There seem to be many people in this world who share the name Ben Cheetham, and one of them is this mysterious boy, who is said to be "red with love." This particular Ben Cheetham is a model, signed with a major London agency, currently with a tiny online portfolio, and is an actor with one credit on IMDb, the Anthony Hopkins exorcism drama The Rite (2011). Young Ben seems to have little or no social media presence, aside from a barely touched Facebook account, and most of the pictures one finds of him seem to be of his eight-year-old self. I'm afraid that I'm one of those people who need to know a lot about a boy before I can properly fall in love with him, but in this case I might make an exception.
Because of the constant barrage of spam in my comments sections - the spam greatly outnumber the actual comments - any comments posted to a post more than a few days after I posted it must be moderated by me before it can appear. Until Blogger, in all its infinite wisdom, redesigned their dashboard several months ago, one saw the moderation queue as soon as one logged onto their dashboard. Now, however, the moderation queue is hidden in a folder inside a folder. A folder, I might add, that I did not know about until just a few days ago. So if you are one of my readers who submitted a comment on this blog that never was approved for posting until just a few days ago, I deeply apologize. It won't happen again.
Time to drop the needle on the record and listen to Frank Sinatra, or maybe it's Chet Baker, singing that all-time golden oldie:
"I fall in love too easily,
I fall in love too fast,
I fall in love too terribly hard
For love to ever last,
My heart should be well schooled
'Cause I've been fooled in the past,
But still I fall in love so easily,
I fall in love too fast."
Considering all the insanely beautiful boys in the world, and even narrowing it down to all the insanely beautiful boys who are insanely beautiful for a living, I often wonder why I (and I assume that I'm not the only one) form instant and wholly unreasonable infatuations with certain insanely beautiful boys and not others. Why is it that I set Google Alerts for Sergey Brisyuk or Andrei Dobrin or Lucky Blue Smith, check their Twitters and Instagrams and Snapchats with painful regularity, and entertain schoolgirl fantasies about our happy lives together in eternal wedded bliss- but not before rescuing them from pirates or saving them from a burning building- while someone like Sam Harwell, who is no doubt as physically perfect as anyone alive, merely causes me to sigh and think, "How lovely." Forgive me if I exaggerate, but if I do it's not much.
Of course, here's nothing wrong with "How lovely." "How lovely" is... lovely, but it doesn't provide that certain thrill that fools often confuse with love. I may be creepy, but I'm not insane. I may haunt their social media, but I'm not a stalker. Despite the song I quoted above, I know perfectly well that the feeling I have for these boys have nothing to do with real love. Lust, yes, admiration, sure, desire, definitely, but love requires a lot more than access to pictures on the Internet.
Why this boy and not that boy? It's a mystery. Of course, those who know me would say, "But Vera, you have a type." Well, yes, I do. I've had enough birthdays to know what I want (that's a song lyric, people) and what I want is male, young, and usually on the thin side.In other words, your basic twink. But not all twinks are created equal, are they?
Which brings me then, after all this mishegoss, to Joland Novaj, who, believe it or not, is the actual subject of this post. He first came to my attention a few weeks ago. Needless to say, the sight of Joland Novaj struck me like a punch to the gut. Love at first sight? Oh, not really, but it was something at first sight, and I didn't only feel it in my throat. Do you want to see the first picture I saw of him? I'm going to show it to you whether you do or not. It's this photo, by Kai Z Feng:
Right then and there he had me. I wanted to take him home, give him a good meal and rock him to sleep. Why? Well, the eyes. The hair. The lips. The shoulders. But they all have eyes, hair, lips and shoulders, don't they? What is it about his eyes, his hair, his etc? What about his smile? His ridiculous, beautiful smile? I don't know what it is, but I know it when I see it.
What do we know about Joland? To begin with he's 18 years old and he's been modeling professionally for about two years. He was born in Kosovo and is very proud of his Albanian heritage, but has lived for most of his life in New York City. He loves to dance. He has attitude to spare.He wants to be famous. And that's all I know.
This is all very silly of me, isn't it? I guess I'm a silly person. But please, let me have this one thing for a while. Eventually all of these boys find some way to break my heart, so let me enjoy this while it lasts.
Have I said enough? Here's a little video of Joland and his friend Kuba on a modeling gig together:
Here are more pictures:
After the break, so many pictures you won't even know how to deal with it.
Here are a few more shots of Argentinian model Bautista Montalvo, because why the heck not? Notice that the slightly dazed, barely-legal porn twink look I mentioned yesterday was no fluke.
Am I wrong or does the picture above look like an ad for the latest release from Helix Studios? I'm not wrong, because that's exactly what I thought this was when I saw it on Tumblr. But, no, this is Bautista Montalvo, in the red, and Klaus Boueke, both legit fashion models from Argentina. Bautista, in particular, has that slightly dazed, barely-legal porn twink look. Not that I'd know anything about that. A few more of Bautista from the same shoot are below.
Say what you will about Nickelodeon, it's a network that has served up a lot of nubile male goodness over the years. Its current line-up includes a sit-com adaptation of the Jack Black film School of Rock, also the basis of the Broadway musical of the same name. In the movie the kids where in elementary school, on TV they are meant to be in middle school, so naturally the role of Freddie, the drummer, is played by 17-year-old Ricardo Hurtado. Owner of one of the more extreme quiffs of the 21st century, and of a YouTube channel where he plays guitar and croons, I'm not sure that he has much of a future as an actor, but his status as a dreamboat seems assured.
It's been a while since Austin Mahone made an appearance here, (actually about five months) but since he seems to have embarked on an "I'm All Grown Up Now" offensive, who am I to ignore him? These photos of the 20-year-old were photographed by Chris Colls for L'Uomo Vogue, on newsstands next week. For the record, Austin first showed up on Vera's in July 2012, and although he still hasn't reached anything like Beiber levels of record sales, he's still plugging away at a music career, and who knows, might even release a full album some day.
