From the New Yorker issue of 10/13/25 (which has not yet arrived at my house), on-line on 10/5, “Takes: Rebecca Mead on Mary Ellen Mark’s photo from the Puerto Rican Day Parade” — from the New Yorker Classics, about “Forward, March” by MEM, in the 6/23/2003 print edition. This photo:
[caption:] Candice Lozada, nine, and Fantashia Toro, eleven, of the S.B.K. (South Bronx Kids) Dance Group, waiting for the Puerto Rican Day Parade to start
In the latest (8/25/25) New Yorker, a Jeremy Nguyen cartoon in which some construction workers party in the sky:
(#1) A play on the well-known “Lunch atop a Skyscraper” photo originally taken in New York in 1932 (which I have labeled Skylunch 1; it was followed by a series of Skylunch variants)
Nguyen has 8 men, grouped 2, 2, 2, 1, 1; they are working-class guys in casual dress (caps rather than hard hats, no harnesses), standing (rather than sitting) around with simple party fare (rather than lunch boxes) in their hands. What guy #3 finds remarkable is not that they are standing on a girder suspended far above the city streets, but that they’re getting their little party in what is for them their lunch spot. This is elephantlessness: missing the elephant — in this case, the floating girder — in the situation.
Nathan W. Pyle’s Strange Planet strip from 1/27/25:
Pyle’s beings on an alien planet cope with the sociocultural world of this one with their views framed in a variety of English that lacks the usual terms, so they concoct fresh ones (slicer for knife, stabber for fork, scooper for spoon, ingest for eat); in this strip, the subject is the education of the young in the etiquette of dining, and it comes with a meta-lesson
Very briefly: in entry 5 in the Waynoratu Nosferamanteau marathon, today, two anti-establishment vampires greet one another:
A 1960s-style hippie on the right (peace symbol, long hair, headband, etc.), a 1970s-style Johnny Rotten punk rocker on the left (anarchist symbol, spiky hair, studded collar. etc.)
Meanwhile, the punmanteau is a complex one: Johnny Rotten wrapped around nosfer– (representing Nosferatu)
Another brief posting opening up a parallel, from the world of grammar, style, and usage, to yesterday’s posting “Accepting variation, or not”, about the (attempted) enforcement of normative prescriptions for other sorts of behavior. The two crucial panels of a Peanuts comic strip from yesterday’s posting:
(#1) Lucy relays to Linus their grandmother’s disapproval of his security blanket; Linus defies her admirably with a sarcastic defense of variation in behaviorGramma’s disapproval is implicitly two-pronged. Prong 1 is that having a security blanket is, variously:
different, atypical, unusual, ill-adjusted, nonconforming
while Prong 2, unspoken, is that it is also
undesirable, reprehensible, even contemptible, potentially threatening
Gramma refuses to accept the behavioral variation that Linus displays, thus mirroring the lack of social acceptance of other kinds of variation — in particular, the disapproval, by many, of same-sex desires, practices, and identities; and the more specific disapproval of what I’ve called f-gay men — the effeminate and the faggy. Disapprovals that are especially wounding because Prong 2 is wrapped up in them.
Now to something that might at first glance might seem to be completely different, but also involves a judgment of disapproval — nonacceptance — on a different sort of failure to conform to normative prescriptions, coupled with what amounts to a companion moral judgment on the whole business, including the people involved in it.
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.
(Not for kids or the sexually modest)
A particularly well-made ad in my e-mail on 6/8, which I’ve cropped so as to split off two aspects of the composition:
(#1) The Band of Four, who I’ll refer to unimaginatively as Man1 though Man4 (they’re actors, of course, posed for this ad; I’ll give you their stage names below); the first three apparently have their gaze fixed on Man4 (possibly their leader, but certainly their conduit to the world outside their little group, as his gaze is to the side, on us, the viewers of the photo)
#1 shows the four men in close conference with another, the suggestion being that they’re what I’ve called a male band (more on this to come); they could be a sports team, a singing group, a smash-and-grab robbery gang, a police unit, frat brothers, a band of musicians, a street-corner gang, a faculty committee, a religious study group, an improv troupe, and so on, or just a bunch of buddies who hang out together.
But wait. They’re all shirtless, or quite possibly naked. And seriously buffed. They’re also racioethnically diverse. Who are these guys? What is this group? What are they conferring about? And, while we’re puzzling, where are they? In the midst of yellow-focus tropical foliage, it seems. (That’s obviously a stage setting, but it’s undeniably tropical in intent.)
The characters are in Brazil, in multiethnic Rio de Janiero, where the actors were filmed in one episode of the recent gay porn flick Muito Quente:
(more…)
