A recent accumulation: a Scott Hilburn strip with a pun; a Zits on X-free foods; a very meta Zippy; and a Pearls Before Swine with heavy use of implicature.
Archive for June, 2014
Assorted cartoons
June 7, 2014Ralph Steadman
June 6, 2014I start with today’s Doonesbury (a replay from some years ago), continuing the story of Duke’s coming out of a drug coma:
(#1)
In the previous installment, Duke was hallucinating a talking lizard (right out of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which is where his cartoon character originates). Now he’s playing on the name of that book: Fear and Loathing at Macy’s Men’s Wear.
Time for some words on the amazing F&L and on its illustrator (the lizard source) Ralph Steadman.
Briefly noted: note from a subculture
June 6, 2014A business card (two-sided, mounted here on an ornamental card) from an establishment in British Columbia, picked up by a friend visiting there: a private place for men to enjoy sexual connection. These range from the gay baths, for relatively short-term liaisons, to those that label themselves as hotels or resorts (some in urban locations, some rural), offering everything from tricking to vacations for couples. Hung Homo Homestay (despite the slangy alliterative name) is definitely at the high end.
I’ll eventually post some about male body types and tastes about them. Here I merely note that these men have exceptionally, indeed abnormally, developed musculature — not to everyone’s taste (think of it as ornamental rather than necessarily arousing), and certainly not found routinely at homo hook-up havens.
Anthony Friedkin
June 6, 2014(About art, specifically photography, and gay stuff.)
Opening soon at the de Young Museum in San Francisco (for 6/14/14 – 1/11/15), the exhibition “Anthony Friedkin:” The Gay Essay”. From the announcement:
A native of Los Angeles, Anthony Friedkin (b. 1949) honed his photographic skills at an early age and became a professional artist after he graduated from high school in the late 1960s. A variety of magazine assignments took him into the streets of his hometown, where he created vivid photo essays that examined the diverse neighborhoods and touched on some of the most important social and cultural issues of the time. During the culturally tumultuous years of 1969 to 1973, Friedkin made a series of eloquent and expressive photographs that chronicle the gay communities in Los Angeles and San Francisco at the time. TheGay Essay was a self-assigned project and, although largely unknown today, it arguably comprises the most important set of photographs in Friedkin’s portfolio to date.
Briefly noted: decline
June 5, 2014From Bruce Handy’s “Comic Relief: Bob Mankoff’s ‘How About Never — Is Never Good for You?’ ” in the NYT Book Review on the 1st (on Mankoff’s book, see here):
To the perennial gripe that the [New Yorker] cartoons aren’t as funny as they used to be [a complaint sometimes ventilated in comments on this blog], Mankoff’s short answer is: “They never were.” It’s true. I conducted another experiment, pulling three random issues of the magazine off local library shelves, from 1933, 1965 and 1997; each batch of vintage cartoons produced the same amount of chuckles, snorts of recognition, mehs, groans and huh?’s as would those in any recent issue (minus jokes at the expense of Africans, Native Americans, Gypsies, Jews and wives who won’t shut up). Mankoff believes that people tend to forget cartoons they didn’t like, remembering only the keepers, which gives the past a perpetual leg up.
Selective memory strikes again.
I’ve gone back over years of New Yorker cartoons and had the same experience as Handy. In fact, some older and celebrated cartoonists — Peter Arno and Helen Hokinson, for example — never entertained me much at all.
Four for the fourth
June 5, 2014My morning mail on Wednesday the 4th brought me six suitable cartoons for this blog. Two I have already posted about: a Doonesbury with Duke hallucinating a lizard; and a Bizarro with a diner asking for eggs without any sense of style. The others: a One Big Happy on the attractions of “diet” versions of foods; a Zits on hearing and listening; a Zippy with (among other things) more better; and a Mother Goose and Grimm with a symbolic ambiguity.
In style
June 4, 2014This morning’s Bizarro:
The diner is asking for eggs in one of the handful of standard named American styles — scrambled, poached, fried (over or sunny side up), boiled (hard- or soft-) — and not in some “fancy” style, whether in French (eggs/oeufs à/a la Florentine), in English with postposed modifier (eggs Florentine style, eggs Florentine), or in English with preposed modifier (Florentine-style eggs, Florentine eggs).
Hallucinations and delusions
June 4, 2014An avalanche of linguistically relevant cartoons this morning. I’ll pick out a few individually, then post a collection. First, an old Doonesbury, relevant to one of the occasions of the week in my house, the anniversary of my husband-equivalent Jacques’s death in 2003; the relevance will soon become clear.
Plant life by public transport
June 3, 2014Now on my desk, a box of Pomegranate notecards, originally posters by Emilio Camilio Leopoldo Tafani for London public transport in 1915, now in the London Transport Museum. Art, plants, and advertising.
From the website:
Day trips to the ancient forests bordering London remain a popular poster theme. Landscape artists, such as Walter Spradbery and Gregory Brown, set new standards in the depiction of trees and woodland scenes. Many of the posters feature Epping Forest, originally reached by motor bus until the extension of the Central line in the 1940s.
In a previous posting, I looked at posters, by various artists, exhorting people to take public transport to the London zoo. Now it’s plants. But still public art for advertising purposes.
Briefly noted: misreading a head
June 3, 2014Occasionally I post some observation about language only to Facebook rather than to this blog (with a link from Facebook), when I think the observation is inconsequential. But it usually turns out that readers find more to say on the topic.
So on the 31st, I noted (in “Annals of headline reading”) that I read what I took to be:
(1) A Plan for Less Trash: Turn New Yorkers Into Composers
(a peculiar idea, but the pull of the familiar word composer overrode the oddness of the thought) for the actual headline:
(2) A Plan for Less Trash: Turn New Yorkers Into Composters
(which makes a great deal more sense).
This encouraged readers to play with the morphological resources of English. (more…)