The List seems to grow weekly? Not that I'm complaining, mind.
Boris Vallejo, soft-porn? A-hem hem, it pleases you to jest, surely? The rules for porn are: if it's colour-photo or video, it's porn. If it's monochrome with a violin score and french accents, it's art. Same with painitngs: if it's oil on canvas or lead pencil on paper, it's art. If it's on glossy easily rumpled paper it's porn.
Oh, and if the collection of images is hard-bound and weighs over 5 kilos, it's also art (such as the Tom of Finland coffe-table book collecting pretty much his entire portfolio - you could put legs on it and use it as coffeetabe in its own right.)
Really appreciate the collected links, it feels like old times when going to the press specialist down town every Friday afternoon to pick up some magazine or other and then sautering across the square to a café for a mug of coffee and hot focaccia covered in almost-boiling mozzarella, pickled olives, diced feta cheese and a light salad, all fisnished off with a chocolate-dipped baseball-sized piece of meringue.
And a licourice pipe, since I stopped smoking. Too bad no-one introduced Magritte to those.
Metal Hurlant, that takes me right back to the 1980s!
Porn is in the eye of the beholder perhaps - perhaps not unlike the difference between wearing a swimsuit because you must wear something on a public beach, and wearing a swimsuit designed to titilate for that very purpose. Or going to the gym to improve body and mind as opposed to see and be seen. There's a line but it's fuzzy and blurred.
The man behind the signature Tom of Finland had a quite the eventful life, and a biopic came out a few years back, well worth seeing despite the need for subtitles unless you speak finnish.
He and his depictions serves well as a divider between the homosexual man who is a man first and foremost, for whom the sex is precisely that: just sex, and the modern day gay man who is all about the identity as some sort of unmanly sterile and thoroughly misogynist demi-woman.
Thanks for the shout out, John. I appreciate the support. Great service with these digests too. Can’t say I read everything linked but I’m amazed you do haha. Thanks again.
Based haha. My career goals as a novelist are to be so prolific only the die hards can even logistically read it all. Perhaps you understand something of this compulsion.
Concise digest of so many great posts this past week! Once again, I'm amazed by how you're able to read all this, compile it into these reviews, and still have time to write your own killer essays!
Writing my own essays is something I conspicuously failed to do this week 😅 I started one about evolution, the Bible, and such, but my heart wasn't really in it. Felt too crotchety.
That's how it is. Sometimes you till the soil and sow seeds and seem to have nothing to show for it except barren soil; then all of a sudden, a bunch of stuff sprouts up and comes to fruition all at once.
LOL. Okay, it is long, but ... he covers a lot of entries in that space, so it's informationally dense. Is there a word for that? If not, I'll have to make one up next time.
Thanks for bringing Brogues Britannicus to my attention. Much appreciated. His take on female affected power will also ring true for many on a professional level in most white collar settings.
Any mention of the father of quarks evokes a well-documented effect bearing his name 😊 Individual (micro? yocto?) psychomachinery with macrosocial implications.
Was hoping you'd see that! He's been writing a lot on the subject of post-liberal futurism, drawing on some interesting subject matter ... One of my favorites was a piece inspired by an 80s Buck Rogers RPG.
Once again, deep thanks for doing this. It's an immense amount of work every week, and most useful.
Many thanks once again for the encomium, and for the *interesting* art ;)
The art is some of Vallejo's more PG-13 work ;)
Yay, let's go full-out Greek, shall we: eulogy panegyric paean! With a heaping helping of Latin: accolades laudation commendation acclamation adulation veneration 😂
Check out the Proedrikí Frourá!
I've seen them live long ago - it takes real class to look dangerous and hard-core in those outfits!
I've seen them live not so long ago 😝 Immensely solemn self-absorbed men; their code of conduct clearly forbids any semblance of smile.
The List seems to grow weekly? Not that I'm complaining, mind.
Boris Vallejo, soft-porn? A-hem hem, it pleases you to jest, surely? The rules for porn are: if it's colour-photo or video, it's porn. If it's monochrome with a violin score and french accents, it's art. Same with painitngs: if it's oil on canvas or lead pencil on paper, it's art. If it's on glossy easily rumpled paper it's porn.
Oh, and if the collection of images is hard-bound and weighs over 5 kilos, it's also art (such as the Tom of Finland coffe-table book collecting pretty much his entire portfolio - you could put legs on it and use it as coffeetabe in its own right.)
Really appreciate the collected links, it feels like old times when going to the press specialist down town every Friday afternoon to pick up some magazine or other and then sautering across the square to a café for a mug of coffee and hot focaccia covered in almost-boiling mozzarella, pickled olives, diced feta cheese and a light salad, all fisnished off with a chocolate-dipped baseball-sized piece of meringue.
And a licourice pipe, since I stopped smoking. Too bad no-one introduced Magritte to those.
I love licorice. It is the best candy.
Had to look up Tom of Finland. That is some very gay art.
As to soft core ... I guess it depends if you think Heavy Metal magazine was art, porn, or both. I'd argue it danced the line between the two.
Metal Hurlant, that takes me right back to the 1980s!
Porn is in the eye of the beholder perhaps - perhaps not unlike the difference between wearing a swimsuit because you must wear something on a public beach, and wearing a swimsuit designed to titilate for that very purpose. Or going to the gym to improve body and mind as opposed to see and be seen. There's a line but it's fuzzy and blurred.
The man behind the signature Tom of Finland had a quite the eventful life, and a biopic came out a few years back, well worth seeing despite the need for subtitles unless you speak finnish.
He and his depictions serves well as a divider between the homosexual man who is a man first and foremost, for whom the sex is precisely that: just sex, and the modern day gay man who is all about the identity as some sort of unmanly sterile and thoroughly misogynist demi-woman.
Comparing Biden to Caligula seems too harsh on Caligula.
That's why I qualified with 'low rent'. Caligula had class.
Thanks for the shout out, John. I appreciate the support. Great service with these digests too. Can’t say I read everything linked but I’m amazed you do haha. Thanks again.
I don't expect anyone to read all of it ;)
Based haha. My career goals as a novelist are to be so prolific only the die hards can even logistically read it all. Perhaps you understand something of this compulsion.
The masculine urge to turn logorrhea into legacy, yes, I can relate.
Hahaha worked for Dumas, ERB, REH eh? Many such cases!
Heinlein, Christ, now there was a guy who needed an editor in his later years....
I have my problems with Neil Gaiman but he said “never preach harder than you entertain.” Robert needed that advice later on.
Concise digest of so many great posts this past week! Once again, I'm amazed by how you're able to read all this, compile it into these reviews, and still have time to write your own killer essays!
Writing my own essays is something I conspicuously failed to do this week 😅 I started one about evolution, the Bible, and such, but my heart wasn't really in it. Felt too crotchety.
That's how it is. Sometimes you till the soil and sow seeds and seem to have nothing to show for it except barren soil; then all of a sudden, a bunch of stuff sprouts up and comes to fruition all at once.
Precisely so. I must have a dozen essays that I haven't gotten around to completing, sitting there in open windows in my word processor.
Concise! 🤣 Someone's got some work to do on his choice of words 🤭
LOL. Okay, it is long, but ... he covers a lot of entries in that space, so it's informationally dense. Is there a word for that? If not, I'll have to make one up next time.
Dense sure sports a slew of all the wrong connotations 😂
Compact? Heavy? In the 60s "whoa man, that's heavy!" sense?
Think quality along other dimensions/vectors as well 😏 I hear you're an accomplished wordsmith in coining neologisms 🤸
😂More like a one-hit wonder, but hopefully I'll be able to create some good ones and deserve that title by the time it's all said and done!
Thanks for bringing Brogues Britannicus to my attention. Much appreciated. His take on female affected power will also ring true for many on a professional level in most white collar settings.
Any mention of the father of quarks evokes a well-documented effect bearing his name 😊 Individual (micro? yocto?) psychomachinery with macrosocial implications.
🗨 You turn the page, and forget what you know.
epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia
The news is simultaneously true and not true until you know something about the subject.
Radical solipsism rears its quirky head again! 😁
Thanks for the links as usual, Boris, not Frazetta but excellent in his own right!!!!
Thank you for all these (and thanks for the pointer to @ndexia!)
Was hoping you'd see that! He's been writing a lot on the subject of post-liberal futurism, drawing on some interesting subject matter ... One of my favorites was a piece inspired by an 80s Buck Rogers RPG.
Big thanks for these write ups!
Great write up. Lots to discover as always! Thanks for including me again!