Robert Manners

Gotta Love 'Em!

I notice I'm using a lot of colloquialisms in my title spellings lately. I remember when I used to use French more often. Do you suppose that's a step up or a step down? I guess like most things, it's neither...it's a lateral sort of step.



So anyway, in my ongoing crusade to flood my blog with positive attitudes, sweetness and light and pixie-dust, here is a list of things I really love right now:



1) Red Vines: when I was at Costco shopping for my party, I bought one of those gallon drums of Red Vines, and I have been very virtuous in not eating them all at once...I'm only about halfway through the 300-count barrel so far. But tonight the virtue is falling away, and I've chawed down a good dozen since I've been sitting here at the computer (the barrel is just a step away on the china-cupboard), and I'm quite tempted to reach for another handful. Mmmmmmm...a fat-free food! So full of sugar and wax and artifically-flavored goodness! I always get a box of Red Vines when I go to the movies, I in fact feel like I'm missing something if I don't have them. Once I bought one of these barrels and took it with me on a trip to Disneyland, and Kevin and I ate the whole thing between here and Santa Barbara. You would think that such a concentrated consumption of faux-raspberry chewiness would turn me off of them, but we bought another barrel to make ourselves sick on the way home. I just LOVE Red Vines! (just three more Vines and I swear I'll stop...for now).



2) Cartier: I have this big coffee-table book entitled Cartier, 1900-1938 by Judy Rudoe, and it's definitely in the top five of my favorite books. Not only is it chock-a-block with pictures of fabulous jewels, it also shows all the many design innovations that the house of Cartier developed in the beginning of the century. It's not just about the jewels and those who wear them (I have other books about those), it's also about the art of jewel-making. And Cartier is definitely my favorite style of jewels. There's something both spare and sumptuous about their designs, an almost unbelievable elegance. I mean, even the backs of the pieces are unbearably beautiful! If I ever found myself the possessor of grotesque wealth, I would certainly become a collector of Cartier pieces. As it is, I can only lust after the pictures in my book and find solace in eBay-affordable substitutes.



3) Porn: but you already knew that, didn't you? I just love looking at beautiful men, and I really love watching beautiful men have sex...even (or especially) stylized, camera-ready sex, which I know resembles real-life sexual intercourse as much as Swan Lake resembles duck-hunting in Russia. And I really enjoy solo-porn, both video and print, the sort of voyeuristic peeping on someone performing a very private and pleasurable act. It does bother me that the world of porn-production is so terribly seedy, so full of drugs and danger and crime, attracting and often destroying the lost and the demented and the doomed. But every once in a while, out of all the crassness, the trashiness, the vulgarity, there are these transcendent moments where two (or three or more) bodies working together in harmony and pleasure are just so aesthetically gorgeous...it's really art, an expression of perfect beauty, not just mechanical titillation.



So there's my gratitude list for tonight. I'm done eating Red Vines, I have to go brush my teeth. I think I'll go get in bed and flip through my Cartier book and then watch some really artsy-fartsy porn like Carnival in Venice. You, in the meantime, can rest your peepers on these beautiful animals:

Now that's the kind of "bare-backing" I can approve!