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selvie-blue · 5 months

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Why So Private, Dick? An An Opinion Piece on Joseph Dain and the Slow Emergence of Frontal Nudity in ENM Media

After looking into the matter, I am putting up this post, again.. And if you want the article with the uncensored pictures, go here.

Joseph Dain. If this name doesn't sound familiar, it should. Let me jog your memory with one memorable scene:

Bullet – 1996

Picture it: two arrogant college-rich kids arrive in the bad part of town to score some drugs. But when they're forced up to the roof of an apartment building, they're not taught about the evils of drug use via a resurgence of the D.A.R.E. program. Instead, they're made to hand over their clothes before their threads star in the latest remake of Tom Petty's “Free Fallin',” as envisioned by the thugs throwing their garments over the roof. What follows is the two naked and embarrassed guys wandering around the building looking for some help. However, they seem to have forgotten that this is a town on the wrong side of the tracks, and people are more suspicious than helpful. So their attempts are in vain, much like D.A.R.E. attempted to try and convince their target audience that “drugs aren't cool.”

While this part of the film may be a staple in the community of those of us who follow such scenes, and while, yes, even I have gotten off to it a few times, there is one important thing missing. While you do see the two guys' butts for a while, their fronts are covered by their hands. Not to mention that the camera doesn't dare go south of the equator unless it's shielded and covered tighter than the chastity device on Amy Yasbeck's character in Mel Brook's “Robin Hood: Men In Tights."

The aggressor was played by Micky Rourke. A former heartthrob from the '80s who starred in films like “Diner”, “9 ½ Weeks” and “Angel Heart”. The dark-haired guy was played by Joseph Dain.

From about 2003 to 2004, Joseph Dain would parlay this exposure into a very short-lived portion of his career, where he starred in a few softcore movies involving minimal plots and men wearing minimal to no clothing. Imagine something like 2000's Voodoo Academy. Except instead of featuring beautiful guys in their jockey shorts, they featured hunks sans jockey shorts.

However, the same can't be said of Mr. Dain. He decided to carry on his modest status, even in films like this. And, for the longest time, I never understood it. Here, you have this good-looking guy surrounded by a bunch of other hunky, built dudes just letting their ding-dongs flop in the wind, while Dain only goes as far as to show this much:

Let's take his debut into this foray, shall we?

DAYDREAM OBSESSION – 2003

In the film, Dain plays a character named Clayton. Clayton is secretly obsessed with his best friend, Brian, played by Chris Michaels. Clayton is living with not only Brian but a bunch of other dudes in this bachelor pad scenario. Of course, all the guys look like centerfolds. While pining for Brian, Clayton gets lost in these fantasies where he's picturing the various men fashioning the suits they were born in.

Here is a breakdown of some of those guys:

We have Julian Cocoa as Raymond. A rent guy Clayton hires to put on a private performance for him while his roommates are away. Raymond then puts on a strip show and bares all.

Then, we have Steven. A neighbor played by Adam Blinn, whom Clayton spies on while he's washing his car before proceeding to fantasize about said neighbor in the buff.

And then we have Chris Michaels, playing his best friend. Near the end, Clayton can't take it anymore and wants to make his fantasy a reality. So, he does the reasonable thing and confesses to Brian, and they have a deep, meaningful conversation. Actually, no, no, that's not what happens. Clayton goes a little psycho, ties him to a chair, and then proceeds to rip his clothes off.

Again, all this male nudity, all this dick flyin' everywhere, and how much does Dain show of himself? Let's review:

That's pretty much it. So, you're tellin' me that this actor is starring in a movie where all these other guys are running around the set and revealing everything they've got to the camera and, even in one scene, where Dain, himself, is actually tearing the clothes off of one of the actors and we still see his penis, but all we get to see of you, Mr. Dain, is your butt? Oh, bravo, man. How brave you are to wiggle your ass for a few seconds while your co-workers are showing far more.

This wasn't just a one-time thing, either. Dain continued this imbalance of exposure in two more films: 2004's Group Therapy and 2004's sequel to Daydream Obsession, Daydream Obsession 2: Infidelities.

After these films, he left gay softcore erotica and moved on to low-budget horror and TV, according to his list of credits on IMDB. However, his main page on IMDB lists him as “Joe” Dain instead of “Joseph” Dain. And even though his softcore films are included, you'd have to scroll down and expand the “actor” category to see them. They're nowhere to be found on his main list of films he's starred in. It's almost as if he just wants you to forget about them.

But let's investigate why Joseph, I'm sorry, “Joe” Dain would want to put these movies far, far behind him. Is it because he's a fuckin' hypocritical prude who refuses to show much of anything, despite that being the main point of the films he was the main character in? HELL, YES!! But, hey, I'm not bitter.

The other reason is because of Hollywood itself. Only recently has full-frontal male nudity become less taboo, both in film and TV. Film, however, is slower on that front. This is mainly because all the people on the ratings board are hypocritical prudes and are more ready to condemn anything more sexual than they are to anything violent. I highly recommend you watch the 2006 documentary “This Film Is Not Yet Rated” to get more information on that. Not only is it a fun film to see, but it is highly informative and reveals how antiquated and unnecessary the MPAA is in today's world.

There has been more of a stigma against men showing what they've got between their legs than against women. And if “Joe” Dain were to actually go full frontal in these movies, then he may not have been able to proceed into the career he wanted for himself. All because the studios would have likely taken one look at his previous work and said, Oh, it looks like you were involved in gay porn. I'm sorry, but we are cleaner than that here. Okay, let's get ready for that graphic, bloody death scene. As for you, get out of our sight! You make us SICK!

Maybe it wouldn't have been that extreme, but, I'm sure, there would have been some bias and prejudice, at least causing some resistance in him moving forward simply by showing his willy.

Even though frontal male nudity is becoming more common, when it has come to ENM scenes in the past, especially ones involving disrobing or being disrobed by force, the penis was still only doing one show a year:

The Heist – 1989 skip to 23:10

Pierce Brosnan plays a man who's recently been released from prison after serving a four-year sentence for a crime he didn't commit. In this scene, he lures two goons down on the beach and shows he's packin'. An actual gun, that is. He makes the two henchmen undress. And when one of them asks, “Keep our shorts on?” Pierce's character slyly smiles and says, “Please.” We see this time and time again. A guy is running around with not much on, and the other men in the scene are not only trying to shield themselves from seeing anything, but they're also acting like they need a bucket to vomit in. Because another man's anatomy is just so offensive and so horrid to look at that it traumatizes them to such a degree that they end up in a mental institution: Poor George over there. Can't talk, can't speak. Because he was playing a game of strip Monopoly, and he happened to see a male player's beef bus swing from the corner of his eye.

At least in this scene, Pierce isn't that blatant about it. And even when one of the guys says he “can't swim,” he makes it a point to look directly at the guy's bikini briefs and respond by saying, “Of course not. You're a hunter, aren't you?” I'm not necessarily sure what that means, but I'm certain it's something snarky and British.

Pierce plays the part with less repulsion and, let's face it, homophobia as some other actors of the time in scenes similar to this nature. There's still an underlying shadow of rigidity. Honestly, I think he does the best he can with the material he's given, and his charm and charisma kind of make it work. And I'm not sure if looking at the dude's package was improvised or not, but I'd like to think so. If only for the fact that he wanted to play it with a certain level of comfort and shy away from a heteronormative train of thought that was the reality for many films existing in that era. And while there were plenty of homoerotic scenes made in the oblivious attempt to display machismo (I'm looking at you, valley ball scene from 1986's “Top Gun") it was still understood that they were only supposed to be shown up to a certain point. Perhaps the two guys showing rear ends after taking off everything may not have been what the director envisioned. But if this were to show frontal nudity of these two muscle-bound bouncers, it probably would have been slapped with an X rating, and there would be no chance of this getting a wide release. The film probably would have been even more obscure had the men bared all, and it wouldn't have been so easily found on YouTube.

Peaky Blinders

Peaky Blinders was a British series brought to the States and streamed on Amazon. (currently not a part of Prime, though). In this scene, Cillian Murphy makes two men undress for the visual pleasure of a couple of women. While we do get a nice look at their butts, we don't see any frontal nudity... at all. The camera even stops at the waist.

Okay, first off, this show is British. We're talking about a country that has a reality show about naked people competing to hook up. So, they have a show like that, but they can't even show a couple of guys' dicks in what, from what I understand, is a pretty violent and graphic show? The UK is usually more liberal than that. America may have a history of minimal frontal male nudity on the screen, but I am not sure why Britain would be following suit.

Crown Vic – 2019

Thomas Jane plays an officer who pulls over a guy to get more information from him. While doing so, he has the man perform a strip search in the street. And he doesn't even let him have his clothes back. It's a hot scenario, and one that I've certainly gone to the self-service station with.

However, as hot as this scene is, I still would have liked to have seen some dong from the guy being made to take his clothes off on a heavily populated city street. However, I have to wonder: if that were the case, would this scene have been made public on ThisVid? As many of you know, while ThisVid is a great resource for ENM and even has quite a few scenes with frontal nudity, it's also notorious for the majority of those scenes being under lock and key, and whether you see them depends on whether the person that has that scene in their collection allows you access. I've found that that's kind of a 50/50 shot.

The actor that is being made to strip is played by Devon Werkheiser, who got his big break on the Nickelodeon show Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide. Maybe it was his choice not to go full frontal because this was how he got started. And, again, what does that say about our culture? That a man being seen fully from the front could do damage to his career? Why should it be? Wouldn't it show dedication to the scene? Be more authentic?

However, today, directors are actually taking more chances. In addition to queer storylines being put to the forefront, when it comes to ENM, the penis has been upgraded to a guest-starring role in more works. There's a liberation starting to happen:

Westworld – 2016-2022

Thandiwe Newton plays one of the robots that's been gaining more sentience in a futuristic park. In this scene, amidst a rebellion of the robots, she makes one of the developers, played by Simon Quarterman, strip completely naked, and you see Simon's uncircumcised penis flop around for a few seconds.

The Righteous Gemstones – Season 1, Episode 3

A group of thugs are hired to come in and start tearin' shit up to send a message to Eli Gemstone, played by John Goodman. However, Eli puts a stop to it with his handy gun and decides to send the person who hired these goons a message of his own. So he forces all of them to strip everything off.

While this scene does show some dick, I have to admit, I really would have liked to see some dick from the hot, beefy redhead.

From how John Goodman is playing it, I can totally picture him saying something like, Got something to hide? You weren't too shy about tearin' through this place. C'mon, let's see how much of a man you all are. You're all big and tough? Why don't you take those hands away and show us how proud and brave you are?

But, alas, he doesn't. I, personally, think it would fit the scene more, especially a scene like this brimming with bravado that is nearly devoid of any kind of homophobic or heteronormative subtext. If these men are made to take everything off, then we should be seeing them made to show everything off. Perhaps the ginger-haired actor in this scene didn't want to go full frontal, but how often do you think women were given the same choice in the past? Times may be changing, but there have been decades and decades of imbalance between male and female nudity to make up for.

And while we have made progress, we still get scenes like this:

Macgruber – 2021-present

The very hot and very hairy Will Forte is forced to strip completely naked by a group of mysterious kidnappers hiding behind the booming speakers from inside a tank. The scene is pretty nice, and it's another one I've certainly enjoyed in the past. However, when it comes to seeing Mr. Forte from the front, this is the best we get:

That is so far away that I don't even think Tumblr would consider this nudity. And why is the scene like this? Well, perhaps the answer lies in a comment made by Will Forte's character: “C'mon, guys, it's really cold out here!” Sure enough, everyone looks at Will's willy as if investigating the deep, philosophical answer to life's big questions.

Now, I don't know about you, but I'm getting a little tired of this. The ol' his-dick-is-so-small-it's-not-even-considered-fun-size joke as a reason to not show a dick in full display and close enough to appreciate it. I know that there are people out there who get off on the humiliation of small penises, or SPH, but I don't consider myself one of them. With that said, I'm sure even an SPH fan would have wanted to see what Will Forte had to show off, and not from FIFTEEN THOUSAND GOD-DAMN LIGHT YEARS AWAY! This may be a fetish, but I don't think that's why this scene was made. I think that this is a layover from the more restrictive days of TV. Using a guy's size to demean him and make him feel less than, and I, for one, would rather that be a relic kept in the past (aside from when it is a fetish and made for the sole purpose of satisfying that, I don't kink shame). In addition to the fact that there's this misogynistic intensity fused deep into the fabric of the thought process behind scenes like this. How often is there that joke made where a guy gets a magnum-sized condom to overcompensate? God forbid anyone to doubt your manliness and masculinity. Because you're a BIG MAN! Others shall cower at the sheer veracity, power, and strength of your throbbing piece of man meat. We should all be bowing to you and admiring such virility in the epitomes of masculinity. And while this probably wasn't what the director had in mind, it most likely is a joke that has its roots in such troubling groundwork.

For an example of a piece of media that's a little more brave, we have to go all the way to France:

Nu – 2018-present

Satya Dusaugey is certainly no stranger to frontal nudity, as he previously displayed in 2016's Tapette. Nu is a series about a police officer who wakes up from a coma and finds that societal standards about the body have changed. The law has made it so that, now, if you are clothed and covering up your private parts, it is considered indecent. Because of the culture shock, Satya's character endures due to this sudden pride in nudism and exhibitionism now being an integral part of society, he inevitably ends up in quite a few ENM scenarios. And unlike other works of media that involve a scene where a man's nudity is brought up in humiliating ways, they made this pretty much the entire premise of the show. Not only that, but they managed to work in some pretty complex emotions and even make it go deeper than just, well, skin deep. And Dusaugey, it seems, is not shy when it comes to his work. He plays the part to perfection. Because of his unabashed nature, we get many, many, maaaaany scenes where Satya's completely on display and has no qualms about acting in such exposing conditions. This kind of show probably wouldn't fly here in the States, even on streaming platforms like Netflix or Amazon, where actors like Nick Clifford have gone full frontal. While male nudity is getting there, I don't think the American streaming services may be ready for a show so matter-of-fact about the male genitalia.

As I said before, with platforms like ThisVid, the availability of ENM scenes involving frontal nudity being limited to private videos and a community that's split on the level of access to such media far outweighs the easily available videos you can find where a man is in a situation where his clothes are taken away and you see everything.

This video, for example, which I only know by the title:

Bearded Hunk Can't Keep His Clothes On

In this comedic short, a rather attractive man lives in a house that's haunted. But it's not haunted by any ghost. It's a ghost that randomly undresses him. The film work is inventive in how the guy's shirt opens up and his fly is unzipped, seen from accurate angles to give the appearance that his clothing is being removed by an invisible force.

This is an online video that I never really got into. I'm sure others will find it hot, but, as for me, it just pisses me off. Apologies to the actor here; he put a lot of effort and work into this short, and it shows. But for a video with such an inventive and sexy premise and this kind of talent behind the camera, there should be more of a pay-off, I think. You see, this ghost doesn't necessarily understand the concept of “naked.” It always stops at his undershirt and underwear. We don't even get to see his undershirt being removed. So, basically, he's dressed down to the point that he might as well be sporting a shirt and form-fitting shorts. Why aren't we seeing everything? Why isn't this unique and creative camera work being used to go further??

However, let's say it did go further. Let's say it not only stripped this nice-looking guy to nothing but forced his hands in place, and we actually see his dick swingin'. Would this actually be a public video? Would it be so easily found?

Let me answer that with a previous search I've done in the past. When I'm online and I go to just Google or Bing and look up “men forced to strip,” I do find scenes, but they're often scenarios and snippets either made for commercial networks where it's played safe or where it's just shy of seeing everything. But, in this same search, results of ENF, or embarrassed nude females, are mixed in. I didn't click on them because, well, quite frankly, I didn't want to, but I can tell from the titles and from the look of the images that it's fetish porn. And I can guarantee you that you see everything of these women.

So, in this same search where I'm looking for men, the results of frontal nudity are a rare gem to find. Yet, when it comes to women, there are actually more examples of forced exposure of frontal nudity, despite the fact that I just told the search engine that that wasn't what I was looking for.

A change is indeed happening. I'm seeing all around us that, as a society, we are getting tired of such an imbalance in the display of the female body compared to the male body. HBO, Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, and Shudder are all services with original works that include full-frontal male nudity. But when it comes to the fetish of ENM, that's still proving slightly more difficult to find. For the most part, a good number of them are still hiding behind the velvet rope of privacy functions and subscription-based platforms. And, ya know what? I get it. If you're a filmmaker, a creator who's spent money on resources to make and create such works, then, yeah, I believe you should have a profit. If you put in the work, you should have a financial benefit. But I also believe that if our ENM community had more creators who started making film projects with full plots and stories and resources to make a professional film that has fewer boundaries when it comes to male exposure, then who knows? It may have a snowball effect, and we can find ourselves in a place where these search results of fetish erotica actually have what we're looking for instead of the equivalent of having someone dig through the bargain basement bin and say, “Sorry, this is all we've got.” It's been the norm for women to be used as visual mediums of sexual expression pretty much ever since the first film near the beginning of the 20th century. That's still a standard and a basis of thought that has been sewn into the fabric of our cultural cornerstones, and it may be a while before we can move even further past that.

In fact, I have an idea for a future article where I'd like to list the stories I've written in the past that I would love to make into films. So, I'm getting the message out there. It's like that expression goes: Be the change you want to see.

Advances towards this movement may have started, but let's keep this train goin'. C'mon, filmmakers and show-runners, if you're going to have embarrassing nude scenes of men in your work, especially ones where they're forced to remove clothing or have clothing forcibly removed from them, let's see it all. Dick Tracy may be private in his investigations, but dick, itself shouldn't be concealed in evidence.

#enm #embarrassed nude men #gay #article #informal piece #men losing clothes #opinion post

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blowflyfag · 4 months

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Pro Wrestling Illustrated: June 1994

WHY BRING BACK THE LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHTS? HERE’S WHY…

In the past few years, title opportunities for light heavyweight North American wrestlers have more or less evaporated. Considering the talent available, the major federations may be missing the boat.

By V.J. Paterno

[At the Tokyo Dome recently, everyone kept an eye on the outstanding aerial moves of Tiger Mask (right) and Jushin Liger (opposite page). Light heavyweights in North America rarely get this kind of respect from their federations.]

“Don’t get me wrong,” 2 Cold Scorpio said over lunch in a suburban Atlanta restaurant. “I love teaming up with Marcus [Alexander Bagwell]. Tag team wrestling is lots of fun. But it would be great to have the opportunity to go after a solo title against wrestlers of my size.”

Unfortunately for Scorpio, that option isn’t currently available to him.

True, he could pursue WCW’s U.S. or TV belt if he so desired. Remember last summer, when he nearly upset Barry Windham for the NWA title? But down the road, Scorpio would likely have to face a super heavyweight or two, and that isn’t fair. Neither the U.S. nor TV titles have weight restrictions.

[In your face! Even the sanctuary of a ring post isn’t enough to protect Liger, as he withstands an assault from this flying Tiger.]

If Scorpion suddenly bolted to the WWF, he’d be in the same predicament. The Intercontinental belt has occasionally been a de facto light heavyweight title, but at 291 pounds, current champ Razor Ramon certainly doesn’t fit that description.

The heavyweights are always going to hog the attention; there’s no getting around that. But WCW and the WWF are missing out on a great opportunity by ignoring the lighter wrestlers.

“People identify with guys like The Kid and Scorpio,” said WCW expert Donald Wayne. “They’re exciting to watch, and they win with brains, not with bulk. Properly promoted, I see no reason why a light heavyweight division couldn’t hold fans’ interest.”

If boxing shared wrestling’s disinclination toward lighter athletes, the world would never have become familiar with the ring artistry of Thomas Hearns, Roberto Duran, Sugar Ray Leonard, Marvin Hagler, and Julio Cesar Chavez. Similar stars are awaiting recognition in wrestling’s squared circle.

Several years ago, WCW had a light heavyweight division, and even imported Japanese aerial legend Jushin Liger to American shores. Scorpio wasn’t in the federation then, but he’s faced Liger in Japan.

[Photographers love the high flying light heavyweights, because there’s always plenty of action. With shots like these, who can blame them? It’s a macho aerial ballet.]

“What a talent,” Scorpio raves. “Such marvelous skills, and he never lets up. The public in Japan loves him. Maybe U.S. fans didn’t warm up to him because they found it hard to define the personalities of Japanese wrestlers like they can with the Americans. But we have wrestlers in this country who can fly nearly on that level, and fans here obviously can relate to them.”

In 1991, WCW instituted a light heavyweight title, and Brian Pillman won the initial championship by defeating Rick Morton in a tournament final. “Flyin’ Brian” lost the title to Liger on Christmas night of that year, but won it back the following February 29. Both bouts were thrillers.

“Those were probably my happiest times as a solo wrestler,” Pillman recalled. “I was in an environment where I could realistically contend for a title, since I wasn’t taking on super heavyweights. And when you regularly wrestle guys like Liger, you know you’re going to improve your skills.”

Brad Armstrong held the title in mid-1992, but vacated it after suffering a knee injury and falling to defend the belt within the required 30 days. Pillman was scheduled to face Armstrong at Clash of the Champions, and in frustration called him a coward

“I’m still made at him,” Pillman said, “but I’m equally angered that none of us in the federation have had a chance to succeed him. The belt never even reached its first anniversary.

[Liger would later profess his respect for Tiger Mask, who withstood the pain of this submission hold and came back for more.]

WCW Executive Vice President Bill Watts promised a light heavyweight tournament for sometime in 1993. But he was dismissed early that year, so any plans he may have had never came to fruition. Perhaps new Commissioner Nick Bockwinkel will revive the division, but he has many other problems to solve, and the light heavyweight question may be on the back burner.

“I’ve talked with Nick, and I think he likes the idea,” Scorpio said. “He knows the talent base we have, that in light heavyweights, junior heavyweights, whatever you want to call us, we have some great wrestlers. Guys like that deserve the recognition of their own division.”

“At the same time, the decision isn’t entirely his. The promoters will have to be convinced that it will work. Settling up something like this takes lots of time and money.”

A rival federation has already thrown its support to smaller wrestlers. Smoky Mountain Wrestling recently instituted a U.S. junior heavyweight title, and is planning to hold cards in WCW’s home base of Georgia. SMW may well force WCW’s hand.

“The fans in Smoky love seeing the smaller guys wrestle,” said Morton, who’s now concentrating on tag team wrestling with The Rock ‘n’ Roll Express. “I like watching it myself. I can’t understand why any wrestling promotion ignores guys our size. Maybe if every super heavyweight had the skills of a big Van Vader, but let’s not kid ourselves. They don't.”

[Tiger Mask recovered to mount a counterattack and thrill fans with several spectacular dropkicks. Action like this could become common in America if federations would just institute light heavyweight divisions.]

YET ANOTHER TIGER MASK LOSES HIS STRIPES

Understandably, most Americans’ interest in the recent New Japan “Battlefield ‘94” card at the Tokyo Dome centered on matches involving Hulk Hogan, Rick and Scott Steiner, and Road Warrior Hawk. But there were other highlights as well, including one that showed just how impressive light heavyweight matches can be.

IWGP junior heavyweight champ Jushin Liger, whose matches with Brian Pillman are still fondly remembered by many WCW fans, challenged Tiger Mask in a non-title bout. It should be noted that this Tiger Mask was the third wrestler to carry the name. The first, Satoru Sayama, excelled in the early-1980s before unmasking himself and leaving pro wrestling. The next Tiger Mask also eventually unmasked on his own volition, revealing himself to be Mitsuharu Misawa. He is still regarded as one of Japan’s premier aerial stars.

The action was as good as promised. There were plenty of high-flying moves throughout, and for several minutes neither wrestler took command. Finally, Liger took the inactive, used a spectacular shooting-star press, and posted the pin at 12:26.

[A humbled Koji Kanemoto voluntarily unmasked in tribute to his conqueror, the legendary Jushin LIger.]

While this was not a stipulation match, Tiger Mask decided to unmask anyway, and was found to be Koji Kanemoto. He immediately challenged Liger to a rematch.

“Tiger Mask has always been a popular concept with Japanese fans,” said correspondent Koichi Yoshizawa. “The man who wears it has a great deal to live up to. Sayama and Misawa were true world-class wrestlers, and Kanemoto is good in his own right.”

“I have no idea if he’ll continue wearing the mask, or give it to someone else. I only hope whoever wears it is worthy of the honor.”

Hogan’s manager, Jimmy Hart, caught some of the match while awaiting the “Hulkster’s” Bout against Tatsumi Fujinami. “People like liger are among the reasons Hulk would like Japanese’ style wrestling to succeed in North America,” he said “While the light heavyweights don’t have the power of Hulk, they’re intense and athletic, really marvelous to watch.”

-Vincent Paterno

#liger #wcw #world championship wrestling #PWI #pro wrestling illustrated #magazine scan #magazine transcript #Tiger Mask

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guywrestlingaddiction · 1 year

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What turned me gay (not really) - Alex Wright

A while back, I came across the sidelineland.com blog and while you would think that the heavy themes around erotic wrestling would interest me, I was mainly intrigued by the author's tongue and cheek thoughts on "What turned me gay". The intention here was not a serious exposition on the root cause of "turning someone gay" but rather what "gay" impressionable moments have led us all to be the people we are today. Although the author doesn't regularly post anymore, this blog is still worth checking out and in honor of these impressionable "gay" moments I bring you -

What turned me gay (not really) ...

WCW jobbers, specifically Alex Wright turned me gay. And I know a lot of gay adults out there probably have similar experiences fantasizing about Alex when they were a kid but this is different, he was literally the first guy I recall having feelings for. Up until that point in my life I just thought that I was a "late bloomer" or that one day heterosexuality would magically click or whatever self-deluding nonsense I fed myself at the time. But for me, watching Alex was a turning point. Alex Wright to me, was my first male lust.

Alex with chest hair!

If you've read my other posts then you know that for me, it's not just about the hot body, although Alex had that 10 times over. There was just something in the way his opponents dominated him and accentuated each and every long and flawless muscle on his torso, or his arm, or his back.

Alex Wright v Chris Benoit (WCW)

Lusting for Alex lead to interest in other wrestlers and while my friends were avid fans of WWF due to the storylines and production values, I was a hardcore WCW enthusiast because of Alex and the other fresh jobbers their programing offered. This was another turning point as well because it was at this point that I started to have less and less in common with my "straight" friends and I began to look for other interests that were separate from them. So whatever the spark, the impetus, for my eventual embrace of being gay - Alex Wright was pivotal to that transformation.

Alex v Buddy Wayne (WCW)

I read later that Alex is training or coaching wrestling and I'm glad that he has avoided the fate that sadly so many other professional wrestlers have fallen into. But in any case, I try not to read too much about my heroes/inspirers (are those the right words?), because for me, Alex Wright will always be that strapping, high flying, sucker for punishment, sex idol, that started it all for me in my youth.

Selected Appearances [Not all shown]

Alex Wright v Rey Mysterio Jr. (WCW)The size difference in this match was so hot to me at the time

Alex Wright v The Gambler (WCW) Beefy and slightly hairy, yum.

Alex Wright v Doc Dean (WCW) Alex as a heel! One of my favorite matches.

"Flyin" Brian Pillman vs. Alex Wright (WCW) I used to have endless thoughts about him in this position

Alex Wright v Pat Rose (WCW 1995) I vividly recall taping this match on the family VCR and hiding the tape in my bedroom

2 minutes into this match and Paul Roma is already going for the low blow.

Alex Wright v Paul Roma (WCW) - Superbrawl VThere was some sexually charged rivalry between these two. In my mind, I liked to pretend that they were going through a messy break up, with Alex cheating on Paul and Paul wanting to humiliate Alex.

For the original post, check out:

#gay wrestling #alex wright

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everything-anything3345 · 2 years

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WCW Wrestler: Ric Flair and Brian Pillman Confrontation: 2/17/1990. Flyin Brian Confronts Naitch on why him and The Four Horsemen turned on Sting. The Nature Boy issues a challenge to Flyin' Brian.

#wcw wrestling #ric flair #brian pillman #challenge

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lalalovezfrenchfriez · 3 months

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Flyin Frydays

authors note: sorry for last week, it's been a sorta crazy few days!! I hope again you all like this part? idk, this is an important part of the story, and while a little troublesome to write, I got thru it :3 love y'all!

My brother, JD, is in his car, a Toyota Corolla. It’s a sleek gray with some nice mods on it, a huge exhaust, a battery for speed, and some luminescent buttons. JD got it when he was 16, and Papi had been building the car for ages for him. He nicknames it, stupidly, the Yum Bug, since he uses it around LA for his munchie ass adventures.

In the passenger seat is Emi, with his dealer Brian Welter and Elliot Pabalan in the back seats. Elliot is JD’s companion in finishing Brian’s infamous Canned Cannabis Joints. This is where Brian rolls a fat ass j about the size of a soda can. Or so he claims. I’ve never seen it before. I’ve only seen JD passed out at 10 even though he works out at that time. I drew on his face.

Emi waves to me. “Hey girlie!”

I wave back, my tears hidden behind the fog as I step in. “It reeks,” I say as I inhale more of my cig and puff out.

“Really Manzanita?” JD lowers his radio thats blaring some 2pac as he stares at me. “You know the rules, Manz,”

I offer the cigarette to him with a grin.

He takes it and throws it out the window. “¡Puta- this car is holy! None of your stupid tobacco shit better be in here!”

“¡Pendejo I never got to fuckin’ finish!” I shout back as he shoots off into the night.

Brian is sitting in the middle, being the skinniest, and Elliot is behind JD, cramped with his football abled body.

Emi tickles my knee as she applies a perfect black lipstick to her lips. It really matches her eyes. “So, how’s your her-mana Laura?” It’s really cute how Emi tries to pronounce Spanish. She talks too much like a gringa for it. I take her hand and tickle it back. She squeals.

“Laura is fine, got her all dolled up for a frat. She should call later.“

JD nods, “Bueno bueno! I like to hear that.”

Elliot is drinking water, probably already high. “Hey I heard you got dumped.”

Now, I usually don’t mind if Laura asks me. She’s my friend who I barely see; She wouldn’t know. But Elliot, as I know, is a chismoso.

Brian looks over, and he cuts the conversation. That’s why I like him. Brian never likes gossip. “What? Humped? No no- this is the Dumb smoke! This maria-juanita is going to get you dumb as fuck! I dunno if I got enough for a CCJ bro, but I know it’s definitely enough for us.” I poke Brian a little. He gives me a soft smile while he looks at Elliot.

I never really grew up liking Elliot, he always seemed to like me, and JD of course knew. It’s not that he’s bad or anything, just annoying. Even after I came out Elliot seemed to think maybe it’s just a phase, like Emi being goth. But now she’s attending community college with her dark hair that’s fried with pinks and purples, pale legs covered with fishnets and her eyes darkened with heavy eyeliner. Elliot is hilarious if he thinks I’ll stop loving girls because he just plays football at San Diego State.

Elliot tries to say something to get back to the topic, but Emi butts in, “Guys, should we try to get Río on weed?”

It’s not like I never liked it, in fact I first smoked with JD. But I just felt too weird, too quiet- I felt almost ravenous when I saw bread. I nearly broke into Mamí’s bakery to eat the conchas y paletas, but Brian and JD stopped me.

“As long as we get food in Chinatown, I don’t give a shit.” I shrug.

“You sure they’re gonna be cool with us?” Elliot asks.

The whole car shifts, uncomfortably.

Maybe I am a hater, maybe I am just annoyed because he tried to bring up my ex a second ago, minutes after I told my first love that I never want to see her again. But Elliot has to stop ruining the moment.

But we all had felt it. The potential racism, judgement and even deadly stares we all could face when we enter the bridge to Chinatown.

JD proudly exclaims, “Who gives a shit?! Brian?!”

Brian is rolling the joint, and I watch as he licks the joint closed. “Not me brah.”

“Emi?”

Emi smirks as she looks behind to me, “Nothing scares me!” I laugh, knowing she almost pissed herself to get the courage and compliment her now boyfriend’s mohawk.

“Manza?!” JD screams. I didn’t even realize, but the speed of the car has increased. He has a great grin, revealing the canines he used to hate in middle school. His jaw is sharp with a tensed look, and his dirty eyes are gleaming. He’s high. I smile. My heart is beating fast. “!Jorge, ya no tango miedo a la muerte!”

“THEN LET’S GO—!”

JD never finishes his sentence. I turn and everything flashes like pictures in my mind. It’s a lime green car that rams into Emi’s side. Her frizzed hair blocks JD’s view and he turns the wheel towards the car. The car finishes going in front of us. Brian flies a bit out of his seat, going unconscious. Cannabis flies everywhere. Elliot smashes his nose against the headrest behind JD. I can’t breathe. I can’t hear. I also fly forward. My right side of my face smashes against the headrest. In my last few moments of consciousness, I see a red painted Emi. JD’s body is mangled. I feel upside down. Elliot is shouting my name. Brian is trying to crawl to me. I can’t feel anything. I feel trapped.

I don’t know what happens. I just let go. I just mumble my brother’s name. I think of Mama, Papi. I think I see Abuelo Oso. He looks the same as he always does. He smiles at me. “Mija? Por que estas aqui? Levante...No llore…”

“RIO!”

I pass out.

#writing #<3 #writblr #writeblr #flyin flydays

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revessie · 1 year

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"Flyin' Next To Me" by Ja'red Scott, Brian Burgess (and RevEssie Scott o...

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caltropspress · 1 year

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FEEDBACK LOOP #11: Infinity Knives and Brian Ennals' "Sambo's Last Words"

But do we got to play Sambo? —dälek, “Abandoned Language” (2007)

Unfortunately, I will not be alive to see my name cleared. That’s what this is about, my name. —Chris Dorner, from the “Last Resort” Manifesto (2013)

They were black and loud. And not detainable. And not discreet. —Gwendolyn Brooks, from “RIOT” (1969)

Infinity Knives and Brian Ennals are not detainable or discreet. You can’t dis- them in any manner—they won’t be disallowed to do anything. No hyperbole, harangues, or holds barred: that’s their daily operation. Allow them to introduce, and reintroduce, and reintroduce themselves. They do so repeatedly on King Cobra: “I’m Brian Ennals, and the funny-looking dude behind me is Infinity Knives.” Ennals dares his employer to do something, punking him with his chest puffed out. We know how the New York Post tried to do Ka—a mild-mannered church mouse on the mic when put beside what Ennals is spitting: the phlegm of plague rats. “I’m just waiting for the meeting at work,” Ennals has said, expressing only the slightest concern at the prospect of a boss googling his name. On the other hand, the statement sounds more like a veiled threat of workplace violence.

Infinity Knives knows the ledge—so don’t push him to the point of going postal either. His papers say Tariq Ravelomanana, but his p.k.a. is drawn from The Blade Itself, a post-millennium fantasy novel by Joe Abercrombie. But me, I’m visualizing the Cutlery Corner infomercials I watched as a kid, and I’m hearing the clang of swords that precede the RZA challenging us to bring da motherfucking ruckus. You can never have too many names or blades, but Brian Ennals is out here with his government written across his forehead. “The E-R-I-C-K is my name, I spell,” Erick Sermon raps on EPMD’s “You Gots to Chill.” He later told Brian Coleman: “It was like taboo to say your name in a rhyme back then—you just didn’t do that in rap! But that’s how real we were.” The B-R-I-A-N Ennals, for his part, keeps it realer than Real Deal Baudrillard (that would be hyperreal, for all you hookers, hoes, and semioticians keeping score at home).

Chris Dorner’s manifesto to Amerika begins with a meditation on the value of one’s name, asking, What would you do to clear your name? He writes that it’s more than just a “noun, verb, or adjective.” “Don’t let anybody tarnish it,” he writes, “when you know you’ve live[d] up to your own set of ethics and personal ethos.” Me and Knives used to be humble, Ennals says before the serrated horn frenzy on “Coke Jaw,” but now we fuckin’ shit up!

2. I’m in Chipotle with a robe on.

Ennals channels his inner Fatboi Sharif, rocking a robe with the same bravado that the Savage Skulls rocked swastika-stitched denim jackets in the Bronx in the ’70s. Some real Flyin’ Cut Sleeves swagger. He approaches the Chipotle counter like the Dude saunters through the supermarket, sniffing a carton of half-and-half in the opening scene of The Big Lebowski. “Sometimes there’s a man, uhm, he’s the man for his time and place….” Yeah, uhm, Ennals is the man for this time [100 seconds to midnight] and this place [amerikkka]. He’s a man for all seasons—for all robbin’ seasons, Baltimore-style.

On “A Melancholy Boogie,” he warns of a “swastika on your door,” so his bathrobe is a sort of Robe of Nessus—a garment soaked in centaur blood and hydra venom—eager to tell Nazi Punks to Fuck Off, to smother their faces in the lethal fabric. Call it his own Valkyrie plot, a regular Henning von Tresckow looking to lick shots at Hitler. A negro assassin, in Cube’s parlance. Even when the plan is foiled, he’ll go out gloriously—pridefully and suicidally—falling on a grenade like von Tresckow, who, before pulling the pin, said: “None of us can complain about dying, for whoever joined our circle put on the Robe of Nessus.” Damn it feels good to be a gangsta.

3. Alas, poor Yorick!

Brian Ennals and Infinity Knives are diggity-dead serious, but they’ll just as soon die laughing. Lots of id in the mix, and the idiot box on, because the revolution will most certainly be televised, brother. Ennals might house a burrito bowl at Chipotle, but he’s also Billy Mays, hawking Chipotlaway on South Park: “You love to eat Chipotle, but you hate all those terrible bloodstains in your underwear!” Ennals “wear[s] boat shoes to shoot dice.” He’s ashy-classy: B.I.G. sweating through a Coogi sweater with labored breaths, or LL with the inscrutable single pant-leg rolled up. Despite his partner having the lemniscate appellation [∞], Ennals is the fellow of infinite jest. A rictus grin behind the mic device; a Killing Joke Joker. Hamlet remarked, “Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know / not how oft,” but Ennals holds Yorick’s skull aloft and skull-fucks it. That’s where his gibes, his gambols, his songs, his flashes of merriment are—a ruckus brought forth. Like erasing Rawkus from the historical record by traveling back in time and letter bombing Rupert Murdoch’s son at Horace Mann prep school.

Hamlet was in the churchyard, but Ennals and Knives are “in the sandlot, scared of the beast.” Fretting over the mark of the beast, maybe. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six (Revelations 13:18 KJV). RFID microchips implanted in their foreheads that hiss like basilisks when they cross the threshold of the anti-theft antennae at Wawa. They can’t stanch the brain bleed. In beast mode for the smash-and-grab. On a murderers’ row boat down the River Styx—not whistling Dixie but whistling 666. Ennals can be our “most poetic of poets and [our] leader into hell,” to crib one from Frederick Seidel.

Or maybe it’s obvious, just the beast of The Sandlot (1993), a slobbery mastiff named Hercules. On King Cobra, high and low art collapse in on each other like Building 7. A folksy implosion of images that combines barbarism and grace as well as the aforementioned sex-and-hex-crazed senex Frederick Seidel, like when the poet audaciously claims:

I’m Mussolini, And the woman spread out on my enormous Duce desk looks teeny. The desk becomes an altar, sacred The woman’s naked.

Ennals’ rhymes are as unadorned and brusque as Seidel’s, too—point-blank: he doesn’t have time for multisyllabic antics. He’s too busy juxtaposing PF Flyers and prophetic visions from Patmos. He’s like Dorner gushing at the conclusion of his manifesto about The Hangover Part III, which he knows he won’t live to see. “What an awesome trilogy,” he writes. “Damn, gonna miss shark week.”

…when a multitude of shepherds is called forth against him, he will not be afraid of their voice, nor abase himself for the noise of them.

—Isaiah 31:4 KJV

On Brand Nubian’s “Dance to My Ministry,” Lord Jamar took the lead for others to follow: “The shepherd is here to protect the flock, / With my staff I walk through the wilderness.” But, then again, Lord Jamar is a homophobe and Holocaust denier. So Ennals abases him—smashes his phallocentric staff and passes him a staph infection; Ennals is a Debaser. “If you strike the shepherd,” though, you’ve still got to compete with the sheep—the leaderless flock, the lemmings, the true believers. You’ve got to be ruthless, murderous, a killer of sheep.

In Killer of Sheep, Charles Burnett’s 1978 film, kids from Watts—Black boys—go to war, hurling stones and dirtbombs at each other. Richard Wright wrote about a similar episode in his autobiographical sketch “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow.” Wright’s house was behind some railroad tracks, and his yard was “paved with black cinders.” Like clods of earth to the Watts kids, those cinders provided warzone entertainment—a joyful adolescent understanding that life is strife:

…cinders were fine weapons. You could always have a nice hot war with huge black cinders. All you had to do was crouch behind the brick pillars of a house with your hands full of gritty ammunition. And the first woolly black head you saw pop out from behind another row of pillars was your target. You tried your very best to knock it off. It was great fun.

But Wright’s fun ends when trouble arrives with a gang of whiteboys from the other side of the tracks (literally) that deliver “a steady bombardment of broken bottles.” Broken glass everywhere. One of the bottles catches Wright “behind the ear, opening a deep gash which [bleeds] profusely.” Bad to worse, though, when Wright’s mother gets a look at him: “She grabbed a barrel stave, dragged me home, stripped me naked, and beat me till I had a fever of one hundred and two…. impart[ing] to me gems of Jim Crow wisdom…. I was never, never, under any conditions, to fight white folks again.” Wright’s comeuppance is confusing and sets the tone for the remainder of his adolescence in the era of Jim Crow.

Brian Ennals is exasperated too, and tired, like Killer of Sheep’s Stan standing in the slaughterhouse with knives chained to his butcher belt. (I’ll give you one guess as to how many knives he’s got.) But where Ennals differs is his willingness to turn a rudimentary work tool into a weapon of mass destruction.

5. BURN A CROSS ON YOUR LAWN

Birmingham, AL. 1963. The Klan bombs the 16th Street Baptist Church. Louisiana. 2019. Three Black churches burned down in a 10-day span in St. Landry Parish. St. Mary Baptist Church; Greater Union Baptist Church; Mt. Pleasant Baptist Church. Baptism by fire? Must be next time. Or it always has been. “They been burning churches forever, man—that shit ain’t new,” is how Ennals tells it. The 2019 arson attacks were by one Yacubian juvenile named Holden Matthews, the son of a cop (ho hum). Not a hate crime, the authorities said. He had a predilection for Norwegian-style black metal, they said. Burzum be proud. Though they neglected to acknowledge how an adoration of Odin often coincides with Völkish beliefs—that’s Nazis all the way down, stupid. They been burning churches forever, man. Forever, man—like a sanctuary candle on the altar of one of those very churches.

“Niggas’ll look you in the face and say the sky ain’t blue.” Well, I suppose it’s not exactly blue when you consider the billowing black smoke that little Holden’s two-gallon gasoline cans have wrought. So much particulate matter it’s got asthmatics gagging. Ennals says, “A lie’s only a lie if you know it ain’t true.” What a conundrum. The post-truth line is a Gordian knot undone. Like some Wallace Stevens stanza: “...the nicer knowledge of / Belief, that what it believes in is not true.”

How did propagandist peckerwood Joey Goebbels put it? “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” Seek your truth, and speak the truth like Lateef. The white ones with the power—who manipulate the knowns into unknowns—they want to smuggle that lie into belief, but you Ain’t Gotta Lie ta Kick It. Ennals, like Cube, is in the business of exposing White lies. He seems to have historically been less concerned with telling white lies, more concerned with arranging white lines—despite Melle Mel’s warnings to the contrary. (That coke jaw might mean Ennals took Mel’s parenthetical double-negative [“Don’t Don’t Do It”] as a canceling of the apparent get clean command.) “Lie all the fuck you want,” Ennals summarizes, “just know who you lying to.” Be forthright. Enough with the smoke and mirrors.

6. Smoke circles the room…

Ennals gawks at the same “mystic moon” that Edgar Allan Poe does in “The Sleeper”: “An opiate vapor, dewy, dim, / Exhales from out her golden rim.” But when you’re gazing up, beware as “the pale sheeted ghosts go by.” Ennals’ “sheeted ghosts” are different from Poe's—one ghastly, the other ghostly. When we hear Poe, in his poem, wish that “Soft may the worms about her creep,” we know—in a Nasean twist—the titular “sleeper” is actually ding-dong-dead. Ennals knew it all along. “Taking walks through the cemetery,” he shared on “A Melancholy Boogie,” so that he could “talk to the graves.”

But that smoke-circled moon can function as less bomb-scary, less fright fest, too. Look to Lloyd Addison’s “Umbra,” where he warms to a better vision:

My sun has gone down in drum suite penumbra The mood of this rhythm my body is umbra

That’s a more suitable mood for “roll[ing] joints that look like caterpillar cocoons.” This is an example of Ennals waxing lyrical, poeticizing his most potent pot, but his prototype is blunt. Blunt like I hope Joel Osteen dies tomorrow (“Bluffin’”); or, Fuck Ted Cruz forever—I hope he gets stabbed (“A Melancholy Boogie”); or, The Catholic Church is a pedophile ring that rapes kids (“Bluffin’”). Put a better way, Ennals is Blunted on Reality. King Cobra, in toto, is the sound of renewed focus. “Sambo’s Last Words,” in particular, is a Philly blunt like a chrysalis split with a scalpel. Ennals and Knives surgically remove shredded tobacco leaves from the cavity of the blunt. They cut open a Death’s-head moth cocoon with an X-acto knife. They stare with wonder at all that flutters in Rawlings Conservatory and serenade butterflies: We know we got cha opin.

7. FLYBOY IN THE BUTTERMILK

“Fuck being fly,” Ennals raps, “when my momma turned sixty-five, / It hit me—son, she’s really gonna die.” Fuck being fly; Ennals is grounded in the grittiest of realities, as real as a plot of worm dirt and no souls are ascending the sediment. He addresses himself as son—dropping the illest illeism—just like his momma would. Her voice; his head. She’s one of the faithful. “She believes in heaven,” but Ennals “could give forty fucks” about forty days and forty nights. Even if Ennals did find his way to heaven, he wouldn’t sit down—he’s not looking to settle for any sacramental offerings. He won’t sign on for the lunch counter sit-in. He won’t let himself be pummeled by white-knuckled firsts and conked with vanilla malts. He’ll be sitting out Gandhi’s satyagraha.

In 1992, Paris dropped “Bush Killa” and took a similar stance: “So don’t be telling me to get the nonviolent spirit, / ’Cause when I’m violent is the only time the devils hear it.” Loud and clear, man: these are assassination raps. Ennals and Knives, yeah, they’ve got the “libs mad ’cause [they] shot Joe Biden.” In the spirit and style of Metallica, of Aes Rock, Kill one, kill a few, kill ’em all. Fill ’em all with guilt. Ennals and Knives are out for dead presidents to represent them.

8. HERE TO PREACH THE GREAT AMERICAN FUCK-YOU

Chris Dorner is a motherfucking legend. On NEGRO, Pink Siifu did his darnedest to immortalize the man, but, with this declaration, Ennals clinches the win. On “Headclean,” Ennals raps, “Religion ain’t the answer, / White Jesus is cancer.” In that, he’s kin with Dorner, whose manifesto includes an anecdote from his school daze: “[The principal] stated as good Christians we are to turn the other cheek as Jesus did. Problem is, I’m not a fucking Christian and that old book, made of fiction and limited non-fiction, called the bible, never once stated Jesus was called a nigger.”

“My man robbed 7-Eleven,” Ennals confides in us, only to disappointedly confess, “he got forty bucks.” Ennals' mom may believe in Heaven, but by rhyming her paradise with 7-Eleven, he debases the promised land to that of a multinational convenience store. “I go a level down,” he raps. Bounding down the eight steps of imperfection toward Dante’s concentric rings. “Turning up” and/or getting turnt doesn’t suit his death-drive. He’s asleep at the wheel, channeling Dante’s arrival at the Ninth Circle of the Inferno:

If I had rhymes both rough and stridulous, As were appropriate to the dismal hole Down upon which thrust all the other rocks, I would press out the juice of my conception More fully…

The journey of the soul seems to detour through a Pornhub directory (“dismal hole,” “thrust,” “press out the juice of my conception”) before we receive Ennals’ message. He, too, offers an apostate’s erotic poem: “Satan’s in a blue dress? I’m lifting the Devil’s gown.” For all the Tony Robbins “level up” talk amongst rappers nowadays, Ennals keeps it gully. He flips the script on Michelle Obama’s when they go low, we go high bunkum. Ennals subscribes to the Monstars’ approach: hit ’em high and hit ’em low both.

So it’s no wonder he’s sticking it to the Devil. On “Bluffin’,” he informed us “the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was making Jesus white.” Tricknology, straight out the cave. Black Francis of the Pixies says this “Monkey Gone to Heaven,” but the racists are intent on sending Black folk to hell. Ennals and Knives load up on drugs to counter the effects of the Yacubian experiments. Simian drugs, simian drugs. Everybody’s in love with our simian drugs.

Meanwhile, Black Francis calculates his own supreme mathematics:

If man is five, then the devil is six, and if the devil is six, then God is seven.

Ennals answers with Seven Eyes and Seven Horns. He’s not strictly anti-Christian, though—he’s irreligious en masse. Ennals and Knives strive for that mass appeal. Even if Cube said he “met Farrakhan and had dinner” on “When Will They Shoot?,” Ennals, again, boils the bullshit down to methane fumes. “Fuck bitches, get money like Elijah Muhammad,” he slanders on “The Not So Tired Sounds of Brian Ennals,” and he all-but-screams “Nation of Islam is Feds” on “Don’t Let the Smooth Taste Fool You.” Ennals establishes a No Hoodwinking Zone, cordoned off with his spine alone—stiff as a bollard. He’s simply intolerant of what Chuck D called “evangelical hustler[s]” on PE’s “War at 33⅓.”

9. NEVA DIE ALONE

…We hafta die. That is our ’pointed task. Love & die. —John Berryman, “Dream Song 26”

“Lost my fucks, I got no more to give,” Ennals raps, breathlessly approaching a last breath. “Sambo’s Last Words,” though—by my count—has six fucks total. But if these are to be his last six (...six, six in the morning, police at my door…), then these objectified obscenities are bundled in a burlap sack and stashed in a trap house for safekeeping, for a rainy day.

When the bullets rain down, Dorner promises to wage guerrilla and asymmetrical warfare. His manifesto is his War Report. He “embrace[s] death as it is a way of life.” Practical, tactical. “I simply don’t fear it,” he writes, “I am the walking exigent circumstance you created.”

“Sambo’s Last Words” is a last will and testament at one turn, a farewell address at the next. Before your hours go missing, let me tell you how to live. In the same way Ennals objectifies fucks, he also objectifies time—“hours” as a metonym for Time (straight from the slums of Synecdoche, Maryland). Ennals rocks a Flavor Flav corpus clock ’round his neck. You know what time it is, or at least you’re familiar with the expiration date on the bottom of your package. The swing of the pendulum grazes the pit of your stomach. But, “shit really ain’t that deep,” Ennals says—organs not being endless, of course, despite your brags of intestinal length. (Despite my musings making the case these depths are, in fact, fathomless. “Stay awake to the ways of the world, ’cause shit is deep,” Inspectah Deck raps, backing me.)

LIVING: A HOW-TO GUIDE by Brian Ennals: “Fuck as much as you can, love your kids, and pray you die in your sleep.” Fuck, love, die. (Picking up where the final issue of Life Sucks Die left off.) Like an Eat, Pray, Love for blasphemers. Edgar Allan Poe died at the tender age of 40 in Baltimore (of all places), childless from his marriage to his 13-year-old cousin. “I’ll sleep when you’re dead,” it was rumored she told him. Fuck as much as you can renders the love-making harsh, impersonal, but Lloyd Addison again restores the balance: “And the silence neuter feminine night / is sighing verb-breaths of love.” Dorner put it less gently: “I thank the unnamed woman I dated over my lifetime for the great and sometimes not-so-great sex.”

10. My mind is right next to where the sun sit…

The proximity of sun and sense—in all their astral fury and incandescence—takes me back to Roque Dalton’s “On Headaches” poem. The Salvadoran revolutionary counterbalances how “great” it is to be a communist with the fact “it gives you many headaches.” His reasoning, though sound, reads like a riddle:

Because communists’ headaches are historical, that is they won’t go away with painkillers only with the realization of Paradise on Earth. That’s how it is.

Plainspoken, but persuasive. Dalton’s closing stanza reveals how communism will be “among other things, / an aspirin the size of the sun.” Pass Brian Ennals the bottle of Bayer then, because “everywhere [he] goes [he] keep[s] hearing this dumb shit….” He’s exhausted. (Dorner: “I have exhausted all available means at obtaining my name back.”) Still, Ennals tells us the specifics of this so-called dumb shit:

Too many niggas, not enough kings. Too many bitches, not enough queens.

Ennals affects the Ludacris voice only to dismiss the sentiment—call it Incognegro, he spits a spiteful chant. He’s got no time for half-steppin’ or hoteppin’ (Ennals is decidedly more Kane than Dr. Umar). Undoing whatever oaths might’ve been made: Fuck that! My niggas, my bitches: go get cheddar. And somewhere Puff Daddy’s affluence raps bounce off satellites in the outer reaches of the solar system, residual space debris from corporate radio: I’m the macaroni and the cheese. But Ennals won’t settle for crumbs; he’ll dine divinely: God’s good. Pussy’s better. This is Brian Ennals kneeling in prayer, reciting a Hail Mary: “I ain’t a killer but don’t push me, / Revenge is like the sweetest joy next to getting pussy.”

In a 1991 episode of KRON-TV’s Home Turf, 2Pac appears as an audience member and responds to host Dominique di Prima’s question about a favorite rap song. Pac, facetiously, answers “U Can’t Touch This” by MC Hammer. He elaborates that Hammer is “diluting rap…playing that Sambo role, and the reason everybody’s buying his record is because he’s no threat, and everybody wanna see Sambo dance.”

11.

The narrator of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) searches for Brother Clifton, only to find him selling Sambo dolls on the street. The sight is devastating:

I saw a square piece of cardboard upon which something was moving with furious action. It was some kind of toy and I glanced at the crowd’s fascinated eyes and down again, seeing it clearly this time…. A grinning doll of orange-and-black tissue paper with thin flat cardboard disks forming its head and feet and which some mysterious mechanism was causing to move up and down in a loose-jointed, shoulder-shaking, infuriatingly sensuous motion, a dance that was completely detached from the black, mask-like face. It’s no jumping-jack, but what, I thought, seeing the doll throwing itself about with the fierce defiance of someone performing a degrading act in public, dancing as though it received a perverse pleasure from its motions.

Clifton, having clearly betrayed his membership in the Brotherhood organization, continues with his sales pitch—now sensationally, rhythmically, spitting entrepreneurial raps like a young Percy Miller:

Shake it up! Shake it up! He’s Sambo, the dancing doll, ladies and gentlemen. Shake him, stretch him by the neck and set him down, —He’ll do the rest. Yes!

He’ll make you laugh, he’ll make you sigh, si-igh. He’ll keep you entertained. He’ll make you weep sweet—

For he’s Sambo, the dancing, Sambo, the prancing, Sambo, the entrancing, Sambo Boogie Woogie paper doll.

This Sambo, this jambo, this high-stepping joy boy? He’s more than a toy, ladies and gentlemen, he’s Sambo, the dancing doll, the twentieth-century miracle.

Sambo-Woogie, you don’t have to feed him, he sleeps collapsed, he’ll kill your depression And your dispossession…

At first, the narrator is “held by the inanimate, boneless bouncing of the grinning doll,” but he eventually looks upon the doll and feels his “throat constrict.” “The rage,” he says, “welled behind the phlegm.” Brother Clifton runs off, pursued by police for his unpermitted hustling, and the narrator walks in the opposite direction, wondering “[h]ow on earth could [Clifton] drop from Brotherhood to this in so short a time?” But he comes upon the pursuit again, and this time Brother Clifton and the cop become entangled, with Clifton delivering an “uppercut that sent the cop’s cap sailing into the street and his feet flying.” The cop regains his footing and fires his weapon at Clifton. For the narrator, “[t]he sun seemed to scream an inch above [his] head.” My mind is right next to where the sun sit…

12.

Infinity Knives has proven himself to be more a composer than yet another (...another) Madlib poser pressing buttons on the SP-404, another Dilla dilettante. “Sambo’s Last Words” is carried by a seething synth line that sounds like Stevie Wonder’s clavinet on “Superstition” if Little Stevie had not been blind since birth but instead gouged out his peepers in a meth-induced psychotic episode, à la Kaylee Muthart.

King Cobra’s opening prelude, “’Neath the Willow’s Leaves,” communes with the music of “Sambo’s Last Words.” Both equally forlorn but in different registers, a fabrication of salix alba and Saxo Grammaticus. Knives has cited his sources, but I refuse to believe he’s not corresponding across time and consciousness with the ballad “Bury Me Beneath the Willow” (#410 in the Roud Folk Song Index, you suckers!). The willows weep in the wind, overdriven and distorting. Ophelia’s body, drowned, floats downstream: “There is a willow grows aslant the brook, / That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream. / Therewith fantastic garlands did she make.”

“Sambo’s Last Words” is nearly a minute in when we hear a haunting banshee wail—a windy ghoul vocal. No denying it: this is the spirit rising from beneath the willow leaves. Her keening over the ever-steady synths mantle the track like hoarfrost.

But with Knives’ compositions, sometimes the willows wither away in wattage—he goes full electro[cution]. He’ll arrange decade-spanning sounds with soulsonic force, an Arthur Baker writing scores for any night of the living baseheads. He summons ghost-in-the-machine spirits. Neve console! Prophet-5! Micromoog! Lexicon PCM 41 Digital Delay Processor! His studio shouts and susurrations stimulate the central nervous system. Like something out of Shakespeare, Knives “buzz[es] these conjurations in [our] brain” (2 Henry VI, 1.2.102). His beats fluctuate from nerve-racking to numbing agent—they’re a helluva drug. The post-apocalyptic Run-DMC need their mutant Rick Rubin—the same cowl of hair, but less plunderphonics; more polyphonic. Less barefooted guru; more blister-footed Orc. Max Richter bumping uglies with E Double’s “Richter Scale.”

13.

I wanna be a stupid and shallow motherfucker now. I wanna be a tough-skinned bitch, but I don’t know how. —Sparklehorse, “Pig” (1998)

Brian Ennals incites the crowd like an Intelligent Hoodlum. He possesses the ravenous raps of a young Canibus freestyling on a DJ Clue or Tony Touch mixtape, but only if Canibus stopped studying his own alien deoxyribonucleic acid and, instead, took a class with Fred Moten and studied the Undercommons. Ennals, you see, raps for the people. He’s got no time to do a tap-dance, a shoeshine, or a soft-shoe. There are more pressing concerns.

We can’t define, precisely, how Ennals’ be dropping these mockeries of Socrates’ philosophies and hypotheses, but the impact is felt like a bludgeoning. “They worship pedophiles like Socrates,” he exclaims on “Don’t Let the Smooth Taste Fool You.” For Ennals, Western education is forbidden. He flexes with boko haram inked on his biceps.

On “The Badger,” Ennals settles his outstanding rent payments the best way he knows: “I’mma kill my landlord, so I got a heater, / Specifically, a nigga got a 9 millimeter.” Killing landlords…glorifying outlaws…it’s nothing new. Peep Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth:

For example, the gangster who holds up the police set on to track him down for days on end, or who dies in single combat after having killed four or five policemen, or who commits suicide in order not to give away his accomplices—these types light the way for the people, form the blueprints for action and become heroes. Obviously, it's a waste of breath to say that such-and-such a hero is a thief, a scoundrel, or a reprobate. If the act for which he is prosecuted by the colonial authorities is an act exclusively directed against a colonialist person or colonialist property, the demarcation line is definite and manifest. The process of identification is automatic.

Same as Woody Guthrie’s “Pretty Boy Floyd” who knew what to do when “a deputy sheriff approached him”: he “grabbed a log chain [and] laid that deputy down.” Or Dylan's “John Wesley Harding,” another folk hero who “trav’led with a gun in ev’ry hand.” This is why Ennals calls Chris Dorner a motherfucking legend. Because he knows we’ll be telling tales of him for years to come, and he does his part to make it certain. Ennals dons a Chris Dorner costume—his cindered LAPD uniform—and Dorner is the Sambo-no-more. These are his last words. Ennals is the medium for Dorner. Together, they come to understand “the American flag [is] the same colors as cop lights.” Ennals is the medium, and the medium is the massacre. BLACK COP! BLACK COP! KRS-One shouts on “Black Cop” from Return of the Boom Bap (Roy Christopher has noted the seated and spitting similarities between KRS’s album cover from 1993 and King Cobra’s). “Stop shootin’ Black people, we all gonna drop!” When you look for a motive, look no further than that.

14.

Admittedly Sambo, but a man’s gots to eat… Gladly buck dance and show teeth. For that kind of paper? You crazy? —billy woods, “DMCA”

In ’98, Boots Riley wasn’t seeing it woods’ way. On the Coup’s “Busterismology,” he had this to say: “If you ain’t talkin’ ’bout ending exploitation, / Then you just another Sambo in syndication.” Pam the Funkstress cuts crazily while Boots paraphrases Nas for the chorus: When we start the revolution all they probably do is snitch. Ennals allies himself with this Bay Area camp, this armed cell. But his focus is on revenge plots for the time being. On “The Badger,” Ennals is joined by Jim—his Iraq War vet companion, his accomplice—who’s schizophrenic. Ennals himself is a 21st century schizoid man, but it’s Jim who sees crimson and starts spraying during the home invasion. Let me remind you of Roque Dalton, my guy—these headaches are historical. And history keeps happening.

On 2007’s “Runaway Sambo,” Hell Razah emerges from the shadows of the Black Market Militia to set the record straight to hell. “They try to tell me I can’t blow ’cause I ain’t tap-dancing like Sambo,” he raps. He refuses the syndication trap that Boots spoke of: “We not no Buckwheats or Little Rascals, / Or Diff’rent Strokes, or whatever-have-you.”

In “Angel Puss,” a Looney Tunes cartoon from 1944, “Li’l Sambo” is paid “four bits” to drown a black cat in a lake, though he’s too daft to notice the cat sneaking out of his sack. The cat paints himself pure white, disguising himself as an angel. He haunts and hunts Li’l Sambo down, enticing him with the sound of a set of dice shaking in his paws. Li’l Sambo, though, eventually figures it out and stalks the cat into an armoire before unloading his blunderbuss.

Li’l Sambo needs to turn the blunderbuss on himself, though—that would be a merrie melody. Travel back with me to Yorick’s skull—that stark symbol of inevitable death. Li’l Sambo needs to kill the buffoon in his head with a hollow-point bullet that can penetrate the Stahlhelms that sit atop the craniums, just as they’re depicted in the embroidered patches of the Savage Skulls. Li’l Sambo needs to break into his own mind, get all “Conscious Rap” sick wid it and trespass on his subconscious. In Larry Cohen’s 1972 black comedy Bone, the titular character, played by Yaphet Kotto, busts in on the Beverly Hills property of Bernadette and Bill. Bone holds the couple captive, forces them to empty their bank account, and threatens to rape Bernadette (don’t worry: when it comes down to it, he can’t maintain his erection—his, erm, boner—and the white lady of the house seduces him instead). Through all these funny games, Bone’s blue shirt is bleach-stained from the original poolside tussle with Bill, the husband—a Big Bang of chlorine chaos, a clever mark of Cain inversion.

In his career-spanning sequence of poems, The Dream Songs, John Berryman also attempted an inversion of the Sambo caricature. Berryman’s subject voice is in constant flux, always switching, in the poems. One “Henry”—who is “sometimes in blackface,” according to Berryman himself—goes by “Mr. Bones” when he rubs on the burnt cork. “Dream Song 273” reads like Ennals bars:

Survive—exist—who is at others’ will optionless; may gelded be, be put to stud, and were sweating sold; was sold. —Mr Bones, dat slavey still is of our former coast. —When they make me, Bud, I show my genitals, cold.

………………………………….. Come closer, Sambo. I planting in your face ilex. Your face. You jus like a flex where the bulb failed. Flail

…at one hundred-odd degrees at four in the morning, where the ofays’ cameras were dutyless.— Muscle my whack. We gotta trickle. Seize them Moslem testicles, and pull. Please hurt my owner, twice.

“The Sambo stereotype,” William Tynes Cowan explains, “served two social functions on the plantation: it helped the individual slave to survive, to hide true feelings and true intentions from the slaveholder; and it allowed the slaveholding class to maintain its belief that the institution of slavery was not only benevolent but was a necessary shelter for their innocent, enslaved ‘children.’” On King Cobra, Brian Ennals and Infinity Knives make their true feelings known. There’s zero chance of misinterpretation. They’re not children—that much is obvious. And for any white folks who feel them charming enough to put on a shelf as novelty knick-knacks, they are here to disillusion such crackers, to disabuse them of that belief. They finish what KMD started on the cover of BL_CK B_ST_RDS: they tighten the noose on that Sambo hanging from the gallows.

Images:

Chicago Seed advertisement page, c. 1970s (detail) | The Big Lebowski, dir. Joel and Ethan Coen, 1998 (screenshot) | The Number of the Beast is 666, William Blake (1805-1810) | Killer of Sheep, dir. Charles Burnett, 1978 (screenshot) | Killer of Sheep, dir. Charles Burnett, 1978 (screenshot) | Anne Moody “Sit-in at the downtown Woolworth’s in Jackson, Mississippi,” Anne Moody, May 28, 1963 (detail) | Gustave Doré, Satan in the Inferno is trapped in the frozen central zone in the Ninth Circle of Hell, Canto XXXIV (1861-1868) | Bone, dir. Larry Cohen, 1979 (screenshot) | Kerry James Marshall, A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self (1980) | The Conjuration, John Opie (1792) | “Angel Puss,” Looney Tunes, dir. Chuck Jones, 1944 (screenshot) | KMD, Black Bastards, album cover, the EMEF (1993) | “New York City street gang the Savage Skulls,” Jean-Pierre Laffont, c. 1970s (detail) | Chicago Seed advertisement page, c. 1970s (detail)

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