An Avi Steinberg cartoon in the March 20th New Yorker, combining cavemen, clothing, and nipples:
(#1)
Cavemen: a cartoon meme. Clothing: one-shoulder garments for men. And of course men’s nipples. And then there’s Avi Steinberg, who’s a cartoonist+.
On the beach nipple patrol. My 2/25/17 posting “Displaying your nipples” — which treats men covering vs. revealing their nipples, nipple erections, nipple enlargement, and nipple worship –has one image (#2) of men baring one nipple in one-shoulder one-piece bathing suits.
One-piece bathing suits for men almost always have two shoulder straps and almost always cover the nipples. But some designers — mostly those inclined to the homoerotic — push the envelope. Here’s a Lake Style suit scooped so low that the nipples are exposed (though this image has been altered to downplay that):
(#2)
Basic black, but seriously sexy.
This Armani leather-look one=piece is specifically designed to accentuate the nipples:
(#3)
And this colorful one-piece nipple show is one-shouldered as well:
(#4)
It’s not just beachwear. Here’s a one-shoulder steampunk men’s brocade vest:
(#5)
— shown here over a shirt, but it could be worn alone as a decidedly sexy informal top, as this Rufskin Samurai top is here:
(#6)
Rufskin’s clothes (“crafted in California”) are unabashedly queer, dwelling lovingly on muscles, crotches, asses — and nips.
Still another genre of nipple-focused homowear is the wrestling singlet, scooped very low in the front to emphasize nips and crotches equally; discussion (and illustrations) in a 12/3/15 posting on this blog.
Cavewear. Cartoon cavemen wear one-piece garments of animal skins. Quite often these cover the nipples:
(#7)
(All the cartoon cavemen in this section are stock images.)
But someimes they’re topless, in which case they can be depicted with nipples, like real men:
(#8)
or without them, like cartoon animals:
(#9)
Or they can be shown in one-shouldered skins (like the guys in #1), again either with a nipple:
(#10)
or without:
(#11)
Avi Steinberg. He’s been drawing cartoons for the New Yorker for a while, but hasn’t previously appeared on this blog. Many of his cartoons have a language-related hook. Here are three, from 2014 (10/13), 2015 (4/27), and 2016 (8/8):
(#12)
(#13)
(#14)
But cartoons aren’t all there is to Steinberg. He’s also a writer, with two remarkable books published so far:
From “Books behind Bars: Avi Steinberg’s memoir of life as a prison librarian”, a review by Nell Porter Brown in Harvard Magazine, Jan.-Feb. 2011 (Steinberg is a Harvard alumnus):
An “earnest Yeshiva boy,” Avi Steinberg ’02 never thought he’d spend his days in prison. But in 2005, when offered the post of librarian at the Suffolk County House of Correction in Boston, he took it, glad to trade writing obituaries for the Boston Globe as a freelancer for a more secure job with dental insurance and a surplus of live, albeit caged, bodies. He was eagerly unaware of what was in store. “I knew this would be a stretch, and I went there searching for something,” he adds. “But I didn’t know what that was.”
For nearly two years he promoted books and creative writing to a range of students: pimps, prostitutes, junkies, thugs, robbers, con men, and even killers. His recently published memoir, Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian (Random House), is a rich meditation on this wild experience and the related nuanced questions about morality and humanity that he confronted armed with little more than his own sensitivities and book learning.
From “Jewish writer travels across the world for ‘The Lost Book of Mormon’” a review by Ellen Fagg Weist in The Salt Lake City Tribune, 11/15/14:
In “The Lost Book of Mormon [subtitle: A Quest for the Book That Just Might Be the Great American Novel],” Steinberg recounts his 18-month literary quest to consider The Book of Mormon by traveling to places where its characters or its translator lived. He begins with this walks through Lehi and Nephi’s neighborhoods in Jerusalem, then takes off on a Land of Zarahemla tour with a Utah company to the Maya cities of southern Mexico and Guatemala. Steinberg later travels to upstate New York to take part in the Hill Cumorah Pageant, and finally to the Illinois jail where Smith was shot.
“The Lost Book” is the story of a winsome, questing narrator’s search for what it means to be a writer. He treats his fellow Mormon travelers with the tenderness of the formerly religious — as Steinberg says, he may not be an observant Jew anymore, instead choosing to observe from afar.
Steinberg is a funny and smart guide for the trip, and for the most part avoids mining the most common Mormon cultural clichés as he investigates the idea of publishing a sequel to the Bible. The Book of Mormon is of greatest interest to him as a book about writing a book. An important American book, that is, which is often dismissed in literary culture. The fact of that dismissal should prompt a re-evaluation, the writer says.
The writer ca. 2014:
(#15)
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