The July 26th opening ceremonies for the Paris Olympic games included a tableau — of drag queens posed as presiding over a banquet — that vaguely resembled Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper painting:
(#1) The Olympic drag pose
(#2) The Leonardo original
From Sally [Sarah G.] Thomason on Facebook yesterday, a beetle tunnel report from Montana:
(#1) ST: I’ve seen [bark] beetle galleries on logs before, but this log, which lies across a trail we [AZ: linguist ST and her philosopher husband Rich, plus their dog Yaskay] often walk on here in Montana, has a particularly exuberant and artistic bunch of galleries
Five things: the title of this posting; beetle galleries (of tunnels); bark beetles; gallery lexicography; beetle tracks (as we referred to them) on a family place out in the boonies of New Smithville PA.
Today’s Zippy strip, with a burlesque of a 1982 Elvis Costello song, notably covered by Chet Baker in 1987:
(#1) Zippy burlesques the first lines — Almost blue / Almost doing things we used to do — and the final lines — Almost you / Almost me / Almost blue — but in the middle he goes off, not into the wild blue yonder, but, stickily, into the glue
In case you didn’t get the allusion, Bill Griffith gives us a hint with his title “Almost Chet Baker”, pointing to a remarkable performance of “Almost Blue” by the jazz trumpeter and vocalist Chet Baker.
Breezed past me on Facebook this morning, this Benjamin Schwartz cartoon (from the 5/6/19 issue of the New Yorker) that made me laugh out loud at its absurdity:
(#1) So festive! Transform any cocktail, in any kind of cocktail glass (the one in the cartoon is a coupe /kup/, a good glass for, say, a daiquiri), into a shrimp cocktail, by hanging some shelled, chilled cooked shrimp (such as anyone might just happen to have a pocketful of on them — this is where I dissolved in laughter) all around the lip of the glass
Even better: the classic shrimp cocktail is already an antic hors d’œuvre, a preposterously elaborate presentation of shrimp, sauce, and sourness (most often, from a lemon slice) that might have been served more simply on a tasty bit of bread, or in a small bowl or cup. With a name — shrimp cocktail — that’s a pun.
So what we see in #1 is in fact goofy-squared.
The liver. Patent medicine. Greek mythology. Advertising. The illustrator’s art. All together now.
In the hands of French illustrator Charles Lemmel (1899 – 1976), the task of devising a poster to advertise a hepatical (a patent medicine for maladies of the liver) somehow fixed on the myth of Prometheus, punished by Zeus (for having stolen fire from Olympus and given it to humans) by being chained, naked, to the side of a mountain and subjected to endless hepatophagy: every day, Zeus’s eagle feasts on the Promethean liver, which then regrows for the next day’s torture.
Not, you might have thought, an ideal theme for a medicine ad; but look what Lemmel did with the idea in the poster (from the 1930s):
(#1) Lemmel presents Hepatior as a rest and relief from the pain of hepatic ailments, a pain like that of Prometheus’s aquiline torment; meanwhile, he elevates the real-life sufferer by depicting the suffering Prometheus as a hot hot muscle-hunk and also a curly black-haired Greek dude — who is smiling and winking at us through the ordeal, reassuring us that it’s all a joke
That’s quite an artistic performance, also soft porn at several levels (extravagant body display, proud masochism). I happen to think it’s deeply silly, but enjoyable in its crudeness.
From the annals of cartoon understanding: about today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, in which an unaccompanied young man in classical Greek attire inquires about the reflectivity of the water in a Tunnel of Love:
(#1) In case you didn’t recognize (a pop-cultural version of) the figure of Narcissus from Greek mythology, the young man sports a buckle with a big N on it; meanwhile, you need to recognize another piece of pop culture, the amusement park ride the Tunnel of Love (which largely disappeared about 80 years ago as an actual amusement park phenomenon, but lives on as a trope in songs, movies, and tv shows) (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are only 2 in this strip — see this Page)
So, yes, you need to bring cultural knowledge to bear on understanding the cartoon — to seeing that it’s hilarious that a Narcissus figure would buy a single ticket for a ride through a Tunnel of Love (designed to provide about 6 minutes alone in the dark for couples to get steamy with one another) and want to know how reflective the water in it is: can I see myself in it?, he needs to know; can I become one with that beautiful man in this dark monument to love?. But all this cultural knowledge is second-hand, coming to us through the distorting, simplifying lens of pop culture: not the myth of Echo and Narcissus, but just a guy foolishly falling in love with himself; not actual amusement park rides, but their pop-cultural echoes in cartoons and the like.
(About naughty bits — men’s testicles and women’s breasts — so not to everyone’s taste.)
From the ads of brands site, “Ad of the Day | Manscaped Gives Men’s “Boys” the Love They Deserve”, from 3/8/24:
There’s a lot of data out there about men but only one truth… 100% of men think their “groin” is the most important part of their body. [AZ: I’d like to dispute that, since I’m deeply attached to my heart and my brain; and since if I had to choose between losing my testicles and losing my arms or my legs, I’d happily give up my balls; but that’s a topic for another day] But the problem is almost all of them feel uncomfortable talking about it. Especially when it comes to grooming. [AZ: looking ahead and clarifying this murky text, what Manscaped is deprecating here is hairy testicles, not pubic hair in general or testicles in general]
The goal for “The Boys” campaign was to stop treating male groin grooming like it’s some kind of taboo. It’s 2024 afterall, we need to normalize groin grooming for the benefit of men (and their partners) everywhere.
The challenge? How to talk about men’s nether regions in a TV-safe way. Enter the visual metaphor. The spot depicts the…you know what… as a pair of miniatures identical to every full-size male character, always attached to him at hip height. The visual allowed us to showcase exactly what the product was designed to do by changing the miniatures’ hairstyles throughout the spot.
(#1) His boys before manscaping
(#2) His boys after manscapingThis visual metaphor opened up a whole world – one where every male would have two identical groomed boys. The jokes unfolded naturally as the boys behaved like men’s body parts — bobbing around whilst jogging or floating to the top of a hot tub. And the ungroomed boys, well, they had a rough time of it [AZ: they were sweaty and uncomfortable and nowhere near as cool as other men’s boys] until they finally got a little love via The Lawn Mower® 5.0 Ultra, MANSCAPED’s newest groin and body hair trimmer.
You can watch the Manscaped “Give your boys the love they deserve” 2024 Super Bowl commercial here. A shorter version has gotten lots of play on tv.
🐇 🐇 🐇 three rabbits to inaugurate the new month, 🃏 🃏 🃏 three jokers for April Fool’s Day, and 🌼 🌼 🌼 three jaunes d’Avril. yellow flowers of April, all this as we turn on a dime from yesterday’s folk-custom bunnies of Easter to today’s monthly rabbits; for this intensely leporine occasion, a Maria Scrivan hare-pun cartoon:
(#1) (phonologically perfect) pun hare on model hair, taking advantage of I love what you’ve done with your hair as an common exemplar of the stock expression (I) love what you’ve done with X; a cartoon posted on Facebook by Probal Dasgupta, who reported, “Even I groaned at this one”
Things to talk about here: my use of turn on a dime just above; Easter + April Fool’s; the yellow flowers of April (which will bring us to Jane Avril — Fr. Avril ‘April’); and the stock expression (I) love what you’ve done with X.
