Swimming pool. Callipygian young man climbing out of it. David Hockney’s California dream. The painting:
(#1) Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool
Archive for the ‘Pop culture’ Category
Till I see my Peter walking away
August 29, 2026
Rhinoceros
August 23, 2026The ultimate topic here is my sleep patterns, which I will post about more systematically in a while. Here I’m trying to take some of the burden of background material off that posting by stashing it for easy reference later. Picking an item — the revival by Harvard’s American Repertory Theatre of Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros — that I also view, in desperation, as carrying an urgent message about today’s sociopolitical climate.
It will start with odd everyday routines of no consequence, but will end with contemplating literal dehumanization, staring evil in the face. I’m touchy on the point, having never fully recovered from the shock of seeing the Nazi death camps exposed when I was a child. And understanding that that could happen to me. (No, I don’t think children should be protected from such knowledge. They should be treasured and supported, as I was, but they should also see the dangers clearly, so that they can arm themselves against them.)
But first, the routines. (If you think I’m just a nutter or a pathetic neurotic in need of professional care, fuck off; it’s none of your business. I’m doing stuff that works for me; why should you care?)
Flamin’ Hot Cheetos Corn Dogs
August 5, 2026Sing out, Louise! Flamin’ Hot Cheetos Corn Dogs, Flamin’ Hot Cheetos Corn Dogs; it’s a mantra, in trochaic (Strong + Weak feet) tetrameter (4 feet per line ) —
Strong Weak . Strong Rest | Strong Weak . Strong Weak
(There’s a Page on this blog about my postings on chants, cheers, mantras, and onomatomania)
But it’s all about the food, and that’s appropriate for August in the US; it’s a variant of the American State Fair staple, the corn dog. From NOAD on the basic object:
compound noun corn dog: North American English a hot dog covered in cornmeal batter, fried, and served on a stick.
And then the corn-puff variant, which popped up on my Facebook page yesterday:
The server’s absurd attentions
May 31, 2026Hey, there, server lad,
Have you any wool?
Yes, sir, yes, sir,
One alpaca full!
This Drew Dernavich cartoon in the 6/1/26 issue of the New Yorker:
A wonderfully absurd riff on the custom of restaurant servers offering freshly ground black pepper (occasionally, also freshly ground sea salt) upon the appearance of food at the table, obliging the diners to participate in a pretentious edgy ritual of condiment dispensation
The cooties of kidlore in couples counseling
May 28, 2026The Wayno / Piraro Bizarro of 5/26:
A Wayno Psychiatrist cartoon, this time with couples therapy in which the couples’s conflicts are referred to the attitudes of their inner children, one of whom is said to be infected with the dreaded cooties of childlore (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page)
It’s likely that some of my readers will find this one-sentence summary of the cartoon’s content to be simply incomprehensible — because the two central terms in all of this belong to specialized vocabularies — cooties from American childlore; and inner child from pop-psychological therapy-talk.
Griffy grapples with Muffler Man on the masculinity mat
May 22, 2026Yesterday, in my posting “Sir, I bring you a token of my subservience”, a Zippy strip in which Griffy addresses a Muffler Man, offering the fiberglass giant a phallic offering to his superior masculinity. It turns out that this strip is a reworking of the text from an earlier strip on a similar theme. And there we have the two-strip set-up for today’s discussion:
(#1) [The 5/21/26] strip “Tired Out”, with, oh dear, the alpha male theme made explicit; it is, in any case, all about (hyper)masculinity vs. inferior masculinity
(#2) The 6/2/17 strip “Rubber Fire”, showing (hyper)masculine contempt for analytic academics (I am, of course, the very model of the modern analytic academic, so eat my shorts, brute boy)
Sir, I bring you a token of my subservience
May 21, 2026The crucial moment of today’s (5/21) Zippy strip, in which Griffy addresses a Muffler Man, offering the fiberglass giant a phallic offering to his superior masculinity. It’s hard to know where to start with this — and then it turns out that this strip is a reworking of the text from an earlier strip on a similar theme.
(#1) Today’s strip “Tired Out”, with, oh dear, the alpha male theme made explicit; it is, in any case, all about (hyper)masculinity vs. inferior masculinity
(#2) The 6/2/17 strip “Rubber Fire”, showing (hyper)masculine contempt for analytic academics (I am, of course, the very model of the modern analytic academic, so eat my shorts, brute boy)
Just to get the two strips on display, for discussion to come. My l life has been overfull, but almost entirely in wonderful ways, and that’s something else for me to talk about.
The fabulously successful idiot plot
March 5, 2026I recently stumbled on the notion of an idiot plot on Facebook — a cultural category I had surely encountered before but must have forgotten about. In any case, I now had Wikipedia’s explanation, along with a notable example, the plot of the Astaire / Rogers musical comedy film Top Hat.
But … despite some evident absurdity, I find the film enormously enjoyable, and in fact it’s by far the most successful of the Astaire / Rogers movies. Musical films are clearly not bound by constraints of rationality or fidelity to fact — indeed, the narrative objects of culture are in general unconstrained by such considerations: consider the plots of most operas and American Western movies, both set in times and places that never existed and often don’t make sense: consider, specifically, Manon Lescaut and The Magic Flute; or Red River and Stagecoach. Masterpieces of their genres, truly wonderful, but preposterous and inaccurate in many ways. We don’t care. All this stuff happens in fictive worlds that are imaginative creations with their own conventions (not unlike the fictive worlds of science fantasy).
Now: background about idiot plots. And then an appreciation of Top Hat.