the elephant has a wrinkled moth-proof hide

Above A construction pattern for making a two-person elephant costume, from Albert Neely Hall, The Boy Craftsman: Practical and Profitable Ideas for a Boy's Leisure Hours. Boston: Lothrop, Lee and Shepard, 1905.

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Ogden Nash, "The Elephant," one of a series of comical animal poems written to accompany Camille Saint-Saëns' Carnival of the Animals . NY: Columbia Masterworks, 1949—

Elephants are useful friends,

Equipped with handles at both ends.

They have a wrinkled moth-proof hide.

Their teeth are upside down, outside. 

If you think the elephant preposterous,

You've probably never seen a rhinosterous.

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VIDEO LINKS

Nature, Art, and Camouflage  

Art, Women's Rights, and Camouflage

 Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage

 Art, Gestalt, and Camouflage

one legge / testy forward imperious tyrannical

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Above Roy R. Behrens, Revisiting Thomas Eakins (© 2021). Digital montage.

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Anthony à Wood, Life and Times—

Sir Arthur Aston was governour of Oxon at what time it was garrison’d for the king, a testy, forward, imperious and tirannical person, hated in Oxford and elsewhere by God and Man. Who kervetting on horseback in Bullington green before certaine ladies, his horse flung him and broke his legge: so that it being cut off and he therupon rendred useless for employment, one Col. Legge succeeded him. Soon after the country people coming to market would be ever and anon asking the sentinell, “who was governor of Oxon?” They answered “one Legge.” Then replied they: “A pox upon him! Is he governor still?”

Charles Henry Bennett | Shapeshifting Fox

C.H. Bennett, Metamorphosis (1863)

Above One of a series of elaborate comic metamorphoses (aka shapeshifting) created by Victorian-era British illustrator Charles Henry Bennett (1863) in sardonic reference to Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection, this one titled "Beware of the goose when the fox preaches." Courtesy The Wellcome Library.

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Vincent Starrett (Chicago Tribune book columnist Charles Vincent Emerson Starrett), Born in a Bookshop: Chapters from the Chicago Renascence. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1965, pp. 295-296—

It is curious how the faces of acquaintances repeat themselves in foreign lands. Uncanny, too, for what could be more disconcerting than to encounter an old friend jogging past dressed like a mandarin or selling chestnuts in coolie cloth? No sooner had I reached the Orient than this began to happen. Friends and associates I thought I had left behind in America, sometimes fellows I hadn't seen in years, popped up in Yokohama, Tokyo, Shanghai, and Peking, looking very much as I had seen them last, yet subtly altered by the native costumes they were wearing. It was as if one met them coming from a masquerade. In Yokohama it was an old school friend who had been dead for years. He was running a cigarette kiosk near the docks and I knew better than to speak to him. In Tokyo it was a genial barber who used to shave me in Chicago. And in Peking [Beijing] here were so many that my blood ran cold.

Among the friends I met in Chinese garb (and with Chinese faces) were some pretty distinguished fellows…I saw Alex Woollcott many times: once he was chirping seductively at a bird he was carrying through the streets in a bamboo cage. Once my dead mother turned out of a side street and gave me a turn that almost bowled me over. Once I met Bob Casey driving a small donkey attached to a two-wheeled cart: he was selling vegetables. After a time it became an amusing game to look for absent friends and sometimes to hail them genially, and no harm came of it for the Chinese were a friendly people, always ready to hail one in return.

But one day I really did get a shock. Rolling down one of the main thoroughfares of Peking in my rickshaw, I came suddenly abreast of another rickshaw rider headed in the opposite direction. He was bundled up in a fur coat and wore a fur hat, rather like a turban, at a rakish angle. He looked exactly like J. P. McEvoy and for a moment we looked hard at each other. Then I said, “Hello, Mac,” and he stopped his boy and said, “Why, hullo, Vince! What are you doing in Peking?”

Digital Montage Parody | Kelly Cunningham

Self-Portrait Parody (2013), © Kelly Cunningham

Above Digital montage by graphic design student Kelly Cunningham (University of Northern Iowa, 2013), a self-portrait parody of A Nymph in the Forest by Charles-Amable Lenoir, oil on canvas, n.d. The original painting is shown below. 

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Bunny Johnson, quoted in Remar Sutton and Mary Abbott Waite, eds., The Common Ground Book: A Circle of Friends. Latham NY: British American Publishing, 1992, p. 274—

We've some good friends who put words together more entertainingly than most of us. For instance, at Christmas they put "ointments" on the tree. Once when she went to visit the Mennonites up in Jefferson County, she stopped to ask the policeman where the "morphodites" lived.

When his ulcer was acting up, he reported that the doctor had told him "not to eat any more plumage." That gives new insight into the meaning of "roughage," doesn't it?

World-class achievements go into the "Gideon's Book of Records." And once after a "hockey expedition game," they took us out to eat "garnished hen."

They've had such an influence on their friends that sometimes we can't remember whether the color, for instance, is really "burgamy" or not. 

Charles-Amable Lenoir, Nymph in Forest (n.d.)

Costumes as Performance & Activism

Roy R. Behrens, Poster Design (detail), 2011

There is such enormous satisfaction in the process of graphic design, especially when a client is clear about the focus of an event (or product or whatever), budget restrictions, and so on—and thereafter it's left to my judgment. A good example recently is this logo-like title image I made for an upcoming symposium (lectures, exhibits, performances) on Costumes as Performance and Activism, sponsored by the University of Northern Iowa Arts Consortium and the Costume Society of America Midwest Region, on October 14-15, 2011. And of course it's the same kind of pleasure that designers of costumes and clothing enjoy.

Victorian Split Personality

Somewhere I have a delightful book of photographs by Mark Sloan, titled Dear Mr. Ripley: A Compendium of Curiosities from the Believe It or Not! Archives (NY: Bullfinch Press, 1993)—unfortunately, I can't find it at the moment. It includes such oddities as women with baby faces on their knee caps, animals with meaningful shapes on their sides, and other examples of "spurious images." One I especially remember is a photograph of a tavern owner from Cresco, Iowa (hometown of Norman Borlaug), in which he is both dressed and shaven to be two radically different persons, one on each half of his body, e.g., bearded on one half, clean-shaven on the other; dressed in white clothing on one half, in black on the other. I remembered this a few weeks ago when I ran across the set of three photographs shown here, which appeared initially in a Victorian-era British magazine around the turn of the century. It consists of course of three photographs of the same person in the same outfit, but seen from three different directions (there is some cheating going on in the photograph on the right, because the top hat has been omitted), which the result that the same person is both a Victorian "gentleman" and a "hobo," or migrating vagrant.