A brief Friday delight, to which I was alerted by Gadi Niram on Facebook: a passive-only verbing based on a proper place name. In today’s CBS News from Boston, the story “3 trucks, including one from Trillium Brewing, get “storrowed” in one day on Storrow Drive”:
Archive for the ‘Music’ Category
Annals of verbing: to get storrowed
May 10, 2024L’affaire Haspelmath / Beyoncé
May 9, 2024An astounding story of linguistics in the public eye that begins with Beyoncé’s name being added to the new edition of the Larousse dictionary, an event that so impressed the BBC that on 5/2 they approached the distinguished German linguist Martin Haspelmath to comment on it, a request that MH found utterly bewildering (as did pretty much everyone who knows MH and his work — his meticulous scholarship — and Queen Bey and her work — her extraordinary voice and her presentation of herself as a flaming-hot sexual being). In fact, the more you know, the weirder it gets.
Eventually, as a genuine éminence grise (I was born in 1940, MH in 1963, and QB in 1981, so we’re dealing with three generations here), I undertook to recount some of my experience in being interviewed by the media; I’ll re-play this below. But first, an enormous amount of background.
Free-range folklore
May 5, 2024… Wayno’s title for yesterday’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, with its excellent POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau) laissez-fairy godmother:
(#1) laissez-faire + fairy godmother yields a hands-off mentor and guide, of not much use to the disgruntled Cinderella, who will now have to do her own prince-finding (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are only 2 in this strip — see this Page)
A custom-made eggcup
May 4, 2024Today’s holiday news: today is (at least) three holidays, one deadly serious, two entertaining. I will discourse later about Four Dead in Ohio Day (remembering the 1970 Kent State shootings), Star Wars Day, and (in the US, where May 4th is 5/4) Dave Brubeck Day (for the 5/4 time signature in music). (Oh, there’s also a very local holiday, the Palo Alto May Fête, lightly connected to Cinco de Mayo, which is tomorrow — but the fête is always on a Saturday.)
But first, the actual topic for today: a custom-made eggcup.
The eggcup, 3D-printed in purple and pink plastic, was given to me last Saturday by Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky, who recognized that I could use a lightweight, nearly unbreakable replacement for the white porcelain eggcups and demitasse cups that I’ve using for my five daily dosages of medications (an hour before breakfast, with breakfast, with lunch, with dinner, at bedtime) — the porcelain resources I’ve gradually been destroying, smashing by accident because they’re too heavy and slippery for my disabled hands. EDZ’s intention is that there should be more, enough that I can retire the remaining porcelain cups. No more little shards of glass on the kitchen floor.
A photo (inexpertly achieved with my new little camera) of the 3D printing and the porcelain alternatives:
In the front, the 3D delight, looking very purple in the photo; then, on the left, a demitasse cup, and on the right, a conventional eggcup
Two more 3D eggcups have (just) now appeared. Two to go.
Name that taqueria
April 29, 2024From the annals of remarkable commercial names, a delicious punmanteau name for a Phoenix AZ taco truck, which just flashed by, without remark, in the first sentence of the piece “Motor Mouth” by Aaron Timms in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine:
Keith Lee is sitting in the passenger seat of a car outside Juanderful Tacos in Phoenix.
Juanderful = Juan (a stereotypical Mexican name) + wonderful, so conveying something like ‘wonderfully Mexican’ or ‘wonderful in a typically Mexican way’.
(#1) The sprightly logo (you can imagine the patter: “Hi! I’ll be your carnitas tacos today! Enjoy my meat!”); the food truck has a website, here
Andrew Salgado
April 28, 2024Coming 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.
Something in the way the pun unfolds
April 23, 2024The Pearls Before Swine strip of 4/21 has cartoonist Stephan Pastis committing a formula pun joke, a genre of humor at which he’s a master:
(#1) Pig assembles, for Goat as his straight man, the parts of an outrageous pun on the first two lines of the Beatles’ song “Something”: Something in the way she moves / Attracts me like no other lover (and then in the last, frame-breaking, panel, Goat upbraids Pastis for exploiting him for the sake of a joke)
So, two things: formula pun jokes; and the song “Something”.
It’s that actor again
April 18, 2024If 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).
Stanford hymns
April 17, 2024In my final dream of the night, I was explaining to a group of rapt visitors that “Come, thou fount of every blessing” was the official hymn of Stanford University — an idea no doubt provoked by the fact that my Apple Music was at the time playing a series of performances of this very hymn (most often set in the US to the tune NETTLETON), of which I am very fond. As it turns out, in addition to an official fight song, Stanford does have an official hymn, its alma mater, “Hail, Stanford Hail” (which is rarely played — deservedly so, in my opinion — except that it’s obligatory at Commencement). Meanwhile, though I have hymn resources from three largely separate traditions and have consulted hymn repositories, there appears to be no tune named STANFORD (STAMFORD is something else entirely), despite the fact that the prolific Anglo-Irish composer Charles Villiers Stanford wrote a number of hymn tunes, among them the often-set ENGELBERG.
So there is in fact a Stanford (University) hymn and a number of (C. V.) Stanford hymns, but no STANFORD hymn (tune).
Jack Hughes’s hooray for Hollywood
April 16, 2024Caught 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
