“Speedos” were such a gay touchstone in the 80’s, and probably now to a degree, that my AI decided that this volume would be devoted to the subject. This video is a snapshot of the 300-page book, narrated by a familiar Western Voice, written, illustrated, and generated by software made by AI, as a Whitman’s sampler of what AI can do. Likewise, bored with the relentless substack articles about how the world is ending, I thought some good old fashioned gay Fluff, half-naked men on a beach, would be relaxing. As we used to say on usenet, “Your mileage may vary.” When I first went to the beach in 1980, Venice Beach California, Men didn’t wear speedos around their middle. They got out in the water, popped them off, put their head through a leg and wore them as a kind of colorful scarf. Those were the days.
This cycle generated some eye-popping visuals, which made me go back and see who Alex Ross really was. I’ll probably get sued for referencing him as my style target for generation, since he’s still alive, in his late 50’s. He’s a prolific comic book artist who inhabits multiple universes (DC, Marvel), and therefore has a lot of high-quality imagery used to train my tool of choice for now, Stable Diffusion. His Wikipedia page mentions “a Norman-Rockwell-meets-George-Pérez vibe” which is precisely what it resembles. I use Norman Rockwell as a style target way further on (Volume 40 I think), but his art is, well delicious. Because there are so may examples, and he’s so contemporary, it doesn’t suffer from any feature bias (spontaneous European, African American, and Asian), and there’s not much crowd-face distortion bias. Happily.
Men kissing bias: One really nice point is that his style doesn’t have ‘male kissing’ bias. Off and on when you see men kissing as a result of an AI summarizing what another AI did and sending as a prompt to another AI to make an image, the net effect is faces squashing together. The Ross target has very enthusiastic kissing:
Which in the context of a 4th of July parade, makes me feel quite patriotic.
But the quite interesting thing is how he packs his speedos. A feature of superheros in comic books which is very… nice… is the fact that they’re basically running around in sheer lycra underwear all the time. There’s even an extremely well-developed sex fetish for both men in lycra, and men in lycra superhero costumes which sort of sprang up (so to speak) in the early 2000’s, from I don’t know where. I’ve met countless British and Australian men who live for lycra, but the American version is so patriotic.
Simultatenous to the Speedo packing, there’s the very urgent collateral question if men of a certain age should be seen in public wearing speedos. One of the characters in the book volumes is over 50, in great shape, and while he’s not always rendered with a beard (sadly) he generally has a dislike of clothing, a quite hairy body, and a healthy appetite. Sort of like all adult men in Robert Heinlein stories.
I think there would be few who felt that a man like this wearing speedos is inappropriate, particularly on Fire Island, in the summer, in 1980. Unfortunately the AI cannot generate a telephone number for me to call him. He does look like a man with the voice of the narrator of the video.
Which brings me to the final image peculiarity. I asked for the Style of Alex Ross in image generation, but what also happens on and off is the name of the Style gets embedded in images like advertising branding.If you stare at the bottom third of the image you’ll notice ‘AlexRoss’ on the man’s Speedoes, or Underwear. It’s an excellent sort of AI Research read to look at those regions in images, to talley occurrences. Yep.
Douglas Adams of course wrote the spectacularly successful “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, which like Dr. Who, is a kind of franchise that never seems to die. I remember at Caltech, one of the VAX/11-780 computers we used was called “Zaphod Beeblebvax” after a character in the story. Goodness! 50 years ago, got some legs. The styling after Douglas Adams works well, the AI generation keeps a perfect tongue-in-cheek feeling throughout the text.
As the sun coyly retreats, the flirty senator, barely cloaked in his scanty Speedo, offers more than just a glimpse of his legislative prowess. Cheekily, he whispers sweet political nothings to a seasoned island lover, their spicy banter about rigid policy making quickly turning hands-on. Meanwhile, Tyler, clasping the naughty painting, unknowingly flaunts a fleshier agenda. Jamal, towering and majestic, wrangles the escalating ruckus with a stern, eye-catching flick of the wrist.
That’s the tawdry, innuendo-saturated tongue-in cheek through a few hundred pages which is quite funny - “glimpse of his legislative prowess”. The Speedo Pride parade was of course a terrible Succès de scandale, so to speak. Remember, the 1980’s were the start of the Great Outing of Politicians period. “Why not make all Pride Parades Speedo Parades” I thought. But of course, they already are.
Even the stranger parts, managed to keep typically Adams in the book.
In 1980, the universe inexplicably decided that cinema needed to explore the bafflingly bold realms of the New York leather scene. So, it conjured up the movie 'Cruising,' featuring none other than the indefatigable Al Pacino. Against the backdrop of gritty urbanity, Pacino dived deliriously into a world of leather, chains, and eye-opening experiences. The film caused quite the cosmic stir, with critics scratching their heads and audiences wondering if they had just been exposed to a parallel dimension of the gay underworld.
I saw Cruising at a theater in the rural south with my parents and a girlfriend when I was 17. There is no word for the simultaneous feeling of being mortified, breathless from watching fairly explicit goings-on at the Mineshaft in NYC, and the calculation machine going off in my head to estimate when I could get to NYC sans family.
Well, enjoy the brief video, we’re just at Volume 5 after all.
5) Summer Fluff: Douglas Adams/Alex Ross