“Arcing ropes of jism.” How could I not open my song of praise to Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme and not feature that description? I had to work it in somehow.

Sure, flying jism is a visual you’d associate with a porn site — but not a Joe Cocker song. And yet that’s the way Homme — the sexy and smart frontdude for the Queens — describes his reaction to a certain snare drum sound that he’s been “chasing” (to mimic and record) ever since he heard it on the Cocker tune.

The jism quote was featured in a recent Pitchfork interview that celebrates the release of the Queen’s exhilarating new album Era Vulgaris.

The title is Latin for “common era.” But don’t take that as an arty snub against our culture’s Last Days cluster fuck. Homme enjoys the times we’re all wallowing in, and considers the current zeitgeist a character building challenge — or as he puts it: (more…)

“Whenever I see twins,” Marcel Proust wrote, ” I feel thrown off balance, like nature is trying to sell me a pattern.”

Which may be why Jacob — or is it Joshua? — at left, decided to dye his hair.

The Miller boys are the gay twins that comprise the bubblegum duo Nemesis – openly gay, which, considering the teenybopper demo they’re aiming at, is pretty extraordinary.

For that reason, and also the fact that they’re out Jehovah Witnesses — a faith that severely shuns its gay members — they are currently the subject of a reality show on the gay-themed Logo channel.

All of which is trilling beyond belief, of course, but let’s get back to our burning question:

Which twin has the Toni? Which twin is rocking the outrageous dye job? That was what Radar online wanted to know in a recent interview.

“That would be Jacob,” said the one with the raven black hair. “Naturally, it’s Josh,” insisted the artfully streaked blond. This was the sort of con job the twins had pulled on outsiders since they were teens, making you guess, for instance , if you were really dating the one you thought you were.

As it turned out, the blond one, Jacob, is the faker. “We were 16 years old in Montana,” confessed Jacob. “We did a hair show, and the salon colored my hair blond.”

Currently the darlings of the gay press, the Miller boys discussed how they came out to each other in an extensive Radar interview, part of which we excerpt below: (more…)

They’re written for teenage girls, right? (Over 18, of course.)

For little pink things with pink cell phones text-messaging each other about parties and the proper way to give a blowjob (in a nutshell, girls, watch the teeth. Men are real crybabies about shit like that.)

Yet why do gay men — fully grown ones well, well out of their late-onset teens (which for a gay man means he’s about 30) — why do gay guys often quote these twiddling, diddling lyrics at you like they are bridging some shimmering chasm of profundity, which mere words, un-levitated by string sections, could never span?

Why, you chucklehead 30-year-olds — why?

And why do the same soppy lyrics crop up in farewell letters and over long-distance phone lines and in coffee shops where first-lovers stare sadly– and with such large, glistening corneas — into each other’s eyes?

Must the lyrics always come from the songs of innocence, never the songs of experience? Never from say, that snappy little toe-tapper by Peggy Lee, Is That All There Is? (more…)

As Henry James once noted: “Summer afternoon. Summer afternoon … the two most beautiful words in the English language.”

‘Tis true: Time and light elongate, clothing slides off, the air gets lazy, breezy — and so do I.

Here are four discs guaranteed to provide the perfect soundtrack for an unwound summer. Two are new, while the others I’ve pulled from storage because summer just wouldn’t be summer without them. (more…)

“Who was the last person who saw you naked?” the intrepid reporter from The Face asked Morrissey sometime back in the ’80s when he was still the lead singer of The Smiths.

Oscar Wilde could not have come back with a crisper reply: “Almost certainly,” Morrissey said, “the doctor who brought me into this cold, cruel world.”

The retort electrified me when I read it. It was that “almost” that slayed me. It elevated Morrissey to my pantheon of sly wits. (We see the singer here in his young, glory days.)

Morrissey, as many of you know, had the dubious honor of launching the entire emo-rock genre with his nakedly pathetic, love-lorn lyrics — most famously:

It was no accident that he inspired a rock cult that faithfully turned up for his every performance: Steven Patrick Morrissey happens to be one of the modern masters of that tricky literary form — the celebrity interview.

Last month the singer summoned the legendary rock journalist Paul Morley for a sit-down. Granting interviews has become increasingly rare for Moz, as his fans call him, and so there was a great deal of buzz when the word got out.

The published article, which has just appeared, is one of those mind-boggling, delicious rarities in the world of vapid, publicist-vetted puff pieces:

The singer actually says something revealing — while seeming to say nothing at all. (more…)

Ejaculating like a fountain all over the audience, fucking your keyboardist up the ass on stage, bursting into flames and than putting it out by pissing over everyone — hey, it’s called rock and roll!

Of course, it’s all showbiz illusion — nobody could keep coming and coming like that. But that doesn’t stop Rammstein, a German- language Heavy Metal Dance band.

And so we have the stimulating spectacle of humpily-built frontman Till Lindemann (left) wagging a liquor-squirting dildo throughout his set, from which the other band members occasionally drink and then — a trademark of the act — mounting his keyboardist, who compliantly assumes the position and offers up butt, complete with rear pants-flap for easy access.

But the ass-fucking is just the vanilla part of the act. For true kink, the studly Till keeps pissing continuously, spraying the front rows in a 100-proof version of a golden shower. (See the video. ) (more…)

Oh yeah … this is singing! This is singing, dancing and jumping up and down. And it’s making us crazy!

Nightcharm’s favorite baritone Nathan Gunn — can we ever get enough of those pecs! Those pecs that were so lovingly lit in the Munich production of Billy Budd, above — Nathan Gunn, our Nathan, is finally starring at the Met in what we hope will be his breakout role.

He plays the lead in a new opera, An American Tragedy (right), based on the the Dreiser novel about a poor but ambitious stud who murders his floozy girlfriend so he can marry a high-society deb.

Surely, you remember the movie,
A Place in the Sun, where Montgomery Clift (then, still Jason Priestly pretty) played the stud, Elizabeth Taylor (in full ravishing bloom) played the rich chick, and the most beloved movie floozy of all time, Shelley Winters was everything you could ask for in cheap and lurid.

Nathan has the superstar looks — aw hell, Nathan has the porn-star chest! — that could easily floor both those dames — not to mention our own brother-in-arms Montgomery Clift. Now there’s a four-way we’d pay to see!
(more…)

Where do we put these tears? Of course, Luther Vandross was gay. It was an open secret — neither denied or acknowledge by the artist. The professional closet so necessary to a singer of romantic ballads was the house that was not a home for this superstar, who sang both A House is Not a Home and Superstar as laments of the deepest, bluest melancholy. (more…)