In yesterday’s posting “The lost years for LGBT seniors”, about a Talk of the Town piece from the New Yorker, my attention was drawn to spot illustrations as a form of the cartoonist’s art and also to the term the magazine used to refer to a spot illustration: spot, an abbreviated version of the N + N compound, specifically a beheading of the two-word expression, in which the head element illustration is suppressed. (This sense of spot seems not to have found its way into standard dictionaries, but the magazine uses it consistently, in every issue.)
Archive for March, 2021
Beheaded spots
March 3, 2021The lost years for LGBT seniors
March 2, 2021In the New Yorker‘s 3/8/21 issue, “Tallying the lost years for L.G.B.T. seniors: An art exhibition at a Brooklyn retirement home features twelve of the country’s three million L.G.B.T. elders, many of whom fear having to go back into the closet when they enter senior housing” by Michael Schulman on 3/1/21, which begins under this spot illustration (aka spot) by illustrator John Hersey:
(#1)
To see Pearl [who’s T] in all her glory, you have to make an appointment at the Watermark, a new “luxury senior community” in Brooklyn Heights. You enter a lobby with a grand piano, get a thermal scan, then emerge onto a mezzanine. You scan a QR code on the wall and download an augmented-reality app. Pearl’s photo hangs to the right: drawn-on eyebrows, hand over mouth, delighted eyes. If you hold up your phone, the portrait comes to life on the app, and you can watch Pearl tell the story of how she became herself. If this level of technology eludes you — maybe, like Pearl, you’re seventy — you can use a pair of headphones connected to an iPad.
departmentalized
March 1, 2021From the Stanford Daily (the student newspaper) on 3/1/21: “‘The work is not done’: Students react to AAAS departmentalization recommendation” by John Okhiulu, Kemi Oyewole and Darion Wallace:
On Feb. 22, the Framework Task Force recommended Stanford’s African and African-American Studies program be departmentalized. Following a half-century of student activism, Black undergraduate and graduate students share their reactions to the news.
This is departmentalize ‘make departmental, give departmental status to, make into a department’ — which ought to be a perfectly ordinary causative use of this verb, but struck me as a use I hadn’t experienced before. And possibly I hadn’t, to judge from the evidence of an assortment of dictionaries, none of which reports this use.
Fired up for the grand finale
March 1, 2021(A right-at-the-line Daily Jocks ad today, with text that takes it over the line for kids and the sexually modest.)
The ad copy from Daily Jocks:
NEW DJX CIRCUIT
Step up your party look with the reimagined black circuit look.
Pair matching Jockstrap, Harness & Shorts.
(The name of the DJX Circuit Collection is a reference to gay circuit parties — on which, see below.)
The image is of Golden Boy (from a 2/27 posting) — hyper-masculine, with a hairy, sweaty, oiled, gold-toasted body — here with a hand in his jockstrap, and posed against a golden car.
My title for the composition:
Fired up for the grand finale,
Golden Boy jams a hand in his jockstrap
To which I’ve added a salacious caption: