It looks like the bots at Pinterest are doing a pretty good job. Thanks to my having posted, in “Giantess Jackie” on the 2nd, a bit about Seward Johnson’s “Forever Marilyn” statue in Chicago, this morning Pinterest offered me a page of “New ideas for you in Sculpture”, entirely devoted to Johnson’s bronze oeuvre, for example this visual parody of Grant Wood’s “American Gothic”, entitled “God Bless America” (now in Florida):
(#1)
Today’s Zippy takes us back to Kennedy Camelot times (January 1961 – November 1963), through the medium of a gigantesque Jackie:
(#1)
This is Bill Griffith’s work, so there is of course an actual giant statue of a Jackie Kennedy look-alike, a fiberglass Uniroyal Gal in Bolton NC (based on an original in Rocky Mount NC):
(#2)
(The hair color and bikini color on these roadside figures are easily adjustable, as is the thing on the giantess’s hand; and in fact the bikini can be replaced by more decorous clothing. But the basic figure and its stance are fixed in fiberglass.)
.. and Halloween, though, pleasingly, neither has anything to do with All Hallows’ / All Souls’ / All Saints’. A One Big Happy that’s a study in American (and Antipodal) phonology; and a Zippy with a fallen roadside fiberglass hero, the Green Giant of Pahrump NV:
(#1)
(#2)
(About gay porn, but without explicit images — these are in an AZBlogX posting — or even detailed discussion of man-man sex, but men’s bodies and sex between men are certainly topics of this posting, so it’s not for children or the sexually modest.)
Yes, a racy portmanteau, of bareback (referring to condomless sex) and Dracula (the legendary vampire), naming a gay porn flick from the Michael Lucas studio in which the legend of Count Dracula is re-worked with cum instead of blood as the life essence. (On the name, compare the 1972 American blaxploitation horror film Blacula.) Front and back covers of the DVD (featuring man-man sex and heavy eye shadow) on AZBlogX.
From Kim Darnell, this puzzle, which she found on Tumblr (no one seems to know the ultimate source, as is usual in such things):
(#1)
You can see this as a puzzle, or you can see it as a wordless cartoon. In either case, it draws on a piece of popular culture, and if you don’t have that, you’re lost.
For Kim, the big point was phonological, but the cultural reference is crucial.
(Little of academic or social significance, but mostly about shameless displays of the male body. Not, however, X-rated, either visually or verbally.)
A while back, links on Facebook to Hollywood Beefcake, a public group on Facebook featuring movie and tv actors dsplaying their bodies. Shots of, among others, Guy Madison, Randolph Scott, Gary Cooper, Hugh O’Brian, Robert Conrad, Johnny Weissmuller, Clint Eastwood, Tab Hunter, Marc Singer, Burt Reynolds, Lee Majors, Jeff Goldblum, Alexander Skarsgard, Matt Bomer, Ryan Phillipe, Shia LaBeouf, Danny Pino, and Chris Meloni. And Charlie Hunnam, who’s appeared on this blog before because he revels in sexy shirtless displays.
Then an appendix on three of the notable shirtless hunks on the television series Glee, who I don’t think had made it onto the Hollywood Beefcake site when I last checked it.
In the latest New Yorker (September 12th), Sam Gross’s clown and his balloon dog return to the magazine:
(#1)
Oh no! Not the chair!
The 1975 quotation (in Green’s Dictionary of Slang) is from a (British working-class) policeman, who “levelled a finger at” a man and made this accusation. My interest here is in the address term sunshine, which has become familiar to me though British (occasionally Canadian) police procedural tv shows, where the cops (or private detectives) often use this form of address, aggressively, to male suspects. From the New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (ed. Tom Dalzell & Terry Victor, 2015), p. 2192:
used as a form of address, often patronizing with an underlying note of disapproval or threat UK, 1972
A (very natural) extension of literal sunshine to ‘cheerfulness, happiness’ has been around for some time, as has the extension to someone who exhibits or elicits cheerfulness or happiness, in both referential and vocative uses. Then, the address term sunshine (like any other) can be used sarcastically, aggressively, or truculently, but the conventionalization of such uses specifically in British (and not American) English, for use to men by men, especially by official authorities, is yet a further development, one that I hadn’t experienced until I got into modern police procedurals, in books and on tv.
Today’s Zippy appears to be just a surrealist melange of pop-cultural absurdity (and can be enjoyed at that level), but in fact many of those absurdities are knit together in a web of allusions to elements of pop culture — probably even more densely than I appreciate.
(#1)
It all starts with Arthur Godfrey, who appears transformed as the central character of the strip, Siddartha Godfrey, with Arthur replaced by the phonologically very similar name Siddartha; Siddharth or Siddhartha is the birth name of the founder of Buddhism, Gautama Buddha.
Meanwhile, the title “Jerry Van Dyke Lives” introduces a secondary, parallel, theme having to do with Jerry Van Dyke.
(Not much about language here, just weirdness.)
Today’s Zippy, with a bow to a novelty item of the 1960s and a modern piece of visionary Americana:
(#1)
This being a Zippy strip, of course there is a giant lava lamp (roughly 60 ft. high), complete with observation deck, in the middle of the little town of Soap Lake WA — but it’s still a vision (of local resident Brent Blake), a prospect not yet realized. It’s a spectral lamp, a companion to Zippy the heartburned spectral rutabaga and the overripe parsnip he longs for:
(#2)