That is, Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, the drag ballet troupe. The segue into that topic is my recent posting on dance belts (and ballet tights for men), and a comment from Mike McKinley on the functions of the dance belt (beyond support).

Mike cited two important functions: one aesthetic, the other practical. On the aesthetic side, the dance belt avoids displaying the the details of genitals. Instead, the parts of the dancer’s package are put together into a smooth bulge. That does have the consequence of making the bulge quite prominent; the man’s crotch is emphasized (though tastefully), so that dance belts have bedcome homoerotic icons.

On the practical side, the dance belt prevents the dancer’s testicles from being smashed between his thighs in certain movements. Here’s Angel Corella (an incredibly accomplished and wildly popular dancer) executing a movement in Giselle that would be painful without the services of the dance belt:

On Corella:

Ángel Corella (born 8 November 1975) is a Spanish dancer, currently the Artistic Director and principal dancer of Barcelona Ballet (formerly Corella Ballet, Castilla Y León) as well as former principal dancer with American Ballet Theatre.

There are a fair number of videos available, for instance this one of Paloma Herrera and Angel Corella in Don Quixote:

On to the Trocks and to photos of dancers in male parts, showing the prominence of the dancebelt. Here’s one from the Bluebird pas de deux from Sleeping Beauty:

And then a couple photos from Mike McKinley, who was a Trock for some years:

First, ballerina Carla Fracci visiting backstage with the Trocks at the Spoleto, Italy, Festival ca. 1980:

Mike is the Boy in Blue in “Yes, Virginia, Another Piano Ballet”. As a guy, his stage name was Igor Teupleze (all Trock stage names play on words). Here Igor is partnering Ida Nevasayneva in Raymonda:

Then, leaving the world of dance belts, here’s Mike en pointe as the White Swan in the pas de deux from Swan Lake, ca. 1986:

(Partnering Mike is Shannon Robbins.)

On this site, you can find Mike’s bio and photo, plus a PDF link to all of Chapter One of Mike’s memoir-in-progress, “Blood and Satin: Confessions of a Drag Ballerina”.

Now, the Trocks. From Wikipedia:

Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo is an American all-male drag ballet corps which parodies the conventions and clichés of romantic and classical ballet. The company was co-founded by Peter Anastos, Natch Taylor and Antony Bassae in New York City in 1974, producing small, late-night shows, in off-off Broadway lofts. Their first show was on September 9, 1974, at a second story loft on 14th street, in the heart of the meat-packing district. The current artistic director is Tory Dobrin.

… The dancers portray both male and female roles in a humorous style that combines parodies of ballet, posing and physical comedy with “straighter” pieces intended to show off the performers’ technical skills. Much of the humor is in seeing male dancers en travesti; performing roles usually reserved to females, wearing tutus and dancing en pointe.

Here’s a perceptive piece about the Trocks by Leigh Witchel in 2005:

“All of our ballerinas are in very good moods. . .”

So ends the announcement at every performance of the Trocks that begins with every dance reviewer’s nightmare; a litany of substitutions that sends the audience scrambling for their programs. It’s a shtick but it still works, an apt metaphor for the Trocks.

Like the other travesti companies, the Trocks are affectionate parodists. There are people in the audience who wouldn’t be caught dead at Lincoln Center, who love the Trocks for the hairy armpits and the zany humor. There are also those like the very elegant Indian lady in the long fur coat in front of me. “Oh no, I was raised on Fonteyn and Beriosova,” she said happily as she sat back to watch the performance and I happily went back to envying her.

The Trocks version of “Swan Lake, Act II” contains the mime passage where Odette explains the origin of the lake and her enchantment. It’s the real thing . . .well, with a few additions. They also retain Benno, and who does that anymore? Odette was performed by Svetlana Lofatkina (Fernando Medina Gallego). With no offense to Miranda Weese, Ms. Lofatkina reminds one of her sharp stage presence and incisive wit. One of Ms. Lofatkina’s best moments came when Benno, played by the small but puffed-up Igor Slowpokin (Manolo Molina), dropped her yet again. She cast him a withering glance and made a quick sign to indicate that this was mistake number two and he would not likely survive a third.

The best of the travesti ballerinas, Ms. Lofatkina and Janie Sparker of the Grandiva company among them, are wonderful because you can tell in every performance how much they love ballet. When asked about the qualities necessary in a ballerina, Alexandra Danilova first named modesty. A ballerina has to love herself  [to] create a persona large enough not to wither onstage, but she has to love ballet even more. In the coda of “Swan Lake”, Ms. Lofatkina came out to do her series of arabesques on the diagonal. What was beautiful about it was not her lines. They were respectable but no matter how skilled men get in pointe work their bodies can’t produce feminine lines, only approximations. What was beautiful was how hard she tried to make those lines beautiful, even in the midst of all the jokes. She wasn’t trying to show us herself; she was trying to show us the ballet. Seeing the Trocks’ “Swan Lake” makes me love the conventional “Swan Lake” more, not less.

My man Jacques adored the Trocks, and we saw them every chance we got.

Just in the past two days, four more deaths of people who have given me pleasure through their work: Ed Fisher and Peter Workman in the NYT yesterday, Jonathan Winters and Maria Tallchief today. There’s some linguistic interest in there.

I’ll lead with Fisher, because he was a cartoonist who played with language a good bit. From the NYT obit by Bruce Weber:

Ed Fisher, New Yorker Cartoonist, Dies at 86

Ed Fisher, whose culturally savvy cartoons, featured in The New Yorker for nearly 50 years, made wry sport of modern life, frequently matching images from history or folklore with captions in an up-to-date mode, died on April 3 in Canaan, Conn.

… An ancient history buff and a keen observer of social behavior, Mr. Fisher created cartoons that managed to be erudite without being pretentious, requiring both a general recognition of the history of the world and a healthy appreciation of irony.

… He contributed to Saturday Review, Harper’s Magazine, The Antioch Review, The Christian Science Monitor and other publications, but he was most closely associated with The New Yorker, which published more than 700 of his cartoons, the first in 1951 and the last in 2000.

Four of his cartoons (and there are five more here). First, one about putting language in cartoons:

  (#1)

Then a play on La Forza del Destino:

  (#2)

And a play on the text of The Raven:

  (#3)

Finally, word puzzlement:

  (#4)

Next, Peter Workman, obit by Paul Vitello:

Peter Workman, Book Publisher With an Eye for Hits, Dies at 74

Peter Workman, the founder of Workman Publishing, whose knack for landing best-selling trade books like “What to Expect When You’re Expecting,” and “The Silver Palate Cookbook” built his company into one of the few remaining independent book publishers in the country, died on Sunday at his home in Manhattan.

… Mr. Workman was known in the publishing world as a genially offbeat entrepreneur of nonfiction, with an on-base percentage — in publishing terms — worthy of Cooperstown: one of every three books issued by Workman sold 100,000 copies or more. His successes included blockbusters like “The Official Preppy Handbook” in 1980 and Patricia Schultz’s “1,000 Places to See Before You Die” in 2003, as well as lesser-known but perennial sellers like Richard Hittleman’s “Yoga: 28-Day Exercise Plan,” the company’s first published book, which is still in print.

… When the cartoonist B. Kliban’s [Bernard "Hap" Kliban] first “Cat” book was published in 1975, for example, sales were anemic until Mr. Workman sent his staff to the Madison Square Garden cat show to peddle copies and had poster-size versions of Mr. Kliban’s richly detailed cats printed for bookstore displays. Sales picked up, and Mr. Workman, an early believer in merchandising, soon followed with Kliban-cat-printed pillows, mugs and calendars.

One of my favorite cartoons by Kliban, which came to me through Workman’s books:

  (#5)

(Many years ago, after Ann Daingerfield Zwicky and I published our piece on American restaurant menus in American Speech, we became minor media celebrities for a while– interviewed on radio and television for several weeks– and a Workman staff member approached us about doing a book on the topic for the company. We talked for some time, but in the end it came to nothing; I’m afraid we were too academic.)

On to today, with two big (and very different) stars. First, Jonathan Winters, in an obit by William Grimes:

Jonathan Winters, Unpredictable Comic and Master of Improvisation, Dies at 87

Jonathan Winters, the rubber-faced comedian whose unscripted flights of fancy inspired a generation of improvisational comics, and who kept television audiences in stitches with Main Street characters like Maude Frickert, a sweet-seeming grandmother with a barbed tongue and a roving eye, died on Thursday at his home in Montecito, Calif.

… Mr. Winters, a rotund man whose face had a melancholy basset-hound expression in repose, burst onto the comedy scene in the late 1950s and instantly made his mark as one of the funniest, least definable comics in a rising generation that included Mort Sahl, Shelley Berman and Bob Newhart.

Winters’s zany, often barely-in-control, humor always reminded me of Andy Kaufman‘s, though Winters was sweeter (but just as strange). I was especially fond of his appearances on the offbeat sitcom Mork and Mindy.

Then, Maria Tallchief, in an obit by Jack Anderson:

Maria Tallchief, a daughter of an Oklahoma oil family who grew up on an Indian reservation, found her way to New York and became one of the most brilliant American ballerinas of the 20th century, died on Thursday in Chicago.

… A former wife and muse of the choreographer George Balanchine, Ms. Tallchief achieved renown with Balanchine’s New York City Ballet, dazzling audiences with her speed, energy and fire. Indeed, the part that catapulted her to acclaim, in 1949, was the title role in the company’s version of Stravinsky’s “Firebird,” one of many that Balanchine created for her.

… Growing up at a time when many American dancers adopted Russian stage names, Ms. Tallchief, proud of her Indian heritage, refused to do so, even though friends told her that it would be easy to transform Tallchief into Tallchieva.

She was born Elizabeth Marie Tall Chief on Jan. 24, 1925 in a small hospital in Fairfax, Okla. Her father, Alexander Joseph Tall Chief, was a 6-foot-2 full-blooded Osage Indian whom his daughters idolized and women found strikingly handsome, Ms. Tallchief later wrote. (She and her sister joined their surnames when they began dancing professionally.)

Quite a few years ago I had someone at a party explain to me that Tallchief was a fabulous Russian ballerina, you could tell that from her name. Nothing I said about the Osage could sway the man.

I saw her dance only on film, a poor substitute for live performance. There are lots of YouTube videos, but none (as far as I can see) of very good quality. I’d love to see a good film of her in Firebird.

The latest dance rage. From Wikipedia:

Twerking is a “dance move that involves a person shaking their upper hips and lower hips in an up and down bouncing motion, causing them to shake, ‘wobble’ and ‘jiggle.’” To “twerk” means to “dance in a sexually suggestive fashion by twisting the hips”.

The word “twerking” may be derived from one of two sources:

a contraction of “footwork”, or
a portmanteau of twist and jerk.

Ties have been made to many traditional African dances.

… Twerking was introduced into hip-hop culture by way of the New Orleans bounce music scene. In 1993 DJ Jubilee recorded the dance tune “Do The Jubilee All” in which he chanted, “Twerk baby, twerk baby, twerk, twerk, twerk.” The video for the song increased the popularity of twerking. In 1995 New Orleans-based rapper Cheeky Blakk recorded the song “Twerk Something”, a call-and-response dance song dedicated to twerking. In 1997 DJ Jubilee recorded “Get Ready, Ready” in which he encouraged listeners to “Twerk it!”.

A great amount of credit for the expansion of twerking outside of New Orleans can be given to strip clubs in Houston and Atlanta.

Twerkers were predominantly black and female for quite some time, but now a major exponent of twerking is the very white Miley Cyrus, and men (both straight and gay, of various races and ethnicities) have gotten into shaking their booties. Here’s Julian Serrano (Juju) moving his butt in the hot video Julian Serrano Pretty Gang Twerk:

  (#1)

A still from this video (Serrano twerking his way through household chores):

(#2)

Serrano is also featured in the hilarious video Twerking to Classical Part 2: High Class Male Makeover (clips of twerkmen doing their thing, set to the William Tell Overture), here (#3).

A New Yorker cartoon by Emily Flake:

(#1)

The reference is to Miley Cyrus’s performance at the recent Video Music Awards.

From Rolling Stone on the 25th, “Miley Cyrus ‘Can’t Stop’ Twerking at VMAs 2013, Twitter Reacts: Pop star stuns alongside giant dancing bears” by Erin Couleran (with a video):

Miley Cyrus performed her hit summer single “We Can’t Stop” at the 2013 VMAs [Video Music Awards] with a parade of giant bears dancing around her. The pop singer performed her racy song in a silver sequin leotard with an image of a bear sticking his tongue out.

After “We Can’t Stop,” Robin Thicke, Kendrick Lamar and 2 Chainz took the stage and performed “Blurred Lines” with Miley. She danced with Thicke, gyrating in a flesh-toned plastic bikini with a foam “We’re No. 1″ hand.”

It was definitely one of the night’s most talked-about moments, with some fans expressing shock and others applauding the pop singer’s wild antics.

A still from the performance:

(#2)

On twerking, on this blog, see here. And on Thicke’s “Blurred Lines”, see here.

Cyrus has come quite a distance since her Disney younger years. From Wikipedia on those years:

Miley Ray Cyrus (born Destiny Hope Cyrus; November 23, 1992) is an American actress and recording artist. The daughter of country singer Billy Ray Cyrus, she held minor roles in the television series Doc and the film Big Fish in her childhood. In 2006, Cyrus rose to prominence as a teen idol after being cast in the Disney Channel television series Hannah Montana, in which she portrayed the starring character Miley Stewart.

From the NYT on the 1st, this entertaining piece by Teddy Wayne, “Explaining Twerking to Your Parents”, beginning:

Every child dreads this day: sooner or later, your parents will come to you, innocently wide-eyed, to ask you about twerking. How you handle this difficult conversation is extremely important and could have a significant impact on the way your parents think about twerking for years to come. You may prefer to put off the big “twerk talk,” but remember that it’s far better for you to be the one to explain than for them to learn on their own by searching YouTube.

A critical first step is to acknowledge that twerking is a normal part of life and that there is nothing shameful in their questions. They’re parents, after all, and this is the sort of thing they hear about on NPR, and, well, they’re curious.

Explain that twerking is a dance move typically associated with lower-income African-American women that involves the rapid gyration of the hips in a fashion that prominently exhibits the elasticity of the gluteal musculature.

They will reasonably wonder why Miley Cyrus, who is white and wealthy, does it at every opportunity. Patiently respond that, for Ms. Cyrus, twerking is a brazenly cynical act of cultural appropriation being passed off as a rebellious reclamation of her sexuality after a childhood in the Disneyfied spotlight, but, in the end, who are we really to judge? I mean, it can’t be a picnic being Billy Ray’s daughter, and remember that Vanity Fair picture of them? That was just …weird.

Previously on this blog:

“Twerking” 7/13/13
“Twerk time” 8/28/13
“Cyrus – Timberlake” 9/1/13

And the creepy Vanity Fair photo:

Probably my last posting on twerking. Who could top this?

Holiday stories pile up faster than I can cope with them. This one is no longer hot news, but I’m charmed by the performance it describes. From a recent New Yorker “Goings on about town”, in the Dance category, on Peter and the Wolf at the Guggenheim Museum, December 6 – 14:

This charming, child-friendly entertainment by Prokofiev, created, in 1936, for the Moscow Children’s Theatre, tells of the adventures of a young boy. Isaac Mizrahi is the avuncular narrator and the brain behind this pleasingly homespun staging, which moves the action to New York’s Central Park. The characters’ musical motifs have been developed by the young choreographer John Heginbotham into witty little dance numbers. The thirty-minute piece will be played live by the Ensemble Signal.

The flamoyant Mizrahi strikes me as an inspired choice for a New York audience. In fact, he’s been overseeing holiday performances of Peter and the Wolf for some years now; the choreography was added in 2013.

Basic facts from Wikipedia:

Isaac Mizrahi (born October 14, 1961) is an American fashion designer, TV presenter, and creative director of Xcel Brands. He is best known for his eponymous fashion lines.

Mizrahi was born in Brooklyn, New York, to an observant Jewish family that originated in Syria. His father gave him a sewing machine at the age of ten. At 15, he launched his own label, IS New York, with the help of a family friend. He attended Yeshivah of Flatbush, High School of Performing Arts, and the Parsons School of Design.

It will come as no surprise that a fashion designer is gay, and Mizrahi has apparently always been visibly, happily out. And now married: he married his partner of six years, Arnold Germer, in a civil ceremony in New York City Hall on November 30, 2011.

You can watch him do a TED talk on fashion and creativity here.

In my posting on Padre Antonio Soler, I quoted a bit about

A fandango once attributed to Soler, and probably more often performed than any other work of his, is now thought by some to be of doubtful authorship.

and was reminded how much I enjoy the word fandango — a straightforward case of “word attraction” (the opposite of word rage). So I’ve gone on to play with the word.

On the word, from NOAD2:

1 a lively Spanish dance [in triple time] for two people [or sometimes solo, or in ensemble], typically accompanied by castanets or tambourine. [YouTube video here]

2 a foolish or useless act or thing: the Washington inaugural fandango.

ORIGIN mid 18th cent.: Spanish, of unknown origin.

Wikipedia gives further figurative meanings:

As a result of the extravagant features of the dance, the word fandango is used as a synonym for “a quarrel,” “a big fuss,” or “a brilliant exploit.”

(Fandango is also a corporation in the United States that sells movie tickets via telephone and Internet, but I don’t know the history of the name.)

I went to the RhymeZone site to collect expressions that rhyme with fandango (taking some license with /æ/ for some of these words, /a/ for others, and variation for some others).  Mango and tango, but also a Japanese food word, dango, plus a collection of proper names.

dango. From Wikipedia:

Dango … is a Japanese dumpling and sweet made from mochiko (rice flour), related to mochi. It is often served with green tea. Dango is eaten year-round, but the different varieties are traditionally eaten in given seasons. Three to four dango are often served on a skewer.

Bizango. From Wikipedia on voodoo:

Besides regular priests who belong to ordinary voodoo temples, there are secret societies in Africa, the Bizango.

Place names. From Pennsylvania to El Salvador.

Venango County is a county located in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania [northwest PA, between Pittsburgh and Erie] (link)

The City of Durango is the Home Rule Municipality that is the county seat and the most populous municipality of La Plata County, Colorado (link)

Durango … is one of the 31 states which, with the Federal District, compose the 32 Federal Entities of Mexico. The state is located in Northwest Mexico. (link)

Ilopango is a town in the San Salvador department of El Salvador. It is a few miles east of the nation’s capital, San Salvador. It is located near Lake Ilopango, the country’s largest lake (link)

Near rhymes (beyond /æ/ – /a/). RhymeZone doesn’t note capitalization for these, since many of the spellings represent several different words, differently capitalized. Here they are, lowercased, arranged by number of letters in the spelling:

5: angle, banco, bongo, campo, canto, rambo, sambo, santo

6: blanco, brando, franco, quango, tangle

7: orlando, taranto

8: commando, fernando

9: bel canto, esperanto

Play with them. Let them roll off your tongue as sheer sound.

Back on the 10th, I posted on a beautifully muscled and athletic male ballet dancer (and his dance belt). Now some follow-ups, starting with a couple of photos from Mike McKinley (balletomane and former Trock) — another ballet dancer, one with extraordinary musculature, and a male pas de deux (as a bonus, naked) — which led to Matthew Bourne and his paired male dancers.

(The photos from McKinley came from pages for Facebook groups (Ballet Boys, Male Ballet Dancers), where they were, alas, uncredited.)

Muscle Man. In this photo:

(#1)

Remarkable musculature — to my eyes, going over the line from wonderfully fit into the world of hyper-developed bodybuilders.

Male pas de deux. Two naked men performing remarkably gymnastic ballet:

(#2)

Wonderful lines.

Matthew Bourne. Bourne is famous for (among other things) his gay version of Swan Lake, with a human male in love with a male swan. Then in 2009 came his ballet Dorian Gray. From the Guardian that year, a piece in which “Richard Winsor and Jason Piper talk about researching their roles, portraying paranoia and the power of an all-male duet”. The pair on stage:

(#3)

Yesterday’s morning name, for a ballet. From Wikipedia:

La Bayadère (en. The Temple Dancer) … is a ballet, originally staged in four acts and seven tableaux by French choreographer Marius Petipa to the music of Ludwig Minkus. La Bayadère was first performed by the Imperial Ballet at the Imperial Bolshoi Kamenny Theatre in St. Petersburg, Russia, on 4 February [O.S. 23 January] 1877. A scene from the ballet, known as The Kingdom of the Shades, is one of the most celebrated excerpts in all of classical ballet.

Today, La Bayadère is presented primarily in two different versions — those productions derived from Vakhtang Chabukiani and Vladimir Ponomaryov’s 1941 revival for the Kirov Ballet, and those productions derived from Natalia Makarova’s 1980 version for American Ballet Theatre, which is itself derived from Chabukiani and Ponomaryov’s version.

… Petipa’s La Bayadère … tells the story of the bayadère Nikiya and the warrior Solor, who have sworn eternal fidelity to one another.

Very brief excerpts from a Bolshoi performance here:

It starts with a New Yorker Talk of the Town piece (July 6th & 13th), “The Horde” (by Claudia Roth Pierpont), about a Twyla Tharp performance. That led me to my files, where Tharp’s piece “Push Comes to Shove” came up because of the truncation in its title. And then to other Tharp dances in my experience. And to Tharp’s first name.

Tharp in a recent photo:

The New Yorker piece. It begins:

“The cane is good,” Twyla Tharp said to a middle-aged man who had presented himself for her inspection. He was one of some hundred people of varying ages and shapes who showed up at a storefront space in Battery Park City on a humid Saturday afternoon with the intention of performing as a dancer that very night. For eleven seconds, precisely—Tharp is nothing if not precise, although she did concede that there would be a few seconds more of glory if one counted the time spent taking a bow.

Tharp, one of the great choreographers of the modern age, is celebrating her fiftieth year of making dances with a program of new material and, come fall, will take a company of dancers on a ten-week tour that culminates at Lincoln Center. But first, in a look back at her past, she was staging “The One Hundreds,” an experimental work from 1970, a moment when ordinary people, doing ordinary moves, had transfixed the dance avant-garde. Tharp was then a powerful dancer who, despite her avant-garde bona fides, loved working with other powerful dancers, and she gave this sixties populism a twist. “The One Hundreds” opens with two trained dancers performing a hundred rehearsed movement sequences of eleven seconds each, in unison, without looking at one another; they are followed by five dancers, each performing a different twenty of those movements, simultaneously, and, finally, by an onrush of a hundred ordinary folk, each of whom performs one of the eleven-second phrases. Tharp has called the piece “a study in deterioration.”

Background on Tharp, from Wikipedia:

Twyla Tharp (…born July 1, 1941) is an American dancer, choreographer, and author who lives and works in New York City. In 1966, she formed her own company Twyla Tharp Dance. Her work often utilizes classical music, jazz, and contemporary pop music.

… In 1973, Tharp choreographed Deuce Coupe to the music of The Beach Boys for the Joffrey Ballet. Deuce Coupe is considered to be the first crossover ballet. Later she choreographed Push Comes to Shove (1976), which featured Mikhail Baryshnikov and is now thought to be the best example of the crossover ballet.

… Tharp was born in 1941 on a farm in Portland, Indiana, the daughter of Lucille and William Tharp. She was named for Twila Thornburg, the “Pig Princess” of the 89th Annual Muncie Fair in Indiana. [Tharp’s parents were given to choosing extraordinary names for their chidren.]

Truncation. I vaguely recalled having posted somewhere on Tharp. Indeed I had, in connection with her dance Push Comes to Shove. In 2010 on ADS-L. From Ben Zimmer on 2/26/10:

The latest OED draft entry for “push” has “if/when push comes to shove” from 1940. Some earlier cites (the first three are from “The Week,” by Defender columnist Roscoe Simmons): [1924, 1926, 1931, 1932, 1935, 1937]

That same day I replied (with minor editing of the text here):

There are also instances of truncated “push comes to shove”, with no overt “if/when”. Huge number of examples in titles (the Twyla Tharp dance, for example), but some in text:

The United States has no national interests in Georgia; Russia does. Push comes to shove, we won’t go to war for Georgia and should therefore not indicate or imply that we would, it makes the Georgian’s take excessive risks. (link)

There are also instances of headlines where what’s conveyed is ‘push has come to shove':

Push comes to shove in Pa. budget process (link)

(That last example is just the usual omission of auxiliary verbs in headlines.)

My files have some other truncations of initial material in formulaic expressions. For example:

the fuck for what the fuck (posting here)

for me for as for me (posted on ADS-L 9/13/11)

safe than sorry for better safe than sorry (not previously posted)

longer term for in the longer term (not previously posted)

best (as) I can VP for as best (as) I can VP (not previously posted)

Truncations of final material are much more common, but truncations of initial material do occur. There are also omissions of initial material that look like separate phenomena from these initial truncations: in particular, omissions of subjects (Just saw Harry) and omissions of initial deinite articles (Thing is, I can’t speak Polish).

Tharp dances. Tharp had a residency at the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State in 1991, so my man Jacques and I got to see her perform right on campus. In one of her performances, she discussed her choreographic process and illustrated the relationship of music and dance by using the same choreography with two contrasting pieces of music (“Fever,” sung by Buddy Guy, and “Java Jive,” sung by the Ink Spots).

These pieces then went on the road as an introduction to her work “In the Upper Room” (with music by Phillip Glass), in a program entitled “Oppositions” — a 1996 performance of which was broadcast on PBS (and is preserved in the American Archive of Public Broadcasting).

Tharp’s name. Note the story above about the origin of the name Twyla in the Wikipedia article — as a variant of Twila. But where does Twila/Twyla come from?

Here the websites on name origins are a complete morass. Most of the proposals — ‘woven with a double thread’ (twined or twisted); ‘twilight’; a Cajun pronunciation of French étoile ‘star’ — look like guesses based on the form of the name, and the occasional suggestion of an Amerindian origin (without any specific details) looks like appealing to native Americans as the source of things that are otherwise obscure. Some of the name sites say that the name appeared in the US in the late 19th century, but give no documentation about the context.

So we have a question that calls for someone with the resources to scour documents from the relevant period and knowledge of the cultural context, and unfortunately I’m not such a person.

From Mike McKinley, this photo from dancer Roberto Bolle’s Instagram account:

(#1)

An extraordinary photo of an extraordinary body, turned into sculpture here.

Very briefly on Bolle, from Wikipedia:

Roberto Bolle (born March 26, 1975) is an Italian danseur. He is currently a principal dancer with American Ballet Theatre and also holds guest artist status with The Royal Ballet and La Scala Theatre Ballet, making regular appearances with both companies.

… Bolle has appeared in numerous fashion and style magazines and has been featured in advertising campaigns; Ferragamo featured him in a 2008 promotion and he also was featured in Vogue US 2009 alongside supermodel Coco Rocha in an editorial spread. Bolle also has an agreement with Giorgio Armani, who supplies him with clothes.

Here he is dancing, flying in mid-air:

(#2)

(Photo by Giovanni Gastel)

As well as being a major talent in dance, Bolle is also a very handsome man, even when fully dressed:

(#3)

(Photo by Andreas Larsson in Fantastic Man #17)

He plays sexily to the camera, and the camera loves him. There’s a substantial body of amazing photos of him by male photographer Bruce Weber, from which I’ve managed to select just one:

(#4)

From my crack team of ballet reporters, two clips of the Golden Idol variation from the ballet La Bayadère, which I wrote about in a 6/23 posting. Nothing of linguistic interest here; this is just for the pleasure of watching these men dance.

First, from Mike McKinley, this clip of Wilfried Romoli dancing in Paris in 1994 (choreography by Rudolf Nureyev, after the Petipa original):

Romoli (born in 1963) has been a principal dancer of the Ballet of the Paris Opera since 1989.

Then, from Chris Ambidge, this clip of Ivan Vasiliev in the Bolshoi Ballet’s 2007 production (choregraphy by Y. Grigorovich, after Petipa).

Vasiliev (born 1989) was a principal dancer at the Bolshoi until 2011, then moved to the Mikhaylovsky Theatre in St. Petersburg and on to American Ballet Theatre in 2012.

(Mostly about dance, but with a digression on a racial slur.)

In the November 2nd New Yorker, under Dance, a Joan Acocella piece, “Tap Routine: Donald Byrd considers the evolution of minstrelsy”. The background:

For bien-pensant people looking to enjoy the art of the past, there is probably nothing more bewildering — not the gaze-worthy nudes of Titian, not the beautiful dances created for Indian girls who had been sold to their temples as priestess-prostitutes — than the minstrel shows that flourished in America in the years surrounding the Civil War. Typically, these shows featured a lineup of a dozen or so men performing comic songs and skits based on “darkie” stereotypes, above all the image of black people as happy-go-lucky, lazy, feckless guys lying around and chewing on something or other. Minstrel shows seem even more deplorable in that they began as the creation of white people, performing in blackface and with big, woolly wigs. But such shows were also hugely popular with black people, who were soon producing their own versions, in which they, too, corked up and put on fuzzy wigs. We owe minstrelsy a great debt. It was the foremost precursor of vaudeville. The one and then the other were what regular people had by way of variety-show entertainment before TV, and therefore they were the arena in which clogging and jigging and other dances coalesced into what we now call tap dance.

And then:

The racial jokes that were the stock-in-trade of minstrelsy are still around, and a lot of us, black and white, are still laughing at them, which is the subject of Yuval Taylor and Jake Austen’s 2012 book “Darkest America: Black Minstrelsy from Slavery to Hip-Hop.” As Taylor and Austen argue, a lot of our best humor, especially our African-American humor, comes from minstrel traditions. Dave Chappelle told Oprah Winfrey that blackface “got me in touch with my inner coon.” This resulted in some very funny routines.

Note Chappelle’s self-mocking coon. I’ll get to that in a little while.

Spike Lee’s movie “Bamboozled,” from 2000, was an angry protest against the use of minstrel stereotypes in entertainment. So is “The Minstrel Show Revisited,” in which Donald Byrd, the artistic director of Seattle’s Spectrum Dance Theatre, has performers in blackface singing and dancing while acts of police brutality take place in the foreground. The 2014 version of Byrd’s show [originally performed in 1991] was inspired by the killing of Trayvon Martin. On Oct. 28-30, at Skirball Center, Byrd will present an updated rendition, taking into account especially the death of Michael Brown, in Ferguson, and the Black Lives Matter movement. Minstrelsy has had a broader legacy than tap dance, Byrd feels.

The Spectrum dancers in a November 8, 2013, workshop performance of The Minstrel Show (photo by Nate Watters):

Now to coon. The (considerable) relevant material from Green’s Dictionary of Slang:

[fig. uses of SE raccoon. typified as a cunning creature. Used orig. in non-racial senses (emphasizing only cunning), the meaning swiftly became unequivocally racist, and used as such in Aus. too, where it described Aborigines; note American Dialect Society List 17/12/01: ‘The daughter of William Lloyd Garrison (the great American abolitionist), while tending to the needs of emancipated slaves on the Gullah Islands, anthologizd Negro spirituals. She also made notes on the Gullah dialect. “Coon” was the name that the ex-slaves called each other, and she indicates that it is the word “cousin” as expressed through the dialect. […] As with many terms that members of ethnic communities call each other, they descend into the pejorative’]

1 (US) a Whig [from 1872; from the emblem of the Whigs]

2 (US) a Native American [from 1857]

3 (US) a sly person, a cunning fellow [from 1843]

4 (US) a person, esp. a rustic, a peasant [from 1832]

5 (orig. US) a highly derog. term for a black person [possibly from 1767, certainly from 1848]

6 (US black) used non-pejoratively of a fellow black person [from 1914]

7 a clown, a fool, the image is of a ‘chocolate coloured coon’ [from 1922, in Ulysses]

8 (S.Afr.) a black South African [from 1982]

9 (Aus.) an Aborigine [from 1986]

This would be the place to announce that I have now created a Page on this blog with postings on “Slurs” of various sorts (under the “Linguistics notes” Page). This is only an inventory of postings (on Language Log and this blog) about slurs, not an inventory of slurs in English; for that you’d need to consult dictionaries of such things.

Another installment on male ballet dancers and their remarkable bodies. Passed on by Mike McKinley, Chris Ambidge, and Arne Adolfsen from the Male Ballet Dancers Facebook page, Friedemann Vogel as photographed by Youn Sik Kim:

(#1)

Vogel in mid-air: slender and lean, lean, lean, but with massive thigh muscles.

From Vogel’s own website:

In September 1998 Friedemann Vogel joined the Stuttgart Ballet and quickly rose through the ranks. In 2002 he was promoted to first soloist, the company’s highest rank.

And he guest dances with companies around the world, taking on an exceptionally wide range of roles in doing so.

Two more photos of Vogel by Kim:

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Youn Sik Kim lives in Seoul, South Korea; his subjects are diverse, but ballet is a special focus. Profile photos of him from his Facebook page:

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(Another posting about the male body, but with some fine photography.)

From the models.com site on the 11th, a piece by Jonathan Shia, “Matthew Brookes’ Ballet Dancers”. Highlights:

Flip through the pages of Les Danseurs, the photographer Matthew Brookes’ new book devoted to the male dancers of the Paris Opéra Ballet, and you might take him for a lifelong fan of the artform. The intimate black-and-white photos offer a personal and powerful look at their bodies, shaped by lifetimes devoted to dance, combining both grace and power as the best performers do. But Brookes, a frequent contributor to various Vogues, Interview, and Vanity Fair who has also lensed campaigns for Giorgio Armani, Cartier, Burberry, and Berluti, says he knew nothing about dance before being introduced to one of the dancers through a casting director he was working with, a chance encounter that eventually blossomed into this monograph.

… The photographs, shot in a clean studio against a rough cloth backdrop, are guided by an abstract and almost sculptural sense of form. There are no arabesques or pirouettes, just shapes and compositions reminiscent of flowers and what Brookes calls his initial inspiration of “birds falling from the sky,” with hints of Rodin’s muscular sculpture thrown in. The photographer says that his driving instinct was to capture the dancers’ strength as athletes, rather than following the stereotypical ideas of classical ballet as “sensitive” and “ethereal.”

Three of the photos:

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(Hat tip to Chis Ambidge and Mike McKinley.)

Listening to WQXR (classical music in NYC) last night, I though I heard the announcer explain that the next item, Tchaikovsky’s “Polish” Symphony (Symphony No. 3), was the only symphony to be written in a major key. Counterexamples crowded to mind like angry insects, so I decided I must have misheard. And indeed, what she said must have been something like “the only symphony he had written in a major key”. So: unique for Tchaikovsky, not for the music world as a whole.

But the symphony, rarely performed, then led me on to the world of dance, and George Balanchine.

Wikipedia on the symphony:

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 3 in D major, Op. 29, was written in 1875. He began it at Vladimir Shilovsky’s estate at Ussovo on 5 June and finished on 1 August at Verbovka. Dedicated to Shilovsky, the work is unique in Tchaikovsky’s symphonic output in two ways: it is the only one of his seven symphonies (including the unnumbered Manfred Symphony) in a major key (discounting the unfinished Symphony in E♭ major); and it is the only one to contain five movements (an additional Alla tedesca movement occurs between the opening movement and the slow movement).

Its first performance in the United Kingdom was at the Crystal Palace in 1899, conducted by Sir August Manns, who seems to have been the first to refer to it as the “Polish Symphony”, in reference to the recurring Polish dance rhythms prominent in the symphony’s final movement. Several musicologists, including David Brown and Francis Maes, consider this name a faux pas. Western listeners, conditioned by Chopin’s use of the polonaise as a symbol of Polish independence, interpreted Tchaikovsky’s use of the same dance likewise; actually, in Tsarist Russia it was musical code for the Romanov dynasty and, by extension, Russian imperialism.

The symphony was used by George Balanchine as the score for the Diamonds section of his full length 1967 ballet Jewels, omitting the opening movement.

From the symphony, the second movement, which can be heard on YouTube here, with notes from the recording:

Sir Thomas Beecham thought highly enough of the work to make only its second British recording, with the Royal Philharmonic in 1947. We hear the second movement, a charming Tchaikovsky waltz in [German] ‘l[ä]ndler’ style, as per the marking “Alla Tedesca.”

Then the ballet, from Wikipedia:

Jewels is a three-act ballet created for the New York City Ballet by co-founder and founding choreographer George Balanchine. It premièred on Thursday, 13 April 1967 at the New York State Theater, with sets designed by Peter Harvey and lighting by Ronald Bates.

Jewels has been called the first full-length abstract ballet. It has three related movements Emeralds, Rubies, and Diamonds (usually separated by intermissions). It can also be seen as three separate ballets, linked by their jewel-colored costumes. Balanchine commented: “The ballet had nothing to do with jewels. The dancers are just dressed like jewels.” Each of the three acts features the music of a different composer: Emeralds is set to the music of Gabriel Fauré, Rubies to the music of Igor Stravinsky and Diamonds to music by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.

Rupert Pennefather in Jewels performed by the Royal Ballet:

The Polonaise finale from Diamonds, as performed by the Paris Opera Ballet, can be viewed on YouTube here. (I know that some people don’t care for Balanchine in general, and that some find the Paris Opera Ballet performances lacking in passion, but you take what you can get.)

Two days ago I posted a Mother Goose and Grimm strip on New Year’s resolution (#1 there, with the character Ralph confusing resolution and revolution). Now comes a Eugene Chan cartoon with a musical pun on resolution:

(#1)

It resolves to a G minor triad.

From NOAD2 on some senses of resolution::

1 a firm decision to do or not to do something: she kept her resolution not to see Anne any more | a New Year’s resolution.

2 the action of solving a problem, dispute, or contentious matter: the peaceful resolution of all disputes | a successful resolution to the problem.

[2a] Music the passing of a discord into a concord during the course of changing harmony.

The sense in New Year’s resolution as ordinarily understood is 1. The sense in #1 is 2a.

When I first saw #1 on Facebook, I took it to be an musically clever xkcd cartoon, but then I saw the link, to Chan’s website don’t shoot the pianist: he is doing the best he can. The site’s name is a film allusion; from Wikipedia:

Shoot the Piano Player (French: Tirez sur le pianiste; UK title: Shoot the Pianist) is a 1960 French crime drama film directed by François Truffaut and starring Charles Aznavour as the titular pianist. It is based on the novel Down There by David Goodis.

(#2)

#1 also made my body ache sympathetically, since the pianist appeared to be performing in a sitting position but without a piano bench. Chan explained on Facebook that he has trouble drawing piano benches.

I don’t know much about Chan — his website is not at all informative — beyond the facts that in addition to being a stick-figure cartoonist, he has or has had some connection to Canada, given his website’s address; that he’s a serious pianist and enthusiast of pianos, piano music, and pianists; that he’s inclined to language play; and that he’s a great admirer of Randall Munroe (also a stick-figure cartoonist given to language play) and his xkcd cartoons. Chan’s website even has an archive arranged just like Munroe’s for xkcd.

Many intriguing things on the archive, including a maddening series of postings on “Pieces You Can Probably Identify: Given only the first note(s)”. You really need to know the piano literature upside and down to play that game.

From that archive, I checked out the intriguingly named “Chopin’s Bolero”, which culminates in a wonderful imperfect pun:

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Two ingredients here: the bolero as a musical composition; and “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition”.

The bolero and Ravel’s Boléro. From Wikipedia:

Bolero is a genre of slow-tempo Latin music and its associated dance. There are Spanish and Cuban forms which are both significant and which have separate origins.

The term is also used for some art music. In all its forms, the bolero has been popular for over a century.

The bolero is a 3/4 dance that originated in Spain in the late 18th century, a combination of the contradanza and the sevillana. Dancer Sebastiano Carezo is credited with inventing the dance in 1780. It is danced by either a soloist or a couple. It is in a moderately slow tempo and is performed to music which is sung and accompanied by castanets and guitars with lyrics of five to seven syllables in each of four lines per verse. It is in triple time and usually has a triplet on the second beat of each bar.

(The Cuban bolero, which spread from its Cuban origin in the last quarter of the 19th century to Puerto Rico, Mexico, and the rest of Latin America, is distinct, as a musical form and as a dance.)

Here’s the bolero rhythm:

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You will recognize this as the underlying rhythm of a famous Ravel composition — about which, the beginning of the Wikipedia article:

Boléro is a one-movement orchestral piece by Maurice Ravel (1875–1937). Originally composed as a ballet commissioned by Russian actress and dancer Ida Rubinstein, the piece, which premiered in 1928, is Ravel’s most famous musical composition

In case you are not already afflicted by a Ravel earworm, you can listen to the whole thing here (it’s long, 17:22 in this performance by the Vienna Philharmonic under Gustavo Dudamel).

The piece builds slowly, getting faster and faster and louder and louder until it climaxes — musically, but mimicking sexual climax — in a wild, clashing finale.

Not expecting the Spanish Inquisition. Now the Spanish composition takes us into Monty Python territory. From Wikipedia:

“The Spanish Inquisition” is a series of sketches in Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Series 2 Episode 2, first broadcast 22 September 1970, parodying the real-life Spanish Inquisition. This episode is itself entitled “The Spanish Inquisition”. The sketches are notable for their principal catchphrase, “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!”. The end of the sketch uses music from the composition Devil’s Galop by Charles Williams.

This is a recurring sketch always predicated on an unrelated sketch in which one character mentions that they “didn’t expect a Spanish Inquisition!”, often in irritation at being questioned by another. At this point, the Inquisition — consisting of Cardinal Ximénez (Michael Palin) and his assistants Cardinal Biggles (Terry Jones) (who resembles his namesake wearing a leather aviator’s helmet and goggles) and Cardinal Fang (Terry Gilliam) — burst into the room to the sound of a jarring musical sting. Ximénez shouts, with a particular and high-pitched emphasis on the first syllable: “NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition!”

The Inquisitors are ridiculously incompetent on several fronts (listing their weapons and achieving torture, in particular).

You can watch the complete series of sketches here (the video is 8:41).

“Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!” rapidly achieved pop-culture celebrity as a catchphrase.

(Mostly about dance and male bodies, with only a bit about language.)

From balletomane (and sometime dancer) Mike McKinley a little while ago, this wonderful photo he found on the Male Ballet Dancers Facebook site (where, as common there,  the poster provided no information at all about the source):

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A beautiful male dancer performing a step in which he appears to be flying in mid-air, exhibiting great power and great grace simultaneously. You don’t have to be into ballet to admire his body and his performance.

Thanks to Google’s image source, I was able to identify the dancer as Jesse Inglis of the Compañía Nacional de Danza España, in a photo by Carlos Quezada. That search led me to three similar performances by other dancers and to a wonderful set of photos of a male couple flying together.

But first some notes on the step in #1, from Mike, who wrote to me:

It’s not a “classical academic” step. It’s something more like demi caractère dancing which is a sub-genre of ballet. If you know Nutcracker, think of the “national” dances in the final act or see [the Wikipedia page on character dance, which tells us:]

Character dance is a specific subdivision of classical dance. It is the stylized representation of a traditional folk or national dance, mostly from European countries, and uses movements and music which have been adapted for the theater.

The step is definitely a grand jeté with a cambré en arriére. There are a bazillion kinds of jeté from small petite allegro to the big ones shown in the photo. Below is from the ABT Ballet Dictionary [on pas jeté}:

Throwing step. A jump from one foot to the other in which the working leg is brushed into the air and appears to have been thrown. There is a wide variety of pas jetés (usually called merely jetés) and they may be performed in all directions.

Now from the Dancerboys site, this shot of dancer Fabian Morales, photographed by Carlos Quezada:

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And from that same site, this shot of dancer Francesco Mariottini, photographed by Romano Paoleschi:

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And from another site, this shot of Sergei Polunin (photographed by Dave Morgan) doing a high jump in Narcise:

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Now to the male duo of Isaac Montllor and Jean Philippe Dury, of the Compañía Nacional de Danza España, as photographed by Fernando Marcos, under the title Levitadores (literally, ‘levitators’):

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Montllor is the darker, somewhat shorter, Spanish one, Dury the lighter, somewhat taller, French, one. Both hot, but in different ways, and they make a nice contrast as a couple. This photo (in a thumbnail) suggests that they are romantic partners as well as dance partners:

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Dury began in the corps of the Paris Opera Ballet and then moved to Spain as a principal dancer in the CND. Dury’s career has been principally as a choreographer for a while now; his own conpany, Elephant in a Black Box, is based in Madrid. Montllor performs traditional Spanish dance as well as ballet.

Two recent items passed on to me by Mike McKinley: one a photograph of young male dancers at the barre, the other a video compilation of dancer Joseph Gatti in an assortment of his roles. The photograph, found on a Facebook page (where it wasn’t identified in any way: where? when? who are they? who was the photographer?):

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The Gatti compilation can be viewed here; it has some remarkable stuff.

#1 has three dancers, all young, lean, and muscular, all wearing nothing but their dance belts. The first two are at rest at the barre. The third, with his remarkable buttocks, is, also remarkably, standing en pointe at the barre. It’s a wonderful photograph, of dancers, of male bodies, of faces, of people at work; I might have asked the photographer to shade down the background behind the first two dancers, to make their heads stand out more clearly, but, on the other hand, leaving the shot this way underscores its unposed character.

I appealed to Google Images to find the source, and the program found a huge number of examples of this image: dozens and dozens on various Pinterest pages, large numbers on tumblr pages, but not a single one with any information at all. (One of the Pinterest people thought it was an old-time photo, I don’t know why.)

Now Gatti is young (30), very much a dancer of our times, and easy to find information about. Well, he tweets., so I know something about his career, his gigs, the fortunes of his favorite sports teams, his enthusiasms for some surprising dancers (like Michael Jackson), his friendships, and the excellence of his girlfriend. He sounds like a nice man, and he’s cute:

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Another compilation, put together from his performances in various competitions and remixed, can be viewed here.

From an Orlando (FL) Sentinel story from a year ago, “After 13 years, Joseph Gatti returns to Orlando Ballet”:

After nearly 13 years, Joseph Gatti is coming home.

From 2001-2003 the dancer was an apprentice with Orlando Ballet, under then-director Fernando Bujones. Just 17 when he departed — he’s now 30.

“It’s the right decision,” Gatti said about returning to live in Central Florida. He’ll perform with Orlando Ballet as principal guest artist during the 2015-16 season and work as an instructor at the school.

“I’ve been through a few companies now, big and medium,” said Gatti, who was a principal dancer with Cincinnati Ballet from 2007-2008, then a principal dancer with Corella Ballet in Spain and most recently a first soloist with Boston Ballet.

“I just don’t feel the need to sacrifice love and happiness for the name of a bigger company,” said Gatti, citing the stress found in big-name troupes. “I’ll be really happy here and loving my career, dancing until the last day I can dance.”

For the past few years, Gatti and his dance partner [not his girlfriend], Adiarys Almeida Santana, have performed freelance gigs with companies worldwide.

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Gatti in flight in mid-air. And here’s Gatti and Bradley Schlagheck flying together in Polyphonia (choreographed by Christopher Wheeldon to music by György Ligeti), photo by Gene Schiavone, at The Boston Opera House in February 2012:

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Bonus. In looking for the source of #1, I found lots of other neat stuff, including the amazing young dancer Jorge Barani, trained in Cuba, who can be seen in action here.

Coming by accident almost at the same time, an opera singer who’s a remarkable muscle-hunk (from Larry Schourup) and a ballet dancer with an equally notable male dancer’s physique (from Mike McKinley). Barihunk Craig Verm and ABT principal Marcelo Gomes.

Craig Verm. An extreme barihunk (a baritone who’s a hunk; see my 7/26/13 posting on the concept). Verm has remarkable pecs and abs, and truly astounding muscular arms, both well beyond the requirements of any operatic role I know of. Here he is as Adonis in John Blow’s Venus and Adonis:

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And a thumbnail with a front view of him in this role

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And a show of his arms, with the man in his Barihunk t-shirt (yes, there’s a website):

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I tried to find a good clip of him singing, but to no avail. What I found had him in ensemble  singing or in clips that were mostly interviews or commentaries.

A remarkable feature of his singing is the very wide range of roles he takes on, including many in contemporary operas (and contemporary oratorios, cantatas, and songs).

Marcelo Gomes. Verm has a muscleman’s physique. Dancer Gomes is astonishingly muscular in a few ways, but otherwise he has a dancer’s lean body (and an amazing, striking face). The photo Mike McK. sent to me was this one:

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Really nice lines. And very strong arms and legs.

Now some information on Gomes, from Wikipedia:

Marcelo Gomes (born September 26, 1979) is a Brazilian ballet dancer currently performing with the American Ballet Theatre.

Born in Manaus and raised in Rio de Janeiro, Gomes began his dance studies at the Helena Lobato and Dalal Achcar Ballet Schools. At the age of 13 he left Brazil to attend the Harid Conservatory in Boca Raton, Florida, and at 16 he studied for one year at the Paris Opera Ballet school. He also studied at the schools of the Houston Ballet, Boston Ballet, and Cuballet. …

Gomes first joined the American Ballet Theatre in 1997 as a member of the corps de ballet. He was promoted to soloist in 2000 and to principal dancer in 2002.

Now two photographs (by Nikolay Krusser) of the darker Gomes dancing with the lighter Denis Matvienko (of the Mariinsky Ballet), on a “Kings of Dance” tour. One highlighting his arms and his face:

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And one highlighting his beautiful buttocks:

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