From Ryan Tamares, on a postcard arriving yesterday (8/21) at my place (it was mailed much earlier at Stanford, passed for some reason through San Francisco, and then shunted back down to Palo Alto; the ways of the USPS are sometimes inscrutable), this extraordinary artwork by a Redbubble.com artist using the name UkiyoCities:
“The Scholar’s Path at Stanford”
Yes, Stanford in the Floating World, simultaneously in the California of today and in the Tokyo of more than 200 years ago.
A follow up to today’s earlier posting “turning point”; again, a lightly edited version of e-mail to family and caregivers.
In The Economist issue of June 13th, in print; on June 11th on-line:
Obituary: Veil and beard and nuclear weapon
Marjane Satrapi set out to correct the West’s views of Iran
The author of Persepolis, an international sensation, died on June 4th, aged 56
From yesterday, in the posting “nostalgie du ciel’, from an exchange with Hana Filip about nostalgia, with a reference to (from my father, long ago):
guidebooks [to Alpine flowers], including a Swiss one with gorgeous color plates. Which are now inestimable sources of delight but also symbols of great loss. As you say, nostalgia.
Now, an inventory of my postings about the one with those marvelous illustrations.
The 6/1 Zippy strip celebrates a vibrant life on the side of the road, in drive-in joints offering comfort food and in flashy highway motels, in the lost days of mid-20th-century America (think HoJo’s clam strips):
(#1) Stunned by signage: an octogenarian’s bulletin from the golden days; the cartoonist Bill Griffith was born in 1944, I was born in 1940, so this was the time of our youth
Remembrance of lost time: L-Ken’s Drive-In Restaurant in Colonie NY (a northern suburb of Albany, the state capital) was demolished on 4/20/17; the Tucson Inn, in Arizona’s second city, was demolished in April 2025. Both were famed for their neon signs (cartooned above).
Yesterday, in my posting “Sir, I bring you a token of my subservience”, a Zippy strip in which Griffy addresses a Muffler Man, offering the fiberglass giant a phallic offering to his superior masculinity. It turns out that this strip is a reworking of the text from an earlier strip on a similar theme. And there we have the two-strip set-up for today’s discussion:
(#1) [The 5/21/26] strip “Tired Out”, with, oh dear, the alpha male theme made explicit; it is, in any case, all about (hyper)masculinity vs. inferior masculinity
(#2) The 6/2/17 strip “Rubber Fire”, showing (hyper)masculine contempt for analytic academics (I am, of course, the very model of the modern analytic academic, so eat my shorts, brute boy)
Spurred by Max Vasilatos’s show-n-tell at the most recent (5/3) soc.motss get-together on Zoom, some material on the S&M graphic artist REX, assembled from material in his Wikipedia entry; the summary paragraph:
REX (1943 – March 2024) was an American visual artist and illustrator closely associated with gay fetish art of 1970s and 1980s New York and San Francisco. He avoided photographs and did not discuss his personal life. His drawings influenced gay culture through graphics made for nightclubs including the Mineshaft and his influence on artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe. Much censored, he remained a shadowy figure, saying that his drawings “defined who I became” and that there are “no other ‘truths’ out there”. REX died in Amsterdam in late March 2024.
A Jacquie Lawson digital greeting card from my old friend Benita Bendon Campbell (who appears frequently on this blog) for Easter, featuring garden flowers, cresshead eggs (eggshells with human faces drawn on them and with green plants — cresses especially — sprouting from them, like hair), and, eventually, large amiable rabbits (not shown below). A penultimate shot of the developing scene:
(#1) A festival of spring flowers and cressheads
Briefly noted.
In an earlier posting today — “El Palo Alto” — I wrote:
the elegant Nobu Hotel Epiphany … preserves (from the earlier Casa Olga hotel) the 6-story-tall mosaic mural of El Palo Alto, the coast redwood tree for which the city of Palo Alto is named
Which caused my helper Isaac to ask two questions:
— 1 mosaic mural? Aren’t murals paintings?
— 2 Who created the mural?
I have no clue about 2, but 1 is straightforward:
Aric Olnes’s Godzilla countdown to Christmas on Facebook, #5 (10 days to go) on 12/15:
Fighting to extract himself from the lights? Showing off his Christmas style? Swatting at the lights like those airplanes that sometimes bedevil him? Or just confounded, as so many of us have been, by the strings of lights? Enraged, delighted, or baffled? It’s the Christmas mystery of Godzilla.
AO’s series began on 12/12 (with 14 days to go); see my posting “Godzilla Santa #1”, showing a wonderfully benevolent Godzilla in a Santa cap, starring in a fable in which he rescues Santa’s workshop from Shimo the ice monster. Other items in the series show us a more traditional Godzilla, devouring trains and devastating city skylines, but for Christmas.
