Giannis Antetokounmpo, Kobe Bryant, Perry N. Halkitis, Phil Jimenez, Hayden Christensen, Aaron Hernandez, Henry Cavill, Tom of Finland Action Figure, and MORE: #GAYNRD DAILY #Throwback #Thursday

ONE MORE DAY... left in January.

THE GREEK FREAK Greece’s basketball superstar, Giannis Antetokounmpo has shut down his social media following Kobe Bryant’s death. According to The Greek Reporter, “Milwaukee Bucks star Giannis Antetokounmpo deleted all of his social media accounts Sunday after the shocking news of Kobe Bryant’s death in a helicopter crash. The Greek Freak used to train extensively with the legendary NBA star and looked up to him as an exemplary person and athlete who had achieved mythical status in the world of sport. He was known to work out with the late Los Angeles Lakers star during summers past. The four-time All-Star Antetokounmpo also unexpectedly lost his father Charles in 2017, making Bryant’s passing yet another devastating blow for him.”

“He’s one of my role models. I always watched him when I was younger,” Antetokounmpo had said of his idol.

But the admiration was mutual. “He’s unbelievable…No seriously, he has a lot of — I don’t think he understands how much talent he has,” Bryant noted during the last MKE stop in 2016.

WATCH the trailer for The Booksellers, a new documentary about rare book dealers. According to Lit Hub, “While from a dollars-and-cents viewpoint, the world of rare books and manuscripts may be at an all-time low, The Booksellers demonstrates that it’s actually doing the best it ever has, as far as the range of book subjects and types of people represented within it is concerned. Kevin Young, Director of the Schomburg Center, admits that he’s nearly always the only black person at the rare book conventions he frequents, but many signs point to a growing interest amongst people of color in collecting, preserving, and presenting material traces of their history. Syreeta Gates, for instance, has amassed a world-class collection of hip-hop publications and ephemera over years of being a superfan. Other important collectors we meet that deviate from the stereotype of book collector as tweed-jacketed white man include Caroline Schimmel, whose Collection of American Women in the Wilderness at Penn is nothing short of trailblazing, and Henry Wessells, whose occult interests and trippy calm make you wonder if he landed here from another planet. Like so many arts and cultural enterprises, brick-and-mortar bookselling today is of course just a shadow of its past grandeur. As Bass-Wyden observes, the number of bookstores in New York City has plummeted from 368 in the 1950s to 79 in 2019. The myriad sellers, collectors, and random aficionados (Fran Leibovitz appearing as a self-deprecating take on the latter) rightfully lament the steady decline of the bookshop, but they also take stock of the reasons to maintain hope. The opening of new stores in New York like Aeon, Better Read Than Dead, and Codex that focus on smaller presses and obscure sub-fields in art and counterculture points to an increasing interest amongst millennials in books, especially as material objects worth collecting. Beyond offering a reflection on the state of local rare and antiquarian bookselling, The Booksellers pushes us to consider the manifold place that books still occupy in our lives.”

Watch the trailer below, the film is out March 6th.

SUNLESS IN SEATTLE CNN reports, “Seattleites have endured a rather unique streak of both gloomy and soggy weather over the past two months. One that even for its hardy residents has become notable. In fact, Seattle has not experienced an official sunny day since November 30. A sunny day requires that the sky has one-eighth or less cloud cover.”

Just checked the numbers. It has rained EVERY DAY at @SeaTacAirport this month — except for New Year's Day. Are you sick of the rain?? #wawx #KOMONews #SoNorthwest

— Abby Acone (@abbyacone) January 28, 2020

THIS PART For the people in the back.

AARON HERNANDEZ  reportedly came out to his mom before he committed suicide in jail. Says Towleroad, “He’s like, ‘Mom, you’re going to die never knowing your son.’ And all of a sudden they have this conversation, and they’re both flooded with tears across from each other.”

HENRY CAVILL explains everything you need to know about The Witcher’s sword.

TOM OF FINLAND THROWBACK Tom of Finland celebrates its 100th birthday by collaborating with Lazoschmidl and Paddle8, on an iconic action-man collection. 25 years after its first release, the vintage leather-clad Tom of Finland action figure gets a makeover in seven runway looks by LAZOSCHMIDL. Celebrated for their norm-breaking and uncompromising designs, LAZOSCHMIDL revisited their archives and recreated looks that charge the action figure’s hyper-masculinity with flamboyance and a new male sensitivity.

Paddle8, the leading cultural e-commerce platform, announces an exclusive online storefront in collaboration with Swedish-German fashion designers LAZOSCHMIDL.  A Hunk’s New Clothes: LAZOSCHMIDL x TOM OF FINLAND will be live for two weeks and feature vintage Tom of Finland action figures dressed in archive LAZOSHMIDL looks. Developed in honor of Tom of Finland’s 100th birthday year, the collection will launch worldwide on January 30th exclusively on Paddle8, coinciding with last LAZOSCHMDIL’s A/W 2020 runway presentation in Paris during Men’s Fashion Week.

HISTORIA and Wonder Woman. DC Daily host Amy Dallen sat down with Jimenez to discuss his love of Wonder Woman and the personal connection he feels to the iconic character. The duo also chatted about the excitement around seeing his take on Diana in Wonder Woman: Bloodlines, which is now streaming on DC UNIVERSE (DCU), the digital subscription service from DC. Jimenez’s WONDER WOMAN run is currently available for reading on DCU as well.

Jimenez says ultimately everything he does with Diana is an homage to his mentor and creator of the modern Wonder Woman mythos and he wanted to hit four points that he thinks made Perez’ run so indelibly relevant: 1. Add to and improve her rogues gallery. Perez made all of her villains particularly Cheetah, motivations emotional and realistic. 2. Remind people of her supporting cast. Jimenez says that because there’s been so much turnover creatively there are a lot, but Julia Kappetelis and Vanessa, Etta Candy, and Steve Trevor of course come to mind. 3. Remind people why she exists. “Her mission is to bring peace to the world,” Jimenez says. “She came to destroy Ares and stayed to make the world a better place.” and 4. The importance of the relationship with her mother, Queen Hippolyta of Themyscira (aka Paradise Island). “I was an only child with a single mom who was everything to me,” he says. “So their relationship is one of the most vital parts of her story to me.”

Below is some art from his upcoming DC Black Label book Historia.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B71X95IB5a0/

GAY MEN THROUGH THE YEARS Dr. Perry N. Halkitis is featured in the Bay Area Reporter about his ground breaking book, Out in Time: The Public Lives of Gay Men from Stonewall to the Queer Generation. Halkitis tells the BAR, “Gay men of the queer generation still confront the challenges faced by the gay men of the preceding generations, namely acceptance and inclusion within society and the continued battle with AIDS. Until we start to eliminate stigma and discrimination that creates the difficulty of coming out, and until we get rid of AIDS, fix the finances of this country, and equalize the playing field, nothing is going to get better.”

The book explores issues of pride (including self-realization and affirmation), myriad identities, the closet and diminished health, (hyper) masculinity, intersectionality and racism, drugs, and switching from a deficit model of understanding gay men to a model of resilience, all within the context of a lifelong process of coming out, using vast social science research and statistics to bolster his theses.

At its heart, however, the book is primarily accounts of gay men telling their stories about how they came out, a process that has remained consistent, despite some differences, for over 50 years.

READ THE FULL INTERVIEW HERE.

#TBT To Hayden Christensen on the set of Star Wars: Attack of the Clones.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B789TcjAmuk/

THIRSTY THURSDAY Anyone need a hoe’zd down?

https://www.instagram.com/p/B762lR6BDD7/?igshid=1cdmmwedz34np