Archive for June, 2017

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Three days in one

June 18, 2017

Mostly this posting is about Fathers Day, but today is also Commencement Day at Stanford and World Music Day in Palo Alto (and other places; here, music of all sorts — including shapenote singing in the Sacred Harp tradition — is performed in locations all over downtown Palo Alto). Then tomorrow comes Juneteenth, recognizing the emancipation of the slaves in the American South. Meanwhile, we’re in the middle of Pride Month.

Fathers Day is at root a commercial and sentimental holiday, officially devoted to a celebration of fathers and fatherhood, but equally devoted to a celebration of conventional, in fact stereotyped, modern American masculinity — gently mocked in this Bob Eckstein cartoon:

(#1)

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Posted in Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Masculinity | Leave a Comment »

For Eve V. Clark

June 17, 2017

… two recent cartoons, one a Rhymes With Orange with a notable verbing of a noun, the other a One Big Happy with a child coping with an unfamiliar word:

(#1)

(#2)

These on the occasion of Eve’s retirement from Stanford, celebrated at a department party yesterday afternoon.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Conversion, Language acquisition, Linguists, Stanford, Verbing | Leave a Comment »

Woolly Mammoth flips us the bird

June 16, 2017

A few days ago, Michael Palmer posted this logo, commenting “I was unaware that Arnold Zwicky was in the theatah”. It’s the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, with its logo in rainbow for Pride Month, and the woolly mammoth is my totem animal. Oh yes, and I’m gay, so it all fits.

(#1)

Then I recalled having written about the theatre company and one of its productions, with fuck in the title, so that it presented an issue for publicity and for publications reviewing the production — notably, the ostentatiously modest (no fuck for us, please, we’re a family newspaper) New York Times.

But apparently I never actually wrote the story up; memory is a fickle, fickle thing. In any case, the play is Aaron Posner’s Stupid Fucking Bird, which had its world premiere at the Woolly Mammoth in 2013, and I’ll write about it now. Even better, the Times‘s handling of the situation when the show came to NYC last year is truly wonderful.

Now: some bits on the Woolly Mammoth, on experimental theatre companies, and on Posner’s play. Then on the play in the media, with the the NYT as the capper.

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Posted in Mammoths, Plays, Taboo language and slurs | 2 Comments »

News for penises: the Haring commemorative bathroom

June 16, 2017

(Sexually explicit images, but they’re certifiably Art, so they should be displayable here. If this is not the sort of thing you want to see, then pass on.)

More Pride Month news. From the Artsy site on the 13th, “Keith Haring’s Most Risqué Mural Is Hidden in a Public Bathroom” by Alexxa Gotthardt:

Masterpieces don’t often end up in public bathrooms.

But boundary-defying street artist Keith Haring didn’t care for the distinctions about where art could and should be made; his canvases were Manhattan’s buildings, streets, and subways. On them, he scrawled ecstatic, aroused bodies that radiated with bursts of energy.

Many of Haring’s public paintings have disappeared since they emerged from his prolific brush in the 1970s and ’80s. The city government treated them as acts of vandalism, or they were rubbed away by the wear and tear of time. Luckily, though, one of his most audacious, masterful murals still stands—and you can find it in a bathroom that’s open to the public every day of the week.

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Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Father and grandfather

June 16, 2017

… plus two grandmothers.

A bit more for Fathers Day, with photos from back in the day, more Alpen-Flora, and some reflections on social class. Starting with these photos:

(#1)

On the left (#1a): my dad, with his parents, Bertha and Melchior Zwicky, in April 1941 (on, I think, my grandparents’ farm in Sinking Spring PA, west of Reading). On the right, two photos from 1948, at my aunt Marian (Marian Rice Fries) and uncle Herb’s farm outside of New Smithville PA, west of Allentown. Top (#1b): Dad and his mother-in-law, Susannah Hershey Rice (called Sue). Bottom (#1c): Marian and Sue, her mother.

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Posted in Holidays, Language and plants, My life, Names, Social class | 2 Comments »

For Saul Steinberg

June 15, 2017

… on the occasion of his birthday (6/15/14; he died in 1999), three cartoons that came my way this morning: a Zits, a Gary Larson, and a Bill Whitehead (new to this blog).

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Posted in Compounds, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Puns | Leave a Comment »

Three garden ornamentals and two trees

June 14, 2017

On a recent visit to Palo Alto’s Gamble Garden, four eye-catching plants, one of them a very big tree. Plus, out my back door, the tree in my next-door neighbor’s back garden, a tall and handsome thing that was pruned professionally yesterday.

So: the labiate Trichostema lanatum, or woolly bluecurls; the succulent Aeonium ‘Cornish Tribute’; a Sisyrinchium, or blue-eyed grass (in the iris family); and that great big tree, Erythrinia crista-galli, or cockspur coral tree, a showy legume. Then my neighbor’s ornamental pear tree (partridgeless, but often home to small birds), a Pyrus, in the rose family (like most fruit trees).

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Posted in Language and plants, Names | 1 Comment »

Pride Time #4: gay porn and gay bioflicks

June 14, 2017

In recent U.S. mail, a flyer for Falcon Studios (now in Berkeley CA), announcing the ambitious, elaborately plotted gay porn flick Earthbound: Heaven to Hell 2, with a large cast, including (in a key role) Brent Corrigan. Corrigan leads to the recent movie King Cobra, a dramatization of his life story; which leads to James Franco, who played a major character in that movie; Franco leads to the movie Milk (a dramatization of the life of Harvey Milk), in which both Franco and Corrigan have roles; then on to the movie Howl, in which Franco plays Allen Ginsberg; along the way, these three gay bioflicks take me to the topic of fictobiography, memory, and fidelity.

(Warning: discussion of men’s bodies and mansex in street language, plus sexy, though not technically X-rated, photos. So not for kids or the sexually modest.)

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Posted in Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Memory, Movies and tv | Leave a Comment »

Poems About Sluts

June 13, 2017

(Until the last section, this posting is mostly about silliness. The last section, however, descends to talk of men’s bodies and mansex in street terms, so is not for kids or the sexually modest. I’ll insert a warning when this material is imminent.)

Passed on in Facebook by Michael Palmer, this preposterous book cover:

(#1)

Yes, of course, a hoax. And appeared as such in a volume entitled Bad Little Children’s Books: KidLit Parodies, Shameless Spoofs, and Offensively Tweaked Covers. Then there’s the real book whose cover was tweaked to yield #1.

Beyond all that, we could take the title of #1 at face value and celebrate sluts and sluthood.

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Posted in Books, Gender and sexuality, Humor, Poetry, Silliness | 1 Comment »

Trailers

June 13, 2017

… in NOAD2’s third sense:

3 a thing that trails, especially a trailing plant.

The occasion was an errand-running walk in Palo Alto a little while ago with Kim Darnell, on which we came across a plant I identified as a fuchsia, remarking that they were often planted in hanging baskets, where their down-hanging flowers spilled attractively over the sides of the basket:

   (#1)

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Posted in Color, Derivation, Language and plants, Lexical semantics, My life, Names, Technical and ordinary language | Leave a Comment »

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