(It’s art, but about male bodies and often about mansex, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)
Original alert from Daniel MacKay on Facebook, about a work that’s far from X-rated (no sexual bits at all) but is nevertheless steeped in a ritual of mansex, t-room cruising, in this case at the urinals:
A follow-up to my posting of the 28th, “Deviant Last Suppers”, about queer travesties of Leonardo’s Last Supper, a painting of the communal meal (celebrated on Maundy Thursday, yesterday this year) that Christians understand as the origin of the eucharist, or communion, ritual (take, eat, this is my body; take, drink, this is my blood). Now after sunset today, the Jewish ritual communal meal, the Passover seder, with its symbolic retelling of the Jews’ liberation from slavery in ancient Egypt. So, Bill Stewart wondered in a comment on this blog, what about a queer seder?
Well, sort of.
… and truncated expressions. From Sam Anderson’s “New Sentences” column in the NYT Magazine on the 20th (on-line) and 25th (in print), “From Morgan Parker’s ‘There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé’”, about ‘Summertime and the living is extraordinarily difficult’:
Every culture is a vast carpet of interwoven references: clichés, fables, jingles, lullabies, warnings, jokes, memes. To be a part of that culture means that it only takes a few words, the tiniest head fake, to set your mind racing along a familiar track. You can lead a horse to. There once was a man from. When the moon hits your eye. If you liked it then you shoulda.
One trick of art is to constantly invoke — and then manipulate and complicate — these familiar mental scripts. The artist sets your mind on a well-worn road, and then, just as you settle into that automatic groove, yanks you suddenly in another direction. It’s the same trick as a crossover dribble. Great art is always, if you will, breaking your mind’s ankles.
Today’s One Big Happy, with a now-classic mishearing:
(#1) the sky’s heard as this guy’s
In my 5/30/12 posting “Annals of mishearing”, discussion of the sky misheard as this guy, on several occasions.
(Men’s bodies, mansex, and sexual fetishes. Not for kids or the sexually modest.)
… given to exposing his ass, interracial mansex, and golden showers. Not your Irish uncle’s saint.
Intro illustration from Chris Ambidge on Facebook (ultimate source not known):
(#1) Shamrock butts on parade
(The young men appear to be wearing thongs, so that they are not strictly speaking exposing themselves.)
Then, more startlingly, the TitanMen sale for St. Patrick’s Day weekend, showing a black man rimming a white man (sale promo code KISSME). Why?
And finally, in the sextoy section of the TitanMen site, a full-scale replica of an erect penis that pisses on command. In chocolate (black), but also vanilla (white) and caramel (brown). Kinky.
Oh, groan. A divine pun in today’s Zippy:
Bill Griffith’s enigmatic God is a recurrent character in the strip. Today we learn about God’s BMW and how He cares for it.
Two from the January 29th New Yorker, a recent Bizarro, and yesterday’s Rhymes With Orange, all requiring considerable background knowledge to understand:
Today’s Zippy has our Pinhead hero trading diner thoughts with a Pinhead named Nesbitt:
For two panels, Zippy spouts the idea that nothing represents, or stands for, something else; things are what they are, and that’s all there is. Meanwhile, Nesbitt runs through two idioms that he thinks of as clichés (rock s.o.’s world, takeaway), and the pair ping-pong plural platypi.
Yesterday’s posting “Rice pudding in the land of quilted steel” focused on diner rice pudding, but the Wikipedia article covers quite a large territory, including rice puddings in different cultures around the world and rice pudding in popular culture. On the latter front, there’s a humorous poem “Rice Pudding” by A.A. Milne (of Winnie the Pooh fame) that Benita Bendon Campbell has reminded me of. The poem takes off from the Anglo-American tradition of rice pudding as plain food for children or invalids — and shows young Mary Jane’s rebellion against the tradition: “She won’t eat her dinner – rice pudding again”.
