From Steven Levine on 8/19, this image from a Facebook group on thrift store finds, about a rectangle of needlepoint (probably intended to be a wall hanging) depicting penguins marching from left to right, through a rainbow, each emerging from the other side with its body, inside and out, in one of the colors of the gay pride flag; the rainbow makes them gay:
(#1) Steven of course thought of me, but appreciated that this would not be the time to be giving me penguiniana, so contented himself with letting me enjoy the strange spectacle
I’d never seen anything quite like it. Marching penguins, yes, of course. Penguins in the colors of the gay pride flag, of course. I’ve posted both. But the preposterous fantasy of penguins getting gay-transmuted by passing through a rainbow, absolutely not. And then to realize it not in drawing, painting, or trick photography, but in the unpretentious craft medium of needlepoint, where we expect earnest images (stylized birds) and slogans (BLESS THIS HOME), well, that’s wonderfully goofy.
The medium. From Wikipedia:
Needlepoint is a type of canvas work, a form of embroidery in which yarn is stitched through a stiff open weave canvas. Traditionally needlepoint designs completely cover the canvas. Although needlepoint may be worked in a variety of stitches, many needlepoint designs use only a simple tent stitch and rely upon color changes in the yarn to construct the pattern.
… Due to the inherent lack of suppleness of needlepoint, common uses include eyeglass cases, holiday ornaments, pillows, purses, upholstery, and wall hangings.
Here’s a chose-up of some of the stitching in #1:
(#2) In much embroidery, the stitching creates a design on some background fabric, but in needlepoint the entire piece, including the background, is stitched
Background: marching penguins, gay-rainbow penguins. Familiar themes, as here:
(#3) King penguins marching; the Getty Images site has a page with 177 photos of penguins marching
(#4) Stylized gay-rainbow penguins (in order, unlike the penguins in #1, which come through the rainbow in what looks like a random sequence)
Background: rainbows. From Wikipedia, which has an enormously detailed entry on the subject:
A rainbow is an optical phenomenon caused by refraction, internal reflection and dispersion of light in water droplets resulting in a continuous spectrum of light appearing in the sky. The rainbow takes the form of a multicoloured circular arc. Rainbows caused by sunlight always appear in the section of sky directly opposite the Sun. Rainbows can be caused by many forms of airborne water. These include not only rain, but also mist, spray, and airborne dew.
A crucial point here comes in the phrase optical phenomenon: rainbows are not things in themselves, existing independently of observers, but are impressions created by the visual apparatus of the viewer in relation to effects of light passing through water droplets (which act as natural prisms, splitting the light into a spectrum of colors). There is no rainbow as a thing you can walk through, no substance hanging in the air that could stick to you. Thinking of a rainbow as a thing or substance is thinking like a cat confronted with a laser dot and chasing after it.
The fantasy of rainbow transmutation. That’s real life. But what we get in #1 is instead a fantasy of the rainbow as a powerful substance hanging in the air. You can walk through it, as you can walk through a cloud of smoke. It can change your color, as a cloud of pigmented particles can. But it’s more powerful than that; it’s like a source of pigment radiation, which alters your color from the inside out, always picking one color from the spectrum, giving one-hued products (like the penguins in #4), not rainbow-hued products like this penguin:
(#5) Rainbow Penguin by GateGraffiti on Deviant Art (first published 5/6/11)
That is a truly remarkable rainbow, a nature-alterating force field of a sort this world has never seen, a gay-transmutational engine from the world of radiation-caused monster / superhero fiction — Gojira / Godzilla, the Fly, the Incredible Hulk, Spider-Man, the Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, the Fantastic Four, and their companions — except that its products are neither evil (like the Penguin of Batman’s world) nor heroic (like the Penguin King in the Hero: 108 animated tv series), just gay. That’s weird, but, I think, nice. Embrace the power of the rainbow.
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