Here’s an idea. If I’m worried that my wife would object to squid art, I could ease her into the idea by first exposing her to rooms with an arthropod theme. As another advantage, when I opened the door to salesmen and Jehovah’s Witnesses, they’d see giant spiders clinging to the walls and run away.
Oooh, I love this idea: art prints on a plastic adhesive that you just stick on the wall. They’ve got squid art! Unfortunately, they’ve also got a hefty price, and doubly unfortunately, my wife has this annoying thing called “taste” which precludes me slapping squid up everywhere in my house.
(via the aptly named Squid)
I’m sorry to say that on our last trip to New York, we missed this museum.
Peruse an 1814 sketchbook by the Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai and eventually you’ll come across a bashful, wide-eyed octopus. You’d never guess that the innocent creature leads a secret life of debauchery. But a few years later, there he is on a woodblock print, still wide-eyed, now presented by Hokusai in a moment of infamous passion—his bulbous head pushed between the legs of a young woman, delivering a rather well-received session of cunnilingis. Hilarious and startling, it’s just one example of the explicit shunga, or “pictures of spring,” in an exhibition at the Museum of Sex surveying four centuries of Japan’s cartoonish pornography.
Next time!
(via 3quarksdaily and Jennifer Ouellette)
I won’t post this lovely print directly, since it might not be safe for work—not because it shows breasts, but because if any of your passing colleagues know anything about molluscan anatomy, they’ll realize that that cephalopod is gnawing on her head and be horrified.
(hat tip to Leslie Madsen-Brooks)
Steve Borres sent along a few shots from his Aegean vacation. Something seems to have reminded him of me, and it wasn’t bare-breasted Cretan dancers:
Very cool. If I’d been around 2500 years ago, there’s something I could have gotten into.
A reader discovered this fascinating graffiti in downtown Minneapolis, near the transit center on Hennepin Avenue.
In Minneapolis! So far from the sea, but I’m not alone in pining for it.
I may have to look this up. This is a travel week for me, as I have to run around taking care of some essential pre-school year duties—I’m actually sitting in the St Cloud mall right now, watching the senior citizens do their laps, while waiting for our car to get some minor repairs and maintenance—and tomorrow I have to run in to the university to attend a meeting and to the airport to dispose of one of my kids for a few weeks. I might have some time to cruise the squid-haunted streets of the Big City for a while.
Carel Brest van Kempen has posted one of his paintings of Cambrian animals—be sure to click on it to get the larger size. I wish I had a pet anomalocarid in my aquarium.
That army of undead cyborg squid-human hybrids idea? It looks like it might be old hat. Owlmirror found an old and rather cryptic
Japanese print of armored warrior cephalopods…and there’s a much, much higher resolution image of the same at that link. I can’t quite make out what they’re fighting, though…an army of dumplings? Meatballs? Who reads Japanese out there?
I have no idea what the cephalopods flying over the city have to do with the ecological message in the small print, but heck, it’s a cool picture anyway.
Maybe it has something to do with octopuses swimming over flooded cities, but they look airborn to me.
John Bentley sent me an issue of Seven Days with this interesting illustration on the cover: it’s titled “California”, by Chris Varricchione. Excuse the smudginess, but I just scanned it in from newsprint, so it isn’t exactly the cleanest image to start with. Still, I had to make it my desktop image—who can resist a flying mollusc/bird chimera? Now if only someone would point me to a sharper original source…
Thanks, John!
