Mail from me to Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky (who is, in principle, away on holiday with Opal Armstrong Zwicky for the Independence Day weekend), sent at 6:06 am on 7/4 (hugely expanded here):
Archive for the ‘Movies and tv’ Category
A Catch-22 of sorts
July 5, 2026A faggot with a Tony
June 20, 2026In the New Yorker‘s 6/15/26 issue, a “Talk of the Town” piece “The Boards: Like Willy Wonka” by Zach Helfand on the theatre director Michael Arden experiencing indoor skydiving at a facility in Queens (in preparation for his latest show, “The Lost Boys”, which includes actors in intricate flying sequences). Then:
In his acceptance speech for his first Tony, in 2023, Arden recounted being a bullied queer theatre kid in Texas, and then said, “All I can say is that now I’m a faggot with a Tony.” Post-flying, Arden said, “I was more nervous making that speech [than flying indoors]. That was terrifying.”
In Arden’s I’m a faggot with a Tony, I hear a mixture of urgent defiance and anxious fear that’s familiar terrain — I’m a pussy-boy in the American Academy — that I passed through first as a child.
Happy Birthday, Mr. President
June 17, 2026(Significant amounts of sexual crudity, so not for the eyes and ears of kids or the sexually modest)
Niall Maher’s New Yorker daily cartoon for 6/15/26:
(#1) To make any sense of this wonderful cartoon, you need to have detailed knowledge of two different events: from 5/19/1962 (I was just a month away from graduating from Princeton); and from 6/14/2026 (essentially, now), with a glance forward to 7/4 — events celebrating the birthdays of two different US Presidents (John F. Kennedy then, our overlord Grabpussy now), through two different renditions of the song “Happy Birthday”: in 1962, in a potent haze of female sexual desire and sexual desirability (by Marilyn Monroe, in as close to naked as she should get while being in principle fully and elaborately clothed), but in this week’s cartoon, by a muscular machine of male aggression (who doesn’t look at all ready to deliver an adoring serenade to this particular President)
And now: backstory, tons of backstory.
A salve for anxiety
June 16, 2026(There will be some man-on-man sex, in street language, so not for kids or the sexually modest)
From my 6/13 posting “Two laughs-out-loud and a shiver of self-recognition”, about this Sarah Akinterinwa Psychiatrist strip:
The therapist recommends, as a relief from anxiety, the familiar comfort of rewatching the same series until its outcomes feel more knowable than your own: a very common strategy for dealing with the terrible burdens of the daily news — and [a salve for anxiety] I regularly employ
For me, not a joke, but a life strategy.
Emily Menon Bender then wondered what some of my favorites were. Below, with only minor editing, my answer.
Two laughs-out-loud and a shiver of self-recognition
June 13, 2026Cartoons that especially moved me in the latest — 6/1/26 — issue of the New Yorker: two by artists who are old acquaintances on this blog (Drew Dernavich and Frank Cotham), trafficking here in their brands of absurdity (their gags made me laugh out loud); plus one by British cartoonist, illustrator, and writer Sara Akinterinwa (whose work, all recent, explores dating, relationships, identity, politics, and navigating adult life as a young woman of color) that gave me not a great laugh but a shiver of self-recognition: that’s not funny, that’s my life strategy!
Four difficult childhoods
June 1, 2026… all fictional, unimaginably different, each one moving in its own way; welcome to the queen of the months, here in the northern hemisphere, where, on this celebratory day, the rabbits — 🐇 🐇 🐇 — come to play
Ir starts with a burlesque of the nursery rhyme “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep” in yesterday’s posting “The server’s absurd attentions”, which led Benita Bendon Campbell to Kipling’s heartbreaking short story with that title. That led me to Saki’s black-comic short story “Sredni Vashtar”. And that to Frances Hodgson Burnett’s children’s novel of healing and the overcoming of adversity, The Secret Garden. Finally, Bergman’s long masterpiece movie, Fanny and Alexander, which pretty much has everything, including some early luminous scenes of family joy, then wrenching scenes of abuse, and finally horrific dream death made real, freeing the children. (There are two versions, a shorter one made for tv, then the full, epically long, theatrical release. Watching the long version is like packing up your mind and moving to another — fabulous but perilous — country for some undetermined number of years; it took me several days to recover my bearings. The only thing I can compare it to is reading García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.)
Out of Switzerland on 942
May 3, 2026Explorations of the channels on my Comcast cable subscription led me to a big block of “music choice” channels in the very high numbers, where I (with my basic cable subscription) don’t normally venture. And there I found channel 942, “classical masterpieces”, offering what ordinary Americans think of as “classical music” (of the serious variety, not the soupy stuff intended for elevators or supermarkets).
Some experience with 942 suggests that it’s very heavily biased towards orchestral music (including orchestral transcriptions of vocal, solo-instrument, and chamber music), especially from the Romantic period. My personal tastes are centered on solo-instrument music (especially for my instrument, the piano), chamber music (which I think of as musical conversations), and opera and art song — especially from the Baroque and Classical periods — so 942’s programming is an imperfect fit for me.
On the other hand, the programming tends to favor obscure composers (a fair number are people I’ve never heard of, though you might take that just to mean that I’m a poorly educated philistine) and obscure compositions by more well-known composers (for instance, a work by Elgar I’d never heard of) — which brings me to what was playing when I first tuned in to 942: Joachim Raff’s (very long, and dramatic) Symphony No. 1, in a recording by the Bamberg Symphony under Hans Stadlmair.
Notable Zwickys
April 29, 2026I had somehow missed this Wikipedia page until I stumbled on it this morning:
Zwicky is a surname. Notable people with the surname include:
Focusing on form rather than content
April 15, 2026In today’s (Wayno / Piraro) Bizarro, a bank teller focuses on how quaint it is that a bank robber has written his demand on paper (the way they did it in old movies), while disregarding the pressing threat of the robber’s gun:
(1) A quibbling triumph of details of form over the real threat of content (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)
Faced with dreadful, uncontrollable situations, people sometimes take to fretting about some minor issue that is more easily remedied.
More TMR goofiness
April 9, 2026(about sex between men, described in street language — entirely unsuitable for kids and the sexually modest)
Continuing my laborious examination of the 2026 MEN.com 5-part DVD The Men’s Room (TMR). So far, two postings on the goofy “human urinal” segment (#1): 4/8 in “human urinal” and 4/9 in “human urinal, the photo album” (nobody expects a porcelain pissoir to have human bodyparts and a fierce desire for sexual relations with men).
Contrast TMR with Joey’s Surf Vacation from the same source — see my 4/5 posting “Travels with Joey”, where I note how carefully designed JSV is. TMR, however, seems have been thrown together from five scenes: the pieces of two previous videos, from 2022, reordered, plus some new material (in “poking the bear”, now #4) — see the appendix for the sources and their ordering in TMR — and some of it is definitely goofy: “human urinal” (#1) and, notably, “porta pounder” (#3), which involves a toilet but one not in a men’s room at all (instead, in a porta-potty).