In the new issue of the New Yorker (9/29/25), two monsters stalk the cartoons in its pages: Joe Dator’s hysterically creepy Wine That Breathes (It’s alive!) and Michael Maslin’s Cyclops waiter at work in an intimate little urban restaurant otherwise located in the waiter’s home territory, the hills of ancient Greco-Roman mythology.
Archive for the ‘Myths’ Category
Monsters
September 25, 2025St. Sebastian without the arrows
July 12, 2025A surprise on my Pinterest this morning: a sinesagittal St. Sebastian from Texan artist RF. Alvarez (who offers tender, communal gay machismo, which is Tex-Mex to boot):
(#1) Alvarez, St. Sebastian (2022), aka “Meet me under the pomegranate tree, St. Sebastian” (a self-portrait of the strikingly handsome RFA in the St. Sebastian pose, with a vulnerable but unharmed body, and steadily meeting the viewers’ gaze, conveying neither agony nor ecstasy); the figure here is hooking up with St. Sebastian, and he’s also mirroring St. Sebastian (with his hands behind his back, perhaps tied to a tree, only a bit of drapery barely covering his genitals)
But why a pomegranate tree (not part of Christian legend)? And the deep orange suffusing the figure’s entire body and filling all the background behind him and the tree — another pomegranate allusion (though pomegranate fruits and juice are garnet-red, not citrus-orange)? An allusion to the Greek myth of Persephone and her pomegranate seeds?
I’ve now looked at quite a lot of RFA’s paintings, and this one stands out from all the others, including his other self-portraits (for instance, Self-Portrait with Grandfather’s Hat (2023)). So it cries out for some explication.
Paris chooses
April 8, 2025[Sex work, naked boys, nude statuary (classical in theme, but, yes, full frontal) — generally not suitable for kids or the sexually modest]
Das wäre Ihr Mädchen, Herr Jakob Schmidt
… Ach, bedenken sie was man für dreißig Dollar kriegt— Weill & Brecht, Havanna Lied (from the 1930 opera Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny)
How is a man to choose? He could have that one for $30. But then the other one looks eager to please. And the third one looks really hot naked.
That was Jakob Schmidt in the imaginary city of Mahagonny — part America, part Weimar Germany — but then this morning Pinterest brought me another man, call him Alex, picking one of three for sexual services, under the watchful eye of an arranger, the clever and mischievous H, in a painting by Cornelius McCarthy:
Warnings
March 3, 2025Passed on by John McIntyre on Facebook yesterday, this Jim Benton cartoon:
(#1) It’s all the fault of the Cassandras; they should have made us believe them, they shouldn’t have let us not believe them
(There’s a Page on this blog about my postings on Jim Benton and his cartoons.)
The eagle’s feast
February 8, 2025On my Pinterest feed yesterday — no doubt because of my interest in men’s bodies — this portrait of Prometheus, writhing mad-eyed in agony, shackled on a rocky ledge, as Zeus’s punitive eagle flies in to gnaw on his liver once again:
(#1) Frank Buchser, Prometheus Forged on a Rock (1855)
To come: first, notes on Prometheus and the eagle, from previous postings on this blog.
Then about the artist, who was, first of all, Swiss, from the town of Solothurn. There will be a digression on the town, which is almost impossibly picturesque.
But for the middle part of his life FB wandered from Solothurn, traveling widely around the world, including five years in the US, where he changed his personal name from Franz to Frank and painted a huge series of works depicting post-Civil War America for an European audience — three of them reproduced here.
Melchior
December 30, 2024The 12 days of Christmas click by as we advance to Twelfth Night — Epiphany Eve — and then on 1/6 to Epiphany itself, the day of the Three Magi, or Three Kings, conventionally each the king of a distant land, each with a characteristic appearance, each with a name, and each with his gift for the Christ Child in Bethlehem. In one tradition, Melchior (alongside Caspar / Kaspar and Balthazar) is King of Persia, the oldest of the kings (a graybeard), and the giver of gold (rather than frankincense or myrrh).
The thing is, I am Arnold Melchior Zwicky, son of Arnold Melchior Zwicky and grandson of Melchior Arnold Zwicky, the last of whom, oh yes, had brothers named Kaspar and Balthazar. I have the name, the age and the gray beard, but lack the kingdom and the gold. Yet for a brief period in January each year, I am Melchior as well as Arnold, I am resplendent, I am a king.
For this period, I rise above the fact that in my country all three parts of my name are seen as strange and foreign, none more than Melchior (for the rest of the year, when I have to clarify my middle initial, I say “M as in Michael”, leading many people to think that my middle name is in fact Michael, so they could call me Mike). Only this year did it occur to me that I should add Michael / Mike to my alter ego’s name Alexander / Alex Adams: ALEXANDER MICHAEL ADAMS, the weighty A. M. Adams, the amiable Alex “Mike” Adams, hookup name Alex, just Alex.
Now, two things. First , an alternative view of the royal Melchior, from a 2022 posting in which he’s depicted as, wow, not only young and virile but also as the (mythic) king of France. And then another 2022 posting that starts out being about okapis and somehow ends up with “M as in musk ox” for my middle initial (plus “O as in okapi” for the O of ARNOLD).
Meanwhile, Epiphany is coming and my royal robes need fluffing.
The naked scribe
December 8, 2024From Tim Evanson on Facebook yesterday, this cover art by J.C. Leyendecker (1874-1951): The Literary Digest of 6/12/1909:
(#1) Homoerotic soft porn in the style of classical sculpture (complete with a laurel wreath for the author au naturel); the laurel wreath identifies the writer as an incarnation of Apollo, the god of poetry, who is often depicted with a laurel wreath (recalling his desire for Daphne, a nymph who was transformed into a laurel tree to escape the god’s advances); meanwhile, the writer is nude, because he’s a god (the model for this drawing was JCL’s favorite model, also his partner in life, Charles Beach (1881-1954))
I’m a writer (among other things), and I mostly work in my underwear, but I don’t write commando. Well, I’m no Charles Beach, and certainly no Apollo.
Hunky idolators
December 4, 2024Steven Levine on Facebook yesterday, contemplating Poussin’s The Adoration of the Golden Calf (1633-34) at the National Gallery in London:
(#1) [SL:] Those golden idol worshipping Israelites were pretty hot. I didn’t learn this in Hebrew school
Note: Poussin’s canvases are mostly huge — far too large to be appreciated properly in reproductions like the ones I’m giving you — and sprawling, crowded with characters (voluptuous women and studly men plus, where appropriate, adorable cherubs) in motion in an assortment of encounters, the whole scene illustrating some biblical or mythological theme, set in a wild natural landscape under a dramatic sky. (The celebration of the picturesque famously characterizes the Romantic movement in the arts, but in Poussin it flourished in the Baroque.)
Now: notes on Poussin; then on his religious painting on the Golden Calf theme in #1; then on to a mythological painting, Acis and Galatea; to a mythological painting in which six different encounters on a single theme (metamorphosis into a flower) are gathered together: The Empire of Flora; and, finally, to a mythological painting focused on sheer physicality: Bacchanale.
Then I will digress to Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party, evoked for me by Poussin’s character-packed canvases. Then from Poussin’s surname, I drift to the tasty French dish poussin, and from this young chicken (typically roasted), I drift further to other chickens, young men considered as desirable sexual objects. Which brings us back to those steamy Israelites worshipping the Golden Calf. It’s the curse — or gift — of the associative mind.
The sun chronicles
November 23, 2024🏈 🏈 today’s the Big Game in these parts — Stanford vs. UC Berkeley, 12:30 (PT), blessedly at Berkeley; the rain has given way to overcast skies, with occasional sunny breaks
From sun to sun, art to art: it starts with a Ukrainian sculpture of Icarus (who recklessly flew too close to the sun, defying the gods, and so plunged to his death); moves through a Russian painting of Icarus with his father Daedalus (who warns his son not to fly too high or too low); from there to van Dyck’s earlier painting of this same scene; which leads to a van Dyck self-portrait with a sunflower, a Helianthus that’s turned to him as to the sun itself: perhaps the painter as an incarnation of the sun god Apollo.
Icarus, nude, falling
November 20, 2024(Another warning about male genitals in fine art)
Encountered on Pinterest on 10/29, a poster of a stunning wooden sculpture of Icarus by Ukrainian artist Bogdan Goloyad: