boy culture

Guyar X 8

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Screwed By President Obama

Abstinence-only programs could be well and truly fucked. Now that's a change we can believe in!

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Drawn To His Subjects

An iPhone is much more efficient, but I like his way, too—an artist drawing everyone in New York. 

Dutch Treat

Jasper Schuringa is being hailed as the hero of Flight 253, which Nigerian shoe pants bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to bring down on Christmas Day, allegedly at the behest of al-Qaeda. The Dutch director apparently leapt into action, grabbing away a burning object and helping to strip the would-be terrorist of his clothes to be sure he wasn't carrying more explosives. Good work, dude cutie!

We can only imagine what would have happened had this plot worked.

The Unbearable Lightness Of Being Italian: A Review Of Nine's Nine

Nine's not one; more like a five and a half out of 10. Partly inspired, partly insipid, my take on it, bit by bit:

Daniel Day-Lewis, RATING: 5/10

Just call him "mistercast". One of our greatest actors, Day-Lewis tries hard, but simply doesn't have the charm (nor does he have the chops) as Guido Contini, the director battling a mid-life crisis. Guido is written as being on the verge of being annoying, saved only by his massive charm. Day-Lewis lacks the charm that Antonio Banderas brought to the sensational Broadway revival, mortally wounding the entire film. What a shame this film and his performance are nothing special considering he's made only four movies this decade.

Marion Cotillard, RATING: 9/10

Luminously beautiful and gifted with an actual part (something most of the other women lack), Cotillard is truly memorable as Guido's neglected wife Luisa. Once his beautiful discovery and muse, Luisa's apparently been replaced—again and again—by various other women who've crossed Guido's gaze. Cotillard's singing is surprisingly strong, making her something most of the others are not—a double threat (no one in the film is asked to dance for real, with lots of stomping around enhanced by Marshall's skillful editing).

 

Penélope Cruz, RATING 9/10

As gorgeous as Cotillard in an almost opposite way, Cruz gives a performance as the ditzy yet painfully sincere Carla that's so delicious it's a shame her character—like everyone's character—is not given more time to flower. She may not be able to suspend herself mid-air like Jane Krakowski did onstage, but she sizzles in her big number and touches the heart with her character's pathetic need for a man who's nothing but an appetite himself. 

Guydar X 8

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In The Future, Everyone Will Be Cute For 15 Minutes

My niece Talia inspects a picture of my dog Sash on her computer...and Sash checks out Talia on hers.

Hairy Christmas!

 

The Homosexual Gourmand: I Want Muscles

Men's Workout (February 2010) offers unnatural wonders like fitness trainer James DiMuzio (above) and holistic PT Luke Scheffert (below):

According to an In Touch (January 4, 2010) poll (and keep in mind, they say Angelina Jolie just got "revenge pregnant" to spite Jennifer Aniston on their cover), a solid majority thinks that Kellan Lutz will do just fine in filling "Marky" Mark Wahlberg's old CKs:

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"O" Holy Night

(Not So) Silent Night

I can't understand how ANYONE would want to attend a Christmas party thrown by Hiram Monserrate, the New York state senator convicted of intentionally slashing his girlfriend. On top of that, he also voted against marriage equality after indicating that he was for it, which is why gay activists disrupted his little shindig with some very appropriate shouting.

As fucked up as every one of those attendees is for being at a bash thrown by a GF basher (far worse than his anti-equality stance, IMHO), how fucked up is his out chief of staff, Wayne Mahlke?

Turning 41 On 12/25 Divided By 9

Merry Christmas to all who celebrate it and have a good 25th to those who don't. I'll be spending the day—my 41st birthday, gulp—eating José's food with friends and catching Nine, which I hope to be able to rate above a Four Point Three (where it currently stands at Rotten Tomatoes). 

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No Fucking Way

When she's a lawyer, she'll DIE when this story comes up on Lexis-Nexis.

 
(Take all of this as humor and don't harass the girl. She already has problems considering she thinks the word "bastard" is one of the most objectionable words in the English language, right up there with "fuck.")

This smug 14-year-old from Manhattan (of all places!) created a fucking Web site to persuade kids to stop swearing called Bleep!. 

"Swearing doesn't serve any purpose, and it reflects poorly on the person who does it."

How a nice Jewish girl from liberal NYC got so gung-ho about censorship (her site is all about choice, yet she writes almost regretfully "it's impossible to get the government to censor everything") is beyond me. And I don't know what asshole told her that swearing serves no purpose, but nothing could be further from the truth. Swearing helps to alleviate stress for one thing, and for another it's as expressive as any other category of words.

I think it's ridiculous when someone uses "fuckin'" every other word without a second thought, but swearing indiscriminately is no more meaningless than "Have a good one!" At its best, swearing can help describe feelings with damn near 100% accurate precision.

If you're arguing with someone and say, "Let's agree to disagree," that lets you know where you stand. So does, "Fuck you and the horse you rode in on."

If I had kids, I would not let them swear until they were old enough to have an intelligent, adult-ish conversation with me, and I would not tolerate disrespectful swearing. But give it up altogether? YOU GOTTA BE SHITTIN' ME. (In fact, I almost wonder if this is an Onion-esque story that fooled the news. I mean, the kid says it's okay to say Damn Yankees or Hell's Kitchen, but in front of children you should say Darn Yankees and Heck's Kitchen instead!)

After the jump, read her cringe-worthy list of dorky words she thinks should be used in place of profanity...and keep in mind she hopes to become a lawyer someday...

Fur Sure

Even without having just seen John Waters talking about "getting some pelt," I find the caption on this Bethenny Frankel photo in Us (January 4, 2010) completely weird. "Showing her pelt" is probably technically correct—it can mean human skin. However, the word is more commonly used to refer to animal skin with fur still attached. All I could think of was Bethenny's pelt, which wasn't really something of which I wanted to spend Christmas Eve day thinking.

The Homosexual Gourmand

As seen in Italian Vanity Fair (23 Dicembre 2009), Thomas Jane is fuzzilicious (above) and Glee's Matthew Morrison hits all the right notes in a James Dean-esque shot by Brian Bowen Smith: 

Maksim Chmerkovskiy brings the hot for his Q&A in Star (January 4, 2010), an interview in which he talks about adopting a new puppy that he's named Sir Sleepalot Chmerkovskiy. (We're sure he's not gay, right? Right??):

Latin superstar Eduardo Yanez might be embarrassed, might be proud—as seen in TV Notas (Diciembre 29, 2009), his 20-year-old son Lalo bears (almost) all in some sexy Internet photos. At this point, I can't really accept that anyone who poses in this way even suspects their images won't get out:

More after the jump...

To Your Health

The Senate has passed its health-care reform bill by 60-39, far more votes than the necessary simple majority. It ain't perfect, but neither was Social Security when it was first passed—and that improved dramatically over time. 

The process was insane and was probably fumbled by the Obama Administration early on. But they won in the end, and that is a big achievement considering the absolutely unconstitutional filibuster bullshit in place in the Senate.

Now the bill has to be merged with the much better one passed by the House. I'm sure abortion will be the sticking point, but with so many women willing to vote Republican, I guess that's gonna have to be their battle. I hope the bills are merged before Obama's State of the Union in January of February—it would be a nice achievement to crow about, even if the right-wingers think it constitutes the end of the world. Or maybe because they do.

Guydar X 7

   

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Something i Said?

A new batch of images is up at my iPhone photo site iLOVESNEWORK. 

Ends Of The World X 3

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Waters Still Runs

Two nights ago, I went alone to a screening of Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes. I don't mind doing things alone, but two nights in a row? After the headache-inducing Holmes, and like a jealous, Watson-less Holmes, I had a date with myself for A John Waters Christmas at the B.B. Blues Club and Grill on West 42nd here in Manhattan, just a few blocks from where I live and an even fewer from where I work. This kind of thing would have been unimaginably posh-sounding to me back when I was a teen in Flushing, Michigan, discovering Waters's films on VHS and feeling like I was the only person in the state who "got" them.

Fun as it might have been, it was still going alone to an event three days before the end of my tenure as a 40-year-old. (Half empty v. half full.)

Re-Gaying

The latest clip and stills released from A Single Man—IMHO the best or one of the best films of the year—go all the way gay, perhaps to combat the "Weinstein is de-gaying the marketing" meme that's out there.

At a screening for the oppressively dark, charmless, chemistry-free and testosterone-clotted Sherlock Holmes—a movie that in stark contrast to A Single Man has been marketed as being far more gay than it is—I sat next to famed writer and illustrator Anthony Haden-Guest. A woman speaking with him and some other reviewers said to her friend, "Have you seen A Single Man? It's [shakes hand from side to side] a little fashiony for me." I can see how it could be quite literally too fashiony for some, but I found it interesting that the hand gesture and the criticism could also be a thinly veiled way of saying "too gay." (In the same way white people routinely say to each other, when black people aren't around, that they don't want to see a movie that has only black people in it...Yes, they do, too, say that!)

Like A Cockroach

I know lots of people find it annoying when stars become advocates, but I think it's a lot more annoying when they don't. It's almost as if we reward indifference and selfishness. Long live cockroaches.

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Let He Who Is Without Cyndi Cast The First Stone

Cyndi Lauper offers a big holiday-neutral greeting with a lovely version of the Christ-drenched "Silent Night". (Note the very faint "True Colors"-esque percussion.)

Is Charlie Crist Bipolitical?

Closet-case Charlie Crist—who got married after years of more than credible rumors that he wasn't the marrying kind but who spent his first anniversary apart from his wife—just lost the endorsements of two of Florida's most important Republicans, including a close friend of his. This, in the face of poll numbers showing that Republicans want to Scozzafava him there in a primary.

Does this mean he's hemorrhaging uncontrollably? Hardly. One of the reps who pulled her endorsement said she had no choice and "he knows why." Maybe he's already told them he's about to switch parties to become a Democrat. So instead of being Scozzafaved, he skips ahead and simply Specters himself.

The good news is there would almost certainly be a Democratic senator from Florida in 2010. The bad news is it would be Charlie Crist, who as a Republican is quite liberal but who as a Democrat would be yet another Blue Dog. With a secret. Oh, well, maybe he'd be so pissed off at being Liebermanned in the primary he'd boomerang around and be more liberal than he has been previously.

Hago Eso

At this rate, Uganda will have marriage equality before the U.S.—Mexico City took the plunge yesterday, saying "I definitely do" with an overwhelmingly supportive vote that upped their ante from civil unions to full equality.

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Still Moore Drama

Demi Moore is wrong. Anthony Citrano is right. There is no gray area. More of his clever proof that her image was retouched before gracing the cover of W is available here. Honestly, woman, nobody believes photos are not retouched extensively at every magazine. No exceptions, not even for beauties.

Young Blue Eyes

Carter Smith shoots Paul Walker for GQ (January 2010). Walker looks quite thin, and that plus the suits conspire to make him kinda resemble Rob Lowe of all people. Might also be the unusual (for him) way he's holding his face:

More after the jump...

Mr. Right Now

Jeremy Edwards lands on the cover of GT (December 2009) as the star of Mr. Right, a British bromance about a straight guy who befriends his fiancée's gaggle of gay pals. Both he and co-star Leon Ockenden, pose for the mag and banter about what sounds like I Love You, Man except with actual homosexuality. When will I get to see this?

A couple more after the jump...

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The Difference Between ABC And NBC = PDA

James Franco puts Adam Lambert to shame on Saturday Night Live. I've never wanted to be Will Forte, and now I'll never not want to be Will Forte.

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On The Face Of It

In high school, probably my senior year, I decided it would be interesting to ask everyone around me to draw a face. Most took my direction to mean a self-portrait, others drew the faces of people who happened to be nearby, still others invented faces out of nowhere—bizarre characters who may or may not have had anything to do with the personalities of my friends and acquaintances. 

It's been over 20 years, but I dug them up, scanned them and gave them a bit of color. Funny how many people really didn't want to try to be "artistic," yet some of the simplest faces are touching to me. I'm not in touch with most of them (though some have popped up on Facebook), and at least one—Jeff—is no longer with us. The funniest part is that I have these random reflections of their personalities, these whimsical faces, even in the cases where their actual faces are a blur in my memory.

Note: Sorry for the swastika...I seem to remember this was a weird character and not done in an admiring way. The Asian caricature is also quite, um, dated.

I'm posting them here so as to make it easier to direct them to the entire gallery: