Archive for September, 2016

Name time

September 9, 2016

Early on in the gay comedy 4th (or Fourth) Man Out, I was struck by the name of one of the actors, Chord Overstreet. I was immediately reminded of another actorial name, Park Overall. Park was the subject of a morning name posting on 12/10/15, and for a moment I was taken with the idea that Park and Chord might, um, sing together on the greensward, until I realized that she’s 32 years older than he is. So probably no Chord and Park Overall Overstreet pairings, onomastically pleasing though they would be.

On to Chord and his acting career. Turns out he’s something of a celebrity, but for his work on a television show I have barely ever seen.

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Julian and Sandy

September 9, 2016

(Some coarse sexual slang, so it might not be to everyone’s taste.)

From the August issue (pp. 37-39) of The Advocate, “Speaking Lavender” by Chadwick Moore, about Bill Leap and the Lavender Languages and Linguistics Conferences (Lav Lgs 23 in February 2016 at American University, Washington DC; Lav Lgs 24 in April 2017 at the University of Nottingham (UK)), with the subtitle: “From Regency England to 1920s Harlem to Miss Piggy, gay vernacular has given voice to homosexual identity and desire in a hostile world. It still does.” and a section on Polari (and its scholar and champiom Paul Baker). Eventually the story leads us to the campy queens Julian and Sandy, and from there by sound associations to the remarkable entertainment (also campy) Façade, uniting the playful poetry of Edith Sitwell and the music of William Walton, notably in the “Valse” / “Waltz” movement beginning “Daisy and Lily”.

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Herb Ritts

September 9, 2016

(Mostly about male photography.)

It begins with a mounted copy of this photo, which was secreted in Kirjasto Zwicky (the library condo) until Kim Darnell brought it to me and we hung it in a convenient place here on Ramona St. Unfortunately, I couldn’t recall who the photographer was and it was too large to scan in, so I resorted to describing it in the lgbt precincts of Facebook:

  (#1)

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Feet in footage, pawns at the pawnshop

September 9, 2016

Two cartoons in my feed yesterday, both turning on ambiguities: a One Big Happy involving foot, a Mother Goose and Grimm involving pawn:

(#1)

(#2)

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How dinosaurs are made

September 8, 2016

A wonderful cartoon that doesn’t depend on words:

The elephant is just the medium of transmission.

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How sweet the daphne smells

September 7, 2016

… and how poisonous it is.

A birthday present from Chris Waigl (plants and poetry, with something of an Edward Gorey twist) , this note:

I was thinking of you the other day when I remembered a little (somewhat twee) poem my mother liked. It’s from a German humorous herbarium (the book is called Heiteres Herbarium [‘Bright/Cheerful Herbarium’]) by someone with the extraordinarily Bavarian name Karl Heinrich Waggerl. The book’s still in copyright [and is described as lyric poetry], so there doesn’t seem to be much online. Apparently, it sold extremely well for a book of, at least on the surface, poetry.
The poem I was thinking of was about the pretty, traditionally medicinally used (and quite poisonous) Seidelbast (Daphne mezereum). Not native to the Americas and therefore not much talked about here. It has a ton (dozens) of common names in German. I knew it as Zeiland in Austria and Lorbeerkraut (lit. laurel herb) at home. Much lore and warnings. The poem is a warning, too, with a quasi-moral level of meaning and at the same time a … rhyme at the end that marks it as jocular.

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Waltzing with Boynton bears

September 6, 2016

Posted on Facebook today by Steve Otlowski, this Sandra Boynton illustration of two bears dancing together by the light of the moon:

Clearly the bears that Uncle Walter went waltzing with. Wa-wa-wa-waltzing.

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Birthday times

September 6, 2016

It’s two weeks of birthdays, of friends, ending today, with my own: #76, an American patriotic number (1776!) and a nice composite of the really square 4 and the really prime 19.

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Rainbow ads

September 5, 2016

The latest (August/September) issue of The Advocate has two themes, one long planned — it’s the LGBT travel issue — and one responding to urgent current events, the June 12 shootings at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando FL. I’m still trying to reach a state of equanimity that will allow me to post about Orlando, but LGBT travel is easy, and there are three ads in the issue that take advantage of the colors of the Pride flag to invite LGBT travelers to Williamsburg and Miami and to encourage them to drive wherever they’re going in a Nissan.

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Spontaneous poetry

September 5, 2016

Written in passing, in my posting on a P.C. Vey cartoon in the New Yorker:

[If you’re a poet], everyone thinks that your task is trivial, because, like, poems are so short, how much work could it take to turn them out?

The closest I get to spontaneous, off-the-cuff poetry is the captions I create for various images, and I do a lot of these (see the Page on AZ captions), but they’re spontaneous only in comparison to my other free verse, which regularly takes days or weeks or more. So: maybe an hour or two for a few lines, which is really fast in my book. (Sometimes it’s finding a donnée, but always it’s the re-writing.)

Then there’s the wonderfully spontaneous poet Frank O’Hara, one of whose tossed-off poems “At the Old Place” (from 1955) appears in the current, August/September, issue of The Advocate (p. 32):

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