Archive for the ‘Art’ Category

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Sail on, silver bros

July 30, 2024

Yesterday’s (soft porn) Olympic photo from Queerly News on X: Noah Williams and Tom Daley, on the occasion of their together winning the silver in the Men’s Synchronized 10m Platform event at the 2024 Paris Olympics:


(#1) It’s a playful bro kiss by NW, at which TD (famous for his charming playfulness) feigns wide-eyed astonishment

TD is also famous as one of the world’s champion divers, a campaigner against bullying, a hot muscle twink, and a gay icon. Also for looking about 14 years old ever since he was 14 (he’s now 30). And as a good friend, to which I now turn — I’ll get back to the gay icon and the hot muscle twink in a moment, but first some Facebook discussion from yesterday about his friendship with NW. Discussion between two gay men, Michael Thomas and me:

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Posted in Art, Gender and sexuality, Language and sports, Language and the body, Male art, Music | Leave a Comment »

Wrong window, said the sea lion, absurdly

July 27, 2024

This Charlie Hankin cartoon in the July 29, 2024 New Yorker:


(#1) Hankin is an old acquaintance on this blog; see the Page on my postings about his cartoons

The cartoon shows people queuing up at multiple windows in a bureaucratic office, each line for one type of applicant (as, in the US, at the (state) department of motor vehicles, the (federal) unemployment benefits office, or the municipal permits bureau), with one clerk for each line; in the cartoon, each queued applicant comes with some kind of ticket in hand. So far, that’s a familiar situation.

But then it’s made absurd when the clerks are aquatic mammals; a sea lion appears in the cartoon, which also refers to otters, but who knows what the other clerks are like: a manatee, a dolphin, a seal, a whale (or perhaps a polar bear, a beaver, a muskrat, a mink, a water shrew, a capybara or a hippopotamus) — given a choice, I would go to the otter or the capybara, but that’s my personal taste.

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Posted in Art, Books, Linguistics in the comics, Sleep | 2 Comments »

Monday morning delight

July 22, 2024

For Pied-Piping Day — see my 7/23/13 posting “Pied-Piping Day”, on 7/22 as Ratcatcher’s Day (cue the Pied Piper of Hamelin), with a discussion of pied-piping in syntax — the wonderful French-English pun Philippe Philoppe:


(#1) Punnng on flip-flop ‘a light sandal, typically of plastic or rubber, with a thong between the big and second toe’ (of imitative origin) (NOAD) — currently being passed around on Facebook (I got it first from Susan Fischer yesterday)

As a jokey bonus, the image is a portrait of an actual Philippe — Philippe I, Duc d’Orléans [known as le Petit Monsieur or simply Monsieur] (from Wikipedia: (21 September 1640 – 9 June 1701) the younger son of King Louis XIII of France and Anne of Austria, and the younger brother of King Louis XIV) — as painted by Pierre Mignard (from Wikipedia: (17 November 1612 – 30 May 1695) … a French painter known for his religious and mythological scenes and portraits).

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Posted in Art, Compounds, French, Holidays, Linguistics in the comics, Puns, Syntax | Leave a Comment »

Meat shoes

July 19, 2024

From Ruth Lawrence on Facebook yesterday, a version of these meat-shoe photos, which had come to her on the net (the way things are customarily passed around, without sourcing):


(#1) The meat shoes

But since what #1 depicts is clearly the (most entertaining) referent of the POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau)

beef Wellington boots = beef Wellington (the food preparation) + Wellington boots (the footwear), referring to (simulacra of) Wellington boots fashioned from beef Wellington

I could quickly track them down to a source —

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Posted in Art, Language and food, Language and the body, Names, Phrasal overlap portmanteaus, Shoes | 2 Comments »

Everything Nancy

July 18, 2024

Released on the 9th, a cartoon feast of a volume from Sunday Press (in Palo Alto), distributed by Fantagraphics: The Nancy Show: Celebrating the Art of Ernie Bushmiller by Peter Maresca and Brian Walker:


(#1) The cover: all about Nancy — but Sluggo’s not far away, and Ernie’s hovering over them both

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Posted in Art, Books, Cartoonists, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »

Cruising Utopia

July 14, 2024

(Men’s bodies and men portrayed in sexual acts, so not to evereyone’s taste)

Encountered on Pinterest this morning, on the Pace Gallery online exhibitions site, “Peter Hujar: Cruising Utopia” (open from 6/30 to 8/3 in 2020), with this arresting photograph:


(#1) Jay and Fernando [Two Men in Leather Kissing], ca. 1966 (I’m an avowed fan of men kissing men, so this photo was guaranteed to get my rapt attention)

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Posted in Art, Books, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Male art, Photography | 2 Comments »

A triumph of the well-prepared subconscious

July 12, 2024

A follow-up to my 7/10 posting “Their satanic majesties re-imagined”, which was

A chapter in the re-working of artistic materials, provoked by my searching for a model for the character Zn in the Bizarro cartoon I posted on yesterday, in “Cu Co Ni & Zn!”, a strip depicting Wayno’s vision of a heavy-metals heavy-metal rock band


(#1) Wayno’s character Zn

… rather than a simple caricature of KFK [Kerry Fucking King — his self-chosen epithet — of the thrash metal band Slayer],


(#2) The actual KFK, complete with the sign of the horns

in Zn Wayno has created a fresh character, a re-worked, re-imagined — a nicer, more Wayno-friendly — rock star, as a kind of homage to the original. Discarding the original’s less savory characteristics (rather than exaggerating them), and so salvaging a vision of what KFK could have been. A lot less Slayer and a lot more Led Zeppelin.

(Orthogonal to all this, my posting also looked at the details of Wayno’s cartooning style)

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Posted in Art, Cartoonists, Linguistics in the comics, Music | Leave a Comment »

Cu, Co, Ni, & Zn!

July 9, 2024

Yesterday’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro strip, set at a rock concert and turning on a straightforward pun heavy metals on the model heavy metal (band):


(#1) Cu on drums, Co on (electric) guitar, Ni on vocals, Zn on acoustic guitar. But then there are all the devilish details, in the text and the images (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)

The details are devilish because there are so many of them, involving choices made by Wayno in putting the cartoon together: the name of the concert venue; the size of the band; the name of the band; the physical appearance of the band members, their clothing, and their instruments; and their stances and gestures in the performance depicted here. Some of these choices were conscious choices by Wayno, but most just flowed from his pen, as it were, governed (if governed at all) by unconscious crafting of the material.

My task here is to catalog what I think are some of the most notable of the choices Wayno made. Unfortunately, the more I look at the cartoon, the more I see; there seems to be no end of details to note. So I’ll start by listing some things that came to me just moments ago, in the writing up of this posting, then go on to a more systematic discussion.

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Posted in Art, Gesture, It's Just Stuff, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Names, Puns | Leave a Comment »

St. Arnold’s Day

July 8, 2024

According to the calendar on my computer, today is St. Arnold’s Day, and it is — just not the St. Arnold (the patron saint of hop-pickers and brewers, born in Flanders, now Belgium, around 1040 and died there in 1087) I had in mind, whose feast day is August 14. An earlier version of the beery St. Arnold’s Wikipedia page had him confused with St. Arnold of Arnoldsweiler (a musician — harpist and singer — who served at the court of Charlemagne and died around 800), whose feast day is  in fact July 8 — though the current version of his Wikipedia page has a typo in which his feast day is listed as July 18.

But most of St. Arnold of Arnoldsweiler’s story seems to be florid invention, with only a few solid facts known about him, while St. Arnold (Lat. Arnoldus) or Arnoul of Soissons (in northwestern France), aka Arnold or Arnulf of Oudenburg (in Flanders), had a fairly well-documented life full of event and accomplishment, so today I’m going to write about him, again, anyway.

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Posted in Art, Holidays, Language and medicine, Language and religion, This blogging life | Leave a Comment »

Annals of animal husbandry: breeding the cartoon horse

July 5, 2024

Michael J. Johnson’s cartoon in the New Yorker issue of July 8 & 15, 2024, offering a fresh solution to a perennial vexation of artists: drawing a horse (especially the legs and head):


(#1) Don’t try to fix the artists; fix the horses

You can see an opportunity for a much larger-scale breeding program — which might be extended, if the ethical issues could be ironed out, to breeding people with easy-to-draw legs, feet, and facial expressions (like the ones in #1)

There are many Michael Johnsons around, even a Michael J. Johnson who’s a painter and video artist. Of the cartoonist of (#1), I haven’t been able to find any information (though my mind is somewhat addled by the heat). I can at least report on two earlier New Yorker cartoons by him:

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Posted in Art, Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »

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