picture by Gus. extra bits by Gus.

 

MORE than 20 years after it first appeared, a classic Mambo design has proved too controversial to sell on a department store T-shirt.

Big W has removed 200 shirts depicting the crucifixion of a mouse from 30 of its stores following a complaint. The design was created by the Australian artist Richard Allen in 1986.

The move comes just weeks after the discount department store added Mambo designs to its clothing range, which was seen as an attempt by the label to widen its sales base.

The "100 per cent Mambo" T-shirt bears the tagline: "Forgive them, father, they know not what to wear."

It appeared this year in a book on cult streetwear, where Mambo was named one of the most influential brands of the past two decades alongside Nike and adidas. But in recent years the label has struggled through tough times. It was sold two years ago to Equity and Capital Finance Australia for $10 million – half what Gazal Corporation paid for it in 2000.

A spokeswoman for Big W, Clare Buchanan, said the T-shirt's inclusion in the Big W collection was reviewed after a complaint from a customer at its Fairfield store.

http://www.smh.com.au/national/mambo-crucifixion-shirt-withdrawn-from-big-w-after-dressing-down-20100902-14rrz.html

 

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For decades, the lad mag published thoughtful political and social commentary by thinkers like Gore Vidal; interviews with Ayn Rand, Martin Luther King Jr., and John Lennon; fictional short stories by literary giants like Jack Kerouac and Norman Mailer along with the first ever released segments of Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451; and pioneering coverage of the murder of Teena Brandon who later became the subject of the Oscar-winning film Boys Don’t Cry.

Though it was famous for the pornography, Playboy also offered ideas, interviews, and opinions that were at the very least thought-provoking to a large number of heterosexual men. All of that is gone now.

A perfect example of the new Playboy was its “Freedom Issue,” published right before the 2016 election. The writers featured included TV host Chelsea Handler discussing abortion, Patton Oswalt on “the freedom to make mistakes,” Wiz Khalifa on police brutality and marijuana legalization, and Killer Mike on minority voting. Adding to this lineup of intellectual lightweights was a conservative who wrote about how Republicans should be listening to Paul Ryan, obviously someone who had his finger on the pulse of America.

Every issue has become an opportunity to prove how woke and relevant the magazine is. From having its first transgender playmate to celebrating activist and writer Noor Tagouri (popular for speaking in favor of wearing a hijab) to publishing mind-numbing articles like “5 Punk Rockers Explain Why the Alt-Right’s ‘Punk Rock Movement’ is Garbage,” Playboy has become an endless exercise in the usual boring virtue signaling.

Such moral posturing has driven away heterosexual men who might otherwise be interested in the publication’s erstwhile fiction and non-fiction. And sadly, Playboy isn’t the only men’s magazine that’s fallen into this trap.

Esquire, a periodical intended for cosmopolitan men, has become an instruction manual for what social justice warriors believe men should be. The exact moment that Esquire’s editorial team lost their minds was in 2016 when they named Hillary Clinton “the sexiest woman alive.” The following year they bestowed that title on German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Esquire‘s main competitor, GQ, is also in the business of peddling social justice-friendly content. Exhibit A was their attempt to revive Keith Olbermann’s career by giving him an internet show called “The Resistance” where he regularly screamed about how the Trump presidency needed to end right up until he was abruptly canceled.

Besides briefly offering Olbermann a platform, GQ has published plenty of essays that cater to progressive men, including “How Free Speech Warriors Mainstreamed White Supremacists” and “21 Books You Don’t Have to Read” (which included the Bible). It also honored Colin Kaepernick as its “man of the year.”

The ground ceded by these men’s magazines is now being claimed by blogs and podcasts like the “Art of Manliness,” “The Catholic Gentleman,” and “BroBible.” But the real loss can be felt in the greater culture, as men are deprived of any mainstream voice that speaks to what they are going through. Instead, Playboy, GQ, and Esquire have gone over to the feminist-approved version of masculinity where men are just progressive women with a different anatomy.

 

Read more:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/why-i-stopped-reading-p...

 

Ohlala... Read from top?

 

In 1900, Norman Lindsay, a promoter of naked, bosomy, lusty women in his highly controversial paintings, engravings and other images such as watercolours, did this cartoonish illustration for The Bulletin. 

“On the Word of a Woman — an Everyday Occurrence”… Norman here portrays "the" woman with the devil behind her bed, hardly seen, as she has entrapped a man, who now is in jail for rape (top left corner)… This is of course a one-sided view which could not be published in our day of uptight PC.
Yet, hasn’t this got ramification in today’s world in which we fight for our political life while being accused of unsavoury stuff, by women often ganging up on us, men, for having done half the trick of attraction themselves and been rejected by the male, us, thereafter? Are women so naive? Are men so dick-dependent? Of course there are occasions when men really step over the mark, especially when women are after favours (including jobs). Are women so pure? Is parading half-naked in a male’s apartment at 2 AM, while flirting, not an invitation to a bit more action than a cup of tea? If a male dick does not harden, then the guy is either impotent or gay.
There are of course rotten males who abuse their strength, their position and their desires. But the Me2 or #metoo movement has cast a wide net with a fine mesh. Much too fine a mesh: Makes the lawyers rich, women bitter and men dumb. Am I going to be in trouble? Sure…

But then:
Lindsay's frank and sumptuous nudes were highly controversial. In 1940, he took sixteen crates of paintings, drawings and etchings to the U.S. to protect them from the war. Unfortunately, they were discovered when the train they were on caught fire and were impounded and subsequently burned as pornography by American officials. The artist's older brother Lionel remembered Lindsay's reaction: "Don't worry, I'll do more."

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See also:
http://yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/35936

 

BOSTON — With its small supernova of a show, “Titian: Women, Myth & Power,” the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum here scores an art historical coup that institutions many times its size should envy, and audiences, hungry for old master dazzle, can count themselves lucky to see. Yet the same exhibition raises troubling questions about how, in art from the distant past viewed through the lens of the political present, aesthetics and ethics can clash.

The show first appeared at the National Gallery in London, moved on to the Museo del Prado in Madrid, and is making its last, and only American stop at the Gardner. At its core is a cycle of six monumental oil paintings of mythological scenes that Titian, who died in Venice in 1576, produced, late in his career, for the Spanish king Philip II.

Originally displayed in a single room in the imperial palace in Madrid, the pictures were gradually dispersed. One stayed in Spain; four went to England; and, in 1896, one ended up in Boston, initially in the Beacon Street drawing room of the local art collector Isabella Stewart Gardner, then in her faux-palazzo on the Fenway. Its arrival detonated an explosion of buzz. It was widely advertised as the most expensive painting in the United States (Gardner bought it for what was then about $100,000, or around $3.2 million today), which automatically made it, for some, the greatest painting anywhere.

 

It was titled “The Rape of Europa,” and its theme — a young woman, a Phoenician princess, is abducted and forcibly impregnated by a god in disguise — can’t help but put us on red alerts today, when accusations and verified reports of sexual assault on women appear almost daily in the news. In fact, the whole cycle, with its repeated images of gender-based power plays and exposed female flesh, invites #MeToo evaluation, and raises doubts about whether any art, however “great,” can be considered exempt from moral scrutiny.

And purely in terms of formal innovation and historical influence, great is what this art is. In 1550, when Titian first received the commission from Philip, then ruler-to-be, he was renowned throughout Europe as the most daringly expressive brush-man in the business. Unlike his Florentine peers, he let paint, stroke by stroke, have a material and emotional life of its own. In this, he was the un-Michelangelo, the contemporary he considered his only real rival.

In Philip, Titian found a patron willing to give him high fees and creative carte blanche. And Philip found in Titian an artist prestigious enough to burnish his own self-image as world-conqueror of an empire that controlled much of Western Europe and had staked out territory in Africa, Southeast Asia and the Americas. And he found a painter who was both experimental and brand-conscious enough to generate a distinctive, forward-looking court style.

 

Read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/12/arts/design/titian-isabella-stewart-gardner-museum-review.html

 

May as well cover these pubics with underpants and brassieres — and not mention them thereafter... Read from top. If you are too sensitive to go and see these nudes, don't go or just admire the rendering of the feet. Beautiful. These paintings were made as soft porn, using the Roman and greek antiquity stories as backgrounds. They were not for public consumption. They were painted for rich men — conquerors, warriors, kings — who were psychopaths fighting other psychopaths for supremacy. The soft porn was what the French call "le repos du guerrier"... (the warrior's pleasure). So stop moaning about. See the exhibition or not, you might learn something about yourself. Write about Assange if you must write about something... Read from top.

 

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