What must be done on this day, according to an adaptation of the cover for Uncle Sam: Special Election Edition, about the DC Comics character Uncle Sam, who is himself a dark and hallucinatory version of the American icon:
(#1) As modern Santa Claus goes (on Christmas Eve), so goes this incarnation of Uncle Sam (on Independence Day Eve) — though this Uncle Sam looks like he’d much prefer blood and flesh to milk and cookies
(Passed on by Tim Evanson this morning.)
Appearing at my door a little while back, on a hot day, an enthusiastic young woman who turned out to be soliciting support for a political candidate, the first one to declare for a seat on Palo Alto’s City Council. As sometimes happens in this little city (of about 50,000 residents), she wasn’t a campaign worker, but the candidate, Katie Causey, working door to door in the neighborhood (which turns out to be literally where she lives — just about a block and a half from my place). KC’s headshot for publicity purposes:
KC, born and raised in Palo Alto, going to local schools through Paly High; BA from George Washington Univ. in DC, in Women’s Studies (but she took a linguistics course, so she was actually impressed by my being a linguistics professor)
Right at the beginning, she asked about the rainbow flag hanging from my patio door; I pointed to the clothing I was wearing — a tank top with a rainbow heart on it, bold rainbow shorts — saying, “Hey it’s Pride Month!” and clearly establishing myself as proudly queer. And she countered by announcing that one of her platform planks was establishing a Palo Alto Pride celebration. Then we were off in a breathless exchange of life histories and opinions.
Well, I am constitutionally an enthusiast, like KC, and enthusiasts tend to amp each other up. Also, she was selling herself and her program — from one of her announcements: “I’m a bi, zillennial, urbanist, and former tenant organizer who believes yes in my backyard, & I’m running for Palo Alto City Council” (wow, a crunchy-granola manifesto!) — while I was a desperately lonely old guy who longs for face-to-face conversation and will go on forever if you encourage me at all. Only the heat of the day brought our exchange to an end.
Now, a bit more about KC. And her generation, Zillennial, on the cusp of Millennial and Gen Z. And her platform. And her status as a crunchy-granola person.
Passed on by Lisa Cohen on Facebook on 6/2: a bulletin about the world’s largest perogy, in Glendon AB. From the Atlas Obscura site, in “Giant Perogy… Roadside tribute to a staple of eastern European cuisine”, published on 9/5/10:
In 1993, Glendon, a village in Alberta …, unveiled its roadside tribute to the perogy. The town’s [fiberglass and steel] Giant Perogy, complete with fork, stands 27 feet tall, weighs approximately 6,000 pounds, and is considered one of the “Giants of the Prairies,” a collection of massive sculptures that can be found across this geographic region of North America.
The fork was added to the sculpture so that people would have some idea as to what it was supposed to be. The first design, without the fork, left passersby baffled. “The first design wasn’t [with] a fork, but then people went by and they responded that it looked like a cow pie or something,” said Johnny Demienko, who dreamed up the sculpture when he worked as the town’s mayor and also a school bus driver.
Apparently, a Perogy Cafe, serving “Ukrainian and Chinese perogies”, was located next to the sculpture for some years.
To come: photos of Glendon’s Giant Perogy; the spelling PEROGY; for comparison to the Glendon dumpling, actual pierogies; the Giants of the Prairies.
From Japanese-born New York artist Naruki Kukita, an art-world three-way: hunky men (some from gay porn) displaying their bodies collide with kawaii-cute manga figures to pose in canonical settings of Western high art (especially on mythological and religious themes). I came across this fine example of Kukitart on Pinterest yesterday:
(#1) John the Baptist (2023), amidst the Disneyoid creatures of the forest
Today’s Sunday Bizarro by Dan Piraro, yet another Bizarro Psychiatrist cartoon, this time with a guy in need of a shrink ‘act of shrinking’, appealing to a shrink ‘headshrinker, psychotherapist’ (so it’s a pun cartoon too):
shrink ‘psychotherapist’ has become so ordinary a term in American English that its connection to the change-of-state verb shrink and the noun headshrinker is no longer salient to many speakers, with the result that the pun has some genuine surprise value (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 6 in this strip — see this Page)
It’s Holy Thursday, and today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro: cartoon jumps the Easter gun, / with an outrageous rabbit pun:
Wayno’s title: “Side Effects May Include Hallucinations” (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 2 in this strip — see this Page)model /ístǝr/ Easter, pun /íθǝr/ ether, shared /í…ǝr/, with coronal obstruents between the two syllabics, so not bad for an imperfect pun; meanwhile, the Easter bunny is administering ether as an anesthetic, so the pun fits the image nicely
Two things: Holy Thursday (and Easter Sunday); and anesthetic ether.
On the heels of yesterday’s posting about the early 19th-century composer Johann Nepomuk Hummel, more people named Hummel (with the accented vowel rounded [U] (as in English put) in German or German-influenced English varieties, like Pennsylvania Dutch English; but unrounded [Ʌ] (as in English putt) in ordinary American English). The German landscape painter Carl Hummel. The fictional Kurt Hummel in the American tv series Glee. And the artist nun Maria Innocentia Hummel, whose paintings provided the original models for Hummel figurines, which is what this posting is mostly about.
From the annals of cartoon understanding, today’s (Wayno / Piraro) Bizarro strip, which is incomprehensible if you don’t know a crucial piece of American popular culture (and Wayno’s title, “The Early Years”, won’t be much help to you):
(#1) Someday Seaman Apprentice Crunch will command his own ship, and then he’ll be Captain Crunch, familiarly known as Cap’n Crunch, and he’ll give that name to a sweet breakfast cereal that American kids have been enjoying for 60 years (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)
Note that Crunch is drinking from an 8-ounce milk carton (while his naval companion is having a beer).
As a follow-up to my posting yesterday, “Anti-Ode to Liszt” (slamming his piano transcription of the Ode to Joy section of Beethoven’s 9th symphony), an amazing New Yorker piece by Alex Ross, in print in the 9/11 issue (under a version of the title above), on-line on 9/4 under the title “The Greatest Show on Earth: Liszt defined musical glamour. But pianists now see substance behind the spectacle”.
I was pointed to the Ross piece by Lise Menn in e-mail. Apparently, I saw a thumbnail announcement of it in my New Yorker feed but missed it in scanning through the issue when it came out (I lose days, sometimes more, of attention to the media through medical or personal crises, so these reminders are genuinely helpful to me).
Now, a section from Ross’s synoptic view of Liszt — his life, his career, and his music. From here on, it’s all Ross:
A wonderful wordless cartoon by Liana Finck from the 10/30/23 issue of the New Yorker presents a challenge in cartoon understanding: what do you have to know and what do you have to recognize in the cartoon if you’re going to understand what’s going on in it and why that’s funny?
An intense confrontation between a doctor and a vampire: the doctor seeks to repel the vampire. while the vampire, in turn, seeks to repel the doctor; each is shielding their eyes, to avoid seeing the repellent brandished by the other (the crucifix threatening the vampire, the apple threatening the doctor); the confrontation appears to be a standoff
A full appreciation of this comical Mexican standoff requires that you recognize the two characters, one drawn from the real world, the other from a fictive world of popular culture, somehow (absurdly) joined, indeed frozen, in mortal combat — which means recognizing why the crucifix is a threat to the vampire (this requires your knowing some vampire lore) and why the apple is a threat to the doctor (this requires your recognizing the joke’s inspired mainspring, a subtle pun on a proverb in English). Truly awesome.
