Archive for the ‘Penguins’ Category

The dinner art installation

June 9, 2023

Assembled yesterday morning, on the teak coffee table in the living-room area of my condo, an art installation that doubles as a dinner-table setting. Some of the elements in this composition  are components of both the installation and the dinner setting; some are part of the installation only — or, some would argue, actually constitute a centerpiece for the dining table, in which case the whole thing is a dinner-table setting, but viewed either as artistic display or as dinnerware (think of Duchamp’s 1917 Fountain, but with a lot more parts and with the stuff actually capable of serving its usual function.)

Photos (by Erick Barros):


(#1) View of the installation from the front


(#2) View of the installation from above

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Street Life

May 21, 2023

A just-installed photo gallery on the wall above the desk in the study of my condo. An addition to the visual density of the place, providing enjoyment for me, but also intended to absorb and please friends and visitors (I am a deeply sociable person, and I like to entertain, in several senses.)

About Street Life. A display of six sex-tinged (but not actually X-rated) photos of men on the street (from Samson McGee, who maintains a gigantic library of malesex photos for sale), each with a fortune from a fortune cookie. I have given them titles and ordered them below in a kind of natural progression; here with the fortunes:

— Soon Paid Off: street hustler, iconic and tough; All of your hard work will soon be paid off.

— Performance over Speed: street hustler, not at all toughened up yet; People forget how fast you did a job — but they remember how well you did it.

— Time Not Money: two sailors, possibly cruising, maybe even hustling; A friend asks only for your time and not money.

— Offer Affection and a Sea-going Hard-On: two sailors strolling, one with a hard-on; Love is being offered to you, be affectionate in return!

— Offer Affection and an Unbuttoned Hard-On: two guys talking on the street, one with a hard-on and his fly open; [once again] Love is being offered to you, be affectionate in return!

— Fish Sticks and Moose Knuckles: two guys talking on the street  in front of a shop selling fish sticks (one sporting a tremendous moose-knuckle); Every wise man started out by asking many questions.

Once again, I would like to give you a photo of the display, but I have to wait until I can get someone to take a picture for me.

The visual density of my environment. First there are the books — in the big main room, the study, and the bedroom. Mostly a deeply random collection of things saved from the dispersal of my 40,000-volume professional library, though there are some coherent subcollections. But possibly worth scanning: I doubt that there’s anyone else in the world with this collection of titles, so you might find some surprises.

Then on almost every remaining horizontal surface, collections of objects — remarkable, pretty, funny, sexy, artfully made, full of affectionate associations. Gay symbols, penguins, mammoths, phallic symbols. In the heavily X-rated bedroom, representations of dicks, simulacra of dicks, creatures with bodyparts in the shape of dicks, and so on.

And on almost every available vertical surface, artworks, cartoons, collages, Zwicky images, postcards (men, animals, food, whatever), and photographs, both family photographs  and hot guys. In the heavily X-rated bedroom, a huge assortment of my XXX-rated homoerotic comic collages.

Much here to amuse the eye and engage the mind. Come visit sometime.

 

 

First with anteaters, then with penguins

March 30, 2023

I spare you the details of what these Pacific “bomb cyclone” weather events do to my body when it encounters the very low air pressure that accompanies them, but it’s extremely unpleasant and totally immobilizing (and this time, it included the inability to focus my eyes, so I couldn’t read anything for, like, four hours). That was yesterday; surviving this attack comes with slow recovery over some days. I had an “easy” entertaining posting in preparation, mostly replays from the past, so this is what I’m giving you now, just as proof that I’m not (quite) dead yet.

The occasion is yesterday’s (3/29) Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, set in a little spheniscid restaurant:


(#1) Wayno’s title: “Just Like Mom Used to Spew” (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page.)

Crude spew from Wayno, technical regurgitate in the cartoon text. Both references to penguins feeding their chicks. So: some comments on these practices. Then on to the restaurant — with all the accoutrements of a little neighborhood place — serving homey specialties, by penguins, for penguins.

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Der Pinguin ist kaput

March 14, 2023

Today’s sad news, an outcome of dramatic high winds that battered and, eventually, smashed my plastic patio plant penguin, the 2-ft b&w sentinel that stood guard by my back door for some years, and before that watched over various very large potted plants.

I’m waiting for the winds to die down to assemble the pieces and put them in the trash.  Then, in a few days we’re supposed to have more rainstorms, floods, and mudslides.

It seems that I have only one photo of the decedent, one that doesn’t show them to best advantage.

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Penguins on the town

February 26, 2023

Penguin spots — showing four penguins on holiday in New York City — by Milanese illustrator Antonio Giovanni Pinna in the 2/27/23 issue of The New Yorker:


(#1) Six of the spots: p. 21, bellhop / porter transporting the penguins in a hotel luggage cart; p. 24, special polar-temp accommodations for the penguins; p. 31, two penguins on a horse-drawn carriage ride in Central Park; p. 42, a penguin contributes to a street musician; p. 46, the four penguins emerge from the subway; p. 49, the penguins collaborate so that one of them can use a tower viewer to appreciate scenic views

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Penguin suits

January 3, 2023

(On the personal background, see my Zardoz posting; the posting below is one I started yesterday but was unable to finish. Hard days.)

Yesterday’s Rhymes With Orange cartoon shows a collection of (apparently all male, to judge from the prickly body hair) penguins putting on their (tuxedo-like) overcoats for journeying home after a winter party:


(#1) Translation between worlds: the characters are all penguins, but they are also human beings in a modern social situation

These penguin suits are overcoats (somewhat resembling tuxedos); in the classic penguin-suit cartoon, however, the suits are actual tuxedos.

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S Novym Godom!

January 1, 2023

🐇 🐇 🐇 greeting the new month and the new year, with Happy New Year! greetings in Russian, on a postcard showing a polar bear and a penguin — symbols of cold polar places, hence of winter — about to shake hands on a globe:


(#1) The Soviet Visuals Facebook page identifies it merely as: “Happy New Year!” Soviet postcard, 1960 (hat tip to Dennis Lewis on 12/31)

Soviet Visuals is a FB site for the Stratonaut shop, which sells all sorts of items from, or harking back to, the Soviet period of Russian history. Alas, in two hours of searching, I couldn’t find #1 anywhere on the Stratonaut site, or anywhere else, for that matter. This is of some interest, because the imagery (the polar bear and penguin) and the apparent message (a wish for unity and amity throughout the world) would be unsurprising in an American card for the Christmas / New Year season, but looks unparalleled in a Russian context — where I can’t find any polar bears or penguins at all, and where the iconography is deeply Russocentric (in one way or another) rather than universalist.

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Beneath a green auroral sky

December 18, 2022

… the Christmas penguins embrace:


(#1) In the sky, the green shimmer of an aurora; on the ground, a parent penguin nurtures their young one (in a green knitted cap)

The image comes to me from Joel Levin (one of the most faithful readers of this blog) for my collection of penguiniana. It came to him in a corporate holiday card from Fidelity Investments, where its visual message of parental care was sandwiched between conventional holiday greetings:

Wishing you a magical holiday

[Fidelity Penguin gif]

Here’s to all the good things the season brings.

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The California fire ranger penguin Christmas card

December 17, 2022

In California, in the winter, in the mountains, when it snows, we fight forest fires with rangers acclimated  to fiercely cold weather: the CAL FIRE penguin patrol. But our ranger penguins are not only tough, they are also rilly rilly cute, iconic adorable-penguin cute (see some iconic examples in my 12/11 posting “The penguin Christmas card”). And now CAL FIRE is celebrating our ranger penguins with:


CAL FIRE’s Holiday Penguin Coloring Page! (link here)

This astonishing object came to me in holiday e-mail from Rod Williams and Ted Bush, with Rod’s note:”This is undoubtedly intended for you!”

Immensely cheering, arriving as was I trying to cope with — on the top of everything else — a terrible head cold, in a moment when respiratory ailments are spreading wildly. I’m supposed to isolate myself still further.

Two Liz Climo cartoons

December 12, 2022

Very much a Mary, Queen of Scots Not Dead Yet posting, opening up a variety of themes, some of them deeply personal for me. But here I just present two delightful Liz Climo cartoons that moved me.

The first is recent, posted by Climo on Facebook on 11/29 and apparently at the moment available only on her FB page. The characters are Bunny and Bear, who have forged a mutually supportive friendship in part by surmounting the natural inclinations of bears to devour rabbits, and of rabbits to dig up the landscape for burrows (thus ruining the lawns that are Bear’s great pride).

The second is from a continuing series of cartoons involving the polar creatures Penguin and Polar Bear. The cartoons:


(#1) My title: One Trip — a delight for me, since my man Jacques was an extreme advocate of the One Trip, approaching Bear levels; as annoying as this was (I played the Bunny part in our One Trip drama), now that he’s been gone for 20 years, the cartoon slashed open a moment of real grief, in which his masculine pigheadedness now seems endearing


(#2) My title: Margarita Snowman — this one is to send to cartoonist Bob Eckstein, author of the marvelous The Illustrated History of the Snowman (2018); see the digression on the book in my 12/3 posting “In the mail: The sleep of reason produces snowmen”