WBF - World Bodybuilding Federation

The single most brilliant musician friend that I ever knew wanted to be a pianist, but she loathed the very idea of being a concert pianist, with the two-tailed coat and the white gloves. She wanted to play in t-shirts and jeans and show how piano and classical music could mean something to ordinary people without all the forced, phony conventions that come along with concert music, that it could be something fun and for everybody.

The mentality of a lot of classical concert fans can best be summarized by the sentence "hey, stop having fun, guys!" In fact, come to think of it that could also apply to the dull and stodgy world of bodybuilding.

I was reminded a little of that when I heard about the WBF - World Bodybuilding Federation, a bodybuilding league and competition created by Vince MacMahon, the panache filled huckster and showman responsible for the WWF (and more applicably, the XFL - a better metaphor for this bodybuilding league). A detailed history of the league, and one of the best blog reads in some time, can be found here.

The WBF was an insanely surreal carnival version of broadcast bodybuilding with bodybuilders adopting weird personas. For example, Tony Pearson had been an actual pilot and so his "character" came out with pilot goggles and gloves and so on as he did the usual bodybuilding flex and grind. There were catwalks that glowed, lots of arm candy girls, fireworks, and smoke bombs detonated in the background. Everyone had a "persona." The professional wrestling school applied to the WBF, where lots of effort was made to turn bodybuilders into not just athletes but superstars. And then there was the narration, which can best be described as YELLING, the kind of color commentary expected of Professional Wrestling. It's so different from the two stodgy dweebs in a booth prattling about "symmetry."

Tony Pearson I must admit, was something of a sensation. The narration insisted that he was "drug free," a claim that is usually worth a belly laugh and not much more. Though I am inclined to believe it in the case of the WBF for the same reason I believe it in American Gladiators: they're under far too much scrutiny to not play conservatively.

I hate to admit it, but I kind of like it all. I've often admired bodybuilding in other cultures like Korea because they don't just do the usual, graveyard-boring "stage where people flex to speed metal."

The WBF had a grand total of two competitions, in 1991 and 1992 and Gary Strydom won both. Here's an area where professional bodybuilding and this bizarre carnival converge: people win not so much because they are necessarily the best but because they have the connections. Gary Strydom was approached to wrestle by MacMahon, who had charisma, but Strydom turned him dwn. This is not too different really from the situation in "real" bodybuilding. Cory Everson is a great athlete but she only really won all those times because she was in the Weider's back pocket, after all. In that sense WBF is more like "real" bodybuilding than anyone would care to admit.

Statue criticized for having an enormous penis

In Jamaica, the "Redemption Song" statue is dedicated to the end of slavery. Instead of chain-breaking and other cliche imagery, the statue chose to show the awe and relief of freedom.

But the guy has a gigantic dick.

Reporters have really filthy minds when they dedicate themselves to it, and they really like to play games...even in the super-serious British press. The first time I realized this was way back with discarded Senator Rick Santorum, who because of his famous anti-gay sentiments received the honor of a gross sex fluid named after him. Man, it was downright hilarious to see newspaper articles work hard to slip in double-entendre phrases like "frothy" and "worked into a froth." It was like the reporters were playing a game with each other: who could put in the most sex references to Santorum without actually getting caught.

The coverage of the statue, when it was unveiled, focused entirely on the immense penis. It was like the reporter was constantly having to hide a giggle.

The thing that makes this so beautiful is that the statue's prudish critics can be accused of penis envy. Count the number of times the word "inadequacy" is used.

"Mutty [a critic of the statue] has an aversion to large penises, and I must say, the penis on the statue is large," wrote Mark Wignall a columnist for the Daily Observer newspaper.

For the most part, the controversy surrounding the statue at its opening has died down and it's a regular part of the city, on every tourist brochure. No one really cares anymore.

Despite the laid-back reputation of Jamaicans for sex, sun and pot-smoking, according to the Guinness Book of World's Records, Jamaica has more churches per mile than any other nation. It doesn't surprise me that the most sexy and interesting monument would come from a culture that at its heart is conservative. There is such a thing as being too casual about sex and bodies, so that all the fun is taken out of it. Ever seen Norway's Vigeland Sculpture Park? There's a nation that is comfortable about sex and nudity that its art is entirely boring, unidealized and straight-up square, with old women and fragile old men.

Visit a Photomanip Blog

I generally don't like photomanips for the same reason that I don't like most muscle growth themed art: a lot of artists don't quite understand that the best kind of photomanips, the most believable sort, are small, subtle twists for more pleasing proportions, and "extreme" level photomanips fall into the "uncanny valley," where something is obviously fake and your mind rebels against the idea.

Also, with the near-universal availability of programs like photoshop, there are a lot more bad photomanipulators than good ones.

With the blog BigDudes, the very best photomanips are the most recent ones where he just tweaks them for masculine dimensions instead of inflating them grotesquely. It's actually possible to see him improve: the first few images are unrecognizable masses of grunting overstuffed bulges, whereas the recent ones are sleek, unbelievably massive and well proportioned. Perhaps I don't "get" photomanips as well as others do, but I like to think for a woman I'm more visual about sexuality and attraction than normal. However, it is true that with any celebrity or photographed figure, the more they're airbrushed the worse things get.

Visit his work here.

Special emphasis should be paid to some of his more robust muscle posteriors and backs. This blog is definitely one to watch for.

"Weird Science" Muscle Growth Episode on Hulu

The muscle growth episode of the "Weird Science" TV series is right now on Hulu (first season, "One Size Fits All" if you're looking for it)...as is, for that matter, the entire series. Watch this episode here.

I didn't remember the "Weird Science" TV series...but Vanessa Angel is, surprisingly, a really great comedian with great timing. She's not as spellbinding as Kelly LeBrock, but she is a lot funnier. Supposedly, Vanessa Angel was the original choice for Xena, Warrior Princess, but Lucy Lawless was the last-minute replacement when she became unavailable...which I find hard to believe.

What I find amusing is the choice to play Wyatt's amazonian girlfriend. If she's an athlete and weightlifter, then I'm a Viking Princess.

Here's one of the more choice sequences for all you beefcake pervs:

A friend of mine that understood men as nearly as possible as it is to understand men, once said that every single guy's favorite movie was almost always one of three films: The Big Lewbowski, The Usual Suspects, and Pulp Fiction. If you've seen all three, you can talk with men about nearly any movie. While I liked all three of those films I'd hardly consider them my favorite movies ever, but then again, I'm not the target audience so it doesn't matter what I think.

If there's a female equivalent of the Pulp Fiction/Usual Suspects/Big Lebowski trio, it would probably be the John Hughes high school films. I always operated under the assumption that the John Hughes movies were all set in the same continuity, and that Anthony Michael Hall's character in Weird Science was the exact same guy as the Freshman in Sixteen Candles. After all, he pretty much played the exact same character in both films: a spastic, immature, yet sweet nerd who was totally unaware he was a geek and thought of himself as a cocky, sophisticated ladies man that understands romance and women.

I always thought Weird Science was John Hughes's Return of the Jedi, the weakest of his movies, kept watchable only because of adorable supercutie Ilan Michael Smith as Wyatt, and the absolutely cool and mesmerizing Kelly LeBrock. Add these two to another lengthy list of actors that I'm astonished never really became very big stars.

Bodybuilding in Al Capp's Lil' Abner

Amazing how some things in pop culture can be totally everywhere one minute and then totally vanish forever the next. Most people that know something about "Li'l Abner" know about it from the Broadway musical, but at one point it was a pop cultural phenomenon.

Essentially, the jokes are all about laughing at the dumb, hick ways of rural poor people - a now radioactively politically incorrect style of humor, which may explain why this isn't paid attention much these days.

This strip is from 1956 and features "Tiny" Yokum, an overdeveloped 15 1/2 year old muscular kid that gets bamboozled by some Charles Atlas type, who exploits him for his overdeveloped hick muscles.

"There's only room for one Toby MacGwire in Hollywood...and that's me...Jake Gyllenhaal!"

My question is this: who does Jake Gyllenhaal think he's fooling with that goofy "macho" stubble, anyway? It reminds me a little of my grandfather wearing sunglasses, a clear-cut case of trying too hard.

Jake Gyllenhaal gets me juiced like a cranapple (as opposed to his dopier and considerably less sexy doppleganger, Toby MacGwire), so imagine my great delight to hear that a huge chunk of the promotional materials for the movie "Prince of Persia" centers around him bulking up, doing his own stunts and being shirtless a lot. At first I was all prepared to be sarcastic and catty...after all, Hollywood tends to do this a lot with varying degrees of sincerity. Remember how part of Terminator 2's publicity was centered around Linda Hamilton getting "buff?" (That level of muscle wouldn't even get her in a bikini contest, much less Fitness-class.)

But the truth is, all sarcasm aside, the guy does look good! I've never seen anyone get this built for a role, with the possible exception of Harrison Ford preparing for "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom."

Apparently, "Prince of Persia" is a real thing. I actually didn't know that. The first place I ever heard of "Prince of Persia" was in Russian author Victor Pelevin's short story "Prince of Central Planning," which showed the life of a Soviet-era drone in a slothful bureaucracy where all everybody does is play computer games all the time, with bureaucrats that live vicariously through their game characters. I thought "Prince of Persia" was as made up as the TV show "Galaxy Quest" until I saw the trailers for the movie and wondered for a minute if I had slipped into an alternate universe.

By the look of things, the film seems like Pirates of the Caribbean 4: an action romantic comedy with rapid-fire dialogue, and even has the Pirates trademark of awkward, totally inappropriate and out of place fantasy elements. For the record, I never liked the Pirates of the Caribbean films after the first: the "ghost story" horror elements were handled so broadly after the first film that they just became awkward and inappropriate, like an episode of Melrose Place that involves time travel. The Jim Henson Creature Shop ship of the dead was especially inappropriate; it felt like something that Guillermo del Toro would have Hellboy encounter instead of Captain Jack.

New York's Own: Javier Datiz

Lots of muscle guys live in my hometown (second only to L.A., San Diego and Miami as the body capital of the United States), but only a few are from here. Allow me to present the gorgeous Javier Datiz!

What got my attention is that even without his muscles he could be a model. And not a pretty boy model either: look at that square jaw of his, high cheekbones.

I've often found it interesting that men really, really hate it when women like a certain kind of movie star: Leonardo di Caprio comes to mind, as does the massive hate for Rudolph Valentino way back when in the silent era.

On the other hand, men don't mind it when women like men that are very much like how men see themselves: Harrison Ford and Clark Gable come to mind, very masculine, tough and heroic sorts.

I have a feeling that most guys wouldn't object to a girl with a crush on Javier Datiz. He's got a little Harrison Ford by way of Newyorican in him.