🔪 🔪 🔪 slash slash slash: It’s Friday the 13th, and Jim Horwitz has re-run a Watson strip from 9/13/19 that plays with Friday the 13th‘s slasher Jason in a hockey mask:
Fudgey the little boy and his big dog Watson; here, Watson’s in a hockey mask, which Fudgey is sure none of the other kids will recognize as an allusion to the slasher Jason in all those old movies (12 of them, the last released in 2009)
So reads a sign — a genuine sign, not an achievement of digital image-making — reproduced widely on Facebook in the past two days:
(#1) The sign at the Wiener Circle / Wieners Circle / Wiener’s Circle, 2622 N. Clark St., Chicago IL 60614; two things about it — its’s a joke, a pun dogs (short for hot dogs ‘frankfurters’) on dogs ‘domestic canines’; and it’s a piece of political mockery
A mockery of Grabpussy, in the US Presidential debates on 9/10, who cited as fact preposterous on-line rumor stories, among them that Haitian immigrants in Springfield OH are preying on people’s pets, eating their dogs and cats — thus painting immigrants as dangerous invaders, monstrous inhuman beasts.
It started with this rich (but baffling) painting on Pinterest a little while back:
(#1) A young boy, standing in a lake or river, holds up a fish he has caught on a line, while a band of intense light (a rocket launching?) shines from the far shore — a work by Irish figurative painter Conor Walton (born in 1970), who does still lifes and commissioned portraits, but also a lot of allegorical figurative painting, on mythological, cultural, and political themes
Some searching on Walton’s website identified #1 as Walton’s Phaethon (2015), so the subtext is mythological; comments to come. That search led to a clearly myth-based painting — a male nude to boot — showing Sisyphus. Then to a political / cultural painting featuring Vladimir Putin, except that it’s also about Slim Pickens’s character Major Kong in the movie Dr. Strangelove, and, yes, it’s another male nude. And finally to a monumentally complex painting on a cultural / political theme, Darwinian evolution.
There’s a lot more, but these four should give you a feel for Walton’s imaginative side.
White Party: my name for the white-flower bouquet that León Hernández Alvarez gave me last Thursday for my birthday, which I trimmed and rearranged yesterday. It sits on my worktable, giving me great pleasure.
White roses are symbols of purity — sorry, not my game at all — and loyalty, which I think suits me pretty well. But then the shock yesterday when I saw that the white rose was actually a very pale pink (symbolizing gentleness, sweetness, and of course femininity, so also — yay for the boys with pretty pink pom-poms — gayness).
The name alludes to the White Party in Palm Springs (this year it was March 29-31), the circuit party that bills itself as “the largest gay dance festival in the world” (there are of course other White Parties elsewhere around the world; there’s some discussion of circuit parties — and for a bonus, shapenote singing — in my 6/22/10 posting “Rivers of Babylon”). Never felt bold enough or hot enough to go to one, and now both my dancing days and my traveling days are long over. But the name comes with sexy vibes, so I’m going with it.
But now about the flowers.
Well, silliness provoked by my getting, yesterday, this excellent fortune cookie fortune:
You will be awarded
some great honor
Which I was then able to combine with a postcard from Ann Burlingham (sent on 3/4/24), showing, of course, a volcano — Frederic Church’s 1862 painting of Cotopaxi in Ecuador — adding the requisite woolly mammoths (on a US postage stamp), flanking the fortune, to complete the composition:
For which I have supplied some verse, filched from Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha (1855), with its famously jogging trochaic tetrameter:
A smashing time: the Economist‘s punning teaser head on its article about demolition derbies in its 8/24/24 issue:
(#1) [Economist caption:] Art for art’s sake (photo: Getty Images)Frankfort, New York: Where crashing cars is the point
After the formalities are seen to — the national anthem sung, the firemen assembled—the fun starts. The sound brings the first thrill: a dozen engines thundering, each without a silencer, and the crackle-pop of backfire. Then comes the crash and crumple of metal on metal. Tyres go flat, bumpers fall off. Cars catch fire, others get pushed up against the wall. They head-butt like billy goats. They hiss, wheeze, smoke, stall and go kaput. Soon only two are still moving, at which point the announcer might growl: “Finish him!”
Tom Wolfe, a writer*, called demolition derbies “culturally the most important sport ever originated in the United States” — closer to the gladiatorial games of Rome than even boxing. Annihilation is the point. The last car running wins. Sports reporters ignored them, wrote Wolfe, because they thought them puerile and low-class: too many kids with “sideburns, tight Levi’s and winkle-picker boots”.
[* AZ: satirical chronicler of both the counterculture of the 1960s and the elite culture of New York City]
Very briefly, from Facebook a few minutes ago:
Aric Olnes reports that live oak acorns are falling where he and Mike are. Then:
— AZ: Yes, they are falling. There are several California live oaks just across the street from me. So squirrels can easily jump from them to the crape myrtle in front of my house and onto the arbor over my walkway. And so to my patio.
One of these squirrels has remembered, from months ago, the excellent soft dirt in the little garden strip on my patio. So fine for burying nuts. I spent some time yesterday barking at it (from inside the house) whenever it prepared to descend from the arbor to the garden, until it gave up energetically threatening me in return and finally carried its nut away, in a huff, to some more congenial spot.
It hasn’t come back today, but I view the current state as likely to be a temporary victory.
— AO > AZ: Squirrels 🐿️ usually win
— AZ > AO: They 🐿️ 🐿️ 🐿️ are astoundingly persistent
I will say that I’ll never tire of watching squirrels leap through the air from tree to tree. The Flying Sciuridae!
(Well, yes, a birthday penis for me to enjoy, so this posting isn’t suitable for kids or the sexually modest)
This year’s birthday card for me from my old friend Vadim Temkin (old friend, but one generation younger than me), a digital artist whose work has often been featured on this blog — playful, clever, homosexy, and with a style of its own. He creates well-designed characters that don’t pretend to fool the eye, but live in a parallel reality — in the case of this year’s card, what looks like a world of slickly made plastic figures, from which comes the smiling Dick, who is completely naked except for a white collar and black bow tie where his rather large head attaches to his body, giving him the appearance of a bobblehead doll. (I don’t think Bobblehead Dick was Vadim’s intention, but it’s what I see, so I’m going with it.)
Meanwhile, his penis is on display, except that it’s awkwardly attached to his body; I’ve had to fuzz it out for WordPress modesty, but it’s an imperfection in the figure, and an annoying one, because of course the bobblehead’s penis — Bobblehead Dick’s dick — was a significant part of Vadim’s gift to me. Among other things:
🎶 9/8 🎶, and it’s Antonin Dvořák’s birthday (in 1841); see my 1/27/24 posting “Spillville”, about Spillville IA and the Czech composer, with this note:
let me recommend the Wikipedia article on Dvořák, for its detailed telling of a remarkable life, of great talent, a lot of pluck, a fair amount of luck, generous humanity, and the benefit of champions, advocates on your behalf (in this case, primarily Johannes Brahms)
(with a reminder that tomorrow, 9/9, is Negation Day, on which we protest, in German: Nein! Nein!)
But now for something completely different, from the Gay & Fabulous site (brought to my Facebook page all the way from Oz by Ruth Lawrence this morning):
I interrupt the outpouring of post-birthday material to report on today’s remarkable e-mail from the world of e-commerce. As it appeared in my mail, only slightly edited, and without comment (never mess with perfection):
from Amazon.com Customer Service:
You saved $0.01 with Amazon.com’s Pre-order Price Guarantee! The price of the following item decreased after you ordered, and we gave you the lowest price.
[item] XXXXX
Price on order date: $23.75
Price charged at shipping: $23.74
Lowest price before release date: $23.74
Quantity: 1
Total Savings: $0.01
