Archive for the ‘Art’ Category
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.
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Posted in Art, Clothing, Furnishings and tools, Language of sex, Language play, Music, My life, Parody, Puns | Leave a Comment »
August 24, 2025
I’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.
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Posted in Art, Identities, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Spanish, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »
August 20, 2025
From 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).
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Posted in Academic life, Art, Language and animals, Language and plants, My life, Penguins | Leave a Comment »
August 18, 2025
I’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
Posted in Art, Collages, Offers, Pop culture | Leave a Comment »
August 13, 2025
First, 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).
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Posted in Art, Language and plants, My life, Penguins | Leave a Comment »
August 11, 2025
This 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)
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Posted in Art, Linguistics in the comics, Music, My life, Penguins, Photography, Quotations, Titles | 2 Comments »
July 18, 2025
From my 7/14 posting on this blog: my life has recently been extraordinarily difficult and extravagantly painful; and so it continues, with the added complications of medical appointments, on 7/14 and 7/16; a new helper / caregiver, starting on 7/15 and 7/17; and a series of computer disasters, one a day for three days (7/14 – 7/16) running.
But then in clearing out the innumerable closets, shelves, drawers, and storage spaces in this house, preparatory to moving, many months from now, to a much smaller apartment in an assisted living facility, I have unearthed two decorative artworks — of cross-stitching and Mexican folk pottery — recognizing and celebrating threesomes, more specifically the affectional and sexual triple of me, my wife Ann Daingerfield Zwicky, and my husband-equivalent / Ann’s lover Jacques Henry Transue, in the years 1975 through 1985 (when Ann died, and Jacques and I became just an everyday gay male couple). Both were presents: the cross-stitching of three monograms from the creator, our daughter, Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky; and the three pottery doves from my former UIUC student and our old friend David Stein, who found them in a crafts market in Tijuana during a day trip from San Diego that David took me on, all those years ago.
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Posted in Art, Design, Gender and sexuality, Marriage, Mexico, My life | Leave a Comment »
July 12, 2025
A surprise on my Pinterest this morning: a sinesagittal St. Sebastian from Texan artist RF. Alvarez (who offers tender, communal gay machismo, which is Tex-Mex to boot):
(#1) Alvarez, St. Sebastian (2022), aka “Meet me under the pomegranate tree, St. Sebastian” (a self-portrait of the strikingly handsome RFA in the St. Sebastian pose, with a vulnerable but unharmed body, and steadily meeting the viewers’ gaze, conveying neither agony nor ecstasy); the figure here is hooking up with St. Sebastian, and he’s also mirroring St. Sebastian (with his hands behind his back, perhaps tied to a tree, only a bit of drapery barely covering his genitals)
But why a pomegranate tree (not part of Christian legend)? And the deep orange suffusing the figure’s entire body and filling all the background behind him and the tree — another pomegranate allusion (though pomegranate fruits and juice are garnet-red, not citrus-orange)? An allusion to the Greek myth of Persephone and her pomegranate seeds?
I’ve now looked at quite a lot of RFA’s paintings, and this one stands out from all the others, including his other self-portraits (for instance, Self-Portrait with Grandfather’s Hat (2023)). So it cries out for some explication.
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Posted in Art, Color, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and religion, Language and the body, Male art, Myths, Race and ethnicity | Leave a Comment »
July 7, 2025
The message from my fellow QUESTer — another Queer University Employee At Stanford — Ryan Tamares, on a postcard mailed to me on 6/19, in the middle of Pride Month:
Happy Pride !
Pride always ! !
— RESIST —
The holiday moment has passed, but now we’re in a world where we have to actively resist, on a daily basis, against the brownshirts and blackshirts serving our overlords. And join with the drag queens and thrown-away club kids who, in one of our foundation tales, fought back against the cops who came to ruin their lives, and ours.
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Posted in Art, Biology, Categorization and Labeling, Events and occasions, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language of sex, My life, Rainbow, Signs and symbols, Stanford, Trade names | Leave a Comment »
