March 2014
In celebration of Attitude’s 20th Anniversary, Harry Judd gets naked for their cover, and it’s a doozy of a photo spread, so to speak. Mr. Judd has been nude here before, and no one complained then, so here he is again. That ass just won’t quit.
Previous Harry Judd Posts:
First Hunk of the Day Appearance
Second Hunk of the Day Crowning
“Laughing at all the haters out there who spend their energy trying to limit and label me with their prejudices and fears! Take your evil tongue and eye and turn them into birds that fly! Don’t waste precious time. Spend it on things you love!” ~ Madonna
The time has come for March to depart, and not a moment too soon. This is not a complaint – March has been, for the most part, pretty damn good to me, laying the groundwork for some major changes – mostly good – to kick-start the rest of this spring. More on that a little later. For now, this recap of the eventful last week of the month that came in like a lion and will hopefully exit as softly as a lamb.
We started off with a few Cocks in Socks. Will there be a Part 2 with my own junk front and center? Wait & see…
It turned out that everyone has a ‘Punky Brewster’ memory.
A British ass menagerie featuring Ben Cohen, Harry Judd, and Tom Daley.
I’m just a jeans-and-t-shirt kind of guy. NOT.
Say a little prayer. Or a lot of them
Our shirtless American hero, prepping for the Winter Festival.
This woman brings out the beast in me.
A pair of birthdays on the same day ~ here and here.
Some were like lions, some were like lambs – all were hunky, including Kevin Selby, Mahershala Ali, Olly Barkley, Kirill Dowidoff, Adam Coussins, and Lenny Kravitz.
The first sign was disturbing: “Socks must be worn at all times.” Where in the hell were we headed, I wondered with sudden trepidation. Upon opening the doors to the Tree Paad (I don’t understand, or want to understand, the additional ‘A’ in the name) I was greeted with the unmistakable odor of, well, socks. The second thing that hit me was the noise. The noise, noise, NOISE!!! Fighting such decidedly Grinch-like feelings, I took a deep breath of socks and questionable pizza, and headed into the swirling vortex of children.
Packs of kids roamed the expansive fluorescent-lit space like roving bands of wild animals. Shouts and screams and flashing lights surrounded me. It was like ‘The Lord of the Flies’ without the order and structure. I honestly didn’t realize that many children actually existed in the world.
As I was about to settle into a sarcastic revelry and cutting social commentary, I walked over to the bottom of the slides, where Emi and Noah were playing with their cousins. Kids were flying out onto the safety mats, giggling and running back up to do it again. Suddenly, I remembered what it was like to be a kid at a birthday party – the initial shyness and slow indoctrination into the social scene, then the relaxing into the event, and finally the enjoyment and fun and adventure.
Both Emi and Noah were excited and talking with their friends, and then everyone bounced around in a bouncy house before convening in a room for pizza and cake.
As they blew out the candles on their fourth birthday cakes, the magic of childhood drifted across the room on a cloud of smoke.
On this day four years ago, a baby boy and a baby girl entered our family and changed our world for the better. Today is the birthday of my niece and nephew. I still remember the slightly rainy day on which they were born. (It was further proof that rain is lucky.) I’d worn a bow tie to work in celebration, but the moment I saw them bound tightly in their blankets, all fashion concerns faded, and my focus shifted to something more important.
In the ensuing four years, they have grown and grown, and so have the people they have touched. Everyone always said that once I got to know kids that were directly related to me, who had a connection to my life, my reticent disdain for children would disappear. I’m happy to report that I remain equally unexcited by children, for the most part, and these two gleaming exceptions prove the rule.
They are the wonder and light of our world, bounding around from new experience to new experience, revealing the simplest joys in a day, and reminding me that the most important thing we can give to each other is love.
They’re also a reminder of the ever-quickening march of time. Four years has passed in a flash, and we speed ahead leaving the baby days behind. I want to slow it down, to savor each moment with them. They’re probably too big to be pulled in their Radio Flyer red wagon anymore – one of my favorite things to do with them – but now they can walk around the block by my side. It won’t be the same, but it will still be good.
As I watch them navigate their way through the world, I realize that they’e not the only ones still growing up.
Happy Birthday, Noah and Emi! Your uncles love you.
O Beautiful Place By The Sea… How my heart longs to be with thee… Clearly I’ve read too many Shakespeare sonnets of late, but the sentiment is true: I wish to return to Ogunquit. Our annual spring trip is a couple of months away still, so I’ll have to pine for a few more weeks, but that glorious shore is within mental sight, and I can almost taste the lobster on my tongue, the salty sea spray in the air. Cries of seagulls echo in my head, and the clanging of a flagpole in the gusty shore breeze sounds happy memories.
This will mark our 14th year of visiting the gorgeous Maine shoreline, where we have always found a sense of peace and calm. I used to think it was just the fact of being on vacation and out of work, with no schedule and an open few days of freedom and unstructured casual living, that caused such a euphoric state, but after all this time it’s clear that something else is at work. If it were only that, we’d find such joy every weekend, and the simple fact is that no other place in the world conjures what Ogunquit can.
It happens much the same way – the transition from winter to spring, that certain smell in the night air, the warmth on the night wind, the heart-rending churning of emotional mayhem that the arrival of the season of birth invariably brings. To that end, no one embodies such dramatic angst better than Madonna. Underneath all the hype and hoopla, the sexiness and showbiz pizzazz, I always sensed the wounded hurt of a lonely heart. It takes one to know one. In the span of the few minutes of a song, she could zone in on the basic longing and yearning for love that most of us have come to know and want at some point.
It’s there in the watery brilliance of the ‘Ray of Light‘ album. From the first (and deepest) cut ‘Drowned World/Substitute for Love‘, to the brutal memory-tripping of ‘Little Star‘ and ‘To Have and Not To Hold‘ – and the farewell implicit in ‘The Power of Good-Bye‘ it rings of loss and hope.
It’s there on the cusp of adolescence, in the tender final days of boyhood innocence, in the desperate want of ‘Crazy For You.’
It’s there in the eclipse-crescents of shadows beneath the leafy boughs hanging over my first year at Brandeis University, and the gentle melancholy of ‘I’ll Remember.’
It’s there in the beautiful brutality and spiritual transcendence of ‘Like A Prayer.’
And it’s there in the mysterious dim beauty of the ‘X-Static Process‘ of love.
The ache of the coming spring. The death of another winter. The power of a pop song.
In preparation for the upcoming ‘Captain America: The Winter Festival Soldier’, I’ve been advised by my accompaniment Skip to see the first film – ‘Captain America: The First Avenger.’ Both star the gentleman seen to such fine effect here: Chris Evans. He’s been featured a number of times in these parts, mostly due to his penchant for shirtless scenes and photo shoots (a happy custom that became so common that his publicist or manager started to shut them down – BOO!) He can be seen in action pulling down his pants in one of the greatest GIFs ever here, or in shirtless stills here, or naked butt for a towel here.
At any rate, here are a few taken before the shirtless embargo.
The rope of beads wound around my grandmother’s wrinkled hand, while the cross swung with the gentle rocking of her chair. She worried each one between her fingers as she said each prayer, then moved on to the next. It seemed an endless chain of recitation to my childish mind, but I assumed it was another adult mystery that would be revealed in time. I didn’t know that there was no answer for this, no magic moment that suddenly made sense of faith and religion. Instead, I did my best to believe, even if the drudgery of saying an entire rosary was beyond my comprehension or capability.
The ritual seemed to calm her. Maybe that was how it worked. It was a form of meditation, and, when you get right down to it, what else is prayer at its most basic essence? The words eventually ran into one another, the meaning but gleaned, and by that point it was simply a matter of a mantra, a chant, a rhythm of speech, a cadence of sounds. The calm and soothing drone of a river of words ~ whispered prayers ~ and an outwardly peaceful disposition belying a raging heart.
A good song will withstand any number of renditions – a great one can become something so much more when given a treatment like this. Listen to Michael Henry and Justin Robinett lift Michael’s Jackson’s classic ‘Man in the Mirror’ to an even higher plane. Minus production pyrotechnics, special effects, or fancy costumes or choreography, these gentlemen sell the song from a simpler place of musical purity, from the very origin of its message.Â
This song reminds me of the very end of winter and the start of spring – in other words, this very time of the year, when dirty snow and roads are just giving way to cleansing rains and warmer days.
Back in 1988, I wasn’t anywhere close to becoming a man – some days I still wonder – but I took this song’s message to heart. Granted, it was at key and selective moments, and it would take years before any real sense of love for my fellow human beings was born, and some days it’s still difficult to access that. You see, you have to start with yourself first, and that’s always been the hardest part.
At the end of every winter, when I was typically at my darkest, mood-wise, I would revisit this song, trying to remember what was really important, trying to do something that mattered, something that was bigger than my small self. As the years passed, it grew in resonance, as I grew up. In ways, I would need to become more selfish before I learned what it was to be generous, I’d have to become mean and cruel before I could become kind. Throughout it all, though, this song put me back on track whenever I stopped to truly listen to it.
Set-backs came at regular intervals, as they do in anyone’s life, and there were moments when I was battered, bruised, and not believed. That was difficult to accept. And when you live as bluntly and honestly as I do, you tend to get a reputation for being cutting and cruel when it’s not always warranted. It’s hard to pull yourself out of that pigeonhole – well, that’s not accurate – it’s hard for others not to see you in that pigeonhole – I never had a problem moving on to a better place. Others usually had a problem seeing me move on, because it was easier for them to keep me trapped like that, to believe that I could not be capable of growth or compassion or even love.
There’s no way I’m anywhere near finishing this work. I’m not even close to being the good person I most wish I could be – that kind and caring and generous and non-judgmental guy that on my best days I only barely approach. But slowly, I’m getting closer. And on the day that I get there, I am certain that I’ll still not be satisfied, which is as it should be. Several words appear as goals now:
Grace. Serenity. Transcendence. Freedom.
I need not mention Truth, for that has always been on my side, an integral part of my world, as problematic as it might be for some to handle. I need not mention Loyalty either.
You can say a great many things about me – many unflattering and unkind things that may be accurate – but you cannot claim the least bit of a lack of self-awareness. I am the most honest, the most harsh, and the most glaringly unforgiving with myself. You can never be as honest with me as I have been with myself. That’s not self-delusional, and it’s not self-denial. I know the man in the mirror. I know he has to change. And I know he can.
No one’s ever going to believe that I’m a jeans and t-shirt kind of guy, so I won’t even pretend to peddle that bullshit here. I’ll never be that guy. I’ll never be that simple, that casual, that easy-going – it’s just not in my make-up. There are too many facets and angles to this frustratingly-complex mess. But every now and then it’s good to strip it all down, so to speak, and indulge in the basics. There are far fewer components to worry about in an outfit like this – no worries of mismatched ties or faulty sock decisions, no striped suit patterns possibly clashing with checkered shirt options. It is the default uniform of the current generation – and given the growing propensity younger people seem to have for sweatpants and other atrocities, a good pair of denim jeans is indeed a dress-up outfit when paired with a smart sport coat, shirt, and tie.
As for its ubiquitous nature, there’s no getting around that. I could deal with a little more blending into mainstream society anyway, so this affords a nice change of pace. As the musical Norma Desmond once sang, “I can play any role.â€
This sort of pancake can’t be baked with Bisquick. It’s a Vietnamese pancake (Bánh Xèo’) and I had it at Phở Basil in Boston recently.
While I’m not usually a big fan of food that must be eaten with fingers (Ethiopian cuisine being an enjoyable exception) this one wasn’t that unmanageable. Eventually, I broke down and made use of the provided utensils, but until those lettuce leaves were done, I did my best.
As for the phở pictured below, I need to do a proper solo post, but I’m not quite up for it just yet. Some things merit more work than I can muster at the moment. It will come, however, because phở is what got me through this winter.
At the time of this writing, Boston is under threat of a winter storm walloping (it will likely have already arrived by the time this gets posted), so I must admit to being glad of not being there right now. Just a few short days ago I captured this promising bush in bud in the Boston Public Garden, where witch hazel was also on the verge of blooming, the willows were gaining in their chartreuse color, and the pond was being worked on for its near-future filling. It was a scene of possibility, the earliest peek at the spring to come, and it made me happy to see. There are good memories in that Garden.
As for our own gardens, they are still mostly buried in snow – lots and lots of dirty snow. I made the first pass through the backyard yesterday, when a pair of cardinals was calling out to me. Loads of bunny droppings were scattered generously throughout the space, a boon to the soil, I hope – but the ground remained frozen. Not one sign of snowdrops or Scilla, or even the tattered foliage of the Lenten rose. It’s late arriving, but spring is assuredly on the way. It has to be.
As the sun sets, and the afternoon advances, the bedroom changes. A stirring beneath the duvet, a flickering of dust in the slanting sunlight, a reluctant sigh. The luxury of an hour or so beneath the sun should not be so quickly dismissed. It can feed the soul, and match more complicated and costly methods of calm. Now that the days are growing longer, there are more opportunities to find such pockets of tranquility.
Having had a day job for most of my adult life, I never take such moments for granted. Beauty like this gets me through the day. The memory of it sustains until a new memory can be made. It is the promise of possibility.
