David: Thanks to everyone for stopping in and making this one of the most popular gay blogs circulating the posh new realm of Web 2.0 (whatever in the fuck that is.) Please keep sending in your catastrophes — because, well, without them we’re nothing.

Oh, too, thanks for voting for us in Cybersocket’s Best Adult Blog category. We’ll mention each of you when we accept our award in Hollywood next month.

David K.
 

David: What’s fabulously meanspirited about this picture’s composition is how the photographer is forcing our attention onto his wreath collection and not so much on the model’s rearing ass. Our future porn star senses that he’s not the center of the spread — which explains his exasperated expression. You can hear him yelling back at the photographer: “Fuck the goddamned garland and show what’s important: My suffering for art — with this cockring ripping my ballsack off at the root!”

Beyond the chaotic menagerie of wall art (a stuffed fish anyone?), we’ve got the one defining element that turns this entire room into a genuine “happening” worthy of Lurid Digs. That luxurious faux mink bedspread, swelling like a wave that’s ready to crash through our monitor. Again the model is upstaged by the setting. He seems precariously placed on the shifty spread, an afterthought almost, easily tossed aside so the room might bloom bigger and brighter with all its festive splendor.

Hat tip to Wayne for this fabulous Christmas moment.
 

Shawn: I feel nothing but sympathy for this guy. He probably figured taking up with those kindly old ladies would be a sweet deal. How could he know they were actually elderly pornographers who target skid row hustlers, lure them back to their respectable-looking suburban split-level and ultimately coerce them to don glittery Santa attire for their web-based smut ring? The dainty, lacy curtains belie a yuletide off-to-grandmother’s-house-we-go warmth and conceal the organized crime within. The chintzy dime store vase has a very “Mama’s Family” rerun vibe while the fakey flower arrangement at once invites you to have a sugar cookie and pay no attention whatsoever to the hidden camera.

Richard: “So, do you like it? It was a total rush job — grandma stepped out of the house for, like, ten minutes, and it took me almost that long to dig out the Naughty Santa costume she’d worn for Halloween. Then I had to set up the tripod and the camera in the living room — I mean, I didn’t even have time to do the red-eye thing. Still, I think it’ll make a nice Christmas card, don’t you, Uncle Jim?”

John: Heaven’s Portals are now open for business. That mural, first of all, then the holy water fount, then the banker’s lamp with the faux stained glass. And back to the mural again. This is what it means when the senses reel.

Gods, cupids, angels — and meaty buns … hard-as-granite meaty buns … please-be-seated meaty buns. I need to lie down now. Medic the room is spinning.

An angel with singed wings (brilliant touch) swoops down with … what, a hula hoop?… no, surely a crown (could that be, of thorns? oh, puleeze!) for our buzz-cut art-lover and damaged altar boy.

Storm clouds part, a …. god? goddess? mermaid? … lifts an elegiac arm, and all the heavens hail the momentous revelation of a perineum in thong, pulled open for full penetration.

Even the clothes, lying willy-nilly, suggest that a blinding manifestation has whirlwinded though the room, stopping only to smoke a Kools from the cigarette pack on the table. And by the way, what is that color scheme… papaya? The lime-skin shutters, the orange-pulp walls?

No matter. The message is clear: Damaged altar boy seeks same, liturgical-acting only.
 

Shawn: I’d describe this setting as a blue movie take on a Vincent Price/Edgar Allan Poe epic from the early 70s called The Mounting of Morella or The Bitchfinder General.

His Faustian Van Dyke and bicep bat tattoo are icing on the cake. If it’s possible to fuse Neo-Goth with Country Primitive, this guy has pulled it off.

High props for the velvety deep green draperies and tablecloth. Both items would seem pretentious and “bordello” were it not for the glossy wood chairs and matching chandelier — two items that could be set interiors on Twin Peaks.

I think the candelabra may be the linchpin of the whole affair. Very Interview With The Vampire. No one really needs one of them, yet he’d lose some of his mystique without it.

The bonus is the treeny Home Sweet Home-style wall mount in the background that adds a cozy air to the whole affair.

Sure, he’s probably going to exsanguinate you or perform some sort of diabolical sex rite upon you while you lay dazed and powerless, but he’ll serve you a nice homemade apple crisp first.

We’ve all had worse.
 

Richard: Under normal circumstances, I could be content writing about the unrelenting beigeness of this interior, or perhaps the unearthly “hand toned” landscape dangling above the classy sleeper sofa, but I haven’t had my coffee this morning, and I’ve got post-Kung Pao indigestion, so I’m gonna go for the jugular and talk about the guy.

I’ll go out on a limb and guess that Romeo-in-Waiting here is a mathematician, or at least the kind of person who excelled at algebra. Which is not to say that I hold a deep-seated grudge against men who can solve for X, but let’s face it: they tend to be a little “left brain”.

It looks like Poindexter caught half an episode of Trading Spaces (which is all anyone should be exposed to, anyway) and ran straight to Sam’s to pick up grosses of votive candles, side tables, and ID lubricant. Which is fine, but whereas a right-brained geometry enthusiast would’ve arranged his new wares in a random pattern to interest the eye, this poor zhlub has chosen fearful, fearful symmetry. Still, we needn’t lavish him with all our pity — we ought to save some of it for his Manhunt blind date.

John: Thank you, Richard, for reminding us that the Beige Lifestyle is a choice; nobody is born that way. But I think Poindexter — for that surely must be his dream name, as Bezuzu was Linda Blair’s dream name in Exorcist II — I think he’s making an epic effort to break out and go gay.

It is not lost on me that he has coordinated the room to pick up the colors in that remarkable paint-by-the-numbers above his bed. I recognize it as Mountain Idly #267, and I suspect P did it, as I did mine, during art therapy at the rehab. It could have been worse. One girl in my class — like so many of us, another showkid in recovery — did the whole ballet series (#430 - 440) and now her bedroom is a pink-striped candy box, with lamps that look like they’re wearing tutus.

So kudos to Poindexter, for going nuts with the forest green bedsheets and matching under garment — alas, it’s too modest to be really called underwear. See that there is the problem: those swim trunks you’re wearing plus the lined-up candles plus the pull-out sofa bed — they’re all too psychically beige to be a true break with your tragic lifestyle.

One suspects that even after chatting up a man for hours online and then meeting him in a coffee shop to check out the goods and then driving him back in a fever to your den of beige sin, you still end up having profoundly anonymous sex — if mutual handjobs can still be called sex.

Richard: I’m not entirely certain how the Lurid Digs handmaidens got their lube-stained mitts on this doozie, but I must say I’m impressed. I mean, it’s not every day that one stumbles across a color photograph of renowned Norwegian painter Edvard Munch — much less on a site usually dedicated to gay pornography. (That is what we’re discussing here, right: gay porn?)

Anyway, as we can all clearly see, this dates from Munch’s early career. In fact, in the work hanging behind the artist’s well-sculpted buttocks, we can see his use of the rich, earth-toned palette he would later immortalize in that perennial dorm room favorite, The Scream (although the painting we see here is clearly a derivative depiction of Oslo’s famous botanical gardens, executed in the manner of Monet).

The photographer seems to have interrupted Mr. Munch in the process of creating a rather naughty self-portrait — such paintings were, in fact, often discreetly displayed on the exterior of urban dwellings across Europe, and they are generally considered predecessors to the “Manhunt headless dick shot” so common today. Let us hope that Edvard’s quest for hot, Scandinavian booty led to a very warm night for all parties.

John: This guy is so succulent, his dick so thick that it kills me that he has such great taste too. He knows — was born knowing — he could only exist in a room like this, a room that aspires to all that is best in Best Western. The anonymous lamp, the anonymous wood, the anonymous panels. Can we please have sex through a gloryhole?

The Motel 6 aesthetic is the Meth-Viagra of room decor — as this heavily-donged bastard so clearly asserts. I bet he even knows never to speak like the educated brainiac that he so obviously is. An art school graduate, I’d say, judging from the impressionist sunset — clearly a post-modern jest — which he hangs, perhaps a tad too knowingly, at an ironic angle as if all he’s good for is fucking on the floor until the walls rattle.

Steve: I’ll be moving in next week; thanks.
 
 
 

Steve: My favorite way of putting an immediate damper on passion is to take photos of myself propped against a mountain of frilly pink plush. The only step further one could take this would be to actually bury oneself in the pile with only one’s face and cock protruding, but then that becomes "art."

For more inspiration see this prior example.

David: The delicate curtains in this picture convey a breezy, gauzy magical quality to the entire tableau. While the diffused lighting mitigates the dark, disturbing Nietzschean quality of this guy’s into-the-wild scrotum.

And the cluster fuck of toys? Who is to say stuffed animals can’t exaggerate the erotic charge of a naked self-portrait? One need only consider the paraphilia-driven Plushies craze. Th-th-th-that’s all folks.