(‘Whatever Seurat is, Seurat is’, that is, ‘Seurat is what he is’. That’s with English que /ke/, as in “Que Sera, Sera”.)
A photo by Elizabeth Zwicky on Facebook on the 14th:
(#1) Boston harbor; the orange bit is a reflection of a construction crane
In the photo (of ripples in water, with reflected points of sunlight), Ellen Evans, on Facebook, saw life imitating art, in this case, Seurat’s pointillism, and I agreed, hence the title of this posting. Robert Coren suggested Monet, and that’s not impossible, but a pointillist painter is a better fit.
Gifts: not just the tea towel, the purple plant mister, and the flared glassware reported on earlier today, but also three postcards from a Human Sexuality display at the Wellcome Trust exhibition centre (in London), sent to me by regular reader RJP. Two remarkable penis-bird cards, and one with a man in stockings — just one item from what turns out to be a rich vein of photographs of men in stockings, high heels, garter belts, bustiers, whatever from the world of gender-bending.
Tucked inside Reid Forgrave’s story in last Sunday’sNew York Times Magazine about the Boundary Waters area of northern Minnesota was an admirable brand name, an off-color portmantriple (boldfaced below):
[Becky] Rom and her husband climbed out of the canoe. Back in [the town of Ely], they pointed out thriving enterprises. One family company makes outerwear, which nicely complements the family’s other business, a lodge that runs winter dogsledding trips. An outfit called Crapola makes cranberry-apple granola. An art gallery displayed prints from a nature photographer…
If you live in or near Ely (a town of three or four thousand people), or if you’re a serious granola maven, you’re probably familiar with Crapola, but otherwise the product isn’t widely known.
Assembled in a group photo, three pleasingly thoughtful household gifts:
(#1) A penguin tea towel and a purple plant mister flanked by two hand-blown flared glasses
The tea towel with penguin slogan (the penguin is one of my totem animals) brought back from the New England Aquarium (in Boston) for me by Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky. The purple plant mister given to me by Kim Darnell (who found them on-line) to mist my mini-phal (which likes high humidity, but not wet roots). The flared glasses blown by Amanda Walker, who made them for me so I could grasp them firmly with my damaged right hand..
A little festival of household furnishings and English N + N compounds as well: tea towel, distantly related to tea (referring to the hot drink made from the leaves of the tea plant); the synthetic AGT compound plant mister; the synthetic PSP compound hand-blown; and the compound punty mark, the (totally opaque) name Amanda gave to the glassy scars at the bottom of the glasses.
And, oh yes, the idiom in the tea towel slogan. Let’s start with that.
That’s from the NYTon the 17th (on-line), Frank Bruni’s op-ed column “Will Pumpkin Spice Destroy Us All?”:
(#1) In the labyrinth of pumpkin spice
It’s invention run amok, marketing gone mad, the odoriferous emblem of commercialism without compunction or bounds. It’s the transformation of an illusion — there isn’t any spice called pumpkin, nor any pumpkin this spicy — into a reality.
Pumpkin on its own is bland. What to do, if you’re not fond of bland? Pumpkin pie can get some pizazz from spices — especially cinnamon and nutmeg, also used to flavor eggnog, for similar reasons.
Such spice mixtures have been around for centuries, but only in recent years has pumpkin (pie) spice achieved commercial superstardom. Leading to Bruni’s comic savaging above, and to a Kaamran Hafeez cartoon (yesterday’s daily cartoon for the New Yorker).
My comment on Facebook: “A double doleful “Awww”. One for panel 3, one for panel 4.” Pig cries out for help in the third panel, Rat sympathetically stands with his friend in the fourth.
Then discussion took us to Lucy and Charlie Brown in Peanuts (and incidentally to Calvin and Hobbes in their eponymous strip), and so to Peanuts artist Charles Schulz, and so to Santa Rosa CA, where Schulz lived and worked from 1969 until his death in 2000, and so to the geographical and cultural regions of northern California (the North Coast / Redwood Empire, the Wine Country, and the North (San Francisco) Bay), in all of which Santa Rosa is by far the biggest town.
Santa Rosa is in the news because of the devastation there in the current spate of wildfires in northern California. The Charles Schulz Museum there was spared, but the family house (with all of its memorabilia) was completely incinerated. The cartoon in #1 is pretty clearly Pearls artist Stephan Pastis’s homage to Schulz in these terrible times.
#1 plumbs Ruthie’s knowledge of the English lexicon (satin is unfamiliar to her, so she does the best she can with it from what she knows), #2 her ability to use anaphoric elements in context (she’s an ace at wielding “sloppy identity”).
About comics, art, and sanitation rather than language, taking off from today’s Zippy:
(#1) Zippy confronts Anthony Gormley’s sculpture Exposure.
[Late-breaking news. John Baker argues, in a comment on this posting, that the model is in fact Celeste Roberge’s Raising Cairn — with thoroughly convincing visual evidence.]
In the first panel, Zippy assumes that the squatting man is defecating, something that people are expected to do in private — though this is a piece of public sculpture, so the man is engaging in what sanitation specialists call open defecation. And in the second panel, the squatting man seems to allude to human beings’ having befouled the earth. Defecation wasn’t Gormley’s own interpretation, but it’s not an unreasonable one.
An adventure in plants, their appearance, and their taxonomic status.
It starts with a recent visit to the Gamble Garden in Palo Alto, where I encountered this pretty small shrub, in bloom, labeled Mahonia ‘Sweet Caress’ (photo from the net):
(#1)
At first glance, not at all like the mahonia shrub my father grew in our garden when I was a teenager: this plant has bamboo-like foliage, but the mahonia in our Wyomissing Hills PA garden had leaves that looked like holly leaves, and my dad referred to it as an Oregon grape holly: grape for the blue berries on the plant during the winter, holly for the prickly Ilex-like leaves, and Oregon for its origin in the shady forests of the Pacific Northwest.
Now it turns out that the holly-leaved mahonia of my youth and the bamboo-leaved mahonia in Gamble Garden are shade-loving evergreen plants with similar yellow flowers and blue berries, and are in fact both in the genus Mahonia, very closely related to barberries (in the genus Berberis). Both Mahonia and Berberis are in the barberry family (Berberidaceae) — with nothing much taxonomically to do with either hollies (in their own plant family, Aquifoliaceae) or bamboos (in the grass family, Poaceae).
(At least at the beginning, about gay porn, focused on men’s bodies and mansex, so not for kids or the sexually modest. Eventually, there will be comics, movies, music, and plants.)
From the 12th, in my “Pizza Boy outtakes” posting, the idiom canyon yodeling, at first only ‘cunnilingus’, then ‘man on man anilingus’, with the sexual slang canyon extended from ‘vagina viewed as sexual organ’ to ‘male anus viewed as sexual organ’. And then today in viewing the gay porn movie Rear Deliveries (William Higgins, 1980), I came upon the wonderfully named pornstar Rod Canyon, whose porn name unites the two central but opposed objects of gay male desire, the penis (insertive) in Rod and the anus (receptive) in Canyon. As far as I can tell, Lance Box hasn’t been used yet as a (dual-purpose) porn name, but Rod Canyon labored in the P&A fields of pleasure around 1980.
(#1) Boston harbor; the orange bit is a reflection of a construction crane
