Archive for the ‘Art’ Category
September 25, 2026
Terrible things happen: the people we love most, and those that we especially admire, sicken and die; our highly competent bodies are overwhelmed by an avalanche of painful disabilities and disfigurements (I can no longer play the piano or assemble collages, among many other things).
But it’s possible to cope with these disasters — not with the blaring of trumpets in resurrection, but in the more modest unfolding of loss, longing, and resolution: Tod und Verklärung on a human scale. In this posting, I’ll wander through several examples from my current life, starting with some things I see out of my big window here at Avant.
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Posted in Art, Collages, Death and dying, Dreams, Language and medicine, Language and the body, Moral worlds, Music, My life | Leave a Comment »
September 5, 2026
It’s Labor Day weekend in my country — unofficially serving also as the end of summer — and we are supposed to be celebrating ordinary working people (OWP). Eventually, I’ll grind into the tangled mass of sociocultural attitudes and practices clustered around the concept of OWP in America, but today I’m starting with the small and personal.
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Posted in Art, Clothing, Events and occasions, Homosexuality, Humor, Language and religion, My life, Names, Penguins, Portmanteaus, Underwear | Leave a Comment »
August 30, 2026
(all the way at the end, we get to some sexual street talk, which I think has exactly the right shock value for its context; but if s*cking c*ck offends you, skip the next-to-last sentence)
It starts with Steven Levine — a sparkling vehicle of joy, enthusiasm, and congeniality — roused to anger and protest, as I reported in the 8/3 posting “Two notes on gay moral purpose”:
SL breaks out in a combination of, on the one hand, genuine pride in occasions of humane concern and (to put it grandly) moral purpose in the gay world and, on the other, righteous anger at a long-standing tradition in psychology, sociology, and medicine of blanketly treating homosexuality as dysfunction and disease. With, as sideshow, celebration of the raw sexuality in homosexuality — recognizing the physical and emotional pleasures of the associated sexual practices — in the wonderful BIG FAG t-shirts created by Steven (which he’d been distributing with abandon at Amsterdam Pride).
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Posted in Art, Clothing, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Moral worlds, Music, My life, Poetry, Social interactions, Social life | Leave a Comment »
August 29, 2026
Also elegantly minimal. Yesterday’s (8/25) Wayno / Piraro Bizarro cartoon:
An Etch A Sketch drawing of an Escher drawing; /ɛšǝ(r)/ Escher (rhotic for me, not for most BrE speakers) vs. /ɛčǝ/ Etch A, so primarily, fricative vs. affricate at same point of articulation (as in sheep vs. cheap or wish vs. witch) (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are only 2 — see this Page)
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Posted in Art, Linguistics in the comics, My life, Paradoxes, Puns, Toys and games | Leave a Comment »
August 25, 2026
(men’s bodies and tons of man-on-man sex, in crude street talk, so thoroughly unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest)
About a single collage of mine, call it DNMe (‘Dick And Me’). One of my XXX-rated comic homoerotic collages, eventually featured in the first of my artwork exhibitions, “They All Laughed When the Hot-Hot Man-Man Sex Started” of 2003. It is, by accident, associated with another current theme of my postings, dying and lamentation, since the exhibition came very soon after my man Jacques’s death. So I came to see the exhibition as a slap of vibrant life in the face of death: we display our dicks, we fuck, we laugh, death shrivels.
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Posted in Art, Collages, Death and dying, Gender and sexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Lives, Marriage, Memory, My life, Names, Phallicity, Slogans | 1 Comment »
August 25, 2026
Two views of (parts of) my apartment at Avant (photos by Opal Armstrong Zwicky), so you can see some of the things I’ve been writing about. And then can be used for a more urgent purpose: opposing death — I am on deathwatch for one of my oldest and dearest friends — by laughing in its face and by counterposing the power of sex against it. This will take us down some surprising paths, of parallels and analogies and loosely related circumstances. And then somehow it will all end in Latin, with Catullus, where I at least will find release and repose — cease, Galatea, cease to grieve. But in a lot of steps, and only a bit of it today.
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Posted in Art, Collages, Furnishings and tools, My life | Leave a Comment »
