Performers Part 16

The Bloodhound Gang

In 1990, James Franks (stage name Jimmy Pop) and a friend formed the band The Bloodhound Gang.  Unable to book shows anywhere, they performed at the house of another friend, Jared Hennegan.  Hennegan joined the band in 1995 as bass player under the stage name Evil Jared Hasselhoff (above).

Jared, born in 1971, often appears naked, including on stage, as we will see.

In 2005, Jimmy and Jared appeared on the German talk show TV Total, above, and Jared did an impromptu striptease.  Now that's an unashamed male!  Being a German show, they didn't blur or pixellate the nudity.

Jared is also known for the stunts that he did on stage as part of Bloodhound Gang performances.   Above, he whips out his penis and drags a box across the stage with a chain attached to his cock ring.  Look, ma, no hands!

An even more outrageous routine is shown above, repeated at so many Bloodhound Gang concerts that fans came to expect it.  While Jimmy Pop is singing, Evil Jared starts pissing on him, right on stage.  Watch the video to see what happens next.

We end with a short clip from a 2007 Bloodhound Gang music video Screwing You on the Beach at Night.  The original music video was played for comedy, showing a dorky-looking clothed Jimmy Pop with a sexy topless woman on a beach, not screwing, just singing about it.  But they also made an X-rated version of the video, showing a male and female porn star fucking, surrounded by the band members playing and singing.  In the clip above, from the end of the video, the porn star comes into Jimmy Pop's hand.  Watch to see what Jimmy does with it (this is starting to look familiar).

The Bloodhound Gang has been inactive since 2013.

Instruments - Part 10

Harp

The harp was played in ancient Egypt, although it didn't have the exact form of the modern instrument.  An ancient cousin of the harp is the lyre, smaller than a harp and with fewer strings.  In ancient Greece, the god Apollo was associated with the lyre.  This is a Roman statue of Apollo with a lyre from Hadrian's villa c. 150 AD.

An etching of a satyr playing a lyre by Hans Sebald Beham, 1531, now in the Museum of New Zealand.

This more recent statue of a nude man with a lyre is by Cummings, San Francisco, 1920s.

This is called Nude Male with Harp by American artist Frank Eugene, 1908-1910, in the Metropolitan Museum.  But it looks like a lyre, not a harp.  Well, they both have strings that you pluck.

This is a Swedish Art Deco glass vase engraved with a naked harp player by Lindstrand c. 1934.

This undated modern painting by Bruce Sargeant, pseudonym of artist Mark Beard, is called Practicing the Harp.

But none of those instruments look like a modern orchestral harp, seen in this photo.  The orchestral harp has more strings, giving it an enormous range, and importantly, it has foot pedals for raising or lowering the pitch of the strings so the harp can play any chromatic note (i.e. the black notes as well as the white notes).  Note also that the base of the instrument is quite wide, acting as a soundboard to amplify the notes.

Another harp player.

We end with a pseudo-angel playing a harp.  Given his lack of clothing, I have my doubts how angelic he is.

Events - Part 18

Swanbourne Nude Olympics

Previously we covered the Maslin Beach Nude Olympics in Australia.  But there's another Nude Olympics in Australia, held at Swanbourne Beach, a nude beach near Perth, since 1983.  Today's photos are from the 2009 Swanbourne Nude Olympics.

These games are held on the third Sunday in February, which is summer in Australia.  Like the original Olympic Games in ancient Greece, all the competitors are naked.  Like the Maslin Beach Nude Olympics, nobody is likely to confuse these games with the real Olympics.

The first event, above, is called Eggs in Space.  Each two-person team tosses an egg back and forth, increasing the distance between them.  The team that gets farthest apart without breaking the egg wins.

Above is is the Tutti Fruiti game, in which contestants have to eat slices of watermelon and then run a course.  Speed in eating the watermelon is critical.

Another watermelon eater.

In the "Fill 'er up" event, contestants have to fill a bucket with salt water using only their bodies to transport the water.

After lunch is the popular Best Bums Contest.  Men and women are judged separately. Above are the men lined up behind a banner so they'll be judged only by their bums.

Here are the winners of the men's Best Bums Contest, marked 1, 2 and 3.

Above are the winners of the Flour Sack Struggle, a sack race.

Then comes the 4-legged race for teams of 3 people.  It's similar to a 3-legged race, except the person in the middle has his right leg tied to the person on his right, and his left leg tied to the person on his left.  This makes it tricky to even walk without falling down, let alone run.

The last event is the Tug 'o War, which everyone is invited to participate in.  It looks like a fun time was had by all.

Vintage Military - Part 20

World War II - Sicily

After the Allied reconquest of North Africa, the next step was to begin the recapture of Europe from the Nazis and Fascists.  The opening move was Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily from North Africa.

The video above, from Britain's Imperial War Museum, shows troops swimming from the ships that had gathered in the harbor at Sfax, Tunisia.  The video was taken on July 6, 1943, a few days before the invasion.  A couple of the troops had swimsuits, but the vast majority swam naked.  In wartime in those days, it was not a big deal.

American, British and Canadian troops landed on the night of July 9th, 1943 and quickly defeated the Italian resistance.  Above, Italian prisoners, some naked, on the beach.

(Photo by LIFE photographer Bob Landry, cropped to show detail)

This is why some of the Italian prisoners were naked.  They had to wade out to board a landing craft, presumably taking them to a POW camp.

(Photo by LIFE photographer Bob Landry)

I used this photo in a previous post about Australian photographer Laurence Le Guay.  Members of an Australian Royal Air Force fighter bomber squadron had provided air support for the invasion.  Here they are afterwards in Sicily enjoying a bucket shower.

Showers were in short supply in wartime, and the troops took every opportunity to shower that they could get.  This short clip from a newsreel shows an Operation Husky soldier taking an improvised shower.

Finally, this footage was taken for a British Pathé newsreel but was unused or not released.  It shows Canadian troops in Sicily taking advantage of another improvised shower opportunity, using water dripping from a railroad water tower.

Ads - Part 15

Dolce & Gabbana

The Italian fashion company Dolce & Gabbana is headed by Domenico Dolce (left) and Stefano Gabbana (seated), shown here apparently getting to know some models a little better.  Both are openly gay, and they were once in a relationship.  The relationship ended, but they are still business partners, if not romantic partners.

Dolce & Gabbana ads have often had a strong homoerotic element.  The 2005 ad above is typical, showing a naked man but with no frontal nudity.

However, rear nudity in is seen in the ads. 

Another ad teases with a little pubic hair.

This ad is a surrealistic combination of a woman wearing an excruciating-looking metal corset around her waist, a naked man on the floor, and other men standing and walking obliviously through the scene.  What's the point of the naked man?  To get your attention, of course.

In this 2007 ad, more women are wearing the excruciating metal corsets.  The men are wearing nothing.

Another 2007 ad (not shown here) depicted a shirtless man pinning down a clothed woman on the ground while other clothed men looked on.  The ad was widely criticized for suggesting a rape scene.

But other D&G ads were actually far more sexual, like this 2008 ad showing a naked man on the floor being looked at and pointed at by two seated men, while the man at left is unzipping his pants.

This 2007 ad for the D&G fragrance "The One" for men is the most explicit, although the naked man's genitals seem to have been edited out.  It depicts a gay BDSM scene.  A naked man is on a gynecology exam chair, complete with leg rests, which one of the men is adjusting, to lift and separate his legs so his asshole will be exposed.  There are wrist straps on the arm rests to immobilize him, although he hasn't been strapped in yet.  And the man at left has pulled out a leather belt that he's getting ready to use.  Yikes!

By the way, I have no idea why this ad would encourage people to buy the fragrance that was being advertised.  Going after the gay BDSM market?

We end with this photo, which is not an ad.  It was taken at the 2014 Dolce & Gabbana spring menswear show.  At the end of the show, when the designers came out to take their bows, this streaker ran down the fashion runway until he was tackled by security guards.  Maybe the designers should recruit him for a future ad.

Festivals - Part 17

Woodstock 99

Woodstock 99 was another attempt to recreate the Woodstock festival, 30 years after the original.  It was held on July 22-25, 1999 in upstate Rome, NY, about 100 miles from the original Woodstock site.

The concert site was the former Griffiss Air Force Base, which had been closed a few years earlier.  As a military base, it was surrounded by a 12-foot plywood and steel fence, which the concert promoters liked, because people couldn't sneak in without paying, as happened at previous rock festivals.

Because it had been an Air Force base, much of it was paved with concrete runways.The weather was hot, and the extensive pavement, combined with a lack of trees for shade (airports don't have trees near the runways), made it even hotter.  Some accounts said it got over 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

Of course, the time-honored rock festival solution to excessive heat was for attendees to get naked.

The festival had a host of problems, not the least of which was that people were not allowed to bring food and drink into the site and had to buy it from vendors who ridiculously overcharged.  A bottle of water cost $4.  There was insufficient grassy area for campers' tents, and people had to set up tents on the concrete runways.  Toilets were insufficient for the crowd of 220,000.  By the end of the festival, angry crowds started fires and broke into ATMs, and vendor booths were broken into and set afire.

But the music was good, and from the Unashamed Male standpoint, one band was outstanding.  The Red Hot Chili Peppers had been known to play naked except for "socks on cocks."  At Woodstock 99, the band was clothed except for bassist Michael Balzary, better known as Flea.  He played stark naked the entire time.  Above is his entrance onstage.  Definitely an unashamed male!

Another view of Flea playing with the other band members.

The video above is an extract that I made from a complete video of the Red Hot Chili Peppers' performance at Woodstock 99.  From over an hour of performance, I selected clips showing the best views of Flea.  Note: this video is rather long (8 minutes; there were a lot of naked views), and the audio is choppy, containing short bits of different songs.  Don't watch it for the music; watch it for the visuals.

A  peace group had distributed candles to the crowd, intending them for a candlelight vigil for the Red Hot Chili Peppers' song Under the Bridge.  However, the crowd began using them to start bonfires (above).  At the end of the Red Hot Chili Peppers' performance, they played Jimi Hendrix's song Fire to honor Hendrix and his performance at the original Woodstock, but this seems to have encouraged the crowd, already angry at the festival organizers, to start burning the place down.

Despite all that, when a documentary of the festival was made 22 years later called Peace, Love and Rage, people who were there called it one of the best weekends of their lives.

Protests - Part 16

Nus et Debout, France

On Aug. 21, 2011, members of the French environmental group Respire (Breathe) met on the Plateau de Gergovie in the Auvergne region of central France for a naked protest.

They called the protest "Nus et Debout," which means "naked and standing," but debout also means erect, in both senses of the word.

They were protesting the construction of an incinerator that they said would pollute the air.

Then they all joined hands ... (disclosure: in the chain of people holding hands, I edited out two women who were between the third and fourth guys)

... formed a giant spiral ...

... and raised their arms in solidarity.

The nudity, and perhaps the phrase "naked and erect," achieved its purpose of drawing attention to the protest.  This is part of the coverage of the protest on French TV.  Note that French TV showed male frontal nudity without blurring or pixellating it.

The thing I liked best in the TV clip was this brief glimpse of a cameraman on a raised platform, because he was also naked, apparently in solidarity with the protesters.

Not the Same Old Song - Part 9

Baby What a Big Surprise

Baby What a Big Surprise is a 1977 song by Chicago.

I was tempted to illustrate it using images like the one above that I found on the blog Sicko Ricko's Crap (thanks, Rick).

But I think this video of a different kind of surprise works, too.  It was recorded in 2017 at a British Lions vs New Zealand All Blacks rugby game in Auckland, New Zealand.

World Naked Bike Ride - Part 19

Welsh Guys, San Francisco 2011

Two guys made a conspicuous appearance at the 2011 WNBR in San Francisco.  Several  comments on photos of them said they were Welsh tourists.  Aberystwyth, on the T-shirt that one of them was wearing before they stripped, is a town in Wales.

The Welsh guys obligingly posed naked for lots of photos.  These photos were all taken in the place where San Francisco WNBR riders gather before the ride begins.

You can see why they were popular photo subjects.

One of them picked up the other one.

And then the other one returned the favor.

More posing for the cameras.

They also posed with other WNBR riders, including the beanie cap guy at left who I covered in a previous post, and two girls who didn't seem to have grasped the "naked" part of World Naked Bike Ride.

Later. I saw criticism of the Welsh guys because they didn't actually participate in the bike ride.  They were tourists and didn't have bikes, but they showed up naked to support the event, which seems to have been appreciated by event co-organizer Jim, who they're posing with above.

In a World Naked Bike Ride, if it's a choice between riding a bike but not being naked, like the girls in the previous photo, and being naked but not riding a bike, like the Welsh guys, I'll take the naked guys.