In the new issue of the New Yorker (9/29/25), two monsters stalk the cartoons in its pages: Joe Dator’s hysterically creepy Wine That Breathes (It’s alive!) and Michael Maslin’s Cyclops waiter at work in an intimate little urban restaurant otherwise located in the waiter’s home territory, the hills of ancient Greco-Roman mythology.
Archive for the ‘Art’ Category
Monsters
September 25, 2025Sloths, penguins, and Buddhist joy
September 6, 2025Birthday greetings: Slothful Salsa, the Penguins of Penzance, and zuiki.
“Slothful Salsa”: the title of a Jacquie Lawson animated ecard, from R&T (Rod Williams and Ted Bush), celebrating my birthday with a delightful salsa-style performance of “Happy Birthday” by a band of jungle animals under the direction of a drummer sloth. At the conclusion, going from the snake on bass to the leopard on guitar:
(#1) All together now! — a slothful salsa led by a salsic sloth; not many sloths are into salsa music, though there are reports of sloths enamored of the spicy sauce, which they consume with ponderous dignity, giving out little whimpers of pleasure (sloths don’t move fast, but they’re very earnest)
From NOAD:
noun salsa: 1 [a] a type of Latin American dance music incorporating elements of jazz and rock. [b] a dance performed to salsa music. 2 (especially in Latin American cooking) a spicy tomato sauce: a flour tortilla with salsa and shredded cheese. ORIGIN Spanish, literally ‘sauce’, extended in American Spanish to denote the dance.
“The Penguins of Penzance”: this wonderful artwork by Opal Armstrong Zwicky, made specifically as a birthday present for me:
(#2) G&S, The Pirates of Penzance — complete, presumably, with the leap birthday and the pilot / pirate confusion — but done with penguins (my original totem animal)
Opal was introduced to Pirates as a child, by her mother and me, and it took. So in addition to the familial Savoyardism, Opal is also an accomplished artist, with a wry sense of humor, and appreciates my attachment to penguins.
Buddhist deep joy. Finally, from Larry Schourup (a loving friend of 55 years now, living for many years in Japan), an e-mail with a birthday sentiment that just bowled me over:
The other day, while listening to a talk in Japanese, an unfamiliar Buddhist term caught my ear. Afterward, when I looked it up, I realized I’d found the perfect way to express how I feel about your momentous 85th. The term, which means “a feeling of deep joy and gratitude for another person’s virtues” is zuiki.
Zuiki is (one version of) my name in Chinese. So for a moment I thought Larry had fabricated the whole wonderful business. But no, it’s all just as he said, and it’s deeply moving.
Bonus. All done in public, on Facebook. Starting with an astonishing encomium from my step-son Kit Transue (my man Jacques Transue’s son), to friends on FB:
— KT: Happy birthday, Arnold Zwicky! (Arnold is one of my two step-dads: he was my father’s partner through my father’s brain cancer, treatment, and subsequent early onset Alzheimer’s. Throughout the course of those challenges, he remained a source of unlimited love and gave my father unimaginable company and support.) Thank you for being true, for being loving, for being open, and for being loud*!
(*I’m no longer surprised by friends who know Arnold from his USENET posts; he now blogs [on WordPress here])
— AZ > KT: Wow. No, I’m not going to dispute that amazing encomium, beyond saying that in all those matters I’ve been doing what I thought I needed to do (not placing any burden on anyone else, also reminding people that I’m a real person, someone who makes mistakes, is often negligent, and sometimes screws things up badly). But yes, I did those good things. I’d just like to emphasize that there was a wonderful time before the first disastrous time, and a long deeply satisfying time with Jacques in between the two disastrous times. I’ve written a fair amount about J’s view of himself as my support staff and my protector (as well as my best friend and my lover and a second son for my dad) and about the pleasures and challenges of life together. He was a good man, the love of my life, still poignantly missed. It’s especially moving that you praise me in just the way your father did; being open (and highly visible) and being loud were not his ways, but he applauded my performances and the good that might come of them.
Life stories. Nothing really could follow the birthday wishes from Larry and Kit. But I also got birthday e-mail from X, who noted that we’d been friends for 51 years. (Larry goes back to Columbus OH, 55 years ago; Benita Bendon Campbell — a friend from Princeton, 66 years ago — survives, with her considerable wits intact; but surely the time-depth award for Surviving Friends of Arnold goes to Bill Richardson, whose friendship goes back to summer boys’ camp when we were but 10, fully 75 years ago.) I cast my mind back to the occasion when X and I met, what their previous life and mine had been like, and how our two lives, separately, then followed extraordinarily complex, and frankly unlikely, paths. And wrote them:
Would anyone believe your life story? Or mine? Bits of it, sure, but the whole thing, in sequence, I doubt it.
X then helpfully pulled out some of the more extraordinary recent turns in their life, which I agreed no one could have predicted, or maybe even imagined possible.
The rainbow made us gay, the penguins say
August 26, 2025From 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.
I’m happy that you quilted me
August 25, 2025(Towards the end, some coarse sexual slang referring to fellatio, which some readers will want to avoid)
After years of service on my bed, the delightful images quilt was sent off on Saturday for dry-cleaning and some stitching repair, and I got to contemplate the other three t-shirt quilts, which had been quietly stored away on a closet shelf that was inaccessible to me, but had been brought down to my level as part of the great project of dispossession. I decided that all four (made by friends as a gift to me) would have to move with me — a triumph of sentiment over practicality — and picked the queer quilt, the really in-your-face one, as its replacement on my bed.
Now, more of the story, with pictures.
Shimmer is both a floor wax AND a dessert topping
August 24, 2025I’m barely getting through my days, but now suddenly there are five new things on my plate (and dozens of other postings I’ve failed to follow up on). I’ve picked the thing of most immediate interest, since it follows up on my posting yesterday “Yo soy Johnny Peso”, where I wrote about this cartoon:
(#1)
In the 8/22 Bizarro strip, Wayno presents us with Johnny Peso, an intricately constructed Mexican-Spanish and Mexican-culture counterpart to Johnny Paycheck as a performer on the Grand Ole Opry stage. If you don’t know about Johnny Paycheck and the Grand Ole Opry, you’re doomed; the cartoon will be incomprehensible. If you know who they are, you’ll get the joke; and the more you know about them, the more you’ll see in Wayno’s cartoon (I suspect there are still more things that I’ve missed). And then there’s a lot to say about the way Johnny Peso introduces himself [with the stiff and Englishy yo soy Johnny Peso].
Then came the objections. In a Facebook comment from David Preston and this blog comment from Geoff Nathan:
— GN: Are you sure it isn’t a reference to Johnny Cash?
— AZ > GN: A point also made on Facebook by David Preston. Yes, surely peso is a rough (metonymic) translation of cash, so Johnny Peso would be a Mexican Johnny Cash. But I made a case in this posting that Johnny Peso is a Mexican Johnny Paycheck. The answer is that in the world of cultural allusion, both things can be true. I’ll expand on this idea in a separate posting [the one you’re reading right now].
Shimmer is both a floor wax AND a dessert topping.
Penguin-oriented art
August 20, 2025From my 8/13 posting “Botanical linocuts”, about some artworks
that I hadn’t previously posted about, so this is my chance to record them before they go away [in the Great Dispossession].
Some are penguin-oriented. On 8/11, I posted “i just gotta be me”, about a penguin photo montage by Steve Raymer. Still to come (when I get good photos of them) are works by two wildly dissimilar painters: the California surrealist Cliff McReynolds and the Oregon artist Ann Munson, loving enthusiast of the Oregon landscape, garden art, and creatures, both domestic and exotic. Today I bring you Henry Evans, a printmaker — a linocut artist, to be specific — devoted entirely to botanical subjects.
And today I bring you McReynolds and Munson, with two very different approaches to penguins from the Pacific coast (with thanks to Robert Emery Smith, for supplying photographs of works not available on-line).
Comic collages
August 18, 2025I’ve lost faith in these offers reaching an audience. But just in case, I have a variety of framed / mounted comic collages, free for the taking (at my downtown Palo Alto condo). In three sets.
First set: eleven pieces of Barry Kite’s Aberrant Art (roughly 10.5 x 15 in. images, with generous framing white space), described in my 11/30/16 posting “Poet in Search of His Moose”; in general,
The collages are parodic or surreal, and quite funny, combinations of elements from art history and from popular culture, with wry titles. Like Bill Griffiths on art in Zippy the Pinhead, Kite shows great affection for the culture that he ransacks to create absurdist, countercultural works.
Second set: two similar works by a collagist De la Nuez (bought at a long-ago Palo Alto art fair; I’ve lost all information about him)
Third set: a large collection of smaller collages, by my hand: comic homoerotic (mostly XXX-rated) collages
Come by and browse; set up a time by e-mail to: arnold dot zwicky at-sign gmail dot com
Botanical linocuts
August 13, 2025First, apologies for losing a day. I fell victim to some sudden and overwhelming intestinal affliction that I would prefer not to describe here — it’s profoundly disgusting — a disaster that took me an entire day to do basic cleanup on, and then took most of my helper’s day yesterday to do a proper cleansing. Resilient AZ then kicked in, so by 4 yesterday afternoon I was back into the business of dispossession, mostly on office supplies (the house I am in has three fully working desks, each overstuffed with its own contents, oh Jesus), but now some tackling of framed artworks. Which brought me to works that I hadn’t previously posted about, so this is my chance to record them before they go away.
Some are penguin-oriented. On 8/11, I posted “i just gotta be me”, about a penguin photo montage by Steve Raymer. Still to come (when I get good photos of them) are works by two wildly dissimilar painters: the California surrealist Cliff McReynolds and the Oregon artist Ann Munson, loving enthusiast of the Oregon landscape, garden art, and creatures, both domestic and exotic. Today I bring you Henry Evans, a printmaker — a linocut artist, to be specific — devoted entirely to botanical subjects. Someone Jacques and I discovered many years ago, in a long-gone science and art store in Stanford Shopping Center. Where we bought, and then had framed, two elegant one-color linocuts of herbs, “Sage” (1984) and “Worm Wood” (1985).
i just gotta be me
August 11, 2025This is stage 3 in the history of pop-cultural affirmations of individuality; it came to me in a framed version of the photo below, an image that’s graced a wall close to my worktable for many years, but has now come down in the great project of dispossession, as I undo the contents of my condo, which was once a kind of gigantic museum of visual delights of all sorts, covering almost every vertical surface, also filling shelves and crowding other horizontal surfaces (on a variety of themes, of which my family and my life, penguins, mammoths, penises, attractive male bodies, cartoons, and collages (many of them both antic and homoerotic) were especially prominent), with an accompanying library of books of equally varied delight:
(#1) It turns out (as I discovered by turning the sheet over) that this was a page in a calendar (presumably from Raymer’s employer, the National Geographical Society, which went on to use it in a line of t-shirts, still selling well); in any case, some 20 or 30 years ago, Raymer put together some of his photos of rockhopper penguins and added the defiant caption i just gotta be me (a sentiment with a history, which I’m about to sketch)
