I found this in a comic book. This is set in the same fictional universe as Iron Man, Spider-Man, and the X-Men. The words in the speech bubble are interesting, I think. My initial reaction:
*whattttttttttttt*
Interesting? What do you think?
This Friday Is Out Of Context Thoapsl Says: A spell is not always restful.
You know, somebody says "Slug Monster!" and you think you know what they're talking about. You turn around for a look, but you already feel like you know what you'll see. Heck, you've seen some horror movies, you've got a pretty vivid imagination; you've seen plenty of slug monsters before. How bad could this one be?
Obviously, you have underestimated certain German illustrators of the early 1920s.
(Note, also: the body in the lower left is not being crushed by the slug. It is being absorbed, or possibly growing out of the slug's body like a deformed limb.)
This image is actually part of a cover for a 1920 issue of Der Orchideengarten, a fantasy magazine that ran for an impressive fifty-one issues in Munich from 1919 to 1921. After the horrors of the Great War, THIS is what people were reading to relax.
Illustrations from the old Saturday Evening Post really fascinate me. There's something really striking about this image, don't you think? (On the other hand, I think modern-day Ikea catalogues are endlessly disturbing and fascinating, so maybe it's just me.)
I could say something about the vertical composition and the blue eyes, but seriously – it's a heck of a picture, yeah?
Anyhow, the context: it's 1955, and you're not a public service announcement about forest fires, you're actually an advertisement for a timber company. BUY WOOD.
This Friday Is Out Of Context Thoapsl Says: A lumberjack is not a little match girl.
Seriously guys, I know, this whole Michael Jackson reminder of tragedy and despair is hard on us all. Yes, it really is.
(for context: this is an illustration by Dorothy Lathrop for a 1942 publication of Walter de la Mere's short story "Mr. Bumps And His Monkey" – you can find the story here, and I found the image here... but it sure looks like Monkey Pope to me.
One hell of a sitcom premise, there...)
This Friday Is Out Of Context Thoapsl Says: A cardinal is not a primate.
On a more personal PS, I'm extremely busy with work this past & coming week, so apologies for the less-blogging-than-usual. Usual conditions will be reasserted in a week or two, I hope. And then – news! New things! And on my other blog I'll be publishing some scripts I've written, too!
PPS: did you know that Catholicism's concept of Papal Infallibility was only invented in 1870? You'd never guess the idea was that recent without looking it up, would you?
PPPS: I really hope that someone appreciates the multiple levels of awesomeness involved in that "cardinal/primate" pun up there. Seriously, that's at least three puns in one sentence. My day has not been wasted.
Let's say you saw this on the cover of a magazine.
When you think of alimony, do you think of circus laundry? Personally, when I think "weapon of female revenge" I think of something a little more literal, but I suppose that's maybe a generational thing? You tell me, magazine readers of the past – what the hell is up with you people?
For increased context, here's the complete picture: cover of Coronet magazine, May 1952. (Found via.) Note that this issue apparently sold well enough to justify at least one printing of two and a half million copies. Note also that the complete picture still fails utterly to link the elephant-watches-man-hang-circus-laundry image with its "Alimony: Weapon of Female Revenge" headline, in absolutely any way. Was there a last-minute editorial change? Were they trying to appeal to that lucrative men-who-fear-women-but-love-the-circus market? Am I missing an important visual metaphor, or something? Help me out, seriously.
This Friday Is Out Of Context Thoapsl Says: An ex-wife is not an elephant in the room.
If you click on the image, you should be able to enlarge it enough to read the caption.
It's the facial expressions that really make this one, I think. Go ahead and drown in those big dark eyes.
(Also: is that a Loch Ness monster in the background, or a dragon? Wt?)
So yes, apparently the Saturday Evening Post magazine was a culturally prominent publisher of fiction with illustrations. This picture is from an illustration by Lynn Buckham from their issue of July 26, 1958. I don't know everything about the story that it accompanied, but I do know it included the following line of dialogue (no joke): "Softy muscle man, I hate you!"
See, people assume that 1950s America was all conservative and repressed and boring, but the truth? This is where the '60s begins. Woman in scuba gear rides moose, escapes Scottish loch monster. Those freaky beats.
This Friday Is Out Of Context Thoapsl Says: A moose is not to make fun.
Actually, even in context this makes no sense. "But forget about him, and put on these anti-gravity shoes" really deserves to be a catchphrase, I think.
(The writer's identity is lost to the mists of time, but this is from "Superman's Girlfriend, Lois Lane" #51, August 1964. I got it out of this, which was an impulse buy that turned out to be a heck of a read, let me tell you...
Also: isn't it just great that there was once a comic called "Superman's Girlfriend, Lois Lane"? That is an awesome title for any sort of publication. Those were Lois's glory days, all right. Why she left the big S to be with that doofus Kent, I'll never know.)
This Friday Is Out Of Context Thoapsl Says: A distraction is not without gravity.
In other developments: I'm away over the weekend, so I'm not sure when the next Rage Roundup post will be up. But the new Bat For Lashes single will be on Rage tonight! Woo! Her new album should be out in a week or two, as well. As should be the potentially awesome (altho: potentially crap) Crystal Antlers album. But freaking Nite Jewel is nowhere to be purchased, damn it all. The world is a pit of bile and injustice.
You'd say that cynicism is negative, wouldn't you? If you had to pick a side.
That cynicism is inevitable, and maybe it's often useful, but also that it's essentially sad, somehow. It's the side of the coin that you pay but don't receive. When someone expresses their cynicism, hearts are not uplifted. We don't feel that cynical people are better or more fortunate than others, for their cynicism. If we usually discover our cynicism in adolescence, then we usually react against it later on. And even if we stay cynical (more or less), we soon lose respect for cynicism as a general outlook, I think. After all, so it goes: what does cynicism do to improve our lives? What good is it? Isn't it somehow tawdry and grim and wrong? Dishonourable, even? Wouldn't the world be a better place, if nobody was cynical?
And okay this is all true or whatever, but: there is one particular upside to cynicism that I've never heard anyone pay much attention to, and I reckon it's a great one. (And maybe it's not even cynicism exactly, maybe it's something else, anyhow, but I'm still going to write it.)
See, the one crucial aspect of culture that most adults are especially cynical towards, across the whole spectrum of the educated modernity? Advertising. Our thresholds for paying attention, for believing, for caring at all what an advertisement says – these thresholds are higher now than they were before. (This is one reason why advertisements from earlier decades have such kitsch value – so many old ads seem so absurd, so transparent and unconvincing. Plastics! New! Duck & Cover! Extra White! – we're cynical towards it, now.) Our higher thresholds, they're higher now because people are generally more cynical about advertising than they used to be, right? And so the advertisers are now so desperate, to grab our ever-more-cynical attention (& affection), that they've had to respond with relentless innovation. Viral marketing, immersive reality games, ads filmed like artsy short films, all of this craft and technique and effect and interest – it's all just a massive effort to trick past our endlessly-renewed cynicism.
And as a result, we have an industry of marketing and advertising that's now hugely more entertaining than it ever used to be. Funnier, more inventive – you might even want to say more intellectual, sometimes. There are ads you might even want to call art, if you were interested in calling things art, I guess. People watch the Super Bowl just for the ads: that's not just a cliche, it's true. And all of this, it's because we've been too cynical to keep paying attention to Sale and New and Value and celebrity endorsement, that same spin forever. If we've seen it before, we're cynical about it already. Give me something else.
Have you watched the youtube of the sheep yet? It's kind of neat, yeah?
It makes you think about things to do with sheep that you hadn't thought of before. New possibilities, new perspectives on an old context. Your mind has changed as a result, has literally expanded the complexity of its structure, now! That's what this advertisement has done for you, in its own small way. It really has made you a better, smarter, wiser person.
(Do you believe me?)
And so anyhow my point, I guess:
If the only cost of a new thought is a quiet reminder to maybe buy Sony afterwards, then I really don't mind the sponsorship. Cynicism can be a force to impel creativity! Isn't that remarkable? Hooray, I think.
(Wait, did I say Sony? I just watched it again, this sheep video is actually for Samsung.
For this image you can thank Bob Budiansky, Frank Springer, and all those responsible for The Transformers cross-media marketing strategies during the mid-1980s. Ah.
This Friday Is Out Of Context Thoapsl Says: A headmaster is not a role model.
From one of many tales of Comet the Super-Horse and his tragic love for Supergirl. Googling it just now, I found there's an article here which conveniently summarises the contextual freakiness.
Of course, it was the 1960s; it was a freaky time. (Aren't they all?)
This Friday Is Out Of Context Thoapsl Says: A super-pet is not what lovers do.
MENA, AR—After an extensive three-month-long search, the Polk County Sheriff's Department located missing 9-year-old Joshua Meyers in an abandoned home, rescued the child from his captors, and returned him to his loving parents, the still bound and gagged boy imagined Tuesday.
So, check this: surely, the most disturbing article ever published by The Onion. Onion jokes have explored similar territory before, but this particular example is freaking hardcore. The final paragraph, especially...
The context is: this review is not actually out of context at its original home, which is the page of Amazon customer reviews for the Denon AKDL1 Dedicated Link Cable. For some reason, this product has been singled out for ridicule: practically all the customer reviews (and there are more than 200 of them) are completely absurd. Some are weak, but some are totally hilarious. Here's another one I really liked:
(& thanks muchly to here for pointing it out to me.)
How did this happen in the first place? Was it just because the product is absurdly overpriced? I think it's amazing the way internets spontaneously produce stuff like this. There's something deeply fascinating about group behaviour that manifests for no particular reason. Especially when it's genuinely spontaneous, like this, and not just somebody's marketing strategy.
Fantastic.
This Friday Is Out Of Context Thoapsl Says: A revue is not a comment.
I should have been posting a lot more over the past week or so ("a lot more"? more than what? more than NOTHING), but my internet connection was messed up. Honest! For once, a lack of new content is not simply due to laziness. But it is still regrettable.
*regrets temporary lack of broadband*
(The image is from here, which is not my favourite webcomic – I think I'll do a post about my favourite webcomic another time – but it's still great. It's so deadpan that when you first start reading it, it seems to verge on the nihilistic; it took me a while to get into the rhythm of the tone. No, "rhythm of the tone" is not a mixed metaphor, shut up.
Now that I've read a fair bit of the strip, I'm starting to think that it's actually quite upbeat.)
This Friday Is Out Of Context Thoapsl Says: A slip is not a mistake.
I imagine that if someone challenged me to go defeat a cloud, I'd probably react like that, too. Wouldn't you?
The more I look at it, the more I think that there's something really interesting to look at, here. It's likeaLichtenstein, obviously, but it's not. (It's from here).
For all the cheese and camp that it evokes out of context, I think there's still a genuinely creepy and haunting edge to it. On the other hand, almost any image will become spooky or disturbing if you look at it for long enough...
This Friday Is Out Of Context Thoapsl Says: A cloud is not a picnic.
Hey, you want to read something else? That I wrote? Because I wrote a draft of a novel the other day, too. Send me an email & I'll let you read it, I think. It's different. You might not like it. It has jokes, though. Also punctuation. Cheers :)
I found this in a comic book. This is set in the same fictional universe as Iron Man, Spider-Man, and the X-Men. The words in the speech bubble are interesting, I think. My initial reaction:
You know, somebody says "Slug Monster!" and you think you know what they're talking about. You turn around for a look, but you already feel like you know what you'll see. Heck, you've seen some horror movies, you've got a pretty vivid imagination; you've seen plenty of slug monsters before. How bad could this one be?
Oh god their eyes, what have we done? HOLY NO WHAT HAVE WE DONE
oh sweet william, please stop. please stop
Do you see this match? Do you see it?
Seriously guys, I know, this whole Michael Jackson reminder of tragedy and despair is hard on us all. Yes, it really is.
Yeah man, who cares. Like, tell me about it.
I LIKE YOUR HAT.
Actually, even in context this makes no sense. "But forget about him, and put on these anti-gravity shoes" really deserves to be a catchphrase, I think.
*swoon*
(Not photoshopped. Honest.)
The context is: this review is not actually out of context at its original home, which is the page of Amazon customer reviews for the Denon AKDL1 Dedicated Link Cable. For some reason, this product has been singled out for ridicule: practically all the customer reviews (and there are more than 200 of them) are completely absurd. Some are weak, but some are totally hilarious. Here's another one I really liked:
(& thanks muchly to here for pointing it out to me.)
I should have been posting a lot more over the past week or so ("a lot more"? more than what? more than NOTHING), but my internet connection was messed up. Honest! For once, a lack of new content is not simply due to laziness. But it is still regrettable.
Brilliant. No further explanations are necessary.
How, indeed?
