(Mostly about dance and male bodies.)

Passed through several Facebook sites, most immediately Michael Palmer’s, this fabulous photo of four dancers from the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, captured flying in mid-air:

(#1)

Other male dancers flying in mid-air were featured in my 1/10/16 posting “Dance Time”. All of these photos are tributes to the skill of the dancers, the choreographer, and the photographer, who undoubtedly had to have the dancers run through their performances many times to get these remarkable shots.

Two more from the men in the company:

(#2)

(#3)

About the company, from Wikipedia:

The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (AAADT) is a modern dance company based in New York, New York. It was founded in 1958 by choreographer and dancer Alvin Ailey. It is [now] made up of 30 dancers, led by artistic director Robert Battle and associate artistic director Masazumi Chaya.

Alvin Ailey and a group of young Black modern dancers first performed at New York’s 92nd Street Young Men’s Hebrew Association (92nd Street Y), under the name Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (AAADT), in March 1958. At this point in time, Alvin Ailey was the company’s director, choreographer, and principal dancer. The company started as an ensemble of only seven dancers

And about Ailey:

Alvin Ailey (January 5, 1931 – December 1, 1989 [note: he died young, of complications of HIV/AIDS]) was an African-American choreographer and activist who founded the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in New York City. He is credited with popularizing modern dance and revolutionizing African-American participation in 20th-century concert dance. His company gained the nickname “Cultural Ambassador to the World” because of its extensive international touring. Ailey’s choreographic masterpiece Revelations [1960] is believed to be the best known and most often seen modern dance performance.

I saw the company in performance only once (with my man Jacques) and am embarrassed to admit I don’t recall what was on the program, only that we were blown away by the story-telling in dance and by the energy of the performances.

(Some vernacular sex talk along the way, so some judgment might be called for.)

It started with Dave Hause on ADS-L reporting this item from the seekingalpha site  (with the crucial bit boldfaced below):

The next wave of media consolidation will surely be on investors’ minds today following AT&T’s weekend agreement to buy Time Warner. Discovery Communications (NASDAQ:DISCA), Scripps Networks (NYSE:SNI), AMC Networks (NASDAQ:AMCX), Lions Gate (NYSE:LGF), Viacom (VIA, VIAB), and CBS already had their tails in the air on Friday afternoon as merger talk between AT&T and Time Warner heated up.

Hause reflected:

I may be off but I would interpret “tails in the air” as cat body language, “sexually receptive.” Maybe less suggestively as “seeking a dominant partner.”

There are actually two figurative interpretations here: one alluding to cat body language (in which an upraised tail communicates contentment and confidence) and one alluding to sexual receptivity signals in mammals (in which females raise their tails — and, often, back up to males — to communicate readiness for coitus).

Meanwhile, figurative (both metaphorical and metonymic) senses of tail — ‘penis’, ‘vagina’, ‘buttocks’, ‘anus’ — impinge on both of these figurative uses of raise (one’s) tail and similar idiomatic expressions, like put/have (one’s) tail (up) in the air.

Feline confidence and contentment. Any number of websites tell us that when a cat’s tail is held upright, it signals that the cat is happy and confident, an interpretation exploited by writer Jack Newcastle in his forthcoming (in December) book from Jack Sprat Press, With My Tail in the Air: The Illustrated Story of A Man, A Girl, and His Cat!:

Newcastle’s own (studiedly retro) description of the book:

Poor Josh Jenkins. Being at the bottom rung of the corporate ladder, he knows the girl of his dreams is way out of reach. Yet, that’s about to change as the self-admitted schnook, schmuck, and shmeggege begins to take on the traits and personality of a certain little fellow who has finagled his way into the apartment.

Written in response to charge that it’s odd for a man to keep a cat, With My Tail in Air  is the perfect read for all cool cats, hepcats, daddy-os, greasers, swingers, playboys, jazzheads, and eggheads, or anyone who wants to be one.

And his account of himself:

A native of the Canarsie section of Brooklyn, NY, Jack Newcastle attributes his lifelong interest in mid-20th Century culture to his nearly ritualistic after-school viewings of television and film of that era. Through the courtesy of local broadcasters, it was on a daily basis that he was presented with fast-talking dames of the 40s, British buffoons of the 50s, and well-dressed but rather inept playboys of the 60s, all of them occupying a world he thought far more appealing than the one outside his 1970s window.

It is only after a long stretch of writing songs and performing with noisy pop bands that he took to writing fiction, with The Fine Art of Mixing Girls being his first novel. He lists British literary giants Kingsley Amis, Graham Greene, and Anthony Burgess as his primary influences, and yet to this day he maintains that the 1960s situation comedy Green Acres is brilliant theatre of the absurd. With his cat, he still resides in the city that used to be New York.

Meanwhile, back in academia, Quote Investigator Garson O’Toole wrote on ADS-L this morning supportimg the Happy Cat interpretation of tails in the air:

The website seekingalpha.com has used the expression “tails in the air” repeatedly. The examples suggest that organizations with “their tails in the air” have been impinged positively by a news event. Anthropomorphically speaking the organizations are happy.

Sexual receptivity. I’m inclined to follow O’Toole here, though the Fuck Me Please interpretation is more entertaining — and FMP manages to combine the root sense of tail with its metonymic extension to the rump of an animal (including the buttocks of a human being) and the further metonymic extension from ‘rump, buttocks’ to ‘vagina’ (and to suggest a further metaphorical extension, in gay usage, from ‘vagina’ to ‘anus’) — so it hits all the sexualized senses of tail except the metaphorical (shape-based) extension to ‘penis’. The larger point is that FMP connotes receptivity and submission.

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

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

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

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

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

Putting it (up) in the air.  Though this is probably totally irrelevant to media consolidation, sometimes putting your tail / ass  / butt (up) in the air is just a dance move. Consider Baracuda’s 2005 tune “Ass Up”, with its jaunty chorus:

put your ass in the air
put your ass up in the air [x3]
put your ass in the air
move around like you don’t care

Easy lyrics to memorize. You can watch Baracuda’s official video here. On the band, from Wikipedia:

Baracuda is a German dance project founded by Axel Konrad and Ole Wierk of Suprime Records in the Winter of 2002. Baracuda {also] consists of Tobias Lammer, otherwise known as DJ Toby Sky, and vocalist Suny.

… in July 2005 Baracuda released their third single, “Ass Up”.

Buttocks-out dancing goes back a bit. From Wikipedia

Grinding, also known as juking, freak dancing or freaking (in the Caribbean, wining) is a type of close partner dance where two or more dancers rub or bump their bodies against each other, this is generally with a female dancer rubbing her buttocks against a male dancer’s crotch area.

Grinding gained widespread popularity as a hip hop dance in night clubs, and eventually moved on to high school and middle school dances (especially proms) in the US and Canada [roughly 2001-2011], where there have been cases of administrators attempting to ban it due to its explicit nature.

A predecessor to grinding as a sexually charged high-contact social dance was “The Bump”, popular in the 1970s, in which the contact between partners generally involved the hips or buttocks of one dancer “bumping” those of the other dancer in temporary contact. Other predecessor elements of grinding may be attributed to the 1987 film Dirty Dancing, and the lambada, a brief dance craze of the 1980s that featured grinding actions [and of course the bump and grind of striptease performances]

(And then came twerking.)

Probably since the beginning of time, people have made music using materials at hand: improvising percussion instruments, devices to modify or amplify the human voice, ways to create sound by blowing on pipes or making fibers vibrate. Here, two examples that have come past me recently: the ugly stick and the comb kazoo.

The ugly stick. From Wikipedia:

The ugly stick is a traditional Newfoundland [percussion] musical instrument fashioned out of household and tool shed items, typically a mop handle with bottle caps, tin cans, small bells and other noise makers. The instrument is played with a drum stick and has a distinctive sound.

(#1)

An assortment of ugly sticks

Origin: In outports and remote villages, social gatherings such as concerts (colloquially referred to as “times”), mummering and kitchen parties, were an important part of the rural culture. The principal melody instruments were accordions and fiddles with rhythmic accompaniment from the ugly stick.

Construction: The instrument’s main body is a mop or broom handle cut to approximately four feet. An old rubber boot was attached to the bottom and a cymbal attached at the very top. At strategic intervals along the length of the shaft, nails affixed with bottle caps, felt tins and other noise makers would be nailed into the shaft. The instrument would then be decorated with items of colour and fluff to the artist’s taste.

Playing: The ugly stick is held in one hand at about ¾ up the shaft and the musician would hold a drum stick in the other. The instrument would be lifted and dropped on the floor in a rhythmic fashion while the musician would strike the attachments and cymbal to embellish the sound.

You can watch percussionist Ed Reifel performing on the ugly stick here.

(The origin of the name is uncertain. The American slang idiom to beat with an ugly stick refers to an action that is popularly supposed to make someone ugly — He looks like he was beaten with an ugly stick — but the Newfoundland instruments are simply ugly themselves, so its name probably has nothing to the American idiom but is simply a specialization of the composite ugly stick — with the accent pattern of a compound rather than that of Adj + N.)

Well, any tradition of folk or street performance, however homely, can be fashioned into art, as has certainly happened with percussionist improvising using the body and everyday objects — spectacularly, in the theatre group Stomp. From Wikipedia:

Stomp is a percussion group, originating in Brighton, UK that uses the body and ordinary objects to create a physical theatre performance.

Stomp was created by Luke Cresswell and Steve McNicholas in Brighton … in 1991. The performers use a variety of everyday objects as percussion instruments in their shows.

You have to see them in action. You can watch them in a trailer for a recent performance here. (Back in December 1994, Jacques and I saw them perform at the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State. Astounding, joyous physicality, combining music and dance. There’s a lot you can do with garbage cans and mops and the like.)

The kazoo. In its origin, a device to modify and amplify humming or singing. The Wikipedia article notes that

hide-covered vibrating and voice-changing instruments have been used in Africa for hundreds of years, often for ceremonial purposes

In modern times, the homely combination of a comb and some paper (waxed paper is the canonical material) creates a simple instrument, the comb and paper or comb kazoo. (One of the simple pleasures of my childhood.) As here:

(#2)

But then modern kazoos were invented. From Wikipedia:

The kazoo is a musical instrument that adds a “buzzing” timbral quality to a player’s voice when the player vocalizes into it. It is a type of mirliton, which is a membranophone, one of a class of instruments which modifies its player’s voice by way of a vibrating membrane.

A kazoo player hums, rather than blows, into the instrument. The oscillating air pressure of the hum makes the kazoo’s membrane vibrate. The resulting sound varies in pitch and loudness with the player’s humming. Players can produce different sounds by singing specific syllables such as doo, who, rrrrr or brrrr into the kazoo.

The first documented appearance of a kazoo was that created by an American inventor, Warren Herbert Frost, who named his new musical instrument kazoo in his patent #270,543 issued on January 9, 1883. The patent states, “This instrument or toy, to which I propose to give the name ‘kazoo’ “…” Frost’s kazoo did not look like present-day submarine-shaped kazoos. The modern kazoo — also the first one made of metal — was patented by George D. Smith of Buffalo, New York, May 27, 1902.

In 1916, the Original American Kazoo Company in Eden, New York started manufacturing kazoos for the masses in a two-room shop and factory, utilizing a couple of dozen jack presses for cutting, bending and crimping metal sheets. These machines were used for many decades. … By 1994, the company produced 1.5 million kazoos per year and was the only manufacturer of metal kazoos in North America. The factory, in nearly its original configuration, is now called The Kazoo Factory and Museum.

A metal kazoo:

(#3)

And then of course they were mass-produced in plastic:

(#4)

The origin of the name is probably the obvious one. From NOAD2:

ORIGIN late 19th cent.: apparently imitative of the sound produced.

Three follow-ups to this morning’s gay Santa posting: earlier gay Santa postings on this blog; a 2013 Christmas bonus, with outrageous black gay Santas in an Alabama Christmas parade; and a link to a couple more Harry Bush cartoons / illustrations.

Gay Santas of Christmases past on this blog:

on 1/1/12: “Late entries in the gay Santa sweepstakes”

on 12/30/12: “Gay Santas”

on 1/17/13: “Accent on Santa skivvies”

on 12/23/14: “Xmas Veggie Hunk”

The Prancing Elites. The verb of the day is definitely prance. From the Daily Mail on 12/22/13:

A small Alabama community got the shock of the season on Saturday when a group of scantily clad gay African American Santas took their Christmas parade route by storm.

The Prancing Elites, an all gay dance team known for their provocative moves and outfits, were confused by the invitation to walk the Semmes, Alabama (population 3,000) Christmas parade but swayed and thrust their way through outraged crowds nonetheless.

Parade organizers have since apologized for including the Prancing Elites, but the five gentlemen from Mobile think it was all just part of a day’s work.

A posed (and inoffensive) shot with four of the Elites:

Oh, honey, the boots!

More Harry Bush. One Bush cartoon / illustration in my posting this morning (#5), showing Santa seeking sexual favor from an insolent young hunk, plus (#6) the (non-Christmas) cover of Hard Boys by Harry Bush. These were definitely sexually suggestive, but not actually X-rated.

Now on ABlogX, two unquestionably X-rated Bushes: #1, with a cheeky Cupid having just nailed a big-dicked fellow with one of his arrows; and #2, with an insolent big-dicked lad (who understands his body’s attractions: his t-shirt reads “I have a BIG ONE”) in the school counselor’s office (having been written up for obscene conduct, insolent attitude, bold exhibition, and manipulation), where he’s clearly about to get the counselor to go down on his big one. (Young men sexually manipulating older men is a recurrent theme in Bush’s work; Bush apparently fantasized about being used by teenagers in just this way.)

(The title above and #1 below should clue you in on whether this posting is for you.)

Today’s remarkable find: a piece on the thump site on the 1st, “This Dance Troupe Performs with Lasers in Their Butts” by Ali Gitlow:

(#1)

Young Boy Dancing Group at “The Curves of the World”, curated by Mette Woller, Chart Art Fair, Copenhagen, 2016 (photo by David Stjernholm)

(Huge hat tip to Kim Darnell for this end-of-the-week present.)

At first glance, #1 can be read in either of two ways: either the green laser light is penetrating the dancer’s asshole (“Fucked by the light / Like a laser in the night”), or it’s emanating from it (“He thinks the sun shines out of his ass, doesn’t he?”).

A moment’s reflection should convince you that the second must be the right reading: the dancer has a laser cartridge inserted in his butt. (There are photos of the insertion in progress.)

From the article:

One Saturday evening last October [2016], I made my way to Bloc nightclub in east London’s Hackney Wick, an area home to factories, artist’s studios, the 2012 Olympic Stadium, and grotty warehouse raves. The occasion was Chapter 10, a recurring gay night that champions techno, house, and disco where Honey Dijon was set to headline. However, many people, myself included, had arrived early to catch a performance by Young Boy Dancing Group — a collective of contemporary dancers from across Europe whose performances are a mishmash of queerness and techno-futurism that could only exist in our digital age.

Upon entering the venue’s main room, it felt like some sort of Wiccan ritual was going on: candles marked out a large circle in the center of the dancefloor. A male performer with a jockstrap in the center of his face, a blonde woman with weave tracks repurposed as a belt, and other performers in bondage-y short shorts grazed through the space slowly. They waved metal amulets reminiscent of clergymen’s incense burners in the air to a chant-heavy tune from the Ghost in the Shell soundtrack, before crawling all over each other in what looked like a refined game of Twister.

Then, they scurried off to various corners of the room, and each inserted a green laser into their anuses. The performance quickly became total mayhem, with group members flailing wildly, creating a mosh pit, and running amok to a pitched-down, jittery dance remix of Enya’s “Only Time.”

Prancing around art galleries with a laser in your butt could be seen as silly, or a cheap gimmick to demand viewers’ attention. However, curator Mette Woller — who included Young Boy Dancing Group in an exhibition called “The Curves of the World” at Chart Art Fair in Copenhagen late last summer — explained to me that this seemingly outré act is deliberate. “They challenge notions of gender and sexuality and constantly question institutionalized settings,” she asserts. “It makes you either cry or get offended.”

(#2)

(I note that this event is either dance or performance art, depending on how you look at it. Or more likely both.)

From the Cambridge Idioms Dictionary, 2nd ed., 2006:

think the sun shines out (of) somebody’s arse/backside: (British & Australian very informal) to love or admire someone so much that you do not think they have any faults

The idiom has percolated through to Amercan English, but with ass or butt.

Yesterday, from Chris Hansen, this cartoon by Daniel Beyer:

(#1)

Chris’s comment:

It took me a minute to “get” it (I’ve been in England for a looooong time)

(Chris is an American long resident in England.)

Another exercise in understanding comics. In this case, requiring a crucial piece of knowledge about American popular culture.

Also requiring that you recognize that the waitress is a cow. And that the woman is proposing that they should tip her because her service was very bad — contrary to the ‘reward’ sense of this verb tip (from NOAD2):

(1) give (someone) a sum of money as a way of rewarding them for their services: [with two objects]: I tipped her five dollars | [no object]: that sort of person never tips.

based on this noun tip:

(2) a sum of money given to someone as a reward for their services.

Instead, we are to understand a different verb tip:

(3) overbalance or cause to overbalance so as to fall or turn over: [no object]: the hay caught fire when the candle tipped over | [with object]: a youth sprinted past, tipping over her glass.

Overbalancing cows so as to make them fall over? Who does that?

Well, according to (recent) American folk belief, young hayseeds as a prank.

(#2)

From Wikipedia:

Cow tipping is the purported activity of sneaking up on any unsuspecting or sleeping upright cow and pushing it over for entertainment. The practice of cow tipping is generally considered an urban legend, and stories of such feats viewed as tall tales. The implication that rural citizens seek such entertainment due to lack of other alternatives is viewed as a stereotype. The concept of cow tipping apparently developed in the 1970s, though tales of animals that cannot rise if they fall has historical antecedents dating to the Roman Empire.

Cows routinely lie down and can easily regain their footing unless sick or injured. Scientific studies have been conducted to determine if cow tipping is theoretically possible, with varying conclusions. All agree that cows are large animals that are difficult to surprise and will generally resist attempts to be tipped. Estimates suggest a force of between 3,000 and 4,000 newtons (670 and 900 lbf) is needed, and that at least four and possibly as many as fourteen people would be required to achieve this. In real-life situations where cattle have to be laid on the ground, or “cast”, such as for branding, hoof care or veterinary treatment, either rope restraints are required or specialized mechanical equipment is used that confines the cow and then tips it over. On rare occasions, cattle can lie down or fall down in proximity to a ditch or hill that restricts their normal ability to rise without help. Cow tipping has many references in popular culture and is also used as a figure of speech.

… Journalist Jake Steelhammer believes the American urban myth of cow tipping originated in the 1970s. It “stampeded into the ’80s”, he says, “when movies like Tommy Boy and Heathers featured cow tipping expeditions.” Stories about cow tipping tend to be second-hand, he says, told by someone who does not claim to have tipped a cow but who knows someone else who says he or she did.

Assorted individuals have claimed to have performed cow tipping, often while under the influence of alcohol. These claims, to date, cannot be reliably verified, with Jake Swearingen of Modern Farmer noting in 2013 that YouTube, a popular source of videos of challenges and stunts, “fails to deliver one single actual cow-tipping video” [genuine farm people are understandably insulted by their stereotype image].

Pranksters have sometimes pushed over artificial cows. Along Chicago’s Michigan Avenue in 1999, two “apparently drunk” men felled six fiberglass cows that were part of a Cows on Parade public art exhibit. Four other vandals removed a “Wow cow” sculpture from its lifeguard chair at Oak Street Beach and abandoned it in a pedestrian underpass. A year later, New York City anchored its CowParade art cows, including “A Streetcow Named Desire”, to concrete bases “to prevent the udder disrespect of cow-tippers and thieves.”

Cow jokes, udder jokes, and (as we’ll see shortly) cud jokes too.

In any case, the cow-tipping thing is peculiarly American, so that the cartoon in #1 will be mystifying to those with little experience of American popular culture. But for Americans, cow-tipping is the source of much (broad) humor. From many choices, two more cow-tipping cartoons, and then some notes on cartoonist Daniel Beyer (who’s new to this blog).

Texas longhorns. From Leigh Rubin:

(#3)

Here you need to know about Texas longhorns as well as cow-tipping.

Tips for cows. And from the Thingsesque site, a cartoon with yet another verb tip, based on yet another noun tip:

(#4)

This one needs the title. And that supplies us with the verbing tip ‘give practical advice to’ of this noun tip (from NOAD2):

(4) a small but useful piece of practical advice; a very reliable prediction or piece of inside information: are those tips you’re getting legal?

Quite different from the noun in (2). In this case, the advice is about chewing one’s cud — definitely useful advice for a cow.

Daniel Beyer. Three more cartoons from Beyer, the first requiring a whole assortment of knowledge, including something else from American popular culture:

(#5)

Three components here: French onion dip (American popular culture, food division); the dip in dancing; and the beret stereotypically associated with Frenchmen (and beatniks, but that’s not relevant here). So: language play on French (‘relating to France, its people, or its language’) vs. French in French onion dip, and on dip in a food context vs. in a dance context.

On French onion dip, from Wikipedia:

French onion dip or California dip is an American dip typically made with a base of sour cream and flavored with minced onion, and usually served with potato chips as chips and dip.

(#6)

French onion dip made of sour cream and instant onion soup was created by [an unidentified French cook] in Los Angeles in 1954… The recipe spread quickly and was printed in a local newspaper. The Lipton company promoted this mixture on the television show Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts in 1955, and early on, it was known as “Lipton California Dip”, but soon simply as “California Dip”. A Lipton advertising campaign promoted it on television and in supermarkets. The recipe was added to the Lipton instant onion soup package in 1958. The name “French onion dip” began to be used in the 1960s, and became more popular than “California dip” in the 1990s.

The origin story, with its unknown Frenchman, is suspect; the adjective French might just have been used for its cachet in the world of cuisine. The actual dip, made with onion soup mix, is solidly American.

That’s the first noun dip. From NOAD2:

noun dip:a thick sauce in which pieces of food are dunked before eating: tasty garlic dip.

(See earlier postings here on dipspreads.)

The second noun dip is a nouning, in a specialized context, of the verb dip:

[no object] sink, drop, or slope downward:swallows dipped and soared | the sun had dipped below the horizon. (NOAD2)

By nouning of this verb, we get a term for a dance move, common to many dance forms (tango, lindy hop, salsa, ballroom dances), in which one partner (the flyer) dips while supported by the other partner (the base); alternatively, the base may be said to dip the flyer. As here:

(#7)

Next, a Beyer with a urinal theme:

(#8)

There are conventions limiting men’s speaking to other men at urinals, and a ventriloquist’s dummy doing the talking would be way over the line.

Finally, more pop culture tropes, this time from the 1970s:

(#9)

From Beyer’s creators.com site:

I grew up between two small towns, Woodstock, Illinois and Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Turns out, they were both home to some rather famous cartoonists: Woodstock (Chester Gould) and Lake Geneva (Joe Martin and Sydney Smith). The more I learned about these cartoonists and their amazing work, as well as meeting the great Bill Sanders (former editorial cartoonist/Milwaukee Journal), the more I wanted to be a cartoonist.

Eventually, he launched his Long Story Short strip (from which #9 comes), which won an amateur cartoonist competition that got him a place in The Cartoonist Studio.

If you think you can escape the Summer Song of 2017 — Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee’s “Despacito” (pop crossed with rap) — you’re probably mistaken. Yes, you can do the obvious: avoid Puerto Rico and Latino-heavy sections of the US, stay away from Mexican, Salvadoran, Cuban, etc. restaurants, all that sort of thing. But you could flee far away, to the Balkans, to Ireland, to Southeast Asia, to Hungary, and it will be in vain: the song will haunt you, in instrumental versions on piano, cello, violin, bamboo flute, oud, you name it; with words in French, Chinese, Gaelic, Croatian, Malay, whatever; performed by one man, one woman, two men, a man and a woman, on up to crowd-sized choruses; as heavy metal, as Romantic-style classical music, as jazz, and so on; as a sweet and softly romantic song, as hard-driving bump-and-grind music, as an enthusiastic anthem, or as flat-out parody; with fresh choreography in almost any dance style imaginable.

I didn’t appreciate the scope of the phenomenon until Kim Darnell sent me a video of Peter Bence (a 25-year-old Hungarian pianist and composer) doing a jazz-inflected piano version (channeling Keith Jarrett), and watching that led me to all this other stuff.

Peter Bence has made a career of doing covers of pop music: of Michael Jackson’s “Bad” and “Smooth Criminal”, Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now”, Sia’s “Cheap Thrills”, and more.

(#1) Peter Bence performing “Despacito”

Remarkably, there’s another young Hungarian pianist named Peter who’s done a cover of the song: Peter Buka, 20 years old, with a more gauzy Romantic-style rendition, roughly what Louis Moreau Gottschalk might have done with it.

(#2) Peter Buka at the keyboard

What is there about Budapest?

Before I go on to a random sampling of other covers, a few words about the last Latin pop/dance craze to sweep the US, “Macarena”. From Wikipedia:

“Macarena” is a Spanish dance song by [the Spanish pop duo] Los del Río about a woman of the same name. Appearing on the 1993 album A mí me gusta, it was an international hit in 1995, 1996, and 1997, and continues to be a popular dance at weddings, parties, and sporting events. One of the most iconic examples of 1990s dance music, it was ranked the “#1 Greatest One-Hit Wonder of All Time” by VH1 in 2002. The song uses a type of clave rhythm.

… The song was originally recorded in 1992, and released in 1993 as a rumba. This was the first of six versions of the song that can be associated with Los Del Rio. Another version, a new flamenco rumba pop fusion theme with fully Spanish lyrics, attained significant success in Spain, Colombia and Mexico. It also became popular in Puerto Rico because of its use as an unofficial campaign theme song for then-governor Pedro Rosselló, who was seeking reelection under the New Progressive Party of Puerto Rico’s ticket. Being the base for many cruise ships, visitors to the island were constantly exposed to the song during their stay in Puerto Rico. This may explain how the song spread to — and became a hit in — cities with sizable Latino communities in the United States, particularly Miami and New York City.

(#3) In the midst of the dance (video here)

Note Puerto Rico as the vector for the spread of the craze.

Now back to “Despacito”.

On cellos. Continuing the theme of classically trained musicians covering the song, there’s a wonderful performance by the duo 2Cellos, which you can watch here. From Wikipedia:

(#4) 2Cellos on “Despacito”

2Cellos (stylized 2CELLOS) is a Croatian cello duo, consisting of classically trained Luka Šulić and Stjepan Hauser. Signed to Sony Masterworks since 2011, they have released four albums and play instrumental arrangements of well-known pop and rock songs as well as classical and film music. The duo perform internationally and have been featured on several US TV shows…

Hauser, born in Pula, Croatia, and Šulić, born in Maribor, Slovenia, to Croatian father and Slovenian mother, both classically trained musicians, met at a master class in Croatia while still in their teens. Šulić — the younger of the two by a year — attended the Academy of Music in Zagreb, and then studied in Vienna. Šulić later entered London’s Royal Academy of Music. Hauser attended the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, after completing his studies at Trinity Laban in London.

The duo rose to fame after their cover of [Michael Jackson’s] “Smooth Criminal” became a hit on YouTube

By teenagers, in Gaelic. Great enthusiasm, energetic dancing (plus some acrobatics), lots of fun to watch.

(#5) Irish lads singing

Two covers in French. One by a female singer (viewable here), one by a male singer (viewable here).

More instrumentals. There are several covers on the Vietnamese bamboo flute — one viewable here, one viewable here. A lyrical version on the electric violin by Madrid musician Jose Asunción, viewable here. And a soulful Oud version by Ahmed Alshaiba (a Yemeni musician living in NYC), viewable here.

More languages. A solo version in Chinese, viewable here. A group version in Malay, viewable here. And the group Nemo Croatia, performing a Croatian salsa version on the Istrian beach, viewable here.

Two pieces of exotica. First, a heavy metal cover by Norwegian artist Leo Moracchioli, viewable here. And then, remarkably, the KPOP group KNK doing a dramatic reading of the lyrics in Korean translation, viewable here.

Yes, there’s more, lots more.

(#1) Homer Simpson ejaculates

From the American tv show Psych, S2 E12 “The Old and the Restless” (2008):

Shawn Spencer: Can you check for a John Doe, please?
[Desk clerk nods, turns to her computer]
Shawn Spencer: Actually, can you check all the Does? Tae Kwon, Cookie, Play, Do-Si…

An extended play on the syllable /do/ in English.

(My latest posting on Psych is here.)

The Homeric interjection. From Wikipedia:

“D’oh!” … is a catchphrase used by the fictional character Homer Simpson, from the long-running American animated sitcom The Simpsons (1989–present). It is typically used when Homer injures himself, realizes that he has done something stupid, or when something bad has happened or is about to happen to him. All his prominent blood relations — son Bart, daughters Lisa and Maggie, his father, his mother and half-brother — have also been heard to use it themselves in similar circumstances. On a few occasions Homer’s wife Marge and even non-related characters such as Mr. Burns and Sideshow Bob have also used this phrase.

The placeholder name John Doe. From the 10/8/14 posting “veeblefetzer”: placeholder names

can refer to objects or people whose names are temporarily forgotten, irrelevant, or unknown in the context in which they are being discussed

Or, as in the Psych case, are being concealed — have been anonymized.

(#2) Meet John Doe is a 1941 American comedy drama film

directed and produced by Frank Capra, and starring Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck. The film is about a “grassroots” political campaign created unwittingly by a newspaper columnist with the involvement of a hired homeless man and pursued by the paper’s wealthy owner. (Wikipedia link)

Tae Kwon Do. From Wikipedia:

(#3)

Taekwondo [or Tae Kwon Do] is a Korean martial art, characterized by its emphasis on head-height kicks, jumping and spinning kicks, and fast kicking techniques.

Taekwondo was developed during the 1940s and 1950s by various martial artists by incorporating elements of karate and Han Chinese Kung-Fu with traditional Korean martial arts traditions … as well as ancient Han Chinese influenced Korean Kung-Fu styles

Cookie dough. From Wikipedia:

(#4) Chocolate chip cookie dough

Cookie dough refers to a blend of cookie ingredients which has been mixed into a malleable form which has not yet been hardened by heat. The dough is often then separated and the portions baked to individual cookies, or eaten as is.

Cookie dough can be homemade or bought pre-made in packs (frozen logs, buckets, etc.). Desserts containing cookie dough, such as ice cream, candy, and milkshakes are also frequently marketed.

Play-Doh. From Wikipedia:

(#5) Sweet stuff made from Play-Doh

Play-Doh is a modeling compound used by young children for art and craft projects at home and in school. Composed of flour, water, salt, boric acid, and mineral oil, the product was first manufactured in Cincinnati, Ohio, United States, as a wallpaper cleaner in the 1930s. The product was reworked and marketed to Cincinnati schools in the mid-1950s. Play-Doh was demonstrated at an educational convention in 1956 and prominent department stores opened retail accounts. Advertisements promoting Play-Doh on influential children’s television shows in 1957 furthered the product’s sales.

And do-si-do. From Wikipedia:

Do-si-do, dosado, or dos-à-dos (see spelling below) is a basic dance step in such dance styles as square dance, contra dance, polka, various historical dances, and some reels.

The term is a corruption of the original French term dos-à-dos for the dance move, which means “back to back”, as opposed to “vis-à-vis” which means “face to face”.

The Psych examples are all of the form X + /do/ (with /do/ spelled DOE, DO, DOUGH, or DOH, and with a variety of semantics). We could add a few more, like DODO and The Ballad of Baby Doe (but as always, the character Shawn Spencer is plugged into popular culture, so maybe Douglas Moore’s opera is too refined for the context). And if we throw in things of the form /do/ + X, then there’s a ton more stuff to play with: DO RE MI, DOUGHBOY, DODIE GOODMAN, DOBIE GILLIS, DODECAHEDRON, …

Some weeks ago YouTube brought me a delightful video of a flash mob performance of Ravel’s “Boléro” (in a town square in Toluca, Mexico). About the same time, my Enhance Fitness class (aimed especially at older and disabled participants) at the Palo Alto YMCA conceived of the idea of converting one of our regular exercise routines — done to the original Billy Ray Cyrus recording of “Achy Breaky Heart” — into a flash mob performance in the lobby of the Y (all this achieved at 5 p.m. on Wednesday September 20th).

Both musical flash mobs were “cumulative” — starting with just a few participants, with more and more added in stages until there was a true mob. Especially effective for the Ravel, which starts with a snare drum ostinato to which a flute is added, and then further instruments, a few at a time, as the piece builds to a crashingly loud finale.

Both pieces lend themselves to a flash mob treatment, and there are a number of YouTube videos for each of them, from various parts of the world. After all, each, in its own way, is fun.

By chance, it happens that each is also a “one-hit wonder”, as described in a posting of mine earlier today.

Flash mobs. The N + N compound flash mob describes a kind of mob (NOAD2: ‘a large crowd of people, especially one that is disorderly and intent on causing trouble or violence’), but without the suggestion of disorganization (quite the contrary): a mob that assembles “in a flash” (NOAD2: in (or like) a flash ‘very quickly; immediately’). From Wikipedia:

A flash mob (or flashmob) is a group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual and seemingly pointless act for a brief time, then quickly disperse, often for the purposes of entertainment, satire, and artistic expression. Flash mobs are organized via telecommunications, social media, or viral emails.

The term, coined in 2003, is generally not applied to events and performances organized for the purposes of politics (such as protests), commercial advertisement, publicity stunts that involve public relation firms, or paid professionals. In these cases of a planned purpose for the social activity in question, the term smart mobs is often applied instead.

… The first flash mobs were created in Manhattan in 2003, by Bill Wasik, senior editor of Harper’s Magazine. The first attempt was unsuccessful after the targeted retail store was tipped off about the plan for people to gather. Wasik avoided such problems during the first successful flash mob, which occurred on June 17, 2003 at Macy’s department store, by sending participants to preliminary staging areas — in four Manhattan bars — where they received further instructions about the ultimate event and location just before the event began.

So a flash mob is far from disorganized, but it is a disruption in the usual social order.

The Toluca flash mob. You can watch the video here. It shows a flash mob performed in a plaza at the center of Toluca, by the Toluca Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Maestro Gerardo Urbán y Fernández (in, I think, 2014). Some people go about their business, moving through the square as they go shopping or whatever, while others arrange themselves as an audience, reacting to the work with pleasure, taking pictures, even — especially the kids — moving with the music.

Thanks to the fact that the Santory women’s fashion store figures prominently in the background of the video, it’s easy to identify just where in Toluca the flash mob took place. A map:

(#1)

The orchestra from above, close to the height of the performance:

(#2)

From a 1/6/16 posting of mine with a section on Ravel’s “Bolero”:

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. [More important, it introduces instruments a few at a a time.]

The city of Toluca. I don’t recall ever having heard of the city before, so I was at first surprised to see that it had a philharmonic orchestra. But, as it turns out, the city is one of a number of large municipalities within the Mexico City metropolitan area, but not inside Mexico City itself. From Wikipedia:

Toluca, officially called Toluca de Lerdo, is the state capital of State of Mexico as well as the seat of the Municipality of Toluca. It is the center of a rapidly growing urban area, now the fifth largest in Mexico. It is located 63 kilometres (39 mi) west-southwest of Mexico City, about 40 minutes by car to the western edge of the city. According to the 2010 census, the city of Toluca has a population of 819,561 [very close to the population of San Francisco CA]. The city is the fifth largest in Mexico in population.

(I’ll get to the “fifth largest” claim in a while, noting here only that according to another Wikipedia article, there are at least 10 cities in Mexico with a population of a million or more.)

The city has large parklands and an attractive botanical garden (especially interesting because of its stained glass). The iconic Toluca building is the Cathedral of San José, which is colonial in style but not in history:

(#3) Construction began in 1867, but was completed only in the second half of the 20th century

(The city wasn’t much damaged by the Puebla earthquake of September 19th, which caused such devastation in Mexico City.)

Briefly on the size of Toluca. The Wikipedia article listing cities in Mexico has Toluca at #32 with 489,333 in the 2010 census – but it’s #5 with 819,561 in the article on Toluca; I don’t understand these disparities. Mexico City, with a population of 8,851,080, is by far the biggest city in population. The top 10 (all with a million or more):

1 Mexico City, 2 Ecatepec, 3 Guadalajara, 4 Puebla, 5 Juárez, 6 Tijuana, 7 León, 8 Zapopan, 9 Monterrey, 10 Nezahualcóyotl

(Ecatepec?, you ask. Well, it’s another large municipality in the area around Mexico City. Still, I suspect that most Americans are unfamiliar with most of the cities on this list, but would do much better on large Canadian cities.)

For comparison, here’s the list of the top 10 U.S cities (again, all with a population of a million or more):

1 New York, 2 Los Angeles, 3 Chicago, 4 Houston, 5 Phoenix, 6 Philadelphia, 7 San Antonio, 8 San Diego, 9 Dallas, 10 San Jose

“Achy Breaky Heart”. About the song, from Wikipedia:

“Achy Breaky Heart” is a country song written by Don Von Tress. Originally titled “Don’t Tell My Heart” and performed by The Marcy Brothers in 1991, its name was later changed to “Achy Breaky Heart” and performed by Billy Ray Cyrus on his 1992 album Some Gave All. As Cyrus’ debut single and signature song, it made him famous and has been his most successful song.

… Thanks to the video of this hit, there was the explosion of the line dance into the mainstream, becoming a craze. The song is considered by some as one of the worst songs of all time, featuring at number two in VH1 and Blender’s list of the “50 Most Awesomely Bad Songs Ever.”

[Section on parodies here.]

Caballo Dorado [Golden Horse] (Latin Grammy winners for Best Grupero Album in 2009) covered the song in 1999 with lyrics in Spanish, as “No Rompas Más (Mi pobre corazón)”

You can watch the Cyrus original here. Mighty sexy. And you can catch some of the line dance on the video too.

But… the line dance has been choreographed in many ways. There’s an inventive version by Özgür “Oscar” Takaç here, and the version we learned at the Y was different still. (I hope eventually to be able to post a video of the Y flash mob, but it’s still in the editing process.)

On Cyrus, from Wikipedia:

William Ray Cyrus (born August 25, 1961 [in Flatwoods KY]) is an American singer, songwriter and actor.

Having released 12 studio albums and 44 singles since 1992, he is best known for his number one single “Achy Breaky Heart” … Thanks to the video of this hit, the line dance catapulted into the mainstream, becoming a worldwide craze.

In addition to his many recordings and his acting on tv, Cyrus is known as the father of Miley Cyrus: Miley Ray Cyrus, born Destiny Hope Cyrus on November 23, 1992. She pops up every so often on this blog, notably in my 8/28/13 posting “Twerk time”.

But back to “Achy Breaky Heart”. There are many translations into many languages, but the most noteworthy is proably the Spanish translation “No Rompas Más Mi Pobre Corazón” (“Don’t Break My Poor Heart Anymore”). In my opinion, and the opinion of a number of others (English-speaking as well as Spanish-speaking), the song is hugely better in Spanish than in English. And since we’ve had 25 years since it first appeared, there are versions in a number of styles. Three notable recordings:

by Caballo Dorado, with really 90s instrumentation (you can listen to it here)

by Coyote Dax, down and dirty (you can watch it here)

by Caballo Dorado, all Tex Mex (you can watch it here)

Back at the Palo Alto Y: though I rehearsed our flash mob version with the class, doing it all in a chair, I didn’t take part in the actual mob (because of breathing problems and preparations for cataract surgery). But I heard good reports, and I’m looking forward to the film. Stay tuned.

Another crowded seasonal category — I’ve already been through music, decorations, clothing, and food — in which there seems to be no end of entertaining folly.  In this case, no end of shirtless men in Santa or elf costumes (down to a cap and nothing else).

On color coding: a red Santa cap can be worn by Santas or elves, while green or green+red indicates an elf.

To come: two news stories, one on an elf figure, the other on Santa figures; then posed photos of shirtless men in red and in green or green+red; and an inventory of past postings of mine with shirtless seasonal figures.

Elf on a pole. Elf on the shelf, elf in a box, and now elf on a pole. From the Logo website, “This Sexy Male Pole Dancer Is All You’ll Want For Christmas: Domenico Vaccaro’s still got talent” by Brandon Voss on 12/10/2017:

(#1) Domenico Vaccaro, on pole, in an elfin screen shot

Speaking of north poles…

Italian pole dancer Domenico Vaccaro, who won Belgium’s Got Talent in 2015 wearing only white briefs, has swung back onto our radar thanks to a festive new Instagram post.

(#2) Vaccaro wowing them in Belgium

Seen in the brief video [available on the website], Vaccaro, dressed as a shirtless elf, shows off his many strengths with a holiday-themed routine performed in Rome and set to — what else? — Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You.”

On pole dancing, from Wikipedia:

Pole dance combines dance and acrobatics centered on a vertical pole. This performance art form takes place not only in gentleman’s clubs as erotic dance, but has also recently gained popularity as a mainstream form of fitness, practiced by many enthusiasts in gyms and in dedicated dance studios. Amateur and professional pole dancing competitions are held in countries around over the world.

Pole dance requires significant muscular endurance and coordination as well as sensuality, in exotic dancing. Today, pole performances by exotic dancers range from basic spins and striptease in more intimate clubs, to athletic moves such as climbs and body inversions in “stage heavy” clubs of Las Vegas and Miami. Dancer Remy Redd at the King of Diamonds is famous for flipping herself upside down into a split and hanging from the ceiling. Pole dance requires significant strength and flexibility. Upper body and core strength are required to attain proficiency, proper instruction, and rigorous training is necessary. Since the mid 2000s, promoters of pole dance fitness competitions have been trying to change peoples’ perception of pole dance to include pole fitness as a non-sexual form of dance and acrobatics, and are trying to move pole into the Olympics.

The Christmas daddies of Canton. From the Stomp website in Singapore, “Shirtless Santas ‘invade’ Guangzhou mall, bringing a different kind of holiday cheer” on 12/16/16:

(#3)

Santa Claus is usually associated with a plump bearded old man clad in a red outfit.

One mall in China however had a different idea of how Santas should look like.

According to Shanghaiist, shoppers in a Guangzhou man were greeted by more than 10 [13 in the photo above] hunky topless ‘Santas’.

The well-built men walked around the mall for 20 minutes.

Other than stopping for photographs, the hunky Santas also asked passersby what they wanted for Christmas.

The organiser of the unusual event said that this was done to provide shoppers with a different type of holiday cheer and to surprise them with a new image of Santa Claus.

The article doesn’t say where the models came from.

Four in red. The images that follow are from Pinterest boards, with no sources identified. They’re a tiny sample of what’s out there.

(#4) Pitsntits Santa in (NYC company) CHULO underwear (Sp. chulo ‘pimp’, but more significantly ‘cute (boy)’)

(#5) Muscle hunk in Aesthetix Era underwear (from South Africa)

(#6) Naked Christmas ornament in a beach boy pose

(#7) Santa’s horny helper

Two in green.

(#8) Delivery elf with a package for you

(#9) Incensed elves at play

On AZ blogs.

1/1/12 Late entries in the gay Santa sweepstakes
https://arnoldzwicky.org/2012/01/01/late-entries-in-the-gay-santa-sweepstakes/
2 shirtless Santas

12/30/12 Gay Santas
https://arnoldzwicky.org/2012/12/30/gay-santas/
#1, 2, 4, 5 shirtless

1/17/13 Accent on Santa skivvies
https://arnoldzwicky.org/2013/01/17/accent-on-santa-skivvies/
Dean Allemang in a Santa Skivvies run

12/14/14 A Lucas Xmas
http://arnold-x-zwicky.livejournal.com/108524.html
pornstar in a Santa hat (and nothing else)

12/23/14 Xmas Veggie Hunk
https://arnoldzwicky.org/2014/12/23/xmas-veggie-hunk/
gay Santa

12/24/14: C1R Xmas greetings
http://arnold-x-zwicky.livejournal.com/108716.html
pornstar Johnny Hazzard in a Santa hat (and nothing else)

12/28/14 Santa Jack
http://arnold-x-zwicky.livejournal.com/109162.html
naked Santa, post-ejaculation

12/16/16 Gay Santas 2016
https://arnoldzwicky.org/2016/12/16/gay-santas-2016/
#3, #4 shirtless Santas

12/22/16: Samtatta and his elf
http://arnold-x-zwicky.livejournal.com/136305.html
extraordinarily betatted Santa having sex with happy elf

12/23/16: Mac Daddy Santa:
https://arnoldzwicky.org/2016/12/23/mac-daddy-santa/
shirtless Tiger Woods as Santa

12/17/17 Xmas follies 2017: the food
https://arnoldzwicky.org/2017/12/17/xmas-follies-2017-the-food/
#1: shirtless Santa UCS (Ugly Christmas Sweater)

Another pun committed by the Bizarro/Wayno collaborative:

(#1)

(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page.)

ballet, valet, what’s the difference? And who can resist a man in a tutu? (Cue Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo.)

The Bolshoi Ballet crossed with valet parking.

On the Bolshoi, from Wikipedia:

(#2) Bolshoi first soloist Jacopo Tissi, aloft in Etudes (music by Carl Czerny, choreography by Harald Lander)

The Bolshoi Ballet is an internationally renowned classical ballet company, based at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, Russian Federation. Founded in 1776, the Bolshoi is among the world’s oldest ballet companies. It only achieved worldwide acclaim, however, in the early 20th century when Moscow became the capital of Soviet Russia. Along with the Mariinsky Ballet in Saint Petersburg, the Bolshoi is recognised as one of the foremost ballet companies in the world.

NOAD on valets:

noun valet: 1 [a] a man’s personal male attendant, responsible for his clothes and appearance. [b] a hotel employee performing valet duties for guests. [c] US a rack or stand on which to hang clothing. 2 North American a person employed to park cars. ORIGIN late 15th century (denoting a footman acting as an attendant to a horseman): from French; related to vassal.

More detail on sense 2, from Wikipedia:

(#3)

Valet parking is a parking service offered by some restaurants, stores, and other businesses, particularly in North America. In contrast to “self-parking”, where customers find a parking space on their own, customers’ vehicles are parked for them by a person called a valet. This service either requires a fee to be paid by the customer or is offered free of charge by the establishment.

Dancing with the cars. I’ve compounded the dance parking pun in #1 with this allusion to the tv show Dancing with the Stars. From Wikipedia:

(#4) A study in cleavage

Dancing with the Stars is an American dance competition television series that premiered on June 1, 2005, on ABC. It is the US version of the UK series Strictly Come Dancing. The show is hosted by Tom Bergeron, alongside Erin Andrews, who became co-host in season eighteen.

… The format of the show consists of a celebrity paired with a professional dancer. Each couple performs predetermined dances and competes against the others for judges’ points and audience votes. The couple receiving the lowest combined total of judges’ points and audience votes is eliminated each week until only the champion dance pair remains.

In #2 in Tuesday’s posting “Dancing with the cars”, I returned to the world of male ballet dancers with a photo of Bolshoi soloist Jacopo Tissi suspended in mid-air during the ballet Etudes — a demonstration of extraordinary athleticism. Tissi himself is young (born in 1995), good-looking, well-spoken (he gives good interview), and also an amazing musclehunk. A friend I showed this posting to then noted that I also posted a lot about the conventional fantasy figures of gay porn — cowboys, firemen, truckers, pizza boys, hitch-hikers, and so on — and was there a genre for male dancers too?

The short answer is no, for fairly obvious reasons (which I’ll write about below). But my question then was whether there’s any ballet-based gay porn. The answer here is yes, at least one film: Jack Deveau’s 1975 Ballet Down the Highway. Straight trucker falls for gay male ballet dancer, lots of mansex ensues.

Which has now gotten showings as an art house film, at a venue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

(#1) Poster for the Brooklyn showing in 2015

Some linguistic notes. Porn films are notorious for their titles: playful, often outrageously so, riffing on titles and other formulaic expressions (case in point: Deveau’s mansex-in-the-sand flick Dune Buddies, playing on dune buggies). So how do you pack ballet, trucking, and sex into a title? Go with the ball of ballet (yes, it’s a stretch, but that never deterred anyone in the porn industry): (high)balling down the highway, having a ball balling the boys.

Background from GDoS (omitting the cites and dating):

noun highball: 2 [the small hanging ball used as a signal] (US) a signal, orig. used by railroads, meaning ‘proceed’.

verb highball [< the noun 2]: (US) 1 pertaining to speed. (a) to leave at high speed … (c) to drive fast

verb ball [< highball 2]: 1 to travel at high speed, to leave

2 [< noun ball ‘a party, a celebration, a riotously, extravagantly good time’] (orig, US black) to have a good time, to enjoy oneself

3 [< noun balls ‘testicles’] to have sexual intercourse

Rich raunchy territory.

The flick. On the Letterboxd site:

(#2) Poster from the period

Ballet Down the Highway 1975 Directed by Jack Deveau

A comedy of manners about a crazed horny truck driver (Gar(r)y Hunt) who crashes in on the budding relationship of a ballet star (Henk Van Dijn) and young dancer (Jeff Sullivan).

Review by Evan  ★★★½: Has a novel concept (presumably straight truck driver falls in love with ballet star) and a pretty deliciously meanspirited ending, but otherwise just feels like your standard Deveau production — all class, from the actors to the locations and original score. As with Left-Handed [also by Deveau], I’ll never get bored of movies where straight dudes are stood up and abandoned by the queers they obsess over.

You can watch a ballet montage from the film here. And the sex is available on YouTube too.

And from the ArtHaps calendar back in 2015:

(#3) The ballerino and the trucker

Sat Oct 10, 2015, 11:59 PM, at Spectacle, 124 S 3rd St., Williamsburg, Brooklyn
Opposites attract when a New York ballet dancer’s car breaks down on the highway and he is rescued by a closeted truck driver. An ambivalent romance blossoms until he finds the city apartment he shares with his boyfriend, a fellow dancer, filled with horny truckers. Filled with sadness and unrequited longing, BALLET DOWN THE HIGHWAY is directed by Jack Deveau, whose disco-tastic DRIVE screened at Spectacle in 2014.

There’s some tradition now for treating gay porn as an artistic genre worthy of critical analysis — going back at least to Wakefield Poole’s Boys in the Sand. Public screenings of these works as performance art are, however, somewhat tricky, since they require not only the customary suspension of belief, but also suspension of arousal (or revulsion, depending on your sexual inclinations): these movies were, after all, made to get guys off (every 10 to 20 minutes).

But they are also stories, exploring the psychology of relationships and identity as these develop through experiences. BDtH has a pile of hard-core mansex, but it’s also a sad story of obsession, folly, and unrequited love.

Casting gay porn. Casting a story film requires matching actors to characters: the part of the cute hitch-hiker calls for a twink; a gladiator or fireman role needs a big muscle-hunk. More challenging are roles embodying a gay porn stereotype but also, for the sake of realism, calling for a display of competence in some actual masculine activity. A repairman character doesn’t have to exhibit skills at home repair (all he has to do is wield a tool from his toolbelt, and coupling follows in mere moments), but a football player character ideally should demonstrate that he can throw and catch a football, tackle and be tackled, with at least minimal competence.

There are in fact a fair number of gay pornstars with sports backgrounds who can manage a believable performance on the field. But porn flicks are put together on tight schedules with small budgets, so casts are often just thrown together, and a football player character might just be shown running down a field with a football under his arm, or (very often) shown only in interior shots, wearing football gear in the locker room.

Much the same would be true for a ballet dancer character: you’d expect a pornstar playing such a character to establish it by demonstrating at least minimal competence in dancing (though I suppose a director could try to get away with only off-stage shots of lean muscular men in dance belts). This way wasn’t open in Deveau’s TDtH, since the script calls for the trucker to be undone by the dancer’s performance. The script has in fact two male dancers in it, played by young men who have been through ballet classes and can dance competently (but unremarkably).

Gayporntypes. Still, despite the fact that male dancers are, in general, natural objects of gay male desire, they don’t seem to figure as as a character stereotype in gay porn: there’s no conventional gayporntype (as I’ll put it), no trope, of the male dancer.

The inventory of porntypes is built on an index of high conventional masculinity (either of the youthful or the mature type), inhering both in places and identities. A brief list of some concomitants of a high index:

loci of high masculinity: frat houses, men’s sports teams, mostly-male work spaces (garages, construction sites, firehouses, ranches, etc.), mensrooms, men’s prisons, arenas for boxing and other martial arts

places where men’s bodies are routinely on display: gang showers, locker rooms, swimming pools, beaches; body sports (gymnastics, swimming and diving, wrestling)

places for mansex or cruising for mansex: cruising areas, gay baths, tearooms, gay bars

conventional fantasy men: cowboys, cops, firemen, gladiators, truckers, leathermen, etc., but also hitch-hikers, delivery men (esp. pizza delivery boys), repairmen

In contrast, some occupations for men have low indexes of conventional masculinity, because they are associated (in the public mind, and often in real life as well) with women or gay men or both: for instance, hair stylist, secretary, organist, librarian, fashion designer, and yes, ballet dancer. Hair stylist, fashion designer, and ballet dancer are not gayporntypes, because, alas, they’re seen as too faggy.

Jack Deveau. A note on the BDtH director, from IMDb:

Jack Deveau was born in January 1935 in New York City, New York, USA as John R. Deveau. He was a director and producer [of gay porn films]. He died on December 2, 1982 in New York, New York.

Director (16 credits): 1986 In Heat (video), 1982 Times Square Strip, 1980 Just Blonds,  1979 Fire Island Fever, 1978 Dune Buddies, 1978 A Night at the Adonis, 1977 Rough Trades, 1977 Sex Magic, 1977 Hothouse, 1977 The Boys from Riverside Drive, 1976 Le musée, 1976 Wanted: Billy the Kid, 1975 Good Hot Stuff, 1975 Ballet Down the High Way, 1974 Drive, 1972 Left-handed

On this blog, on 10/16/17 in “Revisiting 8: Rod Canyon”, a reference to Deveau’s A Night at the Adonis (the dirty porn theater trope).

My friend Michael Siemon died back on November 1st in Oakland CA, and now his California family have planned a memorial dance in his honor, on the afternoon of Sunday March 25th. The flyer:

(#1)

A man of great charm and very wide intellectual and artistic interests.

His obituary on the Oakland Chapel of the Chimes site:

(#2) Michael, flanked by David and Sharon Green

Sharon and David Green are sad to report the death of Michael Siemon in the early hours of Wednesday, November 1. He died peacefully in his sleep.

Born in Kansas City, Missouri, on October 11,1945, Michael moved with his family to Omaha later that year. After his graduation from high school in 1963, he studied math and dabbled in philosophy at the University of Chicago, graduating in 1967. He joined the Peace Corps in 1968 and taught math in Malaysia, where he fell in love with Southeast Asia. After leaving the Peace Corps, he entered UC Berkeley as a graduate student in math in 1971, receiving his MS in 1975.

While at UC, Michael fell in with a group that formed a choir at the  Renaissance Faire, and was introduced to the world of the Society for Creative Anachronism; in that context he joined our household as Johann Heinrich Simon of Wernigerode (the Siemon family’s ancestral home). He served as dancing master, wrote poems for the College of Bards, and played a variety of early instruments. During this time he began working as a systems programmer in San Francisco and in Silicon Valley.

Michael lived with our family in Oakland until 1982, when the three of us and our friend Jody Lee moved to General Theological Seminary in Manhattan. While there, Michael worked for Bell Labs in New Jersey and for the New York Stock Exchange.

In New York, we all soon became actively involved in the world of the Country Dance and Song Society, especially English country dance. Michael joined Christine Helwig’s Chelsea English Country Dancers demo team and New World Sword. He took up the concertina, learning how to play for dances from Leah Barkan, band leader of Country Dancers of Westchester, and played regularly for the North Jersey English Country Dancers.

When the household returned to Oakland in 2002, Michael joined two display dance teams – Goat Hill Morris and Ring of Cold Steel (longsword)–both dancing and playing concertina. He also played concertina at BACDS dances and helped organize Fall Frolick English Dance Weekend as well as two Mendocino English Weeks.

Michael loved mathematics, dance, and music, both listening and playing. He also loved archaeology and travel, bringing back wonderful photos – from China, from Turkey, from a return visit to Southeast Asia, and most recently from Oregon, for the total eclipse. He was an excellent cook, and prepared most of our household dinners, as well as feeding various groups at the house.

Michael is survived by his Nebraska family – his brother Karl Siemon, sister-in-law Kathy, and nephew Craig; his sister Chris Wallace, his brother-in-law Bill; niece Emily, her husband Pete, and sons Vince and Jordan; and niece Nancy and her husband Jerry–and by his California family – David and Sharon Green, their children Lexy and Philip Green, their children’s spouses John Seal and Monica Avila, and grandchildren Johnny Seal, Morgan Avila-Bouldin, and Santiago Avila-Green.

He was a member of our family for over forty years.

I will be shapenote singing in Palo Alto the afternoon of the 25th, and will lead a memorial song for him there. Michael was in fact a shapenote singer, and there will be some Sacred Harp singing as part of the Albany memorial.

A little history. I first met Michael electronically, in the late 1980s, on the Usenet newsgroup soc.motss (for lgbt people and their friends), now the closed Facebook group soc-motss. We met face-to-face at his place in Union Theological Seminary in, I think, 1994. Many electronic exchanges over the years; eventually he became a regular contributor of material — examples, cartoons, and the like — for this blog. The last of these, from 8/12/17 in “The war of the weeds”, beginning:

On Facebook on the 4th, from Michael Siemon in Oakland CA, photos of rampant golden bamboo and common ivy in his backyard jungle.

I countered with a tale of a war of the weeds across the street from my house in Palo Alto.

Bonus: Morris dance. It’s likely that many readers will be unfamiliar with this form of English folk dance. Some highlights from Wikipedia:

(#3) Adlington Morris Men from Adlington, Cheshire

Morris dance is a form of English folk dance usually accompanied by music. It is based on rhythmic stepping and the execution of choreographed figures by a group of dancers, usually wearing bell pads on their shins. Implements such as sticks, swords and handkerchiefs may also be wielded by the dancers. In a small number of dances for one or two people, steps are near and across a pair of clay tobacco pipes laid one across the other on the floor.

The earliest known and surviving English written mention of Morris dance is dated to 1448, and records the payment of seven shillings to Morris dancers by the Goldsmiths’ Company in London. Further mentions of Morris dancing occur in the late 15th century, and there are also early records such as bishops’ “Visitation Articles” mention sword dancing, guising and other dancing activities, as well as mumming plays.

While the earliest records invariably mention “Morys” in a court setting, and a little later in the Lord Mayors’ Processions in London, it had assumed the nature of a folk dance performed in the parishes by the mid 17th century.

There are around 150 Morris sides (or teams) in the United States. English expatriates form a larger part of the Morris tradition in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Hong Kong. There are isolated groups in other countries

Morris dancing was originally  for men only, but for some time there have been women’s and mixed teams as well as men’s.

Back on December 17th, my posting “Xmas follies 2017: the shirtless men of the season” featured (in #1 and #2 there) pole dancer Domenico Vaccaro, engaging in an activity that is both sport — there are competitions — and art form — performances are scored on aesthetic criteria as well as on the achievement of specific moves. Think of it as ballet with a prop, a prop that allows a dancer to fly suspended in mid-air. Male pole dancers frequently perform shirtless, so they also show off their full bodies, which are aesthetic objects in their own right.

And now, thanks to Kim Darnell, another male pole dancer, the Hungarian Peter Holoda, a great pleasure to watch in action. In a still shot:

(#1) You can watch here a piece of a stunning performance by Holoda to music from the film Schindler’s List, played by Holoda’s frequent collaborator, cellist Tina Guo

Notes. On Tina Guo, from Wikipedia:

Tina Guo (born 28 October 1985 in Shanghai, China) is a Chinese-American cellist and erhuist from Shanghai. She has developed an international multi-faceted performance and recording career as a cellist, electric cellist, erhuist, and composer known for her distinctive sound, videos that showcase her talent against theatrical backdrops and elaborate costumes, mastery in a wide range of genres, and improvisatory style in major motion picture, television, and game scores.

And on the erhu:

The erhu is a two-stringed bowed musical instrument, more specifically a spike fiddle, which may also be called a Southern Fiddle, and sometimes known in the Western world as the Chinese violin or a Chinese two-stringed fiddle.

Aesthetic sports, competitive artistry, and sport/art.

The conceptual line between SPORT and ART is not easy to draw, and there are several types of problematic cases. A Wikipedian first take on SPORT:

Sport (British English) or sports (American English) includes all forms of competitive physical activity or games which, through casual or organised participation, aim to use, maintain or improve physical ability and skills while providing enjoyment to participants, and in some cases, entertainment for spectators.

There are at least three relevant factors here: physicality, competition, and audience. To which I would add a fourth: objectivity, in the ways that the achievement of physical goals and the winning of competitions are assessed. Central examples of SPORT — baseball and wrestling, say — are competitions over the achievement of physical goals, judged objectively, and frequently engaged in as a show for an audience.

It follows from the competition factor that central examples of SPORT involve at least two participants.

The contrast is with ART, that is, art forms of various kinds. Central examples of ART — painting and piano-playing, say — are not essentially competitive, not essentially displays of physical achievement, are assessed on aesthetic rather than objective criteria, are often engaged in without an audience present, and are often solo activities.

But of course the factors don’t always align. There are at least three mixed cases.

In aesthetic sports, success in competition is measured in part by objective criteria — performing a set of prescribed moves, achieving specific physical goals — and partly by aesthetic criteria: “points on form”.

Aesthetic sports include diving, gymnastics, and ski jumping.

In competitive artistry, what is ordinarily a straightforward artistic activity is framed as a competition: art works or performances are submitted to a panel of judges, whose aesthetic judgments are then pooled to award medals. Such competitions are established traditions in many artistic fields, among them: ballet, opera singing, piano, violin, painting, photography, and architecture.

In sport/art, an activity is viewed simultaeously as sport and art, something that’s engaged in competitively as a matter of course but on other occasions is made available as an artistic display. That’s (non-sexual) pole dancing, above, and also figure skating.

From Wikipedia:

Figure skating is a sport in which individuals, duos, or groups perform on figure skates on ice. It was the first winter sport included in the Olympics, in 1908. The four Olympic disciplines are men’s singles, ladies’ singles, pair skating, and ice dancing. Non-Olympic disciplines include synchronized skating and four skating. From novice through senior-level competition, skaters generally perform two programs (short and long) which, depending on the discipline, may include spins, jumps, moves in the field, lifts, throw jumps, death spirals, and other elements or moves.

… The sport is also associated with show business. Major competitions generally conclude with exhibition galas, in which the top skaters from each discipline perform non-competitive programs. Many skaters, both during and after their competitive careers, also skate in ice shows which run during the competitive season and the off-season.

And that brings me  to Adam Rippon, who can supply both shirtless pleasures and gay interest:

(#2) Rippon at the 2018 winter Olympics

Adam Richard Rippon (born November 11, 1989) is an American figure skater.

At the 2018 Winter Olympics, Rippon won a bronze medal as part of the figure skating team event, thus becoming the first openly gay U.S. male athlete to win a medal in a Winter Olympics.

(#3) Rippon, shirtless, at the beach

… In March 2018, Rippon appeared at the 90th Academy Awards wearing a harness designed by Moschino.

(#4) Rippon, managing to be highly competent, adorably sexy, and outrageous, all at once

(Significant discussions of gay porn, men’s bodies, and mansex — definitely not for kids or the sexually modest.)

In yesterday’s “Deviant Passover rites”, a section on gay Jewish guys partying at the Sederlicious event in NYC, including a note on non-Jews who appreciate Jewish men — called bagel chasers in write-ups of the event (my 12/19/15 posting “X queen” mentioned matzo(h) queen for a man with a preference for Jewish men, and also hummus queen or falafel queen for a man with a preference for Arab/Middle Eastern men).

So in the gay sexual marketplace, there are certainly outgroup customers for Jewish men (and for Muslim men), but there’s evidence that this is a minority taste (suggesting significant implicit prejudice): while gay porn featuring Jewish men isn’t unknown, there’s not a lot of it — certainly  nothing like the enormous amount of porn featuring black and Latino men as objects of desire. Black and Latino men, especially working-class men, are seen as strongly masculine and powerful (and therefore attractive as fantasy lust-objects, in what you might think of as thug porn), while Jewish men in general are not.

With the (partial) exception of Israelis. The stereotype of Israeli men is that they’re soldiers, physically tough guys, while American Jews are stereotypically businessmen, accountants, lawyers, scholars, and so on. So there’s a vein of high-end gay porn featuring actors identified as Israelis (promoted especially by Michael Lucas) and a considerable genre of amateur porn offering men identified as Israelis, but not much featuring the sort of American guys who might turn up at Hebro events like Sederlicious.

Illustrations to come from Michael Lucas porn; Israeli gay icon Eliad Cohen; and an unusual piece of amateur (but well produced) gay porn starring a man identified as young Israeli dancer Yoav Bosidan (currently dancing with the Ballet am Rhein).

(The situation for Arab / Muslim men is roughly similar, though different in detail, of course. Some American gay men see foreign men in these groups, in particular North Africans and Turks, as especially attractive, while largely disregarding Americans of Arab descent and Muslim Americans.)

X-rated images for this posting are in an AZBlogX posting from yesterday, “Israeli porn”:

#1: Jonathan Agassi and Matan Shalev, naked and embracing, from Lucas’s Men of Israel

#2: Avi Dar about to suck Agassi’s cock, from Men of Israel

#3: Agassi displaying his body

#4: Dar displaying his body

#5: Agassi fucking Naor Tal, from Inside Israel

#6: Yoav Bosiden getting fucked (by an unnamed top)

Michael Lucas in Israel. On the first Lucas Israeli adventure, from Wikipedia:

(#1) DVD cover, left to right: Agassi, Lucas, Shalev, Dar (in a group cock-tease)

Men of Israel is a 2009 gay pornographic film released by Lucas Entertainment studio. Journalists from The Atlantic, Out Magazine and Yediot Aharonot noted it as a landmark film as the first pornographic movie shot on location with an all-Israeli cast; while Tablet magazine and the Los Angeles Times remarked on it being the first to feature an all-Jewish cast. Director Michael Lucas — who is Jewish and obtained his Israeli citizenship (made aliyah) in 2009 — undertook the film as “a bold move to promote Israeli culture and tourism” and to counterbalance what he saw as biased portrayals of Israel in mainstream media.

Director Michael Lucas was born in Soviet Russia and experienced antisemitism at an early age, which led him to form a strong connection with his Jewish identity and the state of Israel. Lucas is particularly well known for his activism and outspokenness on a variety of issues in LGBT and Jewish cultures. Hezbollah’s attacks in the 2006 Lebanon war stirred Lucas to go to Israel to entertain gay soldiers who are allowed to serve openly in the military. The trip stirred debate in Israeli society, which is pulled between a progressive, almost secular Tel Aviv — named the “gay capital of the Middle East” by Out Magazine — and the conservative, Ultraorthodox community centered in Jerusalem.

His New York Blade columns on Ultra-Orthodox Judaism and Islam sparked a campus debate at Stanford University in February 2008 when Lucas was invited to give a speech to students. The New Republic and the New York City media have called him the “Lion of Chelsea” and the “last of the New York porn moguls” [one of his porn films, in two parts, is entitled Kings of New York].

… According to Lucas the intent of the film is to help viewers see Israel for its geographic features and history, and a place not much different than Prague or Palm Springs: an inviting LGBT vacation destination where handsome men have sex. “The global media has created an image of Israel as war-torn nation, which streets are lined with destroyed debris and crumbling ruins,” wrote Lucas on the film’s site, “Never are we shown Tel Aviv, Haifa, the Red Sea, the Dead Sea resorts, the beautiful beaches, the amazing architecture and the embracing culture that allows its citizens to thrive.

[cast: Avi Dar, Naor Tal, Morr Foxx, Ninrod Gonen, Guy Ronen, Matan Shalev, Jonathan Agassi]

A gorgeous travelogue combined with sweaty harcore mansex. Two of the performers, with writeups from Lucas:

(#2) (Also in #2 and #4 on AZBlogX)

Avi Dar was born in Kibbutz Karmei Yosef, an agricultural sub-society near Tel Aviv. Most of his childhood was spent on the quiet countryside where he worked harvesting fruits and vegetables with his family.

position: versatile, dick size: 8”, height: 5’8

(#3) Matan Shalev on the cover of the 2011 calendar (also in #1 on AZBlogX)

Matan Shalev has quickly become one of Lucas Entertainment’s most in-demand exclusive models. Whether he’s burning up to screen with Avi Dar in Israeli Auditions, making love to Naor Tal on a picturesque seashore, or getting banged up by Rafael Alencar, Matan Shalev never manages to disappoint. Purely versatile, Matan Shalev is the hottest thing to come out of Israel since falafel!

Born in the the Israeli community of kibbutz Lotan, Matan was raised by a rural farmer and his milkmaid mother.

As a teenager, Matan went to work on the farm and often practiced karate.

When Matan turned at 18, he joined the Israeli miltary [for a one-year tour of duty].

position: versatile , dick xize: 8.5”,  height: 5’11

And on Agassi (amply illustrated in four of the images on AZBlogX):

Lucas Entertainment exclusive Jonathan Agassi is an Israeli scene stealer in some of Lucas’ hottest gay porn epics. Carving a niche for himself as a furry versatile sex bomb, Jonathan Agassi has revitalized the industry as one of the most popular Lucas exclusives in years! Jonathan Agassi was born into an artisan family, his mother a painter and his father a DJ in Berlin. He was raised in Tel Aviv since the age of six months. Growing up Jonathan loved the beach and traveled almost every weekend to the exotic and remarkable parts of Israel.

position: versatile, dick size: 8”, height: 5’10

On the following Lucas porn flick, from the QueerMeNow site:

Following the success of MEN of ISRAEL, Lucas Entertainment’s new movie INSIDE ISRAEL is packed with nine incredible scenes, with six FULL hardcore action scenes and three oral vignettes.

The 12-man cast comes from seven different countries across four continents. Bruno Jones and Max Schutler (Argentina), Jay Roberts (Slovakia), Jordan Fox (France), Hugo Martin and Carlos Caballero (Spain), newcomers Sasha Dov (Israel) and Baptiste Bremont (France), along side Lucas Entertainment exclusives Jonathan Agassi and Naor Tal (Israel), Michael Lucas (representing USA) and the premier exclusive Martin Passoli (Hungary).

Eliad Cohen. Meanwhile, in Israel itself, there are gay icons. From Haaretz (which doesn’t do apostrophes), “At Home With Eliad Cohen, Israels Top Gay Icon: Israeli beefcake Eliad Cohen takes a break from partying shirtless around the world to talk about growing up gay in Israel” by Avshalom Halutz on 6/8/14:

(#4) Cohen, beshirted

(#5) Cohen, shirtless and cock-teasing

When Eliad Cohen steps out of his gym in downtown Tel Aviv, people walking by cannot help glancing at him. His enormous muscles are framed by a tank top with a neckline so low and broad that his huge, hairy chest is entirely on display, and his gigantic arms look like they were transposed from the Incredible Hulk and covered with tattoos. Although he attracts a lot of interest, most people do not know his name. Cohen manages to stay relatively anonymous in Tel Aviv, but in Manhattans Chelsea or Madrids Chueca neighborhoods, it would be impossible to find someone who did not know exactly who he was — the most famous gay Israeli icon of recent years.

Ever since he appeared three years ago on the cover of Spartacus, the bible of gay tourism, Cohen has been a sought-after model. He is also the owner of the PAPA party line that has been successful in dozens of cities all over the world, the co-owner of Gay-ville, a gay vacation rental service, a star of gay-themed YouTube videos — and the fantasy of millions of men. Photographs of him in underwear, a bathing suit or an Israeli Defense Forces uniform have become popular, particularly on the Internet, receiving responses such as, I want peace now with Israel after seeing u. Cohen is the extreme embodiment of the contemporary Israeli gay man: He lives freely and openly, strives for success and self-actualization and makes no apology for his masculinity or sexuality.

These days, Cohen is launching a collection that bears his name with the Australian brand BCNÜ and an online store with PAPA merchandise.

… Just two weeks ago, he celebrated his 26th birthday in Paris, right after landing there from Sao Paulo, in a celebration that would have made Kim Kardashian blush. At midnight, his French friends gave him an enormous cake topped with a huge black handlebar mustache, PAPAs logo. From there he continued to another party in Madrid, where he walked around bare-chested among the drooling revelers. Not a month goes by without a PAPAs party somewhere in the world. The next one will be called Papa Dont Preach, as homage to Madonna. Cohens biggest dream is to have her appear at one of his parties.

Yoav Bosidan, or someone a lot like him. I’ll start with the young Israeli dancer Bosidan, seen here in a head shot (looking adorable) and in a mid-air leap:

(#5)

(#6) KAOS Balletto di Firenze is a ballet school in Florence

Since the 2016/17 season, Bosidan has been a member of Ballet am Rhein. (Ballet dancers move around a lot.)

Then we move to PornBosidan, the central figure of the 18-minute porn video “Israeli dancer Yoav Bosidan being fucked”, paired with an unnamed top. Three screen shots with PornBosidan’s face in them:

(#7) Undressing his top

(#8) The cocksucker’s gaze

(#9) Getting sucked

Plus a cropped version of an acrobatic fuck, the first of several fucks for PornBosidan:

(#10) Guiding the top’s cock in (full shot in #6 on AZBlogX)

With brief interludes, as in #9, PornBosidan is submissive, enthusiastically serving his partner in a variety of ways. There are also long stretches of passionate kissing throughout the video..

In the athletic fuck scene in #10, PornBosidan has no trouble performing a standing split with one leg on his partner’s shoulder, but has to focus intently on guiding his top’s cock into his asshole so that the coupling will work for both of them. A craftsman moment, then he goes back to being ecstatic.

The man in the video sure looks a hell of a lot like the dancer, and he has a dancer’s command of his body. If this is Bosidan, he wouldn’t be the first male ballet dancer with a high drive for mansex, but I hope he’s not going to get into trouble for realizing his sexual pleasures on video.

Two notes. One, Yoav Bosidan needs a proper website to publicize his dancing. And two, PornBosidan has a porn-sized cock, so if big-dicked bottoms are your thing, the video’s right up your alley.

(Men’s bodies and tons of mansex — anal, anal, anal — in street language. No actual penises on display, but nevertheless absolutely not for kids or the sexually modest.)

Padraig porn for the day:

(#1) The TitanMen gay porn sale for this weekend: Kiss me, I’m Irish

Four things: One, Dakota Rivers fucking Liam Knox in Dick Danger 2: The Return of the Dick, and their facial expressions — in particular, Knox’s half-smile of pleasure in being fucked. Two, Kiss me, I’m Irish and playful variations on the catchphrase, including Fuck me, I’m Irish and Blow me, I’m Irish. Three, a note on the pleasures of being fucked. Four, some bilingual wordplay on Kiss me / Baise-moi.

How Dakota and Liam look while they’re fucking. Two previous postings on Rivers and Knox in The Return of the Dick:

on 3/9/18 on this blog, “The further adventures of Dick Danger”, about the forthcoming release of the porn flick (with a title punning on dick ‘penis’ / ‘detective’)

on 7/4/18 on AZBlogX, “Liam Knox for the 4th”, in which #4 has the full photo of Rivers fucking Knox (missionary style) in Dick Danger 2 — used as the ad image for the TitanMen April Fool’s Day 2018 sale; now it appears again for St. Patrick’s Day 2019 — a fuck that will apparently live on and on in the holiday jack-offs of gay men (bonus shots from The Return in the 7/4/18 posting: #7 with Rivers fucking Knox doggie style, #8 with Rivers sucking Knox’s cock)

Now, the men’s faces in the holiday image:

(#2) The workmanlike Rivers, intent on fucking Knox (and gazing into his eyes)

(#3) Knox’s half-smile of pleasure at having Rivers’s cock in his ass oh yes baby yes yes yes fuck me like that oh sweet jesus fuck (not an actual transcript)

Possibly Knox is on his way to full Ecstatic, just at the early Happy Boxboy stage. That’s for us to imagine; this is, after all, a still shot staged for the ad, not a screen shot of the action in the flick.

But it’s evocative and satisfying to view. Knox is lying back with his head resting on his hands, his entire body open (in a pitsntits presentation) for his fucker to appreciate, a thin sheen of sexsweat on his forehead. The scene is, first of all, about the men’s faces, then Knox’s body, and then, in the visual center of the photo. Rivers’s sturdy cock entering Knox’s asshole and Knox’s sweet balls and half-hard cock (a fully engaged fuckhole is of course aroused by his fucker’s face, body, and cock, but his intense pleasure is mostly focused on his asshole, not his own cock).

Above, in #3, that pleasure as distilled in Knox’s relaxed but alert body and  in his face.

V me, I’m Irish. A catchphrase of the day. From Wikipedia:

Kiss me, I’m Irish is a common phrase associated with St. Patrick’s Day. It often appears on T-shirts.

(#4) The catchphrase as a t-shirt slogan

It originates from the legend of the Blarney Stone, which is believed to bring luck and eloquence to those who kiss it.

According to Jemma Tosh of Manchester Metropolitan University, the phrase is related to anti-Irish racism and sexual violence: “Whether it is the popular ‘Kiss me I’m Irish’ or the more aggressive ‘Rape me I’m Irish’ ‘joke,’ the conceptual Irish body is positioned as an object for others to act upon.”
[“”Rape Me, I’m Irish”: An Analysis of the Intersecting Discourses of Anti-Irish Racism and Sexual Violence”. Intersectionalities. 4 (1): 59–81 (2015)]

Whoa! “Rape me, I’m Irish” is not the punchline of a joke with any currency at all. On the other hand, “Fuck me, I’m Irish” — a playful variation on the catchphrase (on playful variations, see, among other postings, this one from 2014 and this one from last week) — is available as a slogan on tons of t-shirts, of many different designs. One here:

(#5) A (genuinely) light-hearted t-shirt, intended to convey a P-construal of fucking — anal or vaginal — as a social act, rather than a V-construal

From my 2/10/17 posting “Annals of adorable”, on two different accounts of how one man might come to be fucked by another:

(P) men engage in these sex acts because they find them both physically pleasurable and emotionally satisfying [P is for pleasure]

(V) being fucked is being subjected to an act of violence, a painful, aggressive, and humiliating violation of the body (humiliating because it is both feminizing and also a defeat at the hands of another man) [being fucked is being raped; V is for violence]

Almost all gay men who bottom for other men construe the act as one of pleasure for them. And of course in their ordinary life, straight women hope that getting fucked will equally be a source of pleasure for them. In both cases, a t-shirt like (#5) is an offer of mutual pleasure (for both parties). A hyperbolically promiscuous offer, to be sure, but an offer nevertheless. And it assumes that being Irish (in fact or in the ad-hoc fantasy of the holiday) makes the wearer attractive.

In fact, the fuck variant of the catchphrase is potentially ambiguous between an older Agent-Subject, Patient-Object sense of fuck (Fuck me! says I want you to fuck me) and a newer Patient-Subject, Agent-Object sense (Fuck me! says I want you to fuck for me, I want to fuck you). Details in my 7/9/13 posting “Sexual lexical semantics”. But no matter who’s the penetrator and who’s the recipient, the t-shirt in #5 takes the P-view of the act of fucking, not the V-view.

Of course, the fuck variant of the catchphrase isn’t the only one around. There are oral variants:

(#6)

(#7)

And variants with (rough) synonyms of fuck: eat me, screw me, bang me, all attested (but not illustrated here).

And variants that aren’t sexual at all: trust me, beer me, punch me, fight me, plant me [garden store], murder me [murder mystery game], …

The happy boxboy. Back in my 2/10/17 “Annals of adorable” posting:

The disjuncture between (P), the celebratory, bright sexual world according to gay men, and (V), the alarming, dark world of mansex according to some straight men, could hardly be greater. What gay men can do, what I can do, is amplify on the former world, explaining the physical pleasures and the emotional satisfactions of mansex in vibrant detail, to sketch an alternative to (V). Not to say, Try It, You’ll Like It — though in fact the techniques of mansex can be learned, and can provide satisfactions even if you’re a guy who’s not aroused by other guys, as straight brolovers have discovered — but to depict an attractive alternative sexual world based on mutual pleasure and regard.

… since we’re on butt-fucking here, let me just say that when I’m in [the bright world of gay sexual pleasure] I love getting fucked. It feels fantastic [physically, in several ways], and when it really goes well (as it almost always did with Jacques) I feel intensely masculine, sharing my body with another man, becoming man-squared with him inside me (and on his end J felt the same way: joined together, we were awesomely powerful). That’s a really big emotional payoff.

Very briefly on the physical pleasures of getting fucked up the ass:

the stimulation of the anal ring (comparable in some ways to stimulation of the lips, both the mouth and the anus being abundantly supplied with nerve endings), also exploited in other sorts of anal play (stroking, finger-fucking, rimming, dildo play)

the sensation of being pleasurably filled (up)

the stimulation of the prostate, a guy’s version of a woman’s O-spot

There are also psychological pleasures in receptive sex, as I noted above. These can be quite intense. From my 2/9/16 posting “Morning names: wiles, Wiles”:

I’ve been reflecting on [Kevin Wiles’s] take on cocksucking and bottoming. In both cases, he goes well beyond mere willingness (after all, anyone can learn to perform these acts at least competently) and beyond enthusiasm, into something deeper and more intense, amounting to a kind of sexual orientation of its own, in which he submits with pleasure to another man by taking that man’s cock into his body (into his mouth or into his asshole) and worships it by having it become, in his sexual imagination, part of his own body. He absorbs that cock, as a symbol of the man it represents and the essence of his masculinity, and becomes one with it. He is deeply oriented towards cock (and consequently towards cum), as (I now say) an ubercocksucker or uberbottom (or both, as in KW’s case).

For some men, there’s a further psychological satisfaction: submission. See my 2/17/19 posting “Eat it! The oral humiliation you deserve”, on the paradoxical pleasures of (some or all of) SHAC:  submission, humiliation, abuse, constraint.

A lexical note, from my 12/29/15 posting “Boxboys and transitive bottoming”:

there’s a set of everyday terms for the vagina, and box is one of those — at the euphemistic end of the scale, with pussy taking us into taboo territory, and cunt at the extreme, flagrantly coarse, end of the scale.

… all everyday vocabulary for the vagina can be (and, as far as I can see, has been) pressed into service to refer to the male anus viewed as a (receptive) sexual organ (see my 7/26/13 posting on the phenomenon). That gives us a series of synonyms of bottom boy ‘man whose preference is to serve as the recipient in anal intercourse, man who prefers to be fucked’: from the top on down: cuntboy, pussyboy, and, yes, boxboy. (All of these have boy used for a gay man, of whatever age.)

The fairy’s fuck. Another round of play on kiss me, now from French. From  my 9/13/13 posting “Défonce Moi”, on French vulgar slang:

The new routine vulgarity [largely replacing foutre] is the verb baiser, as in the title of a controversial French film … Baise-moi (Fuck Me)

Baiser is a French verb meaning “to fuck”; it also means “a kiss” when used as a noun (un baiser)

and is now in competition with the even more vulgar, more powerful défoncer.

But in the appropriate context, the noun le baiser ‘the kiss’ can still distantly evoke fucking, which makes the title Le baiser de la fée (The Fairy’s Kiss) potentially risible. From Wikipedia:

Le baiser de la fée (The Fairy’s Kiss) is a ballet in one act and four scenes composed by Igor Stravinsky in 1928 and revised in 1950 for George Balanchine and the New York City Ballet.

(#8) Cover art: The Fairy Woods by Henry Meynell Rheam, 1903

Based on Hans Christian Andersen’s short story Isjomfruen (English: The Ice-Maiden), the work is an homage to Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, for the 35th anniversary of the composer’s death.

Things pile up in the context: not just baiser, but also la fée / fairy, with their possible, um, fey connotations, and then the association with the homosexually inclined Tchaikovsky.

Yesterday, the flowers of the season were still yellow — les jaunes d’Avril — but today they are white — les muguets pour le premier Mai — also (on the plus side) delicately pretty and highly scented but (on the minus side) both poisonous and rampant, while conveying beginnings, affectionate respect, and the power of unions marching in the streets. Hey, they’re just colors, and just plants — It’s Just Stuff, as I say every so often —  each capable of symbolizing pretty much anything, in some sociocultural context or another.

(The April section of this posting is not about les gilets jaunes, despite Google search’s inclination to wrestle any jaunes-related query into an investigation of politically significant vests.)

April, very briefly. The sunny flowers of spring, the yellow flowers of April, which burst suddenly onto the scene: the chalices of yellow crocuses —

(#1)

and the trumpets of yellow daffodils —

(#2)

From the jaunes d’Avril to the dancer Jane Avril:

(#3) Toulouse-Lautrec’s 1893 poster

From Wikipedia:

Jane Avril (9 June 1868 – 17 January 1943) was a French can-can dancer made famous by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec through his paintings. Extremely thin, ‘given to jerky movements and sudden contortions’, she was nicknamed La Mélinite, after an explosive.

… Using the stage name Jane Avril, [Jeanne Beaudon] built a reputation that eventually allowed her to make a living as a full-time dancer. Hired by the Moulin Rouge nightclub in 1889, within a few years she headlined at the Jardin de Paris, one of the major café-concerts on the Champs-Élysées. To advertise the extravaganza, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec painted her portrait on a poster that elevated her stature in the entertainment world even further. The popularity of the cancan became such that Jane Avril travelled with a dance troupe to perform in London.

Le 1er Mai. Background on the plant of the day, from Wikipedia:

(#4)

Lily of the valley (Convallaria majalis), sometimes written lily-of-the-valley, is a sweetly scented, highly poisonous woodland flowering plant that is native throughout the cool temperate Northern Hemisphere in Asia and Europe. Other names include May bells, Our Lady’s tears, and Mary’s tears. Its French name, muguet, sometimes appears in the names of perfumes imitating the flower’s scent.

… the genus is [currently] placed in the family Asparagaceae … It was formerly placed in its own family Convallariaceae, and, like many lilioid monocots, before that in the lily family Liliaceae.

… Convallaria majalis is an herbaceous perennial plant that forms extensive colonies by spreading underground stems called rhizomes.

On the various symbolisms of le muguet, from the site The Connexion: French news and views, on 5/1/14, “France’s other May Day tradition”:

Shops are shut, buses are not running, and unions are marching for workers’ rights, as France marks the Fête du Travail [Labo(u)r Day] today.

(#5) In 1890 the Socialist movement adopted a red triangle to symbolise their objective: 8 hours work, 8 hours sleep, 8 hours of leisure. This symbol was later replaced by the wild rose, then in 1907 by a sprig of muguet. (from the magazine L’Assiette au Beurre*)

But, as well as work and workers, May 1 – which became a public holiday in France in 1947 – is associated with an older tradition. It is the Fête du Muguet, when thousands of roadside stalls selling lily of the valley spring up.

(#6) A flower seller in Paris in the 1930s offering muguets — a much-reproduced photo whose source I haven’t been able to trace; see the Laidback Gardener site’s posting, “The Mayflower: the flower behind the name”

The flower only became associated with workers’ rights in the 20th century.

Last year the French forked out €31.8m to buy a sprig of lily of the valley (“muguet”) as a token of affection for family and loved ones.

The tradition of giving lily of the valley flowers on May 1 is said to have begun in 1560, when knight Louis Girard presented King Charles IX with a bunch of lily-of-the-valley flowers as a token of luck and prosperity for the coming year.

(#7) The first of May brings happiness

It is said that he took a shine to the idea and began the custom of presenting lily-of-the-valley flowers to the ladies of his court each year on the same day.

[*footnote, from Wikipedia:

L’Assiette au Beurre (literally The Butter Plate, and roughly translating to the English expression pork barrel) was an illustrated French weekly satirical magazine with anarchist political leanings that was chiefly produced between 1901 and 1912. It was revived as a monthly for a time and ceased production in 1936.

The magazine’s caricature and editorial cartoon content was drawn from a varied cadre of illustrator-contributors of many backgrounds and disparate artistic styles. The content often focused on socialist and anarchist ideas.]

In advertising for the Palo Alto Art Center’s exhibition Local Editions: A Celebration of Bay Area Printmaking 6/15/19 – 8/25/19, this arresting print by Judy Aoki:

(#1) (She) Twerkin’, 2014 stone lithograph with watercolor (on Aoki’s website under the title Dance Styles of the 1800’s, from her Museum of Historical Makeovers)

A note on the late 20th- / early 21st-century dance craze twerking, then more on Aoki and her work.

Twerking. See my 9/4/13 posting “One more twerk”, which has links to three previous twerk postings. And in action:

(#2) 2014 twerk choreo by DHQ Fraules (music: Travis Porter, “Bring It Back”)

Aoki. From Wikipedia:

Kathy Aoki is a feminist artist who works in many different mediums, including printmaking, video and painting.

… She currently lives in Santa Clara, California and is an associate professor of studio art at Santa Clara University.

… Aoki’s work explores “gender, beauty and culture consumerism.” While she says that her work is feminist, she wants viewers to “feel comfortable” with her work “so that they want to stick around and get the message.” Her work often contains pop-culture themes, such as incorporating elements from anime and manga or by referencing My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (Battle of Kawaii). She has also parodied superheroes and public service messages in her work. In combination with her popular culture themes, Aoki has created the “role as ‘curator’ of the fictitious Museum of Historical Makeovers” for herself, which allows her to examine consumerism and beauty in a humorous way.

To remind you, from NOAD:

adj. kawaii: (in the context of Japanese popular culture) cute: she paints elephants that are extremely kawaii. noun kawaii: the quality of being cute, or items that are cute: even in a cosmopolitan city like Tokyo, kawaii is everywhere.

Aoki has a page on the Kala Art Institute site, which has a set of her MHMO prints:

(#3) nw How I Lost My Vegetarianism, 1998 linocut; ne Sex Slave, Porn Star, 2001 multiple plate linocut; sw Thanks Mom, 1999 multiple plate linocut; se Big Tools Rock, 1998 silkscreen with watercolor

(#4) nw Untitled (Wingnut) 2001 multiple plate linocut; ne The Lawyer, 2000 multiple plate linocut; sw Truckin’, 2001 multiple plate linocut; se Teddy Harvest, 2002 multiple plate linocut (heavy machinery meets kawaii in the last two)

Note on the Kala Institute:

Kala Art Institute’s mission is to help artists sustain their creative work over time through its Artist-in-Residence and Fellowship Programs, and to engage the community through exhibitions, public programs, and education. (studio 1060 Heinz Ave., Berkeley 94710; gallery 2990 San Pablo Ave., Berkeley 94702)

As I noted in yesterday’s posting “Das Wappen”, over the years, Zwickys have moved from Canton Glarus not only to all parts of Switzerland, and from Switzerland north and west in Europe (and then further west to the Americas), but also to the east, all the way to the Slavic lands — specifically, to what is now Ukraine and Russia. And also to what is now Belarus. Where we find the Tsviki — Цвики — family.

Two Belarusian Tsvikis, about 60 years apart in age. One, Leonid, back in Vitebsk, Belarus; the other, Julia (who came to the US a few years ago), in Hallandale Beach FL.

(I make no attempt here to piece out the family relationships involved. Though I will say that Leonid is the grandfather of Denis Zwicky, from yesterday’s posting.)

Where are we? The Republic of Belarus (capital Minsk) is bounded by (from the top, the north, going clockwise) Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia. Vitebsk is a city in northwest Belarus, especially notable as the birthplace of artist Marc Chagall.

(#1) Chagall, Over Vitebsk (1913)

And in the US, Hallandale Beach FL is south of (going north from it) Hollywood, Dania Beach, and Fort Lauderdale; and north of North Miami Beach

Leonid. Age before beauty, as they say. Leonid being in his 80s. From the official Belarus travel site, in the religion subsection on Christianty:

The first Lutheran congregation in post-Soviet times was founded in the year 1993. Until 1998 the organisation of the Lutheran congregations in the various regions of Belarus was largely uncoordinated. Some joined the ELCROS community (Evangelical Lutheran Church in Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Central Asia). In the summer of 1999 ELCROS nominated Pastor Leonid Tsviki from Vitebsk as deputy of the Bishop in Belarus. However, many congregations wanted to remain independent and founded the Evangelical Lutheran Church of the Republic of Belarus together. ELCROS rejected this completely. Therefore a schism occurred and in 2004 the independent Evangelical Lutheran Church of the Republic of Belarus was founded and it now has 11 member congregations.

(Note: evangelical Lutheran churches are mostly mainstream Protestant churches, not evangelist.)

Julia. From the site of the Natalie Dance Academy, 202 NE 1st Ave, Hallandale Beach, FL, about singing teacher Julia Tsviki:

(#2)”BA in Music In 2014 graduated Belorussian State University with MA in Acting and Performing. 2009-2016 Julia worked as a main drama actress in the National Theater.”

And a spread for the dance academy:

(#3)

(Mango Meshman shows off his body, to the accompaniment of mansexually suggestive lyrics. Not for everyone.)

(#1)

The beauty of his buttocks
And the juicy sweetness
Of his secret parts

We know him in a previous incarnation as the fabulously receptive superhero Mesh Man:

(#2) From my 2/13/19 posting “Mesh Man: Always Open for Business®”

(And again in my 4/27/19 posting “A standout in his shorts”, with Mesh Man “flaunting his famous receptive organ — he’s all man and a foot deep”, in photos #1  – #3 (and admiring his penis in #4).)

But now he’s doing business as Mango Meshman, the maestro of the Mango Ballet, with costumes provided by a new fetish underwear line, DJX, from the Daily Jocks firm (ad in my mail today). The ad copy:

Get party ready with the DJX Trough Collection. Exclusive to DailyJocks this party look will make you stand out from the crowd with matching Harness, Jockstrap, Shorts & Socks.

From NOAD:

noun trough: a long, narrow open container for animals to eat or drink out of: a water trough.

The trough in the ad will suggest pigs feeding, and gay sexual excess.

As for the Mango Ballet, it’s a dance form of Meshman’s own devising, based on four ballet positions, each with an associated color and character; each character has perfectly color coordinated clothes (harness, jockstrap, shorts, and socks) — fetishwear with style:

(#3) First position: the Red Fool, an especially ridiculous-looking posture and costume

(#4) Second position: the Blue Victor

(#5) Third position: the Khaki Contemplative

(#6) Fourth Position: the Black Cruiser

In the technical literature on Mango Ballet, the first two positions are known as covered positions: the buttocks are covered by shorts, and the dancer’s prominent package is highlighted instead. And the last two as open positions: the dancer’s buttocks are on display in his jockstrap.

The fourth position is sometimes known jocularly as The Closer, or as the Coup de Grâce.