It starts with this image from a “JoBros” Pinterest board (you post about a Jonas Brother, Pinterest knows where you’ve been and wants to take you back there):

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Nick, Kevin, and Joe, but especially Nick

I was going to just post this as a way to start the new week with a modest appreciation of male bodies (I’m unapologetic in these matters), but then I saw two directions for further comment: the Bros in JoBros, and the Jonases’ projections of masculinity (which is what leads to all those Pinterest boards and fan sites celebrating the three men, but especially Nick, who revels in displaying himself). And that will eventually take me to reflections on integrating a masculine identity with a gay one, made poignant by the gaybros movement.

(Note: I have a huge backlog of recent items to post about. My efforts to catch up were seriously impeded by two long and intricate postings I spent several days on: on the 24th, “The invention of the X job”, about the hand job / handjob and more; and yesterday, “On the boulevard of broken dreams with Kip Noll”, about the boulevards of Los Angeles, gay porn, gigolos, prostitution, and more. And now this. There’s plenty of gender and sexuality in here, but, I think, nothing to frighten the horses.)

The Jonas Brothers and their boy band. My posting on 10/4/14, in “Homage to Marky / Mark” looked at the Jonases, but especially Nick in a cheeky display in a magazine spread recalling the Calvin Klein golden days of Marky Mark. A four-panel image of Nick, “crotch-grabbing, abs-displaying, flagrantly challenging, and homoerotic all at once” (the pulled-down jeans were Nick’s own contribution to the scene, not in Marky’s original):

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But back to #1, which presents the three Jonas butts for our viewing pleasure. The first thing to say is that most of the Jonas sites are maintained by women, who admire the Jonas butts (among other things) because they are symbols of attractive masculinity: as I’ve noted before, men’s butts are notably different from women’s, so, like their faces, their torsos, and so on, they serve as powerful secondary signs of masculinity, available for objectification by admiring women (and by gay men, who get a double dose of objectification pleasure: the butt as a symbol of masculinity and also as an object of sexual desire).

The second thing to say is that Nick is a performer, and he welcomes, invites, courts the adoration of his audience. His body displays — which his brothers have been quite critical of — are one of his performances. They’re especially satisfying because he genuinely seems to embrace his audience (both female and gay male), showing no sign of the contempt for audiences that some performers express privately, and sometimes publicly. The larger point is that his body displays are performances of high masculinity (amiable rather than dominating masculinity, but masculinity nonetheless). Even displays like #2, with Nick playing a sexually challenging Marky, are in fact playful send-ups of a macho stereotype. (Marky played the Bad Boy; Nick plays the Boyfriend.)

A digression. The boy band is gone; the boys have grown up. As a boy band, they were enjoyable, but the genre is both narrow and shallow, and I was never a great fan (no squealing and wetting panties for me, but then I was never a teenage girl. )

Band names and the bro thing. There are three American bands of some repute named the X Brothers (not the X Brothers Band, so put the Allman Brothers Band aside here): the Everly Brothers, the Isley Brothers, the Jonas Brothers. All can be referred to for short as the Xs: the Everlys, the Isleys, the Jonases (a fair number of relevant ghits for all of these).

Separate from all this, Brothers in commercial names is conventionally abbreviated as Bros. in print (but not as /broz/ in speech, except as a joke): Smith Bros. cough drops, Hills Bros. coffee (plus my favorite, Firesign Theatre’s Ersatz Bros. coffee), etc.

And independent of that we have the rise of bro as the name of a sociocultural type, in an especially complicated way. From my 4/28/16 posting “Bad bro days”:

The story of the … term bro in relatively recent years begins with its use by black men to black men, roughly (but not exactly) like the widely used American buddy — a term of male affiliation [at first, only as an address term, then for referential use as well, as in my bro Jack, and then in an explosion of bromanteaus, like bromance]. It then spread into the wider culture, serving as a mark of male solidarity. This is what I called in a 4/12/16 posting “good”, positive, bro. But male solidarity tends to come with a dark side: rejection of anything perceived as feminine, played out as sturdy misogyny and homo-hatred in general; and the elevation of boys’ clubs (formed for whatever reasons) to boys-only clubs, aggressively hostile to women and to men perceived as inferior. When these guys use bro to address (or refer to) one another, then we’ve got what I called “bad”, negative, bro.

Regular use of bad bro between men in groups, for instance by fraternity boys and so-called brogrammers, has led to a steady pejoration of the term for people outside those male groups; bro is now a tainted term for many people, calling up unpleasant images of aggressive masculinity.

All these uses share a component of conspicuous masculinity (and a strong suggestion of relative youth), which in combination with the orthographic abbreviation opens up the possibility of abbreviating the X brothers (as the name for the three men or for their band) as the X bros (with “good” bro), at least if the brothers in question are young enough. Of the three bro-bands, only the Jonases are young enough to get this treatment, and this abbreviation is well attested, as here:

The restaurant is named after the Jonas bros’ great-grandmother Nellie, who passed away in 2011. (link)

There’s a further abbreviatory step possible here, creating what Ben Zimmer (in a 12/30/05 Language Log posting) called an acronymic blend (using blend ‘portmanteau), in which parts of a cmplex expression are clipped down to their initial syllables. The process very much favors the orthgraphic vowel O (usually /o/), as in HoJo (Howard Johnson’s), SoHo (South of Houston), froyo (frozen yoghurt). Jonas Brothers or Jonas bros just cries out for this clipping: JoBros. (For a variety of reasons, EvBros and IsBros aren’t nearly as satisfactory.

JoBros then manages to pack together masculinity, youth, familiarity, and informality in two syllables.

An aside. A nice find in my bro-searching. From Wikipedia:

Bros is an English [boy] band, formed in 1986 in Camberley, Surrey. The band consisted of twin brothers Matt and Luke Goss, and Craig Logan who all attended Collingwood School in Camberley. The band was managed by former Pet Shop Boys manager Tom Watkins. The band split up in 1992. It was announced in October 2016 that the band would reform in 2017.

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The Bros in 1988

You can watch the video here of their big 1988 hit “When Will I Be Famous?”.

In a cleft stick: the gaybros. As I said above, uses of bro share a component of conspicuous masculinity (and a strong suggestion of relative youth). What if you’re relatively young, see yourself as thoroughly masculine — but also identify as gay? Well, you have a problem. Here’s an OUT Magazine piece (on-line) from 8/7/13, “Meet the Gaybros: The guys who gab about gear, grub, and guns” by Mike Albo, about young men trying to negotiate this combination of identities:

“I’ll drink a beer before a mixed drink any day,” says Jon Allen, a 23-year-old rugby-playing graduate of Columbia College in Chicago. For people like Allen, there is now a place to talk about that.

“Gear, Grub, Guns, and Guys” is the tagline of Gaybros, a Reddit subgroup that has grown from 200 subscribers at the beginning of 2012 to nearly 28,000 today, with more than 3 million pageviews a month. For Allen, who joined the forum as a moderator just a few months after it was created, the site offers a community he can’t find elsewhere — a place where he and others like him can talk about anything, from sports to microbrewing to the military.

The group’s short statement of purpose: “Gaybros is a network of young men who come together around shared interests. Both online and through meet ups in every major English-speaking city on the globe, Gaybros create their man-cave corners of the world.” More from OUT, with a crucial bit bold-faced

“There isn’t necessarily a safe space for gay people to talk about these subjects, or for me to talk about how I love playing rugby,” says Allen, who grew up in Oak Park, near Chicago, and came out to his parents when he was 15.

… Many posters on the forum are moved to declare their alienation from the “gay scene,” rejecting it as an artifice of tropes and myths. “I had this picture in my mind of the gay scene, where you needed to be model-hot, financially successful, have a perfect body, and a variety of other cultural stereotypes to ever ‘fit in’ the gay community,” writes ArmyofOne86, in a comment that is fairly typical.

The same is true for Alex Deluca, who created the group shortly after graduating from Northeastern University.

Although out at the young age of 12 and, like Allen, the beneficiary of a supportive school and community, Deluca also felt under pressure to play a certain role. “It wasn’t until I was in my twenties that I realized my interests and passions weren’t really aligned with the things I was actively taking part in, because I hadn’t met other gay guys who shared those interests,” he says. “That thought process was a spark that eventually resulted in the creation of Gaybros.”

… “There really aren’t that many places/groups that put a focus on the traditional ‘guy stuff,’ from my own personal experience,” writes Marc LaPlante, who lives outside Boston and, at 33 years old, is the oldest moderator of the group. “Gaybros gives an avenue, in my opinion, to talk about things that wouldn’t normally come up in a bar or a Grindr conversation or other, more traditional groups.”

It’s difficult to glean from the gaybros what exactly this “gay culture” is that they feel doesn’t speak to them. Is it Glee? Lady Gaga? Guys dancing shirtless to Rihanna? I wrote to Deluca, asking him if the people who gravitate to the forum feel there’s a stereotype or image promulgated by media (including gay organizations) about what being gay is. “I think that’s a fair analysis,” he replied. “But it’s important to note that there is nothing wrong for people who do identify with that image they see in the media… It’s just sometimes very specific and can be foreign to those who grew up in conservative religious families in Southern U.S. communities, for example. We’re not defining ourselves by saying we’re not that, we’re just coming together around different interests and presenting an additional group for people to identify with. We’re simply trying to broaden the spectrum.”

… As a rule, effeminacy is not part of the gaybro DNA, and that strikes a chord. “THIS IS ME!!” posted a reader in response to a gaybro article on Buzzfeed. “I spend most of my time at straight bars and hang out with my straight friends, who all tell me that I don’t seem gay at all. It is a huge disappointment to me that there are few guys like me who like camping, fishing, hiking, hockey, basketball, videogames, comics… And if I say that a fem guy is not for me, somehow that makes me self-hating. I wish I could find more guys like me.”

“I don’t feel comfortable with effeminate men,” writes another commenter. “I like hangin’ with my buddies… We enjoy our manhood — being masculine — and a man is fun and comfortable. What I don’t get is why out guys are prejudice[d] against us just because we feel comfortable not being obvious.”

Men like these often label themselves as regular guys or normal guys, and they say that they are just like straight guys except for who turns them on. Ok, man, dick makes you hard, and pussy doesn’t, but that doesn’t mean you have to check every single box on the multi-page Masculinity Form (it would be ok for you not to be into tools and building things, or to prefer tennis to rugby, or to prefer role-playing video games to action-adventure ones, or to have no interest in skeet-shooting; look, very few actual straight guys would check every box).

And you are defining yourself by saying what you’re not: you’re not into show tunes, or opera, or men’s fashion, or romantic movies, or cuddling, and dozens of other things that are tainted by being seen as feminine or queer — and you’re very much not into any guy you see as less masculine than you are (which is to say, anyone who you might find some femmy bit in, however small). Apparently, you’re not into such a guy even as a friend, or someone you might hang out with; you’re uncomfortable with such guys, threatened by them.

But ths is an obvious trap. If you find this God of Masculinity, what makes you think he’ll find you acceptable? After all, you could fail to be perfectly masculine in any number of ways, and all it would take is for you to fail on one of those boxes. Anyway, what if your God of Masculinity turns out to insist that you be submissive, let him call the shots in what you do together, bottom for him? (There are lots of guys like this. And they are all over the map on high-masculine vs. high-feminine interests.) Or would that threaten your identitity too much?

The thing is, you’re in a cleft stick here, at least if you continue to insist on Perfect Masculinity. Because masculine ideals (at least in the U.S. for some time now) are directly antithetical to queerness. Your task in negotiating life is to undercut both the stereotypes of masculinity (which you thinkingly accept) and the stereotypes of queerness (which you reject).

Sobering words from Michael Kimmel, from a 4/12/16 posting on this blog:

On to Michael Kimmel’s Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men. Understanding the Critical Years Between 16 and 26 (2008), and in particular its chapter 3: ““Bros Before Hos”: The Guy Code”, which notes that the basic rules of masculinity – “the boy code” and “the guy code” – have scarcely changed at all for many decades; the first rule is that “masculinity is the relentless repudiation of the feminine” (p. 45).

And the central precept of the first rule is No Sissy Stuff!: avoid anything that might suggest homosexuality. The most wounding insult to a young man is to call him a fag(got), and “That’s so gay” is a powerful put-down among adolescent boys.

But beyond that: avoid women as friends rather than sexual conquests; avoid “feminine” interests (like the arts), avoid empathetic rather than competitive interactions (men improve one another, make one another into better men, by challenging each other agonistically), etc.

Also avoid “Mama values” (at the risk of becoming a “Mama’s boy”): cleanness, neatness, respectfulness, “proper grammar”, no “dirty talk”, etc. – including these values as policed by female partners (standing in for Mama), who are seen as “ball-busters” or “castrating bitches” when they perform this role: women as emasculating.

These are the demands of stereotypical masculinity, and they are enforced for boys by fathers, older brothers, coaches, and other male authority figures. If you’re queer, embracing them wholesale is a recipe for pain and sorrow and alienation. (If you’re straight, they’re no picnic either.)

Gaybros could in principle help young men out of this impasse (especially since the OUT reporter found the men he met less than 100% high-masculine themselves — not that there’s anything wrong with that), but the group appears to be reinforcing rather than subverting stereotypes of both masculinity and queerness. Well, at least Gaybros on-line seems to have a brisk traffic in hook-ups: regular guy seems same for boxing and a flip-fuck, or something like that.

(About actors, movies, and tv, with very little language stuff in it.)

Watching Twin Peaks (the original tv series) on Netflix, and delighted to see Michael Ontkean (cute, amiable, and hunky) in it again. I’m a great fan of smiles, so here’s the young Ontkean smiling:

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Brief sketch about the man, from Wikipedia:

Michael Leonard Ontkean (born 24 January 1946) is a retired Canadian actor. He is known for the 1970s crime drama The Rookies, the films Slap Shot (1977) and Making Love (1982), and the cult-favorite TV series Twin Peaks (1990–1991).

As a teenager, he worked as an actor in Vancouver, then had a serious ice hockey career at the University of New Hampshire before becoming a full-time actor, in a long string of tv shows and movies, until his retirement in 2011.

Three of his roles that impressed me: in Slap Shot, Making Love, and (especially) Twin Peaks.

Slap Shot. On the first, from Wikipedia:

Slap Shot is a 1977 comedy film directed by George Roy Hill, written by Nancy Dowd and starring Paul Newman and Michael Ontkean. It depicts a minor league hockey team that resorts to violent play to gain popularity in a declining factory town.

The movie is a star vehicle for Newman, but Ontkean got a chance to use his ice hockey skills to professional advantage. Here we see him — not only shirtless, but in a jockstrap — as player Ned Braden:

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A fine figure of a man.

Making Love. Romantic gay relationships came to Hollywood in this movie, which was, however, extremely cautious in how it presented the two main characters’ sexual relationship. It did get them to bed together, but without any clinches, and I don’t think they actually got to kiss on screen — this ten years after the wonderful British film Sunday Bloody Sunday (which came complete with hot gay male kissing). From Wikipedia:

Making Love is a 1982 American drama film starring Kate Jackson, Harry Hamlin and Michael Ontkean. The film tells the story of a married man [Ontkean] coming to terms with his homosexuality and the love triangle that develops around him, his wife [Jackson] and another man [Hamlin].

Ontkean’s character is inexperienced with men, also searching for a long-term partner. Hamlin’s is an old hand at sex with men, and promiscuous. They are both satisfyingly masculine and hunky — no campy stereotypes here, but not a lot of physical contact either. (As a fan of male-male affection of all kinds, I felt cheated. It’s taken Hollywood a long time to get sort of comfortable with same-sex affection, especially between men.)

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(Hamlin went on to a big role in L.A. Law and elsewhere, and in a few years Ontkean got the best role of his career.)

Twin Peaks. Kyle MacLachlan as FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper and Ontkean as Twin Peaks Sheriff Harry S. Truman. Cooper and Truman are thrown together as partners in crime, so to speak, and they develop a solid friendship that provides some stable core within the circus of derangement, bizarre surreality, venality, and violence that surrounds them in Twin Peaks and across the border in Canada. From Wikipedia:

Twin Peaks is an American television serial drama created by Mark Frost and David Lynch that premiered on April 8, 1990, on ABC.

… The series follows an investigation headed by FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) into the murder of homecoming queen Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) in the fictional town of Twin Peaks, Washington. The narrative draws on elements of crime drama, while its uncanny tone and supernatural elements are consistent with horror tropes, and its campy, melodramatic portrayal of quirky characters engaged in dubious activities draws from American soap operas. Like much of Lynch’s work, it is distinguished by surrealism and offbeat humor, as well as distinctive cinematography. The show’s acclaimed score was composed by Angelo Badalamenti in collaboration with Lynch.

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Agent Cooper is quirky, intense, and fastidious, while Sheriff Truman is easy-going and dogged (Ontkean gravitated towards nice-guy roles, and this is a great one). The men are also physically complementary, with MacLachlan shorter and more compact than the amiably hunky Ontkean.

I first noticed him in some episodes of the tv series Charmed, playing a personable (and hunky) ex-demon named Drake. And now he’s coming past me again, in the second season of Twin Peaks, once again charming, boyish, playful, and sexy (his perennial actorial persona). In between Twin Peaks (1991) and Charmed (2005) came, among other things, the movie version of The Phantom (1996), with Zane in the title role.

So this will be about actors, the comics, tv and movies, and some of Zane’s masculine attributes: that persona, a strong physical presence, a sensuous masculine face, and (of course) an attractive body. Not a lot about language here.

I’ll lead with the face and the body:

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A characteristic pose. That wayward curl is part of the boyish thing. Open mouth in a half-smile, with fairly full lips (much exaggerated by makeup in Twin Peaks), and those eyelids: somewhat lowered, and angled, conveying intimacy. (If there’s a name for eyes like this, I don’t know it — but it’s certainly a recognizable look.)

Plus the widow’s peak, often seen as a sign of high testosterone in men, hence high masculinity. Note that the Phantom’s superhero costume (#4-6 below) has a widow’s peak built into its face mask.

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Showing off his sweaty body. He’s still got the curl and the full lips, but otherwise his face is challengingly masculine: lips closed, eyes open and staring intently.

From Wikipedia:

William George “Billy” Zane, Jr. (born February 24, 1966) is an American actor and producer. He is best known for playing Hughie in the thriller Dead Calm (1989), Kit Walker / The Phantom in the superhero film The Phantom (1996), Caledon Hockley in the epic romantic disaster film Titanic (1997), and for his television role as [businessman] John [Justice “Jack”] Wheeler [enamored of Audrey Horne, played by Sherilyn Fenn] in the serial drama series Twin Peaks.

His other film credits include roles in the science fiction comedies Back to the Future (1985) and Back to the Future Part II (1989), the Western film Tombstone (1993), the horror film Demon Knight (1995), and the comedy-drama CQ (2001).

From Charmed, Zane’s character Drake playing a debonair character in tuxedo, along with Alyssa Milano (as the character Phoebe, also in costume):

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An episode within an episode. Zane’s time with the Charmed Ones began in S7 E14 “Carpe Demon”, first aired 2/13/05, in which the ex-demon Drake is the newest professor hired at Magic School.

Phantom days. Start with the comic-book character.

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From Wikipedia:

The Phantom is a long-running American adventure comic strip, first published by Mandrake the Magician creator Lee Falk in February 1936, now primarily published internationally by Frew Publications. The main character, the Phantom, is a fictional costumed crime-fighter who operates from the fictional African country of Bangalla. The character has been adapted for television, film and video games. [Many artists have drawn the comic over the years.]

… In the strip, the Phantom was 21st in a line of crime-fighters which began in 1536, when the father of British sailor Christopher Walker was killed during a pirate attack. Swearing an oath on the skull of his father’s murderer to fight evil, Christopher began a legacy of the Phantom which would pass from father to son. Nicknames for the Phantom include “The Ghost Who Walks”, “Guardian of the Eastern Dark” and “The Man Who Cannot Die”.

Unlike most other superheroes, the Phantom has no superpowers and relies on his strength, intelligence and reputed immortality to defeat his foes. The 21st Phantom is married to Diana Palmer; they met while he studied in the United States and have two children, Kit and Heloise. He has a trained wolf, Devil, and a horse named Hero. Like the previous Phantoms, he lives in the ancient Skull Cave.

The Phantom was the first fictional hero to wear the skintight costume which has become a hallmark of comic-book superheroes, and was the first shown in a mask with no visible pupils (another superhero standard). Comics historian Peter Coogan has described the Phantom as a “transitional” figure, since the Phantom has some of the characteristics of pulp magazine heroes like The Shadow and the Spider, as well as anticipating the features of comic book heroes such as Superman, Batman, and Captain America.

As a boy, I was a great fan of the Phantom (The Ghost Who Walks, with his great strength and intelligence and his powerful animal companions), in the Sunday papers. I do have to admit that, though brave and resourceful, he was awfully earnest, so he lost my interest as I grew older. The Phantom of the 1996 movie is, however, something else. A poster for the movies:

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And Zane in costume and in character:

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From Wikipedia:

The Phantom is a 1996 American superhero film directed by Simon Wincer. Based on Lee Falk’s comic strip The Phantom, the film stars Billy Zane as a seemingly immortal crimefighter and his battle against all forms of evil. The Phantom also stars Treat Williams, Kristy Swanson, Catherine Zeta-Jones, James Remar and Patrick McGoohan. The film’s plot is loosely inspired by three of The Phantom stories, “The Singh Brotherhood”, “The Sky Band” and “The Belt”; but adds supernatural elements and several new characters.

… The film suffered the same fate as two other period-piece comic book/pulp adaptations of the 1990s, The Shadow (1994) and The Rocketeer (1991), and did not fare very well at the box office in the United States, debuting at number six the weekend of June 7, 1996. However, it has since sold well on VHS and DVD.

Reviews were mixed with Roger Ebert calling it one of the best looking movies he had ever seen, giving the film three and a half stars out of four. British critic Kim Newman wrote for Empire that the movie “has a pleasant feel – few superheroes have been as sunny and optimistic – as Zane breezes through chases and fights, stops for the odd quip – and pals around with a heroic horse, a dashing dog and the helpful ghost of his father”…

Billy Zane’s performance was praised by filmmaker James Cameron, who cast him for Titanic (1997) on that account.

Somehow Zane’s actorial persona got grafted onto the Phantom character — an excellent move, to my mind.

(Time to watch my DVDs of The Phantom, The Shadow, and The Rocketeer. After Twin Peaks…)

Today’s One Big Happy:

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Ah, a potential orthographic ambiguity, turning on word division: MENSWEAR as MENS WEAR ‘men’s clothing’ (what the store intends) or MEN SWEAR ‘men curse’ (what Ruthie reads).

As is often the case, when there’s an ambiguity, somebody is going to play on both meanings at once. In this case, men swearing about men’s wear / menswear. There’s at least one website devoted to it, in fact:

Real Men Swear: Another Fucking Menswear Blog

in which men’s fashion shots are profanely captioned. Two examples:

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… and his servant Guran, in a scene from early in the 1996 movie The Phantom:

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Secure in the Chronicle Chamber within his jungle stronghold, The Phantom (Billy Zane) and his servant Guran (Radmar Agana Jao) discover the secret of the Skulls of Touganda.

The Phantom of course works shirtless in his jungle library (amidst his collection of manuscripts and books) — I mean it’s in the steamy goddam jungle (and anyway we all need to appreciate his pecs). Outside of the jungle (where he’s the 21st Phantom), he’s Kit Walker, raised in the U.S., college-educated, and NYC-savvy. Then there’s his servant Guran, who’s obviously not a member of the African tribe the Phantom works with; instead, he looks Filipino and is dressed in Indian garb. The movie is packed with cultural mixtures, and this is just one of them.

I’ll write some about these, but first a bit about the fascinating life story of Radmar Agana Jao.

Radmar Agana Jao. The actor’s p.r. photo for the movie:

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(In the comics, the character Guran is a member of the Bandar tribe in Bengalla and is older than Kit; in the movie, he’s Asian, and much younger.)

From Wikipedia:

Originally from Valparaiso, Indiana, … from a family of nine children. He was born in Gary, Indiana on 7 November 1966 to Tessie Agana, a Filipina actress from the 1950s. He received his bachelor’s degree in Communications from Indiana University, then moved to Los Angeles and became an actor, working in film (The Phantom, Minority Report, Diplomatic Siege), television (Seinfeld, Will and Grace, Dharma and Greg, ER), and stage (Sweeney Todd, A Language of their Own, Heading East – The Musical). He also volunteered for an after school arts intervention program called inside Out, working with at-risk youth in some of the roughest neighborhoods of Los Angeles.

Jao entered the California Province of the Society of Jesus in 2001, and since earned a master’s degree in Applied Philosophy from Loyola University of Chicago. During his two-year regency assignment at the University of San Francisco he taught acting and theatre appreciation, and worked with the University Ministry team leading CLC [Christian Life Community, a Catholic organization supported by the Jesuits] groups and coordinating retreats. Jao completed a master’s of Divinity degree from the Jesuit School of Theology of Santa Clara University in Berkeley, where alongside his studies he served as a campus minister at the Cal Berkeley Newman Center, as chaplain for the Children’s Hospital of Oakland, and as deacon at St. Agnes Parish in San Francisco.

… Jao was ordained a Roman Catholic priest on June 11, 2011.

Fr. Radmar A. Jao, S.J., in a recent photo:

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Jao and Agana are Filipino family names, Radmar apparently a German personal name.

Cultural mixtures and cross-overs. The Phantom movie belongs to the superhero genre mostly by virtue of the hero’s costume (since the Phantom has no superpowers), but it also belongs to the jungle hero genre, because of its setting (during parts of the movie) and its hero’s inclination to swing through trees; that makes it kin to, above all others, the many incarnations of Tarzan (for some Tarzan survey, see my 12/10/15  posting), and also to the George of the Jungle parody, starring Brendan Fraser.

Fraser’s actorial persona is similar to Zane’s: boyish, playful, amiable, sexy. Fraser’s roles have tended towards fantasy action/adventure heroes, with comic touches (the Mummy films, Journey to the Center of the Earth; see my 12/25/15 posting on Fraser). Notable exemplars of the genre: the Indiana Jones movies and tv series,  The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr.  tv series, The Librarians tv series,   And this is the third genre that contributes to the Phantom movie, in both its African portions and its long (beautifully shot) NYC sections. All this genre cross-fertlization in The Phantom makes for a somewhat muddled movie. (There’s also a mercenary soldier theme, a pirate theme, and a gangster theme.)

Bonus: yet another, more recent, Phantom. Plus Ryan Carnes shirtless, also naked (though not R-rated), also kissing men. From Wikipedia on Carnes:

Ryan Gregg Carnes (born November 21, 1982) … first started acting in 2004 when he became the ninth actor to portray Lucas Jones on the ABC soap opera General Hospital from July 2004 until September 2005… From 2004 to 2006, Carnes had a recurring role on Desperate Housewives as Justin, the love interest of Andrew Van de Kamp, played by Shawn Pyfrom. Carnes starred in the 2004 film Eating Out and the 2006 film Surf School.

… Carnes appeared in two episodes of the British science-fiction drama series Doctor Who — “Daleks in Manhattan” and “Evolution of the Daleks”, in which he played Laszlo, who was turned into a half-human, half-pig slave. In the 2008 horror film Trailer Park of Terror, based on the Imperium comic series of the same name, Carnes plays an arrogant teenager called Alex.

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Cute-boy Carnes

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Bare-boy Carnes

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Kissy-boy Carnes: with Scott Lunsford (Eating Out), Shawn Pyfrom (Desperate Housewives)

On The Phantom on tv, from Wikipedia:

The Phantom is a 2009 miniseries inspired by Lee Falk’s comic strip of the same name, and directed by Paolo Barzman. It first aired on The Movie Network and then on Syfy in June 2010. It stars Ryan Carnes as Kit Walker, the 22nd Phantom

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Finally, Carnes in costume for the series:

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A shame to cover it all up.

(Racy allusions, but nothing hardcore. Use your judgment.)

Yesterday’s Daily Jocks ad (with a caption of mine):

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Pink X marks the
Spot of furtive mansex in the
Shadow of the highway, a dirty
Substreet trickland, where
Simon worshipped daily until the

Boys bronzed him,
Wrapped his package in
Lime green and red,
Mounted him on the
Pink X as a symbol of their
Delicious depravity.

Not the first time an underwear model has been bronzed.

on 2/23/17, the posting “The beautiful immortal” (about another DJ ad):

(#2)

They looked upon him, found him
Wonderful, fabulous, a mighty man —
Unanimously accepted him as their
Prince everlasting — and
Had him bronzed.

He was indeed fabulous, a creature from another world, who could move in an instant through time and space:

(#3)

Then there’s the title of this posting, alluding to the St. Petersburg  statue of Peter the Great, the subject of Pushkin’s famous narrative poem The Bronze Horseman (1833) — see the  discussion in comments on my 3/1/17 posting “stans”. But also playing on horseman and whoresman. Simon the bronzed whoresman, so pretty in pink.

Another set of photos of my family, this time a page of 6 shots of me as a little kid (age 4-7). Some notes on memory, clothing, and names for things.

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The top four are from the first house my family lived in, on a circle in the Oakview Manor subdivision of Allentown PA; I was around 4 at the time. There are three characters in this little play: me and my playmates and neighbors Woody and (I think) Sally.

Top right: me on the right, my buddy Woody on the right; we’re wrapped in beach towels after playing in what we used in those days as a kiddy pool — an ash tub of galvanized steel (whose everyday use was to haul coal ashes from the furnace to the alley for trash pickup).

Top left: Sally and me enjoying each other’s company.

Bottom left: me nuzzling Sally, probably at my mother’s encouragement.

Bottom right: the three musketeers, looking cute.

I have a vivid memory of playing with Woody in that ash tub, and of the three of us romping around the front yard (in view of the garden in the middle of the circle, the garden that my dad maintained for the neighborhood, and in which he bred tulips (wonderful exotic hybrids that followed us through the next two houses, outside of Reading). So I have these vivid memories, and I’m sure they’re all false, created by sitting with my parents and looking at these very photos with them, while they constructed for me the story of my early childhood.

As far as I can tell, my first real memories come from house #2, in West Lawn PA; they include meeting our next-door neighbors, the Barths, adding coloring to margarine to make it look like butter (for the war effort), growing vegetables in a Victory Garden, collecting tin cans for the war effort, and (deliriously, clamorously) celebrating V-J Day on the sidewalk on our block.

In the bottom two photos I’m 7, posing in my Eton suit and cap at my Swiss grandparents’ house in Sinking Spring PA (just west of West Lawn): with my mother and with my father.

Two items here: the ash tub and the Eton suit.

Ash tubs. They are still being made after all these years, but they’re rarely called ash tubs — I doubt that people use them these days for hauling ashes — and little kids have plastic kiddy pools that are more capacious than an ash tub.

The ash tubs of yore haven’t really changed, but now they’re called just tubs, or steel tubs, or wash tubs, or (tellingly) beverage tubs, since their principal use these days is to be filled with ice cubes so that they can keep bottles or cans of beverages cold at parties. Here’s a nice galvanized steel number:

(#2)

Eton suits. They started at England’s Eton school, a boarding school for young boys from elite families. A 19th-century example:

(#3)

Note the short pants. In both the UK and the US (and, I believe, throughout most of Europe at the time), boys were expected to wear short pants until some cutoff age, when their first long pants marked them as becoming young men.

At the same time, in the 20th century a version of the Eton suit became fashionable in the US. From a history of clothing site:

A spin off of the Eton suits became fasionable for small American boys beginning about 5 years of age. The suits had very short jackets with no lapels and were generally worn with very short short pants. The suit was usually worn without a tie with the collar folded over the jacket. A Peter Pan collar was usually used and not the stiff Eton collar formerly worn by British boys. Eton suits were worn until about 7 or 8 when the boy would given a more adult-looking suit with longer short pants or longs. The suits were generally blue or black with matching knee socks, but sometimes with ankle socks. Grey suits were also worn. Eton suits generally disappeared in the 1980s, although very small boys are still dressed in them. The shorts, however, in the 1990s tend to be knee length in contrast to the rather short shorts worn during the 1950s-70s.

A pair of little American boys looking cute in their Eton suits:

(#4)

Materials and colors varied, as did the style of cap (though there were usually caps). Which brings me to my childhood Eton suits (I had more than one), which served as my fanciest dress, for special occasions: the little-boy equivalent of a three-piece suit.

Yesterday’s morning name was chub (the name of a fish), which led me to the rest of the bilabial-final family: chum, chump, and chup. (And that led to the velar-final family chug, Chung, chunk, chuck, but I won’t pursue that one here.) As it is, the bilabials will lead us into many surprising places, including the Hardy Boys books, eyewear retainers, Australian dog food, gay slurs, and hunky underwear models.

chub the fish. From NOAD2:

noun chub: a thick-bodied European river fish with a gray-green back and white underparts, popular with anglers. [Leuciscus cephalus, family Cyprinidae [carps, minnows, and their relatives].] ORIGIN late Middle English: of unknown origin.

Some plump chub netted in the River Trent (from a UK fishing site):

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The adjective chubby. Yes, the fish leads to the adjective. From NOAD2:

adjective chubby plump and rounded: a pretty child with chubby cheeks. ORIGIN early 17th century (in the sense ‘short and thickset, like a chub [fish]’).

The synthetic compound chubby-chaser. From GDoS:

noun chubby-chaser  a man who prefers (unfashionably) plump or fat women or, if gay, men. [first cite 1980 in the journal Maledicta]

A synthetic compound of the agentive type: ‘man who chases chubby people (for a romantic or sexual relationship)’.

Looking ahead a bit, chubby can be shortened in this compound to chub: the abbreviated chub chaser — as in this Filipino gay porn movie:

(#2)

Slang nouns chubby. From GDoS:

noun chubby

1 a short, squat umbrella [only cite 1927]

2 [play on fatness] an erection [first cite 1998; sometimes used for a semi-erection, partial hardon]

So you can have a morning chubby, just like morning wood.

And this sexual noun chubby, just like the chubby in chubby-chaser, can be shortened to chub.

Slang nouns chub. We are now in the territory of non-piscine nouns chub. From GDoS:

noun chub [Standard English chub, a short, squat fish; thus a pun on ‘thick’ or ‘dense’ or being ‘easily taken’]

1 an unexperenced, naive person, a fool. [first cite 1623; most recent cite 1823

2 a rustic, simpleton; thus chubbish adj.] [only cite 1666]

3 (UK Underground) a sharper [cites 1698-1776]

4 a fat person; the fat on the body [first cite 1838] [AZ: this is surely now seen as a shortening of chubby, as above, rather than as directly derived from the name of the fish]

5 (US campus) a child; a baby [only cite 1896, where a derivation from cherub is suggested; (AZ) but, again, now surely seen as related to chubby rather than to the fish chub]

6 [shortening of chubby ‘an erection’] an erection

Three nouns chum. From NOAD2:

noun chum 1: informal a close friend; a form of address expressing familiarity or friendliness: it’s your own fault, chum.
verb chum: [no object] to be friendly to or form a friendship with someone: they started chumming around in high school. ORIGIN late 17th century (originally Oxford University slang, denoting a roommate): probably short for chamber-fellow.

noun chum 2: chiefly North American chopped fish, fish fluids, and other material thrown overboard as angling bait; refuse from fish, especially that remaining after expressing oil.
[There are some reports of this chum being used to mean ‘menstrual flow’, (unpleasantly) alluding to both fish ‘vagina; a woman’ and to menstrual blood.]
verb chum [no object] use chum as bait when fishing. ORIGIN mid 19th century: of unknown origin.

noun chum 3: (also chum salmon) a large North Pacific salmon that is commercially important as a food fish. [Oncorhyncus keta, family Salmonidae.] ORIGIN early 20th century: from Chinook Jargon tzum (samun), literally ‘spotted (salmon).’

Friendly chum. chum 1 is one of a set of relational Ns of friendship in informal English, in particular:

(R) mate, pal, chum, buddy

These Ns denote ‘friend of s.o.’, where the related friend is canonically expressed as a possessor of N: a definite determiner, in NP’s N (his pal, Frank’s chum, etc.); or a possessive object of of in an indefinite nominal, in a N of NP’s (a mate of mine, some buddy of Frank’s, etc.). Canonically, the relationships are male-male, but the facts of actual usage are more complex than that.

(#3)

Male friendship: two mates/pals/chums/buddies

The choice of a particular relational N of friendship is sociolinguistically very complex. The friendship N mate is characteristically British or Australian, almost never used by North Americans; the friendship N buddy is characteristically North American, rarely used in the UK or Australia. The friendship Ns pal and chum are more widely distributed.

The relationship N chum originated in BrE and then spread into AmE, where for a time it was quite common. Note this Hardy Boys mystery:

(#4)

The Missing Chums is volume 4 in the original The Hardy Boys Mystery Stories published by Grosset & Dunlap [written in 1928, revised several times]… The plot concerns the disappearance of the Boys’ chums, Chet and Biff, when they take a motorboat trip down the coast. When Frank and Joe finally find them, they are all captured. In the end, they triumph over the bad guys on mysterious Hermit Island. (Wikipedia link)

In AmE, this use of chum has retreated; it now sounds dated to American ears, though it doesn’t sound entirely foreign. Consider the American company Chums, whose original products were eyewear retainers:

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The all-cotton, easily adjustable Chums Original Cotton retainer is the product that put us on the map. Millions agree: it is ideal for all forms of action, be it on water, land, snow, or in the air. The original cotton eyeglass retainer has it all: quality, comfort, and the ability to fit most standard frames. (company website link)

The company’s name comes from its mascot Chumley, a golden lab. (The company branched out into outdoor accessories, men’s sportswear, wallets and keychains; their principal competitor seems to be the Croakies company,) However, Chums is not above playing on the relational N chum:

(#6)

Relational chum continues to be widely available in BrE Two illustrations.

First, there’s the 1990s BBC comedy show, originally titled Harry Enfield’s Television Programme, but later, when its focus had moved from Enfield to Enfield and two of his friends, it became Harry Enfield and Chums (Wikipedia link).

And then there’s the British underwear company Bum-Chums:

Gay men across the world, it’s time to rejoice!! Bum-chums has arrived and is on a mission to rid the world of dull, dreary, sad and saggy men’s underwear and replace with fun, funky, form fitting fancies to caress your bottom and everything else!

Bum-Chums is a British brand with all of our pants made in Britain… That’s right… We design and make all of our great men’s underwear right here in England and we’re proud to say so too.

Our mission to make the best men’s underwear we can drives us in our every day struggle to get the world into our pants! That’s right; we want you to get in our pants! You heard us right! (link to company website)

Front and rear:

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(#8)

The rhyming name pairs relational chum with BrE bum ‘buttocks; anus’; it looks like the BrE counterpart of AmE butt buddy, but the BrE compound appears to be used only to refer to the bottom man in anal intercourse, while the AmE compound can (like asshole buddy) have this meaning, but is most often used to refer to an extremely close friend.

Then there’s the Australian dog food Chum, which comes in various flavors (lamb of course, also beef and chicken):

(#9)

(I’ll get to chumpy below.) I haven’t been able to find out where the name comes from, but it’s possible that chum is an allusion to “man’s best friend”.

Back to the relational Ns in (R). They are all usable as address terms as well as referentially, with one twist: though referential chum is no longer generally used in AmE, vocative chum thrives there (Listen, chum, I don’t believe a word of your story). So does the verbing chum, as in chum around with, and the adjective chummy.

The bait noun chum. This is the noun chum 2, referring to ground-up trash fish, used as bait. In a bag:

(#10)

Note terrible pun: Chum and Get’Em.

The salmon chum. This is the noun chum 3, referring to what is also known as the dog salmon or keta salmon.

(#11)

The noun chump. After the complexities of chum, chump is virtually a breeze. From NOAD2:

noun chump: informal a foolish or easily deceived person: how can this chump be a detective? ORIGIN early 18th century (in the sense ‘thick lump of wood’): probably a blend of chunk and lump or stump.

A somewhat better quote, the title of a story in Men’s Fitness:

10 Signs She’s Playing You Like a Chump

More from Down Under. After the ‘thick lump of wood’ and ‘easily deceived person’ senses, the Macquarie Dictionary (1981):

noun chump: 3. the thick blunt end of anything. 4. Colloq. the head. 5. Meat Industry. a section of lamb, hogget or mutton, between the leg and the loin, each chump containing approximately four chops.

From the Mulwarra Export Co., a bone-in lamb leg chump:

(#12)

This meaty chump is presumably the source of the “… so chumpy you can carve it” in #9, with chumpy ‘like a chump’, that is, like a piece of meat.

The word chup. The last of the bilabial-final series. This one has the vowel /U/ (as in put) rather than /ʌ/ (as in putt). From NOAD2:

exclamation chup: Indian be quiet! ORIGIN from Hindi cuprao.

So we end with Indian English. Well, not quite…

A couple extras, words that start with chup-, both pronounced with /u/. Both from GDoS:

noun chupa [orig. Sp.]: (US campus) a sucker, often used affectionately [cite from Eble in 1996]

adj. chupid:  [W.I. variant of stupid] gullible, ignorant [first cite 1869]

On Pinterest this morning, this Grim Reaper cartoon by Myke Ashley-Cooper (under the name Ashley Cooper):

(#1)

A pun on death/deaf or a mishearing, take your pick.

This cartoon led me to Ashley-Cooper’s site, which announces:

This Humor Website is about
Funny Cartoons and Funny Pictures as well as
Crazy Jokes and Animations

(many of them based on puns and wordplays).  And that led me to Ashley-Cooper’s take-off on a famous painting:

(#2)

The original of the cartoon caricature is Jack Vettriano’s The Singing Butler (1992):

(#3)

From Wikipedia on Vettriano:

Jack Vettriano (né Jack Hoggan, born 17 November 1951), is a [self-taught] Scottish painter. His 1992 painting, The Singing Butler, became a best-selling image in Britain.

[from the section on critical responses:] “His ‘popularity’ rests on cheap commercial reproductions of his paintings.” … Vettriano has been labelled a chauvinist whose “women are sexual objects, frequently half naked and vulnerable, always in stockings and stilettos”

Vettriano is fabulously successful with the public — one site reports that he outsells Dali, Monet, and van Gogh — though not at all with art critics. His paintings have been lovingly copied and varied by others, as in Zhaana’s Wedding Dance on the Beach (an homage to The Snging Butler) on DeviantArt:

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Another Vettriano beach painting, The Picnic Party:

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And then one indoors, The Man in the Mirror:

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Vettriano’s debt to commercial illustration (in the mold of, say, J. C. Leyendecker) should be clear, and the style suffuses everything the artist has done, including the many overtly sexual images. Eventually, although the art establishment remains cool to Vettriano, the fashion world has warmed to him. From the Elite Traveler site, “A Fitting Tribute: Stefano Ricci Honors Jack Vettriano”:

The Stefano Ricci Tribute to Vettriano exhibition will … launch the 10th International Short Film Festival Salento Finibus Terrae [2012] in Borgo Egnazia di Savelletri, Italy. The exhibition complements Stefano Ricci’s latest fashion collection, inspired by the paintings of the Scottish artist.

(Ricci is an Italian designer of luxury men’s fashion.)

(#7)

On the left, Vettriano’s painting Pincer Movement; on the right, Ricci’s re-creation.

[Puzzled note. The Elite Traveler site reports on events and locations you might want to travel to (like the Salento Finibus Terrae [the Salento Region] film festival), often with quite specific time references (today in the Vettriano Tribute story, for instance), but with absolutely no indications of the year when a story was posted, and only very rarely a month and day. I had to search around to discover that the 10th Salento Finibus Terrae festival was in 2012.

Why on earth would a travel site do this?]

From Chris Hansen on Facebook, a late entry in this year’s Easter Peepstakes: a model who dreamt he played with yellow Peeps in his Aronik swimwear:

(#1)

About the company, its products, its models, its symbol, and its name

But first, two more samples of Aronik Peepsiana: a hunk in pink, and yellow bro-play:

(#2)

(#3)

The company, its products, and its models. From its website:

We are a swimwear brand based in Salt Lake City aimed at providing quality, vibrant, & fashionable swimsuits for men.

Very restrained language, but the company is well-known for its flashy promotional campaigns, featuring amazingly muscular models in brightly colored skimpy tight swimsuits, many of the models sporting significant moose-knuckles (case in point: Yellow PeepsHunk in #1 and #3). The company’s ads absolutely drip muscular homoeroticism, and they’ve been much appreciated by gay websites passionately devoted to the male body.

For instance, the Homotrophy site (a ‘gay sexy blog”) — the name is intended as a portmanteau of homosexual and photography, but it could also be read as a compound homo + trophy ‘trophy for homos’ — which “features mainly new face models, new fashion designers, and new photographers. Nonetheless Homotrophy also features some well-known people as well, mostly photographers”. The site does enthusiastic spreads on Aronik models every now and again.

Then there’s the Gay Body Blog, where you can find a 5/21/14 posting “The Ridiculous Boys Of Aronik Swimwear”:

There I was thinking we had finally gotten over the massive craze of insanely hot tight muscled abs you could grate cheese on. I was looking around out there today and I found this shoot for Aronik Swimwear with some of the most ridiculously handsome and ripped hunks I think I have ever seen in one shoot.

Don’t hold back, guys.

The symbol and the name. So far we have big splashes of homocarnality. In Salt Lake City, which might give you pause, since everything we’ve seen up to now runs right against LDS teachings and practices. Yellow PeepsHunk is decidedly un-Mormon.

But then there’s the bee, the symbol of the Aronik company — and, in association with the beehive (itself a symbol of Mormonism’s pioneer past, signifying industry, harmony, and cooperation), it’s all over Salt Lake City.

Digression on the busy bee: a poetic interlude. The honeybee as a symbol of industry or cooperation or both has a substantial history before Joseph Smith; in particular, it’s served as a figure in Christian moralizing. Notable in this regard: Isaac Watts’s “Against Idleness and Mischief” (1715), which begins:

How doth the little busy bee
Improve each shining hour,
And gather honey all the day
From every opening flower!

The Watts text achieved a certain sort of fame in Lewis Carroll’s parody “How Doth the Little Crocodile”, from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865):

How doth the little crocodile
Improve his shining tail
And pour the waters of the Nile
On every golden scale!

How cheerfully he seems to grin
How neatly spreads his claws
And welcomes little fishes in
With gently smiling jaws!

And now I’ve parodied them both, and gayed them way up, in an Aronik version:

How do Aronik musclehunks
Improve their solid tails
And flaunt their massive packages
And stroke their treasure trails!

How like the cheerful honeybee,
Who offers men his assets,
He welcomes his admirers in
And sweetly shares his sweat.

By way of illustration: a solid Aronik tail and an elegant Aronik treasure trail:

(#4)

(#5)

Now to the company name. At first, I tried to see the name as a play on ironic, but then it occurred to me to consider Aaronic; if I were LDS, I’d have gotten this one right away. From Wikipedia (with the most relevant passage boldfaced):

The Aaronic priesthood (… also called the priesthood of Aaron or the Levitical priesthood) is the lesser of the two (or sometimes three) orders of priesthood recognized in the Latter Day Saint movement.

… Latter Day Saints believe that John the Baptist conferred the Aaronic priesthood directly upon Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery on May 15, 1829.

… In the LDS Church today, the Aaronic priesthood has taken on a role as a source of training, leadership, and service for adolescent boys and new converts. It is often called a “preparatory priesthood.” Holders of the Aaronic priesthood whom the church considers worthy are advanced to an office in the Melchizedek priesthood as a matter of course around the age of 18, or in the case of adult converts, after approximately a year of active church membership.

The Aaronic priesthood is open only to men and boys, twelve years old or older, who are considered worthy after a personal interview with their bishop. Requirements for worthiness include abstaining from all extra-marital sexual practices, following the Word of Wisdom (a code requiring abstinence from drinking alcohol, smoking, and consumption of coffee and tea), payment of tithes, and attending church services.

To LDS thinking, all male-male sex is an extra-marital sexual practice (even if you are legally married, since the LDS Church does not recognize same-sex marriage). All masturbation (including that accompanying the viewing of homoerotic imagery, like Aronik ads) is sinful as well. So here Aronik is very much not Aaronic. Presumably the choice of the company’s name was deliberately cheeky, rebellious, transgressive, in fact sacrilegious. Even, possibly, meant as ironic.

In line with this blasphemous attitude, the 2017 Aronik swimsuit collection is named the Temple Square Collection. One very un-LDS item from the collection, plus Wikipedia on Temple Square:

(#6)

Temple Square is a 10-acre complex, owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church), in the center of Salt Lake City, Utah. In recent years, the usage of the name has gradually changed to include several other church facilities that are immediately adjacent to Temple Square. Contained within Temple Square are the Salt Lake Temple, Salt Lake Tabernacle, Salt Lake Assembly Hall, the Seagull Monument, and two visitors’ centers.

Two cartoons to end the week: a Rhymes With Orange with a four-word play and a Bizarro with a POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau):

(#1)

The Cantonese American dish moo goo gai pan ‘chicken with button mushrooms and sliced vegetables’, with a pun on each word: onomatopoetic moo, onomatopoetic goo, the informal noun guy, the Greek god Pan.

(#2)

(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 2 in this strip — see this Page.)

Doctors Without Borders + Border Collie(s).

(Note that there are a lot of things you need to know to appreciate these comics.)

moo goo guy Pan. Wikipedia on the dish:

(#3)

Moo goo gai pan is the Americanized version of a Cantonese dish, usually a simple stir-fried dish consisting of sliced or cubed chicken with white button mushrooms and other vegetables. Popular vegetable additions include snow peas, bamboo shoots, water chestnuts and Chinese cabbage.

The name comes from the Cantonese names of the ingredients: moo goo (mòhgū): button mushrooms; gai (gāi): chicken; pan (pín): slices

The cartoon has a table with, in order, a cow, a baby, a young man, and what you need to recognize as a satyr.

The cow says moo. From NOAD2:

verb moo: make the characteristic deep vocal sound of a cow. noun moo: the characteristic deep vocal sound of a cow. ORIGIN mid 16th century: imitative.

The baby says goo(-goo). Again, from NOAD2:

1 amorously adoring: making goo-goo eyes at him. [possibly related to goggle; possibly (AMZ) related to sense 2] 2 (of speech or vocal sounds) childish or meaningless: making soothing goo-goo noises. [onomatopoetic]

A young man can be called a guy.

All that’s easy, diner #4. the satyr, is a bit trickier: you need to recognize him as the god Pan, and to accept English /pæn/, the name of the god in English, as close enough to /pan/, the usual pronunciation of the fourth syllable in the name of the dish. From Wikipedia:

(#4)

Absolicious modern rendering of Pan, from this site

In Greek religion and mythology, Pan is the god of the wild, shepherds and flocks, nature of mountain wilds and rustic music, and companion of the nymphs. His name originates within the ancient Greek language, from the word paein (πάειν), meaning “to pasture”; the modern word “panic” is derived from the name. He has the hindquarters, legs, and horns of a goat, in the same manner as a faun or satyr. With his homeland in rustic Arcadia, he is also recognized as the god of fields, groves, and wooded glens; because of this, Pan is connected to fertility and the season of spring. The ancient Greeks also considered Pan to be the god of theatrical criticism and impromptus.

Doctors Without Border Collies. In #2, we’re in a doct’s office, and there are a lot of sheep there. Two ingredients for the POP (one for the doctors, one for the sheep), and you need to recognize both to appreciate the cartoon.

On Doctors Without Borders, from Wikipedia:

(#5)

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), also known as Doctors Without Borders, is an international humanitarian non-governmental organization (NGO) best known for its projects in war-torn regions and developing countries affected by endemic diseases. In 2015, over 30,000 personnel — mostly local doctors, nurses and other medical professionals, logistical experts, water and sanitation engineers and administrators — provided medical aid in over 70 countries. The vast majority of staff are volunteers. Private donors provide about 90% of the organization’s funding, while corporate donations provide the rest, giving MSF an annual budget of approximately US$750 million.

Médecins Sans Frontières was founded in 1971, in the aftermath of the Biafra secession, by a small group of French doctors and journalists who sought to expand accessibility to medical care across national boundaries and irrespective of race, religion, creed or political affiliation. To that end, the organisation emphasises “independence and impartiality”, and explicitly precludes political, economic, or religious factors in its decision making.

And then border collies. From Wikipedia:

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Border collie posing

(#7)

Border collie herding

The Border Collie is a working and herding dog breed developed in the Anglo-Scottish border region for herding livestock, especially sheep. It was specifically bred for intelligence and obedience.

Considered highly intelligent, extremely energetic, acrobatic and athletic, they frequently compete with great success in sheepdog trials and dog sports. They are often cited as the most intelligent of all domestic dogs. Border Collies continue to be employed in their traditional work of herding livestock throughout the world.

… [BUT NOTE:] Border collies require considerably more daily physical exercise and mental stimulation than many other breeds. … Although the primary role of the Border collie is to herd livestock, this type of breed is becoming increasingly popular as a companion animal.

In this role, due to their working heritage, Border collies are very demanding, playful, and energetic. They thrive best in households that can provide them with plenty of play and exercise, either with humans or other dogs. Due to their demanding personalities and need for mental stimulation and exercise, many Border Collies develop problematic behaviours in households that are not able to provide for their needs. They are infamous for chewing holes in walls, furniture such as chairs and table legs, destructive scraping and hole digging, due to boredom. Border collies may exhibit a strong desire to herd, a trait they may show with small children, cats, and other dogs. The breed’s herding trait has been deliberately encouraged, as it was in the dogs from which the Border collie was developed, by selective breeding for many generations. However, being eminently trainable, they can live amicably with other pets if given proper socialisation training.

The Daily Jocks ad from the 25th, with an appeal to base, or low, instincts (of taking pleasure in viewing the male body); to the basic, or fundamental, instinct of sexual appetite; and ultimately to an appreciation of the fundamental, or basilar, that is, gluteal:

(#1)

On the lexical items involved — among them, the moral adjective base, the adjective basic, the noun fundament, and the adjective basilar — see my discussion in the earlier posting today “base(ly)”. Here, I’m slipping back and forth between locational understandings of these expressions, moral understandings, and anatomical understandings.

(The title also works in to appeal to the (political) base and the movie Basic Instinct, but in a scattershot way.)

The DJ ad is for the Australian brand Teamm8, which turns up here every so often. If you’re interested in the details: the hunky model — I think of him as Basil — is wearing a Tempo Tank (in Navy) and a Track Short (in Gray Marle).

Then there are matters fundamental (of the fundament) or basilar (of the bottom): Teamm8 gluteal delights. Three samples from the current catalogue:

(#2)

The gray marle short, bottom view

(#3)

A Sprint Brief in green, basilar shot

(#4)

An Animal Instinct Brief in tiger, rear view

Basil the Base, at bottom a good guy.

From two different sources, trips back to the ’70s and ’80s and the expression of gay identities through dress. From my correspondent RJP, a link to a Tumblr site celebrating Hal Fischer’s Gay Semiotics: A Photographic Study of Visual Coding Among Homosexual Men, 1977; and from Daniel MacKay on Facebook, a link to an Advocate magazine site on “The Men, Mustaches, and Memories of Jim Wigler (101 Photos)” by Christopher Harrity. Then there’s the Levine/Kimmel book Gay Macho: The Life and Death of the Homosexual Clone, exploring the Age of High Gay in the ’70s and ’80s:

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Three photos from Fisher’s Gay Semiotics:

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That’s Basic Gay, Jock, and Leather. Other Street Fashion photos: Forties Trash, Hippie, Uniform.

Harrity’s Jim Wigler site focuses on the Leather category. Three of Wigler’s photos:

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Men from the San Francisco leather/bdsm subculture from the ’80s on.

Background from the 1998 Levine book (edited and with a introduction by Kimmel: the back cover text, with some additions by me:

Before gay liberation, gay men were usually perceived [in the larger culture] as failed men – “inverts”, men trapped in women’s bodies [and gay men often offered “swish” presentations of self]. The 1970s saw a radical shift in gay male culture, as a male homosexuality emerged that embraced a more traditional masculine ethos. The gay “clone”, a muscle-bound, sexually free, hard-living Marlboro man, appeared in the gay enclaves of major cities, changing forever the face of gay male culture. Gay Macho presents the ethnography of this homosexual clone. Martin P. Levine, a pioneer of the sociological study of homosexuality, was among the first social scientists to map the emergence of a gay community and this new style of gay masculinity. Levine was a participant in as well as an observer of gay culture in the 1970s, and this perspective allowed him to capture the true flavor of what it was like to be a gay man before AIDS. Later chapters, based on Levine’s pathbreaking empirical research, explore some of the epidemiological and social consequences of the AIDS epidemic on this particular substratum of the gay community. Although Levine explicitly rejects pathologizing the gay men afflicted with HIV, his work develops a scathing, feminist-inspired critique of masculinity, whether practiced by gay men or straight men.

A corrective: though swishy types were long the main way gay men were presented in popular culture, among gay men themselves, there was a tradition of high-masculinity presentations of the objects of gay desire, in beefcake magazines. From Wikipedia:

Beefcake magazines were magazines published in North America in the 1930s to 1960s that featured photographs of attractive, muscular young men in athletic poses. While their primary market was gay men, until the 1960s, they were typically presented as being magazines dedicated to encouraging fitness and health: the models were often shown demonstrating exercises.

Because of the conservative and homophobic social culture of the era, and because of censorship laws, gay pornography could not be sold openly. Gay men turned to beefcake magazines, which could be sold in newspaper stands, book stores and pharmacies.

… In December 1945, gay pornography pioneer Bob Mizer founded Athletic Model Guild, or AMG. Mizer’s AMG produced Physique Pictorial, the first all-nude and all-male magazine, and the film Beefcake documents his work and the growth of the Beefcake magazine industry. H. Lynn Womack published magazines such as Manorama, MANual, Fizeek, and Trim and was involved in the U.S. Supreme Court case MANual Enterprises v. Day (1962). From 1964 to 1967, Clark Polak published DRUM magazine.

In the 1960s, the pretense of being about exercise and fitness was dropped as controls on pornography were reduced. By the end of the decade gay pornography became legal, and the market for beefcake magazines collapsed.

This was the subculture in which Tom of Finland developed. When gay macho went mainline in the 1970s, ToF became one of its icons.

Harrity enthusing about Wigler’s photography, as in #5:

Photographer Jim Wigler is a treasure. He was born in Detroit, and as soon as he was able he headed to New York City to begin his photo career with the Nikon his father had bought him.

His New York adventures included a big early photo shoot with Leonard Cohen and a torrid drug- and liquor-fueled affair with a New York City beat cop, Paul Borter.

When that fell apart, Jim beat a hasty retreat to San Francisco just in time to spin out of control completely in 1979.

Then, happily, recovery happened early in 1980. Along with his newfound sobriety, he rekindled his affair with photography, learning everything from scratch sober. He began shooting for all the gay sex magazines there — Drummer, Bear Magazine (Brush Creek Media), Honcho, and many more. His knowledge of the leather scene in San Francisco from the ’80s on is astounding.

… The collection of images here is from his massive Tumblr archive. The images are both sexy and moving. Many of the men are no longer alive, due to both AIDS and old age. What began as sexy photo shoots has become, over the years, a soulful archve of a time both magical and tragic.

You can watch the slideshow on the Advocate site; and Wigler is still at work, with his own Tumblr site here.

It started with my observing to a friend that a container in which a blue cheese had been stored can be used to start “blu(e)ing” any cheese, citing the blue cheddar I had recently created in my refrigerator. And then this friend went off to buy some cheese for me, and came across some blue jack, a blue version of Monterey Jack. Jack is a mild cheese that has the virtue of being sliceable, and sliceable blue cheeses aren’t easy to come by (most blue cheeses crumble or shatter), so blue jack could be a good find. And so it was:

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From the Boar’s Head site effusive ad copy:

Inspired by the rich tradition of European bleu cheese, just the aroma of Boar’s Head Bold_® MarBleu_™ Marbled Blue Monterey Jack Cheese will send your senses on a flavor voyage. This masterfully blended cheese delivers a creamy yet distinctive bleu flavor that can be sliced without crumbling.

It is, in fact, subtly blue, and goes well in a sandwich with sliced roast beef.

I was then moved to think about possible interpretations of blue jack, considering first semantically transparent combinations of blue and jack, for various senses of each of these:

adj. blue: (a) blue in color; (b) depressed; (c) characterized by sexual or obscene language

noun jack: (a) a device for lifting heavy objects; (b) a particular playing card, the lowest of the face cards; (c) short for (a) hijack; (d) short for (a) jack-off ‘an instance of masturbation’; (d) short for (a) jackrabbit

No doubt there are more relevant senses (well, there’s blue ‘with the Penicillium mold added’ and jack, short for (Monterey) jack cheese). Not all combinations are sensical, but some are entertaining; I’m especially fond of blue jack ‘a masturbation accompanied by dirty talk’ and blue jack ‘a depressed jackrabbit’.

Then there’s a collection of fixed expressions, idiomatic to one degree or another, starting with a fish blue jack, aka coho (salmon). Dictionary.com (from Random House):

coho salmon: a small salmon, Oncorhynchus kisutch, of the North Pacific coasts and also in the Great Lakes, where it was introduced: important as agame and food fish.

Also called blue jack, cohoe salmon, coho, cohoe, silver salmon.

1865-70; earlier cohose (construed as plural) < Halkomelem (mainland dial.) k̉ ^wə́x ^wəθ

From Wikipedia:

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Blue jack in its ocean phrase

During their ocean phase, coho salmon have silver sides and dark-blue backs. During their spawning phase, their jaws and teeth become hooked. After entering fresh water, they develop bright-red sides, bluish-green heads and backs, dark bellies and dark spots on their backs. Sexually maturing fish develop a light-pink or rose shading along the belly, and the males may show a slight arching of the back. Mature adults have a pronounced red skin color with darker backs and average 28 inches and 7 to 11 pounds, occasionally reaching up to 36 pounds. They also develop a large kype (hooked beak) during spawning.

Then another fish, the aquarium fish the Electric Blue Jack Dempsey, Nandopsis octofasciatum, an aggressive carnivore. From the LiveAquaria site:

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We’re pleased to offer the Electric Blue Jack Demsey, an uncommon but natural variant of Nandopsis octofasciatum. Adorned in brilliant blue, this showcase cichlid is typically smaller and reported to be less aggressive than its popular counterpart.

The Electric Blue Jack Dempsey is a freshwater fish that originates in the murky warm waters of Central America. It has a base color of electric blue to gray, and displays many iridescent blue and green spots, giving this fish a spectacular look. When breeding, these colors will intensify.

By now, you will have seen that Electric Blue Jack Demsey doesn’t actually have the expression blue jack in it, since it’s parsed

[ electric blue ] [ Jack Dempsey ]

From NOAD2:

noun electric blue: a steely or brilliant light blue: the pot is decorated with circles of electric blue | an electric-blue sports car.

And from Wikipedia:

The Jack Dempsey (Rocio octofasciata) is a species of cichlid that is widely distributed across North and Central America (from Mexico south to Honduras). Its common name refers to its aggressive nature and strong facial features, likened to that of the famous 1920s boxer Jack Dempsey.

Then something of a mystery, the Bluejack National. From the company site:

Bluejack National is a private club and resort-style community located on 755-acres of rolling hills in Montgomery, Texas. Bluejack, which features the only Tiger Woods-designed golf course and short course in the United States, is limited to 400 residences and 550 memberships.

I haven’t found anything that explains the name. It might possibly have been intended to evoke the sport fish and bluejack as a shortening  of bluejacket in one of the regional, Native American, or military senses I’ll mention below.

Then from the allbud site on medical marijuana:

Hybrid – 50% Sativa /50% Indica: Blue Jack is one of the most commonly used strains that offers smokers a sense of newness; its strong citrus like scent calms the nerves and evokes the feeling of serenity. The strain is also known as blueberry jack, but in recent years, it has taken the name of ‘Blue Jack.’ The immediate effects of the strain include euphoria, happiness, laziness, sleepiness and uplifted mood.

And from (among other sites) Urban Dictionary on the verb bluejack:

to send a message, ringtone, image or file via Bluetooth to someone’s mobile phone who you don’t know. – by Gunter 11/4/03

(a portmanteau, Bluetooth + hijack).

Now, to Bluejacket or Blue Jacket in a variety of senses, many of which can be abbreviated to bluejack or blue jack. A summary from Wikipedia:

People

A term for an enlisted sailor in the United States or Royal Navy

Blue Jacket (1745–1810), Shawnee war chief known for his defense of Shawnee lands in the Ohio Country

Charles Blue Jacket (1817–1897), 19th century Shawnee chief in Kansas, and Methodist Minister

Jim Bluejacket (1887–1947), one of the first Native Americans to play in major league baseball

Jimmy Smith (baseball) (1895–1974), major league infielder often referred to as Bluejacket

Geographic

Bluejacket, Oklahoma [named for its first postmaster, the Rev. Charles Bluejacket, one-time chief of the Shawnee and grandson of noted leader Blue Jacket]

Blue Jacket Creek, a stream in Ohio

the original 1777 settlement at the site of today’s Bellefontaine, Ohio

Ships

Blue Jacket (clipper), an 1854 clipper ship in the Liverpool and Australia trade

USS Blue Jacket, the name of several U.S. Navy ships

Other

The Bluejacket’s Manual, the basic handbook for U.S. Navy personnel

The Bluejackets, a 1922 Dutch film

Columbus Blue Jackets, a professional ice hockey team in the NHL based in Columbus, Ohio [The Blue Jackets’ name and logos are inspired by Ohio’s Civil War history.]

Fleet City Bluejackets, a World War II American military football team that won the 1945 service national championship

Tradescantia ohiensis, a plant known by the common name “bluejacket”

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Tradescantia ohiensis (which grew wild in my Columbus garden)

To which I add:

blue jacket: part of the uniform of Union soldiers in US Civil War; hence, such a soldier

A display of Yankee blue (with Civil War re-enactors):

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A Zwicky family photo (from 1945 or ’46) showing Bertha and Melchior Zwicky (my Swiss grandparents), their five children, four of the five spouses (only my uncle Theodore Severin is missing from the photo shoot), and ten of their twelve grand-children (only my cousin Ted Severin is missing from the photo shoot; his sister Eleanor was yet to be born):

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The family

Bertha and Melchior

The five children and their children (order in the cousin set given by the boldface number following the name:

1: Fred (Frederick) 1904 (wife Lucille)

— 1: Fred 1 10/12/30; 2: Eleanor 5 5/19/38 (Justice); 3: Henry 9 1/26/43

2: Bertha 1906 (husband Theodore Severin)

– 1: Wilma 2 4/14/33; 2: Ted (Theodore) 4 1/10/35; 3: Eleanor 12 8/4/49 (Houck)

3: Walter 1909 (wife Miriam)

— 1: Lynda 8 12/7/41 (Hood); 2: David 10 10/25/43

4: Lillian 1911 (husband Al (Alfred) Coleman)

— 1: Don (Donald) 3 9/20/34; 2: Bob (Robert) 6 12/24/38; 3: Ken (Kenneth) 11 9/25/45

5: Arnold 1914 (wife Marty (Marcella))

— 1: Arnold Jr. 7 9/6/40

The cousin set, in chronological order:

1 = 1.1 Fred 10/12/30

2 = 2.1 Wilma 4/14/33

3 = 4.1 Don 9/20/34

4 = 2.2 Ted 1/10/35

5 = 1.2 Eleanor 5/19/38

6 = 4.2 Bob 12/24/38

7 = 5.1 Arnold Jr. 9/6/40

8 = 3.1 Lynda 12/7/41

9 = 1.3 Henry 1/26/42

10 = 3.2 David 10/25/43

11 = 4.3 Ken 9/25/45

12 = 2.3 Eleanor 8/4/49

The family in the photo:

the older generations, left to right: Al, Lillian; Arnold, Marty; Walter, Miriam; gm Bertha, gf Melchior; Lucille, Fred; Bertha (six women, all mothers)

kids in picture, left to right: Ken 11 (in Al’s arms), Don 3, Bob 6, Arnold Jr.7, David 10, Lynda 8, Fred 1 (in back), Henry 9, Eleanor 5, Wilma 2

missing: uncle Theodore and cousin Ted 4 (and of course cousin Eleanor 12)

Notes: (a) none of us kids, with the possible exception of Lynda, is making an attempt at smiling for the camera; (b) cousin Fred 1, at (roughly) 16, was already taller than his father and about as tall as his uncles Walter and Arnold; (c) the little boys (me, David, Henry) are all in short pants, the older boys (young men) in long pants. (This was then the custom, which hangs on in expressions like, “I started my first software company when you were still in short pants, kid!”)

Given baby Ken in my uncle Al’s arms, the photo would seem to have been taken (on a warm day) between the fall of 1945 and the spring of 1946, probably the former.

Bonus photo: two mothers — my mother and grandmother — plus me and my grandfather:

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My mother is wearing a fancy hat, as was the custom of American women in the 1930s and ’40s. I can’t recall my grandmother Zwicky ever wearing a hat.

(Plain talk about men’s bodies and sexual practices, so use your judgment.)

Thanks to Greg Parkinson for a link to this John Crisvitello t-shirt:

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The slogan is a send-up of the odious BROS BEFORE HOS, preserving only the rhyming, the street language, and a message about balancing allegiances. My reading of the slogan is that it calls for gay men to generally value bonds to other gay men — fags stand with fags — over the sorts of allegiances expressed in flags: nationality, regional identity, religion, race and ethnicity, political affiliation, etc.

Earlier on this blog, a 3/27/17 posting about (among other things) Michael Kimmel on the slogan  “Bros Before Hos”:

the basic rules of masculinity … have scarcely changed at all for many decades; the first rule is that “masculinity is the relentless repudiation of the feminine”

“Fags Before Flags” is, in contrast, a call for solidarity and tolerance.

Crisvitello’s studio offers a variety of outrageous t-shirts, including several that aren’t WordPressable because of their high phallicity. Three of these are now viewable in a posting on AZBlogX, “Cocktees”. The studio’s descriptions for them:

#1 What do you get when you cross 70’s uncut Tony Danza goodness with punk troll Danzig / DANZAIG !!!!!!!!

#2 Raising Cock Holster Awareness since May 2017

#3 Wish You Were Here [an invitation to being bukkake’d]

In #1 we see a naked cross between actor Tony Danza and punk rocker Glenn Danzig, featuring the composite Danzaig’s cock. On Danzig, from Wikipedia:

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Glenn Danzig (born Glenn Allen Anzalone, June 23, 1955) is an American singer, songwriter and musician from Lodi, New Jersey. He is the founder of the bands Misfits, Samhain, and Danzig. He owns the Evilive record label as well as Verotik, an adult-oriented comic book publishing company.

Having begun in the mid-1970s, Danzig’s musical career has encompassed a number of genres through the years, including punk rock, heavy metal, industrial, blues and classical music. He has also written songs for other musicians, most notably Johnny Cash and Roy Orbison.

Danzig has made a career out of acting and talking outrageously, so the idea of a hybrid between his persona and Tony Danza’s genial, playful persona is intrinsically comical.

#2 comes right from the headlines, by way of the May 1st episode of CBS’s Late Show With Stephen Colbert, in which Colbert ripped into POTUS and declared, “The only thing your mouth is good for is being Vladimir Putin’s cock holster” — using the compound cock holster ‘mouth (esp. for the purpose of fellatio)’. You can watch the passage here, but note that the YouTube video bleeps the word cock.

Meanwhile, the t-shirt in #2 shows a sizable (simulacrum of an) erect cock jutting out of a gun holster, rather than ramming into it, so that the fellatial interpretation is obscured. Well, art is hard.

Finally, the tank top in #3 has a line drawing of six erect cocks pointed into the central space, which has “wish you were here” in it: we want to shoot our loads on you, bukkake-boy..

(Men’s underwear, but nothing hard-core.)

The Daily Jocks ad from the 9th, featuring the Marco Marco brand, with my caption:

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Maximum Marco in boxer briefs.
Middle Marco in briefs.
Minimal Marco in almost nothing,
Beyond the pecs, the abs, and the thighs,
Nothing like one another, but they’re
Totally tight —
All three for Subcomandante Marcos, the
Subcomandante for all of them.

Four things here: the Marco Marco firm, which is trés gai; the play on All for one and one for all (most famously alluding to the motto of the Three Musketeers)); the play on Marcos the plural of the personal name Marco vs. the surname Marcos; and the reference to the Zapatista leader Subcomandante Marcos. Plus a whiff of an allusion to Goldilocks and the Three Bears (Marco Midi is just right). And of course the differences in the three men’s body types.

Marco Marco. A 3/3/17 posting has a section on the Marco brand and L.A. designer Marco Morante (who designs over-the-top stuff for women, drag queens, hot gay men, whatever), where I noted, cautiously, that “Many of his underwear models read as gay”.

One all, all one. Or the reverse. And, yes, a Swiss connection! (Swissies are everywhere.) From Wikipedia:

Unus pro omnibus, omnes pro uno is a [chiastic] Latin phrase that means “One for all, all for one” in English.

… Switzerland [which is a federation] has no official motto defined in its constitution or legislative documents. The phrase, in its German (Einer für alle, alle für einen), French (un pour tous, tous pour un), Italian (Uno per tutti, tutti per uno) and Romansh (In per tuts, tuts per in) versions, came into widespread use in the 19th century.

… One for all, and all for one (Un pour tous, tous pour un; also inverted to All for one, and one for all) is a motto traditionally associated with the titular heroes of the novel The Three Musketeers written by Alexandre Dumas père, first published in 1844.

The three Marcos probably aren’t Swiss, but they are presented as a trio,

The Zapata connection.Instead of going to Marco Polo, I decided to go for someone a bit rougher (ok, and more obscure, at least to most Americans). From Wikipedia:

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Subcomandante Marcos was the nom de guerre used by Rafael Sebastián Guillén Vicente (born June 19, 1957) who was the leader and primary spokesman of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) during the Chiapas conflict. Marcos has used several other pseudonyms; he referred to himself as Delegate Zero during the 2006 Mexican Presidential Campaign, and in May 2014 announced that Subcommandante Marcos “no longer exists,” adopting the name Subcomandante Galeano instead.

Born in Tampico, Tamaulipas, Marcos earned a degree in sociology and a master’s degree in philosophy from National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), and taught at the Autonomous Metropolitan University (UAM) for several years during the early 1980s. During these years, he became increasingly involved with a guerrilla group known as the National Liberation Forces (FLN), before leaving the university and moving to Chiapas in 1984.

The EZLN was founded in the Lacandon Jungle in 1983, initially functioning as a self-defense unit that was dedicated to protecting Chiapas’ Mayan people from evictions and encroachment on their land. While not Mayan himself, Marcos emerged as the groups leader, and when the EZLN – often referred to as Zapatistas – began their rebellion in January 1, 1994, Marcos served as the Zapatistas’ spokesman.

Known for his trademark ski mask and pipe, and for his charismatic personality, Marcos led the EZLN during the 1994 revolt and the subsequent peace negotiations, during a counter-offensive by the Mexican Army in 1995, and throughout the decades that followed.

Body types and personas. Using several models in a single ad is a way to appeal to a wide variety of potential customers: each customer wants to be that guy in the ad, and he want to do that guy, and he’s also got his own tastes in men. So the company supplies its own brand of guy in almost all of its models — for Marco Marco, the guys have those pecs, amazing abs, sturdy thighs — but then each model is as distinct from the others as possible. Marco Maxi is compact and lean, “ethnic”, with black hair, a mustache, and a light beard; the others are clean-shaven and have blond to brown hair, with bigger bodies than Maxi.

But Midi and Mini have very different hair styles, and very different torsos, though they’re about the same height: Mini has an extraordinarily long torso (from the shoulders to the hipbones), much longer than Midi’s. And Mini has a bunch of tattoos and wears glasses.

A type for them all, each one a type of his own.

Three cartoons in today’s feed: a Bizarro with a talking dog; a One Big Happy with a slice that OMG might grow into a pizza; and a Zippy riff on Farley Granger and They Live by Night:

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(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)

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Annals of animal communication. #1 is a goofy variant on Wittgenstein’s “If a lion could speak, we could not understand him” (Philosophical Investigations, p.223). Well, you could teach a dog to talk, but then you’d have to live with the dog’s preoccupations, like smelling things; signing chimpanzees were, after all, largely fixated on bananas,

The dangers of a slice. Two things about #2: Ruthie thinks of pizzas as living things, the fruits of the pizza tree (an idea that she combines with a childish fear of swallowing seeds — a bit of childlore that, in my own experience, centered mostly on watermelon seeds, which you were never ever to swallow); and the lexical item slice (in pepperoni slice).

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(postcard from Zazzle)

From NOAD2 on the noun slice:

a thin, broad piece of food, such as bread, meat, or cake, cut from a larger portion: four slices of bread | potato slices; a single serving of pizza, typically one eighth of a pie: every payday we’d meet at Vinnie’s for a beer and a couple of slices.

The NP a slice, standing on its own, is then understood either as ‘a slice of (something)’, where the whole that the slice is part of is supplied by context; or specifically as ‘a slice of pizza’, even when there’s no pizza in the context — as in the NOAD2 example above, or in I really could go for a slice right now.

On the lam with Farley Granger. The title of #3, “Grangers on the Brain”, is an elaborate pun on the title of one of Farley Granger’s most famous films, “Strangers on a Train” (1951); on the movie, see my 12/31/15 posting “Zippy’s Eve”. From the Wikipedia article:

The film has … been the inspiration for … film and television projects with similar themes of criss-cross murder, often treated comically. [with a long list]

On Granger, from Wikipedia:

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FG posing in a swimsuit

Farley Earle Granger Jr. (July 1, 1925 [in San Jose CA] – March 27, 2011) was an American actor, best known for his two collaborations with director Alfred Hitchcock; Rope in 1948 and Strangers on a Train in 1951.

Granger was first noticed in a small stage production in Hollywood by a Goldwyn casting director, and given a significant role in The North Star, a controversial film praising the Soviet Union at the height of World War II, but later condemned for its political bias. Another war film, The Purple Heart, followed, before Granger’s naval service in Honolulu, in a unit that arranged troop entertainment in the Pacific. Here he made useful contacts, including Bob Hope, Betty Grable and Rita Hayworth. It was also where he began exploring his bisexuality, which he said he never felt any need to conceal.

His bisexuality (manifested in a number of affairs with famous people of both sexes), was covered in juicy detail in his autobiography, written with “his longtime romantic partner Robert Calhoun” (from the NYT obituary, discussed in my 3/31/11 posting “partners”):

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The 1948 film They Live by Night came between The Purple Heart and Rope. From Wikipedia:

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They Live by Night is a 1948 American film noir, based on Edward Anderson’s Depression era novel Thieves Like Us. The film was directed by Nicholas Ray (his first feature film) and starred Farley Granger as “Bowie” Bowers and Cathy O’Donnell as “Keechie” Mobley.

The movie is the prototype for the “couple on the run” genre, and is generally seen as the forerunner to the movie Bonnie and Clyde. Robert Altman directed a version using the original title of the novel, Thieves Like Us (1974).

(Not much about language. Warning: eventually there will be hunky young men wearing virtually nothing.)

As part of the run-in to Pride Month, the Out Magazine June-July issue has a page on clothes for the occasion:

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I’m not aesthetically moved by most of these, though I do like the Levi’s socks; and at $15 a pair they’re the closest thing there is to an affordable item in the set. Second on the economic front ($28 a pair) is the Mack Weldon underwear — but you’re probably wondering what black trunks are doing in a display of Pridewear. Seems they’re a stand-in for a line of underwear in hot rainbow colors, one color per skivvy. (There’s a Page on this blog on rainbow underwear, if you’d like to explore a more conventional approach.)

Here’s an ad for the Mack Weldon line:

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With extravagant winking ad copy (including boys for testicles):

This Mack Weldon Pride Pack ($135) is equipped with Mack Weldon styles in colors that make up the pride flag: a Red Heather boxer brief, a Tyrian Purple boxer brief, a Lemon Yellow trunk, a Nectarine Orange trunk, an Army Green brief, and a Cendre [Fr. ‘cinder, ash’; cf. Cendrillon ‘Cinderella’] Blue brief.

The boxer briefs, trunks, and briefs used for the Mack Weldon Pride Pack are made up of the Mack Weldon styles that are created from the ultra-soft 18 Hour Jersey. This pack will not only benefit the Human Rights Campaign, but it will also greatly benefit your package. Your boys will be resting in such a comfortable way – the way a man’s best friend deserves to be treated. And that is definitely something to feel prideful about during this Pride season! (link to Underwear Expert)

Here’s the Underwear Expert’s assemblage of six models in rainbow underwear, one color per man (from various designers):

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If that isn’t minimal enough for you, here’s another set of models making a thongbow — a rainbow in things:

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After this, we’d go to a set of cocksocks in rainbow colors — yes, such things exist — and that would have to go on AZBlogX.

Collecting material for Tuesday’s gay-interest posting on Farley Granger led me to Arthur Laurents (who I wrote a bit about on the occasion of his death in 2011). Yesterday’s posting in this run-up to Pride Month switched to rainbow clothing. Today I’m back to accomplished LGBT people, with a brief posting on Laurents.

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Laurents in 1984

From Wikipedia:

Arthur Laurents [né Levine] (July 14, 1917 – May 5, 2011) was an American playwright, stage director and screenwriter.

After writing scripts for radio shows after college and then training films for the U.S. Army during World War II, Laurents turned to writing for Broadway, producing a body of work that includes West Side Story (1957), Gypsy (1959), and Hallelujah, Baby! (1967), and directing some of his own shows and other Broadway productions.

His early film scripts include Rope (1948) for Alfred Hitchcock, followed by Anastasia (1956), Bonjour Tristesse (1958), The Way We Were (1973), and The Turning Point (1977).

… Laurents wrote Original Story By Arthur Laurents: A Memoir of Broadway and Hollywood, published in 2000. In it, he discusses his lengthy career and his many gay affairs and long-term relationships, including those with Farley Granger and Tom Hatcher. Hatcher was an aspiring actor whom Gore Vidal suggested Laurents seek out at the Beverly Hills men’s clothing store Hatcher was managing at the time. The couple remained together for 52 years until Hatcher’s death on October 26, 2006.

The book:

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Hatcher and Laurents as gorgeous young men

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Laurents (at age 90) with Patti LuPone in 2007, for the revival of Gypsy:

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