Return of the pansies

Thursday, April 15, 2021

My friend Manjula Martin (author of Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living) posted a pansy from her backyard that was so good I had to resurrect my dormant Pansy Luchadores project!

painting by Tateishi Tetsuomi, *Spring*, 1973

I’m become a little bit of a pansy nut and have taken to collecting (saving images to my hard drive) artwork featuring the flowers. I recently came across this wonderful painting by Tateishi Tetsuomi, who was described this way in a documentary synopsis:

Tateishi Tetsuomi was born in Taiwan in 1905. He returned to his birthplace to find painting subjects and then he had been attracted by the landscape and local cultures of Taiwan. During his stay in Taiwan, he made oil paints, illustrations and wood engravings for the magazine Minzoku Taiwan (Taiwanese Folklore).

He was regarded as a promising painter, but his achievements were to be forgotten when he was repatriated to Japan at the end of WWII and lost most of his paintings. He earned a living as an illustrator for children’s books, but finally achieved unique expressions in his last years.

And our recent neighborhood walks have yielded sights like this, so stay tuned for more:

Comedy and theft

Monday, December 21, 2020

A question from my inbox, along with my response:

I’ve noticed how fierce comedians are about joke stealing. Are there examples of comedians who use influences to produce original material?

Of course. Like any artist, a comedian takes what’s come before them and turns it into something new. They begin by trying out the voices of other comedians and eventually find a voice of their own.

There’s a whole paragraph about comedians in Steal Like An Artist:

Conan O’Brien has talked about how comedians try to emulate their heroes, fall short, and end up doing their own thing. Johnny Carson tried to be Jack Benny but ended up Johnny Carson. David Letterman tried to copy Johnny Carson but ended up David Letterman. And Conan O’Brien tried to be David Letterman but ended up Conan O’Brien. In O’Brien’s words, “It is our failure to become our perceived ideal that ultimately defines us and makes us unique.”

One of my all-time favorite comedians is Richard Pryor. His writer, Paul Mooney, once quoted Milton Berle: “I know a good joke when I steal one.”

One of my favorite Richard Pryor skits is “Exorcist,” off That Nigger’s Crazy. Pryor imagines the movie if there were black people in it. “The movie would’ve been about seven minutes long. [In The Devil’s voice] ‘Hello?’ [In Pryor’s voice] ‘Goodbye!’”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InLfUMjyKNo

About a decade later, Eddie Murphy stole Pryor’s joke and updated it using Poltergeist: “Why don’t white people just leave the house when there’s a ghost in the house?” (See also: Jordan Peele’s Get Out.)

This is what makes comedy so rich: When you listen to any particular lineage of comedians, you can often hear the echoes and trace the influences in their work. (I love the beginning of Chris Rock’s Bring The Pain — he actually flashes images of some of his favorite comedy albums before the set, acknowledging the masters he’s trying to join.)

What these guys did, of course, is steal from the comedians who came before them and transform the jokes into something new. Most of the joke-stealing ire you see online now is the result of comedians stealing from their contemporaries, or worse, stealing from lesser-known comedians.

Good theft vs. bad theft.

Hope that helps?

Pansy precursors

Saturday, May 23, 2020

A reader sent me this amazing find: a special “Poet’s Number” of Vick’s Floral Guide from 1893, which not only contains quotations from famous writers about flowers and gardening, but also this family of “Pansy Sailors” which show up throughout the pages. Certainly, they are ancestors of my Pansy Luchadores!

I can’t find any real explanation for them or any evidence that they were used in other Vick’s guides.

Here’s a little bit about James Vick and his illustrated floral guides:

Vick’s Floral Guide and Catalog, first produced in 1862, proved to be the perfect outlet for his expertise as a printer, writer, publisher and gardener. Filled with charming wood-cut engravings and vivid color plates (by some accounts, Vick was the first to use color illustrations in a U.S. seed catalog), the Floral Guide quickly became the most popular seed catalog of its day. “Vicks Floral Guide came like the first breath of spring, with promise of future bloom,” raves a typical magazine review. “Vicks catalog, like his seeds and plants, is first class. It is finely illustrated, on good paper, and with two beautiful colored plates.”

This particular illustration is mentioned in A Touch of Blossom: John Singer Sargent and the Queer Flora of Fin-de-siècle Art:

Inverts were also called, from at least the 1880s on, “pansies,” “buttercups,” “daisies,” “violets,” “blossoms,” and even more generally, “horticultural lads.” A Vick’s Seeds advertisement from the 1890s conflates the already queer figures of the pansy and the sailor into a suggestive hybrid. The back cover of a seed catalogue, the image depicts two flowery sailors, overseen by their captain, raising anchor. The anchor’s chain for the moment imprisons the blooming asters, but when the “sailor lads so bold and free / Put out again,” the poem at the bottom right assures us, dissemination will occur.

“A pansy is a loaded subject,” wrote John Ashbery in a 1997 retrospective of Joe Brainard’s work, then pointed out the “seed-packet look” of Brainard’s paintings and collages of pansies.

Compare those pieces to this:

“The world keeps showing me these pictures.”

Recent candor

Wednesday, November 6, 2019

It’s not like I was holding that much back before — unfortunately, I tend to do my thinking out loud — but for better or worse, I’ve been more candid than usual in recent interviews. I don’t know what’s brought it about, really, other than: Being truthful and open feels really good, but even more than that, it’s not boring. So many podcasts are so boring and who wants to be boring? I’m also just genuinely happy and relaxed right now, so, I dunno, I just don’t feel like bullshitting. (You’d think the opposite would be true? That I’d have more patience for bullshitting now that I’m happy and relaxed? Life is weird.)

My interview with Jonathan Small on Write About Now:

And my interview (in two parts) with Chris Do on The Futur:

Filed under: interviews

Wrestling with flowers

Wednesday, July 10, 2019

We stumbled onto a motherlode of pansies in the Kerrytown neighborhood in Ann Arbor, Michigan, so I made a dozen more pansy luchadores. (Many of the Lucha Libre covers were courtesy of this post.)