(Racy talk and joking about men’s bodies, so probably not to everyone’s taste.)

The background story is an error committed by the Imperator Grabpussy in reading from his text recently, with /θaj/ for /taj/ ‘Thai’, thereby introducing us all to the wonders of Thighland. (Details below.) Wags seized on the error for jokes, and on Facebook Tim Evanson offered photos of the King of Thighland, showing his massive muscular thighs and focusing our attention on the crotch they surround:

(#1) Thigh Guy: Kevin Cesar Portillo, who is all-around massive (he’s 6′5″), a former college basketball player at Miami-Dade CC, Mississippi Valley State, and Ave Maria Univ., now working as a male model (projecting smouldering sexiness) and fitness consultamt

Even more impressive:

(#2) Closer up

My first jab at a response:

This is in Thighland Park IL, right?

(Highland Park, a suburban city in Lake County IL, about 25 miles north of downtown Chicago.)

And then the much more elaborate racy parody (with Babes in Toyland apologies to Victor Herbert and the Disney Studios):

Thighland, Thighland
Delicious crotch and my land
While you dwell within it
You are ever happy there
Thighland, Thighland,
We’re on our way to Thighland
Don’t know when we’ll get there
But we know there’s fun in store

[Digression: from Wikipedia on Babes in Toyland, which may refer to:

— Babes in Toyland (operetta), a 1903 operetta by Victor Herbert

— Babes in Toyland (1934 film), a musical comedy starring Laurel and Hardy, based on the Victor Herbert operetta

— Babes in Toyland (1961 film), a Disney musical starring Ray Bolger, Annette Funicello and Tommy Sands, again based on the Victor Herbert operetta

— Babes in Toyland (1986 film), a television movie starring Drew Barrymore and Keanu Reeves, using only two songs from the Victor Herbert operetta

— Babes in Toyland (1997 film), an animated film featuring the voices of Christopher Plummer, Joey Ashton and Lacey Chabert, using only one musical number from the Victor Herbert operetta]

Tim Evanson countered with a racy parody of his own:

One night in Thighland and the world’s your oyster
The bod’s a temple – pull the sausage free
You’ll find a god in every bulging crotch there
A little flesh, a little history
I can feel his devil sliding up in me

The original keeps us in Thailand. From Wikipedia:

“One Night in Bangkok” is a song [released in 1984] from the concept album and subsequent musical Chess by Tim Rice, Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus. British actor and singer Murray Head raps the verses, while the chorus is sung by Anders Glenmark, a Swedish singer, songwriter and producer.

The original words:

One night in Bangkok and the world’s your oyster
The bars are temples but the pearls ain’t free
You’ll find a god in every golden cloister
And if you’re lucky then the God’s a she
I can feel an angel sliding up to me

The song exists in many versions. Here you can watch the video from Chess: a re-recorded version from a TV performance in 1985 for the special “Lyrics By Tim Rice”.

The name of the actual country. From a NYT story (from Reuters) on-line on 8/7/20: “Not ‘Thigh-Land’: Thais Amused at [REDACTED]’s Slip”:

Citizens of Thailand were surprised and bemused on Friday to discover their country’s name had become a social media meme after U.S. President [REDACTED] mispronounced it.

Though [REDACTED] quickly switched to the correct pronunciation, people quickly seized on the slip to mock the U.S. leader online as #Thighland became one of the top-trending Twitter hashtags in Thailand with 32,000 tweets and in the top 25 in the United States with over 156,000, according to the tracking site Twitscoop.

… The American president made the gaffe during a speech in Ohio while explaining how his trade war with China had forced factories to move production to Southeast Asian countries, Vietnam and, as he pronounced it, “Thi-land”.

In the next breath, [REDACTED] got it right, saying: “Thailand and Vietnam – two places that I like their leaders very much.”

The meme escalated when conservative American pundit and filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza, who was pardoned by [REDACTED] after a conviction of violating campaign finance law, argued in a series of tweets that “Thighland” is in fact the correct pronunciation.

Rikker Dockum, a professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College, told Reuters that Trump’s second pronunciation – with an aspirated hard “t” instead of a soft “th” sound – is the widely used one in both Thai and English.

“Among English speakers around the world, this is not a disputed pronunciation,” he added.

Today’s Mother Goose and Grimm, with the POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau) Edgar Allan Po’ Boy = Edgar Allan Poe (the American writer and poet) + po’ boy (the superb New Orleans submarine sandwich):

(#1) Edgar Allan Po’ Boy is a N1 + N2 compound N, understood as having the head, N2, semantically associated with the modifier, N1, by (the referent of) N2’s being named after (the referent of) N1 — parallel to the Woody Allen Sandwich (a tower of corned beef and pastrami) at NYC’s Carnegie Deli

(Plus the allusion to Poe’s poem The Raven — Quoth the raven, “Nevermore” — in Grimm’s, “I had it once, but… nevermore”.)

If you were a betting person, you would surely put some money on this MGG strip as not being the first to use this particular POP — of course, that would be fine, it’s all in how you develop the joke — and you would win.

Just on this blog, in Zippy postings from 2016 and a Rhymes With Orange posting in 2017.

Plus bonuses: a texty with a pun turning on the ambiguity of /póbòj/ as either po’ boy or Poe boy; and two cartoons turning on Edgar Allan Poe / Po’ Boy understood as a Source or Ingredient compound (parallel to shrimp po’ boy) — yes, Edgar Allan Poe in a po’ boy, in it, good enough to eat.

Zippy in 2016. In my 1/7/16 posting “Bilkpoe and fractured Stein”, a Zippy strip “with writer Edgar Allan Poe (under the name Elgar Durwin Poboy) crossed with Army Sgt. Bilko from the tv show The Phil Silvers Show (in a mash-up of high culture and pop culture)”:

The names are absurd plays on the writers’ names: Elgar (the English composer Edward Elgar) for Edgar, Poboy (for po’boy, the New Orleans submarine sandwich) , and Durwin for Allan (probably an echo of the misnamings the character Endora on the tv show Bewitched came up with for her son-in-law Darrin — Delmore, Darryl, Darwin, Durwood, etc.)

Then in my 1/24/16 posting “More Ravening”, a Zippy strip devoted to Elgar Durwin Poboy.

Rhymes With Orange in 2017. From my 7/18/17 posting “POP with Poe”, a Rhymes With Orange strip with the doggerel “The Edgar Allan Poe Boy”:

Once upon a midnight dreary,
Edgar wasn’t thinking clearly,
“Give me raven, lettuce and tomato,
hold the mustard, extra mayo.”

plus material on po’ boys / po’boys

An Edgar POP bonus. In my 5/15/20 posting “Edgar Allan Wrench”, a Bizarro cartoon with the POP of the title: = Edgar Allan + Allen wrench.

A texty bonus.Texties are cartoon-like compositions in which a pictorial component is entirely absent or merely decorative, not essential to the point of the composition — in effect, words-only cartoons; they can be intended as humor, like gag cartoons, or as serious commentary, like political cartoons. This one turns on the ambiguity of /póbòj/ — either po’ boy or Poe boy:

(#2) Zazzle shirt design by Funny Shirt — one of many designs on this text, from various sources; this one’s my favorite

A Source / Ingredient bonus. Two cartoons (the second a photoon), both from Reddit postings (and both incorporating a raven), turning on Edgar Allan Poe / Po’ Boy understood as a Source or Ingredient compound, thus exploiting  the well-known multiplicity of understandings for N1 + N2 according to the semantic relationship between (the referents of) head N2 and modifier N1: contrast Source / Ingredient lobster po’ boy with

Metairie po’ boy (New Orleans suburb of Metairie), Mitch Landrieu po’ boy (former New Orleans mayor Landrieu), NOLA po’ boy (NOLA restaurant in Palo Alto), foodie po’ boy, time-sink po’ boy, old-time po’ boy, and so on.

Plus an endless number of distant compounds, requiring interpretation in a rich discourse context, like Superdome po’ boy understood as referring to a po’ boy like the ones we used to get at that stand next to the New Orleans Superdome.

(#3) Posted by u/drummerchuk77 7 years ago (yes, Allan mis-spelled as Allen; that happens a lot); the roll is a specially made New Orleans French bread

(#4) Posted by u/forceduse 8 years ago (that is one gigantic roll)

(Phallic preoccupations abound in this posting, sometimes in street language — I mean, look at the title above —  so some readers may want to skip over it)

Passed on by a friend on Facebook yesterday, this German grocery-store snapshot plus a joking double-entendre intro in English (together making what appears to be a a fast-spreading meme):

(#1) Hähnchenschnitten Wiener Art ‘Viennese-style chicken cutlets’ from the (German) Vossko company, the name of the product including the German phrase Wiener Art ‘Viennese-style’ — that is, prepared like Wiener Schnitzel / Wienerschnitzel); meanwhile, the English-language intro alludes to wiener art, in the sense ‘penis art’, referring to artworks in which penises are significant elements (or, in an hugely extended sense, to any artworks in which human penises are visible) — the label wiener art involving the (mildly racy) AmE sexual slang term wiener ‘penis’

German Wiener Art ‘Viennese-style’ (a) leads to English Wiener art ‘Viennese art’ (b) and then to four AmE slang uses of wiener art: (c) ‘sausage / frankfurter art’; (d) ‘dachshund art’; (e) ‘penis art’; (f) ‘weenie art’. All will be illustrated below.

Know your memes. The frozen-food package in #1 is not an invention for the purposes of a joke, but the real thing. Here’s the package from Vossko’s site:

(#2) with (a) Gm. Wiener Art; Wiener Schnitzel — made from boneless cutlets of veal, tenderized and flattened by pounding, coated with breadcrumbs, and pan-fried (in lard or butter) — is an Austrian national dish, historically associated with Vienna; variants of the dish made with pork, beef, or chicken are referred to in German as other kinds of Schnitzel or with the modifier Wiener Art; and are often referred to in English as kinds of schnitzel (chicken schnitzel, a staple of our Columbus OH household, typically served with egg noodles, parsley, and lemon slices)

(b) Wiener art. The art of Wien, a city famous for its artists and its public art of many different sorts. Most notably, perhaps, through the Vienna Secession movement. From Wikipedia:

The Vienna Secession … is an art movement, closely related to Art Nouveau, that was formed in 1897 by a group of Austrian painters, graphic artists, sculptors and architects, including Josef Hoffman, Koloman Moser, Otto Wagner and Gustav Klimt. They resigned from the Association of Austrian Artists in protest against its support for more traditional artistic styles. Their most influential architectural work was the Secession Building designed by Joseph Maria Olbrich as a venue for expositions of the group. Their official magazine was called Ver Sacrum (Sacred Spring, in Latin), which published highly stylised and influential works of graphic art.

For modern Americans, Klimt is the face of the movement. See the section on Klimt and his art in my 3/23/16 posting “Klimt Eastwood”, featuring this celebrated Klimt portrait:

(#3) (b) Wiener art: Klimt’s Adele Bloch-Bauer I, 1907

The English noun(s) wiener. First, the capsule version from NOAD:

noun wiener: North American 1 a frankfurter or similar sausage. 2 informal a penis. 3 informal, derogatory a weak, socially inept, or boringly studious person. ORIGIN early 20th century: abbreviation of German Wienerwurst‘Vienna sausage’.

[AZ: note that frankfurter is originally Frankfurterwurst ‘Frankfurt sausage’, though modern English speakers see no connection between frankfurter and the city of Frankfurt, wiener and the city of Wien / Vienna, or, for that matter, hamburger and the city of Hamburg; they’re just food names]

Then, the fuller treatment in OED3 (Dec. 2019) on the noun wiener:

— 1. Originally and chiefly North American. A small, thin sausage similar to a frankfurter, traditionally made of pork and beef, and typically smoked. Also more fully wiener sausage, wienerwurst … Cf. Vienna sausage [1st cite 1880]
— 2. North American colloquial. The penis. [1st cite 1935]
— 3. North American colloquial. A person held in contempt, esp. one ridiculed as weak, socially inept, or unfashionable; a fool. Also used as a general term of abuse. [1st cite 1970]
— compound noun wiener dog: a dog of a very short-legged, long-bodied breed; = dachshund, sausage dog [1st cite 1922]

The four uses of wiener in OED3 then give rise to four senses of wiener art:

— (c) wiener art ‘sausage / frankfurter / hot dog art’ (the basis for the other senses)

— (d) wiener art ‘dachshund art’ (metaphor from the sausage sense, the dog resembling a sausage)

— (e) wiener art ‘penis art’ (metaphor from the sausage sense, the penis resembling a sausage, and the sausage resembling a penis — there’s a Page on this blog on my postings about penis art

— (f) wiener art ‘weenie art’ (metonymy — part standing for whole — from the genitals sense, with accompanying derogation, as in prick, dick, putz, schmuck); the derogation can follow from perceived interactional flaws (you’re a weenie because you’re socially ineffectual or bumbling) or from perceived social disengagement (you’re a weenie because you’re absorbed in bookish or nerdish / geekish concerns), as in NOAD on the noun weenie:

… 2 … [b] (also wiener) informal a weak, socially inept, or boringly studious person: newer programming languages are a favorite of the tech weenies.

And, yes, there’s art of all of these types. Most of it lowbrow stuff, or art serving some purpose beyond art for art’s sake (entertainment, advertising, sexual arousal, whatever), or art pointedly commenting on art of those two types.

(c) hot dog art. Well, there are the jokey men’s boxer shorts with images of hot dogs in buns on them. And then images of hot dogs in buns as satisfying scenes from everyday life, — in effect, mass-culture still lifes — like this søciety6  art print by Miriam Joy E:

(#4) Hot Dog in a Bun (intended to hang on the wall in a living room or dining room)

Then a piece of poppish and meta ceramic art from the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum:

(#5) Betty Spindler, Hot Dog, 2000, glazed clay

And then, sheer high-poppish light-heartedness, in a 6-foot fiberglass replica of a fiberglass hot dog advertising figure:

(#6) Note that he’s enthusiastically self-condimentizing. Also extraordinarily phallic. You can order one of your very own from the Big Cheese Productions site; remember that he’s one tall hot dog (5 inches taller than me, in fact)

(d) dachshund art. Here there is a mass-art compendium, cartoonist Gary Larson’s 1990 book Wiener Dog Art:

(#7) Wiener dog cartoons from Larson’s Far Side

Hard to pick just one example.  Many of the cartoons are parodies of, burlesques of, or riffs on famous works of art — for instance, an homage to Salvador Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory. The Dalí:

(#8)

The Larson:

(#9) Larson, The Persistence of Wiener Dogs

(e) penis art. From my 9/23/16 posting “News for penises and their simulacra”, in which I ramble on about having to cordon off most images with human penises in them on AZBlogX, but manage to find a few that can get by, in particular an alarming but entertaining photo of the gigantic graffito of Brussels / Bruxelles:

(#10) [newspaper quote from my earlier posting:] Les habitants et les passants de l’avenue du Parc, à la Barrière de Saint-Gilles, ont été sacrément surpris, voire choqués. Un graffiti d’un gigantesque pénis a été dessiné sur la façade d’un bâtiment.

(f) weenie art. Showing the socially inept or the socially disengaged. One example of each sort from (for a change) high art. For the first, from the 16th-century Dutch artist Quentin Massys (in the collection of the (American) National Gallery of Art):

(#11) Massys,  Ill-Matched Lovers, c. 1520/1525

And for the second, a boy lost in his books:

(#12) Joshua Reynolds The Studious Boy (date uncertain), in private hands — a grind, as we were called, contemptuously, when I was a lad at Princeton; grinds were a subtype of weenies, and that was the current term (even though the OEDs first cite in this use is from 1970, and this was roughly 1960)

Every so often the accidents of the calendar bring together remarkably contrasting occasions. This is a day of such cognitive dissonance. Weep with me. Gasp in pleasure and delight with me.

First, today is Holocaust Remembrance Day, marking the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi death camp, in 1945, an event that serves as a symbol of the Holocaust — the Shoah — that wiped out around six million Jews (and a number of others) and caused untold suffering.

But then today is also the birthday of two people whose works have brought pleasure to millions: the astonishingly prolific composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (born in 1756) and the mathematician-turned-comic-writer Charles Lutwidge Dodson, who wrote the Alice books and a number of remarkable nonsense poems under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll (born in 1832).

The Holocaust. Around a million people were exterminated at Auschwitz-Birkenau alone. It’s hard to grasp death at such a scale; mass starvations at this level were instigated by both Stalin and Mao but were never properly appreciated by outsiders, because they were spread over large areas and had no identifiable individual perpetrators. But the death camps assembled large numbers of victims in relatively small spaces and then people devoted to this purpose killed them, primarily by poison gas. When the death camps were liberated, the not-quite-dead appeared before us as crowds of specters, and piles of the remnants of the dead — their eyeglasses, their shoes, their hair, their teeth — were brought to view.

It was appalling, apparently incomprehensibly evil, but in fact it was distressingly ordinary: the scapegoating of some groups (about the Jews, from my grade-school playmates in a working-class neighborhood that banned both Jews and blacks: they killed our Christ) as responsible for social ills, and the demonization of the Others. Then carried to fanatic ends.

From the imaginative literature of the Holocaust, just one thing: Art Spiegelman’s Maus, an extraordinary graphic novel of the Holocaust told as fables of Jewish mice and Nazi cats:

(#1) Cover of the complete work — first published in comics, then in two volumes (in 1986 and 1991)

Mozart. Born on a cold January day in 1756, died on a bitter-cold day in December 1791. Two things from his operas: the remarkably beautiful — and amazingly constructed — trio “Soave sia il vento” (“May the wind be gentle”) from Così fan tutte (1790); and Papageno’s charming comic aria “Der Vogelfanger bin Ich ja” (“I am the birdcatcher, I am”) from Die Zauberflöte (1791).

Recordings and videos of these two songs are easy to find. Here I give you the first page of the score, for “Soave sia il vento”:

(#2)

And a photo of Nathan Gunn singing Papageno’s birdcatcher aria in the Julie Taymor production of The Magic Flute (available on video):

(#3) Papageno and his magic bells (Tamino has the magic flute)

Lewis Carroll. From Alice in Wonderland, ch. VII: A Mad Tea-Party:

(#4) (left to right) Alice, the March Hare, the Dormouse, the Mad Hatter (illustration by John Tenniel)

This is the scene that gives us the profoundly silly song parody that I committed to memory when I was, oh, 7:

Twinkle, twinkle, little bat!
How I wonder what you’re at!
Up above the world you fly,
Like a tea-tray in the sky.

Facing death. Confronted with hard truths of the Holocaust, of course we grieve. And we rage against the perpetrators, vowing Never Again. But it’s also natural to stave off being overwhelmed by death, to deny its power over us, by laughter (Papageno faces death several times).

In my family, there’s a category of films we characterize as Movies to Watch When the Dog Dies — from an actual occasion, when the decedent was our beloved Shvani, and The In-Laws supplied the balm of laughter we needed — but then dire occasions piled up, and now it’s a whole big genre. There is even a movie to watch in the face of the Holocaust: Mel Brooks’s The Producers. (Alas, just mentioning the movie traps me in the coils of a “Springtime for Hitler” earworm. This is happening right now.)

I began writing this posting in the dark of night (I start my day early); recollecting my first experience (age 7 or 8) of the death-camp liberations and how I was undone then by sheer evil left me just sitting at my computer, weeping. And then today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro appeared in my comics feed, shook me into laughter, and put me back on course to look at Mozart and Lewis Carroll. Here it is, a bit of dyslexic drama:

(#5) FILM NOIR / FILM NORI (noun nori: a Japanese edible seaweed eaten either fresh or dried (NOAD) — used in making sushi rolls); if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page

Wayno’s title, “The Maltese Mackerel”, is a play on the title of a specific film noir, The Maltese Falcon, with an allusion to saba sushi, made from mackeral.

Today’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro plunges us into a double play on words, plus a visual parody — offered on a platter — as well:

(#1) To understand the cartoon, you need to know about kosher delis (deli, short for delicatessen), and pastrami as a prominent offering in them; and about Salvador Dalí and his surrealist painting The Persistence of Memory (If you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Dan Piraro says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page.)

The egregious pun kosher deli > kosher Dalí in combination with a play on the title of a Dalí painting Persistence of Memory > Persistence of Pastrami (with a visual parody on the painting itself, offered on a platter by the waiter; hence, Wayno’s title, “Culinary Surrealism”).

Dalí’s name is most commonly Englished as /ˈdali/, like Dolly, and that makes the deli > Dalí pun particularly close ( /ɛ/ > /a/, otherwise perfect), but sometimes maintains the Spanish / Catalan iambic accentuation as /daˈli/, in which case the imperfect pun is more distant.

On the artist, from Wikipedia:

Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, Marquess of Dalí of Púbol (11 May 1904 – 23 January 1989), known as Salvador Dalí was a Spanish [Catalonian] surrealist artist renowned for his technical skill, precise draftsmanship, and the striking and bizarre images in his work.

Not to mention his personal flamboyance and showmanship.

The artist in a photograph that probably served as the model for the Dalí character in the cartoon:

(#2) Dali’s Mustache (photo by Philippe Halsman)

The painting:

(#3) Salvador Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory (1931)

The painting has been much parodied. As in #1 above and in my 9/26/22 posting “The news for wieners”:

(#4) From cartoonist Gary Larson’s 1990 book Wiener Dog Art: the drawing The Persistence of Wiener Dogs, a parody of / burlesque of / riff on / homage to the Dalí

From the annals of visual allusion (bordering on parody or burlesque), this David Sipress cartoon in the 2/12&19/24 New Yorker:

(#1) A stripped-down, cartoonized, goofy reinterpretation of a key work of modern art, Matisse’s 1910 painting La Dance (the cartoonist is an old acquaintance on this blog; there is a Page here about my postings on his work)

The occasion. Today is DoMQoS Day, recognizing the death of Mary Queen of Scots on this day in 1587. But, like Monty Python’s MQoS, I’m not dead yet, though I’ve been out of commission for a while, thanks to two days in succession on which the atmospheric pressure plummeted in the morning, leaving me incapacitated by joint pain and mentally confused. This morning feels better, so I’ve gingerly returned to posting, putting aside what is now an overwhelming accumulation of already committed postings in favor of this brief pleasure from the latest New Yorker.

The Matisse. From Wikipedia:

(#2) The 1910 painting

Dance (La Danse) is a painting made by Henri Matisse in 1910, at the request of Russian businessman and art collector Sergei Shchukin, who bequeathed the large decorative panel to the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, Russia. The composition of dancing figures is commonly recognized as “a key point of (Matisse’s) career and in the development of modern painting”. A preliminary version of the work, sketched by Matisse in 1909 as a study for the work, resides at MoMA in New York City, where it has been labeled Dance (I).

… The painting shows five dancing figures, painted in a strong red, set against a very simplified green landscape and deep blue sky. It reflects Matisse’s incipient fascination with primitive art, and uses a classic Fauvist color palette: the intense warm colors against the cool blue-green background and the rhythmical succession of dancing nudes convey the feelings of emotional liberation and hedonism. The painting is often associated with the “Dance of the Young Girls” from Igor Stravinsky’s famous 1913 musical work The Rite of Spring. The composition or arrangement of dancing figures is reminiscent of Blake’s watercolour Oberon, Titania and Puck with fairies dancing from 1786.

(#3) The Midsummer Night’s Dream Blake

Day-old bread, an’ we wan’ go home, as this Dale Coverly Speed Bump cartoon of 3/1/24 has it:

day-old as a pun on day-o, which then licenses the full-out substitution of day-old bread for daylight come

And so the Jamaican dock-workers’ Banana Boat Song — famously recorded by Harry Belafonte in 1956 — is hijacked for baked goods.

(Thanks to Susan Fischer for passing this Coverly cartoon on to me)

Then, in my 5/23/14 posting “Piercing”, on a piece of Stan Freberg’s comedy routine of 1957:

 [“Piercing, man, piercing’] comes from musical comic Stan Freberg: his “Banana Boat Song” of 1957 [a riff on Harry Belafonte’s hit song], which you can view here:

The routine has two players: a lead singer (1, sung material is in boldface; otherwise, everything is spoken) and a beatnik bongo drummer (2, speaking only):

1: Daylight come and
Me wan go home
2: My ears, man, like my ears
1: Day.
2: No, hold it, man
1: Me say day-o
2: It’s too shrill, man
2: It’s too piercing
1: Well, I don’t see why
2: No, it’s too piercing, man
It’s too piercing
1: Well, I got to do the shout
2: No, man, it’s too piercing

To this day, 67 years later, the word piercing tends to evoke a really loud day-a-ay-o for me.

The July 26th opening ceremonies for the Paris Olympic games included a tableau — of drag queens posed as presiding over a banquet — that vaguely resembled Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper painting:

(#1) The Olympic drag pose

(#2) The Leonardo original

Though the creative director maintained that the performance was a re-enactment of Jan Bijlert’s Feast of the Gods (a painting that is a French national treasure):

(#3) The Bijlert Feast

The director was of course aware that many people would take the tableau to be a parody of the Leonardo masterpiece, but noted that the Leonardo had been endlessly parodied, including by Andy Warhol and The Simpsons — the implication being that a drag-queen re-enactment of the painting would be no more sacrilegious than pop-art or pop-cultural parodies (a stance that I’m deeply in sympathy with).

Now, the program for this posting. I’m going to talk about:

— The Feast of the Gods as a subject of artworks in Europe (going back to antiquity)

— Bijlert’s Le Festin des dieux as a notable painting in this tradition; the painting highlights the two gods Apollo (as the central figure at the table) and Dionysus / Bacchus (as the central figure in the foreground of the painting)

— parody magnets in the art world, with Leonardo’s Last Supper as the most powerful parody magnet of all time, attracting imitations of many sorts

— the opposition between Priapus / Dionysus and Apollo as archetypes of masculinity, male attractiveness, male power, and male sexuality

Deities feasting. From Wikipedia:

The Feast of the Gods or Banquet of the Gods as a subject in art showing a group of deities at table has a long history going back into antiquity. Showing Greco-Roman deities, it enjoyed a revival in popularity in the Italian Renaissance, and then in the Low Countries during the 16th century, when it was popular with Northern Mannerist painters, at least partly as an opportunity to show copious amounts of nudity.

The revival of the subject in the Renaissance took off with Bellini’s Feast of the Gods. From Wikipedia:

(#4) The Bellini painting, with the gods feasting on the ground

The Feast of the Gods (Italian: Il festino degli dei) is an oil painting by the Italian Renaissance master Giovanni Bellini, with substantial additions in stages to the left and center landscape by Dosso Dossi and Titian. It is one of the few mythological pictures by the Venetian artist. Completed in 1514, it was his last major work. It is now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., which calls it “one of the greatest Renaissance paintings in the United States”.

The painting is the first major depiction of the subject of the “Feast of the Gods” in Renaissance art, which was to remain in currency until the end of Northern Mannerism over a century later. It has several similarities to another, much less sophisticated, treatment painted by the Florentine artist Bartolomeo di Giovanni in the 1490s, now in the Louvre.

… The figures shown are usually taken to be (left to right): a satyr, Silenus with his ass, his ward Bacchus as a boy, Silvanus (or Faunus), Mercury with his caduceus and helmet, a satyr, Jupiter, a nymph serving, Cybele, Pan, Neptune, two standing nymphs, Ceres, Apollo, Priapus, Lotis.

The Bijlert painting. In #3. From Wikipedia:

Le Festin des dieux (‘The Feast of the Gods’) is a painting by the Dutch painter Jan van Bijlert, created around 1635–1640. It is in the Musée Magnin in Dijon, France [and is owned by the French State].

It is one of a number of pictures in western art to depict the feast of the gods, in this case at the marriage of Thetis and Peleus, with Bacchus in the foreground, and a prominent dancing satyr.

… The painting represents a banquet taking place on Mount Olympus to celebrate the marriage of Thetis, a nereid, and Peleus, king of Phthia, in which many gods from Greco-Roman mythology participate. In the centre, Apollo is crowned [as the sun god, with a halo of light] and holds a lyre [as the god of music]. In the left part we can recognize Minerva, Diana, Mars, Venus, and Love and, behind, Flora, the goddess of spring. On the right are Hercules and Neptune, as well as Eris, recognizable by the golden apple of discord that she brought as revenge for not having been invited. In the foreground are a dancing satyr and Bacchus, eating a bunch of grapes.

The left part of the painting has been cut off, explaining the absence of certain gods. For example, Juno’s peacock is present, but not the goddess herself.

Meanwhile, the painting highlights two of the gods: Apollo (with his sun-god halo) in the middle of the diners; and the wine-crazed celebrant Bacchus / Dionysus in the foreground.

Parody magnets. In the world of verbal art, certain works, because of their obsessions with content or quirkiness of style, invite parody — so they are endlessly played on; Poe’s The Raven and Moore’s A Visit From St. Nicholas are monuments of parody magnetism.

So it is in visual art — as with parody magnets like Hopper’s Nighthawks , Wood’s  American Gothic, and Munch’s The Scream — except that some works develop their parody magnetism simply from being extraordinarily well-made, famous, or culturally significant; here Michelangelo and Leonardo lead the pack, Leonardo with his Mona Lisa and especially with the most powerful parody magnet of all, his Last Supper. There are countless parodies out there, some respectful, some affectionate, some silly, some outrageous; some  from the world of high art, some from pop art, many from various corners of pop culture. A sampling …

— from my 8/24/11 posting “Marisol”: artist Marisol’s Last Supper: translation, reinterpretation, burlesque?

— from my 11/22/17 posting “Superhero supper”, superhero parodies of the Leonardo

— from my 3/28/18 posting “Deviant Last Suppers”, starting with a 2017 Salerno (in southern Italy) gay sex-filled version of the Last Supper — with Jesus and his disciples in various stages of undress, kissing, engaged in oral sex, and one offering his body for anal sex — and going on to 8 other queer and female versions

The opposition between Priapic Man and Apollonian Man. Between Priapus / Dionysus / Bacchus and Apollo, as archetypes of masculinity, male attractiveness, male power, and male sexuality. Extended discussion from my 4/8/22 posting “The Aussie firedog”:

Priapic Man is not all there is, though you might not appreciate that, because he gets most of the press. But there’s another world, the domain of Apollonian Man, the decorative and accomplished young man — the musician, the singer, the dancer, the poet; also the artist, the creator and designer of beautiful things; the caring healer; and the educator of children. Usually represented as a beardless, athletic youth.

Apollonian Man doesn’t get such great press, because in the context of the stringent standards of (fiercely binary) normative sexuality in the culture that currently surrounds us, he is seen as feminine and therefore as deficient and distasteful.

… (Note on the mythology. The Greek mythic embodiments here are Dionysus vs. Apollo (Priapus is a minor fertility god, but he’s as intensely male as you could wish for, so I use his name). As far as absolutely root maleness goes, both Dionysus and Apollo spread their seed, Apollo rather more than Dionysus apparently; and then both also took youths as male lovers — notably, Apollo had Hyacinth and Dionysus had Ampelos — but that was indeed the Greek way… )

I strongly urge you to try thinking of the Priapic and the Apollonian simply as two different ways of being masculine, with neither tied directly to stages of life; Priapus / Dionysus and Apollo are, after all, metaphors. So you can exhibit Priapic or Apollonian masculinity at any any age; your sexual desires can incline towards men or towards women, your sexual practices can be with men or women, you can identify with a gay community or a straight community, while exhibiting either of these forms of masculinity; if you’re a man and your sexual desires or practices are directed towards other men, you can be receptive or insertive, submissive or dominant, and so on, while exhibiting either of these forms of masculinity. (Yes, there are associations between these factors, many weak, some quite strong, but the factors are distinct.)

Very very crudely, Priapic guys are hunky and Apollonian guys are adorable. The guys in the Australian Firefighters calendars and their ilk are hunky and Priapic; a lot of the guys in the the Cocky Boys calendars and their ilk are adorable — the adjectives twinky and twinkish are sometimes bruited about — and Apollonian

1/6 it’s Epiphany and 2001 Insurrection Day, and there’s fresh news from the salamander hotline, a follow-up to my writing yesterday, in the posting “That’s a lotta axolotl”:

I have known about axolotls since the 1950s, when Mad magazine was responsible for potrzebie as a non sequitur nonsense word, ferschlugginer as a sort of all-purpose modifier of negative affect, … and axolotl as a nonsense reference.

Which elicited this comment from Robert Coren:

As you may not be surprised to learn, my thoughts also went to Mad magazine as soon as I saw the word. I particularly remember fragments of a parody of Wordsworth’s Daffodils …

I omit RC’s recollections, which are indeed fragmentary, after the first two lines (memory is a fickle thing); but the parody / burlesque (which I’d forgotten about) manages to be both clever (maintaining the form of the Wordsworth — 6-line verses of iambic tetrameter, with rhyme pattern ABABCC — and catching its spirit) and crude, just as a Mad parody ought to be.

(Rhymes for axolotl are not plentiful: the Mad parody uses bottle, twice, rejecting glottal, throttle, and wattle, and also AmE waddle, twaddle, toddle, swaddle, coddle, and model.)

Mad‘s axolotl poem. From issue #43 (1958), reproduced here with centered lines in a sans-serif font:

(#1)

And then the Wordsworth original from (1807), reproduced here with serif-font centered lines:

Daffodils

(#2)

Mad’s first verse parodizes Wordworth’s first, and Mad‘s last verse Wordsworth’s last, but Mad‘s middle verse is fresh playfulness unrelated to Wordsworth’s middle verses. So: establish the parodic scheme at the beginning, then diverge from it, only to return to the scheme as closure — see the discussion in Zwicky & Zwicky, “Patterns First, Exceptions Later” (1986), available on-line here.