Performance – Arnold Zwicky's Blog (original) (raw)
Archive for the ‘Performance’ Category
Masculine flamboyance
March 12, 2026
adj. flamboyant: (of a person or their behavior) tending to attract attention because of their exuberance, confidence, and stylishness … [from _NOAD_]
Last Saturday I made the acquaintance (in the first Crooked Media show on MS NOW) of this exemplar of masculine flamboyance, presenting himself in this IMDb photo as an impish hunk:
Jon Favreau (advertising Crooked Media’s Pod Save America show)
Inexplicably, I seem not to have noticed JF before, though he’s someone of great substance. Meanwhile, his performance on the show was hugely entertaining — cutting criticism of our overlord Grabpussy and his administration, flamboyantly delivered. The deep moral commitment of Stephen Colbert performed in a wildly expressive style.
Posted in Effeminacy, Facial expression and gesture, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and politics, Language of sex, Morality, Movies and tv, Performance, Personas | Leave a Comment »
The ecstasy of oral pleasure
October 26, 2024
(The title is a warning; this posting is about men fellating men, and while the language mostly rises above raunchy street talk, the topic is clearly not for kids or the sexually modest)
I begin with a severely cropped image of one gay porn actor fellating another, a picture that manages to have no penis in it, despite the fact that the unseen penis is the emotionally central element of the act for both participants. Because what struck me about the image was, instead, the fellator’s state of being, as evidenced in his facial expression:
Posted in Facial expression, Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and food, Language and the body, Language of sex, Masculinity, Performance | Leave a Comment »
Julio Torres
August 11, 2024
In my e-mail recently, the program for this year’s New Yorker Festival, with some of the interviewees in a display ad:
(#1) No, I don’t know why pink; Cumming, Maddow, and Torres are notably LGBT, but not the other five in this display (maybe 3 out of 8 exceeds some tipping point, but it’s more likely that pink’s just a random color choice, devoid of meaning)
Now, which of these 8 is not like the others? Well, that’s an odd photo of singer-songwriter Sara Bareilles, but it’s an atypical one. Otherwise, Julio Torres’s photo does stand, or leap, out, and for him it’s fairly restrained; his pictures show him with a wide variety of hair colors (sometimes involving henna red or bright blue) and bodily adornments, and sometimes in drag. Meanwhile, he’s young, adorable, outrageous, smart, and dead series about creating comedy in a variety of forms.
Posted in Color, Events, Gender and sexuality, Movies and tv, People, Performance, Photography, Spanish, This blogging life | Leave a Comment »
Let me do few tricks
July 12, 2024
(Charms of the male body, plus a striptease song, so not to everyone’s taste)
A Daily Jocks e-mail ad in my mailbox today, with this beautifully composed male figure:
[AMZ caption:] Let me entertain you … I’m very versatile
The actual ad copy (offering 35% off):
Missed out last time? Our once a year Long Johns sale is happening this weekend at DailyJocks.
These Helsinki Athletica Long Johns have SOLD OUT completely during the previous 3 seasons so don’t miss out!
Made from premium modal which forms to your skin for ultimate comfort, whilst showing off your best assets.
Posted in Language and the body, Music, Performance, Phallicity, Shirtlessness, Underwear | 1 Comment »
Their satanic majesties re-imagined
July 10, 2024
A chapter in the re-working of artistic materials, provoked by my searching for a model for the character Zn in the Bizarro cartoon I posted on yesterday, in “Cu Co Ni & Zn!”, a strip depicting Wayno’s vision of a heavy-metals heavy-metal rock band:
(#1) [from this posting, with emphasis added:] Wayno could have picked some specific heavy metal band and caricatured them for this cartoon, but he hasn’t done that here, at least not in any straightforward way: Zn is depicted as a heavy-metal acoustic guitarist who’s bald, darkish-skinned, wears dark sunglasses, and has a droopy gray mustache, and I’m pretty sure there is no such guy in real life.
I searched for several hours for candidates as the model for the character Zn in the real-life world of heavy-metal performance, but emerged empty-handed. Then David Preston commented on Facebook and made me re-think my search; maybe what Wayno was doing was not a simple caricature of someone from real life, but the creation of a fresh character, a re-worked, re-imagined character, as a kind of homage to the original. Relatable to the original, but significantly different from it. In which case, DP and I had a clear candidate for the source of Zn in #1.
Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Music, Performance | 1 Comment »
Sense-shifting pun jokes
December 2, 2023
A common joke form exploits an ambiguous expression E. Prior likelihood or the preceding context in the joke favors one understanding for E, but then fresh context (in the joke) brings out another, more surprising one. The effect is that the sense of E has shifted as the joke proceeds. It’s a pun, son. Used in a sense-shifting pun joke. (Puns get used in all sorts of jokes: knock-knock jokes, one type of riddle joke, and more.)
I now offer two examples that especially tickled me, to show how such ((phonologically) perfect) puns work. Then some comments on a different joke form, formula pun jokes, which can turn on imperfect puns and involve a different kind of set-up / pay-off from sense-shifting pun jokes.
Posted in Ambiguity, Comic conventions, Illusions, Jokes, Language and race, Language and the body, Linguistics in the comics, Perception, Performance, Puns, Quotations, Snowclones, Taboo language and slurs, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »
Ditto ditto my song
November 17, 2023
A serenade on my Apple Music in the dark night of 10/13, Danny Kaye singing Gilbert & Sullivan patter songs, with warmth rather than the sharp edges of the D’Oyly Carte patter specialists; at my 2 am whizz break, he had arrived at the Lord Chancellor’s “Nightmare Song”, from G&S’s Iolanthe, with its concluding:
the night has been long —
ditto ditto my song —
and thank goodness
they’re both of them over!
Being (more or less relentlessly) a linguist, I asked myself, not for the first time: What kind of word is ditto? It looks a lot like some kind of adverb here, with the crucial line paraphrasable as (awkward) thus thus my song, or (better) also also my song, or (even better) so too my song. (Although you might argue that _ditto_‘s a special kind of noun, since it’s paraphrasable as the same.) And, while we’re on the subject: Where on earth does it come from? I entertained speculations about some connection to double, maybe Greek _di_– ‘two’, or possibly to dot, given ditto marks.
My etymological speculations are provably off-base; the closest English words are diction and dictate, from the Latin stem _dict_– ‘say’. Meanwhile, my off-the-cuff part-of-speech assignment is flatly contradicted by the authority I look at first, NOAD (a lexicographically respectable dictionary of manageable size, and — unlike AHD or the M-W dictionaries — one accessible directly from my browser). NOAD is based on the resources of the OED, and the OED (which I can access on-line) on ditto classifies the word as a noun — but in an entry from well over a century ago, so we need to look critically at its evidence for this classification. Which shows that in the 18th century the word was incontestably a noun (with a plural dittoes). That usage, however, is long dead. The question is what to say about modern usage, and there my adverb idea has a lot going for it (and is also the classification given in Merriam-Webster’s word history for modern ditto).
So we’re in for a bumpy ride, much like the Lord Chancellor’s, with possibly more questions than answers. Hang on.
Posted in Conversion, Etymology, Grammatical categories, Language change, Lexical semantics, Lexicography, Music, My life, Performance, Trade names, Verbing | 4 Comments »
Lisztomania enters the 21st century
November 13, 2023
As a follow-up to my posting yesterday, “Anti-Ode to Liszt” (slamming his piano transcription of the Ode to Joy section of Beethoven’s 9th symphony), an amazing New Yorker piece by Alex Ross, in print in the 9/11 issue (under a version of the title above), on-line on 9/4 under the title “The Greatest Show on Earth: Liszt defined musical glamour. But pianists now see substance behind the spectacle”.
I was pointed to the Ross piece by Lise Menn in e-mail. Apparently, I saw a thumbnail announcement of it in my New Yorker feed but missed it in scanning through the issue when it came out (I lose days, sometimes more, of attention to the media through medical or personal crises, so these reminders are genuinely helpful to me).
Now, a section from Ross’s synoptic view of Liszt — his life, his career, and his music. From here on, it’s all Ross:
Posted in Culture, Music, Performance, Pop culture, Writers | Leave a Comment »