In honor of his recent retirement announcement, this is a gratuitously shirtless post of David Beckham in his underwear. Hopefully this will afford him the time and opportunities to concentrate on more important matters, like posing in and out of underwear.
As a follow-up to this mega-collection of naked male celebrity photos (The Erection Collection), and a pre-Easter treat in the limbo-like suspense before He rises (oh blasphemy), here is another group of former ‘Hunks of the Day‘, hyper-linked for easy access and studded with a few new photos for your man-candy Easter baskets. I’m not going to group them into any sort of order or label as I did last time, partly because we as humans defy such quick categorization (but mostly because I’m just too damn lazy and it will be enough searching through the archives to find a decent spattering of male celebrities getting their nudity on).
By the way, if you want to search the Archives yourself, scroll down to the bottom of the page, click the drop-down box for the ‘Archives’ section, and select the month and year you wish to peruse. If you go to the bottom of the pages and hit ‘Older posts’ you can keep going back, back, way on way back when…
The very furry Scott Caan…
The artfully inked (and aptly-last-named) Stuart Reardon…
The sporty Nick Youngquest…
The perfectly pubic Noah Mills…
The beautifully bountiful Columbus Short…
The sexy-back singer Justin Timberlake…
The arguably cutest of the three, Nick Jonas…
The ever-Speedo-clad Tom Daley…
The gleefully shirtless Darren Criss…
The oh-so-young-but-still-hairy arm pits of Taylor Lautner…
The specimen of perfection Scott Herman…
The dashing dancer/football player Victor Cruz…
The shirtless guy from all the shows I never watched Chace Crawford…
The falsetto smoothness known as Adam Levine…
& the manliest man Sacha Harding.
This has happened to me before: the idea of getting into David Beckham’s underwear is always more thrilling than the actual event. Mr. Beckham‘s latest offerings from H&M are slightly changed from the first run, but I still have to admit that I’m more of a fan of them on him than on me. The boxer briefs are a bit snug – and for a footballer that seems at odds with his body. He would do better to take a lesson from Bonobos and allow room for some junk-in-the-trunk. Of course, perhaps the manufacturers are not banking on us having footballer bodies (which in my case is a very good thing.) The fabric is a definite improvement from the cheap modal-like blend that ruined his entry into the underwear world, but I’m still not sold on the longevity of such a brand, or its products. He’s got a long way to go before threatening Calvin Klein. That said, I did enjoy the top and the additional colors (an army fatigue green and a darker blue are vastly more interesting than the black, white, and gray palette of before, if still bland as beige). For now, though, this line is mostly just a vehicle to see Beckham in his briefs, and I can’t complain about that.
“For I am – or I was – one of those people who pride themselves on their willpower, on their ability to make a decision and carry it through. This virtue, like most virtues, is ambiguity itself. People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception. Their decisions are not really decisions at all – a real decision makes one humble, one knows that it is at the mercy of more things than can be named – but elaborate systems of evasion, of illusion, designed to make themselves and the world appear to be what they and the world are not.” ~ James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room
“What happened was that, all unconscious of what this ennui meant, I wearied of the motion, wearied of the joyless seas of alcohol, wearied of the blunt, bluff, hearty, and totally meaningless friendships, wearied of wandering through the forests of desperate women, wearied of the work, which fed me only in the most brutally literal sense. Perhaps, as we say in America, I wanted to find myself. This is an interesting phrase, not current as far as I know in the language of any other people, which certainly does not mean what it says but betrays a nagging suspicion that something has been misplaced. I think now that if I had had any intimation that the self I was going to find would turn out to be only the same self from which I had spent so much time in flight, I would have stayed at home. But, again, I think I knew, at the very bottom of my heart, exactly what I was doing…” ~ James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room
“He made me think of home – perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.” ~ James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room
The scarcity of narrative forces the viewer to fill-in-the-blanks. Like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure story (which I always hated – why make the reader write the book? And which ending is the definitive ending? What really happened??) in its infuriatingly obtuse and abstract construct, it offers hints and nudges, but no real directive. If you’re looking for answers here, you will come away disappointed. The essence of tease and release, the game at its most obstinate and inane. I would feel worse about it were there not other demons with which to duel. Confined by the frames and threatened ever by the cropping, it is a claustrophobic place to reside. It is, by my own design, a trap. A cage with the illusion of freedom, and plumage that grows more faded with the passing of time. This story is yours. Write it as you would have it written. Or better yet, listen to the words of James Baldwin:
“Now, from this night, from this coming morning, no matter how many beds I find myself in between now and my final bed, I shall never be able to have any more of those boyish, zestful affairs – which are, really, when one thinks of it, a kind of higher, or, anyway, more pretentious masturbation. People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted.”
“Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it. Either, or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.”
“Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford and you are not that young anymore.”
“He looked at me and I saw in his face again something which I have fleetingly seen there during these hours: under his beauty and his bravado, terror, and a terrible desire to please; dreadfully, dreadfully moving, and it made me want, in anguish, to reach out and comfort him.”
On a summer weekend in 2009, July 16 to be exact, I arrived off the train in New York and walked to the Hotel Chelsea. I didn’t know then that it was tottering on its last legs, soon to give up its ghosts, but I should have been able to tell by the wretched service and the even more terrifying conditions. The biggest cockroach I’ve ever seen in my life – far larger than anything I’ve ever encountered in Florida or the Philippines – scurried under one of the resident doors on the first floor, right next to the room in which they initially wanted to put me. It was the only time I absolutely refused and made them find me another. Not that I fared much better in Room 532, but it was the perfectly-run-down version of seedy that lended itself to the photographs I got for ‘A Night at the Hotel Chelsea‘.
It would be great if I could offer you some sort of gritty take on the artsy-fartsy scene of Chelsea, bluntly making bold proclamations on the crumbling state of the hotel, and what it meant to its storied history. But to be honest all I felt as I hunkered nervously down into a bed no doubt ravaged by all sorts of bugs  was this: I am way too old for this shit. (And I was right about the bugs – my back and neck and even the tip of my nose ended up getting bitten by some creatures in the night – such is the price you pay for getting naked in questionable environs.) Crappy hotels and dodgy lodgings are the province of the young, and I say let them have it. I was done. The next day I checked into the Club Quarters by Rockefeller Center, where there were clean sheets, soaps, and a blandly modern color scheme. It was heaven.
It was, however, worth it – for the honor of saying I stayed there, and for the raw material for one of The Projects.
“Andrew’s childhood had been spent in a tall, narrow old house in the French Quarter, a house dressed in iron lace, a house with lines as graceful as those of a willowy woman. The house was even more feminine than most of the houses in that odalisque district, full of silky and velvety textures and fragrant silence… There was an enclosed courtyard where a fountain ran musically amid japonicas, camellias, green frills of ferns. The Persian carpets on the dark floors were very old, their colors muted by age to the dim, coal-lit glow that stained glass can have when you stand outside a church at night. There was a Pleyel piano, a library of scores… The town house was full of big and little pleasures and comforts, as if it thought that everyone within deserved – a soft and perfumed lap to lie in… Relax, it seemed to say. Unclench your neck, breathe deep and slow. Read my books. If you’re tired, sleep. Sleep, for that matter, when you want to. Sit on the veranda in the sun and watch the clouds go by.”
~ Laura Argiri, The God in Flight
“Winter here was a manageable enemy, held well at bay by a little fire in a toy fireplace like the one in this room… There was also a peculiarly New Orleans detail, an ormolu gilt plant stand that held an ancient and flourishing feather-fern plant. A bookcase with bowed glass doors yielded a cache of French novels and poetry: George Sand, Balzac, Lamartine. Simion had awarded himself the pleasure of drying well before the fire and got into bed in one of Andrew’s old silk robes. He had hung it on the back of a chair before the fire to warm while he bathed and slipped into it with a sigh of delight. Andrew had given him this robe; it was a heavy yet liquid damask silk the color of strong pekoe tea. He brushed his hair and thought how nice it would be to have someone else do the brushing so he could concentrate fully on the pleasant sensations and fell into one of those strange states that came upon him in this house, at once abstracted and relaxed and utterly alert. The mirrors reflected him, still as a picture, hand and brush poised at the end of a stroke. There were lots of mirrors. Three, in fact; the one above the fireplace holding him full-face, the two on the side walls offering his profile. This was how Andrew found him when he knocked on his door and entered, wearing a sherry-colored dressing gown and looking particularly golden and godlike.
‘Come, don’t turn away. You let those heartless mirrors see you, now let me.'”
~ Laura Argiri, The God in Flight
While I’m not slipping into a jockstrap this year like I did here, and here, I managed to find a few guys who did, and here they are. They’re not your traditional football-playing jocks, and that’s why I like them.
There’s a more complete jockstrap post coming up later today in honor of the Super Bowl, but for now my own little football get-up is here to get in the sporty spirit.
The vantage point of a lofty hotel room.
A pause in the middle of the day.
Suspended between work and play
we soon move on our way.
A purgatorial robe
not quite tied around the waist.
A pair of socks.
The trampled bed.
Passing sun, drifting moon, the clouds swim overhead.
The gray of dawn fills in with color
before dusk takes it back.
The wild winds of January returned in full-force this past week, plunging us into the depths of sub-freezing temperatures and reminding us that winter in the Northeast is anything but a cake walk. Fortunately, there was solace to be found in the more superficial pleasures, and some of the deeper ones as well.
A recent FaceBook post of mine indicated that I could never bring myself to make Justin Bieber a Hunk of the Day – and I am staying true to my word. So this is not a Hunk of the Day post – it’s sort of a wanna-be Hunk of the Day post, as it features Mr. Bieber mooning the camera. The idiot then went reportedly put it on Instagram, then promptly deleted it. Because, you know, Instagram and things on the Internet are so easily erased and forgotten. For those Beliebers out there – and for those who hate him – here is the butt pic. There’s something in it for everyone. (He is eighteen, right?)
