Thursday, August 16
Behold, the Neo-Classical Frisbee
What with summer doldrums and the real world, I've been really falling down on the job finding fun ways to spread classicist subversion, or at least Baroque subversion. (The difference is classicist subversion involves semi-nekkid Roman deities, while baroque subversion involves semi-nekkid flying babies.)
So, without further ado, I present The Commemorative Death of Hyacinthus frisbee I devised a few Sundays back during the frisbee-making contest at the firm picnic in Central Park. (The guy next to me was doing an elaborate map of the five boroughs, complete with the locations of all the parks, and I had to escalate). You see, Hyacinthus, Apollo's friend (or something), was the first victim of ultimate frisbee, bonked on the head with the sun-god's whopping big discus during a particularly badly-timed throw.
The event was most famously rendered in the painting (on canvas, not in Sharpie marker on plastic) of the same name by American expat artist and bad-spelling President of the Royal Academy Benjamin West in 1770-1771, incidentally. So I'm not the first.
I later discovered the competition jury were not my classical architecture superiors, but their kids, and, of course, the high-concept frisbees (the borough map, the Mondrian, the retro-psychedelic swirls) similarly suffered, with flowers, smily faces, and colorful stripes winning instead. Maybe next time I should try something like the Phaeton Hotwheels Truck or the Acis and Galatea Beach-Ball. Or you could branch out into things medieval, and fast-food tie-ins: the Cheeseburgers of Calais. The possibilities are endless.
![[SMMMHDH]](http://www.mgilleland.com/music/smmmhdh.png){kind=small}
