Design – Arnold Zwicky's Blog (original) (raw)
Archive for the ‘Design’ Category
Triple art
July 18, 2025
From my 7/14 posting on this blog: my life has recently been extraordinarily difficult and extravagantly painful; and so it continues, with the added complications of medical appointments, on 7/14 and 7/16; a new helper / caregiver, starting on 7/15 and 7/17; and a series of computer disasters, one a day for three days (7/14 – 7/16) running.
But then in clearing out the innumerable closets, shelves, drawers, and storage spaces in this house, preparatory to moving, many months from now, to a much smaller apartment in an assisted living facility, I have unearthed two decorative artworks — of cross-stitching and Mexican folk pottery — recognizing and celebrating threesomes, more specifically the affectional and sexual triple of me, my wife Ann Daingerfield Zwicky, and my husband-equivalent / Ann’s lover Jacques Henry Transue, in the years 1975 through 1985 (when Ann died, and Jacques and I became just an everyday gay male couple). Both were presents: the cross-stitching of three monograms from the creator, our daughter, Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky; and the three pottery doves from my former UIUC student and our old friend David Stein, who found them in a crafts market in Tijuana during a day trip from San Diego that David took me on, all those years ago.
Posted in Art, Design, Gender and sexuality, Marriage, Mexico, My life | Leave a Comment »
Zapf, Zagat, and Zimmerman
June 16, 2025
The morning names of 6/14, all Z names — well, I’m a Z-person, and I notice — all of which were in my mind from recent mentions on Facebook
of Zapf dingbats (named for the typeface designer Hermann Zapf)
of the Zagat restaurant guides (now taken over by Google)
and of the singer-songwriter Bobby Zimmerman of Hibbing MN (who became famous as a very young man in NYC under the name Bob Dylan and is more or less constantly in the news)
Posted in Design, Language and food, Morning names, Music, Names, Professional names, Typography | Leave a Comment »
American Locomotive
February 16, 2025
From Joe Transue on Facebook on 2/12, as a comment on my 2/11 posting “On the faux-Hopper watch”, about Waiting for the train (an image that was merely inspired by Edward Hopper (1892-1967), not actually by him):
(#1) JT reported that this image came up on his feed out of nowhere, with the label: Edward Hopper. Locomotive 1944; there’s a lot to be said here, but one thing is absolutely clear: it is not a painting by Hopper; there are excellent catalogs of Hopper’s paintings, and neither this image (or anything like it) or this title (or anything like it) appears in the catalogs — but then it turns out that Hopper spent years (resentfully) churning out illustrations, for magazines and for advertisements, just to pay his bills, and these haven’t been catalogued, so who knows?
More things that are absolutely clear: that this image was in fact used in an ad (in Life magazine) in 1944, for ALCO (the American Locomotive Company); that the locomotive in the ad is an ALCO DL-109 diesel engine built between late 1939 and the spring of 1944; and that this ad appeared at a time when Hopper had been recognized as a major figure in American art and was in the midst of one of his most productive periods (in the 1930s and early 1940s, he painted New York Movie (1939), Girlie Show (1941), Nighthawks (1942), Hotel Lobby (1943), and Morning in a City (1944), among others), and cannot imaginably have been resorting to commercial illustration to pay his bills in 1944.
So where does #1 come from?
Posted in Art, Design, Kinship, Language in advertising | Leave a Comment »
The gay scallop shell
July 6, 2024
(Moves quickly into the male body and man-on-man sex, in street language, so not for kids or the sexually modest)
Terrible days in the heat, barely functioning, while I accumulate promises to write on various topics, praise scholars of note, and follow up on earlier postings. So I’m feeling singularly inadequate — have in fact reached the point of taking a posting, any posting, off the gigantic heap of things in preparation, just to get something, anything, done. (Meanwhile, I’m supposed to be cheered that the day is predicted to be “much cooler” than yesterday — a high of merely 86F instead of 98F. That would still leave me breathless, profoundly exhausted, and unable to think clearly. I did go out at 6:30 am to water the plants in the cool of the morning, to protect them from heat death, and that actually was pleasant. Now I’m just avoiding going outdoors.
In any case, this is bringing you a follow-up to my 5/11/24 posting “The gay handshake”, which was about the trope of the blowjob as gay handshake. Today it’s the penis as gay scallop shell, on (images of) cocks as a gay equivalent of (images of) scallop shells — penises as a design motif in decor. Dicks treated like not only scallop shells, but also thistles, dolphins, pineapples, roses, tigers, bumble bees, lilies, elephants, and peacock feathers (and many other things) as figurative motifs. Alongside more abstract motifs, like the fleur-de-lis, Greek key, quatrefoil, genital triad, Chinese knot, chevron, star, and paisley motifs. And color motifs, like the Princeton orange and black, the Ohio State scarlet and gray, and the gay rainbow flag colors.
Posted in Design, Furnishings and tools, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Male art, My life, Photography | 1 Comment »
The Princeton rub tool
June 14, 2024
(Even choosing my words carefully, a fair amount of this posting is going to be inappropriate for kids and the sexually modest; you’ll see why in a couple of seconds)
Two themes for today: tools, and their masculinity; and male-male frottage, especially one variant of the Princeton rub. Somewhat astoundingly, these two themes intersect in what I think of as the Princeton rub tool: a dual masturbation sleeve, a device to facilitate two guys getting off together face to face.
Posted in Design, Furnishings and tools, Holidays, Homosexuality, Language and food, Language and the body, Language of sex, Logos, Masculinity, My life, Phallicity, Princeton | Leave a Comment »
Lit up in Paris by amz
April 15, 2024
From Ned Deily, reporting from Paris on Facebook today, this shop sign, suggesting that amz is everywhere:
(#1) As you can see, this isn’t Arnold Melchior Zwicky, but Anne Marie Zahar, of LUMINAIRES DECO DESIGN ANNE-MARIE ZAHAR CRÉATION (website here); what she’s selling is lighting: a small number of high-concept (and expensive) floor lamps and ceiling lights
Posted in Art, Design, Furnishings and tools | Leave a Comment »
Cognitive dissonance in bricks and mortar
August 4, 2023
From Steven Levine, continuing his observations in the Netherlands, on Facebook yesterday:
[SL:] A McDonald’s in Haarlem. I can’t decide if I think this is creative reuse or a violation of sensibility. Either way, what a building.
Ah, a continuation of my architecture theme, specifically in my posting “Durability, utility, beauty” from yesterday, where I looked at architectural design as simply the design of very large everyday objects, subject to the same judgments that we apply to kitchen tools, downspouts, typewriters, and the like.
In this case, there’s a certain cognitive dissonance (Steven’s “violation of sensibility”), between the elegant design of the building and the crass display of a fast-food restaurant. (On the other hand, for a McDonald’s, this display is positively modest and unobtrusive.)
Posted in Architecture, Design | Leave a Comment »
Durability, utility, beauty
August 3, 2023
I post fairly often on the design of everyday objects, looking especially for genuinely useful things that are also a pleasure to use, hold, or see. Now, I find myself getting thoughtful postings from someone at Tumblr — a side effect of my having to join Tumblr in order to get at some racy male photography that I have since posted — the 8/1 posting Firmitas, utilitas, venustas being about guiding principles for the mind, eye, and hand of the architect: that is, about the design of very large everyday objects.
I have no link to this posting, only the mailing, so I’ll reproduce that in full for its interest in the principles of good design, and the pleasure of its writing, which is both personal and analytical. (I don’t know who the writer is. The posting is unsigned — the e-mail reply address is merely welcome@tumblr.com — and I see other identification of them, so Tumblr cognoscenti are presumed to know who the voice of the site is. Grr.)
The text under the line. Then some comments and illustrations.
Posted in Art, Design | 6 Comments »
More new things
May 20, 2023
My previous “New Things” posting (on 5/11) was about replacing household furnishings that were difficult, painful, or actively dangerous for me to use with more suitable items. As it happens, the replacements were well-designed aesthetically as well as functionally.
This morning, noting Target ads for melamine plates for picnic use — it’s the season — the colors of which offended her, my daughter Elizabeth was moved to suggest to me that I might think about replacing the thin apple-green plastic plates I’d been using, whose virtues were that they were super-lightweight (crucial for my seriously disabled hands), durable, microwave safe, and really cheap (they’re still available: Preserve® Plateware, in #5 plastic, recyclable too). Alas, cheap in both senses: inexpensive and of inferior quality. And I hate the color.
In my kitchen cabinets I have a full set of handsome stoneware plates and dishes that Jacques and I bought for everyday use, plus a full set of elegant china for when we had guests, but now it’s all way too heavy for me to handle, and far too breakable. I can deal with a bowl, because I can hook a thumb and forefinger on the rim and then carry it safely, but plates are out of my range.
Now Elizabeth had planted in my mind the idea of replacing the cheap greenies with something better — not melamine, because it doesn’t microwave safely — but something more aesthetically pleasing, and maybe even on sale, since it’s the picnic season.
Posted in Design, Furnishings and tools, Language and the body, My life | 2 Comments »