The One Big Happy from the 24th:
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Ruthie wasn’t familiar with the word synchronized in the conventionalized composite synchronized swimming, so she interpreted t as best she could, and so it became sink-n-cries, which makes a lot more sense (as her father notes).
Offers of DVDs, asking only for the mailing cost. To request an offer, E-MAIL ME at arnold.zwicky@gmail.com specifying what you are asking for and giving your postal address (Kim Darnell — drdcrunk@gmail.com — will then get in touch with you to make arrangements).
I begin with the most pressing set of offers, XXX-rated gay porn DVDs. We have no other outlet for these, so the unclaimed ones will be junked. (The others can be donated to local agencies.)
(About art and sexuality. Not much language in it.)
Terry Castle, my Stanford colleague (in English literature), has been using Pinterest to compose a kind of history of modern art in pictures, specializing in drawings, paintings, and photographs of lgbt interest. Most recently, two photographs by George Platt Lynes, a photographer of (among other things) male nudes, from the 1930s-50s:
A photograph of a trio of men from Lynes’s artistic (often labeled “magical realist”) and homosexual (the term they used at the time) circle, George Tooker, Paul Cadmus, and Jared French:
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And then a photograph of a “dancer in costume with animal skull headpiece” (as it is described by the Metropolitan Museum of Art):
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In the August 2016 Funny Times, a wonderful piece “The Name Game” by M.K. Wolfe, about binomial nomenclature for living things, but with special reference to the taxonomic names of insects (there are, after all, so very many of them). A copy of the piece (which you should embiggen for easier reading):
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An entertaining tour of playful, even silly, names that have been adopted. As far as I can tell, these are all entirely accurate, even the insects Agra vation, Lalsapa lusa, Pison eu, and Vera peculya.
(A number of gay pornstars, but no man-man sex and just a bit about male bodies, so somewhat racy but probably not a danger for kids or the sexually modest.)
I start with a gay pornstar whose performances I enjoy, for several reason: Tommy Defendi shown here in a porn publicity shot (back on 7/23/11, he was featured in flagrante in an AZBlogX posting):
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Here I’m primarily focused on faces and evaluative judgments of them. Defendi’s face is certainly attractive; he’s a good-looking man, but the question is: in what category of masculine attractiveness? And what label to apply to it? — at the high-masculine end, ruggedly handsome or just rugged; or handsome; or beautiful; or cute; or at the low-masculine end, boyishly cute or just boyish. I’d label him cute, along with some other pornstars, some male models, and a fair number of mainstream actors (all men whose livelihood depends of their faces and their bodies, among other things).
To come: very brief notes on Defendi. Comments on categories and labels in the domain of male attractiveness. Further examples of cute gay pornstars, of a variety of types. And a note on cute male actors outside of porn, notably Matt Damon.
Today’s Bizarro:
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(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page.)
Implementing he Paleolitic diet, Paleo diet, caveman diet, Stone Age diet, or hunter-gatherer diet, right along with the appropriate hunting practices, for the appropriate prey.
(Not much about language here, just weirdness.)
Today’s Zippy, with a bow to a novelty item of the 1960s and a modern piece of visionary Americana:
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This being a Zippy strip, of course there is a giant lava lamp (roughly 60 ft. high), complete with observation deck, in the middle of the little town of Soap Lake WA — but it’s still a vision (of local resident Brent Blake), a prospect not yet realized. It’s a spectral lamp, a companion to Zippy the heartburned spectral rutabaga and the overripe parsnip he longs for:
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I woke to the words peccata mundi ‘the sins of the world’ playing from my iTunes. Well, not bad at all, because this is the end of the phrase qui tollis peccata mundi ‘who takes [or taketh] away the sins of world’ (from the Latin Mass), so it was a kind of morning cleansing.
The Agnus Dei from Mozart’s Mass in C Minor, the “Trinitatis Mass”, K. 167 (written in Salzburg in 1773, while Mozart was still a teenager).
Today’s Bizarro, on categories in the domain of sexuality and gender:
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(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page.)
Some brief introductory words on homosexual, gay, and queer. Then on LGBTQ. And on to a recent NYT Magazine article on queer. Which leads, remarkably, to the Penrose triangle (of interest to scholars of both perception and art).
In the July 25th New Yorker, an affectionate brief memorial (by David Remnick, the magazine’s editor) for cartoonist Michael Crawford, “Remembering an adored cartoonist: Michael Crawford was a wry and sensitive artist whose sweet, jazzy personality converged with his work”, beginning:
Michael Crawford was a cartoonist and a painter, a wry and sensitive artist who woke each day with his head full of dreams. Straight from bed he reached for his pencils and pad, the better to get those images and word clusters down on paper. For at least an hour every morning, “Michael was mining his dreams,” his wife, Carolita Johnson, also a cartoonist for this magazine, said. “And when it came to cartoons he just started drawing, without any idea where things might go. Lots of drawings sat around for years without any caption. He was his own one-man cartoon-caption contest in that way. But he was patient.
There was a wild, improvisational streak in Crawford’s work. He loved baseball, and imagined a cockeyed intimacy in the talk between, say, two pros in the dugout: “Why so aloof in here? When you’re on base, you yak your ass off with every Yankee in sight.” A student of American art, he redrew many of Edward Hopper’s moody paintings as cartoons and then provided snappy dialogue for the painter’s lonely souls.