From Season Devereux this morning, this excellent image on Threads, from the poster linguisticdiscovery:
Two flying entities, the helicopter and the pterodactyl, are about to hybridize, to merge into a single thing, which will then obviously be denoted by the portmanteau helicopterodactyl — Is it a plane? (not exactly, though it’s a kind of aircraft) Is it a bird? (not exactly, though it has wings) It’s Superfly!
Coming to the Stanford Humanities Center on November 18 at 4:00 p.m., the 2024 Marta Sutton Weeks Lecture, “Caravaggio’s Americas” by the poet and scholar Edgar Garcia of the University of Chicago; the announcement:
This talk relocates the where and when of the baroque to the sixteenth-century Americas, arguing that the anxieties of eroded sovereignty amidst legal heterogeneity that gave rise to the baroque began not in Counter-Reformation responses to Protestantism but earlier in encounters with the legal and cultural others of the indigenous Americas. In this account, the spirit of the Counter Reformation precedes the Reformation and is, in its expression as the baroque, inescapably entangled with Indigenous cultures and polities of the Americas. In turn, this view of the baroque from the Americas helps to recast, interpret, and even re-visualize the works of the iconic late sixteenth-century Roman painter and living catastrophe-on-legs Caravaggio.
Dense with the abstract vocabulary of sociocultural analysis and cultural and literary history — it makes actual claims about the sources of the baroque / Baroque style in the Western arts, but it might take you some work to figure out what they are — the announcement devolves into a vividly earthy thumbnail characterization of Caravaggio as “the iconic late sixteenth-century Roman painter and living catastrophe-on-legs”. A sting in the tail. [Here we laugh and applaud.]
Just a moment ago on MSNBC’s “Deadline: White House”, the host, Nicolle Wallace, delivered a pitch for the Deadline: Legal Blog, giving instructions on how to subscribe, concluding with what I heard as:
You’ll have a fresh new sweater delivered to your mailbox every Friday
Well, yes, she said newsletter, and though this actual word hadn’t appeared before in her brief pitch, a newsletter was an unsurprising thing to come up in the context of news television and blogs, while sweaters and other articles of apparel were far from the material in her program.
Pixies, I blame pixies. And, of course, sunspots.
From Benita Bendon Campbell back on 11/1, a joyous diversion from painful times (“Something funny, we need something funny”): Rowan Atkinson playing “distinguished British baritone” Robert Bennington singing the Ode to Joy … until things go awry and he has to improvise a German text to Beethoven’s soaring tune. You can watch the YouTube video here.
And now, much more detail, from the Classic FM site (“the most relaxing music”), “The time Rowan Atkinson ‘forgot’ the words to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in hilarious skit” by Maddy Shaw Roberts on 5/11/21:
The Ode’s progress (picture: YouTube)
… and boy-foot bear with teak of Chan … no, no, Kent McCord and the Nelsons’ Rick, that’s the ticket.
(Tales of male-male desire and sexual acts — so this posting will be edgy for some readers — but not particularly vivid tales, and the photos are there for faces and torsos, not genitals)
Rick and Kent, figures of attractive, desirable masculinity — the first from my teenage years (there was a lot I didn’t understand in the Rick, or teenage hard-on, years, during which Ricky got me off, a lot), the second from young adulthood (it was during the Kent years that I gained some self-knowledge and entered into serious, life-long relationships with other men; suddenly it was important that Kent was not only a really hot guy as Officer Jim Reed on Adam-12, but that he also presented himself as a sturdy, dependable and empathetic nice guy, so an eminently satisfactory object of adult lust). Note: I was perfectly aware that Rick and Kent were, by all accounts, uncomplicatedly straight (as it happens, they became buddies when they worked in tv together); what I had in my head were fantasy Rick and Kent, and their kisses were sweeter than wine.
Now I tell you that Rick, Kent, and I were / are all essentially the same age; Rick 4 months older than me, Kent 2 years younger. (Rick died in 1985, but Kent is still alive, and he’s a great-looking 82-year-old.)
And while they’re interesting as objects of desire (on tv and elsewhere, notably from the 1950s through the 1970s), they get a posting here because of a characteristic facial gesture that they share: the spread-lip smile, a feature of Rick and Kent that large numbers of straight women and gay men find powerfully attractive (and that, no doubt, makes many straight men envious).
🎆 🎆 🎆 fireworks for 11/11, the double-lucky day the Great War was over (my parents, now long gone, were only 4 at the time and didn’t remember it; I was just short of my 6th birthday when V-J Day, recognizing the end of World War II, came along; celebrating it on the streets of West Lawn PA is my first clear memory of events in the larger world)
Hard to appreciate now what a gigantic rupture the Great War (beginning in 1914) was; the horrors of its modern warfare came along with those of the Russian Revolution (beginning in 1917) and the great influenza pandemic of 1918, and (as Paul Fussell argued in The Great War and Modern Memory) fostered a disillusioned modernist sensibility, wiping out much of what had gone before.
Then, as I wrote in my 11/11/22 posting “Carousing for St. Martin”:
It’s Armistice Day [commemorating the 11/11/1918 armistice ending World War I] (in the US, Veterans Day), solemnly following on the solemn anniversary of Kristallnacht, but it’s also (as Hana Filip just reminded me) the feast day of St. Martin of Tours: St. Martin’s Day, which has its serious saintly side — St. Martin and the beggar in rags — but is, as well, a day of wild revelling, initiating the winter season. An occasion that, ultimately, inspired a piece of music that is just sheer noisy unbridled fun: the Wine Chorus from Haydn’s The Seasons (aka “Juhe! Der Wein ist da!” from Die Jahreszseiten).
But now about 11/11:
… and, instead of taking the Zzyzx exit, catches a ride with a guy in a SYZYGY car to the end of the road, where one-point perspective takes you (so we are both out in the desert in San Bernardino County CA; and also in the artist’s meta-world, where perspective lines converge in a vanishing point, and that is truly the end of the road). All this in yesterday’s Zippy strip, which is rich in Z, Y, ZY / ZI, and ZYG. plus the occasional antic X:
(#1) Three things: Zzyzx Road; one-point perspective; and the word SYZYGY (the ZYG of which took my mind to the word ZYGOTE; while the concept of syzygy took me to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which is a wedding-feast of syzygy — of counterparts, contrasts, conflicts, and oppositions)
And then there’s zig; from NOAD:
noun zig: a sharp change of direction in a zigzag course: he went round and round in zigs and zags.
(which can then be verbed to yield to zig ‘to take a zig’, as in my title)
From Ryan Tamares on Facebook this morning, this mock ad (whose ultimate source is unclear to me), posted in response to Grabpussy’s electoral victory, with the laconic comment: Need.
References in the ad: the tag “I’m a doctor, (Jim,) not a …” (later expanded to “Dammit, Jim, I’m a doctor, not a …”) comes from various incarnations of Star Trek, first used in The Original Series by Dr. Leonard McCoy (played by DeForest Kelley); the ad’s centerpiece is the name Dammit Gin, punning on Dammit, Jim
And then there’s Ryan’s message, one of many today from people saying they’ll take the edge off the electoral disaster and the unpleasant future it portends by taking refuge, for the moment, in drink. After which we’ll all have to get on with the task of protecting what we can and resisting the tide of fear and anger that’s washing in.
Somewhat to my astonishment, I’m not tempted to be taking a ride on the gin train, for reasons I will now explain.
