newyorkette

^{Buds in Central Park.}

It’s the first day of spring! Unlike in previous years, this year’s vernal equinox falls on March 20th (instead of the 21st): scientific explanation integrating a Seinfeld episode here. This is a photo in honor of Spring’s arrival, saying: oh, spring, you’re so pretty, whaddoyouwanna go and be so cold to me for?

And if the effects of the early Spring and it’s environmental implications interest you like they interested me as I watched flowers and buds coming up early in Central Park this year, see WaPo’s article: Early Spring Disturbing Life on Northern Rivers

^{(Laurel & Hardy plays on flat screen TVs with the sound turned off)}

I hadn’t thought of Big Nick’s as a Tables for One kind of place, but last week I was out late, too tired to go home and cook, and I had an odd craving for a crab burger and Laurel & Hardy films.

Now I know what you’re thinking. Another dive? Well, I love dives. And I need them, too. I, like many people who lived the free and bohemian life of the international globetrotting soul-searcher, am broke! I’m paying years of back taxes. I’m doing it willingly, since it was my choice to come back to the states. And dives are my friend. Big Nick is my friend. This I know because Big Nick tells me so. There are signs all over the place declaring that “Big Nick cares,” and even balloons I can buy that will tell the world as I walk to the subway: “Big Nick is my friend!”

Big Nick’s is comprised of two “joints” as the menu says: ” Big Nick’s burger joint & pizza joint,” and todays Tables for One comes from the burger joint, whose entrance is on the right. (The pizza joint has a separate entrance on the left. But you can have pizza in the burger joint.)

Not really a place to bring a date unless you’re testing him/her to see if they’re too finicky for a longterm relationship, but Read the rest of this entry »

A google search: “how to season an iron skillet” gave me this page with the most mind-boggling and, well, pretty obscene Google “smart ads” I’ve seen yet.
Was it a case of some crazy cross-referencing of the word “loin” in “tenderloin” in the ad on the right (to come up with “vaginal”) and the words “wife” and “rancid” in the site text (to come up with the “odor”) which then ended up coming together as “fishy vaginal odor” ?

I don’t know if lightening will strike twice, but you can try my google search yourself, and choose the “Whatscookingamerica” link that starts with “How to season a cast-iron skillet.” If that doesn’t work, try this link, though it may have a session id that won’t work for you.

At the very least, you’ll learn how to season a cast-iron skillet like I did tonight!
If not, and you simply want to humiliate yourself at the office, click on the link for the first ad (enzara.com) while there are plenty of people around, and then just try to live it down.

“Dessine-moi un mouton à six pattes”:

Montage inspired by AFP ticker item:

Every now and then the AFP ticker will have a one liner you can’t stop thinking about:

Here’s an older one I saved:

Leave it to WNYC to find “The Chocolate Bagpiper,” as Preacher S.L. Harris calls himself:

Harris marched and bagpiped with the Donegalans today, and is the one and only black bagpiper in the world that he is aware of. He wrote to the Howdy Doody show when he was 10, hoping to win an essay contest whose reward was a set of bagpipes, but didn’t win. He ended up playing the bass, the sax, and even the flute and violin (which he hated because they made him feel kind of “feminine.”) Harris finally took up the manly bagpipes at the age of 60 when his engineer’s union started a bagpipe band. “Other people have trouble starting up. But as soon as they put it in my hands, I played it,” he says. Now 65, he’s played all over the country, as well as in Ireland where he hopes to settle down with a young wife someday (he’s available, girls! don’t let the age fool you, he’s got personality, a point of view, is in great shape—looks good in a kilt—and is just as lazy as any young guy, says he needs a young woman who’ll fetch him a drink of water now and then and make him some babies, drinking women may abstain.)

He gave me his card, which says “The Chocolate Bagpiper” on one side, and “The Gospel Bagpiper” on the other. His fee in “full uniform” is $350 1/4 hour. His fee “Without Uniform” is $250 1/4 hour. I’m assuming “without uniform” means in his civilian clothes, not naked. Right, S.L.?

The parade committee continues to “refuse to allow gay people of Irish descent to march as an identifiable group.” The following are a few shots I profer (almost) without comment:

Read the rest of this entry »

^{(Dublin House, 79th & B’way, on St.-Pat’s eve. Artistic blur thanks to cameraphone and a very strong vodka tonic.)}

I was at Dublin House on St-Pat’s eve, where the green tinsel and four-leaf clover christmas lights complemented the schlocky Irish shmaltz coming out of the jukebox, as the Irish got a head start on their drinking. Why couldn’t they have played a little Chieftains? I play the tin whistle meself! “Sousin’n’carousin’ on St. Pat’s”

The rest of the week in New York was all about DEATH! Ways to die in New York.
And more death: “Wouldn’t YOU like to know!” You can’t read about the death of two chinese women that Times writer Joyce Purnick charges the press ignored, though, unless you have TimesSelect. Way to go, Joyce! A friend emailed me a cut and paste of the article since I’m too stubborn to subscribe. I say we all find a friend who’ll give us TimesSelect articles for free! If they’re too stubborn to go the iTunes route, TimesSelect can kiss my ass! (But only if they have a subscription!)

Death, and SEX! Playboy bunnies made their appearance in The New Yorker, but were unavailable to netporn-addicts reading the online version of The Sex Issue this week, er, I mean The Style Issue. (“In honor of the Style Issue”)

The New Yorker continued to be a huge presence in my life this week, as the BBC came to cartoonist “batch day” at Bob Mankoff’s offices and interviewed me when they caught me avoiding them by sitting outside Bob’s office instead of inside it. They asked the usual New Yorker cartoonist FAQ.

Finally, in a bit of nostalgic indulgence (hey, it’s st-patrick’s day, we can be shlocky) Carmen the dog is celebrated for propelling me into the world of cartoonery without even meaning to.

I’m going to bed early so I can get up in time to watch the parade and get an earful of bagpipe music, and watch Irishmen honor the struggles of their forebears by (as Conan O’Brien suggests) wearing their Moriarety green plastic leprechaun hats and covering the streets with green vomit! I’ll be wearing my rubber boots!

^{Les Aventures de Bananita & Lola (image: carolita johnson)}

Carmen was the start of it all. When I came back to New York with naive visions of immediate success in the illustration business in my head, the project I was supposed to be working on was a book on the international adventures of me and my dog Carmen. I’d turned us into Bananita & Lola, as you see above. Yep, that was my self image. A hairy monkey. Cute, but still a monkey. I could tell you all about how I was called “Apeface Johnson” from age 12 to 17, but that would be another story. (Suffice it to say that when I look in the mirror and like what I see, I’m thinking, “Hey! Lookin’ good, Apeface!“)

Carmen’s in doggy Heaven now, and you may have guessed that when she went, so did my thoughts of doing a book on her. I’d shown my friend Crawford some of these Bananita drawings before I even moved back to New York, and he’d thought I had potential in the cartooning business. So he started me on the cartoons while I struggled to regain control of my hand-eye coordination after 15 years of not drawing much more than doodles with sharpies a couple times a year when not working on projects for other people. As it turns out, the cartooning developped faster than my illustration style, which is finally taking on embryonic dimensions, after much frustration.

What made me think of this alluvasudden? The Ides of March yesterday! That was Carmen’s birthday. I thought it was about time I got Carmen/Lola back out again, now that she’s propelled me into doing cartoons for The New Yorker. She was a magic dog, an illegitimate daughter of one of King Juan Carlos’ dogs and Pepita (a smiling dachshund slut from Spain), who went to Derrida seminars with me, attended Jean-Paul Gaultier shows, peed in Jean-Paul’s showroom, and sniffed Yves St-Laurent’s dog’s butt. She had more of a social life than I did, went to more parties than I did, as well as travel internationally more than most Americans. She’s lived with me in a garret purported to be the maid’s quarters of Madame de Maintenon’s secret love-nest in Paris, and slept in Stephane Sednaoui’s and Laetitia Casta’s love-bed in New York (with me, not them).

Read the rest of this entry »

^{(I don’t mean it. I really, really love bagpipes.) [image: carolita johnson]}

St-Pat’s is tomorrow, and The Daily news offers up this list of bars in New York where you can go if you want to carouse with soused Irishmen (or wannabee Irishmen), which I’ll be using as a list of hotspots to avoid. I will, however, be attending the parade in order to get my earful of bagpipe music. Yes, that’s my dark secret. I love the bagpipes. I love their obscene cry. When I hear them in the distance I am spellbound, hypnotically compelled to seek them out as intently as Frankenstein’s monster sought out the violin in Young Frankenstein. I have resolved never to marry, but if I were to meet a man who had everything my boyfriend has, plus a talent for playing the bagpipes, I’d have to change my tune. So to speak.

Happy St-Pat’s all you crazy greenies!

^{A version of my rejected “spring break venus” cartoon. (image: carolita johnson)}

It’s just not easy to make an ex-model blush. Accidentally burst into the room while I’m dressing and I’m more likely to be annoyed at your manners than be consumed with embarrassment. I’ve undressed in front of dozens of people, and have walked down a runway for Dolce & Gabanna nearly twenty years ago with nothing on but a thong and a transparant dress. (The only thing about it that embarrassed me was that I hadn’t been warned, and so my bikini line was rather feral. And the only thing that made me balk was that having worn the wrong color underwear, I had been obliged to choose between being thrown out of the show or borrowing my friend Eugenie Vincent’s thong right offa her in order to wear the dress.)

So when I picked up The New Yorker this week, and turned to Joan Acocella’s “The Girls Next Door” I didn’t bat an eye at the page of pinups. I checked them out to see if any of the girls had breasts that I could envy (amusingly enough, the one-page collage of pinups that accompanies her piece in the magazine isn’t available online. No porn online via The New Yorker! You’ll just have to be like Emily at Emdashes and blush on the subway). Then I checked the length of the article to see if it was really as long as it had seemed online. Which it was. (Call me a chauvinist, but I don’t see how a woman can write objectively about pornography unless she’s a social anthropologist). I promptly forgot about the article, retaining only a vague puzzlement over why anyone would write so lengthily about “The Playmate Book: Six Decades of Centerfolds.”

I kind of resented the long article (and free publicity) on Playboy because the reason I don’t peddle my cartoons to Playboy is that according to Sam Gross (the shrewdest cartoonist in the business) their pay sucks and they retain all rights over your image. That means you get nothing from them once you sell them a cartoon, which isn’t the case with The New Yorker. I get royalties, and they act as my agent when someone wants to buy an original drawing or hire me for an advertisement. Till I learned this, I’d always wanted to sell my more salacious cartoons to Playboy, since their cartoons are an institution. Having grown up with two brothers and an ex-navy sailor father, I would go to the barber’s with them looking forward to reading all the Playboy cartoons while I waited. (Either my father didn’t notice, or figured Playboy was already so softcore that even a 7 year old girl could read it! Either way, I was objective enough as a child to be curious, and childish enough not to find the naked girls particularly offensive. For me, it was pure information: this was what women’s bodies looked like naked. The silly positions were obviously for the benefit of those puzzling grown-ups and didn’t seem to regard me.)

So, blasé as I am, I was even more surprised by the objections raised by a friend of mine to the Dolce & Gabbana ad in this “Style Issue”. It shows two rather spaced-out looking girls in a hayloft in some kind of hazy, drunken embrace. To me, it was just dumb. The first thing I noticed was how skinny the girls were. Eeew, is what I thought. I found them very unsexy. But for some, it’s particularly suggestive. The fashion world has become so boring in the last ten years that they have to resort to a little titillation and shock value to get anyone’s attention anymore. This is achieved by making their images resemble pornography. The problem is that they’re selling to people who, like them, are already in the fashion world and completely innured to such images. Which is why they have to go further and further.

The more I hear people complaining about the sexual content in this issue, the more I think maybe I should be shocked too. But that would make me a hypocrite. Am I a hypocrite? No! So where was this feeling of indignance coming from? Then I realized. I’m not shocked morally. I’m shocked in my capacity as a cartoonist! It’s easy to place a page of Playboy bunnies in the mag or print the word “fuck” in the fiction or reportage pieces, but try it in a cartoon! And that goes for nudity too. I’ve noticed that the occasional nudity in the cartoons is usually rather stylized and neutered-looking. No obviously sexual men or women unless you’re meant to laugh their sexuality away. In fact, even the sexuality in the fiction is usually diffused by an atmosphere of depression and impossibility of gratification.

I’ve decided that this issue of The New Yorker is a sign of its own confusion. TNY doesn’t want to be a prude. But they don’t want to be a slut either. It’s a hard balance to achieve. I find it all very interesting. I’ll just save my salacious cartoons for other purposes. They’ll be good for something someday.

Because who knows? Maybe we’ll someday have The New Yorker: “The Sex Issue”! Put it in a brown paper bag, and stamp it with an R rating. They probably couldn’t print enough copies to keep up with the demand. I’m ready for it!

^{Bob’s office, with miserable cartoonist. From a rejected “Mohammed themed submission week” batch. (image: carolita johnson)}

I got an email last night from Zach the assistant cartoon editor at The New Yorker with the reassuring subject line “Everything normal this week” (you have to wonder what kind of climate we work in when that’s news), message content being that the BBC people were coming to do an audio piece on batch day at the cartoon department this morning. The result of which was this inter-cartoonist banter:

Crawford: “You just came early because you wanted to get interviewed, you cartoonist whore.”
Me: “No, I just happened to wake up early and couldn’t get back to sleep!”
Crawford: “You wanted to be on TV, liar!”
Me: “No, really! I just woke up early! And anyway, YOU were early too!”
Crawford: “I needed to see Bob.”
Me: “Yeah, right. Well, I just wanted to see what was going on. Anyway, it’s the radio, not TV! It’s BBC!”
Crawford, relentless: “You wanted to be on the radio! You just wanted to hear your own voice on the radio, Miss Chatty!”
Me, capitulating shamelessly: “Alright! Alright! I wanted to be on the radio, okay! I like the radio! I like BBC!”

I have to admit, when anybody comes to batch day (others include the NYTimes Style section, Good Morning America, and Charles Osgood, who I love), I actually get up early and drag my tired, underslept ass in, looking as decent as possible. Yeah, I love the media. I’m an old pro. I like seeing them around. Also, everyone comes out of the woodwork when someone special is in, and I get to see cartoonists I haven’t seen in months this way. We all want to be interviewed, though we won’t admit it.

Anyway, these two BBC ladies pounced on me with their furry microphone, and asked me to show them my batch and explain each cartoon for the radio, which is harder than you’d think. Usually people just look and laugh, or look and say “I don’t get it.” Describing them is a bit like describing a silly face you’re making at someone to blind person. You don’t want to say, this is funny because… And the last thing you want to hear yourself say is, “get it?” It takes incredible aplomb and presence of mind. I’m not sure I had either in huge quantities this morning, having only slept for 4 hours.

They asked the usual questions:
How long did you submit cartoons before you were allowed to come in and meet Bob Mankoff? (answer: 5 weeks)
How soon before you sold a cartoon? (answer: 5 weeks)
How long before you were published? (answer: a year)
How many cartoons do you bring in each week? (answer: 7, though others bring in up to 20)
How long do you spend drawing them? (answer: anywhere from 4 hours to 3 days depending how pleased I am with them)
Do you get paid per cartoon? (answer: yes) (They’re so polite they don’t ask me how much I get paid. Those discrete Brits!)
How often do you sell? (answer: about once every few weeks)
Did you sell something today? (answer: I don’t know yet, because nobody knows till Thurdsay night if they sold something)

Voila! If you’d never heard the cartoonist FAQ, there you have it! I managed to get interviewed because I was avoiding the “fly on the wall” audio recording they’d been doing of cartoonists seeing Bob in his office with their batch. Bob wore a stunning tie that I hope someone described for the radio, BTW. (I rarely wait to see Bob with my batch, preferring to drop it in the “in” bin, and simply chat with Bob about anything, anything but my batch. It’s torture watching him look over my drawings. He sees 500 cartoons every week, and never laughs. Even if he does laugh (he has laughed a couple of times, or declared, “this is funny”) it’s no guarantee that the cartoon in question will sell. So I prefer to leave my offering and go eat lunch or have a nap if I have no job afterwards.

Which is what I did today. Just woke up. Am on my way to go see North by Northwest at the Ziegfeld! The BBC ladies have my number and will call me on Thursday to see if I sold something. I’ll let them, and you, know how it went!

^{(image: carolita johnson)}

This cartoon is in honor of this week’s The New Yorker “Style Issue.”

Though I’m not in this issue of The New Yorker, I can, in the spirit of good sportiness, highly recommend the Shouts and Murmurs piece, “Ideas for paintings,” by Jack Handey, which is almost like something really annoying my own art-opinionated father might write if he was funny. But it’s by Jack Handey, so it’s not annoying. My favorite is the “French Lovers” suggestion. My favorite cartoon of this issue is Crawford’s “Is that what you’re wearing to Hell?”

People often ask me why I don’t do more fashion cartoons, since I’ve worked for so long in the fashion business and in so many different capacities (model, designer, patternmaker, software for agents, stylist’s assistant, you name it). But my answer is always that having been in it so long, and still being in it up to my ears really, I don’t have the distance I need. My cartoons are almost always about things I don’t understand, things that stump or surprise me. (Like how I got to the point one day when I was surprised that there are actually people out there who don’t know or even care, by gosh, who Dolce and Gabbana are.)

Now this is what I call sadly ironic. Joyce Purnick supposedly wants to bring our attention to two other murders that we negligently haven’t been paying attention to while we’ve been busy soaking up all the media available on Imette St-Guillen’s case. So she writes an article that only TimesSelect subscribers can have access to?

Let’s say I didn’t buy the paper today. I buy it often enough not to be bothered with the NYTimes’ petty imposition of TimesSelect’s subscription fee. Has it occured to them that the least they can do is let me open a Paypal account that lets me pay, say, a fifty cents to a dollar for access to all or some of their TimeSelect articles all day on a given day? Is what works for iTunes not good enough for the gray lady?

Well, if you have TimesSelect, read all about the “Two Killings That Didn’t Make News.” I’m not subscribing. I did the trial period and concluded that I won’t pay for Maureen Dowd, for one. She’s getting way too sloppy for me, liberal as I am (which is probably more liberal than she’s supposed to be). And paying for a subscription plus buying the paper in person so that I can read something on the subway or park or cafe (without toting my computer around) isn’t gonna happen. For another thing, I can’t sit on my computer on the wet lawn in Central Park.

^{Unless the lone diner in question looks like this, it’s safe to assume she’s happy to be dining alone. (image: carolita johnson)}

I bought the Sunday Times this weekend, but neglected to read it till today because I spent the weekend not alone. This morning I found Bob Morris’ article “The Rudeness of Strangers”, thinking it was about rude New Yorkers, and was surprised at the content. Oh, I get it now… We’re making a reference to Blanche DuBois, the pathetic, old and lonely but still hot under the collar, desperate old maid who liked to say: “I’ve always depended on the kindness of strangers.”

New York is hardly the place where a woman eating alone is the object of pity. More likely, if she’s the object of any negative ideas at all, she’s the object of annoyance to a hostess who would rather seat two at a table than one, or the waiter who stands to make only half the tip he’d make if he were waiting on a couple. I’ve worked in restaurants, so I know. (NB: once you’ve established yourself as a regular, most waiters and hostesses will give you preference over an unknown couple if it comes down to a choice.)

But it never occured to me that a waiter would “make a fuss” or assume I’ve been stood up, as Serena French seems to assume people think about her when she dines alone. The only time I can think it might be rough would be if I had the misfortune to end up in a date-restaurant alone, but this is usually avoidable. No, dining alone, as Bob eventually manages to understand, isn’t always something a person wants to be saved from.

So what is the protocol, he wonders? Let me tell you, as the well-seasoned dine-a-loner that I am. Read the rest of this entry »

^{(image from La Esquina’s take-out menu)}

Much has been made of La Esquina, where hipsters go to feel special and be insulated from ordinary people (word, from jossip for example, has it you can’t get into the speakeasy without a special phone number, but when I went to the restaurant for brunch one Saturday, Serge, an owner told me this was nonsense. Though he did also ask me, in a very nice way mind you, if I’d be interested in cheating on my boyfriend, so maybe it’s only true for some).

The Corner Deli, which is the taqueria third of the Corner/Esquina triumverate (there’s the deli, the fine restaurant, and the speakeasy all contiguously located on that corner) is a non-hipster (but not a nohipster) joint. Open to everyone, you can sit at the counter elbow to elbow with deliverymen, students, artsyshoppy bobo types, and me.

Read the rest of this entry »

You can’t beat the Ziegfeld for seeing the old movies you’ve only been able to watch on TV, DVD or your worn out old VHS cassettes for the last ten years or so, so you gotta jump when you see that North by Northwest is playing there this week (Tuesday 8:30).

So is Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Friday 8:15). (I always cry at the end the way other people cry at weddings, when Dreyfuss becomes a sort of intergalactic Cinderella.)

Maybe someone can tell me who the Ziegfeld Theater pissed off enough to make sure their showtimes aren’t on any of the movie websites (not even their own).

Other movies include: Alien, Space Odyssy 2001 and others you can call them to get more info about: Ziegfeld.
Other features of the Ziegfeld include: red velveteen retro interior, great sound, and the best restrooms ever, with individual sinks and mirrors in each stall! Class!

^{“Are you flirting with me?” (image: vincent van gogh)}

– Post-coital nap to eternity in idling car: “Love birds die in fume horror”[NYP] – Count on vitamin B to avoid heart attack: “Studies find B vitamins don’t prevent heart attacks”[NYT] – Cancer from being born not long after 9/11: “9/11 toxic tots”[NYP] – Get raped and murdered by a bouncer: Littlejohn [Gothamist] – Get hit by a bus in Brooklyn [NYP], or hit by a bus on the Upper West Side: [eOnline], or hit by a bus on the East Side instead: [AMNY] – Work at the Ragtop Lounge: “Slay club…” [NYP] – Run into this guy on the wrong day: “No longer can I tolerate”: [Found Magazine]

Had enough? Forget all this and go gaze upon the “Dance of Life” painting in the Munch exhibition at the MoMa. You’ll get the chance to see a lot of surprisingly undepressing work that you probably didn’t know existed. Satisfaction guaranteed, unless you were hoping to see the “Puberty” painting, which isn’t there (but a version of it’s there in a drawing near a version of “The Scream,” still AWOL since it’s theft.)

Newyorkette studies find that nothing prevents death as the final and ineluctable consequence of being alive, so enjoy it while you can.

^{A bud on a tree on the lake in Central Park, NY.}

^{No, not to me, to them.}

On my way home from Fairway with my goat’s milk, multi-flower honey, and PG Tips, I spotted a couple sitting on the corner of 73rd and Broadway with a sign that said: “TALK TO ME.” Nobody was talking to them.

So I walked up to them and said, “Okay, what’s your story?” And they just said, “How ya doing?” Before I knew it, I was talking to them.

It transpired while we were chatting so pleasantly that they met my editor, Bob Mankoff, in an elevator at a psychiatrists’ convention where he was the guest of honor (for all the shrink cartoons he’s done). And he’d talked to them too, for three hours. They were discrete, dammit, and wouldn’t tell me anything except Read the rest of this entry »

^{Spring coming up through the mulch near Hernshead, central Park}

It was 74 degrees today! A walk through Central Park was a vision of bare legs, belonging either to pretty girls in skirts or to dorky types already wearing shorts. Lovers lounged around on the edge of the lake; indulging in PDA. Flowers were shamelessly poking their buds out of the mulch, coyly proferring bud cleavage.

This week in New York was all about Imette St-Guillen, the bouncer who may or may not have killed her (but who was up to no good either way), and we learned a lot about bouncers from a bouncer. Meanwhile, the Dubai Ports deal sank, taking the President’s approval ratings along with it. On the lighter side, we still have no bird flu and can laugh at apoplectic French cocks, while enjoying the best croissant I could find this side of the ocean.