Showing posts with label Spiro T. Agnew. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Spiro T. Agnew. Show all posts

Saturday, April 1, 2017

Resplendent Subtlety

Welcome to the world's most popular cultural blog! Please, there's no need to thank me.

You know, if there's one complaint I get more than any other—and I get plenty, believe me—it's that I have a tendency here on the old blog to overindulge in what might be called gross-out humor. Too often, my numerous critics tell me, I emphasize only the obvious, the offensive, the scatological, eschewing the nuanced and the refined—qualities wrongly thought not to be in my wheelhouse—in favor of the tasteless, the crass, or the frankly disgusting. In short, I am accused of pandering to the lowbrow tastes of my audience for the mere sake of maintaining what I concede is an already wildly-lucrative blog. While I am not totally blameless in all this, I have to admit I'm a little hurt by the constant criticism of my crudeness. Well, friends, that ends today.

Why today? Because, having duly checked my calendar, I see that today is the first day of the 2017 MoCCA Arts Festival, a two-day comics extravaganza held on the West Side of New York City not too far from the Intrepid. Last year I attended the 2016 Festival, if only for a couple of hours, and photographed a rather refined piece of original illustration art by the great Rick Meyerowitz, "O Tempore! O Sophomore!"—a classy Latin title if ever there was one. Now, one full year later, I am finally posting this bounteously-overflowing work to help promote the new 2017 MoCCA Arts Fest and to usher in a new, more genteel phase of my blogging. Can you scent the change? At last I can indulge my true predilection—too often suppressed in the past—for the subtle, for the serene, for the sublime. No longer will anyone be able to say that urbane sophistication and refinement are simply not to be found in my Milhouse.

Rick Meyerowitz
"O Tempore! O Sophomore!"
Original art
National Lampoon, August 1972






I don't know if I'm going to make it over to MoCCA Fest this year—I'm trying to keep a low profile in the face of so much public opprobrium—but if I do manage it on Sunday, the day they let in the riff-raff, please say hello and do try to be a little forgiving. I'll be the one not wearing a white carnation.

Becky Cloonan, MoCCA Fest 2017




April 2, 2017 Update: Well, I never made it over there, but if you said hi to me anyway, thanks.


Note:  Rick Meyerowitz has never appeared on this blog before, but, as I've said, I'm turning over a new leaf as of today.

Richard M. Nixon was the 37th President of the United States. Respect.


Quick Links to the Attempted Bloggery Archives:

Richard M. Nixon

The MoCCA Arts Festival

Other Posts of the Season

Jack Ziegler (1942-2017)

02142

Friday, August 30, 2013

Walt Kelly's Pogo: Fifty Whacks

Walt Kelly's original artwork for the Pogo strip of June 26, 1971 features a bulldog who is a caricature of F.B.I. Director J. Edgar Hoover. The strip also includes a hyena in full regalia who represents Vice President Spiro Agnew. I'm a little out of my depth here, so I'm going to quote Wikipedia:
In the early 1970s, Kelly used a collection of characters he called "the Bulldogs" to mock the secrecy and perceived paranoia of the Nixon administration. The Bulldogs included caricatures of J. Edgar Hoover (dressed in an overcoat and fedora, and directing a covert bureau of identical frog operatives), Spiro Agnew (portrayed as an unnamed hyena festooned in ornate military regalia), and John Mitchell (portrayed as a pipe-smoking eaglet wearing hightop sneakers.)[13] Always referred to but never seen was The Chief, who we are led to believe was Nixon himself[citation needed]. (Nixon eventually made his appearance—as a reclusive, teapot-shaped spider named Sam.)
J. Edgar Hoover apparently read more into the strip than was there. According to documents obtained from the FBI under the Freedom of Information Act, Hoover had suspected Kelly of sending some form of coded messages via the nonsense poetry and Southern accents he peppered the strip with. He reportedly went so far as to have government cryptographers attempt to "decipher" the strip.[14]


I'd love to know what the cryptographers came up with.




Walt Kelly, Original Comic Strip Art for Pogo, June 26, 1971

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Original-Art-Walt-Kelly-POGO-daily-comic-strip-J-Edgar-Hoover-as-bulldog-/111082732494?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item19dd0bfbce&nma=true&si=UB68sj2DvLx%252F9kdb54zXrlCgzYs%253D&orig_cvip=true&rt=nc&_trksid=p2047675.l2557


Note:  This blog has a lot more about Walt Kelly's Pogo here, but not as much as the Whirled of Kelly blog has here.

0863