Thursday, December 27, 2012

Faces No. 347 - Boxing Day

By Jack Brummet

[pencil, Sharpie on 2'x2' cotton sterilization wrapper]

click to enlarge

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Monday, December 24, 2012

Driving Home To Seattle On Christmas Eve, We Watch Deer Drinking from the Skookumchuck River


By Jack Brummet

A rainbow loops over
An alder cathedral.
Dark clouds are sinking.

The Lamplighter
Loans them a patch of land
And a heartbeat.
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Friday, December 21, 2012

Faces No. 344 - Doppelgängers

By Jack Brummet


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Poem: A touch of evil



By Jack Brummet

Darkness, once eliminated
furtively obtrudes again.

Does the wind blow 
over the earth,

or does it blow 
under heaven?
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Faces No. 343 - Armageddon Eve

By Jack Brummet

[Sharpie, pencil, and pen and India Ink on rough watercolor paper]

click to enlarge
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Thursday, December 20, 2012

Ashleigh Brilliant on fingertips, and self-determination



"There is a whole world
which I alone rule, but it ends at my fingertips." 
- Ashleigh Brilliant
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Santa Claus (1959, directed by René Cardona)

By Jack Brummet, Film Editor

Santa Claus (1959) appears on many worst movies ever lists. "Santa works in outer space and does battle with a demon sent to Earth by Lucifer to ruin Christmas by killing Santa and "making all the children of the Earth do evil." Mystery Science Theater 3000, of course, did a send up of this film.


click to enlarge
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ATIT Reheated - A compendium of hand gestures: The finger, the wanker, the cuckoo sign, the shocker, rock horns, the shaka sign, and more

By Mona Goldwater, Signs and Hand Gestures Editor


Click to enlarge. Vice-President Rockefeller gives the finger to a
group of hecklers.

The finger - (e.g., "giving" someone the finger), is an highly popular hand gesture made by extending the middle finger of the hand while bending the other fingers at the second knuckle. It's can perhaps be a softer way of saying "f*** you". In other countries, the OK sign means the same thing. President Bush can be seen in the montage below, performing the gesture. The finger can be extremely hostile, or, among friends, it can just be another way of saying "yeah, right."




This variant was sent by Mark Yeend,
who called it the "fake flip off"
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The Bent Elbow is a theatrical, Italian version of The Finger, and is sometimes combined with the finger. In Italian it is known as the gesto dell'ombrello, meaning "the umbrella gesture." It is typically used two ways: 1) to answer "no way!" in an extremely emphatical (and quite vulgar) way, and 2) after a triumph against some unfair enemy, with a sense of revenge.
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The Sssshhh sign... (Thanks to Mark Yeend)
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The Fig sign - The sign of the fig is a highly insulting hand gesture used, so far as I know, only in Italy (perhaps in other places, too.) It is made by making a fist, with thethumb inserted between the index and middle fingers. The gesture allegedly represents the female genitalia, although I really don't see the resemblance. . .
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The cuckoo sign. A hard sign to illustrate, because it is active. It is used to indicate a person in the room is unbalanced. Kids sometimes use it in a sort of rebus: You (pointing toward a person) + drive (gesture showing two hands moving a steering wheel) + me (point toward self) + crazy (the cuckoo sign). Normally, the gesture is made by pointing your index finger at your head and tracing circles with the finger. It's a little bit old school, and you don't see it much anymore.
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The beckoning sign. Another active sign. The "come here" gesture. You hold your fist clenched. The finger moves repeatedly towards the gesturer (in a hook) as to draw something closer. It is normally seen as condescending because it is a command. It is sometimes performed with the four fingers, or the entire hand.
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The blah blah sign /the yak yak gesture. The fingers are kept straight and together in a horizontal fashion while the thumb is held out straight. The fingers and thumb then snap together repeatedly to suggest a mouth talking. Sort of like a duck's mouth. It is used to indicate that a person is pointlessly flapping their gums.
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The time out sign. Used in sporting events, and sometimes in normal conversation. In conversation it can mean "let's take a break," "please quite talking about this," or "stop arguing."
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The benediction sign. Used by pontiffs and emperors (and, I think, Priests) as a blessing sign. Click on this link to see the Benediction gesture, on a coin of Emperor Constantine.
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Crossed fingers - Crossing the first two fingers is a good luck sign around the world, mainly, however, in Christian countries. One theory posits that when Christianity was illegal, the crossing of fingers was a secret sign for Christians to recognise each other. The gesture sometimes is used to negate something spoken (if you tell someone "you look fabulous" with your fingers crossed, you were probably not telling the truth).
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Rock horns/hook 'em horns/devil horns
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The OK sign
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The shaka sign is the "hang loose" gesture. It is similar to American Sign Language letter "Y", where a fist is also made with only the thumb and pinky extended. The sign is often followed by waving as a greeting or acknowledgement--"thanks for letting me on the freeway!"
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Call me. These days it might be a gesture you make to someone across the floor of a nightclub.
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Thumbs up
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Thumbs down - We think--from watching all those Cecil B. DeMille style sand and sandals epics--that the thumbs down gesture means "kill him!" In fact, scholars just aren't sure whether the gesture means kill him, or spare him...thumbs down meaning, "no, spare him," and thumbs up meaning "yes, kill him!"
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The stop gesture - In the U.S., this is the stop gesture. In Greece, however, it has a slightly different meaning: "I rub feces in your face!"
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The Vulcan salute ("live long and prosper").

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The wanker sign. . .I probably don't need to explain this one.
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Biting the thumb at anyone was once a mark of contempt, usually designed to provoke a quarrel. . .it also means to defy. ``Do you bite your thumb at us?'' -Wm. Shakespeare
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The choke sign - The gesture refers to someone or something "choking" in the sense of failing under pressure. It generally refers to someone involved in an athletic event, althought I have heard it used in the business world too.
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The cutthroat sign is usually used for one of two things: to warn someone to quit talking or suffer the consequences. Or to say "He's a dead man."
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The Bang Bang, or, gun sign
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nose thumbing/queen anne's fan - This is a mild mocking gesture.
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The shocker - A sexually-charged, gesture in which the ring finger and thumb are curled down, with the other fingers extended. The index and middle fingers touch, and the back of the hand faces away from the gesturer. The gesture refers to the act of inserting the index and middle fingers into a vagina and the pinky finger into the nearby exit apperture (the "shocker"). The shocker is sometimes considered vulgar. Did I just write sometimes? There are dozens of rhyming phrases for this gesture, like "Two in the pink, one in the stink."
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The gag me sign - This is the only photo I could find of this gesture. I'm not sure, but the gesture may have originated with "Valley Speak," the idion of the kids of the San Fernando Valley. I do remember the Valley Speak phrase "gag me with a spoon." I'm sure this gesture was around along before the 80s.
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Victory Sign - V for victory. A lot of us remember this as being one of Sir Winston Churchill's signatures. In this photo, President Richard Nixon used the sign at the moment of his greatest disgrace. . .he was leaving Washington D.C., having resigned the Presidency. Moments after this 'chopper took off, Gerald Ford became President and Nixon landed later that day in California, as a civilian.
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Let's get high - Tommy Chong in a vidcap from The Tonight Show with Jay Leno demonstrates this gesture.
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