Archive for the ‘Art’ Category
April 27, 2021
Today’s Zippy strip has Griffy (Bill Griffith’s counterpart in the strip) drawing up a cartoon storm in fin de siècle Paris, in competition with a disdainful local painter (call him PP, for peintre parisien):
(#1)
Their dispute is about cartoons, in terms familiar to Griffy:
… but is it art?
(here, asked about cartoons). PP emphatically says no, calling them “gaudy daubings … dégoûtant!” — while Griffy returns the insult by referring to PP’s work as “post-fauvist, pre-cubist, elitist scribbling”, while Griffy’s own work “recognizes th’ absurdity of life”.
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Posted in Art, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Pop culture | Leave a Comment »
April 19, 2021
(Underwear models doing their thing, seductively. Plus Michelangelo’s David and a naked Venus by Bouguereau. So not to everyone’s taste, but not over the line.)
Today’s Daily Jocks ad (for the Cellblock 13’s Cyclone 2.0 Singlet) reproduces poses of head and body from classical Greek sculpture, poses that previously appeared on this blog in another Daily Jocks ad, in my 6/20/20 posting “Ephebe with a big package” — the big package being, in both cases, the model’s genitals, covered but also ostentatiously on display.
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Posted in Art, Gaze, Phallicity, Stance, Underwear | 1 Comment »
April 7, 2021
(Men’s bodies as sexual objects — women’s, too — and sex between men, all of this discussed in street language, with edgy images, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)
At the intersection of the pinup-girl world (AZ Page here) and the premium men’s underwear world (AZ Page here), two recent ads from the Daily Jocks people: from 3/28, under the mail header “Model of the week: Freddy”, an ad for OnlyJox subscriptions, already of interest to me for its display of male buttocks as sexual objects for a male audience and for pushing the line between softcore and hardcore porn in doing so; and from 4/2, an ad for the DJ Easter sale, already of interest to me for its display of the front surface of the model’s body as series of sexual objects for a male audience, from the framing of his penis in a jockstrap though the sexualized presentation of his armpits, pectoral muscles and nipples.
The 4/2 ad is also quite clearly the photographer’s carefully composed re-creation of a classic pinup pose using a male model. And then I realized that that the 3/8 ad was in fact a bow to yet another classic pinup pose.
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Posted in Art, Facial expression, Gender and sexuality, Language and animals, Language of sex, Male art, Movies and tv, Phallicity, Photography, Scalarity, Underwear | Leave a Comment »
April 5, 2021
Background on pinups / pin-ups (I’ll use the two spellings interchangeably), in preparation for creating a Page on postings about them and (eventually) a new posting, on pinup-girl conventions carried over into, oh my, ads for premium men’s underwear. Stay tuned.
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Posted in Art, Gender and sexuality | Leave a Comment »
March 17, 2021
The current issue of The G&LR (The Gay & Lesbian Review) — volume 28, number 2, March-April 2021 — is in fact the 150th issue of the magazine, and comes as a book, Casual Outings (plus a minimal, 15-page, supplement of book reviews, without any of the customary articles). The front cover:
(#1) (from p. 64) [The illustrator Hefling] is now a retired professor, having taught theology, philosophy, and Great Books at Boston College for thirty years. Besides drawing and (digital) painting, his artistic pursuits include calligraphy and manuscript illumination.
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Posted in Art, Books, Linguistics in the comics | Leave a Comment »
March 7, 2021
From Pinterest on 3/5, on the Business Insider site, “Frist Center [in Nashville TN] Presents Visual Artist Nick Cave’s Soundsuits, Installations, Video, and More in Dynamic Survey Exhibition”, in a 9/6/17 story, beginning “Chicago-based artist Nick Cave (b. 1959) creates works at the intersection of sculpture, dance, and fashion”:
(#1) From the Nashville show, a soundsuit with phallic components
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Posted in Art, Phallicity | 3 Comments »
March 4, 2021
From Charlie Adams (Charles J. Adams III, who for 28 years, until his retirement in 2013, hosted the popular morning radio show “Charlie & Company” on WEEU in Reading), photos from the Murals Corridor (mostly Cherry St.) in West Reading, passed on to me on Facebook by Eleanor (Severin) Houck (my first cousin, daughter of Bertha Zwicky Severin). Two from the set:
(#1) “Wake Up”, 410 Cherry St.
(#2) “Clique”, 416 Cherry St.
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Posted in Art, Language and food, My life | 1 Comment »
March 3, 2021
In yesterday’s posting “The lost years for LGBT seniors”, about a Talk of the Town piece from the New Yorker, my attention was drawn to spot illustrations as a form of the cartoonist’s art and also to the term the magazine used to refer to a spot illustration: spot, an abbreviated version of the N + N compound, specifically a beheading of the two-word expression, in which the head element illustration is suppressed. (This sense of spot seems not to have found its way into standard dictionaries, but the magazine uses it consistently, in every issue.)
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Posted in Abbreviation, Art, Compounds, Linguistics in the comics, Modifiers | Leave a Comment »
February 23, 2021
Among the scent notes in the “unisex perfume” A City on Fire — burnt match is another, but that doesn’t require looking things up — from the Imaginary Authors company, whose remarkable fragrances come with synopses of fictitious works of extravagant fiction and with striking graphic-designer labels on their bottles.
The perfumes aren’t cheap — $95 for a 50 ml bottle ($38 for a 14 ml Traveler size, $6 for a 2 ml Sample size) — but then we don’t know how many bottles get sold, and how much the perfumes are actually worn, as opposed to being treasured and displayed as art objects with an olfactory as well as visual and textual dimensions.
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Posted in Art, Fiction, Language and plants, Language in advertising, Linguists, Names, Semantics, Smell, Switzerland and Swiss things, Taxonomic vs. common, Trade names | 1 Comment »
