited there before the place was used by the ERR. “In several of the rooms,” Rorimer wrote, “we found the art libraries of Paris collectors. Thrown behind and between the books were rare engravings, drawings, and paintings.” He added: “We were guided to a hidden, thick steel door; this one locked with two keys. Inside there were two large chests of world-famous Rothschild jewels and box upon box of jewel-encrusted metalwork. There were also rare manuscripts and more than a thousand pieces of silver from the David-Weill and other collections.”

It came to me via Google Alert last week, another creative Zwicky: Denis Zwicky, videographer in Miami. At first, I guessed from his French first name and his fluent but non-native English that he was related to the Zwickys of Wallisellen, outside Zürich, of the Zwicky thread and yarn company and now the Zwicky Areal Facility, an exploration of urban development on the grounds of the thread factory:

(#1) Wallisellen: the old factory and a corner of the new development

Though they’re in German-speaking Switzerland, the younger generations of the family mostly have French names (I’ve written about Joelle); see my 6/27/18 posting “Three Züricher Peter Zwickys”, with a section about “Silk Peter” of the thread company and his four daughters.

But no, far otherwise. As I wrote in yesterday’s posting “Das Wappen”, Denis turned out to be one of the Slavic Zwickys (more in today’s posting “Tsviki from Belarus”). However, I’ll put this personal and family history aside for today, to report on Denis the videographer.

Specifically, from his ZwickyFilm website for “wedding and cinematography video in Miami”, this “Who we are?” statement:

(#2) A display of six of DZ’s videos: five wedding videos and a 2019 Miami Beach Pride video ad for the men’s fashion company 2(X)IST

Zwicky Filmmaking is a Video Company located in Miami, Florida. We always try to make our works cause feelings and be special. We take the process of shooting very seriously, and we always try to do something unique in every work. Zwicky Filmmaking we specialize in Commercial, Wedding, Promo-Video as well as Real Estate and non-commercial projects.

From DZ’s page on the WEVA (Wedding & Event Videographers Association International) site for professional wedding photographers (in the US, UK, Canada, Ireland, Iceland, and Australia) — of course there’s a professional organization — this intense banner:

(#3) Featuring a still from the very erotic “Black Magic Woman” (cinematic video)

Then two photos of DZ himself:

(#4) On a shoot for a video about New York City, with camera and notably magenta t-shirt

(#5) DZ’s presentation of himself for prospective clients

It’s worth reflecting on these, since they’re an artist’s self-portraits. In both, DZ’s gaze is to the side, not confronting the viewer, but absorbed in his work. In the ad shot, he’s casual in a flannel shirt, masculine and easy-going, smiling pleasantly; his wedding clients are young couples, so he wants to appear both cooperative and competent, and inspire trust in both women and men (not too fussy, not too aggressive, not too stiff). (This is my reading; I’m sure Denis didn’t think it through like this when he was choosing his clothes and striking his pose — he just went with what felt right, no doubt after trying a lot of things out, that’s what artists do, but the result is there for people like me to analyze.

A bit more detail on the Miami Beach Pride video, which I think is wonderfully shot and wonderfully cut; I wanted more (but it’s an ad). The video:

(#6)”Promo video for American luxury fashion label 2(X)IST on Miami Beach Pride 2019 . Videographer: Denis Zwicky. Music: Mikey Geiger – Fern Avenue.”

From Wikipedia:

2(X)IST (pronounced “to exist”) is an American luxury fashion label that makes men’s underwear, swimwear, activewear, loungewear, socks, and watches. 2XIST also launched a women’s line featuring activewear, sleepwear and intimates. The company was founded in 1991 by Gregory Sovell and is headquartered in New York City.

The core business is high-end homowear (underwear and swimwear), often advertised extravagantly, as in this ad from a 6/8/16 posting of mine:

(#7)

Today’s Zippy has our playful Pinhead frolicking and cavorting in the surf, on a water trike:

(#1)

In no particular order: the Aqua-Cycle water trike, seen above churning through the surf (and, quite possibly, several holiday-goers); the verbs frolic and cavort, great favorites of Zippy’s, which tend to come with a sexual tinge; the social custom of pleasurable frolicking and cavorting in the water, easily bent to homoerotic purposes, in displays of the body and playful contact between men; and one particular artist of that scene (from a great many), Keith Vaughan.

The water trike. I had somehow completely missed this giant toy device (hat tip to Kim Darnell for unearthing what you see below). Zippy’s riding a one-person model — the two-person numbers seem to be the most popular, for family fun — in gray, while the devices mostly come in bright eye-catching colors, like this blue one:

(#2) An Aqua-Cycle water trike in blue

Verbs of playful movement. Something of a Zippy specialty. In my 4/28/19 posting “All ˈlaundry ˈis a ˈblur of ˈstatic ˈcling”, Zippy strips on cavorting and gamboling —

(#3)

and on cavorting and frolicking —

(#4)

plus images of gay frolicking and capering.

From NOAD on the verbs, bringing out uses with a sexual tinge:

verb frolic: [no object, usually with adverbial] [a](of an animal or person) play and move about cheerfully, excitedly, or energetically: Edward frolicked on the sand. [b] play about with someone in a flirtatious or sexual way: he denied allegations that he frolicked with a secretary.

verb cavort: [no object] [a] jump or dance around excitedly: spider monkeys leap and cavort in the branches. [b] informal apply oneself enthusiastically to sexual or disreputable pursuits: he spent his nights cavorting with the glitterati.

Frolicking and cavorting in the water. The holiday pleasures of playing in the water — at the seaside, in lakes and rivers, and in swimming pools — are now well-established social customs. Such practices involve displays of the body and also playful physical contact between people, so the sexual suggestions of frolic and cavort easily spill over into the sexualization of frolicking in the water, including play between men.

This sexualization has been well illustrated on this blog, notably in strkingly homoerotic swimming suit ads from underwear companies, but also in representations of watery horseplay between men, in photographs, graphic artworks, and films (some of these pointedly homoerotic). From artists who specialize in just this sort of thing.

Keith Vaughan. One among these was the subject of an exhibition Keith Vaughan: On Pagham Beach at the Austin Desmond Gallery (in Holborn, London) in 2017.

From Another Man magazine on 11/2/17, “Lost Photos of Nude Men on the Beach from the 1930s”, about the exhibition:

Much is known about the British painter Keith Vaughan [1912-77] thanks to his extensive journals, written between 1939 and his death [by intentional overdose] in 1977, and described as some of “the greatest confessional writing of the 20th-century”. They document the trials he faced as a gay artist whose principal focus was the male nude, rendered first in an erotic, Neo-Romantic style, and later an increasingly abstracted one.

Now further light has been shed on Vaughan’s oeuvre thanks to the rediscovery of a collection of lost photographs, taken by the self-taught artist during covert visits to Pagham Beach in West Sussex in the 1930s, with a coterie of male friends. “When Vaughan decided to become a fine artist in 1938, he began to distil a visual language through photography, based on the male figure,” explains David Archer, curator of a new exhibition of the images in London. “After the war, he used the photographs to develop his unique drawing style, with compositional elements recurring in his gouaches and oil paintings until the mid-50s.”

The pictures depict Vaughan’s lithe pals cavorting on the beach, nude or semi-nude, performing handstands and drinking from shells. They brilliantly capture the abundant joy of their protagonists, temporarily freed from the shackles of societal prejudice, while their technical skill aligns Vaughan with the likes of Man Ray and László Moholy-Nagy. “It’s as if he could disappear from his subjects’ presence; he was an observer but never a ringleader,” notes Archer. “Like all true works of art, these images transcend time.”

Two of the photos:

(#5) Keith Vaughan, Two male figures, one throwing, 1939

(#6) Keith Vaughan, Two male figures in silhouette, one holding wet cloth, 1939 (I have fuzzed out the penis of the young man on the right, even though it’s not a central feature of the photograph)

Vaughan mined some of this material in his paintings. From #5, we get:

(#7) Keith Vaughan, Figure Throwing at a Wave, 1950

As the years went on, Vaughan moved further and further away from figurative painting, eventually producing works like this one:

(#8) Keith Vaughan, Bather: August 4th 1961

From the Tate Gallery site about this painting:

The artist wrote (22 June 1962) that he considered this one of his best works. He felt he had achieved a special balance between the purely abstract and the figurative elements which had hitherto pushed his work into one or other of these categories.

The bather was naked, though you can’t really tell that here.

Pride Month is past, and so is the Fourth of July (US Independence Day), but my postings on these celebrations will go on for some time. Today, three images for Pride: the art of the flag; penguins at work; and the M&S sandwich.

It’s a grand old flag / It’s a high-flying flag. Specifically to celebrate Pride events and the 50th anniversary of Stonewall: this rainbow composition taking off on the famous Iwo Jima photograph from World War II:

(#1) Gay Pride composition by Alvaro — Alvaro Limon Lopez, diseñador grafico y rapero (graphic designer and rapper), ca. 25 years old, living in Matamoros, Tamaulipas, Mexico (across the river from Brownsville TX), @AlvaroArtz on Twitter

A carefully done formal composition, compressing as much of the LGBT community as possible into four figures: a black man, a woman, a leatherman, and a drag queen.

About the original, from Wikipedia:

(#2)

Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima is an iconic photograph taken by Joe Rosenthal on February 23, 1945, which depicts six United States Marines raising a U.S. flag atop Mount Suribachi, during the Battle of Iwo Jima, in World War II.

The photograph was first published in Sunday newspapers on February 25, 1945. It was extremely popular and was reprinted in thousands of publications. Later, it became the only photograph to win the Pulitzer Prize for Photography in the same year as its publication, and came to be regarded in the United States as one of the most significant and recognizable images of the war.

… The image was later used by Felix de Weldon to sculpt the Marine Corps War Memorial, which was dedicated in 1954 to all Marines who died for their country and is located in Arlington Ridge Park, near the Ord-Weitzel Gate to Arlington National Cemetery and the Netherlands Carillon.

Proud and professional: rainbow penguins on parade. Since Stonewall, pretty much all scientific and academic fields have developed gay / lgbt / queer organizations of one kind or another. Linguistics has at least three: since 1991, OUTiL, OUT in Linguistics (originally a social organization and mailing list, now a closed Facebook group); beginning in 1993, the Lavender Languages and Linguistics conferences; and now an LSA Special Interest Group on LTBGQ+ Linguistics, currently managed as a mailing list.

In polar studies / research there’s Pride in Polar Research (and probably others, but I know about this one through Chris Waigl, at U AK Fairbanks, and it’s of totemic, spheniscid, interest to me):

(#3) Penguin from the south, polar bear from the north, united in rainbow pride

On the two iconic figures: from my 1/20/19 posting “Know your Prideful polarities”, a Pride in Polar Research caution for for Penguin Awareness Day 2019:

(#4) There are detailed pointers in the 1/20 posting

Other rainbow penguins on this blog:

— in my 9/1/16 posting “Penguin Pride”, from the Pilsner Inn (in SF)

(#5)

— from my 2/21/19 posting “For gay penguins, science, and Canada!”, Stan and Olli at the Berlin Zoo:

(#6)

Elsewhere, rainbow penguins abound, in many forms. Two CafePress examples from this richesse:

(#7) Rainbow penguin mousepad

(#8) Rainbow penguin t-shirt

What do you get when you add guac(amole) to a BLT? A really proud sandwich, like this Marks & Spencer item:

(#9) Gay guacamole! (No, I don’t know why blue in the flag has been replaced by black)

This came to me on Facebook from David Horne — a composer who lives in Manchester (England) and teaches at RNCM — who got it as a Pride present from his partner Omar. It’s special for Pride, part of a M&S campaign for charity — which has, however, not been universally applauded in the British lgbt world.

From the (UK) Pink News on 5/2/19, “M&S launch LGBT sandwich and it’s dividing opinion”:

British supermarket chain Marks and Spencer (M&S) has launched a new “LGBT” sandwich, filled with lettuce, guacamole, bacon and tomato.

But the pride-themed snack has caused a stir with social media users, who have been debating whether or not they agree with it.

The conversation began when a picture of the sandwich with the caption “M&S threw the first artisanal sandwich at Stonewall,” went viral on Twitter:.

(#10)

The supermarket released the BLT-plus-guacamole sandwich to raise money for the Albert Kennedy Trust, a charity dedicated to helping homeless LGBT+ youth.

The retailer says it has donated £10,000 to the charity, and will be making a further £1,000 donation to another charity called BeLong to Youth Services in Ireland.

Some posters suggested gay people should just steal the sandwich (presumably on the grounds that the sandwich really belongs to us), one claimed to be enraged at being equated to a sandwich, still others complained about the price and the salt content, and one said it was an insult to the lesbian community (assumed to be uniformly vegetarian) because of the bacon.

I found the venom in these comments surprising. Was it just general antipathy towards mass-market retailers, or was there some special animus towards M&S making a pitch to lgbt people. (Is this pitch viewed as insincere, as a mere marketing ploy, or as an attempt to paper over past disregard of or active disdain for our community? Or what?)

The gay avocado. Just on the chance that guacamole the foodstuff or guacamole the noun or guac the clipping of that noun had some gay associations, I searched on “gay guacamole” and came across this remarkable Urban Dictionary entry:

avacado: A homosexual who is indiscernibly gay. Because avacados are fruits, but do not look or taste much like fruits, the term is applied to gay people who do not fit the “Will & Grace” stereotypes. [Example:] A bad dresser and NFL fanatic, you would never guess that Jacob was an avacado. Posted by omouallem 1/16/07

Let me get the nonsense out of the way.

First, it’s spelled AVOCADO.

Second, the business about avocados being fruits, a peculiar and persistent confusion on the part of some English speakers between the technical botanical term fruit referring to a plant part and the ordinary English term fruit referring to a type of foodstuff. This ambiguity of fruit results from a decision by botanists to technicalize the culinary noun as a term of plant anatomy — an unfortunate (though understandable) decision, in my view, but there it is and it can’t be taken back. From my 6/4/19 posting “perennial, evergreen, hardy”:

Many botanical and zoological terms are specializations — technicalizations — of everyday vocabulary, and some of these (evergreen among them) are felicitous, but (I have maintained on this blog), some are unfortunate. It’s distressing to have to explain to perfectly intelligent people that a strawberry is not, technically, a berry, while a watermelon is — a terminological choice that makes scientists look just silly.

(Note: an avocado is, in this technical vocabulary, a very large berry with a single large seed in it.)

In any case, a fairly large number of things that are, botanically speaking, fruits of plants are, when viewed as foodstuffs, vegetables (and not, as things to eat, fruits):

tomatoes, peppers of all kinds, cucurbits (cucumbers, zucchini, squash, pumpkins), peas and beans, eggplant, olives, okra, and, yes, avocados

Now to something of substance. These things are all, from one point of view, fruits, but from another, not fruits but vegetables. The name of any one of these things could then serve metaphorically to refer to something with a double nature — as an X, from one point of view, and as not an X but a Y, from another point of view.

In particular, the name of any of these fruits-not-fruits could serve metaphorically to refer to a man with a double sexuality — as a fruit (a faggot, a queer, a homo, or a gay (man)) from one point of view (the orientation of his desire), and as not a fruit but as a hetero, or a straight (man) from another point of view (his presentation of self). That is, to refer to a gay man who passes, or can pass, for straight.

In my linguistic experience, there is no simple English expression for such  a man; passer would be a natural (though colorless) choice, but it seems to have no history in this sense. ( I guess I should point out that I am one, though I frequently queer the pitch by displaying identifying symbols and slogans). Meanwhile, omuallem (in the UD entry above) or someone they know has taken the bold step of picking a fruit-not-fruit name as colorful slang for this purpose. Avocado isn’t a bad choice; it has a somewhat exotic feel to it, and while it has some metaphorical slang uses (for breasts and for testicles) these aren’t so common that they’d overshadow a fresh coinage.

So I guess I could be referred to as an avocado. Though the prospect of being mashed up into a party dip is not a pleasant one.

In the NYT Style Magazine (Men’s Style) on-line on 9/5/19 (in print 9/8), a remarkable piece by Hilton Als, “‘Giovanni’s Room’ Revisited”, with the subtitle: “James Baldwin’s 1956 novel is a layered exploration of queer desire — and of the writer’s own sense of self”. The cover:

(#1)

Als’s text comes with an artful photo-essay illustrating a reimagining of the story of Giovanni’s Room as an interracial gay love story, each photo also serving as a men’s high-fashion spread, displaying extraordinarily expensive clothing from famous brands.

A jarring moment in modern culture.

David and Giovanni meet (and fall in love) at a gay dive bar in Paris, among les folles — the femmes, queens, sissies, faggy queers, flaming faggots, flamers, what have you (men the aspiring-butch narrator David holds in contempt), presided over by the femme proprietor Guillaume. (Here I note that Als is himself, among many other things, a chronicler of his femme identity.)

So we get fabulous Ferragamo among the flaming faggots. The culturally marginal put to labor as advertisements for absurdly conspicuous consumption. Funding a long thoughtful essay by Als (black and gay, of Barbardian ancestry) and the intriguing photographs of John Edmonds (black and gay), mediated by the work of Carlos Nazario (NYC Puerto Rican and gay) as stylist, in sense 2 below:

noun stylist: 1 a designer of fashionable styles of clothing. … 2 a person whose job is to arrange and coordinate food, clothes, etc. in a stylish and attractive way in photographs or films… (NOAD)

(Edmonds is also a fashion designer, a stylist in sense 1.)

The Baldwin version, the Edmonds/Nazario version.

In the novel, both main figures are white, but Baldwin has split his own racial identity between the two characters: David is the voice of Baldwin’s black-American experience, while Giovanni is the exotic olive-skinned European, the dark one. Meanwhile, David is immersed in shame over his sexuality (suffering the burden of the persecuted black man), and is drawn powerfully to Giovanni, who is without shame (offering the authenticity of the proud black man). In the Edmonds-Nazario visual reimagining of the story, David is white, Giovanni black, as in #1 and this kiss (I’m a fool for men kissing):

(#2) Left: Salvatore Ferragamo coat, $4,200, ferragamo.com. Loro Piana sweater, $1,695, loropiana.com. Right: Celine by Hedi Slimane jacket, $4,460, (212) 226-8001. The Row T-shirt [$250].

The themes of masculinity and manhood, which are prominent in the book and treated at some length in Als’s text, don’t, so far as I can see, figure in the photo essay. (I propose to touch on them in a separate posting on femmes, with South Park‘s Big Gay Al — who recently popped up here in a posting about my birthday, thanks to Big Gay Ice Cream — as one exemplar of the type, among several.)

The Edmonds/Nazario project. From the NYT piece:

Behind the story: The images in this story had existed, in some form, in the minds of its creators for over a decade. Shot by the New York City-based artist John Edmonds and styled by Carlos Nazario, the pictures are a visual reimagining of “Giovanni’s Room.” The book was personally significant to nearly all the main collaborators, all of whom (including the critic and New Yorker staff writer Hilton Als, who wrote the accompanying piece) are queer men.

A carefuly framed formal composition:

(#3) Left: The Row T-shirt, $250, (212) 755-2017. A.P.C. jeans, $220, apc-us.com. Right: Hermès shirt, $960, hermes.com. Dior Men pants, price on request, (800) 929-3467.

The models: New York-based actor James Cusati-Moyer (as the namesake character Giovanni) and British-Nigerian dancer and model Temi Bolorunduro (as the protagonist David).

One more photo, of Giovanni and David, adrift and apart:

(#4) Far left: Giorgio Armani Icon Collection coat, $3,595, and pants, $1,395, armani.com. Sandro shoes. Right: Giorgio Armani Icon Collection T-shirt, $1,595, and pants, $775. Mr. P. shoes, $495, mrporter.com.

On Hilton Als. From Wikipedia:

Hilton Als (born 1960) is an American writer and theater critic. He is an associate professor of writing at Columbia University and a staff writer and theater critic for The New Yorker magazine. He is a former staff writer for The Village Voice and former editor-at-large at Vibe magazine.

… His 1996 book The Women focuses on his mother (who raised him in Brooklyn), Dorothy Dean [African American socialite, connected to Andy Warhol’s The Factory, 12/22/32 – 2/13/87], and Owen Dodson, who was a mentor and lover of Als [African American poet, novelist, and playwright, 11/28/14 – 6/21/83]. In the book, Als explores his identification of the confluence of his ethnicity, gender and sexuality, moving from identifying as a “Negress” and then an “Auntie Man”, a Barbadian term for homosexuals. His 2013 book White Girls continued to explore race, gender, identity in a series of essays about everything from the AIDS epidemic to Richard Pryor’s life and work.

Als’s most recent appearance on this blog was in  the 2/27/17 posting “CK basks in Moonlight” about the movie Moonlight, including a stunning New Yorker review of the movie by Als that I quoted in full.

Beyond being queer, Als and I don’t have a whole lot in common. But, even though I’m a generation older than him, we do both have the experience of having been through the AIDS epidemic — which wiped out almost all the gay men in my age cohort (leaving just a precious handful of survivors), and cut down so many young men in Als’s.

Yesterday’s Zippy takes us to a historic diner in Albany NY and its notifications boards:

(#1) Note the parochial character of the messages: bulletins about the diner’s offerings

The real diner’s interior:

(#2) From the diner’s last day of service, posted 2/17/12 on the All Over Albany site

Photorealism at the diner. For comparison to #1 and #2: the Ralph Goings painting Miss Albany Diner (1993), oil on canvas:

(#3) Not a photo, but a photorealist painting (with, once again, the notifications boards)

On Goings, from Wikipedia:

Ralph Goings (May 9, 1928 – September 4, 2016) was an American painter closely associated with the Photorealism movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. He was best known for his highly detailed paintings of hamburger stands, pick-up trucks, and California banks, portrayed in a deliberately objective manner. [The entry is illustrated with the painting Ralph’s Diner (1981–1982).]

And on photorealism, again from Wikipedia:

Photorealism is a genre of art that encompasses painting, drawing and other graphic media, in which an artist studies a photograph and then attempts to reproduce the image as realistically as possible in another medium. Although the term can be used broadly to describe artworks in many different media, it is also used to refer specifically to a group of paintings and painters of the American art movement that began in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

… The first generation of American photorealists includes such painters as John Baeder, Richard Estes, Ralph Goings, Chuck Close, Charles Bell, Audrey Flack, Don Eddy, Robert Bechtle, and Tom Blackwell. Often working independently of each other and with widely different starting points, these original photorealists routinely tackled mundane or familiar subjects in traditional art genres — landscapes (mostly urban rather than naturalistic), portraits, and still lifes. [The entry is illustrated with Jon Baeder’s painting John’s Diner with John’s Chevelle, 2007. More diners — Baeder’s specialty.]

On this blog, in my 8/14/14 posting “Tumble Inn, Stan”, some discussion of Baeder’s paintings of roadside diners and eateries — meticulous chronicling of this rapidly disappearing facet of American vernacular architecture. Once again, provoked by a Zippy cartoon, as part of Bill Griffith’s passionate concern with American vernacular culture, especially its art and architecture, as manifested (for example) in roadside figures, commercial logos and mascots, and the design of diners, fast-food eateries, amusement parks, and motels (and of course comic strips, popular music, and the movies). The seriousness of Griffith’s interests in such everyday matters (as deep as Baeder’s) tends to be masked by the playfulness of much of the material itself and the antic delight with which Griffith presents it, but in fact he treats it both lovingly and respectfully.

So I see the strip in #1 as an elegy — at once both matter-of-fact and fanciful —  for a monument of American diner culture, presented as functioning now as it did a decade ago (caucuses in Iowa, Elizabeth Warren!).

The diner. From Wikipedia:

(#4) The diner in April 2010 (Wikipedia photo)

Miss Albany Diner … is a historic diner in Albany, New York, built in 1941 and located at 893 Broadway, one of the oldest streets in Albany. Used as a set for the 1987 film Ironweed, which starred Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep, it was added to the U.S. National Register of Historic Places in 2000.

In 1929 the site was occupied by a lunch cart that provided hot food to workers in the area. It was succeeded by a prefabricated diner built by the Ward & Dickinson Dining Car Company. The current building was erected in 1941 and originally called Lil’s Diner. It is a “Silk City Diner model, manufactured by the Paterson Vehicle Company in Paterson, New Jersey, one of the leading diner manufacturers of the time. The building is typical of the prefabricated diners that were common from the 1920s through the 1940s, built to resemble railroad cars and incorporating elements of Art Deco design. With its interior of cherry wood and porcelain enamelled steel and a geometrically tiled floor, it is one of the few pre-World War II diners in the United States in near-original condition. The interior was depicted by the photorealist artist Ralph Goings in his 1993 painting Miss Albany Diner.

The diner changed hands over the years and was called successively Elaine’s, the Firehouse Diner, and the Street Car Diner. Its current name was shared by a chain of several now defunct Miss Albany Diners owned by Stillman Pitts which were popular in Albany during the 1920s …

In February 2012, … the diner was finally bought by Matthew Baumgartner, the head of a property company that owns a nearby beer garden and several other restaurants in Albany. Baumgartner said that the diner’s structure would be retained when he and his partners develop the site, but that there were no plans to run it as a diner. Jane Brown and her son retained the rights to the “Miss Albany Diner” name and its signature recipes. The Miss Albany served its last meal as a diner on February 10, 2012.

The former diner is now the site of Tanpopo Ramen and Sake Bar.

Start spreadin’ the news: the notifications boards. A board informs and advertises, but about very local matters — what’s on the menu today, what’s especially recommended, what the house rules are (if you sit at the counter, you can’t move to a table, that sort of thing). It’s Bill Griffith’s fantasy that it could be used as a newsreel or general advertising board; any day now, in Zippyland, while we’re at the counter having a grilled cheese sandwich, some cole slaw, a cup of coffee,  and a slice of cherry pie from the pie case, a board will tell us about forest fires in northern California or solicit us to take a Celebrity Cruise.

We have in fact gotten used to getting news bulletins and being assailed with advertising in public places, all the time. So adapting a diner’s notifications board for these purposes doesn’t seem all that outrageous. Not as remarkable as bringing news and ads into the men’s rooms, and that happened some years ago.

I first came across the phenomenon 20 years ago at a Chili’s (a “casual dining restaurant”) in Menlo Park CA, which had pages from the day’s USA Today mounted above the urinals in the men’s room. The practice was apparently already common then. Over the years, the supra-urinal space has also been put to use for electronic devices, playing video ads or sports coverage, or even coordinating electronic action with urination; from the Wired site on 11/18/12, in “Urine the Money” [there is no pun so low…] by Sarah Mitroff: “Captive Media’s urinal entertainment system shows ads on screens above each urinal and starts playing games when you pee”.

(A personal posting, not about language, and only glancingly about gender and sexuality.)

From Virginia Transue today, the photo of my man Jacques H. Transue (1942-2003) from his Haverford College yearbook in 1964:

Virginia had just discovered that tons of yearbooks were available on-line, so she searched and found this — which I had never seen before.  Virginia (the widow of Jacques’s older brother, Bill) described it as “one of the dreamboatiest photos” she’d ever seen, a judgment I’m inclined to agree with (but then I’m wildly prejudiced).

It is the product of a commercial photographer working in a particular genre, which smoothes and genericizes the subject’s faces. The interesting angular planes of J’s face are gone, as are the crinkles that accompanied his talking and smiling. The somewhat Mediterranean tint of his skin has turned to generic American cream, and since this is a b&w photo, we don’t see the attractive gray-green of his eyes. But the guy in the photo has gorgeous eyes, and a long lean face of masculine beauty. A dreamboat, as Virginia says.

I’ll leave it at that, using this as today’s Not Dead Yet posting — NoDY being a project in which I intend to rise above the physical afflictions and the anxieties and preoccupations of my daily life, to produce at least one posting to this blog each day (an intention not always achieved), just to show that I’m not dead yet.

(Meanwhile, a posting on the modern English preposition come — yes, you read that correctly — is simmering.)

A return to the subject of my 3/10/16 posting “Male beauty”, on cultural categorizations of attractiveness and masculinity, primarily as evidenced in facial characteristics. Adding to the mix (a) yesterday’s posting on my man Jacques Transue as a young “dreamboat” (“Him, 55 years ago”); and (b) repeated passing references here to the Clint Eastwood of the tv series Rawhide (1959-66) as “young and beautiful, but ruggedly handsome”.

A side by side comparison, understanding that both photographs are posed (though in very different ways) and that J’s photo was adjusted in processing to make it a serious and smoothly generic portrait, while Eastwood’s shows him in cowboy character from an episode of the tv show. J is in an earnest student costume, with accompanying facial expression; Eastwood is in cowboy costume as the young drover Rowdy Yates and (in this photo) is half-smiling, companionably.

(#1) “the guy in the photo has gorgeous eyes, and a long lean face of masculine beauty. A dreamboat, as Virginia [Transue] says.”

(#2) Eastwood (born in 1930) inhabiting his character: also an elegant lean face (though not as long as J’s), with beautiful crinkly eyes

They’re both adorable, but in different ways, in part because they are presented as projecting different personas. And also both strongly masculine.

Also: both tall and lanky, leanly muscular, and with a strong physical presence.

More on JHT. (There will be a good bit more on CE below.) A more candid head shot of J at about the same age as Eastwood in #2:

(#3)

When I confided in a mutual (gay) friend about this time that J and I had become lovers, the friend (who knew about my sexuality but not J’s) was astounded: “You’re telling me that Jean-Paul Belmondo is gay?!”  A reference to the French actor, especially noted for his role in Breathless (1960). The young Belmondo (born in 1933), another exemplar of male beauty:

(#4)

Notes on male beauty. Relevant postings before my 3/10/16 one include:

— a 8/6/13 posting “Seven Supermen and Brad Pitt”

— a 2/29/16 posting “Four mythic hunks”

Among the actors depicted and discussed in these three postings as examples of facial male beauty are Brad Pitt, Robert Redford, Jensen Ackles, and Johnny Depp. I solicited opinions, in a totally unscientific fashion, from a number of women (including two teenagers) and gay men . There was broad agreement over which actors were good-looking, and broad agreement that there were several distinct subcategories of GOODLOOKING-MAN, which they referred to via the labels handsome, cute, beautiful, and hot (with an implicit acknowledgment  that the boundaries were not always clear; with some suggestion that the hot group cross-cuts the other three; and with some inclination to distinguish bad-boy dark beauties like Johnny Depp from sweeter blond beauties like Robert Redford).

It’s clear to me that there’s a rough system of categories here, but one that’s hard to get at through labels in English (and of course exhibits considerable social variability).

There is, in particular, a clearly recognizable subcategory of GOODLOOKING-MAN that has no widely known label in English — unlabeled taxa are in fact fairly common in systems of cultural categories — and it’s relevant to this posting, because it’s the category that Clint Eastwood mostly falls into after his early BEAUTIFUL-MAN period: strikingly tough, even hypermasculine, goodlooking men. Macho hunks, more or less.

You can see the Eastwood Man With No Name character developing in his early years. Here’s the beautiful Eastwood, but shirtless and apparently sexed-up, at 26 (before his success in Rawhide), in a p.r. photo (from the Getty archives):

(#5)

Then comes Rawhide, in which he smiles a lot, usually with his beautiful eyes  wide open, as in #2. But sometimes the smile comes with narrowed eyes (because he is, after all, frequently squinting into the sun, out on the Texas plains), as here:

(#6)

And sometimes, as when he’s confronting some problem or nastiness, unsmiling with those narrowed eyes, as here (still from Rawhide):

(#7)

The beauty has hardened into machismo, and this becomes Eastwood’s default presentation (though the full range of his roles is considerable). From my 5/26/18 posting “Porn for the holidays, with narrowed eyes”:

Narrowed eyes are a regular feature of Clint Eastwood’s characters. Conveying anger, ferocity, intense attention, or dominance, or some combination of these:

(#8) Clint Eastwood Eyes in “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”

We are now a very long way from beautiful. This is one scary dude. Damn good-looking, but whoa!

One more eccentric vein of modern still lifes, on the Production Paradise site: from the Spotlight Nov. 2018 magazine: “Piotr Gregorcyk Photography – Food & Drink Photography & Motion”: still photographs of food and drink floating, disassembled, in zero gravity. Frozen moments captured from floating motion in time and space.

Boosterish note fron the Spotlight site:

Piotr Gregorczyk [(PG)] is a London-based artist, photographer and retoucher specialising in food, liquids, drinks and still life. He is best known for his conceptual, food and liquid photography exploring the concept of weightlessness of food and drink in zero gravity. His images are clean and exceptionally detailed with a sense of vision unique in the industry.

PG Photography manages all post-production in-house, relying on 16 years of shooting and retouching experience in London. Piotr recently took on the mission of becoming a table top food director to translate the visual language of his stills into film.

Working with a network of London’s best model-makers, food and prop stylists and set builders, Piotr has built a reputation for creating dynamic and graphic images – the hallmark of his style.

Two examples of PG’s work. First, the Breakfast Samie [sandwich] image, in motion:

(#1)

and at rest:

(#2)

Second, the fish:

(#3)

My title. From Wikipedia:

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Czech: Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí) is a 1984 novel by Milan Kundera, about two women, two men, a dog and their lives in the 1968 Prague Spring period of Czechoslovak history.

A quote from the novel, showing relevance to PG’s photographs:

the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant.

Having posted recently several times on still lifes involving foodstuffs, I’ve been getting lots of suggestions from Pinterest of food photography in general (and when I post this, I’ll get even more). Striking among these suggestions: Francesco Tonelli’s album of breakfast photos (on his website, here).

These turn out to have an informal snapshot quality, as if we’re just catching these foods in the act, combined with an extraordinarily sensuous presentation. For example, breakfast PJ&B (peanut butter and jelly — or in this case, jam, which is much more intense than mere jelly):

(#1) Peanut butter and jam, aroused and about to hook up

Now, more from his breakfast album (and then the About page from his website, about who  Tonelli is and what he does).

Everyday items made remarkable.

(#2) Just a soft-boiled egg, in the midst of being eaten

(#3) A playful grilled cheese and egg sandwich

(#4) Sesame bagels, romping

(#5) Essence of a breakfast standard: bacon with eggs, sunny side up: realer than real

(#6) Essence of a breakfast standard: cereal and milk, with almonds and gleaming blackberries, exploding into the air

On the photographer. From his About page (with, of course, some puffery):

(#7)

Another spinoff from my recent postings on still lifes, leading to photographs of food, in particular an earlier posting today, “Breakfast with Francesco Tonelli” (the food photographer). And that led me to a genre of food photography I hadn’t known about: the exploded view, deconstructed, flying, or food-layer hamburger. (Any sort of sandwich or layered food could be treated this way, but hamburgers tend to have more parts than most, and they’ve spread as everyday food through much of the world, so they’re especially well suited to this photgraphic treatment.)

An introductory example: a photo by David Fedulov (Дэвид Федулов) in Moscow:

(#1) Managing to get the dressing separated like that is the real trick here

Here I guess I should remind you that the stuff in lots of wonderful food photography isn’t food at all, but some simulacrum that will stand up under hot lights and long exposure times. Tricks of the trade. Making actual food gorgeous in still shots (as Tonelli does) is quite an accomplishment.

Five more examples, from all over the world.(We’ve already got Russia.)

The Vietnamese veggie burger. Photo by by Bếp Thực Dưỡng:

(#2) Even simpler, but with a much stronger sense that the components are alive and dancing; possibly my favorite

From Spain. A cover of Metropoli magazine.

(#3) Strictly horizontal alignment. Note the Spanish for ‘hamburger’: hamburguesa

From Martigny, canton Valais, Switzerland. Professional photographer Thomas Masotti on the Fstoppers site: “One of the many burgers that i love in a small restaurant near my city the “Downtown Burger” in Switzerland.”

(#4) An egg and bacon, plus veggie and cheese layers

By Francesco Tonelli, an Italian working a lot in the US. (See above.)

(#5) Delightfully kinetic, with mustard and ketchup in motion

By professional photographer Carla McMahon in South Africa.

(#6) With mushrooms, pickle slices, red peppers — lots of jazz

One of many burgers that look challenging to get in the mouth. Along with #3-5 and many commercial burgers covered previously on this blog. But we’re in fantasy burger territory here.

(Six might seem like excess, but there are plenty more available on the net. It’s a thing.)

When in doubt, explode it out!

A photo of me stashed away in my photo archives and not previously posted, showing me in my sweet and fuzzy guise:

The photo turns out to be from 6/7/06 — I was 65 at the time — from the year-end celebration of my year (2005-06) at the Stanford Humanities Center. Only 15 years ago, but it now seems like an image from a long-ago time.

Readers who know me know that I am wary indeed of photographs, since I believe they mostly present me — only too accurately — as funny-looking, but if they can capture my sweet and fuzzy side, then I am pleased. As here.

My attempts to discover if I’d used this image before yielded some fascinating results. I searched on “Arnold Zwicky ” plus “photograph” / “photo” / “picture” — and did pull up photographs of me, but also an enormous range of other stuff, heavy on shirtlessness, underwear images, shots from gay porn, artworks, and images of dancers.

Another Nice Guy photo of me from Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky’s stash:

(#1) The origin of this photo is currently unknown — but note that it was taken in a public place — an eating place? — with other people visible in the background

This for comparison to this 1/3 sweet and fuzzy photo from 2006:

(#2)

Notes on the photos:

— #2 has me looking down, with a half-smile on my face; while #1 has me looking into the camera, with a full smile on my face

— #2 has me wearing glasses with smaller, oval lenses; while #1 has me in glasses with much larger lenses, making my face look bigger

— my hair style and facial hair style seem very similar in the two photos; in both these regards, I’ve pretty much stuck to the same thing throughout  many years

— both photos show me with salt-and-pepper chest hair, though this is much harder to see in #2 (I mention this because I’ve had some gay men tell me they think this feature is adorable, and others tell me they think it’s hot — me, I just think that that’s the way I am, though I’m happy to accept compliments, especially if they come with sexual overtones)

Anyone who thinks they might recognize the occasion for #1 — time, place, event, whatever — is invited to let me hear what they know (in a comment on this posting or in e-mail to arnold.zwicky@gmail.com). (Warning: don’t send me anything via FB Messenger; if you do, I will never see it.)

[Addendum 1/7/21: From Ned Deily on 1/6:

The Nice Guy photo you ask about was taken by me on [7/28/01, almost 20 years ago] at the Stanford Shopping Center during the Palo Alto [soc.motss] “mini-con” that weekend. There were a number of other motssers sitting around the table there: I see the Burlingham sisters [Ann Burlingham, Kathryn Burlingham], the Aberjanks [or Aberlaks: Sim Aberson and Mike Jankulak], EDZ, Lars [Ingebrigtsen], Michael Palmer, Lisa Cohen. More showed up at your place the next day (Sunday). Here’s another photo of you taken a few minutes earlier:

(#2)

Note: soc.motss (earlier, net.motss) was a Usenet discussion group founded by Steve Dyer in 1983 for lgbtq people and their friends: members of the same sex. (It has since moved to life as a group on Facebook.) Since 1987, there have been annual face-to-face gatherings — motss.cons — and often ad-hoc gatherings (mini-cons) like the one in Palo Alto in 2001.]

I continue to find Nice Guy photos of me projecting a sweet and fuzzy persona; apparently, lots of people I know find this presentation of self attractive (and have done so for at least 20 years). They have a point.

Here’s the latest, me at the Ramona St. condo:

(#1) Photographer not known; and date not known, but it was before the diningroom table (in the top center) became my work table and the desk (on the right) became a storage surface

This image of me is very much like #1 from my 1/5/21 posting “More sweet and fuzzy” (from 2001), but with a head tilt. Both differ from the image in my 1/3/21 posting “Sweet and fuzzy, from 2006” (the first in the series).

Many people find my sweet and fuzzy face quite attractive, especially when combined with a big crinkly-eyed smile, and I see their point. This is, after all, the face of a really nice guy, highly empathetic, amiable and trustworthy. Not a tough guy, not conventionally handsome (though my facial hair has been concealing my “weak chin” since 1969, and a lot of people just take my Alpine nose to be a Jewish nose, which is ok with me), but a guy projecting — pretty accurately, I think — interest in you, helpfulness, and good humor.

Back when I could walk like a normal person on city streets, strangers who caught my eye sometimes said hello and smiled at me. And felt free to ask for directions or other help. That pleased me a lot.

(I don’t look like someone who could repair heavy machinery or pitch a mean baseball or crush the opposition in a bar brawl, and that too is basically on the mark.)

My favorite in this series so far, because it presents me as not only sweet and fuzzy but also as contemplative (if you know me, you know that I am not only a very playful nice guy, but I am also deeply serious about what I see as my work and almost relentlessly analytic, about pretty much everything):

(#1) Once again, I  have no idea about when this photo was taken or by whom; the shirt, with its horizontal stripes of charcoal and purple, turns out to have some history, however

I love my shirt. By great good fortune, just as I came across this photo in a stash of them collected by Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky, Jeff Shaumeyer resurrected two sweet and fuzzy photos of me in his own files, and they have me in this very shirt. One of them (with colors shifted oddly; #1 has the correct colors):

(#2) (AZ: I lack the software to clean the photos up, in particular by removing the bright points of reflected light; my apologies)

These are very firmly dated. E-mail from Jeff:

These were the two photos that your “sweet and fuzzy” posting reminded me I had scanned earlier last year. They were taken in October 1993 at my house in College Park, MD, when you were in Washington DC for the March on Washington with a number of other motsseurs. [or motssers — that is, regulars on the Usenet newsgroup soc.motss, for lgbtq people and their friends]

So, the shirt goes back more than 25 years.

Compare to #1. This photo, taken, I believe, by EDZ, which has a similar finger gesture, but caught in a brief moment of unconsciousness:

(#3) Note my wedding-equivalent ring

The attractions of this face. A summary, from my 1/7/21 posting “Sweet and fuzzy 3”:

Many people find my sweet and fuzzy face quite attractive, especially when combined with a big crinkly-eyed smile, and I see their point. This is, after all, the face of a really nice guy, highly empathetic, amiable and trustworthy. Not a tough guy, not conventionally handsome (though my facial hair has been concealing my “weak chin” since 1969, and a lot of people just take my Alpine nose to be a Jewish nose, which is ok with me), but a guy projecting — pretty accurately, I think — interest in you, helpfulness, and good humor.

The full title: LOVING A Photographic History of Men in Love 1850s – 1950s. Assembled by Hugh Nini & Neal Treadwell (5 Continents Editions, 2020).

(#1) Front cover of the book

From the introduction to a Queer Review interview by editor James Kleinmann with the authors (11/1/20):

A married couple themselves, Neal, who works in the cosmetic industry, and Hugh, a former ballet dancer turned ballet teacher, have been together for nearly three decades. While browsing in an antique store in Dallas, Texas around 20 years ago, the pair stumbled across a photograph from the 1920s of two men in a tender embrace. That unexpected discovery sparked a passion that has resulted in their still growing “accidental collection” of around 3,000 photographs of men in love. A selection of over 300 of these images is featured in their beautifully produced new book which was published internationally on October 14th 2020.

A beautifully produced volume, with minimal text: an appreciative note “Amantes Amentes”, by Paolo Maria Noseda (pp. 6-13) (Noseda elsewhere   defines himself as “an interpreter, translator, speech coach, ghost writer, consultant in the field of international communication, writer and occasionally teacher and student”), and the explanatory essay “An Accidental Collection” by Nini and Treadwell (pp. 14-23).

The photographs are surprisingly moving (and, yes, Nini and Treadwell are aware of the common practice of close male friends — “best buddies” and the like — taking photos of themselves in entirely non-sexual physical closeness, but argue that in many cases the exchange of facial expressions between male couples and their body language clearly indicate a loving relationship).

The publisher’s advance synopsis:

Loving: A Photographic Story of Men in Love, 1850-1950 portrays the history of romantic love between men in hundreds of moving and tender vernacular photographs taken between the years 1850 and 1950. This visual narrative of astonishing sensitivity brings to light an until-now-unpublished collection of hundreds of snapshots, portraits, and group photos taken in the most varied of contexts, both private and public. Taken when male partnerships were often illegal, the photos here were found at flea markets, in shoe boxes, family archives, old suitcases, and later online and at auctions. The collection now includes photos from all over the world: Australia, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, France, Germany, Japan, Greece, Latvia, the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, and Serbia. The subjects were identified as couples by that unmistakable look in the eyes of two people in love – impossible to manufacture or hide. They were also recognised by body language – evidence as subtle as one hand barely grazing another – and by inscriptions, often coded. Included here are ambrotypes, daguerreotypes, glass negatives, tin types, cabinet cards, photo postcards, photo strips, photomatics, and snapshots – over 100 years of social history and the development of photography.  … The photographs – many fragile from age or handling – have been digitised using a technology derived from that used on surveillance satellites and available in only five places around the world. Paper and other materials are among the best available. And Loving will be manufactured at one of the world’s elite printers. Loving, the book, will be up to the measure of its message in every way. In these delight-filled pages, couples in love tell their own story for the first time at a time when joy and hope – indeed human connectivity – are crucial lifelines to our better selves. Universal in reach and overwhelming in impact, Loving speaks to our spirit and resilience, our capacity for bliss, and our longing for the shared truths of love.

And an ad for the book with a display of six photos from it:

(#2)

You can also watch a charming video, “Loving: A Short Documentary” (roughly 8 minutes long), available here.

(Men’s bodies as sexual objects — women’s, too — and sex between men, all of this discussed in street language, with edgy images, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)

At the intersection of the pinup-girl world (AZ Page here) and the premium men’s underwear world (AZ Page here), two recent ads from the Daily Jocks people: from 3/28, under the mail header “Model of the week: Freddy”, an ad for OnlyJox subscriptions, already of interest to me for its display of male buttocks as sexual objects for a male audience and for pushing the line between softcore and hardcore porn in doing so; and from 4/2, an ad for the DJ Easter sale, already of interest to me for its display of the front surface of the model’s body as series of sexual objects for a male audience, from the framing of his penis in a jockstrap though the sexualized presentation of his armpits, pectoral muscles and nipples.

The 4/2 ad is also quite clearly the photographer’s carefully composed re-creation of a classic pinup pose using a male model. And then I realized that that the 3/8 ad was in fact a bow to yet another classic pinup pose.

The two ads, from the wonderful world of designer jockstraps:

(#1) 3/28: the model Freddy, tail in the air, offering his ass; stroking his dick, apparently, out of our view; displaying his muscular shoulders and back (his traps and lats); fixing us with a knowing cruise face; and playing with his gorgeous springy hair (“and his hair was perfect” — Warren Zevon, “Werewolves of London”)

(#2) 4/2: the model I’ve called Aradesque, offering his dick; with his legs spread to suggest the availability of his ass; displaying his muscular pecs and abs and a hairy armpit; and with his cruise face (dark wide eyes in a carefully groomed and made-up face)

For gay men, the two primary sexual features of the male body are the asshole (to fuck) and the dick (to jack off, suck, or be fucked by). The buttocks are technically secondary sexual features — the fleshy portals to the asshole within. And then there are the other secondary features, further signals of attractive masculinity, in particular facial, body, and armpit hair; and powerful male musculature (Freddy’s back, Aradesques’s arms and torso).

Both models are performing versions of what I’ve called butch fagginess (see my 8/14/18 posting with that title, and others following it), in which a primarily high-masculinity (often exaggeratedly so) presentation of self is combined with at least a few elements that are conspicuously, conventionally un-masculine, indeed faggy: slogans on clothing, facial expressions, stance, a conveyed urgent need to get fucked (as with Freddy), un-masculine bits of clothing or colors (like Aradesque’s neon pink jock), make-up (Aradesque’s eye make-up is fabulous), whatever.

Freddy. Freddy is humped up, with his tail in the air, displaying his buttocks as sexual objects (and incidentally displaying the declivity of his lower back as sexual as well; see my 3/30/21 posting “Tramp stamps”, with its section on the erotic potential of the lower back).

Then from my 10/25/16 posting “tail in the air”, on the Fuck Me Please (FMP) interpretation of tail in the air:

FMP manages to combine the root sense of tail with its metonymic extension to the rump of an animal (including the buttocks of a human being) and the further metonymic extension from ‘rump, buttocks’ to ‘vagina’ (and to suggest a further metaphorical extension, in gay usage, from ‘vagina’ to ‘anus’) — so it hits all the sexualized senses of tail except the metaphorical (shape-based) extension to ‘penis’. The larger point is that FMP connotes receptivity and submission.

The crucial element in FMP is raising the hips, putting the rump up in the air. From Wikipedia:

Lordosis behavior, also known as mammalian lordosis (Greek lordōsis, from lordos “bent backward”) or presenting, is a body posture adopted by some mammals including humans, elephants, rodents, felines and others, usually associated with female receptivity to copulation. The primary characteristics of the behavior are a lowering of the forelimbs but with the rear limbs extended and hips raised, ventral arching of the spine and a raising, or sideward displacement, of the tail.

Or, as in “Sex positions for gay men” (from 2/12/16):

(4) bottom kneeling (a genicular fuck), commonly called doggie/doggy-fucking

— or, in crude terms, taking it like a bitch.

In fact, lordosis in dogs in heat is generally not nearly as pronounced as in, say, cats or rats, as you can see in this illustration from the Petsoid site (with pet advice) from 2/26/20, “How Long Does a Female Dog Stay in Heat” by Anna Liutko:

(#3)

Now, #1 is intended as porn; it’s an ad for DJ’s OnlyJox subscription service, which supplies images of DJ models for (I paraphrase) the private pleasures of the subscribers. Freddy in #1 is in between soft porn and hard porn (aka softcore and hardcore), but towards the high end; it’s pretty much right up against the line.

Linguistic digression: scales and labels. #1 belongs to the category of porn images, a category that is often conceptualized as a collection of images arranged on a scale between two end-points, two poles, customarily labeled as soft and hard, with the whole scheme analogized to other scales using these labels for the poles: hardness for minerals, for sleeping surfaces, for cheeses, for penile erections, etc.

I’ll leave the concept of scalarity unanalyzed here, trusting in your naive intuitions for my present purposes — though there’s a considerable literature in semantics on scales — but will concentrate on the assignment of labels.

A scale doesn’t necessarily have a conventional label, but those that do are often labeled with the label for one of the poles, which then serves as the unmarked pole. The scale at issue in this discussion of #1 is the scale labeled hardness, with the unmarked pole labeled hard — asking How hard is it? doesn’t entail that it’s hard — and the marked pole labeled soft — asking How soft is it? entails that it’s soft.

Another significant fact about scales is that intermediate elements frequently lack conventional names. Often when there are names for intermediate elements, these don’t pick out the halfway, or neutral, points, but instead are located by reference to one of the poles: semisoft cheeses, half-hard erections. I’m much taken with half-hard for reference to an intermediate state in porn that’s close to the hard pole — as in #1.

A similar labeling scheme for the erection hardness scale is presented in my 8/4/20 posting “Towards the high end of the  hardness scale”, from the British tv show Cucumber, Banana, and Tofu — with Tofu labeling the soft pole, Cucumber the hard pole, and Banana an intermediate half-hard point.

Aradesque. From my 3/19/21 posting “Personas and poses”, about an earlier DJ ad featuring the model I’ve called Aradesque, focused on scales and on his dick-framing gesture:

(#4)

Aradesque’s presentation of self is far to the queer end on the queer-straight scale [the straightness scale, with the straight pole as the unmarked end], but (within the queer domain) also far to the butch end of the fem-butch scale [the butchness scale, with the butch pole as the unmarked end].

Meanwhile, he’s performing a dick-framing gesture with his left hand, outlining a highly visible (though covered) half-hard penis — well short of a crotch grab, but similar in spirit to that gesture. In any case, it’s a homoerotically charged pose; he could just have rested his left hand lightly on his thigh, as he’s doing with his right hand.

But #2 is something else. It has the muscular body and the dick-framing gesture (but here with briefs in a less faggy color), but lacks the supine pose with a pitsntits display and the very cruisy face, include what seems to be fairly heavy eye make-up. So: a much faggier presentation than #4. It is in fact an easily recognizable take-off on a classic (female) pinup pose (though in the pinups, the woman’s legs aren’t spread, but are drawn up (sometimes raised in the air).

A famous example of the pose: Jane Russell in the movie The Outlaw (1943), seen here in a poster for the movie (with a phallic gun for extra sexual interest; remember that this material is created for a male audience, so phallic symbols have the virtue of providing a place in the picture for the men in this audience):

(#5)

The pitsntits gesture is designed to push the breasts forward and so to display them as much as possible. For women as models, sexual display for a male audience focuses on two secondary sexual features, breasts and buttocks — that is, tits and ass (aka t&a). The pose in #5  is a tits display. (An ass display will come along shortly.)

#5 is softporn photography displaying tits. There is of course a parallel genre of softporn graphic art displaying tits, for example this drawing by pinup artist Gil Elvgren:

(#6)

So much for tits. On to ass. And back to …

Tail in the air (take 2). Now as a standard pinup pose. Here, just one example, a work on a Flickr site (with a gigantic phallic element as a bonus):

(#7) Mandy Galileo, Pinup Sonja_005a: “This is my sister Sonja who wanted to show she supports the war effort. At ’em boys, give her the gun!!! Shot at Naturally Naughty February 21, 2021.”

This takes us back to Freddy in the DJ ad in #1, which, in addition to its other associations, we can now see as a take-off on this pinup pose.