Return with me now to (what was by one reckoning) the beginning of summer, seven months ago, when I started a complex posting on the boys of summer. Now it’s chilly winter / spring in Palo Alto (night-time lows around 40 F.) and it pleases me to contemplate warmer times.
Archive for February, 2023
The boys of summer
February 6, 2023Don’t call me a “creative”
February 5, 2023Today’s (2/5/23) Doonesbury strip shows us artist J.J. Caucus and her husband Zeke Brenner in her studio, with J.J. fuming about being labeled a creative:
(#1) “I’m a noun, not an adjective!” But then Zeke shifts the ground from be a creative to be creative, noting (in effect) that be creative denotes a characteristic, not an identity, so “less pressure”
J.J.’s complaint is about the nouning of the adj. creative, yielding a C[ount] noun creative that apparently just means ‘creative person’, but she’s more than a creative person, she’s a professional creator, an artist. As it turns out, the C noun creative is a great deal more specific that ‘creative person’ — and in its established usage it refers to a type of professional in the advertising industry, so in fact doesn’t apply to J.J. at all. Gripe on, J.J.!
On the power of music
February 4, 2023It begins with Rainbow (SH 344) in Palo Alto CA (where I live now) and ends with Gospel Trumpet (SH 99) in Exeter Township, Berks County PA (the county I grew up in), about 2500 miles away, and it’s about the power of music.
Moving from a California low-slung open-plan church complex (UUCPA: the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto), in a 6/5/22 singing celebrating 50 years of Sacred Harp singing in Palo Alto, which I was able to take part in face to face (and to supply recollections of how I got into shapenote singing, in Columbus OH, and how I became part of Sacred Harp groups in the Bay Area). With Rainbow, an ecstatic hymn of praise.
And then to one of the regular Sacred Harp singings at the Exeter Friends Meeting House, a small stone meeting house built by Pennsylvania Quakers in the 18th century — in January 2019, when a singing of Gospel Trumpet (loud, raw, powerful) was captured on videotape.
Narcisyphus
February 4, 2023A Mark Anderson Andertoon (brought to my attention by several Facebook posters) with an excellent portmanteau: Narcisyphus = Narcissus + Sisyphus:
(#1) Anderson’s selfie cartoon #7599 (he has a whole series of them); there’s a Page on Andertoons on this blog
Narcissus. Narcissism — usually through reflections, in water or in a mirror, but here through taking a picture of yourself. Sisyphus — a whole cartoon meme here. Not the first time Narcissus and Sisyphus have been joined in a cartoon, but not so elegantly, in a single panel.
Talker of the Town
February 3, 2023This is about the writer Michael Schulman, the current artist of the New Yorker‘s Talk of the Town pieces — a “miscellany of brief pieces — frequently humorous, whimsical or eccentric vignettes of life in New York — written in a breezily light style, although latterly the section often begins with a serious commentary” (Wikipedia). The great Talker of the Town was Lillian Ross, who wrote hundreds, but over a long career that began in 1945. Schulman has been at it only since 2006, but he’s already done over a hundred Talks; he engages with people easily and has mastered the combination of empathy and wry detachment that the form calls for, so we can probably just give him the laurel wreath now and anticipate the pleasure of Talks still to come.
(#1) The New Yorker’s PR shot of Schulman; note the sweet half-smile (he’s smiling in most of his photos), the informal dress, and the light facial scruff (a constant of his presentation of self)
Schulman caught my attention recently with a New Yorker piece about the career of Angela Lansbury that I reproduced on this blog so that I could reference it in my posting “Angela goes to dance camp”. Then in the most recent New Yorker (the 2/6/23 issue), with an extraordinary piece “What Became of the Oscar Streaker?” (“Ballad of the Oscar Streaker” in print).
My often fanciful gaydar pinged on the photo in #1 and the tone of his writing, so I went to his personal website. With fabulous, entertaining, and touching results.
Angela goes to dance camp
February 2, 2023(It’s the morning of Groundhog Day 2023. American families: do you know where your marmots are?)
The late Angela Lansbury, starring in a glitzy television production as the introduction to the 1973 Academy Awards show: a 7-minute extravagant celebration (in three parts) of show business glamor.
Now, the Academy Awards shows are already spectacles of Hollywood’s rapturous self-congratulation, always teetering on the edge of self-parody, but for a while in the 1970s and 1980s, the brakes on spectacle were off, and we got Oscar openers that could, just barely, be read as fabulously glamorous, but were always open to being interpreted as camp — earnest, usually unintended, but definitely camp.
Sometimes, as in 1973, surely intended.
In any case, the star vehicle for the 1973 opener was Angela Lansbury.
(#1) AL’s 1973 Oscars apotheosis: Star Descending a Staircase, packing into a few moments a whole fabulous universe of allusions to stage musicals, extravagant choreography, movies, stylized glamor, carnival, and flagrant camp
I’ll start with a brief 2016 review of the show, go on to some chat between Aaron Broadwell and me last October on the show as profoundly gay, and take it from there, with a special tribute to AL as one of the great character actors of all time.
Death of a character actor
February 2, 2023A death notice for Angela Lansbury (last October) and appreciation of her achievements: in The New Yorker, “Angela Lansbury Shimmered Through the Decades: The actress, who died this week at ninety-six, revealed every facet of her talents” by Michael Schulman on 10/12/22 — which I reproduce here so that I can refer to it in a separate posting I’m doing on an AL performance from 1973. I would like readers of the other posting to read Schulman’s piece and take it to heart, because it makes such an important point about AL — that AL was one of the great character actors of all time, her genius being her ability to fully inhabit whatever part she was playing, to be that character, with no hint of showing off how wonderfully she was playing that part.
It follows that if she appears to be guying us, wink-nudging her acting ability at us (something that Meryl Streep, for one, is inclined to do), then that’s because that’s the character she’s playing, that’s who she is in the scene we’re watching; she’s showing us that her character is an impersonator.
Schulman’s piece is an extended appreciation of this genius of hers, so I want it in my AL-1973 posting, but it’s much too long to just insert into the middle of that posting, so I’m providing it here as auxiliary material.
From here on, it’s all Schulman.
Where are they now?
February 1, 2023This is about comics superheroes, and the first thing you need to know is that I am not a Superhero Person. Occasionally, something from the comics, from animations, or from the movies comes by me, for one reason or another, but basically I’m an utter outsider who occasionally is moved to glance into this world. If you’re a fan, I respect your enthusiasms, but I don’t share them. Nevertheless, your worlds are a significant element in the popular culture that surrounds me, so I might want to have some awareness of them.
The second thing you need to know is that I’m looking at a report (about the mutant superhero Iceman) from the past — from nearly 7 years ago, in the New York Times on 12/24/15, when I noted it down for posting on, but then never got around to it. Now I wonder what’s happened to Iceman and his kind since then.
The third thing you need to know — which you will already know if you’re a reader of this blog — is that I’m a gay man with a lifetime of activism and of research and writing on the organization of LGBT+ life and the place of LGBT+ people in our culture. Which is why I am now curious about the fictional Iceman and his / our kind.
The wildebeest caper
February 1, 2023🐇 🐇 🐇 trois lapins to inaugurate the month of February. But wait! Are those the hoofbeats of … wildebeests? Stand clear! Make way for gnus!