Sphagnum-Covered Ghillie Suit, January 6, 2021. Twitter.
They came in all sorts of camouflage, in animal pelts and flak jackets, in tactical gear and even a sphagnum-covered ghillie suit.
When you leave the totems of your usual identity behind you free yourself from the laws that govern that identity and assume those of another character — a frontiersman, a hunter, a warrior, even a superhero…
“Ghillie” is a misspelling of Scots Gaelic Gille, meaning an outdoor servant. The suit so named may refer to the Gille Dubh (“black-haired youth”), an Earth spirit clothed in leaves.
Ghillie suits were adopted by British Army snipers in 1916.
Australian Army snipers call them “yowie suits” after the Yowie, “a mythical hominid similar to the Yeti and Bigfoot which is said to live in the Australian wilderness.” (Wikipedia)
Chris Malone. University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.
A classic mnemonic for spelling “graffiti” is that it “doesn’t have two fucking titties.” And the classic graffiti on locker room urinals is “A lot of pricks hang out here.” These durable tropes capture the sophomoric tenor of Chris Malone’s venom:
“Congratulations to the state of GA [Georgia] and Fat Albert @staceyabrams because you have truly shown America the true works of cheating in an election again!!!” Mr. Malone wrote. “Enjoy the buffet Big Girl! You earned it!!! Hope the money was good, still not governor!” [Posted Tuesday night, January 5, 2021]
(Neil Vigdor, “‘Hateful’ Tweet About Stacey Abrams Costs University Football Coach His Job,” NYTimes, 1-8-21)
“Fat Albert,” a 2004 movie, is based on a figment of Bill Cosby’s imagination.
“… Because of the high school setting and gentle boy-girl crushes that partially drive the story, Fat Albert will have more appeal for middle grade kids and tweens.” (www.commonsensemedia.org)
Driven by the right-wing figment of election fraud, Chris Malone, an arguably grown-up white man, traduces “Fat Albert“ into a body-shaming label applied to a Black woman almost elected Georgia governor in 2018, and whose fight against voter suppression has recently helped put two new Democratic senators in national office. “Enjoy the buffet Big Girl” garnishes the spite with misogyny.
This is a taste of only one dish of Coach Malone’s rancid smorgasbord, but there’s no point in gorging on blind fury.
As an act of speech violence, Malone’s sally is garden variety invective of the sort fired gutlessly from the sniper roosts of social media. Its only distinction, other than having cost “an assistant and offensive line coach for the Mocs” his current job (spoiler: he’ll find another), is to add context to the myriad acts of physical violence carried out in Washington D.C., only hours after his tweet, on January 6, 2021.
[XCIII] Si alguna vez tu pecho se detiene, If there comes a time when your heart stops, si algo deja de andar ardiendo por tus venas, if something warm and ardent ceases plying your veins, si tu voz en tu boca se va sin ser palabra, if your voice leaves your mouth but not as words, si tus manos se olvidan de volar y se duermen, if your hands forget to fly and go to sleep,
Matilde, amor, deja tus labios entreabiertos Matilda, love, let your lips stay parted porque ese último beso debe durar conmigo, because that last kiss must linger with me, debe quedar inmóvil para siempre en tu boca must stay motionless forever on your mouth para que así también me acompañe en mi muerte. so it accompanies me as well in my demise.
Me moriré besando tu loca boca fría, I will expire kissing your wild cold mouth, abrazando el racimo perdido de tu cuerpo, clinging to your body’s lost cluster of fruit, y buscando la luz de tus ojos cerrados. and seeking out the light of your closed eyes.
Y así cuando la tierra reciba nuestro abrazo That way, when earth returns our mutual embrace iremos confundidos en una sola muerte we’ll go confounded in a single death a vivir para siempre la eternidad de un beso. to live forever the eternity of a kiss.
Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada. Cien sonetos de amor 1924, Pablo Neruda y Herederos de Pablo Neruda 1994, Random House Mondadori Cuarta edición en U.S.A: febrero 2004
The cartoon by Brendan Loper is tagged “Very good people.”
The tagline evokes the Unite the Right “Tiki-torch” rally of August 12, 2017, held in Charlottesville, Virginia. A self-declared white supremacist rammed his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing Heather Heyer and injuring 19 other people. In subsequent remarks, Tr***p referred to “very fine people on both sides.”
Te pongo aquí un cuadro reciente, tonto y burlón, mal logrado por supuesto, de ejecución turbia, hiciera lo que hiciera. Está pintado sobre otro cuadro que hizo tu abuelo, mi papá. El suyo fue un desnudo masculino sentado, visto de … Continue reading →
All respect to Pierre Cardin’s memory and legacy. I’m no fan of censuring yesterday’s culture for not living up to today’s expectations. But in matters such as gender parity it doesn’t seem unfair to observe dispassionately how an artifact may beacon values discordant with the current moment’s.
The photograph (above) is delicious for its dated, risible ickiness. It contrives a harmonic that resonates with Cardin’s art-driven, if blatant, abstraction from the cash cow audience feeding his coffers. There’s a soupçon of je m’en foutisme in his saying “I think of the dress… The woman doesn’t matter.”
In the staged tableau, saturnine, impassive, gauntly handsome and exquisitely tailored, the Ozymandias of fashion, master of his imperium, with a sneer of command basks in the mimed fervor of swarming corybants who beseech his favor by offering their compliant flesh as rack and billboard for his effulgent creations.
What the lens conveys is a decadent machismo that swaggers through the thread trade while slouching through other industries with unglamorous, deadening efficacy. The image preserved has a Leona Helmsley aura to it, minus the felony.
A good pub feels a bit like a living room: a familiar, informal space where you can have a pint with friends and strangers… Enjoying a drink in a room that has been used for the same purpose for hundreds of years is an anchoring experience you are unlikely to get from your sofa.
(Eleanor Salter, “Will Britain’s Pubs Survive the Coronavirus?” NYTimes, 5-15-20)
I give high marks to this article’s illustration for its clever spookiness and skillful draughtsmanship.
The encomium to the British pub makes me realize how alcohol-centric my own relationship with booze is. Wherever I find myself, a bottle alone endears that spot to me; anchors me there; lends beauty to the moment; wraps me in fuzzy contentment.
My sofa is the ideal spot to “have a pint.” If I’m caught outside the house, any perch that’s friend-and-stranger-free will do for a swig. The alcohol completes it — a boosting and buffering companionable consolation.
Mine is not a commended orientation, I grant, which is why I corked the bottle.
The 1901 flag of Maine. Credit… David B. Martucci.
Someone who studies flags is a “vexillologist.” There’s a North American Vexillological Association for persons devoted to this study. In the 18th and 19th centuries, a flag was not so much a symbol as a practical way to tell from a distance whether a ship or an army was friend or foe, according to a past president of the association.
The contemporary Maine flag. Credit… Visions of America/Corbis, via Getty Images.
What I take away from Jennifer Finney Boylan’s piece about Maine’s flag, besides a happy meeting with “vexillology,” is how flags can become bully props pressed into the service of hem-kissing and disuniting narratives.
Words can evolve similarly, especially under the stress of feral politics. The advent of “homeland” rather than “national” security took our civic discourse in the direction of Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism, or the “USA PATRIOT Act.” The labels have a discomfiting whiff to the “fatherland” to them.
Boylan’s parting comment is food for thought: “When you wave the flag, the flag is also waving you.”
(Jennifer Finney Boylan, “Two Flags Over Maine (and America),” NYTimes, 6-10-20)
“Spring” (1931), a joyful painting from “Alice Trumbull Mason: A Pioneer of Abstraction.” Credit… Alice Trumbull Mason/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; via Washburn Gallery.
In the matter of electing to be born of illustrious forebears Alice Trumbull Mason, of Litchfield, Connecticut, chose well. Her rumbling name preserves affiliation with a “well-off family of old New England stock.” (All stock isn’t equal even where egalitarian mythology reigns!) Ancestors included Revolutionary-era painter John Trumbull and William Bradford, a 17th-century governor of the Plymouth colony.
Roberta Smith writes that Mason “has long been a painter’s painter, known mainly to a small number of artists and collectors.”
To be a “painter’s painter” is to be known mainly to a coterie of adepts and buffs. It’s an interesting label, presumably losing its force if an artist attracts broader recognition. In urging “institutional attention” for Mason’s achievement, Smith credits her with finding her voice early and with “adamantine pursuit of its implications.”
Alice Trumbull Mason in 1946. She was a true independent whose careful, balanced abstractions are just being appreciated. Credit… via Alice Trumbull Mason, the Archives American Art, and Washburn Gallery; Charlie Horowitz.
Mason held steadfastly that abstraction was “the true realism” (her words). Her influences ran through Wassily Kandinsky and Joan Miró to light on Piet Mondrian.
She spent long periods as a single mother when her sea captain husband was away, during which time she stopped painting and wrote poetry instead. The likes of William Carlos Williams and Gertrude Stein, encouraged her to publish.
Mason’s “Paradox #10 Chiaroscuro” (1968) is a geometric landscape. Credit… Alice Trumbull Mason/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; via Washburn Gallery.
Mason’s work is not something you absorb in a flash. Its integrity, “mindfulness” and assured beauty emerge slowly, in careful compositions, color choices, delicate but tactile brushwork, and inevitable balance.
Mr. Cardin in his Paris studio in 1963 with a model and the actress Jeanne Moreau, right. Credit… Pierre Godot/Associated Press.
“I wash with my own soap… I wear my own perfume, go to bed with my own sheets, have my own food products. I live on me.”
The proudest garment in my closet was once a blazer with the Pierre Cardin label on it. Stealing a trope from the great man, I was merely the water it shaped.
Clothing, he said, was meant “to give the body its shape, the way a glass gives shape to the water poured into it.”
A Pierre Cardin trouser suit in an undated photo. Mr. Cardin viewed the female body as an abstraction, a hanger of sorts. “I think of the dress,” he said. “The woman doesn’t matter.” Credit…Keystone/Getty Images.
The consummately French Italian-born designer, Pietro Costante Cardin (1922-2020), has shuffled off this mortal runway in his tenth decade.
He earned the title “Napoleon of licensors” from his marketing. Judging by this obituary, added to the outsized gifts and acumen that he parlayed cannily into wealth and fame was a Napoleonic knack for lionizing himself.
“I was born an artiste… but I am a businessman.” “The dresses I prefer… are those I invent for a life that does not yet exist.” “If I can put a Maxim’s [restaurant] in Beijing, I can put a Maxim’s on the moon.” “I don’t play cards, I don’t smoke, I don’t drink, I don’t like sports… I just work. It’s marvelous. It amuses me.” “My life is on an intellectual level much higher than that of La Couture.” “I’m the financier, the banker and the creator… I’ve always done what I wanted because I’ve never had a boss.”
(Ruth La Ferla, “Pierre Cardin, Designer to the Famous and Merchant to the Masses, Dies at 98,” NYTimes, 12-29-20)
Cardin creations at a fashion show in Moscow in 2011. Credit… Alexander Nemenov/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images.
High fashion isn’t about clothing per se; it’s about concept and vision embodied by an art whose chief medium is drapery around bodies. Keeping that thought present helps me value the outlandish contributions of the fashion titans.
The Rhetoric of Figments
A classic mnemonic for spelling “graffiti” is that it “doesn’t have two fucking titties.” And the classic graffiti on locker room urinals is “A lot of pricks hang out here.” These durable tropes capture the sophomoric tenor of Chris Malone’s venom:
“Congratulations to the state of GA [Georgia] and Fat Albert @staceyabrams because you have truly shown America the true works of cheating in an election again!!!” Mr. Malone wrote. “Enjoy the buffet Big Girl! You earned it!!! Hope the money was good, still not governor!” [Posted Tuesday night, January 5, 2021]
(Neil Vigdor, “‘Hateful’ Tweet About Stacey Abrams Costs University Football Coach His Job,” NYTimes, 1-8-21)
“Fat Albert,” a 2004 movie, is based on a figment of Bill Cosby’s imagination.
“… Because of the high school setting and gentle boy-girl crushes that partially drive the story, Fat Albert will have more appeal for middle grade kids and tweens.” (www.commonsensemedia.org)
Driven by the right-wing figment of election fraud, Chris Malone, an arguably grown-up white man, traduces “Fat Albert“ into a body-shaming label applied to a Black woman almost elected Georgia governor in 2018, and whose fight against voter suppression has recently helped put two new Democratic senators in national office. “Enjoy the buffet Big Girl” garnishes the spite with misogyny.
This is a taste of only one dish of Coach Malone’s rancid smorgasbord, but there’s no point in gorging on blind fury.
As an act of speech violence, Malone’s sally is garden variety invective of the sort fired gutlessly from the sniper roosts of social media. Its only distinction, other than having cost “an assistant and offensive line coach for the Mocs” his current job (spoiler: he’ll find another), is to add context to the myriad acts of physical violence carried out in Washington D.C., only hours after his tweet, on January 6, 2021.
(c) 2020 JMN