For some time now, I’ve avoided posting about the current POTUS, which has meant not posting a great many cartoons that come my way (most cartoonists are savagely critical of him), or posting the cartoons but not even mentioning his appearance in them. Initially, I referred to him only mockingly: Herr Drumpf at first, then Helmet Grabpussy. Now, many of my friends and acquaintances practice the policy of mentioning him as little as possible and, where necessary, not using his name; [REDACTED] and POTUS are two reference strategies along these lines.

Even so, I’m tickled by an observation made by the Canadian comedian Colin Mochrie — hat tip to Chris Ambidge — that Lord Dampnut is an anagram of POTUS’s real name.

(Warnings. There will be talk of men’s bodies and sex between men, mostly in plain language, so this is not for kids or the sexually modest. And there will be comparisons of mansex to religious ritual, which some might find sacrilegious and therefore offensive.)

That would be the singer George Michael, as canonized by Australian artist Scott Marsh. The cover of the March-April 2017 Gay & Lesbian Review:

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One allusion is to Michael’s enthusiasm for sex in public places — in mens rooms, in the hookup areas of parks, and so on — which eventually triggered his coming out as gay and led to his fashioning defiant celebrations of his sexuality and of these practices. Another allusion is to sexual acts, especially mansex, as analogues of religious rituals: a man sucking cock as worshiping the essence of maleness on his knees, a man getting fucked as offering his body to another man as sacrifice.

To come: the Scott Marsh mural; about George Michael’s music, with an appreciation of several of his songs; musings on sex in public, its organization as a social practce, and entrapment by police; and the rituals of mansex.

The mural. Advance notice from GLR, in e-mail:

On the cover of the next Issue (March-April) is an extraordinary mural of George Michael titled Saint George, Patron Saint of Parks at Night, painted by Australian artist Scott Marsh. He says he painted it on a wall in Sydney after Michael’s death “to honour our friend, brother, father figure.” Check out the mural here.

Another shot of the mural, from a Peter Devlin 1/14/17  story in the Daily Mail:

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‘Saint’ George Michael immortalised in mural by Sydney street artist behind infamous Kanye kissing Kanye painting.
Sydney street artist Scott Marsh painted a mural of late singer George Michael.
The colourful mural is located in Erskineville, in Sydney’s inner west.
Marsh’s latest work depicts George Michael as a ‘patron saint of the gays’.

Michael and his music. From “George Michael Made It Big” by Colin Carman, in the coming GLR issue (with periodic commentary from me):

The year 1998 proved that Michael was pursuing new kinds of public exposure. He was arrested in Will Rogers Park in Los Angeles for cruising a bathroom and exposing himself to an undercover policeman on so-called “potty patrol.” Michael, who was essentially entrapped by the Beverly Hills PD, would later tell MTV, “It was a stupid thing to do, but I’ve never been able to turn down a free meal.” He then transformed the embarrassment into an up-tempo song called “Outside” that satirized the incident.

Comments on entrapment later. Meanwhile, you can watch a remix of  GM’s “Outside” video (1998) here.

In it, he celebrated sex al fresco and gave new meaning to his cover of Elton John’s “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me,” which had sailed to the number one spot on the UK and American charts seven years before.

A cheap but entertaining play on sexual go down on ‘perform oral sex on’. And you can watch GM and Elton John doing this 1991 song together here.

More importantly, the incident forced the artist to confront what he had known since he was 26 but had kept secret.

At some point I don’t see how anyone could have missed the homoerotic intensity of GM’s music. I recall being stunned by “Faith” and “I Want Your Sex” in 1987, a good 11 years before GM’s t-room adventure. My god, they were hot. Videos to watch here and here, respectively.

… George Michael’s career grew even more interesting in its emotional intensity. A song like “Amazing” is proof that he never abandoned his faith in love’s power to redeem — “I never thought my savior would come” — but it’s found on his fifth and final solo album, 2004’s Patience, when his best days were already behind him. A vocalist with astounding flexibility, Michael could hold his ground when sharing the microphone with the likes of Elton John, who revered Michael’s songwriting skills, and Aretha Franklin (on 1987’s “I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me)”), which provided the Queen of Soul with her first number one song in the UK. Michael acted as a bridge between the thoroughly closeted acts like Liberace and Freddy Mercury, whose flamboyance he appropriated and honored (he stole the show at an AIDS fundraiser and tribute to Mercury after the Queen frontman’s death in 1991) and fully out acts like Adam Lambert and Rufus Wainwright (whose indictment of American exceptionalism, “Going to a Town,” George Michael covered on 2014’s Symphonica).

GM did joy and enthusiasm beautifully. And he “got” other artists and their styles wonderfully.

Rivaled only by Diana Ross’s “I’m Coming Out,” “Freedom! 90” has become a coming-out anthem in the GLBT community.

And that 1990 anthem you can watch on video here.

Sex in public. Well, in what are legally public spaces. Nevertheless, it’s a set of social practices, regulated informally. The aim of this regulation is to provide men with locales — mens roons, parks, back alleys, whatever — for cruising (finding sexual partners) and engaging in mansex, while concealing all of these transactions from those who would use these places for more conventional purposes and would be offended by the activities of the t-room men. The goal is to protect both the conventional world and also the subterranean world of mansex.

The regulation involves a system of signalling availability for sex and for specific sexual acts, a system for keeping the sexual negotiations subterranean, a system of maintaining anonymity (if that’s what you want), and norms for interaction (notably, maintaining consensuality and avoiding imposition by force, but also little conversational routines for expressing thanks).

Yes, what happens in the subterranean world is illegal in most jurisdictions, but then there are lots of illegal activities that are tolerated because they are mostly harmless but have benefits for those who engage in them; these activities are typically informally regulated; and some of them are quite widespread. Jaywalking, for example. (I believe that subterranean mansex is less common in the age of Grindr and other forms of hooking up, but there are still reasons for some men to engage in it — for the anonymity it can provide, for instance, and the place away from home that it can make available for the mansex — and some men simply have a taste for it, as GM apparently did, and as does the protagonist of the German film Taxi zum Klo.)

However, even modest types of illegal activities will attract the attention of law enforcement, which is not above using the activities to harass and demonize those who engage in this activity. Laws against jaywalking are rarely enforced, but when they are, they tend to be used against specific groups, as a form of social control. Some years ago, when Columbus OH went on an enforcement campaign against jaywalking, it was selectively enforced in only three places: on the streets surrounding Ohio State University, outside gay bars, and in the black areas of the city.)

Selective enforcement, but also, not infrequently, entrapment (as in GM’s case). In the case of t-room sex, entrapment (and outright fabrication) by the police is common. One case, from the NYT on 10/8/14, “Lawyers Challenge Lewdness Arrests at Port Authority Bus Terminal” by Joseph Goldstein:

For some of the more than 100,000 travelers who use the Port Authority Bus Terminal each day, a second-floor men’s room is their first or last stop in New York City. The facilities are what you might expect: toilets, urinals, hand dryers.

But above the row of sinks, a posted sign offers an atypical note of caution: “Restrooms are patrolled by plain clothes officers.”

It is not an idle warning.

Port Authority police officers have arrested more than 60 people this year in the bus terminal on public lewdness charges, a sevenfold increase over the same period last year. Most of those arrested were accused of masturbating in the second-floor bathroom. According to court records, they were observed by plainclothes officers, who were often standing next to them at an adjacent urinal.

At least a dozen of those arrested are represented by the Legal Aid Society, whose lawyers say their clients — some of whom say they were merely urinating — were victims of aggressive and intrusive police tactics.

The effort by the Port Authority police is part of a crackdown on quality-of-life crimes at the bus terminal.

The bathroom is hardly a hotbed of sexual activity. Capt. John Fitzpatrick, the Port Authority police commander who oversees the bus terminal, acknowledged that complaints about sexual behavior in the men’s room “are few and far between.”

The last point is important. It’s not that there was a problem with mansex in the mens room; the idea was to humiliate men the cops thought might be gay — and, probably, to boost their arrest stats, but mostly it was a campaign against faggots.

Enforcement doesn’t have to be like that. In some places and at some times, there have been t-rooms (especially in out-of-the-way spots) that enforcement agencies simply ignored, so long as there was no harassment by the t-room men (or against them).  Or, in at least one case known to me, a (24-hour) t-room that  an enforcement agency patrolled regularly, but only to ensure that there was no harassment on either side (a policy that might be thought of as intelligent harm reduction).

Mansex as worship. Explicit in Scott Marsh’s mural. The image of a man sucking cock on his knees is routinely seen as a symbol of religious worship, specifically taking communion: take, eat, this is my body. GM’s sex in public in fact seems to have been oral (“I’ve never been able to turn down a free meal”).

But fucking is also construable as worship, and in more than one way. In particular, the man getting fucked can be seen as symbolically offering his body as a sacrifice to his fucker. Especially when this offer is made in public, and especially when the offer is made to many men, freely and without reservation, the fuckhole can be seen as a figure of awe, analogous to Christ or to a willing martyr: all this I have done for you.

Then there are the texts of mansex, its liturgy. Like, say, the liturgy of the Eucharist, these texts don’t vary a lot; they are verbal rituals that gain much of their power from repetition in the context of the practices they are associated with. The strength of sex talk, dirty talk, springs from its predictability (“Suck my dick, faggot”, “Fuck me harder, please, please”, and so on): creative variation on the formulas is likely to derail the intense focus of the moment (“Whoa, I never heard that before!”). This is why inventive dialogue in written porn tends to be comic rather than arousing.

The sex talk in gay porn flicks is heavily formulaic, and that’s a good thing. We like to hear the good old songs.

A Benjamin Schwartz cartoon in the latest (February 13th/20th) New Yorker:

The German folk tale of Snow White provides the basis for this name play, though the published version of the story by the Brothers Grimm didn’t name the dwarfs who help Snow White. The modern names entered pop culture with the 1937 Disney animated film. At which point they provided an inventory of names to play with (supplementing another source of pop culture names, the names of Santa’s eight reindeer from “A Visit From St. Nicholas”).

The first five of Schwartz’s dwarfs continue the tradition of naming them for physical, personality, or behavioral characteristics, but with more modern vocabulary (I’m especially fond of Crunchy, as in crunchy granola, and Skeezy). The last two, Jayzy and Emojy, bring us firmly up to date.

Jayzy is the image of the rapper Jay Z (complete with his NY Yankees cap. From Wikipedia:

Shawn Corey Carter (born December 4, 1969), known professionally as Jay Z, is an American rapper, businessman, and investor. Formerly known as Jay-Z, he is one of the best-selling musicians of all time, having sold more than 100 million records, while receiving 21 Grammy Awards for his music.

And then Emojy, with an emoji-colored face.

(Very little of linguistic interest, beyond a penis joke in Spanish and a note on grammatical gender. Otherwise, it’s the massive Latino musclehunk “The Marvel” on display.)

From my regular correspondent RJP this morning, a (broken) link to a Facebook video by The Marvel (posting as maravilla3x). I persevered and found a working Facebook link, which FB seems now to have taken down as too racy: it shows a naked Marvel sitting up in bed humping a big heart-shaped box of Valentine’s chocolates, then taking the cover off and eating chocolates from the box while revving up the tempo and intensity of his pelvic thrusts towards climax (at which point the tease is cut off). However, The Marvel has resourcefully put the video on YouTube, and you can watch it there.

A still from the video, close to the cut-off point:

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The caption (I translate from the Spanish): “Who wants chocolates? Your Valentine’s present.”

Some things to note: the truly gigantic upper arms; the shaved armpits, the big-assed tattoos.

That degree of muscle development, like a really big dick, is out of my personal arousal zone and into the zone of abstract size awe: something remarkable to observe, but not something I’m interested in engaging with carnally. (Yes, I understand that many other fags find The Marvel’s body deeply, deeply moving.)

The shaved armpits just mark him as a bodybuilder; on his FB page he identifies himself as an “NYC Fitness Model”, and the videos and photos there include a fair number of him doing weight training (but also a huge number of flagrantly sexual displays, aimed at women but surely snaring an audience of admiring gay men as well; in interviews, the man says he’s straight but welcomes followers of all kinds). As for the armpit hair, I’m really into that and miss it in serious bodybuilders.

The ornate, intense tattoos will be better visible in photos to come.

On the Marvel’s FB page we learn that his real name is Franyely Lora, born 9/3/93, and that he began to take an interest in music at an early age and had a talent for it. On the evidence of the photos, he seems to be a keyboardist.

Linguistic note: Maravilla is a fairly common Hispanic surname (I have friends with this name). But Spanish is a language with grammatical gender, and the noun maravilla ‘marvel, wonder’ is of fem. gender grammatically, even when it’s used to refer to a man. That’s why The Marvel is (in Spanish) La Maravilla (with the fem.sg. definite article la rather than the masc.sg. el).

(He could have chosen the pseudonym El Maravilloso ‘the marvelous (one) [masc.]’, but maybe he though that was just too long, or that nouns are somehow “stronger” than adjectives.)

More images of La Maravilla, two from a huge number in which the man is posed as an underwear model. “Buenos Dias”, with his morning coffee, in a minimal brief:

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And “Buenas Tardes”, with an afternoon moose-knuckle (also showing off his pecs and abs):

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A sex-play bonus on his FB page:

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The main part of the title, up to the last word, I would translate roughly as ‘What your (female) friend needs, to calm that pelvic heat’ (calor pélvico is an entertainingly roundabout way of referring to female arousal). Now that last word might remind you of English penicillin (the drug), but the name of the drug in Spanish is penicilina, while the last word in the title is pretty clearly pene ‘penis’ plus some diminutive derivational material: what the woman needs for the fire in her genitals is a dick (and here’s a toy one). Well, that’s how I read it.

Meanwhile, enjoy those Valentine chocolates.

(Everyday mansex — just your ordinary fellatio — discussed in plain language, mostly analytically rather than enthusiastically, so maybe not enough to frighten the horses in the street. Use your judgment.)

The Michael Lucas studio ad for a Valentine’s Day offer, cropped here for the sake of modesty (the full image, of happy cocksucking, can be viewed on AZBlogX):

When the Old Porn Peddler comes on a holiday, he naturally turns to puns. For Valentine’s Day, it’s probably going to involve heart and hard-on, as here.

Commentary: on the heart/hard pun for VDay; on the figure of the Old Porn Peddler; on the smiles by both cocksman and cocksucker (even though the latter has his mouth filled by a big dick); and on what the men are doing with their hands.

The heart/hard pun. Earlier on this blog (again, with X-rated images on AZBlogX):

for Fathers Day in 2015, “My hard-on belongs to Daddy” (with Daddy/Boy sex)

for VDay in 2016, “We got our Heart-On for you!”

The Old Porn Peddler. My play on that legendary figure, the Old Dope Peddler. From Wikipedia:

“The Old Dope Peddler” is a satirical song by Tom Lehrer. It was on Lehrer’s first album, Songs by Tom Lehrer from 1953, and a new live recording on Tom Lehrer Revisited in 1960.
The song is a parody of a popular tune well known at the time, “The Old Lamp-Lighter” by Charles Tobias and Nat Simon, which was a hit first for Kay Kyser in 1947, and continued to have popular new recordings to 1960. The sticky-sweet verses of the original asserted that

He made the night a little brighter
Wherever he would go
The old lamplighter
Of long, long ago

It goes on to say that if there were sweethearts in the dark, “he’d pass the light and leave it dark,” and concludes by explaining that now, the old lamplighter turns the stars on at night and turns them off at dawn.
Lehrer’s parody switches the song’s protagonist to “the Old Dope Peddler” selling “powdered happiness”. It has lines like this:

He gives the kids free samples
because he knows full well
that today’s young, innocent faces
will be tomorrow’s clientele

In the case at hand:

He gives the guy great blowjobs
because he long ago learned
that that young, horny cocksman
will soon blow him in return

Smiling through the sex. In the ad, both cocksman and cocksucker are smiling happily: hey, buddy, this is awesome!

(Personal tastes: I love to see men kissing. And I love to see men smiling, especially when they’re enjoying mansex, as above.)

Easy for the cocksman, something of a trick for the cocksucker, who’s got his mouth filled with cock. But he can still smile with his eyes, crinkling them up. From a 10/13/15 posting of mine:

In this photo, [actor Jordi] Vilasuso isn’t quite smiling with his mouth, but he’s definitely “smiling with his eyes” — appparently known as smizing in some circles. The verb smize is of course a portmanteau of smile and eyes

Note that both men are smiling at us, for us, the viewers. But they’re connecting with each other, and not just through that cock.

What the hands say. The connections are through their hands, on each other’s bodies: cocksucker with a fist wrapped around the base of the cocksman’s balls (giving his guy an extra measure of pleasure, beyond the action on his cock), cocksman with an affectionate hand on the cocksucker’s head.

The hand on head can be a gesture of dominance and control, forcing the cocksucker down on that cock. But very often it’s a sweet, affectionate gesture, a way for the cocksman to connect with the guy serving his dick, maybe as an embrace, maybe as a kind of sexual counterpart to a buddy pat. You don’t just offer your hard dick to a guy and expect him to get down to work on it, you hold him affectionately, support him.

Screenshots and stills: know your audience. All of this makes the ad quite pleasing, and it doesn’t hurt that both participants are good-looking young men with hot bodies. I don’t know who the actors are, or what porn flick this photo was originally advertising, but I’m quite sure it’s not a screenshot from a video, but a posed still shot. It’s almost a sure thing that nothing like this scene appears in the video.

Ads for porn flicks often show wonderfully smiling actors, when it turns out that in the actual videos no one smiles at all during sex: the actors are intently focused on performing the sex, on being competent men-at-work, and their characters are fully absorbed in their sexwork. (When this happens, I tend to feel cheated, because I really like those smiles.) And in the videos, the actors don’t gaze at the camera (that is, at us fags viewing the videos) — or, at least, they’re not supposed to, because that would break the third wall and break the viewers’ identification with the characters in the scene, which is what drives the viewers’ sexual arousal.

So: the image above is great as an ad, but would be terrible as a moment from a porn flick. The ads are directed at potential buyers, the videos are directed at fags jacking off.

Today’s Zippy:

On Henny Youngman and his famous one-liner “Take my wife … please”, see the Youngman section of this 9/8/12 posting.

(Note: Youngman’s name is pronounced with an unaccented second syllable, as opposed to the youngman of the Village People’s song “YMCA”, which has secondary accent on this syllable.)

Then in sequence: Elmer Fudd, Disco Duck, Liberace, and Wayne Fontana (as is so often the case, a Zippy strip is a big grab-bag of popular culture). Plus a note on the various verbs die.

There’s a section on Elmer Fudd in my 6/2/16 posting “Cartoony days”.

And there’s a 1/16/12 posting on Disco Duck.

On Liberace in Wikipedia:

Władziu Valentino Liberace (May 16, 1919 – February 4, 1987), mononymously known as Liberace, was an American pianist, singer, and actor. A child prodigy and the son of working-class immigrants, Liberace enjoyed a career spanning four decades of concerts, recordings, television, motion pictures, and endorsements. At the height of his fame, from the 1950s to the 1970s, Liberace was the highest-paid entertainer in the world, with established residencies in Las Vegas, and an international touring schedule. Liberace embraced a lifestyle of flamboyant excess [flamboyant hardly does credit to the man] both on and off stage, acquiring the sobriquet “Mr. Showmanship”.

… Liberace’s fame in the United States was matched for a time in the United Kingdom. In 1956, an article in the Daily Mirror by columnist Cassandra (William Connor) described Liberace as “…the summit of sex — the pinnacle of masculine, feminine, and neuter. Everything that he, she, and it can ever want… a deadly, winking, sniggering, snuggling, chromium-plated, scent-impregnated, luminous, quivering, giggling, fruit-flavoured, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother love”, a description which strongly implied that he was homosexual.

The ensuing libel suit, which Liberace won, turned in part on whether the writer knew that fruit was an American derogatory slang term for ‘homosexual’. (Liberace never admitted that he was homosexual.)

Liberace sort of haunted my childhood, since I was an un-flamboyant classical pianist.

Finally, Wayne Fontana. The brief description from Wikipedia:

Wayne Fontana (born Glyn Geoffrey Ellis, 28 October 1945) is an English rock/pop singer, best known for the 1965 hit “Game of Love” with the Mindbenders.

Then dying. The last panel of the strip has a pun involving die ‘stop living’ and a slang sense of die that GDoS glosses as ‘to fail utterly, to have a difficult time’, with a first cite in 1828 and a fine show-biz quote from 1920:

George Ade, Hand-Made Fables 8: Small-town Comedy will not get across unless the audience is sufficiently Sprung to be in a Receptive Mood. Billy died.

Bonus, in connection with le petit mort ‘ejaculation, orgasm’, as noted in yesterday’s posting on Feliz d’Eon: NOAD2 provides the following sense of die, labeled “archaic”: ‘have an orgasm’.

(Discussion of men’s bodies and male-on-male sex in mostly very plain language, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)

Today’s playtime viewing began with a compilation video of scenes from porn flicks featuring Trenton Ducati, beginning with an especially nicely crafted scene from the 2012 TitanMen Stud Finder, involving Jed Athens, Ford Andrews, and Ducati. Well, yes, a bit of titular word play, combining carpentry / construction work and hot men.

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The DVD cover, with Ducati in the middle

Gay porn flicks (and the scenes within them) are interpersonal dramas in a largely conventional format, involving stock characters and relationships and characteristic narrative structures (among them: first physical displays of affection as foreplay, then cocksucking, then fucking, then everybody comes, on camera), and set in characteristic locales. Some of the most favored locales are spaces mostly peopled by blue-collar men, so it’s no surprise that a number of gay porn flicks are set in carpentry shops and construction sites and have titles like Stud Finder, packaging together stud ‘an upright support in the wall of a building to which sheathing, drywall, etc., are attached’ and stud ‘a young man thought to be very active sexually or regarded as a good sexual partner’ (both definitions from NOAD2).

A posting on AZBlogX (“Beefier and beefiest”) has XXX-rated photos (#1-3) of the three actors in the scene, displaying their bodies; descriptions of the three characters; two stills of sexual action from the scene (#4 oral, #5 anal); the story of the scene compactly described (who does what to who, in what sequence, with what emotional tones); and a brief analysis of the relationships between the men, mostly in terms of b/t (roughly, subordinate / dominant) roles (see the Page on b/t here).

From AZBlogX on the characters:

The scene involves three men: at first, slender, smooth-bodied, boyish Jed Athens (an enthusiastic bottom who sometimes tops) and beefier, hairy and scruffy Ford Andrews (versatile), who run through sexual preliminaries — lots of kissing, passionate cocksucking, Andrews on Athens, then Athens on Andrews) before they are joined by the beefiest of the three, square-jawed bodybuilder (hence smooth-bodied) Trenton Ducati (also versatile in gay porn, but in this scene he’s top all the way). The contrast in body types is especially nice. (Meawhile, everybody’s tall and everybody has a wonderful pornstar cock.)

(I follow the custom in many descriptions of porn of conflating the actors (identified by their stage names) with the characters they portray, since no one in the scene uses any names.)

Cropped versions of #1-3 in AZBlogX, so you can judge the men’s faces and bodies:

  (#2)

Athens

  (#3)

Andrews

  (#4)

Ducati

The somewhat breathless ad copy for the video, with the scenes numbered and the relevant scene description boldfaced:

Got hung? You need to find some wood and steel, and you need it soon. Hold the tool in your hand and guide it carefully until it hits the spot… [a little forest of phallic vocabulary] or just let TitanMen Trenton Ducati and Hunter Marx be your Stud Finders, leading the charge as a group of utility players get sweatier and hornier by the second. [1] A basement workshop heats up as Hunter Marx and Will Swagger [hard to beat as a porn name] take turns sucking each other before the hairy Hunter plows his bud’s hole. [2] After a passionate suck exchange, buddies Ford Andrews and Jed Athens are soon under the spell of alpha-stud Trenton Ducati, whose energy takes control. [3] Handyman Race Cooper’s ass is too much for co-worker Stany Falcone to resist; watch the duo’s tight abs and muscled bods glisten as they get breathless together. [glisten is a great porn verb]

The conclusion of my interactional analysis on AZBlogX:

On the basis of body types and face types, you might have expected Ducati over Andrews over Athens, or if you throw in Andrews’s [very masculine] hairiness and scruffiness (and Ducati’s versatility in other parts), maybe Ducati and Andrews flip-fucking [and both fucking] Athens (or even Andrews over Ducati). But the scene plays out with Andrews as everybody’s b (and Ducati as everybody’s t): the others both fuck Andrews (twice each), he doesn’t fuck anybody, and he comes last [coming first is a t move, coming last a b move]. A nice reversal of expectation — but only a partial reversal, since the three-way opens with Athens serving the other two orally, and his getting spit-roasted (ecstatically taking the other two men at once) is the high point of the scene, and Athens is a total cockwhore in it. So the three-way plays out as Athens serving the other two, then switching to being the man in the middle, and finally going back to where he really belongs, serving the other two.

Meanwhile, Andrews is a total b in the three-way, a role prefigured by his going down on Athens first in their initial encounter [going down first is a b move].

The whole scene (in two main parts) is long and unhurried, building slowly to its conclusion. Yes, I found it moving.

Within the constraints of the genre, this is a complex and interesting narrative.

Studs and stud finders. From NOAD2, with the senses relevant to the porn flick boldfaced. The complete entry for the inanimate noun stud:

1 a large-headed piece of metal that pierces and projects from a surface, especially for decoration; a small, simple piece of jewelry for wearing in pierced ears or nostrils; a fastener consisting of two buttons joined with a bar, used in formal wear to fasten a shirtfront or to fasten a collar to a shirt; (usu. studs) a small projection fixed to the base of footwear, especially athletic shoes, to allow the wearer to grip the ground; (usu. studs) a small metal piece set into the tire of a motor vehicle to improve roadholding in slippery conditions.

2 an upright support in the wall of a building to which sheathing, drywall, etc., are attached; US the height of a room as indicated by the length of this.

3 a rivet or crosspiece in each link of a chain cable.

ORIGIN Old English studu, stuthu ‘post, upright prop’; related to German stützen ‘to prop.’ The sense ‘ornamental metal knob’ arose in late Middle English.

And the complete entry for the animal-related noun stud:

1 an establishment where horses or other domesticated animals are kept for breeding: [as modifier]: a stud farm | the horse was retired to stud; a collection of horses or other domesticated animals belonging to one person; (also stud horse) a stallion; informal a young man thought to be very active sexually or regarded as a good sexual partner.

2 (also stud poker) a form of poker in which the first card of a player’s hand is dealt face down and the others face up, with betting after each round of the deal. [the sense development isn’t clear to me]

ORIGIN Old English stōd, of Germanic origin; related to German Stute ‘mare,’ also to stand.

And then, finally, the relatively transparent N + N compound stud finder, from Wikipedia:

A stud finder (also stud detector or stud sensor) is a handheld device used to locate framing studs located behind the final walling surface, usually drywall. While there are many different stud finders available, they all fall into two main categories, magnetic stud detectors and electric stud finders. Stud finders have been in use since the early 20th century.

Stud finders are not very photogenic, so I omit the pictures.

I suppose we could think of Grindr as a stud finder.

(Obviously, there will be a lot of dick talk here, but of the art-historical and art-critical variety, rather than the sexual-arousal variety.)

On Facebook, art historian Reuben Cordova writes:

I’m giving a lecture: “The Penis in Art. A Short History, From the Greeks to Today.” Any suggestions?

and offers as an example this ancient Greek vase with the image of a naked woman carrying a gigantic penis on it:

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(Such images appear to fall under the Fine Art Exemption for body display on Facebook, and presumably Google+ and WordPress as well. The point presumably being that the penis images on display are not of actual human bodyparts, but are fantasy creations.)

Naked men are all over ancient Greek art, and ancient Roman art as well. A few more examples, then a pile of links on this blog and AZBlogX to phallic art, and a sampling of modern penis art not already covered in my blogs.

A note on Cordova. From his amazon.com author page:

Ruben C. Cordova is an art historian, curator, and photographer. He holds a BA from Brown University (Semiotics) and a PhD from UC Berkeley (History of Art). Cordova has taught courses treating Art History, Film, and Museum Studies at UC Berkeley, UT Pan American, UT San Antonio, Sarah Lawrence College, and the University of Houston. He has curated or co-curated more than 20 exhibitions featuring Latin American, Latino, and Chicano Art. As a photographer, his primary interest is Day of the Dead and his work has been featured in 40 exhibitions. … His future books will treat the artist Mel Casas, Day of the Dead in Mexico and the US, and Frida Kahlo.

The glories of Greece. These include herms (or hermai) like these:

(#2)

Archaic herma of Hermes

(#3)

Herm with an inscription linking it to the Hermes Propylaios by Alcamenes

From Wikipedia:

A herma (Ancient Greek: ἑρμῆς, pl. ἑρμαῖ hermai), commonly in English herm, is a sculpture with a head, and perhaps a torso, above a plain, usually squared lower section, on which male genitals may also be carved at the appropriate height. The form originated in Ancient Greece, and was adopted by the Romans, and revived at the Renaissance

… In ancient Greece the statues had an apotropaic [‘supposedly having the power to avert evil influences or bad luck’ (NOAD2)] function and were placed at crossings, country borders and boundaries as protection, in front of temples, near to tombs, in the gymnasia, palaestrae, libraries, porticoes, and public places, at the corners of streets, on high roads as sign-posts, with distances inscribed upon them. Before his role as protector of merchants and travelers, Hermes was a phallic god, associated with fertility, luck, roads and borders. His name perhaps comes from the word herma referring to a square or rectangular pillar of stone, terracotta, or bronze; a bust of Hermes’ head, usually with a beard, sat on the top of the pillar, and male genitals adorned the base. The surmounting heads were not, however, confined to those of Hermes; those of other gods and heroes, and even of distinguished mortals, were of frequent occurrence. In this case a compound was formed: Hermathena (a herm of Athena), Hermares, Hermaphroditus, Hermanubis, Hermalcibiades, and so on. In Athens, where the hermai were most numerous and most venerated, they were placed outside houses as apotropes for good luck. They would be rubbed or anointed with olive oil and adorned with garlands or wreaths. This superstition persists, for example the Porcellino bronze boar of Florence (and numerous others like it around the world), where the nose is shiny from being continually touched for good luck or fertility.

In Roman and Renaissance versions (termini), the body was often shown from the waist up. The form was also used for portrait busts of famous public figures, especially writers like Socrates and Plato. Sappho appears on Ancient Greek herms, and anonymous female figures were often used from the Renaissance on, when herms were often attached to walls as decoration.

(Hat tip to Arne Adolfsen.)

The Secret Erotic Art of Pompeii and Herculaneum. The title of a 6/24/14 blog posting by Barbara Weibel, with a number of remarkable illustrations, including these enormous erect penises, mounted on walls to ensure fertility:

(#4)

Postings on my blogs on phallic art:

a Page “clothed/unclothed” on postings about male photographers concealing or revealing the penis in their work

on 5/20/11: “Saint Sebastian:”: #3 Keith Haring work with penis

on 5/23/11: “Another Flandrin pose”, with a link to an AZBlogX posting on the pose

on 9/14/11: “The news for penises”, with its 5th section on phallic art, with a link to an AZBlogX posting on Jos Karis’s penis art, plus two Baroque penis compositions, my “Dick Bouquet” collage, and a Benetton montage of genitalia

on 1/20/13 on AZBlogX: “Dick aversion”, with 11 examples of art works displaying penises

on 1/21/13: “Horror of the penis”, following up on this AZBlogX posting:

Hard cocks are apparently by definition inflammatory and cannot be displayed with serious artistic intent. There’s a small list of exceptions to this generalization: in particular, folk art, comic and fantasy art, and (overlapping with these categories) art showing erect penises *detached* from a body (here we sing King Missile’s 1992 song “Detachable Penis”). The remaining examples seem subject to constant pressure to re-label them as pornography rather than serious art.

plus a bibliography of books on male art (art with some homoerotic content or tone) in my library

on 1/22/13: “Porn / art”: art or porn? in male photography

on 3/22/13: “Surrealists”: Paul Cadmus and his male nudes

on 5/23/13: “Annals of phallic animation”: a flying penis monster from the 14th century

on 10/2/13: “Male nudes”

on 11/24/14: “Phallic art”, linking to artwork on AZBlogX

on 12/27/14: “Set of three”: Orlan painting of a male nude, reproduced on AZBlogX

on 1/13/15: “Bernard Perlin”: an much given to drawing male nudes

on 7/11/15: “Outrageous art”: Frankenchrist image on AZBlogX

on 9/24/15: “Another medieval penis monster”

on 1/17/16: “A remarkable website”, on photographer Bob Mizer, with full-frontal nudity on AZBlogX

on 5/17/16: “Joe Dallesandro”: photos of JD, with explicit images on AZBlogX

on 7/25/16: “George Platt Lynes and Jared French”, with male nude photos by Lynes on AZBlogX

on 8/22/16: “The Fine Art Exemption”: Michelangelo’s David on the cover of the NYT Magazine

on 8/26/16: “Two impressively eccentric artsts”, section on Lynda Benglis and her bronze phallic smile

on 8/26/16: “Sylvia Sleigh’s male art”, with a link to genitally nude paintings on AZBlogX

on 9/23/16: “News for penises and their simulacrea”:

Two new annoyances with the Penis Ban on WordPress, Facebook, and Google+. In two recent postings on AZBlogX: “Bear poets in 1963” on the 20th, with a Richard Avedon photo of poets (and lovers) Peter Orlovsky and Allen Ginsberg, in which Orlovsky’s (flaccid) penis is not at all the focus of the piece, but is important to its interpretation; and “Voluntary cuckoldry” on the 21st, with a striking graphic illustrating the roles of the three characters in such a relationship, a graphic with two stylized penises in it, one flaccid and one erect…

In both cases, the penises are central to the composition, and not as objects of veneration or erotic triggers; my fondness for cocks in these functions is well-known, and though in principle I think that that more open carnal sexuality would be a good thing, I’m willing to keep such images in a protected place. But in these two cases, I bridle at the Penis Ban.

Nevertheless, this blog is extremely important to me, so I don’t want to do anything that would threaten it. But I can still complain.

In contrast to the two problematic images I just described, consider another image, from an article in Le Soir on the 20th, “D’immenses graffitis de sexe choquent à Bruxelles” [‘Huge sex graffiti shock in Brussels’], an image that was quickly posted on Facebook: [#1, a giant penis image]

on 10/24/16: “Naked boys playing at liberty” in photographs, with a link to genitally nude photos on AZBlogX

on 11/9/16: “Eliding the black penis”: balloon male genitalia

on 12/31/16: “Surrealists, but especially Jess”: #5 Narkissos by the artist Jess

Modern times. From Bob Russell in response to Cordova’s request, this instance of a Magrittean Disavowal (which I’ve posted about several times; it all started with a pipe, but it’s gone in lots of directions, here to a wooden penis):

(#5)

Russell gave no source for the image, and I haven’t been able to track it down: Google Images unhelpfully thinks it’s a picture of bread, and searching on the text didn’t get me a source for #5, though it did net this version in chalk:

(#6)

This from Robyn Gallagher on Flickr, taken 12/10/06 in Auckland NZ. Gallagher’s comment: “They’re right. It’s not. Outside the Stamford Hotel on Albert Street.”

Searching on “penis in art” brought several more entertainments. This jar of pickled penises, for example, Mary Ellen Croteau’s Men I Have Known:

(#7)

Penis art by women (like #7) is sometimes playful but often edgy. A SheRa magazine posting by Charlotte Heather on 1/7/15, “Dick Pics: Art and the Penis”, offered four examples of “some female artists working on or around the penis”, starting with this whimsical composition by Freudenthal & Verhagen:

(#7)

Freudenthal & Verhagen are a Dutch duo who’ve been working as a photographic and creative team for over 20 years. Both Carmen Freudenthal (photographer) and Elle Verhagen (stylist) graduated from Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam in 1988 and began working together shortly after [laergely in commercial art]. Since, this provocative pair have developed a shamelessly edgy style. (link)

Then Louise Bourgeois and her Janus Fleuri:

(#8)

From Wikipedia:

Louise Joséphine Bourgeois (… 25 December 1911 – 31 May 2010) was a French-American artist. Best known for her large-scale sculpture and installation art, Bourgeois was also a prolific painter and printmaker. She explored a variety of themes over the course of her long career including domesticity and the family, sexuality and the body, as well as death and the subconscious. Although Bourgeois exhibited with the Abstract Expressionists and her work has much in common with Surrealism and Feminist art, she was not formally affiliated with a particular artistic movement.

And Yayoi Kusama’s Violet Obsession:

(#9)

From the MOMA site:

[Kusama] affixes sewn-and-stuffed phallic protrusions to everyday objects — ladders, shoes, furniture — which she then arranges in installations, some room-sized. Violet Obsession is a monumental Accumulation: a rowboat with oars, electric purple and covered in irregular oblong forms.

Finally, Kirsten Fredericks:

(#10)

A knitwear designer for 12 years, Kirsten Fredericks decided to turn a craft deemed very feminine on its head by crocheting and knitting a bunch of penises. She does all shapes, sizes, colors, and personalities (from SheRa)

Bonus. A bit of language art, a prick ambigram:

(#11)

Reversible word readable upside down. This ambigram shows how the CK letter combination becomes a P after a 180° rotation. In slang language, a prick is a penis, and is also a term used for a worthless asshole. (Wikimedia link) [designed 10/10/16 by Doxoc]

From Wikipedia:

An ambigram is a word, art form or other symbolic representation whose elements retain meaning when viewed or interpreted from a different direction, perspective, or orientation.

Douglas R. Hofstadter describes an ambigram as a “calligraphic design that manages to squeeze two different readings into the selfsame set of curves.”

… The earliest known non-natural ambigram dates to 1893 by artist Peter Newell. Although better known for his children’s books and illustrations for Mark Twain and Lewis Carroll, he published two books of invertible illustrations, in which the picture turns into a different image entirely when turned upside down.

Once again, I return to the question of what you have to know to understand a comic strip or a cartoon, with two recent cartoons in my comics feed, a Rhymes With Orange and a Bizarro; in both, understanding requires that you supply a word that isn’t in the text of the cartoon:

(#1)

(#2)

(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in #2 — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)

The legally inclined dog. The Rhymes in #1 is completely incomprehensible if you don’t get the allusion to the idiomatic synthetic compound ambulance chaser. Otherwise, the dog is chasing an ambulance, and what does that have to do with law school?

The key, from NOAD2:

ambulance chaser: a lawyer who specializes in bringing cases seeking damages for personal injury. ORIGIN late 19th cent.: from the reputation gained by certain lawyers for attending accidents and encouraging victims to sue.

Texting 101. #2 is somewhat easier to cope with, since you can see where the key to understanding lies: the text has the unfamiliar noun tapmanship in it. You then have to work out that the word is a coinage based on the noun penmanship, and alludes to the act of tapping keys on a keyboard, in particular the keyboard of a smartphone used for texting.

On penmanship, from NOAD2: ‘the art or skill of writing by hand’. (Note that the word has drifted somewhat from its close association with pens, and now applies to any sort of implement for writing by hand, including pencils and crayons.) The conceit of the cartoon is that schoolchildren now need coaching in the skill of tapping the keys on their smartphones, the way they used to need coaching in the skill of writing by hand. It’s also possible that some younger people might not even know the noun penmanship.

Bonus. Asking Google to search for {tapmanship} first causes the program to offer the following alternatives:

upmanship, teamsmanship, topman shop, penmanship

(The third of these turns out to be a reference to Topman, a chain of British mens’ fashion stores.)

But Google does offer two legitimate occurrences of tapmanship, both playful coinages, one referring to wiretapping, one to typing. (You could imagine the word also being coined to refer to skill in tapping kegs of beer, etc.)

From the Battle Creek [MI] Enquirer on 5/23/73, a reference to an inept wiretap:

President Nixon had the FBI put taps on Mrs. Nixon. Regrettably, it was a sloppy piece of tapmanship, wires became crossed, Mrs. Nixon’s phone began performing oddly.

And from the publication Yojana (Planning Commission of India, New Delhi), Vol. XX, No. 2, on 2/15/76:

Not in the same category as M.F. Husain’s triology, “12 June 1975”, “24 June 1975” and “26 June 1975” now adorning the first sheet of the GOI [Government of India] calendar this year, perhaps, but worthy of a close look, nevertheless, the picture above [which I have omitted here] was done on a typewriter by Shri Y.M. Pitre of Belgaum [a city in the Indian state of Karnataka]. We liked especially the smart little truck, upper left, and the twelve marching soldiers at the bottom. The serious critic may find things to say about their pot bellies, but their stance and posture must not go unremarked. The number of eyepopping hours Shri Pitre lavished on this work of painstaking tapmanship is not mentioned in the forwarding letter sent by the proprietors of Pankaj Prakashan, Belgaum, the publishers of’ ‘Development Through Cooperation’ edited by the typartist.

Bonus bonus: the use of typartist for someone who does typart (aka typeart, type art, ASCII art, text art, text pictures, keyboard art, etc.), in the sense ‘creating pictures composed of typed characters’.

A deeply silly morning name today, a play on the title Le Malade Imaginaire. Which then led me to some ethereal culinary musings.

From Wikipedia:

The Imaginary Invalid (French: Le malade imaginaire … ) is a three-act comédie-ballet by the French playwright Molière with dance sequences and musical interludes by Marc-Antoine Charpentier. It premiered on 10 February 1673 at the Théâtre du Palais-Royal in Paris and was originally choreographed by Pierre Beauchamp.

My morning name refers to an imaginary salad. But what sort of salad is imagined (rather than real)? I suggest a classic Salade niçoise  (also a favorite of mine). From Wikipedia:

Salade niçoise … is a salad that originated in the French city of Nice. It is traditionally made of tomatoes, hard-boiled eggs, Niçoise olives, anchovies [or tuna], and dressed with olive oil. It has been popular worldwide since the early 20th century, and has been prepared and discussed by many famous chefs.

  (#1)

We might think of its imaginary version as Salade ne soit pas (roughy ‘Don’t be salad’).

Now imagine this: M.F.K. Fisher, Craig Claiborne, Julia Child, and James Beard, are gathered together ethereally to plan an imaginary meal. Things are going slowly. So far they have a soup — Vietnamese Faux (on Vietnamese pho, see my 4/5/11 posting “Go pho it”) — and La Salade Imaginaire, and a dessert, an Illusion Flottante ‘Floating Illusion’, an allusion to Île Fottante ‘Floating Island’: from Wikipedia:

A floating island is a dessert of French origin, consisting of meringue floating on crème anglaise (a vanilla custard). The meringues are prepared from whipped egg whites, sugar and vanilla extract then quickly poached. The crème anglaise is prepared with the egg yolks, vanilla, and hot milk, briefly cooked. … In French cuisine, the terms œufs à la neige (“eggs in snow”) and île flottante (floating island) are sometimes used interchangeably

  (#2)

And there the four ran aground in their menu planning, until Fisher had the smashing idea that the fish and meat courses should be truly and totally imaginary, nothing but air; a substantial soup, a substantial salad, and a light dessert would suffice. That settled, they pondered the question of whether the wines should be equally imaginary. Child argued that since the wines would be at least ethereal, they should go for the top of the line, Faux-Monnayeur-Conti ‘Counterfeiter Conti’, the other-worldly counterpart of Romanée-Conti. From Wikipedia:

Romanée-Conti is an Appellation d’origine contrôlée … and Grand Cru vineyard for red wine in the Côte de Nuits subregion of Burgundy, France, with Pinot noir as the primary grape variety … Wine from the vineyard is among the most sought after, and expensive, in the world.

And then, of course, they all floated away.

Today’s Zippy:

(#1)

Zippy’s Arbitrary Donuts, spreading clarity through surrealism in today’s sociopolitical landscape. Alarmingly, the truck grows smaller with each panel. (No, I don’t know why.)

The allusion in the last panel is to “Without vision, the people perish” (Proverbs 29:18 in KJV), which continues “but he that keepeth the law, happy is he”.

The donut truck has appeared in Zippy at least once before, also without an easy interpretation, also with the truck growing smaller with each panel. That was all the way back on 3/25/04:

(#2)

Putting aside that puzzle, I note that donuts, donut shops (some with huge donuts on their roofs or in front of them), diners serving donuts, etc. are a regular drumbeat in Zippy. His world is Donut Land.

Now for some actual linguistic content, Zippy strips with donut puns — all orthographically based, do not / donut — in their titles. Five of them, with one repeat pun (good things bear repeating).

My favorite is the first, “Donut ask, donut tell” from 1/16/04:

(#3)

(Og Mandino was “The Greatest Salesman in the Worl” — see the Wikipedia entry.)

Then “Donut try this at home”, twice (9/24/05 and 4/25/11):

(#4)

(#5)

Then “Donut ask for whom the jelly rolls” (a play on “Do not ask for whom the bell tolls”), from 9/17/13:

(#6)

And finally “Donut go gentle” (… into that good night), from 7/8/15:

(#7)

(Hunky guy in skimpy swinsuits, mildly racy talk. That’s all.)

  (#1)

Born
SwimWear GrabCock,
Of a long-ago line of
Poultry thieves,
In an eccentric
Underwear-oriented
Family, with his
Brother JockStrap and his
Sister SportsBra,

SwimWear traded his natal
Surname in for
GrabBag,
Because it wasn’t necessarily
Sexual, and he liked to
Scratch his balls

A recent Daily Jocks ad, featuring a formidably upper-bodied model, with the rest of the equipment to match (especially those thighs).

Here he is on another part of the beach, amidst the black volcanic rocks, sliding a hand into a pocket  to dig for nuts:

  (#2)

(Some frank discussion of the female body, with a racy food photo. Use your judgment.)

A photo on Facebook from John Dorrance, with the comment “These things are obscene”:

Well, they’re striking vaginal symbols (vulvar symbols would be more accurate anatomically, but just think of this commonplace use of vagina as metonymic).

Before I go on with this, I should point out that I’m a long-standing mytilophile, a lover of mytilids (mussels, in the family Mytilidae), or in street talk, a mussel fag (forgive the play on muscle fag, which I am not)  — see my 11/1/15 posting on mussels, with some foody photos — but many people find the creatures uncomfortably, um, life-like, and that includes some gay men like JD (I note that gay men are often charged with hostility towards women, and sometimes that’s a fair cop, but JD’s not in that crew); some straight women; and, yes, some lesbians (one of whom confessed as much in a comment on JD’s posting).

The problem with symbolic genitals that are edible is that the more realistic they look, the more uncomfortable a diner is likely to find them. I am extraordinary well-disposed towards penises, especially up close and personal, but truly realistic edible penis-simulacra would give me pause: eat dick is, after all, figurative.

While I’m playing around with language: to use a common vulvarity, I think I deserve some points for vaginality.

(Various sex acts playfully portrayed in neon, but still…)

The last of yesterday’s four “Body works” postings (about San Francisco artist Keith Boadwee) ends with a discussion of Bruce Nauman’s neon sculpture Eat War (1986), echoed in Boadwee’s photo composition Eat Shit. And so to the incredibly multifaceted (and very often unsettling) artist Nauman, who is, among other things, a playful language artist and a chronicler of human connection, especially through sex.

One of each, both in neon:

(#1)

“None Sing Neon Sign”, 1970

(#2)

“Seven Figures”, 1984

Nauman in his famous work “Self-Portrait as a Fountain”, 1966, and in a more recent photo:

(#3)

(#4)

From the Wikipedia entry, which I quote at length because it’s a good survey of a long and complex career:

Bruce Nauman (born December 6, 1941 [the day before the original Pearl Harbor Day]) is an American artist. His practice spans a broad range of media including sculpture, photography, neon, video, drawing, printmaking, and performance. Nauman lives near Galisteo, New Mexico.

Nauman was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, but his father’s work as an engineer for General Electric meant that the family moved often. He studied mathematics and physics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (1960–64), and art with William T. Wiley and Robert Arneson at the University of California, Davis (1965–6). In 1964 he gave up painting to dedicate himself to sculpture, performance and cinema collaborations with William Allan and Robert Nelson. He worked as an assistant to Wayne Thiebaud.

Ah, the Davis connection. See my 2/2/16 posting on Arneson and my 12/5/16 posting on Thiebaud.

Upon graduation (MFA, 1966), he taught at the San Francisco Art Institute from 1966 to 1968, and at the University of California at Irvine in 1970. In 1968 he met the singer and performance artist Meredith Monk and signed with the dealer Leo Castelli. Nauman moved from Northern California to Pasadena in 1969. In 1979, Nauman further moved to Pecos, New Mexico. In 1989, he established a home and studio in Galisteo, New Mexico, where he continues to work and live along with his wife, the painter Susan Rothenberg.

Confronted with “What to do?” in his studio soon after graduating, Nauman had the simple but profound realization that [I boldface this for emphasis] “If I was an artist and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio must be art. At this point art became more of an activity and less of a product.” Nauman set up a studio in a former grocery shop in the Mission district of San Francisco and then in a sublet from his university tutor in Mill Valley. These two locations provided the setting for a series of performed actions which he captured in real time, on a fixed camera, over the 10-minute duration of a 16mm film reel. Between 1966 and 1970 he made several videos, in which he used his body to explore the potentials of art and the role of the artist, and to investigate psychological states and behavioural codes. Much of his work is characterized by an interest in language, often manifesting itself in a playful, mischievous manner. For example, the neon Run From Fear – Fun From Rear, or the photograph Bound To Fail, which literalizes the title phrase and shows the artist’s arms tied behind his back. There are however, very serious concerns at the heart of Nauman’s practice. He seems to be fascinated by the nature of communication and language’s inherent problems [he is something of a student of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein], as well as the role of the artist as supposed communicator and manipulator of visual symbols.

Two more neon sculptures, both phallus-themed, from 1985″

(#5)

(#6)

The neon sculptures are, as far as I know, all kinetic; most switch back and forth between two states (fairly obviously in #6), some with more. To see some of them in action, you can look at the video here: video installations of Bruce Nauman from the exhibition “Extended Drawing” in the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht, 2001-12.

What I’ve given here is a very tiny sample of Nauman’s work, designed to link closely to previous postings on this blog. Check out the wider range; a lot is available on the web. You will see that Nauman, even at his most playful, is a craftsman at whatever he does.

First encountered on Pinterest this morning, what is apparently a new rage in texties: jokes told by a cute husky pup (rather than, say, a llama, a penguin, an eel, or Ryan Gosling), for example this one:

(#1)

(Texty is my name for things that combine the features of slogans — as on e-cards — and cartoons; they are essentially joke delivery systems supplied with some visual background. When the visual background is a fixed image, re-used on many occasions, with a creature or person presented as telling the joke, then the custom has become for the texties to be referred to as meme. In this case, the (cute) husky pup meme. The jokes can be of any sort; many of them are hoary japes rather than fresh cleverness.)

Before I say more about the texty in #1, notes about the actual joke (which was new to me, but probably not to the world). Getting the joke depends on your knowing the Swiss flag:

(#2)

(An especially simply flag design, also one of only two official flags for a nation-state that’s square, rather than rectangular, in shape.)

Once you’ve got #2, you’ll recognize the white cross as a plus sign, which will lead you to another use of the noun plus. From NOAD2:

an advantage: knowing the language is a decided plus

And a big plus is even more of an advantage than just a plus.

Back to #1. From one of many sites spreading cute husky cubs, Dose of Funny, deliriously maintaining that “15 Pun Husky Meme Jokes are Insanely Cute”:

The pun husky meme is one of the best memes to be created in the last year. It’s simple, it takes three photos of an adorable husky pup who is playing with his little husky toy … The first [panel] is him talking, then the second photo is the punch line, and the last photo is the kicker of the little husky pup laughing at the joke… Once you see it, you’ll know why the hilariously cute pun husky meme is just the best of them all. The basic premise is you can tell any sort of corny (but still funny!) joke and if you have it coming from an adorable husky, then it’s not corny anymore, but it’s super cute. Sort of like the lame joke eel, but much, much cuter.

It’s all in the cuteness. Husky pups beat joke eels hands down. Here’s the eel doing racy jokes:

(#3)

(#4)

The joke eel excels at snarkily sophomoric, but the husky cub has the market on cute cornered.

(Otherwise known as In Search of Lost Mustard.)

Today’s Mother Goose and Grimm:

(#1)

A bilingual pun, with the flavor of a portmanteau: Dijon (mustard) + déjà vu.

Mustard. From Wikipedia:

Dijon mustard (Moutarde de Dijon) is a traditional mustard of France, named after the town of Dijon in Burgundy, France, which was a centre of mustard making in the early Middle Ages and was granted exclusive rights in France in the 17th century. First used in 1336 for King Philip VI, it became popular in 1856, when Jean Naigeon of Dijon replaced the usual ingredient of vinegar in the recipe with verjuice, the acidic juice of unripe grapes.

The main ingredients of the condiment are brown mustard seeds (Brassica juncea), and white wine, or a mix of wine vinegar, water and salt designed to imitate the original verjuice. It can be used as an accompaniment to all meats in its usual form as a paste, or it can be mixed with other ingredients to make a sauce. The term “Dijonnaise” refers to a dish that is prepared with, or has a sauce containing, the mustard (including a blend with mayonnaise).

(#2)

It’s déjà vu all over again. From NOAD2 on déjà vu:

a feeling of having already experienced the present situation; tedious familiarity: to list the opponents of his policies is to invite boredom and a sense of déjà vu. ORIGIN early 20th cent.: French, literally ‘already seen.’

Remembrance of Mustard Past. Or in the original: À La Recherche De La Moutarde Perdue. Alternative translation: In Search of Lost Mustard.

All of this based on Proust’s masterpiece À La Recherche Du Temps Perdu, at first made famous in English translation under the title Remembrance of Things Past, now known under the more literally translated title In Search of Lost Time.

(Well, yes, men’s bodies, sex talk, and man-man sex. Not for kids or the sexually modest.)

A friend request on Facebook, from someone using the name Nick Petersucker (some time ago, FB obviously ceased to care a great deal about its policy of insisting that posters use their real names; now, all sorts of remarkable names come past me on FB). His profile picture, a selfie of someone, first posted in 2012:

(#1)

The information he provides (some of it obviously invention):

Worked at dildo sucker
Studied at Princeton University
Lives in Miami, Florida
From Dildo, Newfoundland And Labrador

with a birth date of  6/13/90 (for what it’s worth, I have no friends on record with a June 13th birthday). Princeton might be right, or it might just be a reference to Princeton as a fabled site of gay male sex. Miami might be right, or it might just be a reference to Miami as a hot (in several senses), fashionable place with a big gay scene. Dildo NL is a real place, but petersucker Nick probably has no connection to it. I’ll get to it in a moment.

A few of his messages from 2012 (with d for dick):

[6/22] Don’t let the d be hard to get, let the d be hard to forget (;

[6/22] He sent me a (; HE WANTS THE D!

[7/8] they want this d fosho

In the last two, he appears to be solicting mouths, not dicks.

On to Newfoundland. From Wikipedia:

Dildo is an unincorporated place on the island of Newfoundland, in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. It is located on the southeastern Dildo Arm of Trinity Bay about 60 kilometres west of St. John’s. South Dildo is a neighboring unincorporated community. The town’s unusual name has brought it a certain amount of notoriety.

The place name “Dildo” is attested in this area since at least 1711, though how this came to be is unknown. The origin of the word “dildo” itself is obscure. It was once used to reference a phallus-shaped pin stuck in the edging of a row boat to act as a pivot for the oar (also known as a “thole pin” or “dole pin”). It was used as early as the 16th century for a cylindrical object such as a dildo glass (test tube), for a phallus-shaped sex toy, as an insult for a “contemptuous or reviling” male, and as a refrain in ballads. The name, then written as “Dildoe”, was first applied to Dildo Island, located offshore from the present-day town of Dildo. This use was recorded in 1711 and 1775, and the name was thereafter applied to the Dildo Arm of Trinity Bay and other local physical features. Social scientist William Baillie Hamilton notes that Captain James Cook [the famous circumnavigating Capt. Cook] and his assistant Michael Lane, who mapped Newfoundland in the 1760s, often displayed a sense of humour in the place names they chose, and were not above selecting names that might offend over-sensitive readers. Regardless of the origin, the name has brought the town of Dildo a measure of notoriety. In the 20th century there were several campaigns to change the name, though all failed.

(#2)

(All real places.)

The origins of dildo are obscure, but the largely metonymic origin of the sexual slang peter seems clearer. From the GDoS entry for its 4th noun peter:

(also pete, petey) (joc. use of proper name + initial letters) the penis, esp.of a young boy [first cite 1870 Cythera’s Hymn: For men must slum and women will try / To gain a small pittance by walking the High. / While Peter stiff is standing. Other cites from the early 20th century on.]

GDoS gives the (agentive) synthetic compounds peter-eater [1952, with rhyme] and peter puffer [1992, with alliteration] ‘one who fellates, cocksucker’, but not the transparent petersucker, peter-sucker, or peter sucker. Presumably petersucker is pre-empted by the older term cocksucker, widespread from the late 19th century on, though it can always be coined for playful usage.

From a posting by Randy Murray to the Facebook page‎ “THE ERRORIST MOVEMENT – Correct grammar, with humour”, where he comments, “apostrophes mean so much”:

(#1)

At first glance, this ad would seem to fall into four big topic areas on this blog: dubious commercial names; It’s All Grammar; vulgar slang; and phallic play (in particular, word play). To which I add: the conventions on the form of hashtags, e-mail addresses, and web addresses (URLs). But first, I have to tell you that this particular Dick’s Pizza is a fabrication.

(Hat tip to Michael Palmer.)

dickspizza.ca. It’s in Toronto ON, but it’s not an actual functioning pizza parlor. From Adweek on 8/18/16, “SiriusXM Created a Restaurant Called Dick’s Pizza Just to Make Tons and Tons of Penis Jokes: Fake ad and storefront promote comedy contest” by Patrick Coffee:

“Nothing livens up a party quite like a big serving of Dick’s.”

At least that’s the promise of Dick’s Pizza, an unfortunately named and even more unfortunately fictional restaurant created by agency Taxi Toronto for internet radio service SiriusXM.

It almost feels like the brief for this viral play was, “How many penile jokes can you make in one minute?” And the answer is “a great many,” because the resulting ad [viewable on the Adweek site] is bulging with innuendo

There’s more to it than a series of juvenile jokes from a man named Richard Long. In fact, Taxi created the campaign to promote the client’s second annual Top Comic, a contest in which would-be Canadian standup stars compete to win $25,000 and a chance to perform at the Top Comic Finale in September.

Dubious commercial names. A compendium of examples in a 3/22/16 posting, noting

dubious commercial names, ranging from the flagrantly transgressive to the winkingly suggestive to the possibly innocent in intent.

(There’s an inventory of postings, with links, in a 6/10/16 posting.)

The Dick’s / Dicks / dicks in #1 lies squarely in the flagrantly transgressive camp, thanks in part to the lack of apostrophes in all but the logo and the uniformity of case everywhere — either all upper-case or all lower-case — so that the sexual slang dick and the male proper name Dick aren’t distinguished in print (as they are not in speech).

Though men with the nickname (or legal personal name) Dick suffer from a certain amount of joking about their name (see the phallic play section below), and a few insist on being called Richard, Rich, Rick, Richie, or Ricky, most just sail on in life under the name Dick and everyone gets used to it. Some of these men have pizza parlors named after them, and that doesn’t seem to be an issue. A few examples from various parts of the US: Papa Dick’s Pizza in Horseshoe Bend AR, Dick’s Pizza and Pleasure in Milwaukee WI. Dick’s Pizza Palace in Muncie IN, Mountain Dick’s Pizza in Jay VT.

But if you say “Dick’s Pizza” in a jokey voice and with a smirk, then we’re into dick talk.

It’s All Grammar. The Errorist FB page proclaims that it’s all about finding and correcting errors in grammar, but as usual, there’s some question about what counts as grammar for him. People who write two dick’s (with an apostrophic Pl) or his dicks size (with an anapostrophic Poss) surely don’t think that the numeral two requires a Poss form for its head noun — instead, it requires a Pl form — or that a determiner NP (like his dick) has to be in its Pl form — instead, it has to be in its Poss form.

No one’s unclear about the relevant principles of English grammar here. But lots of people are sometimes confused about how to spell the Pl and Poss forms, or (quite often) hold erroneous beliefs about how these forms are to be spelled. There are errors here, sometimes iadvertent, sometimes advertent, but they are spelling errors, akin to spelling definate rather than definite, or seperate rather than separate.

So the question is: Does Randy Murray think that spelling errors count as errors in grammar? If not, then #1 doesn’t belong on the ERRORIST page, but on a page devoted to spelling mistakes (surely there are many of these). If so, then he’s just another one of the It’s All Grammar crowd.

From a 7/10/04 posting of mine to Language Log:

To PITS, People In The Street, “grammar” embraces pretty much everything having to do with language, spoken or written, so long as it’s regulated in some way: syntax, morphology, word choice, pronunciation, politeness, discourse organization, clarity and effectiveness, spelling, punctuation, capitalization, bibliographic style, whatever.

— an idea pursued futher in a 2/22/12 posting “It’s All Grammar” on this blog:

why do people think of such a diverse collection of phenomena … as constituting a natural category?

The short answer: they all involve aspects of language or language use that (some) people object to and so would (literally) regulate; they are domains of linguistic peeve-triggers. But otherwise there’s no common thread, and it’s a serious confusion to treat them as deeply similar. Meanwhile, there is a place for a term denoting ‘the system of regularities connecting the phonetics and semantics of a (variety of a) language’ [this is what linguists call a grammar]. If you really have to have a term for the great grab-bag of linguistic peeve-triggers taken together, I suggest garmmra.

Garmmra is a giant complaint space, not itself a system of regularities.

Here I lapse into Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Episode 29, even though it’s not strictly relevant:

Man: (… sees a door marked complaints; he goes in) I want to complain.

Man in charge: You want to complain … look at these shoes … I’ve only had them three weeks and the heels are worn right through.

Man: No, I want to complain about …

Man in charge: If you complain nothing happens … you might just as well not bother. My back hurts and … (the man exits, walks down the corridor and enters a room)

Man: I want to complain. (‘Spreaders’, who is just inside the door, hits man on the head with a mallet) Ooh!

Spreaders: No, no, no, hold your head like this, and then go ‘waaagh’! Try it again. (he hits him again)

Man: Waaghh!

Spreaders: Better. Better. But ‘waaaaaghh’! ‘Waaaagh’! Hold your hands here …

Man: No!

Spreaders: Now. (hits him)

Man: Waagh!

Spreaders: That’s it. That’s it. Good.

Man: Stop hitting me!

Spreaders: What?

Man: Stop hitting me.

Spreaders: Stop hitting you?

Man: Yes.

Spreaders: What did you come in here for then?

Man: I came here to complain.

Spreaders: Oh I’m sorry, that’s next door. It’s being hit on the head lessons in here.

Man: What a stupid concept.

Vulgar slang. This is the usage label NOAD2 gives for dick ‘penis’. As I’ve posted elsewhere, I think this label is no longer accurate: dick and cock are simply informal slang terms for the penis, everyday alternatives to the medical/technical label penis and the literary-toned phallus (and an assortment of euphemisms and playful synonyms).

On the other hand, in collocations with other bits of sexual slang, dick can certainly be vulgar — and eat dick ‘fellate’ (which figures prominently in #1)  is one such collocation. So #1 manages to talk dirty by pretending to be merely erroneous spelling.

Phallic word play. The great vehicle for word play on the name Dick was Richard Milhous Nixon, Tricky Dick, who was, among other things, a notable dick / dickhead ‘a stupid, irritating, or ridiculous person, particularly a man’ (NOAD2) — specifically, an irritating, meanspirited paranoid. If you disliked Nixon, you used his name against him; if you supported him, you used his name against his opponents, as in these (unofficial) campaign buttons from his 1972 presidential campaign against George McGovern (for the presidential term that was cut short by Watergate):

(#2)

(Apparently, similar buttons were created for Nixon’s unsuccessful 1960 campaign against John F. Kennedy.)

And then, eventually, came the 1999 comedy movie Dick, discussed on this blog on 7/21/15. About Tricky Dick, played by Dan Hedaya (scruff-jowled, scowling) in an inspired piece of casting.

Meanwhile, there’s the sperm whale Moby-Dick of Melville’s novel. The novel was written well before dick ‘penis’ became current, but sperm whales do have huge (retractable) penises, about 2m (6.5ft) long, and whale penises do get some coverage in the book, so Moby-Dick and his penis have become subjects for cartoonists. Two items (whose sources I haven’t tracked down):

(#3)

(#4)

On the sperm whale, from Wikipedia:

The sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus), or cachalot, is the largest of the toothed whales and the largest toothed predator.

… From the early eighteenth century through the late 20th, the species was a prime target of whalers. The head of the whale contains a liquid wax called spermaceti, from which the whale derives its name. Spermaceti was used in lubricants, oil lamps, and candles. Ambergris, a waste product from its digestive system, is still used as a fixative in perfumes.

On-line conventions: hashtags, e-mail addresses, web addresses. The image in #1 contains both the hashtag #dickspizza and the abbreviated web address (URL) dickspizza.ca. Either one gets you to Dick’s Pizza, the Top Comic site on Sirius XM. Now, hashtags, e-mail addresss, and web addresses are allowed to have (some) parts with characters other than plain Latin letters (lower-case a-z, upper-case A-Z) and digits (0-9) and to distinguish case, but some systems don ‘t tolerate much beyond the basic characters and are insensitive to case (though hashtags begin with #, domain names (after the @) in e-mail addresses can have a hyphen in addition to letters and digits, and path names in URLs will have a period), so the custom has grown up for actual usage to revert to the plainest possible styles: all lower-case, with no special ASCII characters — in particular, no apostrophes — and no spaces.

The hashtags #Dick’s Pizza, #Dick’sPizza, #DicksPizza, and #dickspizza will (in principle) all get you to the racy Dick’s Pizza Twitter page, but usual practice is to go for the last, because it’s the simplest to type — a practice that eliminates the distinction between the common noun dick and the proper name Dick and the distinction between Pl and Poss forms of these nouns. (Similarly, #Je Suis Charlie, #JeSuisCharlie, and #jesuischarlie will, in principle, all get you to the Charlie Hebdo Twitter page, but amost everyone uses the last.) This custom has nothing to do with ordinary spelling; it’s all about on-line conventions. But it helps to set up the Dick’s Pizza joke.

There are similar restrictions (in many systems) on the names of image files. Here’s a full view of the Toronto storefront (note the bonus sexual word plays in DICK’S COMING SOON and DING DONG! WE DELIVER):

(#5)

The name of the image file is DicksStorefront.jpg. On my system, the apostrophic Dick’sStorefront.jpg is unacceptable, as is a version with a space: Dicks Storefront.jpg. On the other hand, the system is case-sensitive: DicksStorefront.jpg, Dicksstorefront.jpg, dicksStorefront.jpg, and dicksstorefront.jpg are not equivalent.

Caught during a Prairie Home Companion re-run on the radio yesterday: a joke set-up for the burgers of Calais (referring to hamburgers), punning on Rodin’s The Burghers of Calais (his extraordinary bronze sculpture).

Burghers. The Stanford version of Burghers (in Memorial Court, more or less outside the window of an office I had some years ago):

(#1)

From Wikipedia on the sculpture:

Les Bourgeois de Calais is one of the most famous sculptures by Auguste Rodin. It commemorates an occurrence during the Hundred Years’ War, when Calais, an important French port on the English Channel, was under siege by the English for over a year. Calais commissioned Rodin to create the sculpture in 1884, and the work was completed in 1889

… The City of Calais had attempted to erect a statue of Eustache de Saint Pierre, eldest of the burghers, since 1845. Two prior artists were prevented from executing the sculpture: the first, David d’Angers, by his death; and the second, Auguste Clésinger, by the Franco-Prussian War. In 1884 the municipal corporation of the city invited several artists, Rodin amongst them, to submit proposals for the project.

Rodin’s design was controversial. The public had a lack of appreciation for it because it didn’t have “overtly heroic antique references” which were considered integral to public sculpture. It was not a pyramidal arrangement and contained no allegorical figures. It was intended to be placed at ground level, rather than on a pedestal. The burghers were not presented in a positive image of glory; instead, they display “pain, anguish and fatalism”. To Rodin, this was nevertheless heroic, the heroism of self-sacrifice.

In 1895 the monument was installed in Calais on a large pedestal in front of Parc Richelieu, a public park, contrary to the sculptor’s wishes, who wanted contemporary townsfolk to “almost bump into” the figures and feel solidarity with them. Only later was his vision realized, when the sculpture was moved in front of the newly completed town hall of Calais, where it now rests on a much lower base.

… Under French law no more than twelve original casts of works of Rodin may be made.

The first cast of the group of six figures, cast in 1895 still stands in Calais. Other original casts stand at [I emphasize the American casts, most of which I have seen]:

Glyptoteket in Copenhagen, cast 1903.

… the Rodin Museum in Philadelphia, cast 1925 and installed in 1929.

the gardens of the Musée Rodin in Paris, cast 1926 and given to the museum in 1955.

… the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., cast 1943 and installed in 1966.

… the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California, cast 1968.

the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, cast 1985 and installed in 1989:

(#2)

PLATEAU (formerly the Rodin Gallery) in Seoul. This is the 12th and final cast in the edition, cast 1995.

Sculptures of the individual figures from the monument are on the campus of Stanford University.

Burgers. Hamburgers have become a big thing in France. A Telegraph (UK) piece by Henry Samuel from 3/8/16, “‘Le burger’ now top selling dish in French restaurants, new study reveals: New figures suggest the decidedly un-French burger is served in 75 per cent of French eateries from the most humble fast food outlets to top-notch restaurants”:

For the guardians of French gastronomy, the prospect of being served something as unsophisticated as a slab of mincemeat with a bap and slice of cheese would long have been considered sacrilegious.

Today, however, the tables have turned. In a culinary revolution, three quarters of French restaurants now sell hamburgers and 80 per cent of these say it has become their top-selling dish, according to a new study.

“Le burger” – as the French dub the quintessentially American invention to the despair of linguistic purists of the Académie Française – has become a feature of even the most illustrious eateries.

Indeed, such is its success that sales are set to overtake those of the classic “jambon beurre” (ham and butter baguette), the nation’s staple lunchtime sandwich.

Last year, the French chomped their way through 1.19 billion burgers, an 11 per cent rise on the previous year, while “le jambon beurre” fell to 1.23 billion.

“Burger mania (in France) is unstoppable,” declared Bernard Boutboul, head of Gira Conseil, the food consultancy behind the study.

A Parisian burger, incorporating some frites:

(#3)

Meanwhile, in Calais…

The port city of Calais is the largest city in the French department of Pas-de-Calais (the French name for the body of water we know in English as the Strait of Dover), with Boulogne-sur-Mer in second place; the capital city is Arras.

A search for hamburgers in Pas-de-Calais yields a huge list of places in or within 25 miles of the department: among them, places in Ypres, Belgium, and in Lille, Saint-Omer, Mimeraux, Le Touquet, Arras, and yes, Calais itself. In particular, the Buffalo Grill in Calais. The exterior:

(#4)

and the interior:

(#5)

Maine burgers. Now to Calais ME. From Wikipedia:

Calais /ˈkælᵻs/ is a city in Washington County, Maine, United States. As of the 2010 census, it had a population of 3,123. The city has three Canada–US border crossings (also known as ports of entry) over the St. Croix River connecting to St. Stephen, New Brunswick, Canada.

Notes on Calais ME:

First, it’s tiny, especially in comprison to Calais, France (which had a population of 126,395 in the 2010 census, roughly 40 times the size of the Maine town).

Second, there’s a considerable Francophone presence there, but it’s Canadian French, not continental French.

Third, note the pronunciation of the town’s name. It’s a spelling pronunciation, accented on the first syllable rather than the second, homophonous with Engish callous / callus or nearly so. This means that the burgers of Calais is a piss-poor pun in Maine.

Finally, despite its size, it manages to have at least two places serving hamburgers. One is a McDonald’s — which makes it not unlike France, where McDonald’ses are all the rage. The other is a warmer local place called Yancy’s, seen here in an interior view:

(#6)

There are probably some more hamburger joints over the border in New Brunswick.

On ADS-L on the 20th, Quote Investigator Garson O’Toole wrote:

This post was made in response to [Fred Shapiro’s] request for famous quotes from comic strips. This topic is complicated enough that I think a separate discussion thread will be helpful.

The double-meaning of the phrase “The peasants are revolting” was featured in the comic strip “The Wizard of Id”. Here is a [11/8/64] piece in “The Philadelphia Inquirer” that mentioned the joke within an introduction to the comic before its debut in syndication.

(#1)

The ambiguity became closely associated with The Wizard of Id, as in the collection in #1, but of course it didn’t originate there. In Garson’s ADS-L posting, his focus was on antedating the joke — antedating is a preoccupation of the hounds of ADS-L — but my interest here is on other things: the comic strip itself and some entertaining examples of the joke, regardless of when they appeared.

From the Inquirer:

A magic potion of medieval merriment, a new comic strip entitled “The Wizard of Id,” will be offered to Inquirer readers six days weekly starting Monday.

The comic is straight from the Dark Ages — but its satirical, tongue-in-cheek views of royalty somehow never made the formal history books.

There is the King of Id — “a tyrant’s tyrant” — who, when told the peasants are revolting,” calmly replies, “You can say THAT again.”

Readers will get such lines daily in “The Wizard of Id,” the creation of the team of Brant Parker and Johnny Hart.

Overview from Wikipedia:

The Wizard of Id is a daily newspaper comic strip created by American cartoonists Brant Parker and Johnny Hart. Beginning in 1964, the strip follows the antics of a large cast of characters in a shabby medieval kingdom called “Id”. From time to time, the king refers to his subjects as “Idiots”. (The title is a play on The Wizard of Oz, combined with the Freudian psychological term Id, which represents the instinctive and primal part of the human psyche.)

In 1997, Brant Parker passed his duties on to his son, Jeff Parker, who had already been involved with creating Id for a decade. In 2002, the strip appeared in some 1,000 newspapers all over the world, syndicated by Creators Syndicate. Hart’s grandson Mason Mastroianni took over artist’s duties on the strip after Hart’s death in 2007. The new byline, “B.C. by Mastroianni and Hart,” appeared for the first time in another of their strips on January 3, 2010. On December 14, 2015, Jeff Parker also passed his duties on to Mastroianni.

On the joke in (#1): it turns on an ambiguity in the use of revolting, the PRP form of a verb REVOLT, which can either be (a) a V in the Progressive construction of English — in the VP complement to the main verb BE — or (b) an Adj.

In the (a) use, REVOLT-a (‘rise in rebellion’) is an intransitive V in the VP complement to BE; other verbs (with similar meanings) that can appear as intransitives here are REBEL, RIOT, and MUTINY.

In the (b) use, REVOLT-b (’cause to feel disgust’) is one of a large number of “psych verbs”, whose PRP forms are available as Adjs, both prenominal (a revolting smell) and predicate (the smell is revolting). The verbs in this class are both negative (like REVOLT) — DISGUST, APPALL, SICKEN — and positive — AMAZE, ASTONISH, SURPRISE.

So there are two different verb lexemes here, and both can occur as a one-word complement of BE. Rebellion verbs other than REVOLT-a don’t have psych counterparts, however, so the ambiguity arises just in this one case (and, in fact, psych verbs are mostly marginal as intransitive progressives).

Antedating. Barry Popik’s excellent website has an 10/12/14 entry on “The peasants/people are revolting”, taking it back to The Wizard of Id and some other mid-1960s versions and listing lots of later occurrences, including an especially memorable version in the Mel Brooks-directed comedy film History of the World, Part I (1981):

Count de Monet: It is said that the people are revolting.

King Louis XVI: You said it! They stink on ice!

You can watch the YouTube clip here.

Meanwhile, Garson O’Toole has found some earlier occurrences, and yesterday on ADS-L Jim Landau reported a find in the Irish Digest in 1959, for which he had only a snippet view. Garson noted that this was in fact a different joke based on the ambiguity, and unearthed this 7/5/55 cite in the Times Record of Troy NY:

A South American was describing his country to an American woman

“Our most popular sport is bullfighting,” he told her.

“Isn’t it revolting?” she asked.

“No,” smiled the man. “That’s the second most popular sport.”

Two more examples. From cartoonist Glenn Foden:

(#2)

(this is Foden’s second appearance on this blog. His first was here.)

And then a grotesque version “My Queen” from left-handed toons by Drew Mokris in 10/6/11:

(#3)

left-handed toons (for right handed people) is a group toon, founded in 2007 by Drew Mokris and Justin Boyd.