Giving Good Face

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For some reason I can't quite fathom, faces seem to be doing it for me today. Big time.

So the question is who's giving the best face ...

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... decisions being of course totally subjective.

F R Leavis and Raymond Williams - Two Very Different Positions on 'Culture'

As I grew up, my idea of culture was what socialists disparagingly called 'posh culture', being positively championed and articulated by the famed literary critic F R Leavis ...

... in, among a range of contexts, 'The Great Tradition' (1948). Such high culture was seen to be embodied in a small number of seminal and critically important literary and artistic works, productions that revealed universal truths and wisdom, and the highest spiritual and moral goals to be strived for in a society. This notion of culture has developed and been controlled by elites for the past two hundred years.

Leavis was only ever recorded once and by the BBC - in a open lecture at Cambridge University, where he was a don. In this talk, he articulated his elitist position that the democratisation of culture was a great declining, as exemplified in the following extraordinary extract ...

One articulation of an alternative emerging and contemporary view of culture was given by Raymond Williams ...

 ... novelist, critic and Cambridge University don, in 'Culture and Society 1750-1950' (1958). Coming from a Welsh working class background, Williams widened the idea of what 'culture' could involve to mean 'the whole way of life' of all of the classes in a society, though there was a corrective and politically motivated focus on the culture of the working classes.

With my middle class plus background, I still have a sneaking affinity with elite culture - so wads of opera, ballet and classical music do me very well indeed. But through university sexual politics, theoretically based in an amalgam of Marx, Freud and Michel Foucault, I've added pop music, Manga comics and a range of other dangerously dissident interests to the mix.

Being gay, I guess we live across borders, using Williams' term, and have a natural affinity with taking a range of different often contradictory angles on the way we view the world and culture. I've never felt the needed to resolve the inherent contradictions in such a stance.

And I was wondering where you guys stood in this?

Is It Or Isn't It?

Ben Godfre has been moving towards the full monty for some time, like in Jon Seneca's somewhat coy but totally beautiful photo shoot ...

... through this pretty hot butt set ...

... and on to this more explicit mock amateur snap shots set ...

 Question is whether this (sadly faceless and, at the end, gas masked!) video is of Ben selfing ...

Ben's leg tat ...

... and foot tat ...

... are in evidence in the video ...

 

... so, rather unbelievably, I reckon this is the real thing.

What do you think guys?

Let's thrown one final image into the mix ...

... to help our decision making.

Postscript

No explanations necessary!

'These Are A Few Of My Fav-or-ite Things'

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These just caught my attention on some not so serious web surfing ...

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... any favourites?

I bet you know choices are better with reasons - LOL! 

Joseph Sayers - An Essay In Black and White

I suspect I can never get enough of Joseph Sayers - and a hot set of black and white images is all the excuse I need for yet another post.

And for the lucky last ...

... one of my all-time favourite images of this pint-sized erotic flesh pot.