Posted on Facebook by Will Leben on Good Friday (source not identified):
(#1) My caption: The phalanx of troops marching from the Just Born factory in Bethlehem PA to blanket the landscape, in the annual Easter Promenade and Cavalcade. They are charming but merciless.
Specifically, a huge (and very popular) public sculpture garden featuring nude statuary. Scarcely imaginable in the prudish United States, but it’s something of a national treasure in Norway.
From the Third Eye Traveller site, “Vigeland Sculpture Park in Oslo – Why You MUST Visit the Weird & Wonderful Frogner Park” by Sophie Pearce, last updated 1/15/22. One example from Pearce’s story, with her comment:
The Man Attacked by Babies sculpture shows a man that literally has babies crawling all over him. It almost looks like the babies are flying everywhere.
This abstract work is meant to represent a father who is nervous at the thought of parenthood.
Others say this is called the Man fighting off genii, or evil spirits.
From Kyle Wohlmut on Facebook today under the header “Rate this translation”:
(#1) They spell French pamplemousse ‘grapefruit’ wrong and then treat it as if it were parsed as pomme ‘apple’ + mousse (referring to one of several foamy substances; see especially senses 1 and 2 in English, below, which are directly borrowed from French)
Inventive, but absurd, and totally off the mark. Prime-grade etymythology.
That would be Grzegrorz Gwiazda, whose extraordinary bronze Shamefaced (of 2015) came to me on Pinterest a little while back:
(#1)
All sorts of details to come, but I’ll start out by juxtaposing #1 to two works by the father of modern realistic sculpture, Auguste Rodin (12 November 1840 – 17 November 1917).
… in marble and bronze: a continuation of yesterday’s “Two bronze Orpheuses”, which began with the fate of Michelangelo’s marble David in Florida, where high school students must be shielded from viewing the statue’s penis. Australian cartoonist Cathy Wilcox’s savage take on that situation:
(#1) Wilcox’s “American Obscenity” cartoon (from the Sydney Morning Herald)
From here, even disregarding the American obsessive prudery about the human body, the topic goes off in many different directions. I’ll ramble through these in no particular order, starting with a digression on Wilcox, who’s new to this blog.
🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit for the first of April, and that’s no joke. Today’s topic is the depiction of the god Orpheus in two bronze statues, one in the UK, one in the US.
More specifically, it’s about the treatment of Orpheus’s genitals in the two statues, reflecting a (sub)cultural difference between the US (where a strain of fundangelical belief holds that the naked human body, especially the male body, is unclean and dangerous, especially to children and women, who therefore must be elaborately protected from viewing it) and essentially the rest of what might referred to in shorthand as western civilization (where norms of privacy and modesty hold sway, but artistic representations of the naked body have their place, even in public parks and gardens).
This posting was provoked by, first, a complex case in Florida involving a reproduction of Michelangelo’s David shown to a high-school class; and then the ensuing photo of one of the Orpheuses — from the UK — on Facebook. There’s a lot more, but I’m unable to finish this posting today, so I’ll just give you the teaser materials here. More to come
🐅 🐅 🐅 tiger tiger tiger for ultimate March, a month that seems to have lasted forever, through meteorological disasters, the daily devastation of mass shootings, and the profoundly dangerous paranoid ravings of the moral monster Grabpussy. Oh yes, and the latest chapters in the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the event that, quite by accident, relocated two artists from Kyiv to Chattanooga TN (in a state that is currently contending fiercely for the title of Gun Capital of the United States).
This is about one of them, Denis Sarazhin, who came to me through a reproduction of some of his remarkable paintings on Pinterest. In particular:
(#1) Pantomime No. 22 (2017); note the painfully contorted poses
I spare you the details of what these Pacific “bomb cyclone” weather events do to my body when it encounters the very low air pressure that accompanies them, but it’s extremely unpleasant and totally immobilizing (and this time, it included the inability to focus my eyes, so I couldn’t read anything for, like, four hours). That was yesterday; surviving this attack comes with slow recovery over some days. I had an “easy” entertaining posting in preparation, mostly replays from the past, so this is what I’m giving you now, just as proof that I’m not (quite) dead yet.
The occasion is yesterday’s (3/29) Wayno / Piraro Bizarro, set in a little spheniscid restaurant:
(#1) Wayno’s title: “Just Like Mom Used to Spew” (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page.)
Crude spew from Wayno, technical regurgitate in the cartoon text. Both references to penguins feeding their chicks. So: some comments on these practices. Then on to the restaurant — with all the accoutrements of a little neighborhood place — serving homey specialties, by penguins, for penguins.
“Is this strip a rerun? It looks familiar”, Mike Doonesbury says to his wife Kim (Rosenthal) in the final panel of today’s (3/26/23) Doonesbury strip — in which Mike and Kim savage a (mock) Prevagen commercial they are watching on tv. And it’s an inside joke, because this Doonesbury strip is in fact a (slightly altered) rerun of the one from 2/14/21, which I wrote about in my 2/15/21 posting “The brain health product”. So Kim responds, in today’s (meta-)strip: “Wow. Good recall! No Prevagen for you!”
As I wrote in the 2021 posting, in the mock commercial,
the dietary supplement is openly hawked as a useless (but expensive) placebo for treating mild forgetfulness (with a digression in the 5th panel on a secret ingredient in it derived from the fabulously memorious jellyfish)
And the final panel of that strip Mike asks (echoing the commercial): “Are placebos right for us? I forget.” To which Kim replies: “If they come in gummies, I’m down with gummies.”
Today’s morning names: notions in the sense ‘cheap, useful articles (especially for the household)’ (and then later specializations to sewing materials); which suggested novelties in the sense ‘small, inexpensive, ornamental items’; and curios ‘rare, unusual, or intriguing objects’. All three concrete plural nouns arise from abstract nouns: notion ‘impulse or disposition to act’; novelty ‘newness, originality’; and curiosity ‘desire to know or learn things’.
I’ll consider the three concrete plurals in succession. I’m hoping that there’s some literature on the historical development of notions, but, given my very limited search abilities I haven’t been able to discover any of it.
