James Dean & His Pig

The famous photo to the left was taken by Dennis Stock for Life Magazine in 1955. According to the website for the exhibit "James Dean Comes Home: Photographs by Dennis Stock" (here), Dean asked Stock to accompany him to his family's farm in Indiana to celebrate his birthday. This picture of James Dean and a pig on his family's farm in Fairmount, Indiana was part of the exhibition of Stock's many photos of the young actor.

Is It Wrong to Call Someone a Pig?

I hate to wade into our cultural obsession with celebrities, but I thought it might be worth linking to an article in Salon about Alec Baldwin's now infamous phone message for his 11-year old daughter Ireland, whom he called a "rude, thoughtless little pig." Heather Havrilevsky's op-ed (here) asks the question "What's so wrong with name-calling? anyway. While it doesn't have much to do with pigs beyond a clever reference to Ralph and Piggy from Lord of the Flies, it was accompanied by this illustration of a pig-like child that called to mind the 1946 film Johnny Learns His Manners that I blogged about last week . I suppose it further testifies to the ease with which western culture uses its ideas of pigs to comment negatively about a person's supposed traits.