In Which We Are Stumped

 

Every time I feel like I am getting a handle on the website I am creating for Super Agent Fred's art, I suddenly have my ass handed to me.  These setbacks lead to a dance my people call One Fucking Step Forward, Two Fucking Steps Back, Fall Down On Your Face, ChaChaCha.

This all started when Super Agent Fred died, the inconsiderate little pea brain.  And now that I think about it that in itself was a pretty serious setback.  His death meant that SOMEBODY had to deal with all of his art.  How did that somebody turn out to be me?  I'm not sure, I wasn't paying attention, but I suspect it was mostly because of my tendency towards OCD.  But even the most serious OCD can only do so much in the face of ongoing delays.

Let's just consider these complications in order, shall we?  The very first setback was moving all the art pieces over here to my apartment.   As I was wrestling them across town, my initial estimate of how many there are was somewhere around 100.  I have since come to realize that was laughably low.  I keep revising the total upwards, currently I'm guessing there are about 400 pieces.  In case you have trouble with math like I do, the technical term for 400 is A Lot.

Once it was all over here, the collection (which consists of paintings on canvas, drawings on heavy paper, collages, big pieces, little pieces, lotsa pieces) was pretty much a mountain filling up my guest room.  I made a couple of half-hearted passes at tidying it all up, but it remained an overwhelming heap looming there.  That was in late September and I concentrated on ignoring it.

My idea was that I would take pictures of each piece, post them on a website here on blogger.com, and then advertise that site on places like Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace as "Free Art" and hopefully recycle all this art out into the wide world.  I still think it's a good idea, but executing it turned out to be held up by setback number 2, and this is a big one, the fact that I am a lazy slug.

Weeks went by with me putting off the very first step which was taking those pictures.  When I finally realized I would never become the kind of go-getter who would take all those photos, I decided to hire someone.  Setback number three then was finding a photographer and setting up a photo session.  You can read all about that here, but the TLDR version is that once I contacted him, boom, he was over here and finished the job in just a few hours.  Thank God somebody is on top of things. 

So I created the blog and loaded the pictures on to it, a task that only took a few minutes, but which I was able to stretch out over several more weeks, and which we should think of as setbacks number four and five.

And that's where we have currently run aground.  Now that all the pieces are up on the blog, I am labeling each one with its measurements, a description ("ink and acrylic on heavy stock" for instance,) and reference number, so when people clamor for their own masterpiece I will know which one they're talking about.

Setback number 6 turned out to be that when I finally set to putting together those labels, I discovered my "organizational system" of dumping all the pieces into heaps around the room didn't lend itself to tracking down each one of them when I needed to find it to measure and describe it.  So I spent an afternoon actually grouping the works into categories that I could lay my hands on when I needed them.  

It was during this uncharacteristic burst of organizing that I ran across the latest setback, number 7, which was that apparently, the photographer did not photograph all the pieces.  In his defense, I don't think he deliberately skipped some, more likely, the shambles he had to master simply meant that there were some he wound up overlooking.  So now I need to get him back over here to finish. 

I know, I know, I know, you're thinking "mrpeenee, just get on with it," and I will.  But every time one of these reversals rears up and smacks me in the face, I am so overwhelmed, I just take to my bed.  Defeated, I slink out of the guest room, lie down with Toby curled up next to me and his little head on my shoulder (so fucking SWEET) and comfort myself by looking at porn.  Because I always have energy for smut.  Procrastination is one of my overwhelming problems, but I'm trying to bear in mind that I have actually made progress, just not very much and not very quickly. But like I said, one fucking step forward . . . .

Guys I would not put off: 

I'm digging that wallpaper

Get in the car, loser.

What a sweet boy.

Hot tubs with that much foam in them are a bad sign.  Too much DNA running loose in there.

A naked, humpy reader.  What could be more appealing?

This picture confuses me, he's washing next to a scaffold, amidst a rock garden?  Not that that would stop me, but still, what?

That kind of oar is called a scull and I think using them looks so elegant.  Especially if you have an ass like that.

Speaking of asses.

Nick Tyler, in all his meatiness.

And speaking of meatiness.

In Which Our Quietude is Shattered

 

For the most part, I have always been fairly neutral about motorcycles.  I will admit they look cool, sort of, and are an effective prop for gay porn.  

Aside from that, I could take them or leave them.  No hard feelings, you guys go your way and I'll go mine was what I would have thought about them if I had thought about them at all.  All that changed once I moved into this apartment on San Francisco's enormous main drag.  Traffic and its accompanying noise is just part of big city life.  Six lanes of traffic right outside my bedroom window?  Oh well.  Think how easy it is to get an Uber.   A firehouse half a block away just means fire trucks roaring by with sirens blaring at all times of the day and night because people are so inconsiderate about when they burn their house down.

But I will never become accustomed to the racket of motorcycles, the bane of my existence.  It is hard enough sleeping with two cats who have staked out their territories in bed right where I want to sleep (I cannot understand how an animal less than a tenth of my size can take up twice the space I do.  Move over dammit), but then I have to contend with the thunderous roar of somebody's hog rumbling up the street to god knows where.  There I will be, tucked in my bed, in the sweet twilight of not quite awake, forced into a z formation by the cats when suddenly, VAROOM, some queer accountant making up for his lost youth and his inadequate penis revs his engine and scares me awake.  I swear when that happens, I actually levitate slightly up off the surface of the bed. 

Ever since early fall, the streets here have been flooded by gangs of dirt bike riders, the only thing noisier and worse than a regular motorcycle since dirt bikes sound very much like a blender with its volume cranked up to 11.  Any holiday or long weekend is guaranteed to see some biker group on a run come thundering past my building, but those bikers tend to coordinate their invasions with cops.  The dirt bike dirt bags on the other hand revel in their outlaw status (dirt bikes are not street legal here) and since they're much more nimble than the cops, there's not much the police can do.  As usual, I am not 100% on John Law's side, but I would like to have my snoozing only impaired by a couple of insolent kitties, if that's not too much to ask. 

Insolent nude guys: 

Daylight Savings Time begins (or ends, I'm never sure which) this weekend.

It's just one more sign that we have turned the calendar corner and are headed for summer.

I am pretty sure I have featured this guy sort of recently, but, as usual, I don't care.

The Boys of Summer and their adorable buttchops.

I certainly do appreciate a well-filled speedo.

I was going to ask if you can spot this week's AI, but it is pretty obvious.

Daniel Montoya and his superior ass.

In Which We Act Our Age

 Okay, so I will be 70 years old next month. Seventy. Seven tee.  How is that possible?  This was not part of my plan, but is creeping decrepitude really part of anybody's plan?  Winston Churchill left office the day I was born, a bit of trivia which sounds like ancient history these days.  I am exactly as old as Disneyland and McDonald's.  Eisenhower was president and I'm sure there are plenty of Americans now who have never heard of him.  Baby boomers are generally defined as having been born between 1945 and 1965 which puts me smack dab in the middle of that demographic bulge.  The plague years of the AIDS crisis, Y2K, Elton John's wandering hairline: I've seen it all.

This is most certainly not going to be one of those tirades people make about how "I still feel young inside" because I don't.  I am old and I am okay with that.  I used to be fearless (foolishly so) and with a great deal more energy; now I am stodgy, cynical, and oh-so cranky.  I refuse to apologize for any of it, I have earned it all.  If I choose to be irritated by The Youth of Today (and the vantage point of my advanced years allows me to realize The Youth of Today are always irritating, regardless of what day today is) that is my privilege. 

Social media is littered with tales of my contemporaries who foolishly try to emulate the actors in commercials from all sorts of snake oil selling that "age is just a state of mind" bullshit.  Denial is not going to protect you from being old.  Age is your back hurting and all the cartilage in your joints shot to hell and the energy level of an unwound clock and trying to take up hang gliding is not going to change that.  I genuinely have a friend who will get up before dawn to go cross country skiing and I think "What the fuck is wrong with you?  Just calm down, bitch."  And then I have to go lay down because his example exhausts me.  You can struggle against the tide all you want, but when you have to fill in your birth date online and you need to scroll and scroll down through the years to get to yours, it just reminds you, there is no fighting the march of time.

Youth in all its taut-skinned glory:

Nekkid guys this week will all be "vintage" which is code for "old".  Seen here, the beautiful buttchops of Tom LeDuc.

Tim Kramer, who exemplified the Big Dick, Dumb Looks phenotype so dear to the hearts of many.

The beefy glory of Brett Mycles.

Of course, I can't wander down nude memory land without bumping into Colt Studios, Kyle Jessup. 

The superior ass stylings of Billy Herrington, also courtesy Colt Studios.

Steve Cort is an long time favorite around here, and he cranked out smutty pictures by the thousand, but it's hard to find any good ones of him online these days.

Ed Dinakos, prime beef.

Vintage always brings with it hairy dudes, in this case, Al Parker, on the left, Steve Taylor, Parker's real life boyfriend in the middle (little piggy that reportedly he was), and the charming Will Seagers, right.

Lastly, one of my favorite pictures from back in the day, Aiden Shaw, by Pierre et Gilles.

In Which We Speak in Tongues

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In Which We Wrestle with Technology

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In Which We Rock Out

 

As a proud little baby hippie, back in the late '60s during the waning days of both the Nixon administration and the age of Aquarius, I was a passionate lover of loud rock and roll and I have the tinnitus to prove it.  So when our good friend Drumstick asked if we wanted to go see the new documentary, Becoming Led Zeppelin, my answer was an enthusiastic "OH HELL YEAH".

And that's how you would have found Drumstick, Hotfoot and me downtown, after dark, for a very amusing evening, helped in no small part by the excellent Mexican food we had for dinner beforehand.  The movie was pretty darn entertaining, even if it did lean sort of towards hagiography.  But I suppose if you want the Led Zeppelin seal of approval, you have to kiss a little Led Zeppelin ass.  The timeline of the film is pretty fine-grained; it's more than 2 hours long and it only covers between when they first meet as a band in 1968 and when when they become the number one group in the world in 1970.  There were times when I felt like we were watching those 18 months in real time.

The only speaking roles are the three surviving members of the band (drummer John Bonham died in 1980).  They're photographed seated in sort of throne-like chairs, beaming and nodding, modest and genial as all get out as befits the elder sages of rock and roll.  Nobody actually calls themselves "genius" but it's pretty clearly understood.  Movies about bands like this typically would examine the "sex and drugs and rock 'n roll" triumvirate, but if that's what you're looking for, you can just take your sordid little business elsewhere.  The words "heroin" and "cocaine" are never mentioned, and groupies are thoroughly ignored.  This is all about the Music. 

I suppose that's the way it should be, and certainly the presentation of the music is outstanding.  Instead of just clips of different songs to illustrate the points being made, entire songs are presented from various concerts.  The first two albums they put out, which are what the movie covers, have some great songs in them, like Dazed and Confused and Ramble On, so the producers couldn't really miss.  Like the title says, this is the Becoming part of their story.   Probably the biggest problem I had was there's no sense of struggle; the boys meet each other, they're geniuses, and everything falls in place.  But man, do they ever have great hair.  All four of them consistently looked like they have just escaped from a shampoo commercial.

Maybe I am just not whom this was made for.  I was a fan of the band, but really more of their stuff from the mid-70s like Immigrant Song or Kashmir, and even then, I was always more of a Bowie/Pink Floyd/the Who fan.  Certainly, I was never the kind of Led head as most of the crowd in the theater was.

Drumstick and I had disagreed about what the audience would be like, I predicted it would be an Old Hippie Festival.  Once again, I was right, of course.  I always am.  Drumstick is only in his early 50s so he wasn't even born during the period the movie covers.  But I was a teenager in that era and remember it vividly, as did most of the rest of the audience.  When I looked out over that crowd in the dim lights, the gray hair was gleaming everywhere.  It looked like an outing from every old folks home in town.  The crowd was very enthusiastic, clapping and singing and just a-hootin' and a-hollerin' in general.  Yuck.  Calm down, pappy.  If they have to stop this movie for your coronary, I'm going to be mad. 

Boys who put the sex in sex, drugs, and rock and roll:

Skinny boys in shabby jeans, it's a look.

It's been cold and gray for much too long.

Charles Paquette, professional beauty.

I heard one of the cats puking last night, and now I can't find the relevant puke, which makes me uneasy

Speaking of dazed and confused.

Beefy goodness.

Kirill Dowidoff.  I know you can't see his dick.  Use your imagination.