(Male bodies and elaborate photographic fantasies, to inaugurate 2017, which is, by the way, a prime number.)

From my correspondent RJP, a link to the work of the Skiinmode studio (supplying Asian male muscle posed in complex fantasy scenes) on Tumblr. (The material is available on a number of sites, especially on Tumblr and Instagram.)

Men of several nationalities and body types (all with pleasing muscles and most in cocktease poses), in fanciful settings, sometimes appearing as complex imaginary creatures.

(The Asia of this material seems to start in Southeast Asia and go on east from there.)

Four examples, from a great many available on the web:

(#1)

(#2)

(#3)

(#4)

(About men kissing and how people interpret such acts. There will be references to man-on-man sexual acts, so you should be prepared to exercise some judgment.)

A kiss is not just a kiss; it’s almost always something else as well. Sticking to the topic of men kissing men, we’ve got MSMs (“men who have sex with men” — but identify as straight) who sometimes won’t kiss men; and then we’ve got people who are offended and disgusted just at the sight of same-sex kisses, especially between men, and lash out in various ways, from having them banned from public view to verbally abusing the kissers to physically attacking them. These two reactions spring from two different views of same-sex kissing: for MSMs, who want “just sex”, kissing can be problematic because it isn’t sex, it’s affection and love, and emotional intimacy is not what they’re in the market for; while for enraged objectors, same-sex kissing is a sex act, and doing it in public is having sex in public, which is offensive, simply unacceptable.

Then there are people like me, for whom images like this —

  (#1)

— are deeply satisfying, because we see the kiss as embodying both loving affection and sexual connection, while not being in itself a sex act. Two responses, together: “Awww, so sweet!” and “Wow, that’s hot!”

Three more kisses. The kiss in #1 (a David Vance shot of models Paul Francis and Levi Pouter) and the many other man-man kisses I’ve posted about over the years (there is now a”Men kissing” Page on this blog) are displays of affection and sexual connection, not social kisses, not merely conventional actions. Here are three more images: one more with “like attracts like” as in #1, where two similar men kiss; and then two with “opposites attract” (black man and white man kissing, older man and younger man kissing):

  (#2)

  (#3)

  (#4)

I don’t know the sources of #2 and #3, but #4 is a photo by Spanish artist Juan Hidalgo that was used by the Madrid-based Visible Culture LGBT group for its ‘Gay Arts Looks For A Home’ initiative in 2012. It was one of a number of images of same-sex kisses removed by Facebook in (roughly) 2010-12 on the grounds that the images portrayed sex acts (while similar kisses involving a man and a woman were not treated this way).

The song. The title of this posting quotes one line from the song “As Time Goes By”, treated in a 10/12/15 posting “You must remember this”:

You must remember this
A kiss is just a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh
The fundamental things apply
As time goes by
And when two lovers woo
They still say, “I love you”
On that you can rely
No matter what the future brings
As time goes by

The song was made famous by the movie Casablanca and has since become the representative song of Warner Bros. and was also the title and theme song of the 1990s British romantic comedy series As Time Goes By.

The line “A kiss is just a kiss” was also used as the title of a 1971 British tv play, which might have had a gay theme, though that’s hard to judge from the cryptically minimal Wikipedia entry. In its entirety:

A Kiss is Just a Kiss is a 1971 British TV play written by Alec Coppel for ITV Playhouse.

Wealthy young lawyer Kit Shaeffer [David Hedison] visits his doctor [Dr. Alex Noon (Keir Dullea)] for a check up.

In the land of MSMs. From yesterday’s report on Danny Vox in the ultimate fantasy t-room (Mens Room Bakersfield Station), where he has enthusiastic receptive sex with a number of men:

[Danny Vox’s character] doesn’t get kissed — in fact, turns away from attempts to kiss him — until his very last moments in the t-room

… At the end of the Bakersfield flick, a man appears, takes DV’s arm and says, encouragingly, “Don’t panic”, bends forward, and kisses DV passionately; DV melts into him, while the music swells.

DV’s character is presented as a young man who is intrigued by mansex and only somewhat reluctantly (at the beginning) enters into sexual acts with other men, but he quickly warms to his role as a total dickslut, though he doesn’t identify as gay. Director Joe Gage frames DV’s character, like most of the other 12 men in the fantasy t-room, as an MSM, in this place just for sex (some of them wear wedding bands), As in real life, where many MSMs are entirely comfortable with kissing (in fact, enthusiastic about it as foreplay to “real sex” or as a sign of satisfaction after a sexual encounter — “thanks, buddy, that was fantastic!”) while others reject it as coming too close to emotional intimacy, so in the fantasy Bakersfield t-room: some of the t-room men kiss with abandon, especially at the beginning or end of sexual connections, while others avoid kissing. DV’s character is on a voyage on sexual self-discovery, moving from curiosity to identification as a t-room sex man (in fact, a sexually submissive one) and eventually to acceptance of himself as a gay man, seeking not only sexual but also emotional union with other men.

Insofar as I understand these things, in the real world, MSMs do gain emotional satisfactions from the mansex they engage in, but they’re not the satisfactions of loving intimacy. Instead, MSMs see themselves as celebrating their masculinity, boosting it even, by bonding sexually with other strongly masculine men. Discussing their sexual activities, they sometimes compare them to playing sports with a buddy: possibly on a team together, but also making each other better men by competing with each other. These attitudes make it entirely possibly for an MSM to be enthusiastic about getting fucked but repelled by the idea of getting kissed by another man.

Horror at PDAs. Public displays of same-sex affection — kissing, embacing, or just holding hands — can set off firestorms of negative reaction. Especially if they’re between men, especially if the observer is male.

At the low end of the scale, we get reactions like Facebook’s banning images of same-sex kisses on the grounds that they are depictions of sex. The background attitude here is that affection between women and men is simply normal, not rooted in sex in any way, and that affection between two men or two women is an abnormality, a deviation, a sickness, a sin, whatever, which manifests itself in the performance of certain sex acts. In this way of looking at the world, same-sex affection is all about sex, and consequently homosexuality is a private matter, which should never be brought into the public sphere.

For a long time now, queers have worked to re-shape these attitudes, to establish a parity and symmetry between gay and straight. For many younger, white, educated Americans, this program has largely succeeded, and you’ll find dialogues like this one between a young gay man and his straight buddy (dimly recalled from some tv program):

YGM: You get hard for pussy, I get hard for dick; we’re just wired different, that’s all.

SB: Yeah, no biggie. [They go on to talk about video games, or sports, or movies and tv, or music, or current events, or their problems getting dates, the way guys do.]

The point is that SB doesn’t think that hanging out with a gay guy will make people think that he’s gay (not that there would be anything wrong with that): gayness isn’t bad, it’s not, like, a communicable disease, it’s just a state of being, and, by the way, gay guys aren’t predatory, they’re not after your precious heterosexual dick (no matter how wonderful you think it is), and they’re not interested in fucking your precious heterosexual ass (no matter how handsome you think it is), so they’re not threatening.

But Oldthink persists in many corners, maintained in considerable part by the teachings of the homo-hostile churches (notably, the Roman Catholic Church, evangelical churches, and the Mormon Church), which tell their flocks that homosex is a sin, in a special sense of sin, which can be forgiven only through an act of renunciation and contrition on the part of the sinner. The churchly notion of sin, from NOAD2:

an immoral act considered to be a transgression against divine law

It’s the ‘transgression against divine law’ part that brings the homo-hostile churches into the matter, because they claim to know that homosex is an offense against God’s Law. But enlightened queers cut things off before they get to the divine law shit: we straightforwardly deny that homosex should be considered immoral, so we refuse to renounce our desires and practices, we are uncontrite, and we don’t accept the short-circuit in reasoning and imagination that gets so many people from a mere indexing of homosexuality immediately to raw homosex, especially to guys fucking guys. Of course, homosex in public is no more acceptable than heterosex in public (except in special spaces, like sex clubs and gay baths, carved out as, in effect, private for sexual purposes, even though the acts are visible to those in them), but none of the following is, we maintain, homosex in public:

announcing or presupposing that you’re queer

referring to a same-sex relationship of yours

displaying same-sex affection in public

displaying a symbol of queerness, a queer slogan, or a queer image (like the male kisses above)

or, even, publicly discussing homosex (as I do here on a regular basis, though with warnings to my readers)

(This list is not exhaustive.)

But there are plenty of people — some men are especially vocal on the subject — who see all of these things as homosex in public and have violent visceral reactions to them, ranging from assertions that these things make them want to puke, all the way up to murderous attacks on the sources. (The ghost of Dan White will, apparently, always be with us, as will the Levitical “abomination” text that calls for all of us fags to be stoned to death; I mean, it’s God’s Law, right?)

Changes in public attitudes have now evolved to the point where a lot of people seem to believe that unrepentant queers have a right to their lives and their same-sex relationships (up to and including marriage), but only if they keep everything in the closet, keep everything private, out of the sight and hearing of decent people, who would, only naturally, be offended and disgusted. I, of course, flagrantly and fiercely refuse.

Public displays of affection are a tricky business. Jacques and I behaved affectionately among friends and our families (including our parents), and in a few places we gauged to be both tolerant and safe. I’m pleased to hear (from staff) that the restaurant Reposado finds nothing noteworthy about same-sex couples holding hands or kissing, and the same was true of the restaurant Gordon Biersch (its successor, Dan Gordon’s, is a sports bar, so not a safe bet). But elsewhere and on the street, even in supposedly liberal and tolerant Palo Alto, Jacques and I were circumspect. Back in the bad old days, we were verbally harassed on the street for having a rainbow sticker on our car (and the car was defaced), I got death threats on the phone for being a fag, and acquaintainces were thrown out of places and beaten up on the street because of public displays of affection.

Hearteningly, all of that moderated. But now the winds of intolerance blow fresh and strong (for Blacks, Latinos, Muslims, Jews, women, and queers too). So I live in fear (and wonder whether I should be fleeing to Canada, but I’m an old man and tightly woven into my life in Palo Alto). Nevertheless, I’m doubling down on flagrant displays of queerness, everything from images of men kissing (which I totally adore — the images and the kissing both) up to images of cock-sucking and butt-fucking (which I also totally adore — again, the images and the acts both — and am happy to subject to extended analysis).

Now for something completely different: something that has to do neither with Valentine’s Day nor with sex / sexuality. Instead, a project portraying linguists, in photographs and texts, from an emotional, rather than academic, perspective. A project of Stephanie Shih at UC Merced (a Stanford PhD), who last appeared on this blog as the co-editor, with Vera Gribanova, of the volume The Morphosyntax-Phonology Interface.

Steph — from here on I’ll refer to her familiarly rather than formally —  is not only into linguistics (specifically computational linguistics and phonology) and cognitive science, but also food and music… and photography, all quite seriously.

Her description of the snapshot project:

A Snapshot of the Field: Linguistics: a work-in-progress collection of portraits and origin stories of academic linguists

In academia and particularly in highly theoretical fields, there is a concerted and idealistic effort to divorce knowledge from individual emotion and personality: scholars should remain disconnected from the subjects they study so as to maintain objective points of view, and the topics that are chosen for study should be driven purely by intellectual motivations. As much as this sort of emotional disconnect is championed, however, I believe that such a rigorous divide is humanly impossible. What we care about, how we care about it, who we are as individuals, and how we form our relationships with other scholars drive our academic fields and questions of study as much as the intellectual factors.

“A Snapshot of a Field” is a photographic portraiture project that seeks to create an audio-visual ethnography of the modern-day academic field of Linguistics by documenting the scholars that comprise the discipline. It is a common practice in academia to make appraisals of our fields from a scholarly point of view, asking what progress have we made on the main questions of linguistics and where does the field go from here. In this project, I aim to take stock of the field from an emotional point of view, archiving a slice of the discipline by making portraits of academic linguists, focusing on their individual personalities through portraiture. As a component of the portrait sessions, there will also be short interviews with the linguists on how they started in the field. The artistic goals of this project are to explore how the individuals and the sum of their personalities and relationships form an academic community. These photographs and interviews will ultimately be displayed en masse, as a collection representing how the scholars in the subject define the field of Linguistics.

Of course I now provide a photo of Steph, very much in the style of the photos in her Tumblr portfolio:

(#1)

Smiling and side-lit — and (to my eye) somehow suggesting enthusiasm, intensity, and playfulness, all together.

The photos in her portfolio are all of (relatively) young linguists, like Steph herself. Almost all are smiling. Many are of linguists who once took courses from me or worked with me in other ways.

Here are two more photos, one woman, one man:

(#2)

Lauren Hall-Lew, Stanford PhD, now at the University of Ediburgh

(#3)

Patrick Callier, Stanford BA, Georgetown PhD, now back at Stanford on a post-doc with Rob Podesva

In a later posting, I’ll say some things about how I got into doing the things I do in linguistics (beyond the pleasure of intellectual problem-solving). Advance note: social class and my family’s linguistic background are important.

… the male model, in body-display, rather than fashion-display, mode — so only a little about language. On the other hand, this posting is, in word and image, at least technically SFW (though homo-steamy).

It begins with a Facebook comment from Ken Rudolph about image #1 in my “Hitchhiking” posting of yesterday:

(#1)

Ken asked:

Who is #1? And where did that still come from…it looks more like a regular movie than a porn.

Not any kind of movie, but a posed still done by a professional photographer (as are, I think, #2-7 in my hitchhiking posting, and the three photos in the accompanying AZBlogX posting). Meanwhile, a Google Images search led me to Saucier.

(The name Saucier is, no surprise, originally French. It comes, at least in part, to the U.S. from Canada, through Acadians who settled in Saucier, Mississippi, and no doubt other places as well.)

Proviso. There are two Corey Sauciers. Searching on the net leads you mostly to the one above, a Texan white guy still in his 20s, but sometimes to the Californian (went to UCSC, lives in L.A.) black guy, an HIV-positive writer and performance artist who’s now 40 — and also much more massive than the Texan model. His current profile photo:

(#2)

He too is given to shirtless photos, so on that score they could be confused.

The fashion model began appearing in print in 2010, managed by several agencies and modeling for DNA magazine and Calvin Klein, among others. A gay-gushy piece on the homorazzi site (portmanteaus are everywhere: homosexual + paparazzi), “where homos dish everything”: “Model Behavior: Corey Saucier”, by Donovan on 11/18/11:

For this week’s Model Behavior, I really wanted to give you one saucy beyotch [beyotch is a friendly version of bitch]. In this case, it’s pretty literal. Meet Corey Saucier. As his last name suggests, he’s definitely “saucier” than your average male model next door. Perhaps, it’s due to the fact he’s from Houston, Texas. They say everything grows bigger in the Lone Star state and this 6’1″ stud certainly lives up to that motto. I’d gulp down this tall tasty drink of sexy any day of the week. [Have I discussed tall drink of a man? Apparently not.]

The 23-year-old male model was raised in a Houston suburb – Spring to be exact. Growing up, he played numerous sports including football, baseball and basketball. He continued with both football and baseball all the way through til his college years at Texas State University. He majored in business management but dropped out to pursue a career in modeling after being urged by friends to give it a try.

Those friends definitely knew what they were talking about. Upon arriving in New York, Saucier quickly signed with AIG model management. In his relatively short career, Corey has caught the eye of gay the community thanks to his spreads in Out magazine, The Advocate and YVY Mag. With his extremely hot body its hard not to get noticed. He’s also caught the eyes of veteran photographers like Jeremy Kost, Greg Lotus and Eric Schwabel. Check out a few pics from these photogs and others of Saucer below. Be forewarned, you might need a cold shower from all the shirtless pics. Enjoy.

Homorazzi has a substantial photo display, as do a number of other sites from the period; Saucier has a big fan base, among women and gay men. I’ll start with a smiling shirtless pose (with lowered jeans as a bonus) that’s closest to #1 above:

(#3)

(The spread-lip smile is by no means confined to SoCal, though it’s a stereotype of surfer dudes there. Part of the stereotype is that it’s the source of the unrounded variant, [ʉ], of /U/ in good etc., there: those dudes smile, with spread lips, all the time, so they can’t manage to round their lips for /U/. Mysteriously, they round just fine for /u/, as in pool and cute.)

On the homorazzi site, a pubic hair cock tease (also conveying power via his muscular pecs and neck):

(#3)

On the Morphosis (Men’s Fashion and Music) site in 2011, a head and torso shot with hot nips:

(#4)

In a photo by Jeremy Kost for DNA on 12/1/10, we get an armpit display, plus low-riding jeans:

(#5)

Finally, two “Corey Saucier – Male Model Monday” photos on the SocialiteLife site (“Celebrity News, Photos & Gossp”, with a Shirtless album of men as well as a Bikini album of women) on 5/16/10, both decdedly homoerotic (steamy naked pit shot, Calvin Klein crotch grab):

(#6)

(#7)

Then recent news on the Ford Models Facebook page on 4/11/16:

Announcing Corey Saucier as our #MCM [Man Crush Monday]! Corey went to school for business in San Marcos, TX and joined the #FORDmen team soon after!

There’s a brief video interview with Saucier there.

Sexualized images of models are collaborations between photographer and model; #1 and #3-7 above are deliberate achievements, presenting Saucier’s body as sexually desirable, and the homoerotic appeal is deliberate. Meanwhile, Saucer works out regularly to maintain this body, and I’m guessing that he shaves his body as well as his face, to craft the image of one type of masculine beauty, maintaining a youthful smoothness that appeals to many women and gay men. At the same time, he’s got the boyish hair and a stock of varied facial expressions, and he projects a sense of physical power in reserve. Plus the flagrant cock teasing.

Like male models in general, in collaboration with his photographers, he’s using his body to sell himself and the clothes he wears. Of course, none of this says anything about his own sexuality — but he has to appreciate the homoerotic appeal he projects, be comfortable with it, and (to be really successful) welcome it, revel in it. Good job, Sauce Man!

Not about language, but about my life. In photographs from over 70 years ago. Partly in response to a request from a friend on Facebook to post baby photos, partly as part of a project to post more family photos for my grand-daughter Opal.

Three: a photo of me as a newborn in 1940, with my young and delighted parents; then a page of four snapshots of me as a baby; and another page of 4 of me as a little kid. More to come.

The earliest photo of all, posted here on 2/7/11 in “Old photographs”:

(#1)

My mother, Marcella Rice Zwicky, and my father, Arnold Melchior Zwicky. Known, in almost all friendly social contexts as Marty and Zip: my mother detested the name Marcella, and disliked her birth middle name, Ida, almost as much; Zip was my dad’s college nickname (he had a lot of zip).

In those days, everybody wore hats for serious occasions.

Baby time. A set of four snapshots:

(#2)

Upper right: left to right, my maternal grandmother, Susannah Hershey Rice (who was boundlessly nice, but rarely smiled; she had a very hard life indeed); my aunt Marian (Marian Fries as she was then), my mother’s twin sister; and my uncle Herb Fries, bottle-feeding a very small me.

Upper left, mother and baby (I am now able to sit up, but not yet walk).

Bottom right, father and baby.

Bottom left, chaired baby.

The little kid (part 1). Now mobile, the kid in another page of 4:

(#3)

On the top, the lone kid. On the bottom, the familial kid.  Left: my mother, my paternal grandmother (Bertha Waelti Zwicky), me, my paternal grandfather (Melchior Arnold Zwicky). Right: mom, dad, and me. I can’t identify the settings at all.

The text:

And I don’t know a soul who’s not been battered
I don’t have a friend who feels at ease
I don’t know a dream that’s not been shattered or driven to its knees
But it’s alright, it’s alright, for we live so well, so long
Still, when I think of the road we’re traveling on
I wonder what’s gone wrong, I can’t help it I wonder what’s gone wrong

And I dreamed I was dying, I dreamed that my soul rose unexpectedly
And looking back down at me, smiled reassuringly
And I dreamed I was flying, and high up above my eyes could clearly see
The Statue of Liberty, sailing away to sea, and I dreamed I was flying

A song of loss, regret, weariness, resignation… and transcendance.

This is my man Jacques’s death day (14 years ago, on a day as beautiful as this one is). I was about to post some photos of his, from Columbus OH and here in California, and I’ll still do this, but Ann Burlingham just posted on Facebook a reminiscence of a moment from the time when she shared the Columbus house with J and me, a sweet reminiscence of Ann and me dissolving on hearing, by chance on the radio, the song excerpted above, sung hauntingly by the Indigo Girls.

The song is Paul Simon’s “American Tune”. From Wikipedia:

(#1)

“American Tune” is a song by the American singer-songwriter Paul Simon. It was the third single from his third studio album, There Goes Rhymin’ Simon (1973), released on Columbia Records. The song, a meditation on the American experience, is based on a melody line from a chorale from Johann Sebastian Bach’s St Matthew Passion.

The lyrics offer a perspective on the American experience; there are references to struggle, weariness, hard work, confusion, and homesickness. The bridge conveys a dream of death and of the Statue of Liberty “sailing away to sea”. The song ends with an assertion that “you can’t be forever blessed” before the lyrics return to the idea of work, tiredness, and resignation.

You can watch a 1975 performance by Simon here. And here you can watch a 2004 live performance by Simon together with Art Garfunkel, then in their 60s. J and I are within a year of Simon and Garfunkel in age. They were troubadors of our generation, and we were big fans.

The verses above are the middle two of the song. The first verse:

Many’s the time I’ve been mistaken, and many times confused
Yes and I’ve often felt forsaken, and certainly misused
Ah but I’m alright, I’m alright, I’m just weary thru my bones
Still you don’t expect to be bright and bon-vivant
So far away from home, so far away from home

And the last:

But we come on a ship they called Mayflower
We come on a ship that sailed the moon
We come in the ages’ most uncertain hours and sing an American tune
And it’s alright, oh it’s alright, it’s alright, you can’t be forever blessed
Still tomorrow’s gonna be another working day and I’m trying to get some rest
That’s all I’m trying, to get some rest

It’s been a good run, but you can’t be forever blessed.

The Indigo Girls are from the next generation after us. I don’t recall J’s feelings about Amy and Emily, but I’m a fan. They’ve performed “American Tune” many times over the years. The performance Ann and I heard was from Ben & Jerry’s Newport Folk Festival in 1991. With her FB posting, Ann included the video of their performance at Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mt. View CA on 10/2/94 (a venue close enough to me that I can sometimes hear the music out my front window); you can watch the video here. And there’s also a video from the Culture Room in Fort Lauderdale FL on 2/12/11, which you can watch here. A shot from that video:

(#2)

Photos by Jacques. Go back with me now to the late 1980s in Columbus, when J and I were embarking on a series of renovations in the house there. I’m not sure of the year, but these two photos show the beginning of the exterior work on the house and garden — front (facing north) and back (facing south):

(#3)

The top photo. The house came with two huge yews, Taxus baccata (trimmed to be dense shrubs about 4 ft high), flanking the front steps. The whole plant is highly toxic and the yews required constant trimming, so eventually we cut them down, removed the roots, brought in a truckload of flat stones, built two planting areas fenced in by stone, filled the “planters” with good soil, and planted interesting stuff, which you see here at the very beginning.

The tallish green plants are bayberries, in the genus Myrtica. From Wikipedia:

(#4)

Myrica is a genus of about 35–50 species of small trees and shrubs in the family Myricaceae, order Fagales. The genus has a wide distribution, including Africa, Asia, Europe, North America and South America, and missing only from Australia. Some botanists split the genus into two genera on the basis of the catkin and fruit structure, restricting Myrica to a few species, and treating the others in Morella.

Common names include bayberry, bay-rum tree, candleberry, sweet gale, and wax-myrtle. The generic name was derived from the Greek word μυρικη (myrike), meaning “fragrance. “

And fragrant they are.

On the plant family, a new one on this blog, so #64:

The Myricaceae are a small family of dicotyledonous shrubs and small trees in the order Fagales. There are three genera in the family, although some botanists separate many species from Myrica into a fourth genus Morella. About 55 species are usually accepted in Myrica, one in Canacomyrica, and one in Comptonia. (Wikipedia link)

In fact, the genus Taxus of yews is also in a new plant family here, so #65:

Taxaceae, commonly called the yew family, is a coniferous family which includes seven genera and about 30 species of plants, or in older interpretations three genera and 7 to 12 species. (Wikipedia link)

The species in the family almost all have common names with yew in them.

The bottom photo. This is a transformation of a scene shown in part in my 5/23/17 posting “Corn snakes and eggplants”, where the snake was nestled in the crubling wall of the stars going down to the basement. We had the wall taken down and a new one built, and then this excellent deck built out from it. The table and umbrella shown above was a temporary arrangement, until we got a proper teak table with chairs and a bigger umbrella.

The big visible plants are, in back, a huge pot of lemongrass; across the front, left to right: a grevillea, or silk oak (I nursed California trees through the winter), a fig tree, and an Indian lime tree (which bears orange-colored limes).

On lemongrass, see my 9/7/15 posting “Shooting stars, hydrangeas, and lemongrass”, where I wrote about

lemongrass, which I grew in containers for years (both in Ohio and here in California), for use in Chinese cooking. It is in fact a grass (in the Poaceae), and it’s absurdly easy to grow: get a stalk from your local Chinese grocery, let it root in water, and then plant it in soil. It will flourish and divide. Outside of a container, it will sprawl

More information there, with photos #4 and #5.

Then grevillea. From Wikipedia:

Grevillea is a diverse genus of about 360 species of evergreen flowering plants in the family Proteaceae, native to rainforest and more open habitats in Australia, New Guinea, New Caledonia, Sulawesi and other Indonesian islands east of the Wallace Line. It was named in honour of Charles Francis Greville. The species range from prostrate shrubs less than 50 cm (20 in) tall to trees 35 m (115 ft) tall. Common names include grevillea, spider flower, silky oak and toothbrush plant.

… Many species of grevilleas are popular garden plants, especially in Australia but also in other temperate and subtropical climates. Many grevilleas have a propensity to interbreed freely, and extensive hybridisation and selection of horticulturally desirable attributes has led to the commercial release of many named cultivars.

On the family:

The Proteaceae are a family of flowering plants predominantly distributed in the Southern Hemisphere. The family comprises 83 genera with about 1,660 known species. … Well-known genera include Protea, Banksia, Embothrium, Grevillea, Hakea, Dryandra, and Macadamia. Species such as the New South Wales waratah (Telopea speciosissima), king protea (Protea cynaroides), and various species of Banksia, Grevillea, and Leucadendron are popular cut flowers, while the nuts of Macadamia integrifolia are widely grown commercially and consumed. Australia and South Africa have the greatest concentrations of diversity. (Wikipedia link)

This is yet another plant family new to this blog, so #66.

Finally what I know as Indian lime (grown from seeds gotten from Transue family friends in West Palm Beach FL) but which seems to be properly West Indian (or Mexican) lime, Citrus aurantifolia. The fruits are green when immature, but ripen to yellow:

(#5)

Two more photos by Jacques, both taken from the foothills above Stanford, where the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences is located:

(#6)

There are trails along the top of the ridge behind CASBS, and Jacques walked them often with me and Fellows at the Center and other friends, when I was at the Center in 1981-82 and 1990-91. J loved the secluded calm of the Center and the intellectual companionship it offered, and he just adored the trails — usually identified as the Dish trails, after a large radar dish that stands over everything. J had little interest in the Dish, but a lot of interest in the rocks and plants and animals you could see and the amazing vistas the trails could offer.

The top photo is a vista looking out to the San Francisco Bay, in a light haze, with a circling raptor scanning for ground squirrels, pocket gophers, and similar prey. The bottom photo shows two of the cows that graze over sections of the foothills. They’re kept within bounds by cattle grids / guards, like the one shown here on a Nevada road:

(#7)

A cattle grid (UK English) – also known as a stock grid in Australia; cattle guard in American English; and vehicle pass, Texas gate, or stock gap in the United States Southeast; or a cattle stop in New Zealand English – is a type of obstacle used to prevent livestock, such as sheep, cattle, pigs, horses, or mules from passing along a road or railway which penetrates the fencing surrounding an enclosed piece of land or border. It consists of a depression in the road covered by a transverse grid of bars or tubes, normally made of metal and firmly fixed to the ground on either side of the depression, so that the gaps between them are wide enough for an animal’s feet to enter, but sufficiently narrow not to impede a wheeled vehicle or human foot. This provides an effective barrier to animals without impeding wheeled vehicles, as the animals are reluctant to walk on the grates. (Wikipedia link)

The foothills have lots of beautiful California live oaks on them, and in Center has long used images of the tree in its publicity:

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The hillside is dotted with carefully planted live oak seedlings in wire cages — to protect them from the depredations of deer. We live in a delicate balance between nature and cultivation.

Today’s Zippy takes us to photographic LA:

(#1)

While namechecking the famous American photographers Diane Arbus, Edward Weston, Berenice Abbott, and Weegee, Zippy peers in the window of the Darkroom at 5370 Wilshire Blvd. in LA, now a bar and restaurant, originally a camera shop in the shape of a camera.

Looking for buidings in the shape of a camera will then take us around the world, thanks to a construction company in Karawang, West Java, Indonesia.

The Darkroom. From the Los Angeles Conservancy site:

(#2) The Darkroom now (as seen in #1)

Originally a camera shop, this unique structure (now a restaurant) is one of the city’s last remaining examples of programmatic architecture, in which a building physically resembles its purpose.

The façade’s nine-foot-tall Argus camera announced The Darkroom’s wares quite literally. Some claim that during the building’s heyday, the tenant would project short films through the camera lens/window for pedestrians to watch.

Although the famed store is long gone, the black vitriolite facade remains as a protected city landmark (Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument).

Yet its Art Deco neon signage was not protected. Removed and hidden for decades in a private collection, the sign is now owned by the Museum of Neon Art.

Two shots of the facade from its camera-shop days:

(#3) Wider view

(#4) Up close and in color

Programmatic architecture: the camera. The term programmatic architecture was new to me, though I was familiar with the term mimic architecture, referring to a subtype of novelty architecture, as in this Wikipedia article (with the relevant passage bold-faced):

Novelty architecture is a type of architecture in which buildings and other structures are given unusual shapes for purposes such as advertising or to copy other famous buildings without any intention of being authentic. Their size and novelty means that they often serve as landmarks. They are distinct from architectural follies, in that novelty architecture is essentially usable buildings in eccentric form whereas follies are non-usable, ornamental buildings often in eccentric form.

Although earlier examples exist, such as the planned but never completed Elephant of the Bastille, generally the style became popular in the United States and spread to the rest of the world as travel by automobile increased in the 1930s. The Statue of Liberty in New York is a replica building that is part sculpture and part monument, which like many subsequent examples of novelty architecture, has an accessible interior and became a tourist attraction.

Constructing novelty architecture near to roads became one way of attracting motorists to a diner, coffee shop, or roadside attraction, so buildings were constructed in an unusual shape, especially the shape of the things sold there. “Mimic” architecture became a trend, and many roadside coffee shops were built in the shape of giant coffee pots; hot dog stands were built in the shape of giant hot dogs; and fruit stands were built in the shape of oranges or other fruit. Tail o’ the Pup [is] a hot dog-shaped hot dog stand; Brown Derby is a derby-shaped restaurant; Bondurant’s Pharmacy is a mortar-and-pestle pharmacy; the Big Apple Restaurant … and the Big Duck are respectively a tall apple and a (now defunct) poultry store shaped like a duck.

Novelty or programmatic (mimetic) architecture may take the form of objects not normally associated with buildings, such as characters, animals, people or household objects. Lucy the Elephant and The Longaberger Company‘s head office are examples. There may be an element of caricature or a cartoon associated with the architecture. Such giant animals, fruits and vegetables, or replicas of famous buildings often serve as attractions themselves. Some are simply unusual shapes or constructed of unusual materials.

Bill Griffith is much taken with novelty architecture, and I’ve posted a number of times about Big or Giant X structures, mostly inspired by Zippy strips.

Searching for information about a camera shop in the shape of a camera led me to the page “9 Buildings with Architectural Design Look Like Camera Shape” (the text is in Indonesian, the title in decidedly non-native English) on the site of Pt. Niki Four, a general contractor and building maintenance firm in Karawang, listing:

1. The Big Camera in Perth, Australia
2. Picture Perfect Nail Salon in Marion, NC, USA
3. The Darkroom in Hollywood
4. Art Decal by [Chilean artist] Diego Castillo Roa
5. Giant Camera in Point Lobos, CA, USA
6. Camera Inspired House in Pontyprid[d], Wales, UK
7. Public Toilet in Chongqing, China
8. Dreamy Camera Café in Yangpeyong-gun, South Korea
9. Camera House in Biddeford Pool, ME, USA

The third item on this list was clearly what I was looking for. Bingo.

All nine buildings are entertaining, but I was particularly taken by the seventh:

(#5)

Why the city of Chongqing chose to build a public toilet in the shape of a camera I do not know.

Back on the 12th, I posted about the “War of the Weeds” in back of the Palo Alto downtown library, across the street from my house: a contest between common ivy, ailanthus, and golden bamboo for control of the territory. Now I have better photos, showing the whole length of the jungle, in three sections, without cars.

Meanwhile, at the Y where I go to my senior fitness class, there’s a whole rank of California peppertrees covered with red berries, and with leaves already turning for the fall.

All this caused me to delve into the notion of an urban jungle. Turns out different people have very different ideas about what that phrase refers to, and that exploration will take us to Hong Kong, Chongqing, urban gardening, and “wild” parks in various cities, including the Ramble in NYC’s Central Park — with Al Pacino in full gay cruise mode.

The weed-war panorama. (Photos by Juan Gomez.) In three sections, starting on the east:

(#1)

East: crape myrtle in the distance, big ailanthus in the center

(#2)

Middle: the three weeds at war

(#3)

West: out to Ramona St. and a California live oak

Most of what you’re seeing is a low fence (starting under that big ailanthus tree in #1), with the dead wood of a once-sturdy vine twined on it, now with ivy marching west on it, also up into any tree it finds. Golden bamboo thrives on this side of the fence; it marches west rapidly at ground level and has pretty well killed off the periwinkle (Vinca minor) that used to cover the ground. All those trees close up are trees of heaven (Ailanthus altissima).

So three hyper-vigorous plants — two garden ornamentals and a common street tree — vying with one another along that fence, uncontrolled, running amok, creating an ever-expanding urban jungle, a wild untamed place in the middle of the city.

Side notes. That crape myrtle in the distance belongs to a house on Bryant St., the next street west of mine. Under it there’s a pretty white rose bush. And a bit in from that there’s a striking bougainvillea vine (which you can’t see). Further in, on the left in #1 is a very tall, very dead conifer (with, of course, ivy growing up it): a picturesque eyesore, but also potentially dangerous if it comes down.

Behind your back as you look at the photos is the back of  the library building, with a row of Victorian box trees (Pittosporum undulatum) along the wall — one of them totally dead (recently) and two others in trouble — plus wisteria vines running amok. Things are not happy in the parking lot.

California peppertrees. On to another parking lot, at the Ross Road Y in Palo Alto, where a long dividing strip is planted with peppertrees (Schinus molle) –like Victorian box, they are small, pretty trees. They are thick with pinkish-red berries (which, when crushed between your fingers, smell like fresh black pepper) — see #4 below —  and their leaves are now turning red — see #5 (photos by Kim Darnell):

(#4)

(#5)

Around the margins of the parking lot are much more substantial trees, thickly planted. In fact, Palo Alto in general is tree-dense, with street trees, yard trees, and lots of tree-filled parks. Something of an urban forest. But only occasionally jungly.

Urban jungle 1. The expression urban jungle used to refer to truly wild, untended areas in a city — like the library area across the street from me, at least at the moment (until someone cleans it up). Every city has waste areas, abandoned lots, and the like, in which vegetation just runs riot. Jungle areas.

Urban jungle 2. Next sense of urban jungle, not about plants at all. Instead, the expression has metaphorical jungle, the jungle of concrete jungle. With densely packed tall buildings playing the role of jungle trees.

Photographer Andy Yeung has explored one urban jungle in this sense, in a series of studding aerial photographs of Hong Kong. From the designboom site (which is fond of lower-casing) on 3/9/16, “andy yeung’s drone photography captures hong kong’s urban jungle” by nina azzarello:

(#6)

Yeung, Urban Jungle 02

andy yeung, a photographer based in hong kong, captures the bustling metropolis from a completely new perspective for his series ‘urban jungle’. documented via a drone camera, the images depict the architectural sprawl from hundreds of meters above the earth’s surface, highlighting the extreme heights and dramatic depths covered by hong kong’s crowded cityscape. looking down at the city from above, viewers are treated to a typically unseen vantage point — one that accentuates the high-volume high-rises and their impact on the landscape. see images from ‘urban jungle’ below, and more city landscapes by andy yeung on his website

Urban Jungle 3. Some writers use urban jungle loosely to refer to any green spaces in a city, such as those in Palo Alto.

Occasionally the first two senses come together, as in photographer Raphael Olivier’s studies of Chongqing, China, which depict the urban landscape (almost always enveloped in smoggy haze), but with a special interest in green places in the city. From Olivier’s website:

(#7)

Olivier, Urban Jungle #3

Chongqing, Western China, is a municipality covering the area of Austria, home to almost 30 milion people. Even though most of its territorry and population are still rural, its urban center is under massive expansion making Chongqing the fastest growing city in the world. Yet this development is mostly chaotic and unregulated (the city is notorious for its corruption). Over the past years this has led to an incredible forest of buildings taking over mountains and surrounding farm-lands, creating one of the most incredible urban landscapes on Earth. This photo essay aims to show the unique scenery created by Chinese mass urbanization, endemic lawlessness, mountainous topography and subtropical climate, in a very organic urban sprawl out of a science fiction movie.

Yeung’s and Olivier’s portfolios are both impressive, well worth checking out.

Urban Jungle 4. An even looser use of urban jungle is to refer to any city greenery, even house plants, as in the title of this 2016 book:

(#8)

Urban Jungle 5. A final use of urban jungle combines the utterly ‘wild’ sense (1) with the ‘park’ sense (3). In it, the expression refers to parkland that is elaborately designed to seem wild, while being carefully tended to maintain a certain degree of order, as in areas of great urban parks in many parts of the world. For instance, in the U.S., areas of Golden Gate Park in San Francisco and of parks designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, among them the Back Bay Fens in Boston and Central Park in NYC. Here I’ll look at the Ramble in Central Park.

From Wikipedia:

(#9)

Stone Arch in the Central Park Ramble

The Ramble and Lake is a main feature of Central Park in New York City. Part of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’s “Greensward” plan (1857), The Ramble was intended as a woodland walk through highly varied topography, a “wild garden” away from carriage drives and bridle paths, to be wandered in, or to be viewed as a “natural” landscape from the formal lakefront setting of Bethesda Terrace (illustration below) or from rented rowboats on the Lake. The 38-acre Ramble embraces the deep coves of the north shore of the Lake, excavated between bands of bedrock; it offers dense naturalistic planting, rocky outcrops of glacially scarred Manhattan bedrock, small open glades, and an artificial stream (The Gill) that empties through the Azalea Pond, then down a cascade into the Lake. Its ground rises northwards towards Vista Rock, crowned by Belvedere Castle, a lookout and eye-catching folly.

Secluded “wild” areas in urban parks quite often serve as locales for cruising and hooking-up for sex. In particular,

Since at least the early 20th century, the seclusion of The Ramble has been used for private homosexual encounters. In the 1920s, the lawn at the north end was referred to as the “fruited plain”, and in the 1950s and 1960s, The Ramble was feared by many as a haven for “anti-social persons”… Today, The Ramble’s strong reputation for cruising for sex has given way somewhat to nature walks and environmentalism. However, some in the gay community still consider The Ramble to be “ground zero for outdoor gay sex”, enjoying the “retro feel” of sneaking off into the woods. As a tradition much older than Christopher Street and Fire Island, The Ramble continues to be a gay icon even in the more open environment of modern New York.

The Ramble figured prominently in the movie Cruising. From Wikipedia:

(#10) Al Pacino, undercover and on the prowl

Cruising is a 1980 American crime film written and directed by William Friedkin, and starring Al Pacino, Paul Sorvino, and Karen Allen. It is loosely based on the novel of the same name, by The New York Times reporter Gerald Walker, about a serial killer targeting gay men, in particular those associated with the leather scene in the late 1970s. The title is a play on words with a dual meaning, because “cruising” can describe police officers on patrol and also cruising for sex.

From June 30th, a posting “In the dunes, in the dunes” about Fire Island Pines, in reality, in gay porn, and in gay cartoons. At the time, Emily Rizzo wrote me about Tom Bianchi’s [2013] book on the golden days of FIP (which I do not, alas, have, though I have other Bianchi books of male photography). And now, from Randy McDonald, a link to a Unicorn Booty piece on an exhibition of Bianchi’s photos.

Cover of the book:

(#1)

From the Unicorn Booty piece, “These Fire Island Polaroids Offer Us a Rare Glimpse Into a Lost Gay World” by Danny Polaris:

In the ’70s and ’80s, New York’s Fire Island Pines was one of the few places in the world where men could be openly gay and show affection in public. Today, a stunning collection of Fire Island Polaroids, taken by artist Tom Bianchi between 1975 and 1983, documents that lost ‘golden age’ for gay men. Currently on exhibit in New York City, Fire Island Pines: Polaroids 1975-83 can be seen at Throckmorton Fine Art [145 E. 57th St.] through Sept. 16 [exhibit June 29th – Sept. 16th, gallery closed August 30th – Sept. 4th].

A book carrying the same name as the exhibition was listed as one of Time magazine’s Best Photo Books of 2013. Now large versions of the Polaroids are available for all to see.

Some of Bianchi’s Fire Island Polaroids don’t look real, resembling paintings or sketches more than photographs, as if Tom of Finland had gone on holiday to the beach and swapped his black and white cartoon hunks for bronzed gods, golden sands and turquoise skies. There are dozens of gorgeous shots of guys holding hands, kissing and being affectionate in a world where it was still almost unheard of to be able to do so publicly and openly. But these are real photos of real guys living in a different time.

Bianchi gained the trust of the men he photographed in their Fire Island haven by sharing Polaroids with them, celebrating them and making it clear he was on their side.

“In the Pines, my dreams of being an out gay man and artist became possible,” says Bianchi.

In decades past, up to 10,000 men would descend on Fire Island on the weekends for its famous tea dances and legendary all-night parties. It was the first time many would men would ever feel safe enough to hold hands in public, and perhaps still is. Fire Island remains one of America’s ultimate gay vacation destinations, and its parties are themselves still legendary.

When the AIDS crisis hit, Bianchi’s Fire Island Polaroids stopped. They were put away in a box until their publication only a few years ago.

If you’re in New York or visiting before Sept. 16 [but not over Labor Day weekend], it’s well worth seeing the large, limited-edition versions of Bianchi’s amazing photography. If not, the book is another amazing option.

Three examples of the Polaroids:

(#2)

(#3)

(#4)

The name of an Instagram site, which I learned about from Laura Staum Casasanto today. Stunning plants (heavy on houseplants, but by no means confined to them) accompanied by good-looking men, handsomely photographed. Laura supposed, correctly, that the combination would work well for me, and she was right.

The Monster. Let’s start big, with a young man hefting a potted Monstera deliciosa:

(#1)

The plant is young, and (for a Monstera) small. From Wikipedia:

Monstera deliciosa is a species of flowering plant native to tropical rainforests of southern Mexico, south to Panama. It has been introduced to many tropical areas, and has become a mildly invasive species in Hawaii, Seychelles, Ascension Island and the Society Islands.

The specific epithet deliciosa means “delicious”, referring to the edible fruit, while monstera means “monstrous,” in reference to the sheer size that this plant can grow to — over 30 feet in many cases.

Common names include fruit salad plant, fruit salad tree (in reference to its edible fruit, which tastes similar to a fruit salad), ceriman, Swiss cheese plant (or just cheese plant), monster fruit, monsterio delicio, monstereo, Mexican breadfruit, locust and wild honey, windowleaf, balazo, and Penglai banana. The names in Spanish (costilla de Adán) or Portuguese (costela-de-adão) or French (plante gruyère) refer to the change of the leaves from entire to fenestrated (comparing it in the first case with the ribs of Adam and in the second with the hole-filled gruyère cheese).

… Monstera deliciosa is commonly grown for interior decoration in public buildings and as a houseplant. Commonly referred to as the Split Leaf Philodendron. It grows best between the temperatures of 20–30 °C (68–86 °F) and requires high humidity and shade. Growth ceases below 10 °C (50 °F) and it is killed by frost.

Monstera is in the arum family (Araceaea) — with spathe and spadix flowers, like calla lilies or spathiphyllums:

(#2) Flower and immature fruit

The Spikeulent. (My ad hoc portmanteau for spiky succulent.) The woofy Australian yoga guru Patrick Beach embracing a really big agave:

(#3)

Bird of paradise. Finally, for nipple fans, a young man in the shadow of a Strelitzia plant:

(#4)

From Wikipedia:

(#5) Strelitzia reginae (orange bird of paradise) in flower

Strelitzia is a genus of five species of perennial plants, native to South Africa. It belongs to the plant family Strelitziaceae [a new family on this blog, #74]. The genus is named after the duchy of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, birthplace of Queen Charlotte of the United Kingdom. A common name of the genus is bird of paradise flower / plant, because of a resemblance of its flowers to birds-of-paradise. In South Africa it is commonly known as a crane flower and is featured on the reverse of the 50 cent coin. It is the floral emblem of the City of Los Angeles; two of the species, Strelitzia nicolai and Strelitzia reginae, are frequently grown as house plants.

A showy plant, often used as an accent plant in the gardens of coastal California. A magnificent stand of Strelitzia reginae grew just outside the front door of my man Jacques’s dementia care facility. Unfortunately, it turned out that he deeply detested the plants, why I don’t know, and was inclined to swat at them in anger.

(‘Whatever Seurat is, Seurat is’, that is, ‘Seurat is what he is’. That’s with English que /ke/, as in “Que Sera, Sera”.)

A photo by Elizabeth Zwicky on Facebook on the 14th:

(#1) Boston harbor; the orange bit is a reflection of a construction crane

In the photo (of ripples in water, with reflected points of sunlight), Ellen Evans, on Facebook, saw life imitating art, in this case, Seurat’s pointillism, and I agreed, hence the title of this posting. Robert Coren suggested Monet, and that’s not impossible, but a pointillist painter is a better fit.

The art. From my 11/30/16 posting “Poet in search of his moose”, #4 Barry Kites’s collage “Sunday Afternoon, Looking for the Car”:

On the background painting, from Wikipedia:

A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (French: Un dimanche après-midi à l’Île de la Grande Jatte) painted in 1884, is one of Georges Seurat’s [1859-1891] most famous works, and is an example of pointillism.

The original:

(#2)

Note the water. Water figures prominently is a great many pointillist paintings. Here’s Paul Signac‘s Steeple in Saint Tropez, 1896:

(#3)

On the technique, from Wikipedia:

Pointillism is a technique of painting in which small, distinct dots of color are applied in patterns to form an image.

Georges Seurat and Paul Signac developed the technique in 1886, branching from Impressionism. The term “Pointillism” was coined by art critics in the late 1880s to ridicule the works of these artists, and is now used without its earlier mocking connotation. The movement Seurat began with this technique is known as Neo-impressionism.

… The technique relies on the ability of the eye and mind of the viewer to blend the color spots into a fuller range of tones. [“Don’t stand, don’t stand so, / Don’t stand so close to me”]

In comparison to Seurat and Signac, a representative Monet:

(#4) Blue Water Lilies, 1919

From Wikipedia:

Water Lilies (or Nymphéas, French) is a series of approximately 250 oil paintings by French Impressionist Claude Monet (1840–1926). The paintings depict Monet’s flower garden at his home in Giverny, and were the main focus of Monet’s artistic production during the last thirty years of his life.

Monet’s water ripples are achieved by short brushstrokes, not dots.

The song. And, especially, its title. From Wikipedia:

(#5) Listen to Doris Day singing the song here

“Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be)”, first published in 1956, is a popular song written by the songwriting team of Jay Livingston and Ray Evans. The song was introduced in the Alfred Hitchcock film The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), starring Doris Day and James Stewart in the lead roles.

… The popularity of the song has led to curiosity about the origins of the saying and the identity of its language. Both the Spanish-like spelling used by Livingston and Evans and an Italian-like form (“che sarà sarà”) are first documented in the 16th century as an English heraldic motto. The “Spanish” form appears on a brass plaque in the Church of St. Nicholas, Thames Ditton, Surrey, dated 1559. The “Italian” form was first adopted as a family motto by either John Russell, 1st Earl of Bedford, or his son, Francis Russell, 2nd Earl of Bedford. It is said by some sources to have been adopted by the elder Russell after his experience at the Battle of Pavia (1525), and to be engraved on his tomb (1555 N.S.). The 2nd Earl’s adoption of the motto is commemorated in a manuscript dated 1582. Their successors — Earls and, later, Dukes of Bedford (“Sixth Creation”), as well as other aristocratic families—continued to use the motto. Soon after its adoption as a heraldic motto, it appeared in Christopher Marlowe’s play Doctor Faustus (written ca. 1590; published 1604), whose text (Act 1, Scene 1) contains a line with the archaic Italian spelling “Che sera, sera / What will be, shall be”. Early in the 17th century the saying begins to appear in the speech and thoughts of fictional characters as a spontaneous expression of a fatalistic attitude.

The saying is always in an English-speaking context, and has no history in Spain, Italy, or France, and in fact is ungrammatical in all three Romance languages. It is composed of Spanish or Italian words superimposed on English syntax. It was evidently formed by a word-for-word mistranslation of English “What will be will be”

Side note. It seems there are programs for altering photographs to make them appear pointillist, giving output like this:

(#6) Relatively simple pointillization

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)