From Facebook posters, this 1934 painting by Paul Klee (Swiss artist alert!):
(#1) The Path Into the Blue — is, evidently, through a Z
Archive for the ‘Movies and tv’ Category
Grease is the word, but Z is the way
November 16, 2021
From the legends of Brino and Bantam
November 11, 2021(Mostly just silly, or chicken-oriented, but there are two interludes involving male genitals and sex between men, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)
Today’s Wayno/Piraro Bizarro, in which a superboy swings with a miniature superchicken:
(#1) Wayno’s title: “Wardrobe Choices”(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are only 2 in this strip — see this Page.)
Interlude 1: I have a poem for this:
Briefs: the chromatic landscape of life and death
November 7, 2021(Note: no men’s underwear was abused in the preparation of this posting.)
From Kyle Wohlmut on Facebook this morning:
(#1) Available by the gallon
What is the color of immortality? A flat grayish off-white, extending to infinity. Mortality, on the other hand, is a transparent blue, filling all the space around you; swatches available from the Derek Jarman company.
The artist known as Zack Zwicky, and three Zachs
November 6, 2021From Google Alerts this morning, a link to the site (zzwicky.com) of artist Zack Zwicky in Houston TX. A (small) photo of him from LiveJournal, and his earnest and good-hearted, but not very informative,”About” statement on his site:
(#1) Zachary “Zack” Zwicky: ZZwicky![About:] Aspiring to educate and influence students has been my focus for nearly two decades. Listening, understanding, and crafting a plan for their success is the best way to guide them. This is my personal endeavor: to inspire the diverse student body and community in my care with a passion for art – helping them to make sense of the world around them and exceed their wildest dreams.
He’s now an art teacher in the Alief Independent School District in southwest Houston, teaching primary / secondary students who are predominantly “economically disadvantaged”. (The moral taint of poor has become so grievous that many people are reluctant to use it at all, opting to use the ponderous economically disadvantaged instead.)
Before Alief, Zack Z was an Associate Professor at the Art Institute of Houston for nearly 10 years. And he’s done a lot of commercial work of one kind or another, so that we find on LiveJournal:
[About:] Results-oriented Marketing Communications professional with a passion for crafting compelling messages. Extensive project management skills, expert knowledge of print and digital marketing, and a history of teaching others to become creative problem solvers.
Z: Il dort
November 3, 2021A Peanuts strip from 6/21/65 (thanks to Jeff Bowles) ends up being a tribute to the letter Z:
(#1) Snoopy the Z: he is sleeping
His fathers’ powers
October 28, 2021It ends in a distressing moment at the therapist’s, in a Psychiatrist-meme Rhymes With Orange cartoon from 10/24. Here I show only the troubled patient, the engaging young superhero OP Man; the missing therapist’s response supplies what amounts to the punchline of the joke, which I’ll delay for a while, until I can say a bit more about the lives of the superheroes (among them, the patient’s two fathers):
(#1) Same-sex relationships, up to and including marriage and mating, have come to the world of superheroes; as for same-sex mating, superheroes, not being subject to the limitations of human anatomy (in sexual matters as well as others), have abilities way beyond those of ordinary mortals — so OP Man inherits his powers equally from his two fathers
But what does it mean to say that Aquaman and Plastic Man were drawn to one another romantically and sexually, and then married and mated (in some order), to produce OP Man? Superheroes often exist in other worlds, on timelines quite different from ours, and (like the gods of classical mythology) routinely manifest themselves in a variety of ways — differing in form and character and inclinations and abilities. Jupiter, as lord of the sky, manifests himself not only in something like human form, but also in thunder, lightning, or in rain (I am fond of his manifestation as Jupiter Pluvius, probably because the name is a nice double dactyl, in both Latin and English) or as an eagle (also a favorite of mine, because I’m etymologically a sea eagle, though I’m not otherwise Jovian), and that’s just the beginning.
So: some manifestation of Aquaman and some manifestation of Plastic Man — there are many of each — had their worlds and timelines intersect in such a way that they could join together and raise a superhero son someplace, sometime, an OP Man who has now manifested himself in a fictive cartoon world that in many ways resembles our own and that seems to be roughly contemporaneous with our current time. Whoa.
The end of the alphabet
October 22, 2021Well, the Latin alphabet as used for writing English. Its Ω is Z, my letter: [zɛd] most Anglophone places, [zi:] in Anglophone America (meanwhile, it’s [tsɛt] in the language of my grandparents). Suddenly relevant once again when I stumbled on the Z-named disc jockey Zedd, who led me to other Z-names: the singer / songwriter Zee Ali, the transgressive filmmaker Nick Zedd, and the robotic entertainer David Zed.
There are more; these four share the characteristic that their Z-names are professional names they’ve adopted. Their birth names, in order: Anton Zaslavski, Izyan Alirahman, James Harding, David Kirk Traylor.
Tell me that you love me
October 21, 2021Two very different occurrences from my experience.
The Fillmore plea. From the late 1960s, Chuck (Charles J.) Fillmore, tapped (as senior member of the linguistics department at Ohio State) to serve as acting chair of the department while Ilse Lehiste was on leave, hesitantly addressing the first faculty meeting of the year (I was one of those faculty):
(CJF) I can do this job if you all tell me, often, that you love me.
The Transue plea. From ca. 1990, my guy — my husband-equivalent — Jacques Transue, with some visible anxiety, pulling me aside for a moment of serious couple-talk, holding my hand, gazing into my eyes:
(JHT) I need you to tell me more often that you love me.
Two clearly different senses of the verb love (but both, of course, capable of different shadings in different contexts).
Converse all-stars
October 13, 2021The story starts with an instance of semantically reversed impervious (to) — a converse use of a predicate adjective. From Anat Shenker-Osorio, the founder of ASO Communications, interviewed on 10/11 on MSNBC’s The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell. From the transcript:
… What we find in experiment after experiment is that when people have already cemented a world view, they in essence have a frame around what is occurring, then facts are simply impervious to it. They bounce off of it, right?
… And so it`s precisely as you said. If they have an existing story line about, quote, unquote, what Democrats do and how they behave, then facts are pretty much impervious to it.
Office zombies
October 12, 2021The New Yorker daily cartoon for 10/11 by Navied Mahdavian and Asher Perlman commits an unusually long POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau):
“We both have work in the morning.”
