Arnold Zwicky's Blog

By happy accident, my Facebook feed is celebrating the day of the archangel Michael with food and drink artworks. Two in particular: a miniaturist composition I think of as Bisonini Doing Power Crunches:

(#1) From Greg Morrow on FB 9/24 (though it didn’t filter down to me until today), with his own work, which he describes as: “Die kleinenbüffel and their shy friend take a needed break for a snack” (see below; note German der Büffel ‘the buffalo’)

And this socially multilayered appreciation of coffee-sipping:

(#2) From Tim Evanson: “September 29 is #NationalCoffeeDay!!!”; TE says he’s had the image for years, doesn’t know its source

The archangel Michael. From my 9/30/17 posting “The archangel Michael”, touching on everything from the asters that bear his name to the saint as object of same-sex desire:

Michaelmas, devoted to Saint Michael the Archangel, a figure of great power and terrible beauty, who among other things lent his name to the gorgeous autumn-blooming aster commonly known as the Michaelmas daisy (see my 10/5/13 posting).

… Angels and archangels are messengers of god, also protectors. As protectors, they can be either militant (usually masculine) or maternal (usually female);  Michael, wielding his sword against the serpent / Satan, is definitely one of the militant band — but he can be portrayed either as a muscled hero (an Achilles or Ares figure) or as an ethereally beautiful young man doing holy battle (so a hybrid of Apollo and Ares, but Christian).

(#3) From Bill Osborne Studios: Unique Expressions of [Christian] Faith

… [about artists’ depictions of St. Michael:] a costumed muscle-hunk wielding a sword is immediately open to a homoerotic interpretation, whatever the artist’s original intentions.

Bisonini. Back to Facebook today. First, a Greg Morrow note about his miniaturist Bambi and the Bison Boys fantasy in #1:

— GM: I have a pocketful of mini buffalo (which are “die Kleinenbüffel” because German is funny) and I occasionally take pictures of them exploring new places (that I have traveled to).

— AZ > GM: I should consider taking up the bison as another totem animal [to add to the anteater, the penguin, and the woo(l)ly mammoth]. I’m big and hairy, with a big nose and a strong scent. On the other hand, I’m amiable rather than truculent, and smarter than the/your average bison, but physically right on the, um, nose.

Bambi and the Bison Boys are figurines, but that’s a real Power Crunch bar, a chocolate mint one, in fact. Text about the bars, from the company site:

(#4) Always choose snacks that serve your body well

The chocolate mint bar up close:

(#5) In a huge palette of flavors — including also strawberry crème, cookies & crème, salted caramel, red velvet, peanut butter fudge, french vanilla crème, chocolate coconut, s’mores, lemon meringue, and many more

On the miniaturist front: see my 1/26/22 posting “Calendar pages”, on Japanese artist Tatsuya Tanaka and his miniature-figurine dioramas for calendar pages, plus an inventory, from earlier on this blog, of other artistic miniaturizations — variously charming, ingenious, sexy, or entertaining (note especially the Boffoli “Cupcake sledding” posting).

Black is the color of my true love (and his coffee). The drawing in #2 — which (for me) evokes self-possessed b-boys enjoying oral pleasures, but you might have other responses — came through on the heels of my 5am breakfast. My (slightly edited) response to Tim Evanson:

— AZ: Two big cups of dark roast cold brew (unsweetened) at breakfast today. POW! (Have I mentioned that I’m a fan of extreme tastes: bitter, sour, deeply umami, spicy?) (Sweet and salty are ok, but the other stuff is the real action.)

Seriously considered abandoning the usual granola with dried fruits and nuts, blueberries, and yogurt (think of me as a very very old hippie), in favor of some cold leftover extremely spicy Thai parmesan noodles with chunks of seafood. (I’ll have that for lunch, after my flu shot. Big kale-dominant green salad with tuna for dinner, probably; I have a M.A. in Gay Greens.)

In the end I had the standard hippie breakfast, got the flu shot (bizarrely smooth-running freeway traffic going south from Palo Alto brought us to the injection clinic hugely early, but they were running smoothly too and just cheerily folded me in), then for lunch heated up the Thai parmesan noodles, but kept the cold silver noodle salad with ground pork (also very spicy) chilled, and it was all deeply satisfying. (And then: enough leftovers to make into a hot and sour soup for still further meals.)

Plus, the cold silver noodle salad — silver noodles are Thai rice noodles, looking and functioning much like bean thread / cellophane noodles / glass noodles — had a whole lot of gay greens — kale, flat parsley, basil, cilantro — in it.

Gay greens on this blog:

— my 4/23/13 posting “Gay greens: the big two”, on arugula (UK rocket) and radicchio, with an excursion into chicories — especially (curly) endive and Belgian endive — and an appendix on cruciferous vegetables (including kale)

— my 6/24/13 posting “More gay greens”, on watercress, mâche, mesclun, fennel, flat parsley, basil, and chervil, taking cilantro for granted

Throughout all of this I was wearing my bright yellow QUEER 100% CERTIFIED t-shirt. And it was a beautiful northern California fall morning. Terrible DOE (dyspnea on exertion), but what the hell, let’s just celebrate another day.

This entry was posted on September 29, 2022 at 2:34 pm and is filed under Art, Gender and sexuality, Holidays, Language and animals, Language and food, Language and religion, My life, Race and ethnicity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.