Show-Offs

Show-Offs

I'm in the planning phases of a project to tour the U.S. starting with a fledgling fund raising effort: https://www.gofundme.com/traveling-photography-project The idea is to bounce around the country [it will actually be more of a zig-zag] and connect with some of the guys that have already expressed an interest in working together.

The concept end product is to be a photo-documentary of men in the United States that take their clothes off for the camera. I of course also want to shoot some of the places around that I've never been and possibly expand local project "Extroverted Interiors" nationwide. I'm also toying with the idea of going global.

I'm going to have to edit and refine my concept for the public so that it not only makes sense, but makes people want to help me. Hopefully I can get this thing off the ground soon.

Hopefully, I can count on some of you as "Model Citizens" - Good Title, but I was thinking to call it "Show-Offs: The [American] Male Nude Model", or words to that effect.

Take one and pass it on.

My original centurion sketch from the mid 1990s in pencil on 11" x 14" Strathmore 400, and it's computer enhanced version from about a month ago.

Listen UP: "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised ..."

~Gil Scott-Heron

What Your Political “Enemies” Want

Your political “enemies” want you to make it personal.

Your political “enemies”  want you to engage in name-calling.

Your political “enemies”  want you to focus on the physical appearances of them.

Your political “enemies”  want you to engage in ad-hominem attacks.

Your political “enemies”  want you to add to the noise.

Your political “enemies”  want you to agree with them that “The Meaner, The Better.”

Your political “enemies”  want you distracted by social media rather than using it effectively. They want you to put more faith in it than in face-to-face activism.

Your political “enemies”  want you to self-segregate based on politics.

Your political “enemies”  want you to unfriend anyone who doesn’t agree with you.

Your political “enemies”  want you to rush to judgment–and feel good about it.

Your political “enemies”  want you to refuse to listen to others who don’t agree with you.

Your political “enemies”  want you to refuse to acknowledge the validity of HAVING a different point of view.

Your political “enemies”  want you to insist that women, LGBTQ people, people of color, and all members of other minority groups MUST be Democrats; they also want you to mock and disparage any member of those groups who is a Republican.

Your political “enemies”  want you to answer anger with anger, outrage with outrage, rage with rage, noise with noise; they want you to escalate whenever possible.

Your political “enemies”  want you always to believe the more chaos you cause, the more progress you are making.

Your political “enemies”  want you to engage them on THEIR terms, tone, and methods.

Your political “enemies”  want you to embrace boycotts in every situation of disagreement, regardless of the likelihood of success.

Your political “enemies”  want you to look for individual leaders as “saviors” instead of building coalitions, with an emotional appeal at the core of your allegiance.

Your political “enemies”  want you to isolate your ire and activism against a few individuals (such as the Koch brothers), demonizing them personally while others create mayhem unobserved or not scrutinized.

Your political “enemies”  want you to encourage the idea “both sides are just as bad” and elections are “just choosing the lesser of two evils.”

Your political “enemies”  want you to portray political activism and action entail joining a movement that requires absolute political fealty, and require joiners to behave only in ways that match the loudest and most extreme versions of that  movement.

Your political “enemies”  want you to make it about passion and not policy, about political purity and not real-world results.

Your political “enemies”  want you always to insist on total victories, to “leave no one behind,” to see any compromise as immoral failure, to demonize anyone who even suggests less than insistence on all-or-nothing results.

Your political “enemies”  want you to demonize and dehumanize them as people rather than focusing on their ideas or actions.

Your political “enemies”  want you to see the world in us/them binaries, shoring up your certainty of Always Being on the Side of Good and thus Everyone On The Other Side is Evil.

Your political “enemies”  want you to regard all “political enemies” incapable of change or redemption, to rule out any common ground or potential cooperation unless they conform to your own political dogma.

Your political “enemies”  want you to refuse to let people admit their mistakes and make amends.

Your political “enemies”  want you to avoid self-exploration of your own possible mistakes or needs to self-correct.

Your political “enemies”  only want you to be able to argue “your side” of the issues. They want you to refuse even to consider alternative perspectives.

Your political “enemies”  want you to mock others who don’t align with you politically.

Your political “enemies”  want you to disparage and mock independents and non-voters.

Your political “enemies”  want you to embrace tactics of shame and intimidation in personal frameworks, calling out people rather than ideas.

Your political “enemies”  want you to call out the cruelty and lack of empathy of them but then demonstrate a refusal to consider them worthy of consideration or empathy yourself.

Your political “enemies”  want you to avoid the difficult process of seeking the redemption of your “enemies” and instead always commit to the strategy of vanquishing them through shame or intimidation.

Your political “enemies”  want you to limit your exposure to news and information only to partisan sources, the more extreme the better.

Your political “enemies”  want you to fracture your movement, to sow seeds of distrust from within it, to discourage unity and to resist uncomfortable compromises.

Your political “enemies”  want you to avoid any alliances or even engagement with moderate elements “on the other side” and dismiss any and all such efforts as a betrayal of The Cause.

Your political “enemies”  want you to obsess about single issues.

Your political “enemies”  want you to be inflexible and demand dogmatic purity from all candidates.

Your political “enemies”  want you to believe the righteousness of your cause negates any and all mistakes made by anyone or any group working in the name of that cause.

Your political “enemies”  want you to defend any and all protest–at least that you agree with–in the name of freedom of expression regardless of its effectiveness, and they also want you to turn around and try to quash any and all protest by those that you do not agree with.

Your political “enemies”  want you to craft your messaging by how it appeals to those already allied with you instead of how it could appeal to those on-the-fence.

Your political “enemies”  want you to recklessly fetishize rebellion and resistance above crafting credible alternatives.

Your political “enemies”  want you to trash wholesale government institutions such as “the police” or “the military” without specifics, because the more that the public distrusts them, the easier it is to privatize them in ways that are no longer subject to the oversight that government provides.

Your political “enemies”  want you also to trash non-government institutions such as “the church” or “organized religion” in ways that try and convict all instances of them because of historical misdeeds of some, or with self-important declarations of atheism, skepticism, and righteous intolerance.

Your political “enemies” want you to protest without clarity, to declaim and disparage your targets without delineating the better alternatives, to decry problems without giving solutions because cynicism only corrodes politics in general and encourages apathy and disengagement–which benefits them.

Your political “enemies”  want you to ENCOURAGE a reflexive distrust of institutions, especially government, to ENCOURAGE cynicism about politics, to ENCOURAGE messaging that is overwhelmingly negative about politics, politicians, and government.

Your political “enemies”  want you to help them give public service a bad name and discourage people from putting their faith and energy into it.

Your political “enemies”  want you to devote maximum attention to social media flame wars, especially within your own political silos.

Your political “enemies”  want you to frame everything through your own partisan political lens.

Your political “enemies”  want you to fill out online “polls” and “petitions.”

Your political “enemies”  want you to take on “online trolls” whenever possible.

Your political “enemies”  want you to waste your time, your energy, your attention.

Your political “enemies”  want you always to put idealism ahead of pragmatism, to insist on the former and to disparage the latter as “selling out.”

Your political “enemies”  want you to turn all your political defeats into purple-hearts awards that indicate your idealistic purity instead of opportunities to acknowledge your own mistakes and learn from them.

Your political “enemies”  want you to think you can’t make mistakes because of the power and passion of your idealism, and to focus your energy on purifying that idealism instead of learning the skills to accomplish real-world progress.

Your political “enemies”  want you to resist constructive criticism, to react to it rather than respond to it, and to crowdsource rage against any internal opposition.

Your political “enemies”  want you to be sure you are always right, and to let that certainty of righteousness to motivate and guide your tactics, strategy, and message.

Your political “enemies” want you to frame all political engagement as a matter of “vanquishing” those on the other side totally–and to consider that the only sort of acceptable victory.

Your political “enemies” want you to frame the primaries as contentious as a general election instead of as debates for clarifying a party’s message and vision.

Your political “enemies” want you to trash the very IDEA of “political parties” because it only encourages cynicism about process and thus hurts your own party while helping theirs.

Your political “enemies”  want you to evaluate the effectiveness of your words and actions by how it makes you FEEL, not by what it actually DOES.

Your political “enemies”  want you to ultimately help them by being the very authors of your own undoing.

Your political “enemies”  want you to do their work for them.

Your political “enemies”  want to win, know how to win, and want you to do their dirty work from your position inside “the other side.”

~Andrew Adam Caldwell

I'm right there with you on this one - almost as annoying (for men) as passing some woman that has a shorter stride than yours, who then reacts to this as a personal affront and expends an excessive amount of energy to get in front of you, slow down, and then turn around to look at you frequently as if to say: "Why are you following me?"

If you didn't know it by now.

quick reminder that my own gay ass genuinely supports the hell outta each and every one of you. regardless if i know you or not, im happy to be living in this shithole of a life in the same world with you.

and im proud of you, i know in my heart just how beautiful, amazing, talented, smart, and worthy you are and i hope you can see that too🏳️‍🌈🌈