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High art / low art

July 18, 2023

An old Calvin and Hobbes strip, in my comics feed for today:


Calvin attempts to police the invidious distinction between high art (art for art’s sake, as they say, with no goal other than ennobling the subject of the art or critiquing its content — as opposed to art serving some sociocultural function), taking off from paintings (high art) vs. comic strips (low art), but then falling into a bottomless pit of meta-art, meta-meta-art, etc.

“But is it [high] art?” is a recurrent theme on this blog. I routinely note the judgment of high art is not in fact primarily made on the basis of the goal of the work, but always is made by reference to an established structuring of the world of artists, exhibitions, agents, and the like. And I have advocated for the celebration of high levels of craft wherever it’s found.

 

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Smiles of the summer days

July 3, 2022

(Men’s bodies, man-on-man sex, raunchy talk — not for kids or the sexually modest.)

To celebrate high summer, my male-calendar pages for the month of July, both featuring smiles: a smile of callipygian appreciation in a Tom of Finland drawing; a subtle half-smile on the face of Cocky Boy Levi Karter — which led quickly to a photo of a sexual encounter between Mr. July Karter and Mr. June Blake Mitchell that exemplifies a common trope of gay male porn (which cries out for a name), combining a facial component — two faces pleasurably engaged with one another (in what I’ll call facial coupling) — and a groin-buttocks component — a back-on-front sit-fuck (what I’ll call a lap fuck). And led from that to the complex career of Levi Karter, with reflections on personas.

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Into the holiday fire pit

May 30, 2022

Welcome to the holiday fire pit! For Memorial Day (this year, Monday May 30th, today) — because searing slabs of raw meat over an open fire is an obvious way to honor our war dead — and for Father’s Day (this year, coming up on Sunday June 19th) — because searing slabs of raw meat over an open fire is the obvious way to recognize a man’s ability to, as the poet put it, fuck kids up.

In past years, advertisements that came my way for the masculine meat holidays were entirely focused on  conventional grilling apparatus: from various forms of charcoal-fired grills (the simplest round portable grill / barbecues, more substantial wheeled rectangular devices), through gas-fired stoves on wheels, up to motorized spit-roasting machinery.

But in my on-line life, this seems to be the year of the fire pit, ‘a pit dug into the ground or a freestanding metal vessel, in which a contained outdoor fire is made’ (NOAD).

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Characters 1

June 30, 2018

Thomas Nast’s Boss Tweed, Uncle Sam, Denslow’s Wizard of Oz, Archie Andrews, Mickey Mouse, Godzilla, Mr. Peanut, Superman, the Ohio State Buckeye, Herbie the car, Hello Kitty. Not exactly (real) persons, but characters that are like persons to various degrees and in various ways. And all created by artists, all animated — given the breath of life — by visual artists of one sort or another.

In later postings I’ll get to two characters that have recently caught my attention: Percy the Platypus, transformed into a CD player; and Cony the Japanese virtual-sticker bunny, now working in short romantic videos with Brown the bear. First, some musings on characters.

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Extended 69

March 16, 2018

(Heavily sexual topic, some racy — just barely not X-rated — images, and extended discussion of sexual acts. So not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)

Well, extended 69 — the term, not the act.

The story begins with what is probably a one-off use of the sexual slang 69, in You could hug 69, conveying ‘you could hug each other for mutual pleasure’; hug 69 here is a V + V compound, lit. ‘to 69 by/in hugging’, a generalization of the customary sexual 69, preserving only the semantic components of mutuality / reciprocity and pleasure in the act.

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Posted in Homosexuality, Language of sex, Lexical semantics, Semantics, Uncategorized | 5 Comments »

Frank and John in 1971

December 8, 2017

A follow-up to my posting of the 4th, “A dark week in early December”, noting that the 4th is Frank Zappa’s death day, the 8th — today — John Lennon’s (and the 6th Wolfgang Mozart’s, but he doesn’t figure in today’s story). Now Kyle Wohlmut has posted on Facebook a Guitar World 10/8/17 story “John Lennon and Frank Zappa Jam in New York City in 1971” by Damian Fanelli:


Yoko Ono, John Lennon, Frank Zappa

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pillowslip

November 23, 2017

A little (deeply inconclusive) exercise in judging the sociocultural status of a linguistic variant, in this case pillowslip (vs. pillowcase). On ADS-L today, Wilson Gray reported hearing pillowslip spoken by an Australian from New South Wales, commenting:

Mildly surprising. Pillowslip was the ordinary term that I used as a child, in East Texas. I have no idea whether this form is used anywhere else in the U.S., bedclothes not being a particularly common topic of conversation outside of the family. IAC [if anybody cares], it seems to me that pillowcase is the preferred term, in Yankspeak.

(Further information: Wilson is black and about my age, ca. 80.)

My own recollection is that pillowslip was the usual term among the working-class rural/suburban whites I grew up with in southeastern Pennsylvania, but that it was somewhat old-fashioned and was eventually eclipsed by the preferred commercial term, pillowcase.

But these are recollections (which might be skewed), of the usages in our personal experiences (which are tiny samplings of English usage at the time), colored by our impressions of more general usage (which might be completely off-base). So who knows what the actual story is?

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Z is for zip

October 4, 2017

Today’s Bizarro, with a prescription for Drug Z:

(#1)

(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)

The larger topic: Z therapies for aging.

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Self-referential cartooning

August 2, 2017

Today’s Zippy:

An illeistic meta-cartoon.

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News for penises: the Haring commemorative bathroom

June 16, 2017

(Sexually explicit images, but they’re certifiably Art, so they should be displayable here. If this is not the sort of thing you want to see, then pass on.)

More Pride Month news. From the Artsy site on the 13th, “Keith Haring’s Most Risqué Mural Is Hidden in a Public Bathroom” by Alexxa Gotthardt:

Masterpieces don’t often end up in public bathrooms.

But boundary-defying street artist Keith Haring didn’t care for the distinctions about where art could and should be made; his canvases were Manhattan’s buildings, streets, and subways. On them, he scrawled ecstatic, aroused bodies that radiated with bursts of energy.

Many of Haring’s public paintings have disappeared since they emerged from his prolific brush in the 1970s and ’80s. The city government treated them as acts of vandalism, or they were rubbed away by the wear and tear of time. Luckily, though, one of his most audacious, masterful murals still stands—and you can find it in a bathroom that’s open to the public every day of the week.

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