...visit V-M-P: Vintage Male Physiques right away.
Visiting his blog is like visiting an alternate universe where they invented the internet back in the fifties. I had no idea that physique and beefcake magazines were so salacious. Small wonder that Cyndi Lauper used one to bring herself off in "She-Bop."
The absolute standout from the entire page, at least to me, was Vic Seipke, who I didn't know existed. His physique has a chiseled, professional and developed quality. Maybe I just think that because his pompadour, over-the-top even by terrifyingly low fifties standards, reminds me of Luke Perry from 90210. With that hair, he should consider giving up bodybuilding and either be the front man for Bill Haley and the Comets, or play Buck Rogers on some live-TV serial on the DuMont Network.
Here's the really warped thing about the V-M-P blog: while looking it over, it occurred to me these guys were a little...well, small? Maybe the more outrageous physiques of the superfreaks of today have totally destroyed our ability to accurately judge size and mass in any realistic way, but still. It just makes you appreciate all the more someone like Steve Reeves, as massive as he was well-proportioned. It makes sense he'd be the standout of this particular generation.
Just flip through that blog, then after a while come back here and see some Reeves pics.
(It's alright, I can wait.)
Okay, back? Yeah, see what I mean?
Finally, the guy that runs the blog apparently is Hollywood comedian Bob Balaban. Who, by the way, is a dead ringer for Mr. Smithers. Which explains everything.
2 comments:
Thanks for the link to this. It takes me back to the days of my youth, sneaking muscle magazines into my room, hiding them under the bed. The internet's taken all that away, that's for sure.. for better and for worse.
You're funnin' me about Bob Balaban - that's not Mr. Smithers! :-)
Awww, c'mon, you don't see it? I always fingered Balaban as a dead ringer.
I've often wondered exactly who the target audience of these physique magazines were, anyway. I've argued before on this blog that I always figured that part of the appeal by Weider and others was to young men, to show bodybuilding and muscle development as a healthy lifestyle that they did their best to make attractive (and, not incidentally, sell them expensive exercise equipment!).
One of the great losses of bodybuilding culture is that as it has started to "speak its own language" and become insular, instead of other young men looking in and saying, "wow, I'd like to be that, that looks good," they think, "wow, that guy's a freakshow."
I'd certainly have read them, but I'm very unusual as far as women go. Maybe because I'm bisexual, I'm often like a man about sex: "arouse quickly, finish fast," like Fay Dunaway's character in "Network," and more visual than a lot of others I know.
So that brings us to gay men. I suspect this element of the readership was very, very subtly encouraged.
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