On Facebook, the following exchange:

Amanda Walker: Useful term of the day: “ventepølse”, (Norwegian: “waiting sausage”), the sausage you eat off the grill while waiting for your steak to finish cooking.

Jeremy Bornstein: I was hoping it meant something like “someone whose highest purpose would be to become someone else’s sausage”

AMZ: You are my sausage, my only sausage / You make me happy when skies are gray / You’ll never know, dear, how much I love you / Please don’t take my sausage away

It’s all about love of sausage(s) — Würste of many sorts, wieners, frankfurters, hotdogs, bangers, all of them. About what I’ll call lucanicophilia ‘love of sausages’ < Lat. lucanica ‘sausage from Lucania’, in Gk. lukaniko (λουκάνικο). Plus the phil– ‘love’ root.

On the table: the song “You Are My Sunshine”, love of sausage(s), love of penises (peniphilia — sometimes a sausage is just a sausage, but sometimes it’s also a penis), and the terms lucanicophilia and peniphilia.

The song. On 8/21/16, the posting “What you done, sunshine, is criminal damage”, with the Wikipedia entry on the “Sunshine” song (and a link to a performance of it by Johnny Cash and June Cash). And now with sausage for sunshine.

Love of sausage(s). From a piece on the Inside the TravelLab site by Abi King, with an entertaining sausage origin story:

(#1)

For the love of sausages

Nuremberg Sausages: Smaller than the average German wurst, in both length and girth, the Nuremberg sausage often arrives on heart shaped metal platters, in an uncertain gesture of romance. They come this size, so the legend says, because during the medieval plagues it was too dangerous for people to leave their homes in order to go in search of food (this also, incidentally, was the time when people drank beer instead of water (including children) because it was deemed to be the healthiest fluid around.)

One day, some canny sausage-maker stumbled upon the Nuremberg style and shape, so slim it could slot right through the keyholes of the plague infested doors. He threw some marjoram in with the pork, and behold, the Nuremberg sausage was born.

Nuremberg Variations: Today, it’s served boiled white with an onion and vinegar sauce or rost above open flames accompanied by salted pretzels and sauerkraut.

Love of penises. The Nurembergers are little sausages. Then there are big sausages, the object of desire for many people:

(#2)

With this image, we pass from actual to figurative sausages, from Würste to Schwänze. And now we’re in peniphilia territory.

In my 7/4/15 posting “Embrace of the televised penis”, I noted that the term peniphilia ‘a strong positive emotional view towards, or positive emotion caused by, the penis’ had been coined a number of times (before I thought of it), though it’s not in standard dictionaries.

Terminological notes. I can’t take credit for peniphilia, a pretty straightforward invention and a useful one, but I will stand up for lucanicophilia (and lucanicophile and lucanicophiliac), though, frankly, sausage loving should do fine for everyday purposes. And sausage fan or sausage lover will do fine for the long and awkward lucanicophile.

Admonition: food and sex.

A Pinterest board today with the title Dirty Dogs, reviving the perennial topic (on this blog) of hot dogs as phallic objects, but now with explicit allusion to sexual connotations of names and sexual readings of images.

From the many hot dog / frankfurther / wiener postings on this blog, the especially relevant 8/1/17 posting “Slangy Spanish hot dogs”, on the playful wienernym cachorros ‘puppies’.

Most of the items on the board:

Barbecued Pulled Pork Hot Dogs, Jalapeno Onion Bacon Wrapped Hot Dogs, Mexican Hot Dogs, The Cowboy Hot Dog, Colombian Hot Dogs (Perro Caliente Colombiano), South Carolina Bird Dogs (Football Friday), Garlic Butter Italian Sausage Sandwiches, The Tennessee Smoky Hot Dog, Cordon Bleu Dogs, Cheese Stuffed Burger Dog, The Poi Dog with Coconut Relish, Korean Slaw Dog, Kogi Kimchi Dogs, Cachorro Quente (Brazilian Hot Dog), The Greek Dog, Asian Slaw Dogs with Sriracha Mayo

Put them together, especially under the heading Dirty Dogs, and almost everything sounds lewd, starting with hot (slang ‘sexy’) and dog (slang ‘penis’): pull suggests ‘masturbate’, wrap the image of hand on penis, pork and stuff  ‘penetrate sexually’, Greek the image of anal intercourse, Mexican and Italian evoke images of hot Latin men and cowboy of hard-riding ranch hands. By the time I got halfway down the page, even poi, slaw, and kimchi had begun to sound dirty to me.

But surely the master stroke — see how this works: you were caught for a moment by master and stroke, weren’t you? — not far down on the page, is Cheesy Sloppy Dogs, with cheesy suggesting (cock) cheese ‘smegma’ and sloppy suggesting sloppy seconds ‘sexual intercourse after a previous ejaculation in the same orifice’. The photo:

Wiener tips peeking out, ejaculatoid cheese on top

And the descriptive copy gives us nestled in warm toasty buns plus creamy:

It’s perfectly seasoned Sloppy Joes meets hot dogs nestled in warm toasty buns. Drizzle on the creamy garlicky cheese sauce over the tops and you have yourself delicious Cheesy Sloppy Dogs!

Delicious and arousing.

My Swiss friend Guido Seiler (now professing linguistics in the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München) just sent me the latest news from the Zwicky thread company, a firm I’ve posted about several times on this blog, partly because it’s a Zwicky company and partly because of this famous 1950 ad poster by Donald Brun:

(#1)

Earlier on this blog:

on 3/3/10 “Zwicky and the Cat Museum”, with the Brun poster:   “This is not a poster of a cat named Zwicky … but a poster advertising the Zwicky thread firm … The cat is wielding a spool [or bobbin] of silk thread (soie á coudre, literally ‘silk for sewing’).’

on 3/20/11 “Zwicky-cat in NYC”, the poster on display at the Chisholm Gallery

And now to the Zwicky site, northeast of Zürich (near Wallisellen):

(#2) Dabei sein, wenn Neues entsteht

Auf dem Areal der traditionsreichen ehemaligen Seidenzwirnerei Zwicky & Co. AG entsteht in mehreren Etappen ein neues lebendiges und urbanes Quartier mit vielfältigem Wohn- und Arbeitsraum.

Bautätigkeit auf dem Areal: Entwicklung

Vermietung: Wir vermieten neue Wohnungen und Gewerberäume in den ehemaligen Industriegebäuden…

Immobilienverwaltung: Die Zwicky & Co. AG verwaltet auch Ihre Immobilie…

Be there when new things arise! No longer just a respected silk thread factory (Seidenzwirnerei), but now also a construction and realty firm. But the logo preserves the Brun cat with its spool of silk thread.

Meanwhile, the revamped company has produced another symbol, the Zwicky smokestack with its crowning rainbow band. Unquestionably phallic (complete with a flaming head), but surely not intended as an lgbt symbol; instead, it’s a symbol of diversity (Vielfältigkeit; note “mit vielfältigem Wohn- und Arbeitsraum” above). Still, I’m tempted to adopt the smokestack as a personal symbol (though I note that it’s missing the crucial purple / violet color band):

(#3) Zwicky sein Schwanz

To come: notes on Donald Brun and his animal and bird ads; on Seidenzwirnerei ‘silk thread factory’ ( Seiden-Zwirn-er ‘silk-threader’ + abstract nominalizer –ei) and the suffix combination –er–ei; and on the significance of rainbows.

Donald Brun. My current practice is to categorize commercial art, graphic design, illustration, graphic propaganda, folk art, outsider art, and erotic art of all sorts (including the frankly pornographic), along with religious art and commissioned portraiture as art, period, even though much of this material serves functions outside pure artistic expression and is produced outside the Art Establishment. So Donald Brun’s work is definitely art, and worth attending to, despite the modesty of his ambitions.

A characteristically Swiss-modest sketch of Brun’s life and work from the Artfiche site (“The leading art gallery for Swiss poster design”):

Donald Brun was born in 1909 in Basel and died in Clarens in 1999. After his apprenticeship as a publicity illustrator, he attended several art classes in Basel and Berlin. From 1933 he worked as a freelance artist for many important companies in Switzerland. He was a founding member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI).
Donald Brun designed a large number of remarkable posters, mainly for consumer goods. He gained a reputation as one of the most successful graphic designers in Switzerland: his posters are outstanding in terms of brilliance of colour, displaying subtle humour and solid craftsmanship.
Donald Brun never restricted himself to a single style: his creativity required freedom from fixed rules. However, he always brought across the advertising message intended by his clients with great professionalism.

Though many of his posters featured human subjects, his specialty was animals and birds — playful and funny, but with enough expression of character to steer clear of Disneyoid or Japanese-kawaii cuteness, while of course keeping the product front and center. After the Zwicky cat, my favorite is the marmot [misidentified as a beaver in my original posting; see comments] touting the Alpine ski resort of Davos:

(#4) Poster marmot poster

Then, in no particular order, a dog, a toucan, a bull, and a frog:

(#5)

(#6)

(#7)

(#8)

Seidenzwirnerei and other –er-ei nouns. The complex suffix — agentive –er plus abstract nominalizer –ei — seems to be fairly productive as the name of a shop or factory having to do with an occupation denoted by a stem plus the agentive suffix: Fleischerei / Metzgerei ‘butcher shop’ (Fleischer / Metzger ‘butcher’), Bäckerei ‘bakery’ (Bäcker ‘baker’), Brauerei ‘brewery’ (Brauer ‘brewer’).

But there are also many –er-ei nouns in which the –ei is simply an abstract nominalizer, and most of these have connotations that are either silly (Küsserei ‘kissfest, smoochfest’, Liebhaberei ‘hobby’) or unsavory (Seeräuberei ‘piracy’, Zauberei ‘witchcraft, wizardry’,  Arschkriecherei ‘ass-kissing’, Schweinerei ‘mess, filth’,  Schwärmerei ‘enthusiasm, fanaticism, rapture’, Ketzerei ‘heresy’).

Seidenzwirnerei fits in with the first set of –er-ei nouns, but with the added complexity of Seiden ‘silk’. Otherwise, it’s: the noun Zwirn ‘thread’; the occupation noun Zwirner ‘threadmaker, spinner’; and the workshop noun Zwirnerei ‘thread factory’.

I wasn’t familiar with Zwirn ‘thread’ (the ‘thread’ noun I knew was Faden), so Zwirnerei and Seidenzwirnerei struck me at first as having an unserious or unsavory connotation, but the Zwicky firm seems to have had no such thing in mind.

Rainbows. A rainbow is a meteorological phenomenon and as such has no meaning for human life. But human beings are inclined to find all sorts of meanings in natural phenomena (in some systems of thought, everything that happens happens for a purpose and has a deeper meaning): rainbows evoke feelings of surprise and delight and judgments of beauty; they look like bridges; they can be seen as indications that a rainstorm is almost over and thus serve as a symbol of a new beginning; the range of hues in the rainbow can serve as a symbol of diversity and variety; and so on.

In addition, human beings will interpret the continuous spectrum of colors in a rainbow as bands of discrete colors. This interpretation gets carried over in representations of rainbows as (5 to 8) discrete bands of colors, representations that are themselves invested with meanings by users.

These representations are visual symbols, with meanings supplied at first by their creators — but, like all symbols, their meanings are constantly in negotiation by their users and so are subject to change over time and to variation from one social context to another.

In consequence, there can be contestation over the use of rainbow symbols of various kinds. The rainbow Pride flag, for example, was intended as a symbol of diversity and inclusion, but has come to be viewed (for good reason) by some lgbt people as symbolizing the exclusion of significant lgbt subcommunities. I’ll take up this case in some detail in another posting.

Then there’s the fact that in some systems of thought — in particular, in Protestant fundamentalism — this multiplicity of interpretation is flatly denied: there is one true interpretation, and it’s given by the Bible. So it is that you can find many fundamentalist sites that claim that lgbt people have stolen the rainbow for their own ungodly purposes.

From Answers Magazine, in “Taking Back the Rainbow” by Ken Ham on 3/27/07 (I’ve boldfaced some passages for emphasis):

[Beautiful rainbows] remind me of my parents’ teaching of what the Bible says about God’s purpose in giving us the rainbow.

From my childhood days as a lad in Australia to my travels today as a speaker with Answers in Genesis, I’ve seen scores — probably hundreds — of these amazing multicolored arches. Whether seen from the back seat of the family station wagon as it bounced down a dirt road in rural Queensland, or the window seat of a jetliner flying over a storm below, these beautiful bows remind me of my parents’ teaching of what the Bible says about God’s purpose in giving us the rainbow.

Twisted Truth

Rainbows have come to be identified as symbolic of three basic concepts:

Promises — The Bible in Genesis 9 records God’s promise to Noah that He would never again destroy all flesh with a global flood.

Creation — Folklore and regional legends position the rainbow a bit differently. For example, Australian Aborigine and American Indian legends link it to creation events, and the Chinese have a legend concerning the rainbow and the creation of their first emperor Fohi.

Bridges — The rainbow has also been used to represent a bridge from earth (from humans) to a brighter, happier place. For instance, Judy Garland’s “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” represents connecting to a happier place. The New Age religious movement also uses the rainbow as a bridge.

The rainbow has been used as a sign of a new era and a symbol of peace, love, and freedom. Sadly, the colors of the rainbow are even used on a flag for the gay and lesbian movement.

A Biblical Covenant of Grace

However, the true meaning of the rainbow is revealed in Genesis 9:12–15:

This is the sign of the covenant which I make between Me and you, and every living creature that is with you, for perpetual generations: I set My rainbow in the cloud, and it shall be for the sign of the covenant between Me and the earth. It shall be, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the rainbow shall be seen in the cloud; and I will remember My covenant which is between Me and you and every living creature of all flesh; the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh (NKJV).

Back to the rainbow at the top of the Zwicky smokestack: this would appear to be constructed from the three primary colors of pigments, red, yellow, and blue, with the two transitional secondary colors orange and green interposed (orange between red and yellow, green between yellow and blue). If you’re inclined to Christian symbolism, you can then see this flag as symbolizing the Last Days, which will end either in fire (red at one end) or in flood (blue at the other) — well, since we had the flood last time (with Noah), it will be, as James Baldwin wrote in 1963, The Fire Next Time.

Via Facebook friends, a Seattle specialty that had somehow escaped my attention:

(#1) The studiedly suggestive logo for Uli’s Mens Room Sausage: red devil, tipped tails, and of course the pig for the pork (“Men are pigs, but then we like pork”)

Over the years, quite a few men have savored mensroom sausages with great pleasure. I occasionally chronicle such encounters here. But Uli’s is about actual food:

(#2)

Yes, there’s a story behind the name. It’s hard to believe people in the company didn’t see the problem with the combination of mens room and sausage. But in any case, they went ahead with it, probably with a guffaw.

From the company site:

Mens Room Original Sausage is a specialty beer bratwurst made in collaboration with 99.9FM KISW’s Mens Room radio show, Elysian Brewing, and the Fisher House Foundation.

… The Mens Room is an afternoon talk show that airs on 99.9FM KISW Monday through Friday from 2PM until 6PM. Listeners from all over the world tune in by radio as well as stream the show online. The station is a Seattle staple, first airing over 45 years ago. Since then, Rockaholics everywhere have formed one of the most dedicated fan bases in the radio world.

Far from being a simple radio talk show, The Mens Room has a long history of supporting local businesses and charities. One such effort came in the form of a partnership between KISW, Elysian Brewing, and the Fisher House Foundation. Together they developed the Mens Room Original Red Ale [first the ale, then the sausage]. Ever since brewing the first bottle, a portion of the proceeds has been donated to Fisher House VA Puget Sound and Fisher House JBLM. As of 2016, those proceeds total over $570,000 and counting.

A follow-up to my posting on the 23rd, “Two Thanksgiving meals”, in which one of the meals had as its main dish vermicelli Singapore-style, with rice vermicelli as the base. So now I’m all about vermicelli.

Warming up to the pasta topic, let’s consider Zesty Anderson Davis consuming some string pasta made from wheat:

(#1) #2 in a 6/23/13 posting, showing Zesty AD sucking up worms (well, spaghetti) in a panoply of sexual imagery
(#2) Abasement, comfort food, or oral sex?

A bit more of the children’s song in #2:

Nobody likes me, everybody hates me,
Guess I’ll go eat worms,
Long, thin, slimy ones; Short, fat, juicy ones,
Itsy, bitsy, fuzzy wuzzy worms.

There are both American and British versions of this childish gross-out song, going back at least to the 1930s. (You can watch a performance by Charles Van Deursen here.)

The pasta watch. I’ll use the term pasta as a general term for edible starch pastes, extruded, pressed, or cut into various shapes and then cooked, usually by boiling in water. Two major dimensions of classification: by source of the starch (here, I’ll talk about wheat, rice, and mung beans, but there are other possibilities); and by shape (here, I’ll talk only about string pastas — long, thin, solid, round in cross-section — which are differently named according to cross-sectional diameter).

(There are lots of other dimensions, for instance: whether the pastas are dried before cooking, or are cooked fresh; whether other ingredients are added to the paste, for flavor or color; and for string pastas, whether the strings are cooked whole or broken into short pieces.)

The canonical string pasta of wheat is spaghetti (spaghetti is the plural of the diminutive of It. spago ‘string’). Wikipedia on vermicelli:

Vermicelli (lit. “little worms”) is a traditional type of [wheat string] pasta round in section similar to spaghetti. In Italy vermicelli is slightly thicker than spaghetti, but in the United States it is instead slightly thinner [one way of looking at this difference is that the US usage privileges the diminutive in the name vermicelli, while the Italian usage privileges the worm in the name: the worms we’re aware of dealing with in everyday life, like the earthworm in #2, are relatively thick when viewed as pasta analogues].

… In East Asia, the term rice vermicelli [with metaphorical vermicelli] is often used to describe the thin rice noodles popular in China, also known as bee hoon in Hokkien Chinese, mai fun in Cantonese Chinese, [and other names in Thai, Burmese, and Vietnamese]. The term vermicelli may also refer to [metaphorical] vermicelli made from mung bean [often referred to as bean thread or cellophane noodles], which is translucent when cooked, whereas rice vermicelli turns whitish when cooked. Mung bean vermicelli is commonly used in Chinese cuisine. In contrast, misua is vermicelli that is made of wheat instead of rice. While superficially similar to bee hoon it has a very different texture and different culinary uses as well.

The Italian usage: vermicelli 2.08-2.14 mm; spaghetti 1.92-2.00 mm; then in descending order, vermicellini (the name is a double diminutive); fidelini (It. diminutive of Sp. fideo ‘noodle’); capellini / capelli d’angelo / angel hair

The US usage: spaghetti 1.5-2.8 mm (thin spaghetti is spaghettini; the name is a double diminutive); vermicelli < 1.5 mm.

In all of this, capellini is the thinnest. From Wikipedia:

(#3)

(#4)

Capellini (literally “little hairs”) is a very thin variety of Italian pasta, with a diameter between 0.85 and 0.92 millimetres… Like spaghetti, it is rod-shaped, in the form of long strands.

Capelli d’angelo (literally angel hair — hence, “angel hair pasta” in English) is a thinner variant with a diameter between 0.78 and 0.88 millimetres (0.031 and 0.035 in). It is often sold in a nest-like shape. Capelli d’angelo has been popular in Italy since at least the 14th century. As a very light pasta, it goes well in soups or with seafood or light sauces.

Capellini and other very thin pastas (fidelini, vermicelli) are often packaged as nests (#3) rather than rods (#4), so that they don’t break apart so easily:

(#5)

The Barilla company number-codes most of its string pastas, from capellini no.1 through spaghettini no.3, spaghetti no.5, vermicellini / spaghettoni (an augmentative of a diminutive) no. 7, and vermicelli no.8.

Rice vermicelli and bean thread are so thin that they are almost always sold in bundles or nests:

(#6) Rice vermicelli in bundles

(#7) Bean thread in bundles

On cellophane noodles, from Wikipedia:

Cellophane noodles (also known as Chinese vermicelli, bean threads, bean thread noodles, crystal noodles, potato noodles, or glass noodles) are a type of transparent noodle made from starch (such as mung bean starch, yam, potato starch, cassava, canna or batata starch) and water.

They are generally sold in dried form, soaked to reconstitute, then used in soups, stir fried dishes, or spring rolls. They are called “cellophane noodles” or “glass noodles” because of their appearance when cooked, resembling cellophane, a clear material of a translucent light gray or brownish-gray color.

Cellophane noodles are generally round, and are available in various thicknesses.

… Cellophane noodles should not be confused with rice vermicelli, which are made from rice and are white in color rather than clear (after cooking in water).

Rice vermicelli and bean thread are quite similar, though their tastes and textures aren’t identical, and could in principle be used interchangeably (though the custom is for certain dishes to have particular pastas). Very thin wheat pastas could also substitute, but they’re thicker and softer than the rice and mung bean pastas and have a more pronounced taste, so some adjustments would have to be made.

Rebecca Wheeler alerted me to the appearance of this year’s Warwick Rowers‘ calendar, with this image, among others:

Playful decadence, with grapes

(Using a standard genital symbol as a cock-tease screen is a nice touch, though it’s been done before.)

Previously on this blog:

on 11/11/14, “Calendar boys”: Warwick Rowers in #2 and #3

on 10/24/16,  “Naked boys playing at liberty”: naked guys’ horseplay; #2 Warwick Rowers

They’re remarkably fit — well, they’re rowers — and playful. And earnest, as described in this HuffPo piece from the 25th, “The Warwick Rowers’ Steamy 2018 Calendar Has An Incredible Aim: The brawny, buff boys are back and ready to bust stereotypes” by Curtis M. Wong:

The Warwick Rowers are baring (almost) all once again for a steamy calendar they hope will further the “worldwide social movement” they launched nearly a decade ago.

The 2018 edition sees the Rowers, who are students at the University of Warwick in England, posing au naturel on the grounds of regal-looking estates in Spain and the U.K. The guys began stripping nude for the project in 2009 to raise funds for rowing gear, and though their earliest efforts were considerably less cheeky, their calendar quickly found an audience among gay men…

Once the Rowers caught on to who their most fervent admirers were, they opted to re-conceive their mission. Since 2012, proceeds from calendar sales have been donated to Sport Allies, a U.K. advocacy organization aimed at combating homophobia and gender bias in team sports. Recent editions of the calendar have raised more than $300,000 and are sold in 77 countries.

As in previous years, the 2018 calendar features many of the men sunbathing together and lounging around in various stages of undress. In a 2015 interview, rower Tristan Edwards explained that the photos are meant to be more playful than explicit, in hopes of normalizing male-on-male intimacy among both athletes and sports fans.

“A lot of the problems around homophobia in sport come from the enforcement of gender norms… people saying what a man is or what a woman is,” Edwards told HuffPost. “We don’t want to be put into a box in terms of what a man ‘should be’ in sport. This is how we think you can act.”

Always nice to see the University of Warwick Boat Club in action.

Here in northern California, we’ve had some early rain — not very often and not a lot, but enough to turn the golden hillsides to bright new green. And enough to convince the cacti and succulents in Stanford’s Arizona Garden that Their Time Has Come, so they’re bursting with new growth and breaking out in flowers. Notably, a big ol’ saguaro cactus has thrown out huge creamy blossoms, much like these in this photo from the net:

(#1) The state flower of AZ; NM claims the yucca

Meanwhile, the saguaro serves as an anthromorphic symbol — a man with both arms in the air — and a phallic symbol (an interpretation encouraged by the fact that the cactus is, oh dear, prickly).

Earlier on this blog, a posting of 6/19/17, “Sales talk”, featuring saguaros as the cartoon icon of the Southwestern deserts (with a photo of Carnegiea gigantea in #2).

Since the saguaro’s native lands include the Sonoran deserts, the plant also serves as a symbol of Mexico, sometimes presented as a stereotype of the Mexican man — even in that country’s tourism ads:

(#2) Come to Mexico and enjoy the company of Saguaro Man

Saguaro Man comes with sombrero, serape, and guitar (missing only maracas). As a plant, he has characteristic (though small) flowers, of the red rather than the cream variety — but, most notably, he lacks the nasty thorns of real-life saguaros. Saguaro Man is not at all prickly, he’s a good guy, friendly and welcoming.

Tomorrow’s the day to set your hair on fire, especially if you’re a young Scandinavian girl. But while you’re waiting for Advent to culminate in Christmas, you can savor the lights of the season:

(#1)

(Hat tip to Kim Darnell. I was sure I’d posted this image before — it’s, like, my kind of thing — but I can find no record of it. No information as to the source of  the Xmas palm photos here, but there are tons of them around.)

Even more explosively:

(#2)

And inflamed in seasonal red:

(#3)

A malapropistic bonus. From Dean Allemang today:

(#4)

Foreskin for forefront. A classical malapropism, Freudian in nature.

Don’t worry about it, buddy. We’ve got it covered. We’re on the foreskin of technology, here in Silicon Valley, among the palm trees. Right on it.

From Kim Darnell, a link to the Bored Panda site, with a posting “When My Grandmother Does The Christmas Decorations” by Viktorija G. and this excellent image:

Napkin folding for Xmas pleasure

This is the second phalliChristmas decoration posting of 2017, following on the 12/12 posting “The news for penises, St. Lucy’s Eve edition”, with a section on unfortunately arranged Xmas lights on palm trees. There might be more.

… and more, starting with Moby Chick in today’s Bizarro:

(#1)

(If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 8 in this strip — see this Page.)

Watch out for the big white one — you could lose your leg!

Yes, the Ahab and the whale cartoon meme, combined with the Dick / chick pun. Especially satisfying because it reproduces the structure of the story of peg-legged Captain Ahab and the white whale Moby Dick in the barnyard situation of peg-legged Farmer Ahab and the white Moby Chick. Then there’s the ridiculous disjuncture between a monstrous whale and a tiny chick.

The Dick part of Moby-Dick in the Melville novel is just a generic man’s name — but see below for playing with dick ‘penis’ — while the Moby part is of unclear or disputed origin. From a piece “The Origin of the Name “Moby Dick”” on the Melville.org site:

The name of Melville’s most famous creation was suggested by an article by Jeremiah Reynolds, published in the New York Knickerbocker Magazine in May 1839. Mocha Dick: or The White Whale of the Pacific recounted the capture of a giant white sperm whale that had become infamous among whalers for its violent attacks on ships and their crews. The meaning of the name itself is quite simple: the whale was often sighted in the vicinity of the [small Chilean] island of Mocha, and “Dick” was merely a generic name like “Jack” or “Tom” — names of other deadly whales cited by Melville in Chapter 45 of Moby-Dick:

“But not only did each of these famous whales enjoy great individual celebrity — nay, you may call it an ocean-wide renown; not only was he famous in life and now is immortal in forecastle stories after death, but he was admitted into all the rights, privileges, and distinctions of a name; had as much a name indeed as Cambyses or Caesar. Was it not so, O Timor Jack! thou famed leviathan, scarred like an iceberg, who so long did’st lurk in the Oriental straits of that name, whose spout was oft seen from the palmy beach of Ombay? Was it not so, O New Zealand Tom! thou terror of all cruisers that crossed their wakes in the vicinity of the Tattoo Land? Was it not so, O Morquan! King of Japan, whose lofty jet they say at times assumed the semblance of a snow-white cross against the sky? Was it not so, O Don Miguel! thou Chilian whale, marked like an old tortoise with mystic hieroglyphics upon the back! In plain prose, here are four whales as well known to the students of Cetacean History as Marius or Sylla to the classic scholar.”

The transformation of “Mocha” to “Moby”, however, presents a greater mystery. Melville himself never explained the origin of the latter word. Did he invent it on a whim and like the way it sounded? Or is it some strange piece of hermetic Melvillean arcana? The answer will probably never be known, but a number of scholars have amused themselves by taking shots at it. Following as an example is a conjecture put forth by Harold Beaver in his “Commentary” on the Penguin Classics edition of Moby-Dick (1972):

“By July 1846 even the Knickerbocker Magazine had forgotten its earlier version [of Reynold’s article], reminding its readers of ‘the sketch of “Mocha Dick, of the Pacific”, published in the Knickerbocker many years ago…’. That account may well have led Melville to look up the earlier issue, in the very month he rediscovered his lost buddy of the Acushnet and fellow deserter on the Marquesas, Richard Tobias Greene, and began ‘The Story of Toby’ [the sequel to Typee]. May not ‘Toby Dick’ then have elided with ‘Mocha Dick’ to form that one euphonious compound, ‘Moby Dick’?”

So, very speculatively, a portmanteau Mocha + Toby.

Playing with Moby and with Dick. On 3/31/17, in “The Ahab-Moby affair”, there’s an earlier Bizarro that plays on the musician Moby and Captain Ahab. And then on 3/13/17, in  “Risible faux-commercial name”:

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 and #4 in that posting]

There are, of course, more. For instance, this dart flight:

(#2) dart flight in NOAD: ‘the tail of a dart’

Some whole darts, showing the (red) dart flights:

(#3)

Given examples of Moby Dick with a play on dick ‘penis’, I suppose that Moby Prick was inevitable. From the Deviant Art website:

(#4) “Moby Dick’s evil brother Moby Prick” by shittmanthebarbarian

From NOAD:

noun prick: vulgar slang [a] a penis; [b] a man regarded as stupid, unpleasant, or contemptible.

The drawing hints at sense [a], but relies for its humor on conveying sense [b].

Then non-phallic plays on Dick. First, three more rhyming puns (like Chick and Prick), two of them with fishing associations:

Moby Nick fishing charters in Port Credit ON (on Lake Ontario)

Moby Rick’s Seafood, a restaurant in Saratoga Springs NY

the clown Mick Holsbeke, sometimes performing as Moby Mick

Then with a play involving the vowel: Moby-Duck, with /ʌ/ rather than /ɪ/, and with ocean-going associations:

(#5)

Moby-Duck: The True Story… is a book by Donovan Hohn concerning 28,800 plastic ducks and other toys, known as the Friendly Floatees, which were washed overboard from a container ship in the Pacific Ocean on 10 January 1992 and have subsequently been found on beaches around the world and used by oceanographers including Curtis Ebbesmeyer to trace ocean currents.

And finally a play involving the final consonant: Moby Dip, with /p/ rather than /k/, with whale associations:

(#6) on the Better Homes & Gardens site: a set of 3 Moby Dip and Chips ceramic whale-shaped dishes

xx

Zippy continues his visit to North Carolina — yesterday Salisbury, today Charlotte — with Xmas pleasure and puzzlement about the antique technologies of pen and paper:

(#1)

The public art work is The Writer’s Desk (2005, by Larry Kirkland) at the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Public Library:  a bronze quill pen in an inkwell at the top of a stack of books, surrounded by typewriter keys, pencils, and hand stamps.

(#2) A panoramic view of the installation, made of granite, marble, stainless steel, and gold

Note: pens (of all sorts) and columns are both phallic symbols, and a quill pen in an inkwell is easily seen as an ejaculating penis, but such symbolism is of an everyday sort that scarcely merits comment. But wait! There will be more (below).

More about the installation, from the Public Art Archive:

Description: This sculpture was commissioned as a tribute to Rolfe Neill, longtime Chairman and Publisher of The Charlotte Observer. Mr. Neill is beloved by Charlotte for his involvement in the community and is referred to as a Patron Saint of the Arts. The artwork is placed in a plaza of ImaginOn, a building which serves the children of Charlotte – part public library, part theater, a place which encourages learning.

And about the artist, from his website:

Born in 1950 in Port Hueneme, California, Larry Kirkland moved with his military family throughout the U.S. and abroad during his childhood. He received his undergraduate degree in environmental design in 1972 from Oregon State University and his Masters of Fine Arts degree in 1974 from the University of Kansas, both with honors.

Since then, he has collaborated with community and business leaders and design professionals to conceive and create his large-scale, multi-dimensional public artworks. Kirkland’s installations can be found in institutional and municipal buildings, transit hubs, research facilities, libraries, universities, cruise ships and urban parks and plazas. Among his many commissions are artworks installed at Pennsylvania Station in New York; the American Red Cross Headquarters and National Academies of Science in Washington, D.C.; Putra World Trade Center in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; and Kansai International Airport in Osaka, Japan.

Another of his public works, Capitalism:

(#3) Some compound of social criticism and playfulness

From Wikipedia:

Larry Kirkland’s Capitalism (1991) is an outdoor marble and concrete sculpture and fountain installed at the corner of Northeast 9th Avenue and Northeast Multnomah Street [in Portland OR] by the Lloyd Center. It was chosen in a regional art competition during Lloyd Center’s renovation. The sculpture depicts fifty coins stacked on an Ionic column and is set in the center of a circular fountain basin with four water jets. Half of the coins have serious or humorous inscriptions on their edges relating to capitalism and commerce.

The work is a notable and very visible feature of a temple of commerce, a shrine of capitalism. From Wikipedia:

Lloyd Center is a shopping mall in the Lloyd District of Portland, Oregon, United States, just northeast of downtown. It is owned by Arrow Retail of Dallas and anchored by Macy’s, Sears, and Marshalls. The mall features three floors of shopping with the third level serving mostly as professional office spaces, a food court, and U.S. Education Corporation’s Carrington College. A Regal Cinemas multiplex is located across the street. The mall includes the Lloyd Center Ice Rink where Olympian Tonya Harding first learned to skate.

Understood unironically, Kirkland’s work is a hymn to Mammon, and maybe the Lloyd Center’s owners thought of it that way. But it seems clearly ironic, with its humorous texts on capitalism, and with its flagrant phallicism: the massive cyclindrical column standing for the phallus and the prominent Ionic capital supplying the testicles. (There’s probably a joke on the word capital in there.)

Bonus 1. While search on “pen statues” to get information on and images of The Writer’s Desk, I came across this wonderfully phallic miniature, from the Design Toscano firm:

(#4) Art Deco strongman pen holder (cast in solid pewter in Brescia, Italy)

The accompanying ad copy:

As they say, the pen is mightier than the sword…and your pen will never look mightier than when in the grasp of this Art Deco strongman. You’ll love this functional sculpture of the human form in motion as he lifts your pen above the fray of paperwork and letters. A finely detailed replica of an Art Deco original, this sculpture is two pounds of solid pewter handcrafted in Brescia, Italy. Makes a great executive gift for a home, office or library.

It’s often the case that a pen is just a pen, but sometimes it’s a dick you can write with.

Bonus 2. More on the interpretation of symbols (as in my earlier discussions of flags — the American flag and the Pride flag — and the like), with another item from my “pen statues” search:

(#5) The Monument to Party Founding in Pyongyang, North Korea

In democratic contexts, a writing implement (a pen, for example, or a pencil or a calligraphy brush) is a powerful symbol of freedom and protest; writers (and artists) are seen as the guardians of liberty and the vanguard of social criticism. Things are different in authoritarian contexts, where all activities (including the making of cultural productions like writings and artworks) are to be bent to the will of the state and its purposes (which are likely to be articulated as springing from the noblest of motives).

From Wikipedia on the monument in #5:

The monument is rich in symbolism: the hammer, sickle and calligraphy brush symbolize the workers, farmers and intellectuals. The element is 50 meters high to symbolize the 50-year anniversary of the founding of the Workers’ Party of Korea. The number of slabs comprising the belt around the monument and its diameter stand for the date of birth of Kim Jong-il. The inscription on the outer belt says “The organizers of the victory of the Korean people and the leader of the Workers Party of Korea!” On the inside of the belt are three bronze reliefs with their distinct meanings: the historical root of the party, the unity of people under the party and the party’s vision for a progressive future. Two red flag-shaped buildings with letters forming the words “ever-victorious” surround the monument.

All that is, of course, the way those who commissioned the work intended it to be interpreted. To others, it will read as a ghastly monument to forcible oppression. To still others, it looks like a giant penis having its way with a worker and a peasant: homosex on the commune. And so it could be a symbol of defiant survival in the bleakest of circumstances: sex as life force. (I get all of these interpretations except the one the Pyongyang government officially intended.)

Penises are a not uncommon feature of artworks — especially folk art and (of course) male art, but also “fine” art; especially as a natural concomitant of nudity, but sometimes as the focus of the artwork; and especially in works meant for private viewing, but also in public art. Occasionally, it all comes together, in pieces of public art that are about penises: giant phallic sculptures, wall paintings and the like. Phallic sculptures appear occasionally in this blog (or AZBlogX, if I’m not sure that the Fine Art Exemption applies to the case in hand), and there’s been at least one wall painting: an enormous depiction of a pendulous penis, in Brussels, in my 9/23/16 posting “News for penises and their simulacra”. And now this erect phallus, on Broome Street in the Lower East Side of Manhattan:

(#1) Painting, signed by Carolina Falkholt, on Broome Street

(Hat tip to Michael Palmer, who tells me that the work has already been painted over.)

From the New York Post on 12/27, “Enormous penis pops up in NYC”, by Kevin Fasick and Max Jaeger:

Meet the newest member of the Lower East Side street-art scene.

A towering painting depicting a shockingly life-like penis went up on the side of 303 Broome St. on Christmas Eve.

Swedish street artist Carolina Falkholt stood up and took credit on Instagram for the veiny behemoth — which lacks testicles but no doubt took cajones to paint — and said it’s really getting a rise out of folks.

“NO TIME 4 BALL$$ . . . I have never heard so much laughter and seen so many happy faces behind my back when painting as for today doing this wall on Broome Street,” the cocky artist [I suppose the pun was inevitable] wrote alongside a photo of the four-story masterpiece.

The work was apparently commissioned by art group The New Allen, run by Milan Kelez, who co-owns neighborhood Peruvian eatery Baby Brassa.

On the artist, from Wikipedia:

(#2) The artist, wielding a tool of her trade

Carolina Alexandra Falkholt, with the pseudonym Blue, born March 4, 1977 in Gothenburg, is a Swedish artist, graffiti writer and musician. Sometimes she uses her own coined term grafitta to describe her art. It is a play [on] the two words graffiti and fitta, the latter [meaning] “pussy” in Swedish but also [reflecting Swedish  morphology, where an -a indicates feminine gender].

… In 2015 she made a huge mural as a commission for the high school Parkskolan in Ystad [on the southern coast of Sweden]. The painting Untitled (Firewall), [depicts a] stylized naked woman hanging upside down:

(#3)

I’d guess that no American high school has anything comparable to this work.

From the public Facebook Group “Troublesome Catalogers and Magical Metadata Fairies (A place for catalogers, metadata librarians, and those who admire them. Grab your wands and raise some Hell.)”, a January 25th posting by Joshua Barton:

(#1) Barton: “Today’s cataloging adventure. Wish me luck!”

It’s a finger. It’s a phallus. It’s a finger and a phallus.

The back of the package:

(#2)

Just in case you missed the sexual content on the front.

Barton is Head of Cataloging and Metadata Services and Assistant Head of Technical Services at Michigan State Univ. So he gets the occasional challenge to his cataloging abilities.

(Hat tip to archivist Michael Palmer.)

(About men’s bodies and mansex, discussed in street language, so not for kids or the sexually modest.)

Seven photos from gay porn, almost all X-rated, on AZBlogX, in a posting today, “Fingering”, showing finger sucking and finger fucking.

But the impetus for this posting came from a gay porn compendium of orgies, in which one episode included a sweet moment of finger sucking.

Background from a 1/2/11 posting on “Group sex in gay porn”: orgies in gay porn (like the action in an orgy room at the gay baths in real life) are mostly not fluid events with every guy taking on, in turn, almost every other, but rather are organized as sex in groups, typically of two, three, or four men, who pretty much stay together throughout the orgy, but shifting from one sexual act to another and from one role to another within those acts. Orgies in high-end gay porn are often, in fact, carefully composed visually, with pleasing alignments of the bodies in each group and pleasing arrangements of the groups.

The emotional power of an orgy is that though it usually takes place in a private space, carefully separated from larger public spaces, within that space everything is entirely public, available for all the participants to see, appreciate, and be aroused by. Everybody is performing, flagrantly, for everyone else.

In porn films, everybody kisses, everybody sucks cock, everybody eats ass, and a lot of guys get fucked; getting fucked in public is an especially potent assertion of flagrant queerness. In orgy rooms in real life, things are more constrained by individual tastes and preferences — some guys don’t kiss, some guys don’t suck cock, a great many guys don’t eat ass, a considerable number don’t get fucked, a few don’t fuck — but there’s still a lot of sexual action of many kinds.

(In porn, it’s all choreographed, primarily by the director and photographer. In real life, it all has to be negotiated, mostly through non-verbal signals; if that’s a dance, it’s highly improvisational.)

Now to the orgy in the episode I watched yesterday morning. At one point, a three-way was arranged so that one guy had his asshole filled with cock and was getting his own cock sucked, but he had nothing in his mouth and neither of the other guys in the group was positioned to be able to put a cock in his mouth, so one of them, sweetly, gave him a finger to suck, which he did with a little moan of pleasure: he was now fully engaged, dick, asshole, and mouth, all the bases loaded. (A bit later, the guys shifted position and our guy got the cock in his mouth that the finger had promised.)

Some basic stuff. An extended finger is a natural phallic symbol. It can stand for a dick, as in the gesture of giving the finger or flipping the bird, to convey ‘fuck you!’ And it can serve as the promise of a dick, as in this sequence from a Tumblr site on AZBlogX, which is framed as a dominant man taking a submissive man sexually: in #1, the sub sucks a finger (as promise of the dom’s dick in his mouth) then in #2 sucks cock (the promise fulfilled), then in #3 gets finger-fucked (as promise of the dom’s dick in his asshole) — and finally, though this isn’t shown on AZBlogX, gets fucked (the promise fulfilled).

(#1) The encounter begins

#4 in AZBlog shows more intense finger sucking, with a cumface bonus.

An extended finger can also serve as an instrument of anal pleasure — in effect, a dildo you carry around with you, always available for your pleasure or someone else’s. #5 in AZBlog shows a guy self-fingering while jacking off; the combination is apparently quite common, and in fact I discovered its attractions very soon after I began jacking off, as a boy.

Like rimming, fingerwork can be configured emotionally in two different ways: as an aggressive claiming of another man’s body (with the fingerer /rimmer as dominant) or as providing a service to the other man’s pleasure (with the fingerer / rimmer as submissive or, very often, collaborative).

#6 in AZBlogX shows aggressive finger fucking (with two fingers this time), #7 collaborative, highly mutual finger fucking, a finger-fuck combined with cocksucking; an alternative is for the finger-fucker to jack off his partner — in either case, pleasuring both his partner’s asshole and his partner’s cock.

I don’t know how, but somehow I missed the ad videos from Dollar Shave Club — until Kim Darnell stumbled across their “Buttery Dunes” video a few days ago. A follow-up to “Butter Safe Than Sorry”. Those were in 2017. Back in 2013, DSC came out with “Let’s Talk About #2”, an ad for its line of butt wipes.

Full of double entendres, raunchy images, puns, and absurdity.

I’ll take them in reverse chronological order.

“Buttery Dunes”. From AdWeek on 11/9/17, “Dollar Shave Club Stays Ridiculous With a Visit to Creamy Shave Butter Dreamworld: A luxurious escape, even if reality is still awkward”, by Gabriel Beltrone:

(#1) In the creamy Shave Butter dreamworld; you can watch the video here

Dollar Shave Club wants you to know it’s [sic] new shave butter product feels so buttery good, it will make you hallucinate.

A 30-second ad opens on a young man shaving in a gym locker room. As he smears the product on his face, he sighs in ecstasy, and trust-falls backwards. The tile floor melts as he strikes it, enveloping him in a buttery dream world, where he slides and slithers around with surprising ease, grace and purpose, on buttery cloud-like dunes of [white] shave butter.

By the way, did the ad mention it’s buttery there, in shave-butter land?

But wait, there’s more — the spot packs it in. First, our hero passes a long-haired white pussy cat (get it?) hanging out on a luxurious silver tree limb. Then, he happens upon what appears to be Colonel Sanders’ younger, slimmer brother — who, you might be forgiven for thinking, clearly opted to become a literal pimp instead of guzzling fried chicken all day — standing towering on top of a buttery mountain, wielding a giant silvery straight razor.

In fact, it turns out this new character is actually some kind of exceptionally well-dressed scientist-wizard, who, based on his look, might also moonlight as the second most interesting man in the actual world … but is definitely the first most interesting man in this buttery dreamworld.

The sage — perhaps Dollar Shave Club CEO Michael Dubin in an alternate reality or some utopian future — with a mere breath and flourish of his hand, blows all the hair clean off the young man’s face. Also, off the pussy cat (get it?), and the [two] hairy coconuts (get it?) that you might not have seen dangling in the background, also from silver branches.

The voiceover trumpets, complete with melodramatic pauses, that the stuff “is going to change your life.”

Suddenly, the camera delivers a rude but hilarious cut back to the gym locker room, where a naked middle-aged man has struck an epic pose, one leg up on a bench, waving a blowdryer up the towel wrapped around his waist, his face the picture of perfect bliss.

“Well, the shave part of your life,” adds the voiceover, conceding that you will still probably be uncomfortable all the time, just for other reasons.

Meanwhile, a behind-the-scenes video, shot in 360 degrees for some reason, reveals that the star of the ad did in fact get to wiggle through a trough of buttery goop, albeit in front of a green screen.

Overall, it’s an absurdist, amusing tack that tracks back — in general humorous tone, at least — through the company’s advertising since it burst onto the market some five years ago. It’s also notable for giving a bigger role to the hairless cat, which was part of a larger ensemble in the the brand’s 2015 holiday campaign.

It just goes to show if you stick with it for long enough, you get the cream. Or at least, the butter.

What can I say? The sea of semen, the shaved pussy, the shaved balls, the guy blowdrying his crotch! And those are just the highlights.

The actual product, conventionally presented:

(#2)

Then, GDoS on butter and cream as sexual slang:

noun butter: 1 semen; thus buttery, semen-filled [implied in a 1594 quote, explicit in cites from 1668 on; Randolph & Legman Ozark Folksongs and Folklore, cite from 1928: Set on your butt, get a hold of your nubbin, / If you don’t get butter, just keep on a-rubbing.]

noun cream: 1 semen [1st cite c. 1629, in a ballad; G. Legman, The Limerick: There was a young Jewess named Hannah / Who sucked off her lover’s banana / She swore that the cream / That shot out in a stream / Tasted better than Biblical manna.]

“Butter Safe Than Sorry”. From AdAge on 5/26/17, “Brace yourself for Dollar Shave Club’s cringeworthy ads about grooming ‘down there’: ‘Butter Safe Than Sorry'” by Ann-Christine Diaz:

(#3) You can watch the video on the AdAge site

Dollar Shave Club first grabbed attention with its funny videos starring founder Michael Dubin, but its simpler ideas also pack a powerful punch. In fact, these new out-of-home ads about shaving “down there” will likely make you cringe.

Three posters use fruit and vegetables to suggest the male member — a banana flanked by kiwis, an eggplant standing between a pair of potatoes, a carrot rising from behind two beets. In each, one of the orb-shaped figures has a ghastly slash, as if a peeler dug a little too deeply into the flesh.

The point? To promote Dollar Shave Club’s Shave Butter. Tagline reads: “Butter safe than sorry.”

“Let’s Talk About #2”. You can watch this ad here. And the script for the ad is available on this site (and reproduced below).

(#4) The actual product

Hi. Me again. People ask me, “Mike, when are you gonna do video number 2?”. You want to talk about number 2? Great. Let’s talk, about number 2. Poop. Everyone makes it. And I don’t have time to jump back in the shower after a messy number 6. I’m an executive now. I have papers to sign. Fortunately, there’s a better way to wipe your messy bottom. They’re called One Wipe Charlies, and they’re butt wipes – for men.

Butt wipes, Mike?

Yeah, bitch. Butt wipes.

What’s a bitch?

Why do you need a butt wipe? Because you’re not an animal. And whatever you’re using now, is primitive. You’re leaving buried treasure behind! You want to get all the golden nuggets, don’t you? I’m talking about poop, Alejandra!

I know, Mike. We all know.

Ha ha ha! Plus, toilet paper takes forever. You shouldn’t have to be special forces to expect the bad guy with speed and precision. With One Wipe Charlie, you wipe once and get on with your life. I know what you’re thinking. Is all this fancy butt stuff gonna cost me an arm and a log? Does a bear sh*t in the woods? Not anymore. He sh*ts in the toilet and he pays just a couple bucks for a 40 pack. So clean up your act with the softest, manliest way to wipe your ass. Accept no substitute. It’s One Wipe Charlie!

Yes, “the softest, cleanest, fastest manliest way to handle your business”.

That’s Sammy the Slug, the UC Santa Cruz mascot, as appreciated by anthropologist Jerry Zee, who writes on Facebook (text lightly edited):

I made a website and love letter to my first two quarters at this magical place, Santa Cruz. For Santa Cruz folks, if you see more Sammys – and they are hidden in plain sight all through Santa Cruz and beyond – please send to them to me so I can feature them on the SlugWatch!

SlugWatch: A multispecies anthropological archive of Santa Cruz’s favorite anthropomorphic slug

At the top, the university’s official version:

(#1)

(Note the snarky nod to the canon of dead white guys (Plato) and the mocking Latin motto Fiat Slug ‘Let there be a slug’.)

Slugs, especially banana slugs, are phallic symbols. For discussion of their phallicity, and more on banana slugs at UCSC, see these postings:

from 8/5/12, “Snakes, worms, fish, clams, slugs”

from 8/11/12, “Annals of phallicity: Wienermobile, banana slug split”

Banana slugs are hermaphroditic, and their mating often involves mutual exchange of sperm: yes, they can fuck each other, simultaneously. Two of them about to mate:

(#2)

For the rest of us: in your dreams, buddy.

(This posting has reproductions of art works in which penises and female breasts are exposed. My belief is that these works — now on public display in mainstream art museums — fall under the Fine Art Exemption to the ban on such images on WordPress, Facebook, Google+, and elsewhere.)

A follow-up to yesterday’s posting “Annals of shirtlessness: French neo-Classicism”, whose centerpiece was Bouguereau’s Dante and Virgil, featuring two shirtless, in fact naked, men in combat. The painter was heaviy focused on the female form, so his treatment of the male nude is of some interest. On Facebook, Corry Wyngaarden then supplied another Bouguereau example:

(#1) Bouguereau, The Remorse of Orestes (1862)

(with drapery cunningly concealing the man’s genitals, making the painting acceptable for exhibition at the Paris Salon; in intent, this is not a cock tease, but a modest cover-up). The Bouguereau Orestes led me immediately to John Singer Sargent’s Orestes Pursued by the Furies (1921). And from there to Sargent‘s treatment of male nudes, in a set of drawings and paintings kept secret during the painter’s lifetime — sexually explicit, homoerotic works.

The Sargent Orestes:

(#2)

The background story, from Wikipedia:

Orestes Pursued by the Furies is an event from Greek mythology that is a recurring theme in art depicting Orestes.

In the Iliad, the king of Argos, Agamemnon, sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia to the Gods to assure good sailing weather to Troy.

In Agamemnon, the first play of Aeschylus’s Oresteia trilogy, Agamemnon is murdered by his wife, Clytemnestra, and her lover, Aegisthus as revenge for sacrificing Iphigenia. In The Libation Bearers, the second play of the Orestia, Agamemnon’s son Orestes returns home to take revenge on his mother for murdering his father.

Orestes ultimately does murder his mother, and afterward is tormented by The Furies, beings who personify the anger of the dead.

And on Sargent, from Wikipedia:

John Singer Sargent (January 12, 1856 – April 14, 1925) was an American artist, considered the “leading portrait painter of his generation” for his evocations of Edwardian era luxury. During his career, he created roughly 900 oil paintings and more than 2,000 watercolors, as well as countless sketches and charcoal drawings. His oeuvre documents worldwide travel, from Venice to the Tyrol, Corfu, the Middle East, Montana, Maine, and Florida.

… Sargent was a lifelong bachelor with a wide circle of friends. Biographers once portrayed him as staid and reticent. However recent scholarship has suggested that he was a private, complex and passionate man with a homosexual identity that shaped his art. This view is based on his friends and associations; the overall alluring remoteness of his portraits; the way his works challenge 19th-century notions of gender difference; his erotic and previously ignored male nudes; and some sensitive and erotic male portraits, including those of Thomas E. McKeller, Bartholomy Maganosco, Olimpio Fusco, and that of the handsome aristocratic artist Albert de Belleroche, which hung in his Chelsea dining room. Sargent had a long and intense romantic friendship with Belleroche, whom he met in 1882, and who later went on to marry: a surviving drawing hints that Sargent may have used him as a model for Madame X.

It has been suggested that Sargent’s reputation in the 1890s as “the painter of the Jews” may have been due to his empathy with, and complicit enjoyment of their mutual social otherness. One such client, Betty Wertheimer, wrote that when in Venice Sargent “was only interested in the Venetian gondoliers”. The painter Jacques-Émile Blanche, who was one of his early sitters, said after Sargent’s death that his sex life “was notorious in Paris, and in Venice, positively scandalous. He was a frenzied bugger.”

[Linguistic note. Bugger here is (or was) a term of abuse for the insertive partner in anal intercourse (the buggerer); the counterpart term for a male receptive partner in anal intercourse (the buggeree) is (or was) sodomite.]

More on Sargent’s secret art works, from “The secret life of John Singer Sargent” by Colm Tóibín in the Telegraph on 2/15/15:

The key to these works, and indeed to aspects both apparent and hidden in Sargent’s personality as an artist, was offered in a book published in 2000 by Trevor Fairbrother, one of the best writers on Sargent who has also contributed to the National Portrait Gallery catalogue. The book is called John Singer Sargent: The Sensualist. It includes reproductions of drawings of naked men that Sargent never exhibited in his lifetime but kept together in an album. The drawings were donated by Sargent’s family to the Fogg Museum at Harvard, but not much noticed until Fairbrother wrote an article about them in 1981.

[These works are collected in John Esten’s John Singer Sargent: The Male Nudes (1999).]

They really are eye-openers, sexually explicit and filled with open homoerotic desire. “Strapping men,” as Fairbrother writes, “assume showy or exultant poses.” He later writes: “These charcoal drawings are just as vivid and individual as [Sargent’s] better-known society portraits… The album’s male images are variously immediate, lush, intimate, heroic and tender.” These drawings are as openly erotic as Sargent’s Nude Study of Thomas E McKeller, painted between 1917 and 1920. (Sargent noticed McKeller as an elevator operator in a hotel.) This painting was, like the drawings of naked men, not exhibited in Sargent’s lifetime. It was first reproduced in a book in 1955, but did not become widely known until it was bought by the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 1986.

The painting of McKeller:

(#3)

More details on the background of this painting, from the museworthy blog on 12/14/09, in “Thomas E. McKeller – Male Muse”:

few artists can resist an inspiring subject, even if it deviates from their usual genre. John Singer Sargent was no exception. We all know that a muse can happen upon an artist at anytime, anywhere. A bar, a street corner, a party. In Sargent’s case, the unexpected encounter occurred in 1916, in an elevator at the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston.

The striking, muscular young man was Thomas E. McKeller, an African-American bellhop at the hotel. At first sight, Sargent was instantly enthralled by McKeller’s strong physique and facial features. Soon, the young bellhop was posing for the artist, and a large scale oil painting, Thomas E. McKeller Nude Study was produced

Sargent’s male nudes display both foci of gay male desire, the penis and the buttocks, sometimes separately and sometimes together.

The penis, as in #3 and in this wonderful drawing:

(#4) Male Reclining on a Stairway, drawing c.1890-1915 (in the Fogg Museum, Harvard Univ.)

Both together, as here (with a sly peek at the tip of the model’s penis):

(#5) Study of the male silhouette, drawing 1920 (in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts)

(This might be McKeller, but in any case the figure is very close to the one that is the basis for the Orestes figure in #2.)

And just the buttocks, as here:

(#6) Standing Male Figure, drawing ca. 1890? (in the Philadelphia Museum of Art)

As you can see from these samples, Sargent was seriously into muscular thighs and calves.

Two phallic postings from November:

on 11/5/17, “Alpine news for penises”, about a giant wooden penis on an Austrian mountaintop

on 11/6/17, “Revisiting 11: news for wooden penises”, about Finnish military “camp cocks” carved from wood and serving as talismans for the soldiers

Then from my friend K to me:

The mountain penis is fun. [The camp cocks one] unfortunately brings to mind too many instances of rape used as a weapon of war.

I went on to question her interpretation and to riff some on what a wooden penis might “mean”.

Finnish camp cock: you can appreciate why K might have been concerned.

— AZ: Psychologically, that’s not the way camp cocks work. It’s not that men are being encouraged to see their penises as weapons, but the reverse: they’re being encouraged to see their rifles as extensions of their own bodies, to identify with their weapons, as in the Rifleman’s Creed, in which the soldier’s dependence on and reverence for his rifle — so great that it’s like a part a part of his body — is explicit. Soldiers are trained to identify with their weapons and care for them as they would parts of their own bodies, because that attitude is literally life-saving for them. If we’re going to send young men to risk their lives for us in war, customs that foster this attitude are a good thing. (Note: yes, this is all about men, because until recently essentially all soldiers were men; military customs arose in that context.)

— AZ: Another note: if a mountain penis is viewed as a symbol, then like any symbolic object, it’s capable of many different interpretations in different contexts, to different viewers. In particular, a mountain penis can be understand as a symbol of male domination, and thus as no fun at all. Just so with a mountaintop cross or Savior or Madonna figure, all of which can be seen as conveying the message that Christianity rules all of us, that we are merely the servants of the Church. Some people see this as symbolic slavery (we must submit ourselves to Our Lord Jesus Christ, and to the institutions of His Church) and resent it deeply.

— K: I’m happy to know the symbolic meaning for the people using the object. [Story of linga carvings at Phnom Kulen in Cambodia – see below] … I don’t have a vision of penises as inherently violent. I do think we can use more sacred carvings in the world…

On the noun linga, from NOAD:

noun lingam (also linga): Hinduism a symbol of divine generative energy, especially a phallus or phallic object worshiped as a symbol of Shiva. Compare with yoni.

On Phnom Kulen, from Wikipedia:

Phnom Kulen is considered a holy mountain in Cambodia, of special religious significance to Hindus and Buddhists who come to the mountain in pilgrimage.

It also has a major symbolic importance for Cambodians as the birthplace of the ancient Khmer Empire, for it was at Phnom Kulen that King Jayavarma II proclaimed independence from Java in 804 CE. Jayavarman II initiated the Devaraja cult of the king, a linga cult

Kbal Spean is known for its carvings representing fertility and its waters which hold special significance to Hindus. Just 5 cm under the water’s surface over 1000 small linga carvings are etched into the sandstone riverbed.

Unfortunately, the streambed linga carvings don’t photograph well.

— AZ in reply to K: Objects are not inherently anything, especially not any particular thing; they just are. But they can be subject to being understood as symbols in many ways. Penises can be fertility symbols, they can be symbols of sexual pleasure, they can be symbols of play, and so on.

…..

The general principle is It’s Just Stuff. From my 6/30/15 posting “That goes without”, on syntactic truncation in examples like I can’t even:

It’s Just Stuff. [Amanda] Hess thinks of phonetic phenomena like uptalk and vocal fry as each having a single fixed meaning, in fact as having the meaning she hears in them. So she understands the high rising terminal pitch of uptalk as question-asking, though this is not at all what users of uptalk are doing with it.

The fact is that different people are doing different things with uptalk, and that different people are doing different things with vocal fry. These phonetic features are “just stuff”, just material that’s available for becoming associated (within particular social groups) with semantics, social meanings, pragmatic functions, discourse functions, and so on. Similarly for lexical items: for example, different people use discourse markers like well for different purposes. And for syntactic constructions: for example, there is plenty of variation in how Subject-Auxiliary Inversion is used. And so for syntactic truncation.

All these things are just aspects of linguistic form, with no intrinsic meaningful content at all, aspects that are available for becoming conventionally associated (in a particular social context) with various sorts of “meaning” (in a very broad sense). It’s Just Stuff.

So it is with visual forms, like a cross or a phallus.

That would be today, simultaneously April Fool’s Day and Easter Sunday. Celebrations for both are in progress.

For April Fool’s Day, a TitanMen ad offers, unaccountably to my mind, sale prices on gay porn flicks like Dick Danger 2; on that flick, see my 3/9/18 posting “The further adventures of Dick Danger”; for the sale ad, see #1 in today’s AZBlogX posting “For Easter Fool’s Day”. (Could it be that the TitanMen 35%-off sale is a joke?)

Then some food pranks for the holiday, to add to those in my 4/1 14 posting “April 1”.

As for Easter, I’ve prepared a dinner table of mostly X-rated paschal images in my AZBlogX posting, sumarized below.

Food pranks for April 1st. From the Telegraph (UK) today, in a list of 2018 April Fool’s Day pranks around the world:

Burger King:

It’s Easter, so of course chocolate needs to be on everything. Burger King certainly think so, creating its first Chocolate Whooper.

The fast food chain got into the spirit early this year, posting a video on Friday announcing the release of a dessert version of its signature Whopper burger. “Coming soon to your local Burger King. maybe,” it teased.

According to the video, the Chocolate Whopper includes a chocolate cake bun, a “flame-grilled chocolate patty,” raspberry syrup instead of ketchup, white chocolate rings that resemble onions, candied blood oranges rather than tomatoes, milk chocolate “leaves” of lettuce and vanilla frosting “mayo”.

Coca-Cola:

Coca-Cola is reportedly launching three news flavours for the “Instagram generation”: avocado, sourdough and charcoal.

The company said research showed their new flavours were among the most favoured by the “brunch-loving, superfood-snacking millenial”, the Sunday Mirror reports.

Coca-Cola said in a statement to the newspaper: “Not only do they promise to be the perfect tasty, sugar-free refreshment, but they’ll also double-up as the ideal accessory for any brunch time social media photo – guaranteed to see the ‘likes’ rolling in.”

Easter gay play on the X blog. Items #2-6 there:

#2: fratboys coloring eggs for Easter (from Fratpad at JustUsBoys) — their eggs ‘balls, testicles’

#3: a completed project, a pair of gaily colored eggs

#4: on the idiom fuck like bunnies, a pair of gay bunnies fucking, in a homoerotic cartoon by Spanish graphic artic Ismael Alvarez

#5: from a Gay Room video “SomeBunny Loves You”, cute Casey Everett fucked both like and as a bunny (he’s in bunny costume), by rough Lex Ryan and also (not shown there) by a carrot dildo (the carrot as phallic symbol)

#6: a leather bunny top, armed with carrots — proof that not all bunnies are cute

From Aric Olnes a while back, a 5/31/17 piece from Hint Magazine, “Weird & Wonderful Men’s Underwear Ads”:

Hilarious and ridiculous, sure, but some of these vintage men’s underwear ads are downright hunky — they just take a little adjusting…

Hint is a fashion magazine covering men’s fashion as well as women’s. The logo:

(#1)

Earlier on this blog: from 11/6/16 “Wearing the 1970s”, with a set of entertaining ads and links to other postings.

Four examples from Hint, with my captions (and some comments):

(#2)

Bruce and Joe had a
Wonderful relationship,
Except for those pesky elves

This is (I think) the weirdest of the four. The text appears to be a play on get into s.o.’s pants, and it’s easy to read the visual as a sexual interaction between two men. But then there are two extra, smaller, legs in the photo, one of them tied to Joe’s right leg, as in a three-legged race. My conceit is that these extra legs belong to elves. I have no idea what the ad agency had in mind.

(#3)

The locker room parties were
Fantastic, though there were
Spirited disputes about
Pitching and catching

The notable element here is the glove in the right-hand guy’s left back pocket. Marking him as a top?

(#4)

Sam in his
Fig missile briefs,
On the town with his
Sexbuddy Greg, that
Wild animal

Especially worth notice: the moose-knuckle fig leaf.

(#5)

Each of them had found the
Nothing But Socks Club by his
Own route, but then it was
Immensely satisfying

Everybody with legs positioned so as to conceal their packages.

These were from the 1970s, when most underwear ads featured “regular guys” relating to each other as buddies (though these presentations sometimes went awry). Since then, premium men’s underwear firms have veered into porn territory, with models presenting themselves as sculpted lust objects, as in this Daily Jocks ad for Supawear from 10/27/17:

(#6)

Note the seductive facial expression and inviting open mouth. One on one between the model and you.