An old One Big Happy cartoon that’s been sitting on my desktop for some time: casual speech collides with dialectal variation to confound Ruthie’s grandfather (usually it’s Ruthie who misunderstands, but not this time):
(#1) What Ruthie has that her grandfather lacks is inside knowledge: experience with the speaker and how she talks
Ok, first the linguistics, then the frills. On the principle that a spoonful of linguistics helps the ruffles, sharks, and lizards go down.
(Some readers will find some of the material in this posting distasteful, but there’s nothing visual or verbal in it to merit keeping the kids away from it.)
I’ll blame this on the luminous Minnie Driver, playing Queen Elizabeth I in season 2 of the Starz tv period drama The Serpent Queen.
(#1) MD in one of her fabulous QEI costumes; the character invites extravagance in costuming and makeup (further examples to come)
Through an accident of dates, QEI will take us to “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic” song and secret worlds hidden from everyday life (and, of course, gay bears). Then, through the excellent “hell of a queen” quotation, she will take us on a further wild ride to the Princeton Triangle Club in 1960 and, more generally, to queens in drag.
Buckle up.
That’s Pierre et Gilles, the French collaborative artists — playful, way gay, outrageous, and exceptionally fond of sailors — and their approach to what I called, in a 5/20/11 posting, that
widespread and powerful homoerotic subject in artworks, the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian
From that posting, a P&G depiction of the arrow-pierced, agonized saint:
(#1) Saint Sebastian (1987), focused on the beauty of the young male body; this saint seems more anxious about the future than writhing in agony, and the composition is otherwise restrained
P&G have used StS as a subject at least seven times. I was moved to post on their treatments of the saint by encountering a remarkably campy depiction of him on Pinterest this morning:
đ đ đ rabbit rabbit rabbit, busting out all over (as these prolific creatures are prone to do) for June
A follow-up to yesterday’s posting “Queens Pride”, about this digital composition:
(#1) Â Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom, in the 7 ROY G. BIV, or Newtonian rainbow, colors, rather than the 6 Pride Flag colors â so the composition was probably not intended to celebrate the wonderful LGBTQ+ness of June; but letâs just disregard that
Well, QEII #7 is in purple, not violet. Then there’s #6, which should be indigo (a famously elusive color) but strays far from Newton’s rainbow band of that name, so provoking a Facebook exchange between Joel B. Levin (JBL) and me (AZ):
On Pinterest this morning, this entertaining vintage ad, from the site Envisioning the American Dream (“A visual remix of the American Dream as pictured in Mid-Century media”), in “Unintentionally Gay Ads — Does He or Doesnât He?” by Sally Edelstein on 6/12/13:
(#1) A 1944 ad for Wilson Wear pajamas and shorts; SE’s comment: Boxers, bedrooms and pajamas were a natural setting for a romp among âroomates”
What makes this one so funny (because unintentionally gay) is something the ad agency surely never considered. They wanted to advertise a Wilson Wear line by showing both the pajamas and the boxer shorts. So they depicted two guys in intimate menswear in the same pattern — suggesting that they’re boyfriends in His and His clothing, guys who are, as they say, in each other’s pants.
Me, I think it’s sweet.
That’s what the fuzzy sign said that was being passed around on Facebook, in appreciation of its unintended ambiguity: it’s supposed to be exhorting us to oppose hate (with noun hate), but it could be telling us to do our hating on our feet (with verb hate); consider some parallels in which the N and V readings are pulled apart:
Stand Up To Hatred [N reading] Â ORÂ Stand Up To Execrate [V reading, with understood object]
Stand Up To Yelling [N]  OR  Stand Up To Yell [(intransitive) V]
Stand Up To Urination [N] Â OR Â Stand Up To Urinate [ (intransitive) V]
I’ll look at the ambiguity in detail in a little while. But first some words about slogans, like the one on that fuzzy sign.
(Part of this posting will dive right into gay porn for the day, with street-talk musings on man-on-man sex that’s totally off-limits for kids and the sexually modest; I’ll hold this part off until the end, so if you need to you can bail out then)
âď¸ âď¸ âď¸ It’s St. Patrick’s Day, and in my e-mail: two Bob Eckstein cartoons for the day (on turning and wearing green for the day); and a Falcon  Studios sale on gay porn, made holiday-appropriate by the mere addition of a shamrock, but which opens the topic of gay porn with actual St. Patrick’s day themes.
(Underwear models in, well, nothing but underwear, with plain talk about their bodies, so not to everyone’s taste.)
From the folks at Daily Jocks in yesterday’s e-mail, this ad for the company’s racy DJX underwear:
(In the middle of this, with reference to my invention LDV Day, is a discussion of men’s bodies and of sex between men in elevated language — so technically not over the line, but certainly not to everyone’s taste.)
Three different occasions that happen around this time of year, on three different schedules, but this year come together in a single week. And we’re in the midst of it. First, two festivals of pleasure: the Valentine cluster (2/12 Lincoln Darwin Day; 2/13 LDV Day; 2/14 Valentine’s Day) and
Shrove Tuesday / Mardi Gras / Carnival / Pancake đĽ Day / Fas(t)nacht / Doughnut đŠ Day (in the land of my childhood). A day of â depending on where you are â food excesses, sexual excesses, raucous parading in the streets in fabulous costumes, role inversions, whatever, before the 40-day shriving of Lent, the Christian season of penance before Easterâs rebirth (through crucifixion and resurrection). (from my 2/13/23 posting “Abraham Lincoln hosts two festivals of pleasure”)
Mardi Gras — by the church calendar, tomorrow, though festivities are already in progress — is a moveable feast in the Christian liturgical calendar, dependent on the date of Easter, a date that’s calculated for each year from the phases of the moon. In 2024, the two festivals of pleasure happen to coincide; today is Lincoln Darwin Day and Wednesday is Valentine’s Day (which is also a family holiday for me, since it’s my daughter Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky’s birthday).
And then in 2024 these two festivals come during the continuing celebrations of the lunar new year according to traditional Chinese reckoning (in a 12-year cycle); a Year of the Dragon began on 2/10, and the parades and displays are still going on.
That’s the outline; a few more details, with some illustrations, follow. (Oh yes, this is also today’s MQOS Not Dead Yet posting, just more elaborate than usual.)
