(There will, as the title tells you, be riffs on squat, well, on squat. Since I’m given to finding my material in louche and faggy places, there will be brief encounters with squat — short and thick, fireplug-like — male organs and with a squatting position for receptive anal intercourse. But no visible body parts.)
I glanced at today’s incoming e-mail, which included a mailing from the New York Times with a link to a story of theirs offering life advice:
(#1)
I found it remarkable that the paper was giving pointers on how to embark on living in uninhabited buildings without the legal right to do so. But then we live in precarious times, and millions are having trouble coping.
In the Zippy strip for Superb Owl Day, Sunday 2/13 this year, another burlesque from that treasury of the absurd, The Songs of the Toad:
(#1) “Buy Me a Balloon”, a tangled version of “Fly Me to the Moon” — which, as it happens, has been zombielesqued on Zippy, in 2018, as “Flay Me to th’ Moon”
… “Pull my tail, and see my eye light up!” Mr. Nutz is a squirrel of brass, also a notorious flasher (if you don’t pull his tail, he’ll do it himself, in the road) — all at once a squirrel, a brass sculpture, a flasher, and a flashlight too (alas, though he tries to be all things to all people, he is neither a floor wax nor a dessert topping). The eye in his brass face lights up lewdly to show us the way to squirrel verse #2:
We’ll walk in the light, beautiful light,
Come where the dew-drops of morning are bright;
Shine all around us by day and by night,
Squirrels, the light of the world.
(Truly, no squirrel’s light was ever hidden under a basket. Mr. Nutz is not only brazen and bawdy, but also bold and boastful. And, he truly believes, beautiful.)
The first in what I hope will be an occasional feature, brief AMZ verse about squirrels. This installment has two contrasting little poems: a four-line note about squirrel sex in free verse; and a travesty poem you could sing, if you wanted to.
There are no pictures, but you could, I suppose, for the first, call up a climactic moment for Georgina Spelvin and Harry Reems in The Devil in Miss Jones; and for the second, a photo of Rex Harrison speak-singing.
(A homoerotic pose, with companion poetry set in the world of gay desire. Nothing explicit, but, yeah …)
A Daily Jocks ad for its new Signature line of underwear captures a handsome young man in his white high-rise Signature briefs focused intently on the solidly packed pouch of those briefs and apostrophizing the magnificent penis within:
(Largely about male prostitution, so distasteful to many, but not, I think, actually over any lines.)
A stone solid pro, a street hustling boy, plying his trade for a better grade of customers, comfortably indoors, in his sexy Water Briefs, at a pool bar:
(#1) [from the Daily Jocks e-mailing of 8/30; ad copy:] Skip through the beach club line ups and go straight to the pool bar in the new PUMP! Water Briefs. The wide waistband on this low-cut cut brief gives you comfort at the waistline. The customised multi layered leg elastic offers the ultimate support and accentuates the butt.
You don’t see an impudent cruise face like — not his real name — Joe Dallesandro’s every day. For the use of his body and his company, you pay $400 (cash) an hour (extra for a few special services), plus the cost of a hotel room at the beach club’s hotel and the expense of a background check on you (he’ll give you references from his regular clients, and, as part of the background check, he has ways of getting references from your previous escorts — JD’s an independent contractor, and a sharp businessman; don’t let that boyish face fool you).
Most high-end hustlers make contact with new johns electronically, but, having come up from working the street as a sassy teen — risky but thrilling — JD still prefers the physicality of face-to-face negotiation. That also allows him to show his skills at figuring out your desires and fashioning himself into the man who will satisfy them. The cruise of death is just an opening gambit, a kind of best guess as to what you need; experience tells him that most men, especially successful and powerful men, want to be dominated and used.
(Well, yes, jockstraps, depicted and described, with attention to their contents, so not to everyone’s taste.)
In a comment on my 8/15 posting “Jock Robin” (a posting about jockstraps in beautiful colors, masculinity, and sexuality), Mike McManus noted the relevant novelty song “Harry’s Jockstrap” (a jock that’s pale blue, suggesting that Harry is a fairy), a burlesque on the French nursery rhyme (and round) “Frère Jacques”. I had somehow missed “Harry’s Jockstrap”, but here it is, in all of its pale blue fairy glory:
Harry’s jockstrap, Harry’s jockstrap
It’s pale blue, it’s pale blue
They say that he’s a fairy. But Harry is so hairy
So are you, so are you
(Call this verse HJ.) The burlesque goes on and on through many more verses; I’ll give you a transcription and a recording of the whole thing — but first, some background. (more…)
… purveyors of riffs on the arts. The principal riffee: panel 1 of the Peanuts cartoon of 8/29/93 (yes, 1993):
(#1) Hat tip to Jeff Bowles on Facebook on 6/28, where readers noted that though panel 1 was on one theme and panels 2-10 on another, they were both about art
Panel 1 is the big riff, cartoonist Charles Schulz’s reworking of that parody magnet, Edward Hopper’s painting Nighthawks, featuring Snoopy’s best buddy, the little yellow bird Woodstock, as the late-night diners, the nighthawks.
And then from the title of the painting, my little riff, an association from Nighthawks to Nightbirds, bringing in the title of a Patti LaBelle song (and the album it comes from).
Finally, the main part of #1 is a story of artistic creation — with Snoopy as the artist, Woodstock as the subject, and Woodstock’s chick as the audience for Snoopy’s portrait.
Nighthawks as a parody magnet. Attracting parodies in the fashion of Wood’s American Gothic, Munch’s The Scream, the Mona Lisa, and of course The Last Supper. The original:
(#2)
Postings on this blog about parodies of it:
— from 9/9/12, in “Nighthawks”, a collection of parodies
— from 12/26/13, in “Santa art”, an Ed Wheeler parody
— from 5/30/15, in “Earworms, snowmen, and parodies”, a Bob Eckstein parody
— from 12/29/18, in “Nighthawks in search of an artist”, a Bill Whitehead parody
— from 1/2/19, in “Nighthawks on New Year’s”, an Owen Smith parody
— from 4/17/19, in “The last Peepshow”, with Peeps parody dioramas of The Scream, Nighthawks
— from 7/3/20, in “Nighthawks in a time of coronavirus”, still more parodies
Nightbirds is an album by the all-female singing group Labelle [headed by Patti LaBelle], released in 1974 on the Epic label. The album features the group’s biggest hit, the number-one song “Lady Marmalade”
(#1)
