A Mr. Lovenstein comic, on the bagel and the donut hole:
(#1) “Oh, you don’t look Jewish”, said the donut hole to the bagel [AMZ]
Archive for June, 2019
Torus! torus! torus!
June 25, 2019Fashion notes for Pride 2019
June 25, 2019This year on the Pride catwalk, it’s shorts and one-piece garments. In stunning show-off colors.
On your knees for St. George Michael
June 24, 2019(Mostly about men’s bodies and mansex, flagrantly, in street language, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)
Every year, as a lead-up to Stonewall Day, June 28th, comes a much more specific — male and sex-drenched — observance, a celebration of fellatio by men in public places: June 25th, the feast day of St. George Michael of the Beverley Tearoom:
(#1)
While the topic might strike you as mere gratuitous raunchiness, or this take on it as mere flippant cleverness, and I’ll cop to both the sexual vulgarity and the ostentatious playfulness, I’m also serious about mansex in public places as a set of social practices worthy of both systematic study and a celebratory appreciation of its values for its practitioners.
Over the edge with formulaic language
June 22, 2019It looks simple at the start, but then (as Mark Liberman explained earlier today on Language Log, in “[REDACTED]’s “cocked and loaded”: a tangled history”), it gets intriguingly convoluted.
It starts with Iran shooting down an American drone, upon which Helmet Grabpussy first ordered a military strike on Iran and then called it back. Grabpussy tweeted:
(#1)
And with “cocked & loaded”, we were off into the worlds of technical terminology, formulaic expressions, and speech errors — and then, thanks to Bill Maher, gay porn videos.
You shouldn’t have done that
June 22, 2019Today’s Zippy, with Mr. Toad’s chide … deride … upbraid — a one-line poem and an exercise in lexical semantics:
(#1) Mr. Toad condescends to the counterman at the Nameless Diner
Mickey gets stuffed for Pride
June 21, 2019A week from today (on the 28th) is Stonewall Day, this year the 50th anniversary of the original event, which helped to catalyze a long tradition of homophile organizations and protests into annual Gay Pride events all over the world: events that are protests, defiant demonstrations, celebrations of community, and parties, all in one.
The occasion has presented the Disney companies with a public relations opportunity — if they play their cards right, they can be seen as celebrating diversity — and a business opportunity as well — they can sell Disney-identified products to the lgbt community (in special locations, for a limited time, not out in the public eye). Which brings us this carefully calculated Pride sale:
(#1)
Two comics explained
June 20, 2019First came the Frazz strip from yesterday, sent to me by John Baker because he thought it would be of special interest to me (for reasons that will quickly become clear):
(#1) Frazz, the school janitor who’s also a Renaissance man, copes with the puzzlement of one of the students
And then a visual composition with what is obviously a Magrittean disavowal — a visuoverbal humor form realized variously in (at least) paintings, drawings, cartoons, and web graphics (there’s a Page on this blog about it) — that appeared in numerous slightly different versions on Facebook recently, baffling me:
(#2) Ok, it’s not a moon, but what, I wondered, is it? And what does it have to do with the Magritte original?
The Magnificent WaterSports
June 19, 2019(Men’s bodies and mansex, not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
In the Daily Jocks mailing yesterday, this heavily sexualized ad for WaterShorts swimwear (in black, aqua, lime, and coral), the first swimwear from the premium homowear company PUMP! (an old acquaintance on this blog) — with a caption of mine in run-on free verse:
(#1) The Magnficent WaterSports
Portraits of Frank O’Hara
June 18, 2019(Mostly about poetry and art, poets and artists, with some raunchy moments on men’s bodies and mansex, so kids and the sexually modest should steer clear, but not much about language, or for that matter music or plants or food — you can’t always get you want, but if you’re Frank O’Hara, you can probably get what you need.)
In the Village Voice on June 1st, a piece by by Peter Schjeldahl,”Frank O’Hara: He Made Things and People Sacred”, with the summary subhead:
In 15 years as a poet, playwright, critic, curator, and universal energy source in the lives of the few hundred most creative people in America, Frank O’Hara had rendered that world wholly unprepared to tolerate his passing [in a freak accident on the beach at Fire Island on 8/11/66, at the age of 40].
Schjeldahl’s appreciation will also let me cash in the promissory note in the Alice Neel section of my 6/6/19 posting “What makes the world go ’round?”:
The AZBlogX posting [of 6/6/19, “On the art patrol: Alice Neel, Larry Rivers”] has (in #2 there) a famously scandalous Larry Rivers painting of a naked O’Hara with a hard-on and workman’s boots and nothing else; I’ll get to it in a separate posting on O’Hara. Here, Neel’s takes on O’Hara, in two paintings from 1960 [a side view and a front view, both entirely SFW; with a quote from an O’Hara poem: “I was made in the image of a sissy / truck-driver”]
The clown facial
June 18, 2019Today’s Rhymes With Orange, with a clown facial:
(#1)
From NOAD, the nouning of the Adj facial ‘of or affecting the face’:
noun facial: a beauty treatment for the face.
Then the noun facial ‘facial treatment (for beauty)’ serving as head in the N + N compound clown facial (for a pieing — a pie-in-the-face — involving a clown or clowns), which contrasts in interpretation with the compounds cum facial (for a sexual practice in which semen is ejaculated onto the face) and beauty facial (used to clarify that the ‘facial treatment’ sense is intended).
