Who: Bryan Ferry
Age: 62
Know him as: Musician
As the day draws nearer when my AARP card will arrive in the mail, I have returned, like Donna Hanover and Andie MacDowell, to the heartthrob of my youth. Thirty years ago, a British fop named Ferry made a man out of me. All other man-crushes since, from John Doe to John Smoltz to Don Cheadle, have been mere drive-bys.
When Bryan Ferry of Roxy Music freed me from the stoned and lumbering boredom of '70s arena rock, he also delivered me from macho. I had found a new male role model who smirked instead of swaggered, who bragged about redecorating hotel rooms instead of trashing them. He did not own a bong, but he did own a white tuxedo. And gaucho pants. And an eye patch. As soon as I heard Bryan, in his thin, fey croon, name-checking Nijinsky, it was out with the Marlboro hard pack, in with irony, Jerome Kern and hetero camp. Instead of earnest and bedenimed, Ferry was formalist and tongue-in-cheek, a walking, winking essay on pop. He was also a ladies' man, 6-foot-1, and Turner Classic Movie handsome. I wanted to be him.
I learned early on to forgive Bryan. First I overlooked the saxophone in his band. Then I pretended he had not written an entire concept album about being dumped by Jerry Hall. I grant him absolution for all his weak-minded spawn, be they Duran Duran or the Killers, and for the many sins committed in his name, including every '80s music video that ever featured a lip-syncing supermodel. And I positively celebrate the nearly motionless shimmer of his own '80s work, when the obsession with perfect surfaces produced songs burnished to the dead sheen of coffee-table books.
To be honest, Bryan and I lost touch during the past two decades. I spent most of the '90s immersed in country music, perhaps because of the love of gesture and archetype and songwriting he'd instilled in me; perhaps because, after Bryan, I got bored fast with indie rock's louche lack of polish. I admit that I don't know what he's up to these days, at least artistically. I do know what kind of suits he's wearing now, and that he's grown gray at the temples. I'm also aware that he married a model, of course, and that his faux lounge lizard pose hardened into real country squire. One of his kids is a fox-hunting activist -- a pro-fox-hunting activist.
But I have returned not to the live Bryan, but to the Bryan I remember, who is again visible, through the gauze of middle-aged nostalgia, on YouTube. When I want to see my Bryan, I put his name in the search box, and then scroll past all the confusing results, the ones that refer to songs I've never heard of, meaning anything he recorded after 1985, or that otherwise allege he still has a career. Instead, I click on "Jealous Guy," from 1981, in which he whistles. I listen to "Oh Yeah," which is a song named "Oh Yeah" about a fake song named "Oh Yeah" that is the favorite song of a nonexistent couple. It is our song, and Bryan and I are young again.
-- Mark Schone
Who: Tony Leung
Age: 45
Know him as: Actor
Martin Scorcese's Oscar-winning "The Departed," a remake/rip-off of the nail-biting 2002 Hong Kong thriller "Infernal Affairs," turned off fans of the original for one unavoidable reason -- and it wasn't Jack Nicholson's scenery-chewing. It was the absence of the smoldering Tony Leung in the role of the undercover cop lost in a convoluted game of spy vs. spy. As good as Leo DiCaprio's Boston honk and flinty rage are in the remake, he just can't hold a candle to Leung.
But then, of course he can't. Leung is a professional smolderer; the guy's a virtual human Duraflame. Throughout the past two decades, in "Hard-Boiled" (1992), "Chungking Express" (1994), "Happy Together" (1997), "In the Mood for Love" (2000), "Hero" (2002) and "2046" (2004), he's left only glowing embers in his wake. In this year's "Lust, Caution," he added a sadistic streak we'd never seen from him before that caused us to recoil -- and still come back for more.
How, exactly, does he do it? We think it's the way he will occasionally hold our gaze -- a beat or two too long, with such haunted, hungry eyes we feel slightly bruised afterward, like we've had an actual physical interaction. We sure don't get that from Tom Cruise's maniacal, trademarked grin.
Observers are fond of referring to Leung as "Asia's answer to Clark Gable." But in film's new world order, Leung ranks as a much bigger global star than most of the pretty boys in Hollywood's (or People's) stable these days. And the fact that his roles are being recast for more middling American tastes doesn't just make him the poorer for it -- we're the poorer for it, too.
-- Salon staff
Who: Javier Marías
Age: 56
Know him as: Novelist
For weeks after my first encounter with Javier Marías I could scarcely speak of anything else. "'A Heart So White' is so good that I can't concentrate," I confessed to a co-worker. This was no exaggeration; I was smitten.
With his lettered looks and distinguished intellectual pedigree (his father, Julian Marías, was a renowned philosopher), Javier Marías seems an inhabitant of his scented, sophisticated fictive worlds, in which secrets, scandals and spectral narrators lurk in shadowy corridors. Everything, down to his slowly unfolding phrases, which swell with dependent clauses, is permeated with suspense. The moral haziness of his characters, the stylishness of his writing and the sound of footsteps echoing through his narratives lend a noir tone to his work and betray his cinephilic sensibility: In addition to his fiction, Marías has written a collection of articles on film (not yet translated into English), "Donde todo ha sucedido. Al salir del cine."
Marías' allure lies in his prodigious talent -- he wrote his first novel, "Los dominios del lobo," at the age of 17 -- and his capacious mind. Far from confined to his ivory tower, Marías keeps a hand in the journalist world, penning a weekly column for El País. (His polemic on Spain's smoking ban, which ran in the New York Times, was persuasive even to this nonsmoker.) And, like so many of his narrators (opera singers, ghostwriters and interpreters whose careers demand that they cede their own voices) Marías works as a translator. The man is so ultra-literary that he hasn't only read "Tristram Shandy," he has rendered it into Spanish.
Part of Marías' cachet comes from the fact that he remains scandalously under-read on this side of the Atlantic -- despite a devoted readership in continental Europe and rumors of an imminent Nobel Prize. It has become de rigueur to begin every English-language article on Marías tsking about his relative obscurity in the Anglophone world. This is a shame; Marías is too good to be for the happy few. The quality of a bookstore can -- and should -- be judged by whether it stocks Marías on its shelves.
I tend to claim that most of the things I love in life -- cities, certain countries, entire centuries -- were made for me; I, on the other hand, was born to read Javier Marías' fiction. That is the most romantic relationship between a reader and a writer that I can imagine.
-- Megan Doll
Who: Will Arnett
Age: 37
Know him as: Actor
Will Arnett is not the kind of guy I usually go for. He leaves his shirts open one button too low and his hairline is a bit thin. I shrink from his alpha attitude and garish theater voice. He's too tall. He's too mannish.
But being hilarious goes a long way, and with him, I wonder what was ever worth laughing at before. I gush to bored acquaintances: "Omigod you've never seen 'Arrested Development'? Dude rides a Segway around a construction site in white pants. And he does this magic, er, illusion show ... Come on!" I know his softer side, too -- he got all teary-eyed and huggy behind the scenes after shooting the series wrap. Me too, Will, me too.
Lately he's playing hard-to-get. I might get around to renting "Blades of Glory" one of these days, and I took no note of "Hot Rod" until just now, when I googled "will arnett hot picture" for inspiration. But for now I'm satisfied with inappropriately long DVD sessions watching "Arrested Development," which unfailingly knock the wind out of me and leave me sighing, with a faraway look in my eyes, "Oh, Will. Oh, God!"
-- Christopher Walsh
Who: Britt Daniel
Age: 36
Know him as: Frontman of the band "Spoon"
Britt Daniel writes perfect songs. As the man at the center of the band Spoon, he's responsible for six albums of fiercely solid material. I rarely apply words like "precise" and "flawless" to music I really love: Isn't rock best when it's at least a little messy and dirty? But Spoon's songs -- showcased most recently on this summer's record "Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga" -- really are those things, without being careful, safe or clean. They're the results of very smart songwriting, tracks with which it's nearly impossible to find fault.
Daniel's throaty, clever reflections take command on songs about cheerful resignation ("That's the Way We Get By"), a man with a secret ("The Two Sides of Monsieur Valentine"), and a fitted shirt (the appropriately titled "Fitted Shirt"). There are, of course, also plenty about girls. All will lodge themselves happily in your head. In 2006, Daniel co-composed the score for the movie "Stranger Than Fiction." His adaptations of several Spoon tunes proved a natural soundtrack for Will Ferrell's semi-literary misadventures. The band's star continues to rise. In October they performed on "Saturday Night Live," and played their biggest headlining show yet, at New York City's Roseland Ballroom.
Onstage that night, Daniel played tirelessly, wearing a nice white button-down shirt. He raked his fingers through his sweaty hair, turning it into a spiky, rock-star version of bed head. The minor dishevelment was adorable, and exemplary: Despite the band's clean clothes, Spoon plays the kind of music that practically demands that you go off and do something that'll get your hair all mussed. The band was so tight and thrilling it made me want to kick the other 3,000 people out of the venue, pull on a prom dress and dance in my socks on the wood floor.
Oh, and Daniel's quite the hottie. As the face of music this excellent, his rather striking good looks are almost suspicious. But why complain? At least the music matches the man.
-- Eryn Loeb
Who: Omar Vizquel
Age: 40
Know him as: Baseball player
Sexy is an athlete who performs with joy and grace and invisible confidence. You laugh when you watch him in action because his every move is choreographed with a sly intelligence that announces his superiority; he hovers above other players. I hesitate to call Omar Vizquel an athlete because that somehow reduces the man on the field to a set of coarse physical skills that don't account for the elegance with which the masterful shortstop glides into the hole to field a searing grounder, leap and throw in a single fluid move. Sports are too serious, like the military, and so how wonderful it is to watch a 40-year-old man whose litheness and good humor veritably light up the game and allow it to sparkle. A dark cloud has often emanated from left field in San Francisco, from so much of commercialized baseball, but it has never passed over Vizquel, who always trots off the field at the end of an inning with a huge smile, one that betrays even his own surprise at how exhilarating his game, his life, can be. And, really, how sexy is that?
-- Kevin Berger
Related Stories
The sexiest man living!
Forget that other list. We pick the men who really set our hearts aflame -- and there's nary a pretty-boy actor among them.
Story finder (3 ways to search Salon)
Salon Directory (browse by topic)