From Susan Fischer on Facebook today, a link to a very old (11/30/11) Dale Coverly Speed Bump cartoon depicting the Trojan Pizza Boy:
(#1) Pizza Boy wears a cap, and he comes bearing two pizza cartons (plus, we assume, a lot of concealed Trojan warriors)
Coming past me on Pinterest yesterday morning, some really impressive portrait paintings with abstractionist interventions, along the lines of the one below, the left panel of two:
(#1) Andrew Salgado, The Painter’s Apprentice (2014)
Unlike many of the artists I’ve posted about on this blog, AS and his personal and artistic histories are widely available to the public; there’s a Wikipedia page, tons of stuff on his website, and plenty of open (in fact blunt and unapologetically opinionated) interviews that are both informative and thought-provoking. You don’t have to wonder about his childhood — he talks about growing up in Regina, Saskatchewan with enormous affection — or how his personal life, as, as he puts it, a “young gay white guy” with a longtime male partner, living a new life in working-class London, and so on, plays out in his work — he’s happy to reflect on all the stages he’s been through in ten years, and on being an artist as a business, an enterprise that requires planning and salesmanship.
So: not only are masculinity, sexuality, and social identity recurrent themes in his art, they’re also prominent aspects of his presentation of self: as a guy guy, offhandedly but also defiantly queer (like, don’t fuck with me, dude, or you’ll be sorry), and simultaneously working-class, practically minded, playfully imaginative, and genuinely erudite.
AS came to me as paintings I’d never seen before but was bowled over by, paintings with no context at all. I’ve already given you a lot of context, so I’ll jump right in with more paintings, recent ones (in many ways unlike the early painting in #1, and strikingly unlike this year’s work so far, mixed-media depictions of flowers — floral atlases crossed with Georgia O’Keeffe and Robert Mapplethorpe). Then to biography and art criticism.
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.
Viewed yesterday morning: S4 E7 of the tv show Columbo — “An Exercise in Fatality”, originally aired 9/15/74, with four members of the bank of reliable actors with prodigious portfolios that I’ve called the Acting Corps (four plus series star Peter Falk, playing Lt. Columbo) appearing in the early moments of the show, in which character Milo Janus is depicted as a cocky fraudster running a chain of gyms, confronted by one of his defrauded franchisees, Gene Stafford. It is quickly clear that one of these men will be murderer and one victim, but unclear which will be which: Janus richly deserves to get offed, but on the other hand, he’s bastard enough to dispose of Stafford as a mere obstacle in his path.
The plot is nicely balanced between these two possibilities, but I should have realized from the casting how the scene would play out; both characters were cast from the Acting Corps, but Janus is played by a high-recognition, star actor (Robert Conrad), while Stafford is played by character actor Phil(ip) Bruns, who had a supporting role, at one time or another, in virtually every American tv series there was then, so always seemed vaguely familiar but not identifiable.
The character Stafford was then doomed, because the actor playing him was dispensable. Not only was Robert Conrad a star, he was also an incandescent actor: body-proud (displaying his muscular torso and remarkable buttocks), high-masculinity (energetic and athletic, tough, frequently sweaty, giving off a whiff of testosterone), and intense. No director would kill off a property like that in the first few minutes of a 90-minute show.
I originally intended to post about four of the actors from this episode — Conrad, Bruns, Pat Harrington, Jr. (who I recognized and identified immediately), and Gretchen Corbett (who was familiar but not identifiable) — but I quickly accumulated a lot of material about Conrad, so I’m giving him a posting all of this own; I’ll do the other three in a separate posting.
If you watch television series — especially the dramatic series, like police procedurals and mysteries (which consume large numbers of cast members on a weekly basis) — you’ll see familiar actors again and again. Some of them are well-known (so you can enjoy celebrity spotting), but most are lesser-known working members of what I’ve called the Acting Corps. You might see them in dramatic film series and tv commercials as well, maybe also in off-Broadway productions or in Shakespeare in the Park or similar theatrical venues. Acting is what they do. They might also be comics or performing musicians or models, but they are likely to think of these jobs as just another kind of acting, of projecting a persona, role, or character for an audience.
In any case, one of these people will cross your field of vision, and you’ll find them familiar, but might not be able to place them, and unless you’re into the acting world or in this actor’s fan club — I’m pleased to say that there are such things — you won’t know their name. So you have the it’s that actor again experience. It happens to me a lot. Eventually, I’ll check to find out their names and learn something about their histories. If I have the time, post about them.
This is routine. In today’s posting, I’ll file a brief report on Rachel Dratch, notable for the goofy characters she portrays (in several different contexts). Her appearance in a recent American Home Shield commercial finally moved me to identify her.
While I was assembling these materials, my back-channel tv-watching brought me, in adjoining hours but in different programs on different channels, a familiar actor (whose name I didn’t know) playing a serial killer (a true monster) and then an FBI agent (with a good heart) — a juxtaposition that I found emotionally jarring, a whip-sawing of affect; during the second program, I kept fearing that the agent’s niceness would turn out to be mere cover for some grotesque and bloody obsession. But the experience did move me to identify Billy Burke and discover the huge body of his acting work (plus side gigs as a singer-songwriter).
Caught via a Pinterest posting, the London-based illustrator Jack Hughes’s 2020 spread for Entertainment Weekly celebrating 18 LGBTQ entertainers:
(#1) top row, from left: Janelle Monáe, Freddie Mercury, Kate McKinnon, Ricky Martin, John Waters, Dan Levy; middle row, from left: Ellen DeGeneres, Rock Hudson, Laverne Cox, Lily Tomlin, Kristen Stewart, Lil Nas X, George Takei, Ryan Murphy, Cynthia Nixon, Marlene Dietrich; bottom row, from left: RuPaul, Elton John
Poignantly noted on Facebook on Friday by Earl Jackson, a just-released video of Orville Peck and Willie Nelson joined in a moving performance of “Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly Fond Of Each Other”, which you can view here.
Actually, you should view it before reading on with this posting, even if — maybe especially if — you’ve never heard of Ned Sublette’s wry 1981 song, which has been something of a Willie Nelson project for two decades now (he recorded a version of it in 2006) and even if you’ve never heard of the young gay country singer who performs, masked, under the name Orville Peck. Enjoy the song — which is more complex than might at first appear — and the performance, with Peck’s warm, strong country voice paired with Nelson’s raspy but equally strong country voice (a real marvel for a 90-year-old), and Orville’s deep seriousness paired with Willie’s sweet but earnest smiles. So you should listen to their performance, but you should also watch it.
(#1) From the YouTube video: Orville and Willie under a tree, out in the middle of a fenced field, singing and strumming in celebration of gay desire and coupling — urgently conveying a social and political message
From Joelle Stepien Bailard on Facebook yesterday, this Tintin panel (whose specific source I do not know), in which Tintin and Capt. Haddock finally reach the famous machine for understanding women:
bon sang!, Capt. Haddock exclaims (literally ‘good blood’, used as an exclamation covering a range of high affect: roughly ‘Damn it!’); and Tintin prefaces his announcement of their amazing find with alors voila enfin ‘here it is finally’
La célềbre machine is a monster of science-fantasy invention, the sort of unimaginably intricate device that might revivify corpses, transport people through time, or launch a fleet of rocket ships to destinations light-years from the earth. But this one is devoted to understanding women, as if this project were on a par with revivifying corpses, transporting people through time, and launching a fleet of rocket ships to destinations light-years from the earth.
Men! I cry out, peevishly, at the ways of normative masculinity. As women and gay men are given to doing (often together, since many of our annoyances are shared).
The second installment of my adventures with Howdy Boy, aka Troy Anderson (Stanford ’89/’90). In the first installment (my 3/8 posting “Howdy”), with the folksy-friendly salutation “Howdy”, he introduced himself as a student in my gigantic 1989 syntax course — and thanked me for not flunking him. Now, I have a passionate interest (both personal and scholarly) in people’s lives — their daily lives and their life histories — so when I learned that Troy was not only a Stanford football player (a huge guy who looks like the offensive tackle he was at Stanford) but also a high-ranking Go player, now a business executive, who got a BA in anthropology, and as a member of the Coquille tribe in Oregon compiled a dictionary of its lost language, Miluk, for his MA thesis in linguistics, well, I was totally intrigued. We embarked on learning about each other.
Meanwhile, there was the almost flunking out. I wrote him:
It [has] occurred to me that if there was any chance of your flunking out, it would have been because you were juggling too many balls at once, always a danger for very smart manic multi-taskers, as you obviously were at the time (and probably still are).
(I’ll return to the barely not flunking out below). And I added:
I haven’t been able to piece together your history in recent years, so if you could fill me in some, I’d like to hear about it. I might try to talk you into letting me write about you on my blog. (You can sample my blog at www.arnoldzwicky.org.)
Troy turned out to be extraordinarily open in his response — giving me an inventory of major life events, some quite personal in nature, offering to supply further details, and inviting me to post whatever I wanted. An attitude that resonates with the way he presents himself; as I wrote to him a little while later:
you’re a sunny person; your most natural facial expression is a smile of pleasure... I take that disposition to be a sign of a way of being, a moral quality — of openness, of empathy, of enthusiastic commitment. In any case, whether you know it or not, you project a kind of niceness (despite your imposing body) that has surely served you well in life
Clearly, I appreciated his brand of charm, despite his being so startlingly unlike me (except for sharing linguistics, that sunny presentation of self, and serious moral commitments).
But then, more or less in the middle of the inventory, came a swerve and a surprise.
… decked out in red and green, in lovely Christmas smocks; also throughly wired and wielding gear, both vintage (what appears to be a record player) and modern (iStuff), along with Christmas gift boxes:
(#1) A delightful card from Dean and Tim Allemang; on the back it has the Walgreens logo:
(#2) So it’s a Walgreens card, but after much searching on 12/11, I couldn’t find it anywhere on their site (they are demons about their photo cards, but hopeless about everything else)
Then on 12/12, Erick Barros labored on my behalf to find any trace of the card on the net, with no success at all.
Meanwhile, I wrote Dean to applaud the card and report on our fruitless searches, asking if he knew anything about the artist or the composition. And got a surprising answer.
