Who drags Ashton Kutcher along with him. Since I have my shallow moments, there will also be shirtless photos, of Grace, of young Kutcher, and of more recent Kutcher. But first, about the actors and the tv show that made them famous.

Start with the show.

From Wikipedia:

That ’70s Show is an American television period sitcom that originally aired on Fox from August 23, 1998, to May 18, 2006. The series focused on the lives of a group of teenage friends living in the fictional suburban town of Point Place, Wisconsin, from May 17, 1976, to December 31, 1979.

The main teenage cast members were Topher Grace, Mila Kunis, Ashton Kutcher, Danny Masterson, Laura Prepon and Wilmer Valderrama. The main adult cast members were Debra Jo Rupp, Kurtwood Smith, Don Stark, Tommy Chong and Tanya Roberts.

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The teen actors, left to right: back row Prepon, Grace, Kunis, Masterson; front row Kutcher, Valderrama

… The show addressed social issues of the 1970s such as sexism, sexual attitudes, generational conflict, the economic hardships of the 1970s recession, mistrust of the American government by blue-collar workers and teenage drug use, including underage drinking. The series also highlighted developments in the entertainment industry, including the television remote (“the clicker”), the video game Pong, MAD magazine, and Eric’s obsession with Star Wars. The show has been compared to Happy Days, which was similarly set 20 years before the time in which it aired.

… Topher Grace as Eric Forman …: Eric is a nice guy, generally geeky, physically slight and somewhat clumsy. He is a smart-aleck with a fast wit and a deadpan sense of humor. He convinces his parents to let his best friend Steven Hyde move in with them, making Hyde like a brother. His father Red is always hard on him. Eric is in a relationship with his longtime love and neighbor Donna Pinciotti [played by Laura Prepon — mentioned in a 2/14/14 posting on this blog — as a strong, steady character].

… Ashton Kutcher as Michael Kelso (seasons 1–7; recurring, season 8): The dim-witted [and goofy] pretty boy of the group wants to coast through life on his good looks. Often referred to as “The King” in many episodes, he spends the first half of the series in a relationship with the equally vapid Jackie [Burkhart, played by Mila Kunis], but their relationship comes to an end when Laurie (Eric’s older sister) reveals their affair. His best friends are Hyde [the rebel of the set, played by Danny Masterson] and Fez (a foreign exchange student, played by Wilmer Valderrama].

On to Grace. In a screen shot from the show:

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From Wikipedia:

Christopher John “Topher” Grace (… born July 12, 1978) is an American actor. He is known for his portrayal of Eric Forman on the Fox sitcom That ’70s Show, Eddie Brock/Venom in the Sam Raimi film Spider-Man 3, Carter Duryea in the film In Good Company and Edwin in the 2010 film Predators.

(The usual nickname for Christopher is Chris, but Topher is another possibility.)

Then Grace being pleasantly shirtless:

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No fully clothed photos of Kutcher here; you can find them everywhere. But about the man, from Wikipedia:

Christopher Ashton Kutcher (… born February 7, 1978) is an American actor and investor. Kutcher began his career as a model and began his acting career portraying Michael Kelso in the Fox sitcom That ’70s Show, which aired for eight seasons. He made his film debut in the romantic comedy Coming Soon and became known by audiences in the comedy film Dude, Where’s My Car?

… Kutcher subsequently appeared in [many] romantic comedies [and some sitcoms] … and portrayed Steve Jobs in the biographical film Jobs

He continued to specialize in comedies, but also expanded the range of his acting. And also altered himself physically. AK as a young man, modelling for Calvin Klein and displaying his (then) lean and lanky body:

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And then more recently, displaying Buff Ashton

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For me, the main news from the Academy Awards last night was the triumph of the movie Moonlight, an innovative masterpiece that succeeded despite a tiny budget and a story situated amost entirely in a black world, with a central character who’s a (suppressed) gay man, and featuring a cast of mostly sympathetic, indeed moving, characters located in a rich socal context that is, however, unflinchingly shown as involving illegal drugs, jail time, and occasionally erupting frightening violence (along with friendship, affection, and a system of social support that operates in a subculture almost entirely out of sight of mainstream culture).

I should add that the nominees for the various awards included a large number of really excellent films: the best picture nominees had three fine powerfully black-themed movies (Moonlight, Fences, Hidden Figures), the language-themed movie Arrival, and the frothy, celebratory (but apparently rather conventional) musical La La Land.

I’ll say more about Moonlight (which I wrote an enthusiastic appreciation of here back on 11/24/16) at the Academy Awards in a moment, but as a lead-in to this morning’s Moonlight news, about a Calvin Klein photo shoot celebrating the company’s signing Moonlight stars Mahershala Ali and Trevante Rhodes as — whew! — underwear models. (By the way, both of these men give great interview.)

The Oscar news: Mahershala Ali won for best supporting actor and became the first Muslim actor to ever win an Oscar (Ali grew up in Oakland CA and converted to Islam as a teenager); it’s the first movie with LGBTQ characters at its center to ever win the best picture award; it also won the award for best writing (adapted screenplay) for Barry Jenkins; and it was nominated for five other Academy Awards, including best supporting actress for Naomie Harris, best director for Barry Jenkins, best original music score for Nicholas Britell and best cinematography for James Laxton. (My earlier posting commented some on the score and cinematography, both of which blew me away.)

On to this morning’s CK news, reported in lots of places. From the Racked website, “Calvin Klein’s New Underwear Ad Stars? The Cast of ‘Moonlight’” by Eliza Brooke:

Calvin Klein’s new creative team couldn’t have planned it better if they’d tried. Hot off Mahershala Ali’s Best Supporting Actor Oscar win for Moonlight — and even more notably, Moonlight’s surprise Best Picture win after La La Land was mistakenly announced as the victor — a new underwear ad emerged on Monday morning featuring the film’s [male] stars: Ali, Alex Hibbert [now 12 years old], Trevante Rhodes, and Ashton Sanders [now 21 years old].

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Mahershala Ali head shot, lovingly photographed by the CK studio

While the timing is perfect, this casting isn’t a total surprise. Calvin Klein dressed Hibbert, Rhodes, and Sanders for the Academy Awards (Ali wore Zegna), and the New York Times’ Vanessa Friedman pointed out on Twitter that a number of the actors attended the all-American brand’s runway show earlier this month.

The expressive black-and-white portraits are among the first advertising images we’ve seen from Calvin Klein chief creative officer Raf Simons and creative director Pieter Mulier, who were jointly appointed to these roles in early August. The team’s first campaign emerged in the lead-up to New York Fashion Week, and from its heavy use of abstract paintings and gangly models, it was clear that Simons and Mulier were seeking a more elevated, artistic way of selling branded briefs than casting Justin Bieber and Kendall Jenner.

Ali in an underwear shot, and Rhodes in an especially steamy underwear shot:

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Ali plays a supporting character in the first third of the movie, Rhodes the central character Chiron (as an adult) in the third part. Then there are the kids: Hibbert, playing the child Chiron in the first part, and Sanders, playing the teenage Chiron in the second, here from CK:

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A non-sexual photo of Rhodes, on the cover of the March 2017 Out magazine (which has an interview with the actor):

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Now, to respond to people who wonder why they might want to watch a film entirely about a black faggot in dysfunctional, drug-addled ghettoes (look back at my first paragraph above), I’m going to quote, in its entirety, the piece by Hilton Als in the 10/24/16 New Yorker, ““Moonlight” Undoes Our Expectations: By avoiding the overblown clichés so often used to represent black American life in film, Barry Jenkins has created something achingly alive” — the review that convinced me this was a movie I really wanted to see (I’ve now seen it twice, and will buy the DVD when it comes out); not surprisingly, Als’s reviews and my shorter appreciation are largely complementary):

Did I ever imagine, during my anxious, closeted childhood, that I’d live long enough to see a movie like “Moonlight,” Barry Jenkins’s brilliant, achingly alive new work about black queerness? Did any gay man who came of age, as I did, in the era of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and aids, think he’d survive to see a version of his life told onscreen with such knowledge, unpredictability, and grace? Based on a story by the gay black playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney — Jenkins himself is not gay — the film is virtuosic in part because of Jenkins’s eye and in part because of the tale it tells, which begins in nineteen-eighties Miami.

Four white Miami-Dade police officers have beaten a young black man to death and been acquitted of manslaughter, setting off riots in the city’s black enclaves — Liberty City, Overtown, and elsewhere. It’s hard for a man of color walking those sun-bleached streets not to watch his back or feel that his days are numbered. That’s how Juan (the beautiful Mahershala Ali) carries himself — defensively, warily. He’s a dope dealer, so there’s that, too. He may be a boss on the streets — his black do-rag is his crown — but he’s intelligent enough to know that he’s expendable, that real power doesn’t belong to men like him. Crack is spreading through the city like a fever. Stepping out of his car, Juan asks a cranky drug runner what’s up. (Jenkins and his ardent cinematographer, James Laxton, film the car as if it were a kind of enclosed throne.) Juan, his mouth fixed in a pout — sometimes he sucks on his tongue, as if it were a pacifier — doesn’t take his eyes off the street. He can’t afford to; this situation, any situation, could be changed in an instant by a gun or a knife.

In this world, which is framed by the violence to come — because it will come — Juan sees a skinny kid running, his backpack flapping behind him. He’s being pursued by a group of boys, and he ducks into a condemned building to escape. Juan follows, entering through a blasted-out window, a symbol, perhaps, of the ruin left by the riots. Inside, in a dark, silent space, the kid stares at Juan, and Juan stares at the kid. There’s a kind of mirroring going on. Maybe Juan is looking at his past while the boy looks up at a future he didn’t know he could have. It’s a disorienting scene, not so much because of what happens as because of what doesn’t happen. Throughout the movie, Jenkins avoids what I call Negro hyperbole — the overblown clichés that are so often used to represent black American life. For instance, Juan doesn’t take that runaway kid under his wing in order to pimp him out and turn him into a drug runner; instead, he brings him home to feed him, nourish him.

Juan lives in a small, unassuming house with his soft-spoken but confident partner, Teresa (played by the singer Janelle Monáe). The couple look on as the kid eats and eats; it’s clear, though, that he’s hungry for more than food. The boy doesn’t even say his name, Chiron, until Juan nudges him: “You don’t talk much but you damn sure can eat.” The affectionate scolding makes Chiron (Alex Hibbert, a first-time actor, who couldn’t be better) sit up and take notice; it tells him that he counts. And he knows he counts even more when Juan calls him by his nickname — Little — as a way of claiming him.

“Faggot” is another name, and it’s one that Chiron hears often as he grows up. He’s an outsider at school, and at home, too. He lives in public housing with his single mother, Paula (Naomie Harris), who goes on drug binges, less to alleviate her sadness than to express her wrath — against the world and, especially, against her son, who she thinks keeps her from the world. Chiron lives for the moments when he can get away from his mother’s countless recriminations and needs, and swim in the unfamiliar waters of love with Juan and Teresa. One indelible scene shows Juan holding Chiron in his arms in a rippling blue ocean, teaching him to float — which is another way of teaching him the letting go that comes with trust, with love.

But, at the end of every outing, Teresa and Juan show their respect by returning Chiron home. No matter how awful Paula is, she is still Chiron’s mother. This gesture is one of many that Jenkins, who, like McCraney, was raised in Liberty City, understands from the inside out. Growing up in this community, Juan and Paula were taught to care for children, their own and others’. (There are no white characters in the film, and this is a radical move on Jenkins’s part. Whites would have introduced a different dynamic to “Moonlight.” Jenkins’s story is about a self-governing black society, no matter how fractured.) But drugs have made a mess of family, or the idea of family, and Paula gets in Juan’s face when he tries to stop her from using. She has a child, sure, but how can he talk when he’s the one selling drugs? It’s a vicious cycle, in which the characters are oppressed by everything but hope. Still, Juan does hope, if only for Chiron. That he is able to pluck that feeling out of the darkness of those Miami nights makes him a classically heroic figure: he knows his limitations, he knows that life is tragic, but he is still willing to dream.

About thirty minutes into the film, Chiron, sitting at Juan and Teresa’s orderly table, asks what a faggot is. At the screening I attended, the entire audience froze, as did the figures onscreen. Then Chiron asks if he himself is a faggot. There’s no music in this scene; no one cries; Juan doesn’t grab a gun and try to blow the slandering universe away. Instead, he takes the word apart, and doesn’t take Chiron apart with it. He knows that Chiron is marked for misery, and how will Juan’s heart bear it, let alone Chiron’s?

“Moonlight” undoes our expectations as viewers, and as human beings, too. As we watch, another movie plays in our minds, real-life footage of the many forms of damage done to black men, which can sometimes lead them to turn that hateful madness on their own kind, passing on the poison that was their inheritance. As Juan squires his fatherless friend about, we can’t help thinking, Will he abuse him? Will it happen now? Jenkins keeps the fear but not the melodrama in his film. He builds his scenes slowly, without trite dialogue or explosions. He respects our intelligence enough to let us just sit still and watch the glorious faces of his characters as they move through time. Scene follows scene with the kind of purposefulness you find in fairy tales, or in those Dickens novels about boys made and unmade by fate.

Jenkins has influences — I would guess that Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Terrence Malick, and Charles Burnett are high on the list, along with Michael Roemer’s 1964 film “Nothing But a Man,” one of the first modern black love stories to avoid buffoonery and improbability — but what really gets him going here is filmmaking itself, and the story he’s telling. Directors such as Marlon Riggs and Isaac Julien explored gay black masculinity in the nineties, but they did so in essay-films, which allowed the audience a kind of built-in distance. Of course, no one in the nineties wanted to finance films about gay black men. Twenty years later, I still don’t know how Jenkins got this flick made. [It turns out that Brad Pitt had a lot to do with it. And to his credit, though Pitt has his name listed as one of the producers, he seems to have deliberately avoided seeking publicitiy for his efforts, preferring to let Jenkins (rightly) get the credit for the work.] But he did. And it changes everything.

The film is divided into three parts, titled “Little,” “Chiron,” and “Black.” In the second part, Chiron (played now by Ashton Sanders) is a teen-ager, thin and walking with the push, resolve, and loneliness of a character for whom Billie Holiday would have given her all in a song. Like any young person, Chiron wants to be claimed bodily but is not entirely in his body. He’s growing up without much reinforcement outside Juan and Teresa’s home. Paula’s drug addiction has escalated and so has her anger. She’s a rotten baby, flailing around, as full of bile as Terrel (Patrick DeCile, in an incredible characterization), who bullies Chiron at school. So when a classmate, Kevin (Jharrel Jerome), shows Chiron something other than hostility, it feels like a kind of fantasy. Indeed, after Kevin jokes with Chiron about a girl, he dreams about Kevin having sex with her. And it’s like a dream one night when Chiron, trusting little but wanting to trust more, approaches Kevin at the beach where Juan taught him to swim.

The light-skinned Kevin has nicknamed Chiron Black, and he asks why, wondering if it’s a put-down. Kevin, who is more comfortable in his own body, says that it’s because Chiron is black; to him, it’s not an insult. This moment of confusion — about internalized self-hatred and the affection of naming — is unlike anything that’s been put onscreen before; it shows what freedom and pain can look like, all in one frame. When the boys kiss, Chiron apologizes for it, and we wince, because who among us hasn’t wanted to apologize for his presence? Intimacy makes the world, the body, feel strange. How does it make a boy who’s been rejected because of his skin color, his sexual interests, and his sensitivity feel? Kevin says, “What have you got to be sorry for?” As he works his hand down Chiron’s shorts, the camera pulls back; this is the only moment of physical intimacy in the film, and Jenkins knows that in this study of black male closeness the point isn’t to show fucking [probably not fucking, but jacking off, or sucking at the most]; it’s to show the stops and starts, the hesitation, and the rush that comes when one black male body finds pleasure and something like liberation in another.

Watching Sanders play Chiron at this stage of his life is rather like seeing Montgomery Clift act for the first time, or Gloria Foster in “Nothing But a Man.” There’s no accounting for talent like this. Sanders has a conjurer’s gifts, and an intuitive understanding of how the camera works — how it can push into an actor’s face and consciousness, and how the actor can push back against the intrusion by inhabiting the reality of the moment.

But the moment of love doesn’t last. When Terrel challenges Kevin about his attachment to Chiron, Kevin beats Chiron up, and then Terrel jumps on him, too. It’s “The Lord of the Flies” all over again: whale on sensitivity before it can get to you. In a bid to protect his dream of love, Chiron shows up at school one day and, wordlessly, breaks a chair over Terrel’s back. It’s every queer kid’s revenge fantasy, but what follows is every queer kid’s reality: fight back, and you’ll pay for it; the power does not belong to you.

In the third part of the film, Chiron (gorgeously played by Trevante Rhodes) is an adult, but still looking after his mother. She’s in rehab in Atlanta, and he has fulfilled his destiny by example: like Juan, he’s a drug dealer in a do-rag. But he doesn’t have a Teresa, doesn’t have anyone. He wears his sensitivity like a shroud around his now muscular body, which looks very black in the moonlight as he lies in bed, startled to have received a phone call from Kevin after many years. Rhodes’s portrayal of the grownup Chiron feels like a natural evolution from the earlier performances. The gold fronts that his Chiron wears are just another form of armor against longing, in a mouth that yearns to taste Kevin’s once again, to relive that forbidden love, for which black men sometimes punish one another. Rarely has the world taught them not to. But at times, when no one’s looking, love happens, just the same.

Notes on things Als doesn’t touch on, from my earlier posting:

if you’re black [in America and many other places] you never forget it, while most white people largely think of their race as insignificant. Someone should look at how Moonlight‘s characters use the noun nigger, and someone should look at their style shifting in their interactions with one another: it’s all African American black vernacular, but it’s by no means all the same.

Having fallen into the world of American politics in viewing the documentary I Am the Ambassador (about Rufus Gifford, until recently the US ambassador to Denmark), I went on to doing the whole 7-year run of the tv series The West Wing, which I am urging everyone to watch at least some of — as a canny depiction of American political life (Wikipedia tells us that it “received acclaim from critics, as well as praise from political science professors and former White House staffers”), as a gripping drama with an earnest moral core, and as a show worthy of praise for its snappy dialogue, inspired casting, and first-rate acting.

This posting is about just two of the actors, Mark Feuerstein and Jimmy Smits (both prominent in season 6 of the series, which I’ve just finished watching), solid members of what I’ve called the “acting corps“, the bank of accomplished and reliable actors (short of first-magnitude star rank) that make the stage, the movies, and television hum for our pleasure and enlightenment. I find them both attractive, as men and as actors — in particular, as embodiments of an “acting persona” (a more or less enduring persona that cuts across an actor’s roles).

Through Smits, that exploration will take us to another member of the acting corps, the admirable Marg Helgenberger. (I know, I know, you also want me to write about Allison Janney and Stockard Channing, among others, but there’s only so much I can do in one posting.)

On acting personas. This is an idea that I have often blogged about in connection with porn flicks, as in these comments on pornstar Kevin Wiles and his

more enduring persona, his “porn persona”, if you will, that cuts across different roles and indeed, helps to determine which roles he’s offered and which ones he’s willing to accept and how he will realize any particular role

(A porn persona is just a special case of an acting persona, of course.)

Feuerstein has already gotten a posting of his own here (on 7/21/15), mostly about his role on the tv series Royal Pains, with two photos of him smiling (smiles are important to me), one of them also showing off his physique (shirtlessness is a regular preoccupation of this blog; ok, I’m sometimes a bit shallow).  His acting persona embraces an enormous amount of charm and a significant identity as a Jew. (For Smits, it’s passionate intensity and a significant Hispanic identity. For Helgenbarger, it’s unflappable toughness.)

But here are two more photos of Feuerstein, without his customary broad smile: one shirtless, one in character as Cliff Calley on The West Wing:

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Feuerstein is a hunk, but he’s a compact hunk: nice muscles on a 5′ 8″ body. (On a personal note, this is a body type I find quite attractive. Not just me: the actor has a huge and enthusiastic fan base.)

Smits, in contrast, is a really big man: 6′ 3″, with broad shoulders, so he’s quite imposing. Here he is on the cover of the DVD for the tv miniseries Tommyknockers:

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The Tommyknockers is a 1993 television miniseries based on the novel of the same name by Stephen King. It was directed by John Power, and starred Marg Helgenberger and Jimmy Smits in the two lead roles. (Wikipedia link)

I’ll get back to Helgenberger in a moment. First, on Smits, from Wikipedia:

Jimmy Smits (born July 9, 1955) is an American actor. He played attorney Victor Sifuentes on the 1980s legal drama L.A. Law, NYPD Detective Bobby Simone on the 1990s police drama NYPD Blue, and Matt Santos on the 1999-2006 serial political drama The West Wing. He also appeared as Bail Organa in the Star Wars Prequel trilogy and Rogue One, and as ADA Miguel Prado in Dexter. In 2012, he joined the main cast of Sons of Anarchy as Nero Padilla.

… Smits’ father, Cornelis Leendert Smits, was from Paramaribo, Suriname, and was of Dutch descent. [Suriname is a multi-ethnic country, with Dutch as the primary first language, and the English-based creole Sranan as the second.] Smits’ mother, Emilina (née Pola), was Puerto Rican, born in Peñuelas. He has two sisters, Yvonne and Diana, grew up in a working-class neighborhood, and spent time in Puerto Rico during his childhood.

Smits identifies himself as Puerto Rican and was raised in a strict, devout Roman Catholic family. He frequently visits Puerto Rico.

The actor is passionate about Hispanic causes, especially advocating education for Latino youth — a stance mirrored in some detail in his character, Democratic presidential candidate Matt Santos, on The West Wing. In real life, the man is focused and intense, and that’s part of his acting persona as well. But he also has a great smile:

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And he has a wide streak of playfulness, as manifested (for instance) in his send-up of the Cisco Kid, in a 1994 movie that had Cheech Marin playing his sidekick:

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And, much more pointedly, in a delicious Saturday Night Live skit (Season 16, 1990) — which you can watch here — in which NBC News employees (Phil Hartman, Jan Hooks, Mike Myers, Dana Carvey, Julia Sweeney) over-emphasize Spanish pronunciations, but the new economics correspondent (Antonio Mendoza, played by Smits), who’s actually Hispanic, refuses to, and who eventually explodes in anger over the others’ absurd shifts into hyper-Spanish pronunciations of Spanish names and other lexical items.

Marg Helgenberger. From Wikipedia:

Mary Marg Helgenberger (born November 16, 1958) is an American actress. She began her career in the early 1980s and first came to attention for playing the role of Siobhan Ryan on the daytime soap opera Ryan’s Hope from 1982 to 1986. She is best known for her roles as Catherine Willows in the CBS police procedural drama CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (2000–12, 2013) and the subsequent TV movie Immortality (2015) and as K.C. Koloski in the ABC drama China Beach (1988–91), which earned her the 1990 Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series.

In her character as Catherine Willows on CSI:

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And looking glamorous, in p.r. for the tv series Intelligence:

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… of very different body types. Things saved up for some time, now to put them out.

Sage Brocklebank (Psych); Jordan Gavaris and Dylan Bruce (Orphan Black); John Wesley Shipp and Grant Gustin (The Flash).

Brocklebank. If his stage name is Sage Brocklebank, you can pretty much bet that’s his real name (cf. Meryl Streep). From Wikipedia:

Sage Brocklebank (born January 14, 1978) is a Canadian actor best known for his role as Buzz McNab, a long-standing role on the comedy-drama Psych. He also produces movies and writes for theater and film.

He’s a tall man (6´5˝) with broad shoulders, clearly a hunk:

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He seems not to appear shirtless, but I can live with that.

On his Psych character:

Officer (Junior Detective (season 8) [his promotion is a very big thing]) Buzz McNab (Sage Brocklebank) is a member of the SBPD [Santa Barbara Police Department], who occasionally works with Detectives Lassiter [Carlton Lassiter, played by Timothy Osmundson] and O’Hara [Juliet “Jules” O’Hara, played by Maggie Lawson], as well as Shawn and Gus [the centra characters, Shawn Spencer (played by James Roday) and Burton “Gus” Guster (played by Dulé Hill)]. McNab is a naive, lovable cop who is always eager to please Lassiter, even though Lassiter doesn’t always treat him well.

The character just radiates sweetness. All the other characters are interestingly neurotic, but McNab is even-tempered, well-intentioned, and empathetic, though sometimes bumbling. Here’s Brocklebank in character:

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and in a scene with Harris Trout (played by Anthony Michael Hall):

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Harris Trout is a consultant hired by the mayor to whip the SBPD back into shape in “No Trout About It”. He was made the interim police chief at the end of the episode. He is fired as interim police chief at the end of “Someone’s Got a Woody”, due to his dangerous handling of a hostage situation.

In #3 it has come out that McNab has been moonlighting as a male stripper. The dialogue:

Trout: How about you, Magic Mike? [allusion to the male-stripper movie of that name]

Buzz: I actually dance by the name “Morning Wood”.

It’s good-paying, enjoyable work, and McNab has no problem with it. Note that he’s smiling in all three of these shots.

Earlier postings about the show: on 4/4/15, in a posting about Cybill Shepherd, this Wikipedia material:

Psych is an American detective comedy-drama television series created by Steve Franks and broadcast on USA Network with syndication reruns on ION Television… The series stars James Roday as Shawn Spencer, a young crime consultant for the Santa Barbara Police Department whose “heightened observational skills” and impressive detective instincts allow him to convince people that he solves cases with psychic abilities. The program also stars Dulé Hill as Shawn’s best friend and reluctant partner Burton “Gus” Guster [who is black], as well as Corbin Bernsen as Shawn’s father, Henry, a former officer of the Santa Barbara Police Department.

… Madeleine Spencer (Cybill Shepherd) is a police psychologist who is Shawn’s mother and Henry’s ex-wife.

And on 6/23/16, a posting on a moment in S1 E11 when Shawn advises “Lassie” (Lassiter), on attracting women by displaying sternum bush ‘chest hair’.

Orphan Black: Gavaris. Now for something completely different. The premise of the show, from Wikipedia:

Orphan Black is a Canadian science fiction thriller television series created by screenwriter Graeme Manson and director John Fawcett, starring Tatiana Maslany as several identical people who are clones. The series focuses on Sarah Manning, a woman who assumes the identity of one of her fellow clones, Elizabeth Childs, after witnessing Childs’ suicide. The series raises issues about the moral and ethical implications of human cloning, and its effect on issues of personal identity.

Tatiana Maslany [plays] Sarah Manning, and a number of clones …, all born in 1984 to various women by in vitro fertilization.

It’s Maslany’s show, a real tour de force. But there are several central male characters, one played by:

Jordan Gavaris as Felix (“Fe”) Dawkins, Sarah’s foster brother and confidant. He identifies as a modern artist and moonlights as a prostitute. He is the first person Sarah confides in about the existence of clones.

Canadian actor Gavaris (born September 25, 1989) is a hoot in his role as the flamboyantly gay Felix, also with an eerily convincing British accent of his own creation. (Gavaris has snapped back at critics who complain that his faggy character shows gays in a bad light, saying that it’s insulting to insist that queers must be presented only as “straight-acting”.) In one scene he’s tasked with baby-sitting his niece and nephew, and introduces them to the pleasures of cross-dressing.

Felix is a slim leather twink:

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And he loves to show off his body as much as he can. Here he is painting bare-assed (and a very cute ass it is):

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Orphan Black: Bruce. Then there’s

Dylan Bruce as Paul Dierden, an ex-military mercenary, who is Beth’s monitor and boyfriend.

Bruce is an athletic muscle-hunk (yet a third body type in this survey):

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His Wikipedia page tells us that he’s a Canadian actor born April 21, 1980, also known for his role as Chris Hughes on the CBS daytime soap opera As the World Turns.

The Flash. Now to the complexity of the DC Comics world. On the character, from Wikipedia:

The Flash is the name of several fictional characters appearing in comic books published by DC Comics. Created by writer Gardner Fox and artist Harry Lampert, the original Flash first appeared in Flash Comics #1 (January 1940). Nicknamed the “Scarlet Speedster”, all incarnations of the Flash possess “super speed”, which includes the ability to run and move extremely fast, use superhuman reflexes, and seemingly violate certain laws of physics.

Thus far, four different characters – each of whom somehow gained the power of “super-speed” – have assumed the mantle of the Flash in DC’s history: college athlete Jay Garrick (1940–1951, 1961-present), forensic scientist Barry Allen (1956–1985, 2008–present), Barry’s nephew Wally West (1986–2011, 2016–present), and Barry’s grandson Bart Allen (2006–2007). Each incarnation of the Flash has been a key member of at least one of DC’s premier teams: the Justice Society of America, the Justice League, and the Teen Titans.

Specifically on Barry Allen, from Wikipedia:

The Flash (Barry Allen) is a fictional superhero appearing in American comic books published by DC Comics. Barry Allen is the second character to be known as the Flash. The character first appeared in Showcase #4 (October 1956), created by writer Robert Kanigher and penciler Carmine Infantino. His name combines talk show hosts Barry Gray and Steve Allen. Barry Allen is a reinvention of a previous character called The Flash that had appeared in 1940s comic books as the character Jay Garrick.

The Flash’s power consists mainly of superhuman speed. His abilities allow him to move at the speed of light, and in some stories, even beyond that real-world limit. Various other effects such as intangibility are also attributed to his ability to control the speed of molecular vibrations. The Flash wears a distinct red and gold costume treated to resist friction and wind resistance, traditionally storing the costume compressed inside a ring.

Barry’s classic stories introduced the concept of the Multiverse to DC Comics, and this concept played a large part in DC’s various continuity reboots over the years.

An early comic book version of the character:

(#7)

Out of all this, I’m posting here about two tv incarnations of the Barry Allen character. First, in the 1990 tv series:

(#8)

The Flash is a 1990 American television series developed by the writing team of Danny Bilson and Paul De Meo that aired on CBS. It is based on the DC Comics character Barry Allen / Flash, a costumed superhero crime-fighter with the power to move at superhuman speeds. The Flash starred John Wesley Shipp as Allen, along with Amanda Pays, Alex Désert, and Paula Marshall. (Wikipedia link)

And then in the 2014 tv series:

(#9)

The Flash is an American television series developed by Greg Berlanti, Andrew Kreisberg and Geoff Johns, airing on The CW. It is based on the DC Comics character Barry Allen / Flash, a costumed superhero crime-fighter with the power to move at superhuman speeds. It is a spin-off from Arrow, existing in the same fictional universe. The series follows Allen, portrayed by Grant Gustin, a crime scene investigator who gains super-human speed, which he uses to fight criminals, including others who have also gained superhuman abilities. (Wikipedia link)

Shipp and Pays appear in both series. My interest here is especially in contrasting two different ideals of masculinity as embodied in Shipp (Priapus, powerful maturity) and Gustin (Apollo, youthful beauty), and especially in exploring the Barry Allen character as developed for Gustin.

Shipp. The man, shirtless and intense, on Dawson’s Creek:

(#10)

John Wesley Shipp (born January 22, 1955) is an American actor known for his various television roles. He played the lead Barry Allen on CBS’s superhero series The Flash from 1990 to 1991, and Mitch Leery, the title character’s father, on the drama series Dawson’s Creek from 1998 to 2001. Shipp has also played several roles in daytime soap operas including Kelly Nelson on Guiding Light from 1980 to 1984, and Douglas Cummings on As the World Turns from 1985 to 1986 (which earned him his first Daytime Emmy Award). He portrays both Barry Allen’s father, Henry, and Jay Garrick on the current The Flash series on The CW network. (Wikipedia link)

Shipp is a square-jawed major muscle-hunk, and his version of the Barry Allen character is a hard-working superhero (with not a lot of emotional complexity).

Gustin. Gustin as a thin-faced agreeable Barry Allen — indisputably masculine, but in a different way than Shipp:

(#11)

And shirtless, lean, and playful:

(#12)

And a more direct counterpart to Shipp as the Flash in #8:

(#13)

(Note: all superheroes, whatever their body type, exhibit aggressive genital masculinity; they live in the land of jockstraps, dance belts, and codpieces. It’s in their contracts. More seriously, they embody fantasies of power and strength, of secret identities, and of transcending limitations.)

Thomas Grant Gustin (born January 14, 1990) is an American actor and singer. He is known for his roles as Barry Allen / Flash on the CW series The Flash and as Sebastian Smythe on the Fox series Glee.

… On November 8, 2011, he debuted on the television series Glee as Sebastian Smythe, an openly gay member of the Dalton Academy Warblers. Gustin won the recurring role of Sebastian, a promiscuous and scheming character. (Wikipedia link)

Gustin’s Barry Allen is sweet, earnest, and principled, but also an adult and a true hero (when a hero is called for). He reflects often about how to live as a good and decent man. His best friends are a black woman and a Hispanic man, and he helps his gay friends (definitely a modern young man). So he’s an admirable character, someone you’d like to get to know — and then there’s that really cool superspeed thing, and the messing with time and alternative universes. The series has all the DC gee-whiz stuff, but it’s also amiable and funny.

(Sex talk, but in mostly academic style. Still, definitely racy; use your judgment.)

This vision of shirtless high-masculinity turned up on Pinterest this morning:

(#1)

There will be another satisfyingly shirtless cowboy (these two images chosen from dozens, maybe hundreds, that are available), but the focus of this posting is on the saying

(1) Save a horse, ride a cowboy.

on its syntax, its semantics, and of course its allusion to positions for sexal intercourse.

(On a persnal note, I admit that I’ve chosen two cowboys whose body type — lean, well-muscled, long-bodied — appeals to me. Hey, it’s my blog.)

#1 appears to be from a site associated with the book “The Teenage Bucket List: 250 Things To Do Before You Turn 18” by Tammy Mitchell, a slim (34-page) 2014 book that seems to be nothing but that list of 250 things to do.

Here’s the second hunk, rather more interestingly dressed:

(#2)

This guy has on blue jeans (with a worn weather belt), with chaps over them. Chaps — see my 12/24/15 posting —  are crotchless, seatless leather pants that originated as workwear for cowboys, to protect their legs, but then came into fashion as fetishwear; the effect of chaps over jeans is to emphasize the cowboy’s basket (also his butt), so the chaps add an additional note of sexiness to an already sex-drenched image.

These cowboy images are, most of the time, designed to present the hunks in them for the delectation of women: women find them desirable, straight men identify with them as sex magnets (as attractive to women), and of course the images rope in gay men along with women. (There are also specfically homoerotic cowboy images, which a great many women find hot even though they’re not the intended audience.)

Ride that cowboy! So much for the sex that’s pretty much out in front in such images. Then there’s the allusion in the ride a cowboy part of the saying. From Wikipedia:

Woman on top, also called the cowgirl or riding position, is a group of sex positions in which the man lies on his back or sits, the woman straddles him facing either forward [cowgirl] or back [reverse cowgirl], and the man inserts his erect penis into the woman’s vagina or anus.

The cowgirl name derives from the image of the receiving partner “riding” the partner as a cowgirl rides a bucking horse. It is one of a number of receptive-partner-superior sexual positions, another being the reverse cowgirl position. It is fairly simple to achieve and maintain and pleasures both partners.

Man on man, this is Cowboy. From my 2/12/16 posting “Sex positions for gay men”:

something that came up while I was assembling a new AZBlogX posting “Liam Riley, power bottom twink”, with two images of Riley as bottom in what I’ve called sit-fucks (the bottom sits on the top’s hard dick): an in-facing (the bottom is facing towards his top) sit-fuck with top Dustin Gold and an out-facing one (the bottom is facing away from his top) with top Dillon Rossi. I then discovered, in comments on these performances that this was a named sex position, with a cute name: Cowboy for the in-facing variety, Reverse Cowboy for the out-facing. As a cowboy rides a bronco (or a bull), so the bottom rides his top’s cock.

On to the saying. The saying is variously punctuated: most commonly with a comma separating its two parts, as in #1; sometimes with a colon or dash as the separator; and, in these punctuation-shy times, with only a line division as separator, as in #2. In any case, it’s an instance of a two-part sentence construction in which each part is a V-headed constituent (a clause or a VP), with the two parts strung together without any sort of connective or subordinator:

[1: VP(BSE)] save a horse  +  [2: VP(BSE)] ride a cowboy

The mode of syntactic combination here is known technically as parataxis, a subtype of co-equal combination (with parts of equal syntactic rank): pure parataxis, in fact, with no overt coordinator. The other type of co-equal combination is (explicit) coordination, with a coordinator like and or or. Standing in contrast to co-equal combination is subordination (or hypotaxis), with an explicit subordinator, as in these alternatives to (1):

(1a) To save a horse, ride a cowboy. [with complementizer to introducing part 1]

(1b) Save a horse by riding a cowboy. [with preposition by introducing part 2]

Now one type of pure parataxis is in fact fairly common: the paratactic conditional, for instance:

(2a) You break it, you bought it. ‘If you break it, you bought it’; 2 is a result or consequence of 1

with its co-equal alternative:

(2b) You break it, and you bought it.

(Brief discussion in a 2/4/10 posting.)

Similarly, with clauses in both parts: He answers the phone, (and) you (will) die. And with BSE-form VPs in both parts (as in (1)): Learn to fish, (and) eat for a lifetime.

The example in (1) is different:

(1) Save a horse, ride a cowboy. ‘In order to 1, 2’: 1 is a reason or purpose for 2 (1 is a result or consequence of 2)

We might call this a paratactic preconditional.

The saying. Mentions of (1) refer to it as a “saying” or a “familiar saying”, but I haven’t been able to track it back very far. In fact, the trail seems to go back only to a 2004 song. From Wikipedia:

“Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy)” is a song written and recorded by American country music duo Big & Rich. It was released in April 2004 as the second single from their debut album Horse of a Different Color. … The song received wide exposure when ESPN featured the song in commercials for its coverage of the 2004 World Series of Poker. It was also featured in the Boston Legal episode “Death Be Not Proud”.

On February 19, 2016, a parody release by artist Skinny & Broke was released entitled “Save A Wookie Ride A Jedi” by Sony Music Entertainment.

Big & Rich also released a remixed dance version of the song which appeared on their compilation Big & Rich’s Super Galactic Fan Pak. They performed this remixed version at the CMT Video Music Awards in 2005. The song was also featured in a Chevrolet commercial that was aired during Super Bowl XLI and the 49th Annual Grammy Awards.

The song appears on the game Karaoke Revolution Country, as well as in the 2012 film Magic Mike.

The song is a fusion of country rock and country rap. The first two verses detail “Big” Kenny Alphin and John Rich’s arrival into Nashville, going into a bar, “passing out hundred-dollar bills” and, “buying the bar a double round of Crown.” They vow that Nashville is “never gonna be the same.” They ride around Nashville on horses, while everyone else says to “save a horse” and “ride a cowboy.”

(#3)

The song is addressed to women, encouraging them (I think) to ride a cowboy.

You can watch the video here.

An extra. It was bound to happen, I suppose. Frat-boy humor from a meme site:

(#4)

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):

(#1)

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):

(#2)

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.

(#2)

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:

(#1)

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:

(#2)

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.)

(#3)

(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.

(#4)

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:

(#1)

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.

(#2)

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):

(#3)

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.

(#4)

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:

(#5)

And Zane in costume and in character:

(#6)

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…)

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

(#1)

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:

(#2)

(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:

(#3)

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.

(#4)

Cute-boy Carnes

(#5)

Bare-boy Carnes

(#6)

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

(#7)

Finally, Carnes in costume for the series:

(#8)

A shame to cover it all up.

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:

(#6)

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.

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:

(#1)

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

(#2)

(#3)

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).

(#4)

(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:

(#5)

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”):

(#6)

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

(#7)

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).

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.

(#1)

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:

(#2)

Hatcher and Laurents as gorgeous young men

(#2)

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

(#3)

Or: Happy Trails to You.

It starts with a Richard Oliva photo in Steathy Cam Men on the 28th, with the caption “Hello, sexy daddy man!”:

(#1)

In  leather singlet, displaying his furry pecs and treasure trail.

(As with my previous Stealthy Cam Men photo — #1 in this posting from the 26th — the subject is flagrantly displaying his body in a public place, so I have no compunction about passing on a picture taken surreptitiously.)

Two notable elements of this display: the treasure trail, and the wrestling singlet, cut low and crafted from leather, to make a piece of athletic apparel into a piece of fetishwear.

On treasure trails, from a 11/15/11 posting “Annals of anatomical vocabulary”, quoting from Wikipedia:

… hair grows in a vertical line from the pubic area up to the navel and from the thorax down to the navel. Slang terms for this line of hair include “snail trail”, “happy line”, “happy trail”, or “treasure trail”. (link)

Note happy trail. I’ll get to that in a litte while.

Then on gay singlets, from a 12/3/15 posting with a section on wrestling singlets and their adaptations as fetishwear:

Homowear singlets are scooped way low, below the navel, to display the whole torso; they are pouch-enhancing; they’re likely to be made of sexy materials (faux leather, shiny fabrics, camo fabric, fabrics in intense colors); and sometimes they have open rears, offering the wearer’s butt as well as his crotch … They are for fun and display, not athletic competition.

The Treasure of the Singlet Padre. An elaborate play on the title The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, playing on the treasure of treasure trail, substituting singlet for sierra, and replacing madre ‘mother’ in the mountain range name Sierra Madre by padre ‘father’, to make it all masculine, in grammatical gender and in sociocultural gender too (like the guy in #1).

On the movie, from Wikipedia:

(#2)

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is a 1948 American dramatic adventurous neo-western written and directed by John Huston. It is a feature film adaptation of B. Traven’s 1927 novel of the same name, about two financially desperate Americans, Fred C. Dobbs (Humphrey Bogart) and Bob Curtin (Tim Holt), who in the 1920s join old-timer Howard (Walter Huston, the director’s father) in Mexico to prospect for gold.

Happy Trails. The alternative title. A play on the anatomical happy trail, plus an allusion to the song title “Happy Trails”. From Wikipedia:

“Happy Trails” by Dale Evans was the theme song for the 1940s and 1950s radio program and the 1950s television show starring [Western movie stars] Roy Rogers and Dale Evans Rogers, always sung over the end credits of the program.

You can listen to Rogers and Evans singing their song here — and, if you wish, view a slide show of the couple through the years. The chorus of the song:

Happy trails to you,
Until we meet again.
Happy trails to you,
Keep smiling until then.

If you take happy trails to be anatomical, then this is slyly racy. Meet you at the end of the trail!

The alternative reading has not been disregarded. For example: a sexy romp on BuzzFeed on 9/8/14, “23 Breathtaking Instagram Happy Trails Everyone Should Follow: Because they all lead to happiness”. A lot of them have been removed from Instagram, but several steamy images remain, like this one:

(#3)

Homo eroticus on the hoof, head to crotch.

But wait! There’s more! There’s a titular spin-off of the song title “Happy Trails”. From Wikipedia:

(#4)

Happy Trails is the second album of the American band Quicksilver Messenger Service. Most of the album was recorded from two performances at the Fillmore East and Fillmore West, although it is not clear which parts were recorded at which Fillmore. The record was released [in 1969] by Capitol Records in stereo.

Ride a cowboy!

Yesterday’s morning name was the Mexican Spanish nickname Chuy (for Jesus). I’m pretty sure it got into my head from a friend who recently ate at a Chuy’s restaurant in Texas, so I’ll start with that.

But the real topic is Mexican Spanish nicknames: Chuy or Chucho for Jesus, Pepe for José, Che for Ernesto, and Pancho or Paco for Francisco, in particular (with a note on the linguist Viola Waterhouse, who was a student of such things). That will take me to Pepe Romero, Che Guevara, Pancho Villa, the linguist Paco Ordóñez, Paco Rabanne (the man and the fragrances), and from there to Nick Youngquest in the buff, which will supply a moment of gay interest.

Chuy’s. From Wikipedia:

(#1) The original Chuy’s on Barton Springs Road in Austin TX

Chuy’s is a Tex-Mex restaurant chain established in 1982, by Mike Young and John Zapp. The company currently has 86 locations and 8 locations … currently under construction, as of July 2017. Chuy’s currently has restaurants in 19 states: Alabama, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Texas, Tennessee, Oklahoma, North Carolina, South Carolina, Maryland, Virginia, Missouri, and Ohio.

Chuy’s strives in serving a distinct menu of authentic, made from scratch Tex-Mex inspired dishes. Chuy’s highly flavorful and freshly prepared fare is served in a fun, eclectic and irreverent atmosphere. Each location offers a unique, “unchained” look and feel, as expressed by the concept’s motto “If you’ve seen one Chuy’s, you’ve seen one Chuy’s!”.

Every year on Elvis Presley’s birthday, January 8, most locations host the Elvis’ Birthday Bash, during which an Elvis impersonator visits the restaurant. Chuy’s also annually hosts a Green Chile Festival at its locations, celebrating the harvest of the Hatch Green Chiles from Hatch, New Mexico.

Nicknames. Chuy is a common nickname for Mexican or Mexican-American men named Jesus; Chucho is an alternative. A contributor to Urban Dictionary suggests that in joking contexts, Chuy can also be used as a generic address term for a young Mexican-American man (with Concha as the female counterpart).

I am ignorant of all the sociolinguistic details here. Among other things, I don’t know how much the nickname Chuy is used outside of Mexican and Chicano contexts — in other parts of Hispanophone Latin American or indeed in Spain.

It is clear to me that the other male nicknames I’ll be talking about — Pepe, Che, Pancho, Paco — are more widely distributed, though they are indeed common in Mexico, and the sources most easily available to me are about Mexican Spanish specifically.

[Side note. The sociolinguistics of nicknames, pet names, and address terms is invariably exquisitely complex and hard to study in detail. For a brief discussion, generally the best you can do is a broad-brush account of the variants and their users, such as I’m giving here.]

From a column by “the Mexican” (Gustavo Arellano) in the Dallas Observer on 1/1/09 (a repeat of a column from 2007) about Mexican nicknames, I was pointed to Viola Waterhouse’s “Mexican Spanish Nicknames”, in the 1981 anthology Linguistics Across Continents: Studies in Honor of Richard S. Pittman. VW provided a rich compendium of such names, but without extensive comment on their histories.

A nickname is an abbreviated version of some source name –often, however, extended by hypocoristic morphology (Will for William, and then Willy as an alternative). Nicknames can often be seen as conventionalizations of child phonology (/b/ for /w/ in Bill and Billy), sometimes including echoing of consonants or outright reduplication.

VW’s compendium of Mexican Spanish nicknames illustrates all of these points, plus a strong nickname preference for the Spanish palatal affricate spelled CH (which is the source of the initial consonant in Chuy, a consonant that’s then echoed in Chucho, which also has the masculine-gender theme vowel -o added).

[Etymythological side note. Predictably, someone has come up with an acronymic derivation for Chuy. In a 9/4/14 response to a Quora query about the name (lightly edited for typos here):

Luis Fernando Mata Licón, Being Northern Mexican since I was born.

After searching in Google I couldn’t find any viable source, only forums and one article in a history of nicknames page; they say Chuy means:

“Cristo Hijo Unico de Yahveh” (Christ only son of Yahweh). This comes from Jesus Christ and the bible.

For me it seems that the acronym came after the nickname and not before. But I don’t know for sure.

The commenter wisely suspects etymythology.]

[Side note on VW (1918-1997; there’s a brief Summer Institute of Linguistics memorial site for her here). I was previously unaware of her piece on nicknames, knowing her only as the authority on Oaxaca Chontal. From Wikipedia:

Oaxacan Chontal, also called Tequistlatecan, consists of two related but mutually unintelligible languages, Huamelultec (Lowland Oaxaca Chontal), and Highland Oaxaca Chontal. There has been speculation that the languages may be part of the Hokan family of California, or perhaps the Jicaque family of Honduras [but otherwise OC appears to be a language isolate]. The name “Chontal” comes from the Nahuatl, meaning “foreigner” or “foreign”, and is also applied to an unrelated language of Tabasco.

Oaxaca Chontal was VW’s life work.]

[Final note on Chuy: hat tip to Ryan Tamares.]

The nickname Pepe. Another nickname quite distant phonologically from its source, José, though it shows echoing in both its consonant, /p/, and its vowel, /e/. Though Pepe is a common nickname in Mexico, the most famous bearer of the name is Spanish by birth: the classical and flamenco guitarist Pepe Romero. (Romero’s family left Franco’s Spain in 1957, when he was in his teens, to settle in San Diego CA.)

Pepe Romero is of interest here in that he apparently was given the name Pepe as his birth name, thus illustrating another feature of nicknames: that they are sometimes converted to regular names, becoming, in effect, orphan nicknames, parallel to orphan initialisms (both unmoored from their historical sources). So in English we get people whose legal names are Kate. Jack, Meg, Will, and the like.

The nickname Che. As in Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the Argentine revolutionary. Definitely a nickname, but not any kind of abbreviation. Instead, it’s an epithet. From Wikipedia:

Che … is an interjection (i.e. a vocative expression) commonly used in Argentina, Uruguay, and in the Spanish autonomous community of Valencia. In the Southern Cone (especially in Rioplatense Spanish), it is a form of colloquial slang used in a vocative sense as “friend” and thus loosely corresponds to expressions such as “mate,” “pal,” “man,” “bro,” or “dude,” as used by various English speakers. As a result, it may be used either before or after a phrase: “Man, this is some good beer,” or “Let’s go get a beer, bro.” It can be added to an explicit vocative to call the attention, playing the role of “Hey,” for instance: “Che, Pedro, ¡mirá!” or “Hey, Pedro, look!” Che is also utilized as a casual speech filler or punctuation to ascertain comprehension, continued interest, or agreement. Thus che can additionally function much like the English words “so,” “right,” or the common Canadian phrase “eh.”

Che can also be found in some parts of Paraguay, Brazil, Peru, and Bolivia, as a result of their close vicinity to Argentina. In other Hispanic American countries, the term che can be used to refer to someone from Argentina [that is, to convey ‘someone who says che’]. For example, the famous Argentine revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara earned his nickname from his frequent use of the expression, which to his Cuban comrades in the Cuban Revolution was a curious feature of his idiolect.

Apparently, from Che used as a nickname for Ernesto Guevara, some Mexican Spanish speakers have come to use it as a nickname for other men named Ernesto.

The nickname Pancho. An abbreviated version of Francisco, with a lost syllable, /fr/ shortened to /f/, which is then converted to /p/ in child phonology; plus the CH thing again.

From GDoS on the noun Pancho:

[the stereotypical Mexican name] (US) 1 a derog. form of address to an anonymous Mexican man [1962 Terry Southern quote: I think you’ve probably picked the wrong crowd this time, Pancho.]  2 a Puerto Rican [1994 Abraham Rodriguez, Jr. Spidertown If he gets away with that, every li’l pancho be dickin’ me up the ass.]

(I’m not sure if ‘Puerto Rican’ is the best gloss for subentry 2; ‘Latino’ might be better; Mexican ‘Latino’ is quite common in AmE.)

The most famous Pancho is surely the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa: born José Doroteo Arango Arámbula, he adopted the name Francisco Villa and so became a Pancho.

The nickname Paco. Also for Francisco, but not so strongly associated with Mexico. Two examples here, both from continental Spain.

First, among the many Francisco “Paco” Ordóñezes, a colleague in linguistics, of Catalan origin: Assoc. Prof. of Linguistics at Stony Brook Univ., with an undergrad degree from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and a Ph.D. from the Graduate Center of CUNY. From his Stony Brook web site:

Francisco Ordóñez was trained in the study of formal linguistics. His specialization has been the comparative study of the syntax of Spanish, its varieties and other Romance languages such as Catalan, French, Italian and Occitan dialects. His present research involves the study of the syntactic differences of the dialects of Spanish spoken in Latin America and Spain.

(but everyone knows him as Paco).

Then, Paco Rabanne. From Wikipedia:

(#2)

Francisco “Paco” Rabaneda Cuervo, (more commonly known under the pseudonym of Paco Rabanne) (born 18 February 1934) is a Spanish fashion designer of Basque origin who became known as l’enfant terrible (unruly child) of the 1960s French fashion world.

He started his career in fashion by creating jewelry for Givenchy, Dior, and Balenciaga and founded his own fashion house in 1966. He used unconventional material such as metal, paper, and plastic for his Metal Couture and outlandish and flamboyant designs.

Rabanne is known for his costume designs for such films as the 1968 science-fiction film Barbarella. Françoise Hardy was a big fan of Rabanne’s designs. The popular French singer Mylène Farmer continues to bring the extravagance of Paco Rabanne to her live concerts.

In 1968, he began collaborating with fragrance company Puig, which resulted in the company marketing Rabanne’s perfumes. In 1976, the company built a perfume factory in Chartres, France.

An ad for his INVICTUS fragrance for men:

(#3) With the sportif model Nick Youngquest

From Wikipedia:

Nick Youngquest (born 28 July 1983 in Sydney, New South Wales) is an Australian model and former professional rugby league footballer. [Substantial coverage of his rugby career here.]

… In 2006 Youngquest posed nude for the Naked Rugby League Calendar 2007-08, stirring controversy after his revealing pose – in which one hand is placed partially over his genitalia.

(#4) One of many titillating Youngquest body shots

… In late 2012, Youngquest decided to step away from rugby to pursue opportunities in modeling, appearing in a campaign for Abercrombie & Fitch shot by Bruce Weber. He currently resides in New York City. In 2013, he became the face of the new masculine fragrance INVICTUS by Paco Rabanne.

For obvious reasons, Youngquest has a big gay male following, which he welcomes. In addition, though straight, he’s a visible supporter of LGBT causes.

Earlier today, the posting “I sing the body elastic”, about Mikey Bustos’s parodic hymn to Speedos, the skimpy elastic men’s swim suits — with a title playing on “I Sing the Body Electric”, a poem from Walt Whitman’s 1855 Leaves of Grass, celebrating the human body. Beginning:

I sing the body electric,
The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.

On the noun charge here, from OED3 (June 2008):

4. fig. Suddenly exciting, thrilling, or intense, as if caused by an electric charge or shock; stimulating; charged with tension. [first cites 18th c.]

In section 2 of the poem, an appreciation of the bodies of men (especially workingmen), as expressing their natures, their character, indeed their soul:

The expression of the face balks account,
But the expression of a well-made man appears not only in his face,
It is in his limbs and joints also, it is curiously in the joints of his hips and wrists,
It is in his walk, the carriage of his neck, the flex of his waist and knees, dress does not hide him,
The strong sweet quality he has strikes through the cotton and broadcloth,
To see him pass conveys as much as the best poem, perhaps more,
You linger to see his back, and the back of his neck and shoulder-side.

Then in section 9, in a long Whitmanian catalogue, of the parts of the body:

The voice, articulation, language, whispering, shouting aloud

This blog hasn’t shrunk from the appreciation of men’s bodies, as expressions of character and also, yes, as attractive pieces of meat. On this latter path, checking out images of shirtless workingmen, I was led to a 2/1/14 Daily Mail (UK) piece “The best Diet Coke break EVER: Host of bare-chested hunks gathers to celebrate 20 years of the iconic adverts”, reporting on the men who’ve performed shirtless for Diet Coke over the years. Beginning with the first, Lucky Vanous, in 1994:

(#1) A screen shot; you can watch the whole ad here

‘Break’ The original ‘Diet Coke Break Hunk’, Lucky Vanous, kept a group of admiring women in an office building glued to their window, as a shirtless construction worker on a building site.

Lucky Vanous landed the Diet Coke Break ‘Hunk’ role when he was married and attending Fordham Law School. After appearing in the first ‘Diet Coke Break’ ad, Lucky also appeared in the lesser-known 1995 spot ‘Magazine’ – where he plays a male model brought to life on the pages of a fashion magazine after a girl opens an ice cold Diet Coke.

More on the man, from Wikipedia:

(#2) Lucky in a posed shot

Lucky Joseph Vanous (born 11 April 1961) is an American model and actor. He became nationally known in 1994 after appearing in a series of commercials for Diet Coke.

Vanous was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, and served in the United States Army 1st Ranger Battalion. Upon discharge, he studied at University of Nebraska at Lincoln. He was discovered while visiting New York City, and he moved there to model and continue his studies at New York University and Fordham University.

I spent much of Tuesday putting together material for my posting on Mikey Bustos and his parody “I Wear Speedos” of the hit song “Despacito”, by Puerto Rican pop stars Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee. That led me of course to the great Puerto Rican pop star Ricky Martin, who’s been steadily on public view ever since he joined the boy band Menudo back in the 1980s.

So I had a day experiencing several versions of “Despacito”, many times over, and also returning to the pleasures of Ricky Martin’s performances, starting with “Livin’ La Vida Loca” and going on from there through his oeuvre (with digressions to Enrique Iglesias and Shakira).

Then yesterday to lunch at the Mexican restaurant Reposado, where they play pop music in Spanish as background. As I sat down, I recognized RM’s “Livin’ La Vida Loca”. Which was followed immediately by Fonsi & DY’s “Despacito”. How unlikely was that?

Synchronicity at work.

Synchronicity, then a lot of Ricky Martin (sometimes shirtless, once in a Speedo), with a digression on Mexican tripe stew.

Synchronicity. From Wikipedia:

Synchronicity (German: Synchronizität) is a concept, first introduced by analytical psychologist Carl Jung, which holds that events are “meaningful coincidences” if they occur with no causal relationship yet seem to be meaningfully related.

Jung seems to have intended something here more substantial than the human inclination to seek (and find) meaning in everything, plus the fact that coincidences are much more common than people imagine.

But I’m content to believe that the La Vida Loca / Despacito recurrence was in fact nothing but coincidence, involving as it did the appearance on a Latino music service of possibly the most famous piece of Spanish-language pop music ever together with the currently most-listened-to piece of Spanish-language pop music. It was just an accident that I’d been listening to and thinking about these two songs the day before.

(I note in passing that if you’re going to suffer from earworms, “Livin’ La Vida Loca” and “Despacito” aren’t at all bad as aural irritants, especially if you can visualize the canonical videos, which are full of life and energy.)

Ricky Martin. From Wikipedia:

(#1) RM in a concert performance of “Livin’ La Vida Loca”

Enrique Martín Morales (born December 24, 1971), commonly known as Ricky Martin, is a Grammy Award winning Puerto Rican singer, actor, and author. Martin began his career at age 12 with the all-boy pop group Menudo. After five years with the group, he released several Spanish-language solo albums throughout the 1990s. He also acted on stage and on TV in Mexico, where he achieved modest stardom. In 1994, he appeared on the US TV soap opera General Hospital, playing a Puerto Rican singer [with long, wild rock-star hair].

In early 1999, after releasing several albums in Spanish, Martin performed “The Cup of Life” at the 41st Annual Grammy Awards show [you can watch the official video of “La Copa de la Vida” here], which became a catalyst in bringing Latin pop to the forefront of the U.S. music scene. Following its success, Martin released “Livin’ la Vida Loca”, which helped him attain enormous success worldwide [you can watch the official video here]; it is generally seen as the song that began the Latin pop explosion of 1999 and made the transition easier for other Spanish-speaking artists to move into the English-speaking market. Since its release, the song has sold over 8 million copies, making it one of the best selling singles of all time. His first English-language album (also titled Ricky Martin), has sold 22 million copies and is one of the best selling albums of all time.

A bit more detail on “La Vida Loca” (from Wikipedia):

“Livin’ la Vida Loca” is generally seen as the song that began the Latin pop explosion of 1999 and made the transition of other Spanish-speaking artists (first Enrique Iglesias, then later Shakira, Thalía, and Paulina Rubio) into the English-speaking market easier. Before this time, most non-Latino Americans had never heard of Martin until what CNN reported was a show-stopping performance of “La Copa de la Vida” at the 41st Grammy Awards show, which became a catalyst in bringing Latin pop to the forefront of the U.S. music scene.

Menudo moments. The boy band and the tripe and hominy stew. From Wikipedia:

Menudo was a Puerto Rican boy band that was formed in the 1970s by producer Edgardo Díaz. Menudo was also one of the biggest Latin boy bands in history, releasing their first album in 1977. The band achieved much success, especially during the 1980s, becoming the most popular Latin American teen musical group of the era. The group disbanded in 2009.

The band had several radio hits during its course. Their success led them to also release two feature films: Una Aventura Llamada Menudo and Menudo: La Película.

The band was a starting point for both Ricky Martin and Draco Rosa, who were members around the mid-1980s during their youth.

Menudo’s original line-up consisted of two sets of brothers: Fernando and Nefty Sallaberry from Ponce, Puerto Rico (Fernando was born in Spain) and the Melendez brothers, Carlos, Oscar and Ricky Melendez; the latter three are Diaz’s cousins.

Specifically (also from Wikipedia):

(#2) RM in the middle

Can’t Get Enough (1986) is the 23rd album by Menudo. This is their third album in English and features Charlie Massó, Robi Rosa, Ricky Martin, Raymond Acevedo and Sergio Blass.

By all accounts, Menudo was a tough life for a teenager, with a heavy schedule of performances and very strict control by the managers.

Then there is culinary menudo (for which the group is named). From Wikipedia:

(#3)

Menudo, or pancita ([little] gut or [little] stomach, from Spanish panza “gut/stomach”) is a traditional Mexican soup, made with beef stomach (tripe) in broth with a red chili pepper base. Usually, hominy, lime, chopped onions, and chopped cilantro are added, as well as crushed oregano and crushed red chili peppers. [That makes menudo essentially tripe posole.]

Menudo is usually eaten with corn tortillas or other breads, such as bolillo. It is often chilled and reheated, which results in a more melded flavor.

… Menudo is traditionally a family food prepared by the entire family, and even serves as an occasion for social interactions such as after wedding receptions where the families of the groom and bride go to either family’s house to enjoy an early morning bowl of menudo. In popular Mexican culture, menudo is believed to be a remedy for hangover.

Since menudo is time and labor-intensive to prepare as the tripe takes hours to cook (or else it is extremely tough), and includes many ingredients and side dishes (such as salsa), the dish is often prepared communally and eaten at a feast.

Back to RM. RM projects immense energy and sexiness, with big smiles and first-class pop-star hip action. And a body he enjoys showing off, in performances and in posed shots. Shirtless here:

(#4) RM channeling George Michael

(#5) RM rocking a Speedo; cf. Bustos’s “I Wear Speedos”

RM has always had a big gay following. Eventually, he came out as gay himself. While he’s sexually attracted to both women and men, and has had extended relationships with both, he says that his affectional attachments are to men, and he’s now engaged to be married to a man, artist Jwan Yosef. (His position here is much like his position on nationality. He now holds dual citizenship, in the US and Spain (no doubt he could get Mexican citizenship if he wanted to), and he has a home in Madrid, but says that his emotional attachments are to Puerto Rico.)

In 2008, he became the father of twin boys, through a surrogate mother, and entered what amounts to a second career as a publicly visible sweet daddy. Recent photo here:

(#6)

Just as there’s a trove of shirtless photos of RM, there’s a trove of photos of RM with his sons (and often with Jwan Yosef as well); in fact, there are sites entirely devoted to these two themes.

Status report: RM is 45, Yosef 32, and the kids 8. The men are currently failing to get their wedding plans together, largely (it seems) because of their multi-national attachments: you could make a case on RM’s side for a wedding in (in descending likelihood) Puerto Rico, Madrid, Miami, or Mexico, and Yosef’s side is no less complex; from Wikipedia:

Jwan Yosef (born 1984) is a Syrian-born Swedish painter and artist of Kurdish and Armenian ancestry. He specializes in plastic arts and is based in London, England.

So: Sweden, London, or someplace in the Syrian, Kurdish, or Armenian diaspora. (Syria, Kurdistan, or Armenia would probably not be a good idea.)

They could just pick some other place entirely: Hawaii, Tuscany, Paris, the Iguazú Falls, Rio de Janeiro, Bali, Cape Town, Santorini, wherever.

You can find lots of photos of RM and Yosef together, in formal wear, in casual clothes, or on the beach. But Yosef is, like RM, a hot guy in great shape and perfectly willing to display himself, as here:

(#7)

Welcome to the world of highly talented multilingual multicultural gay hunks.

… via Greek-American food in Old Saybrook CT. A Zippyesque journey in today’s strip:

(#1)

Marbles. Having all of them, lacking some, losing them.

From NOAD2:

noun marble: 3 (one’s marbles) informal one’s mental faculties: I thought she’d lost her marbles, asking a question like that.

And from Michael Quinion’s World Wide Words site on 9/9/06:

The earliest example given in the standard references is from It’s Up to You; A Story of Domestic Bliss, by George V Hobart, dated 1902: “I see-sawed back and forth between Clara J. and the smoke-holder like a man who is shy some of his marbles.”

That certainly sounds like the modern meaning of marbles, which as you say refers to one’s sanity. But in an earlier appearance, the writer used it to mean angry, not insane (mad, that is, in the common US sense rather than the British one). It was printed in the Lima News of Ohio in July 1898: “He picked up the Right Honorable Mr Hughes on a technicality, and although that gentleman is reverential in appearance as Father Abraham and as patient as Job, he had, to use an expression of the street, lost his ‘marbles’ most beautifully and stomped on the irascible Harmon, very much à la Bull in the china shop.”

The origin must surely come from the boys’ game of marbles, which was very common at the time. To play was always to run the risk of losing all one’s marbles and the result might easily be anger, frustration, and despair. That would account for the 1898 example and it’s hardly a step from there to the wider meaning of mad — to do something senseless or stupid.

Barbats. Or bar bats. A frequent Zippy-related topic on this blog. See, for example, my 12/31/12 posting “The Dingburger bar bat, or barbat”, about Poindexter barbats.

Apropos of nothing in particular (beyond the fact that this blog has been short of shirtless men recently), here’s a Romanian barbat:

(#2) Rom. barbat ‘man’ (illustrating gratuitous shirtlessness)

The number 93. I have no idea.

The Old Saybrook Diner. Aka the Parthenon Diner in Old Saybrook CT:

(#3) Welcome to the Parthenon Diner Restaurant: Serving the CT Shoreline with 2 locations (Old Saybrook and Branford)

The beginning of their ad copy:

The Parthenon Diner Restaurant is a family business started in 1985. It has won many awards for Best Diner, Best Breakfast ad Best Greek Food for many years by the New Haven Advocate Readers Poll.

Old Saybrook, on the southern coast of New England:

(#4) At the bottom: eastern tip of Long Island NY. Top left: CT. Top right: RI. To the north (not on this map): MA.

Breakfast at the Old Saybrook          :

   (#5)

(#6)

There’s a lot here to reflect on. The diner is ornamentally Greek, which is to say, vaguely Greek-American here and there (feta cheese, spinach, olives), and mostly it’s classic American plain diner fare with large numbers of borrowings from other food cultures, American and otherwise: Nutella, the mixed grill, California cuisine (avocados, a California yoghurt bowl — yoghut with granola and fresh fruit — under the name Greek yoghurt parfait, meaning [Greek yoghurt][parfait]), New Orleans, Mexican, a Philly steak sandwich (well, steak and American cheese) folded into an omelette, and more. Two notable bows to Jewish cuisine (conveying New York City here): bagels (especially with lox and cream cheese) and challah bread, plain or as toast.

The challah especially caught my eye, since we’re now in the High Holidays / High Holy Days (Rosh Hashana was last week, Yom Kippur is in a couple of days), prime time for challah baking.

From Wikipedia:

(#7) Braided challahs (though round challahs are customary for the High Holidays)

Challah (plural: challot or challos) is a special Jewish bread, usually braided and typically eaten on ceremonial occasions such as Sabbath and major Jewish holidays (other than Passover). Ritually-acceptable challah is made of dough from which a small portion has been set aside as an offering.

… Most traditional Ashkenazi challah recipes use numerous eggs, fine white flour, water, sugar, yeast, and salt, but “water challah” made without eggs and having a texture not unlike French baguettes also exists. Modern recipes may replace white flour with whole wheat, oat, or spelt flour or sugar with honey or molasses.

… Poppy or sesame (Ashkenazi) and anise or sesame (Sephardic) seeds may be added to the dough or sprinkled on top. Both egg and water challah are usually brushed with an egg wash before baking to add a golden sheen.

Yes, there’s a lot of variation, and a certain amount of disagreement about which style is best. This is what happens when you start with marbles and barbats.

Twice recently, I’ve been struck by a scale difference between male actors on tv shows (seen in reruns) — in each case, a difference between a hunky regular on the show and a very noticeably bigger guest star. I found the effect odd: at one moment, the guest seemed unnaturally large; at the next, the regular seemed to have shrunk. It all depended on which one I was taking as the standard.

First, regular Woody Harrelson with guest Robert Urich on Cheers. Then, regular Donnie Wahlberg with guest Marc Blucas on Blue Bloods. (And then a footnote about Tom Selleck on Blue Bloods.)

Harrelson and Urich. “Woody for Hire meets Norman of the Apes”, S6 E13, first aired 1/7/88, in which Woody tries to convince his friends that he got a small part on Spenser: For Hire (set in Boston, as is Cheers):

(#1) Urich as himself, Woody Harrelson as Woody Boyd, Ted Danson as Sam Malone

Harrelson is 5′ 10″ and hunky; Urich was 6′ 2″, broad-shouldered, with head size to match — a genial bear of a man:

(#2)

(Danson, meanwhile, is also 6′ 2″ and very fit, but lean.)

In their scene together, Urich overshadows Harrelson.

Harrelson, very briefly:

Woodrow Tracy “Woody” Harrelson (born July 23, 1961) is an American actor, activist, and playwright. (Wikipedia link)

And Urich, from Wikipedia:

Robert Michael Urich (December 19, 1946 – April 16, 2002) was an American film, television and stage actor and television producer. Over the course of his 30-year career, he starred in a record 15 television series.

Urich began his career in television in the early 1970s. After guest stints and roles in short-lived television series, he won a co starring role in the action/crime drama series S.W.A.T. in 1975. In 1976, he landed the role of Dan Tanna in the crime drama series Vega$. It aired on ABC from 1978 to 1981… In addition to his work in television, he also starred in several feature films, including Magnum Force (1973), The Ice Pirates (1984), and Turk 182 (1985). From 1985 to 1988, he portrayed the title role in the detective television series Spenser: For Hire, based on Robert B. Parker’s popular series of mystery novels [set in Boston].

Wahlberg and Blucas. “The City That Never Sleeps”, S4 E2, first aired 10/4/13:

When a famous movie star, Russell Berke, who shadowed Danny for research on his next role, is stabbed, Danny goes to his aid, but must keep the crime on the down-low due to Russell’s celebrity status [and his being in the closet]. (IMDb)

(#3) Marisa Ramirez as Det. Maria Baez, Blucas as Russell Berke, Donnie Wahlberg as Det. Danny Reagan

Wahlberg is 5′ 10″ and hunky; Blucas 6′ 2″, broad-shouldered, with head size to match, and in addition, Wahlberg plays his character as tightly-wound, while Blucas plays his expansively, with a mobile, smiling face and lots of body language, so that he projects a big body into an even bigger character. A shirtless photo in which you can see that he’s nicely proportioned, though you can’t appreciate his overall size:

(#4)

About Wahlberg, from Wikipedia:

Donald Edmond [“Donnie”] Wahlberg Jr. (born August 17, 1969) is an American singer, songwriter, actor, record producer and film producer. He is a founding member of the boy band New Kids on the Block. Outside music, he has had roles in the Saw films, The Sixth Sense, Dreamcatcher, and Righteous Kill, also appearing in the World War II miniseries Band of Brothers as Carwood Lipton. From 2002 to 2003, he starred in the crime drama Boomtown. He has been starring in the drama series Blue Bloods as Danny Reagan with Tom Selleck (his TV father) and Bridget Moynahan (his TV sister) since 2010

And on Blucas, brief coverage in my 9/9/13 posting “Riley/Xander”, which notes his two most famous roles, as Riley Finn in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Matthew Donnally on Necessary Roughness.

And on Tom Selleck. The biggest man on Blue Bloods is definitely Tom Selleck, 6′ 4″ tall and seriously broad of shoulder; my 4/15/15 posting “Magnum” has a section on him (with of course a shirtless photo). In Blue Bloods he appears almost always in uniform or wearing a bulky sweater — presumably a device to make the viewer think that it’s his clothes that make him look so imposing.

(Hunky antipodal gay jocks modeling underwear, a bit of cheap language play, but otherwise not much to shock kids or the sexually modest.)

From the Daily Jocks people today, Aussie gruggerwear (gay rugby underwear) packaged into a calendar so you can take one for the team:

(#1) For the Melbourne Chargers Rugby Union Football Club

From the ad copy:

DailyJocks are proud new sponsors of the Melbourne Chargers LGBT Rugby team!

We have collaborated to create a hot calendar featuring the Charger Boys!

ALL PROCEEDS OF THIS CALENDAR GO TOWARDS SUPPORTING THE TEAM!

Meanwhile, the team’s statement of purpose:

(#2)

The Melbourne Chargers formed in 2009 with the purpose of creating a rugby team where new players could learn the game in an accepting environment and players who had left the sport because of their sexuality could play openly.

We aim to contribute to the promotion and development of the sport of Rugby Union in Victoria and to provide a new and diverse social opportunity for same-sex attracted people.

The Chargers are part of a much larger international movement, in this case one associated with the Bingham Cup (as in #2):

The Mark Kendall Bingham Memorial Tournament or the Bingham Cup is a biennial international, non-professional, gay rugby union tournament [sponsored by the International Gay Rugby association], first held in 2002. It is named after Mark Bingham, who died on board United Airlines Flight 93 when it crashed during the September 11, 2001 attacks .
The most recent tournament was held in Nashville, Tennessee, in May 2016.

(Just to remind you: in the current sporting world, there are three types of rugby football (as opposed to American or Canadian gridiron football): rugby union, rugby league (both originally English), and Australian rules football.)

I’ll sign off with a group photo of the Sydney Convicts, Bingham winner in 2012:

(#3)

Passing between channels on my tv on the 6th, I caught a moment from the show Mr. Robot (S3 E9) in which Terry Colby, an exec at the Allsafe Corporation, spins out a riff in high-macho figurative language, a piece of crude poetry:

That’s all teddy bears and hand jobs, but what are your financials?  We can’t wake up one day and find ourselves tits up, dicks blowing in the breeze.

The masterstroke in all this is all teddy bears and hand jobs, an invention intended to convey an ironic, dismissive version of the high-toned all sweetness and light or, better, the vernacular all beer and skittles ‘all fun and pleasure’ (skittles, the game of ninepins)

On the tv show, from Wikipedia:

(#1)

Mr. Robot is an American drama–thriller television series created by Sam Esmail. It stars Rami Malek as Elliot Alderson, a cybersecurity engineer and hacker who suffers from social anxiety disorder and clinical depression. Alderson is recruited by an insurrectionary anarchist known as “Mr. Robot”, played by Christian Slater, to join a group of hacktivists called “fsociety”. The group aims to destroy all debt records by encrypting the financial data of the largest conglomerate in the world, E Corp.

(all) sweetness and light. From NOAD:

sweetness and light: social or political harmony: the relationship was by no means all sweetness and light; a reasonable and peaceable person: when he’s around she’s all sweetness and light. [taken from Swift and used with aesthetic or moral reference, first by Arnold in Culture and Anarchy (1869)]

With all, the expression is often used in a negative context, either explicit or implicit (“Things aren’t all sweetness and light today”, “That’s all sweetness and light, but…”).

(all) beer and skittles. From NOAD:

(#2) Graphic by Fox in the Loft, Nottingham (UK), “Funky Crafts & Unique Graphic Design”; no idea why the skittles are in rainbow colors, but I approve

beer and skittles: [often with negative] British amusement or enjoyment: life isn’t all beer and skittles.

The Mr. Robot version, all teddy bears and hand jobs, names one thing presumed to be amusing (teddy bears) and one presumed to be pleasurable (hand jobs), but in the context conveying the dismissal of the thing said to be all teddy bears and hand jobs.

tits up. Figuratively, ‘non-working, dead’; the relevant image is presumably of an immobilized person lying flat on their back.

(#3) A notably un-deep quote from the actor Max Irons

The source of the image (AZ Quotes) has quotations from a great many people, including a fair number who seem to have been included on the basis of their celebrity (rather than on their ideas). So we get thoughts from Max Irons, the hunky actor with the interesting face. From Wikipedia:

(#4) Irons in The White Queen, showing nipple (continuing the tits theme)

Maximilian Paul Diarmuid “Max” Irons (born 17 October 1985) is an English-Irish actor and model. He is known for his roles in Red Riding Hood (2011), The White Queen (2013), The Host (2013), and The Riot Club (2014).

Irons was born in Camden, London, the son of English actor Jeremy Irons and Irish actress Sinéad Cusack. He is a grandson of actors Cyril Cusack and Maureen Cusack.

dick(s) waving/blowing in the wind/breeze. Conveying, more or less directly, ‘naked and exposed’, but figuratively ‘helpless’.

Notes on form. Teddy bears and hand jobs is a nicely parallel coordination, of two N + N compounds, the whole thing making a trochaic tetrameter line with a superstrong second half:

S W | S W | S | S

Later there’s the half-rhyming pairing dicks … tits, all alveolar obstruents:

/ dɪks … tɪts /

And then the whole thing ends with the alliterative blowing in the breeze (as a variant of waving in the wind).