newyorkette

Fellow cartoonist (and New Yorker Book of Baseball Cartoons editor) Crawford and I, in our capacity as New Yorker cartoonists, did portrait artist duty for Audi’s Streets of Tomorrow event at Belmont Race Track this weekend. That’s around 600 portraits we did, if I calculate correctly. There were about 150 sheets of paper to an easel pad, and we did mostly couples or families, so give or take a coffee break or two we both went through about one to one and a half each day, so you do the math! (Seriously, you do it, because I’m really bad at math!)

We did start out showing off our cartoonist prowess by drawing whimsical cars, and autographing complimentary copies of The New Yorker’s Book of New York Cartoons, but as soon as one person says, “hey, will you do me?” it’s portrait duty till closing time! “You don’t mind, do you?” asked Eric Bernstein, our TNY event coordinator, with respect we are unaccustomed to. Of course not! Drawing portraits is a lot more fun (and much easier) than trying to come up with 300 original cartoons on the spur of the moment! We count our blessings!

Here are some pics! Crawford decided to break in a new pen by drawing Eric and I before the gig started. He drew me as Condoleeza Rice, and Eric is actually much funnier looking than this (ha ha, just kidding, Eric!):

So, I showed him what for (woof woof!) :

Then we both got to work. Here’s Crawford:

And here are my first two sitters:

And the next two had seen Crawford’s portrait and said, “Do something funny, but… don’t make us into dogs.” The guy looked really scary while I drew him, almost as if here were thinking, “this betta be good”, so that’s what I put into his thought-bubble. And the girl settled into a very worried look, which, since she was sitting next to him made me put “who IS this guy?” in hers. Which was uproariously funny to them, since they’re not cartoon editors (not as picky as Bob) :

My favorite subjects were of course the subjects with a few extra pounds on them, quirky looks, big ears, odd faces, all of whom I drew as if they were the most beautiful people in the world. They were always amazed, and would say, “Wow! You drew me so goodlooking!” (I just draw people as if someone in love were describing them to me! You can’t go wrong that way). Eric claimed I put evil glints into the eyes of naughty children, but I told him I only draw what I see…

Perhaps I was inspired by the live chamber music players, who were doing some pretty deft classical music versions of Led Zep (Been a long time…), Gloria Gaynor (I will survive), and others. (I put in a request to hear Deep Purple’s “Highway Star,” but must’ve been on my break when they played it!)

^{The Bibliotheque Nationale, where I sat at the same desks and read the same books (marked with candle droppings sometimes), and perhaps dreamed the same dreamy dreams as Rousseau.}

Ever look through your old computer and find stuff you can’t remember writing? I found this in my medievel anthropology notes in the middle of some research about Hildegard of Bingen. I must have typed it into my computer at the national library (La Bibliotheque Nationale). Doctoral students spend most of their time wondering how and when they’re going to get into someone’s pants, never doubt that. The only difference between them and regular people is that they lace their daydreams with a bit of Latin. (And, well, regular people just don’t get nicknames like “Onan the Librarian.”)

(click the “read more” link to see the long lost doctoral-student-in-love poem)

Read the rest of this entry »

^{This week’s TNY fiction is available online. (image: carolita johnson)}

If you haven’t read anything but the cartoons yet in The New Yorker, there’s some reading to get done this weekend. This week’s fiction, An Afternoon, plays devil’s advocate by exploring the desire of the pedophile’s victim. Read the rest of this entry »

^{Springtime in Bryant Park, as seen from the lawn’s point of view (yes, it’s open for lunchbreak sunbathing again).}

Angels descended upon us. [Bryant Park overrun by angels]
Writers descended upon us. [PEN World Voices]
The Tribeca Film Festival descended upon us. [If you’re doing the Tribeca Film Festival…].
Softball season began! [TNY softball practice…]
Press 2, to hear the national anthem en español. [The national anthem, their way…]
And in case anybody’s interested in this kind of thing, it’s Saddam Hussein’s birthday today.

^{They did it their way. (Like the rest of us!)}

Some inconsequential uproar and controversy has been brewing about the new spanish-language version of the United States’ national anthem. See Michelle Malkin’s lowdown on “Nuestro Himno”. Or WaPo’s: here.
I don’t know what the fuss is about. Everybody knows that the real national anthem is “My Way!” (Is there anything more american than appropriating and translating everything into one’s own idiom? Not to mention the complete assimilation of the capitalist ideal: 9 of the ten dollars they sell the CD for go into their own pockets, with the remaining measly one going to the effort they’re supposedly supporting.)

(image: carolita johnson)
Stop by The Bubble Lounge between or after films and have some fine champagne under flattering candlelight. (There’s also a full bar). The atmosphere is Parisian cozy chic, with armchairs and sofas everywhere, good music, and here and there my champagne-themed posters. They’re still up (originally put up for the 10th birthday party), though one of them appears to have been splashed a bit, perhaps a drink melodramatically flung in someone’s lying two-timing (and now wet) face? And it’s where A.M. Holmes had her book party, as covered by Gawker’s party crashers. While you’re there, you can pick up a postcard with my “happy cork” image on it and send a drunken “wish you were here” to someone you really shouldn’t be writing to anymore.

Au champagne!
(The Bubble Lounge is at 228 West Broadway, a block north of Franklin Street Station on the 1 Train)
There are snacks, but if you’re really hungry, go up the street to Takahashi Tribeca.

^{Batter up! (No KFC jokes, please) [Image: carolita johnson]}

Well, I had allergies, so I was useless. I spent most of the night on the bench striving not to scratch my itchy eyes. I was good for one thing, though. I had an eight-pack of baby-Buds in my bag, which I added to the bag of Corona’s bought from the ubiquitous Mojito Joe. (I think I’ve even seen him on Brighton Beach!)

Practice was at DeWitt Clinton Park on 11th avenue and 54th street till late last night, and there were lights! (Quite a change from the illumination we’re used to at Central Park: fireflies). We were joined by a few street kids, one of whom, Kyle, was an urchin straight out of a Norman Rockwell. He patiently waited for his chance at bat, hanging on even as his buddies headed home, calling, “Kyle! Go home!” So I gave the kid a break (in addition to my glove), and got Josh Hersh, ever the silver knight, to let him cut the line. After his last hit Kyle composed himself and raised the bat over his head with both hands to yell the words:”Never underestimate the little guy!” (Actually he did the same thing after his penultimate hit, mistakenly thinking it was his last hit, but had no qualms about repeating his finale.) Then he sauntered casually beyond center field adjusting his sweatjacket, and I watched him squeeze through a gap in the fence and disappear into the night.

The team is gonna be great this year! Josh was slugging away, Crawford inspired a shifty man standing behind the dugout fence to exclaim, “the old guy can hit!” (he later exclaimed, “the old guy can catch!”), Gus Powell brought to mind Sidd Finch, and there were a couple of new female fact checkers with incredibly powerful arms. (Leading me to suspect that Canby has realized that good fact checkers are desirable assets to the magazine, but good fact checkers with softball skills are even better.) Read the rest of this entry »

^{Either that or those pigeons are getting way out of hand!}

I had an early fitting this morning for Chocolate Kisses (cool junior clothes you can buy cheap at Kohl’s and the like), and an hour to kill before my next one for Araks (cool, very expensive clothes you can get at Barney’s Coop), so I bought my Bi Bim Bap at Pergola’s on 39th street, and brought it to Bryant Park. I was just about finished with my miso soup when I looked up and saw I was surrounded by angels. Idiot students, was my first grumpy thought, but as my digestion contributed to a feeling of well-being, my curiosity and benevolence kicked in, and I got up and asked one of them what their story was.

“We’re promoting the Cirque de Soleil,” one very pretty angel told me, “and we also go around the city blessing nice people like you,” she added, while stroking my arm rather brazenly for an angel. Anyone sitting in Bryant Park between the hours of 11:30 and 12:30 will have seen their playful antics, done during their lunch break, all of them obviously aspiring, exhibitionist actors. There were cartwheels, waltzes, and raids on single seated park patrons that ended in a whirling hand-held ring-of-angels-around the rosie around the delighted, camera-wielding victim.

All in all they provided scenes that would’ve blown your mind if you’d fallen asleep on park bench and woken up to see, like the above (angels congregating, with the Grace Building for a backdrop), or this one:

^{Books change the world, whether you like them or not.(image: carolita johnson)}

Whenever I’m not working enough, I volunteer for things. PEN World Voices this week got the benefit of my free time last night. It was a little weird since I knew no one, and the other volunteers seemed to know eachother already. I just popped up out of the blue. After all, I’m not a writer, nor am I in the publishing business. I just thought the event was a worthy cause.

Salman Rushdie opened the festival, speaking in his inimitable way, sounding and looking bit like a cross between John McGiver and Alistair Cooke. I long held a grudge against him after reading his first book, whose metaphors and similes annoyed me to no end. The one that constantly comes back to mind is the one worthy of Tex Avery, describing someone (the narrator’s sister?) getting crushed “as flat as a chapati pancake.” I remember feeling insulted, thinking, fuck you, and throwing the book out. The outrage he inspired in me was not against injustice or human suffering, but at himself. It didn’t seem to me that being supremely annoying was worthy of the international support rallied for him after the Fatwah. I’d always thought of him as the Forrest Gump of literature. But now I understand. He’s like the war in Iraq, which I didn’t believe in or want either, but which is now a reality that’s changed all our lives forever, whatever that means. That’s how I feel about Rushdie, a constant he’s there and has changed the face of literary culture, whatever he means.

Orhan Pamuk, on the other hand, was meaningfulness in a bottle. You could almost imagine Rushdie as a little red devil, and Pamuk as a little silver-haloed angel, each perched coquettishly on one of Literature’s shoulders. Even with Margaret Atwood asking him the occasional obviously silly question designed to prompt an easy, painless chuckle from all present, he always answered in all earnestness. Coaxed gently by Atwood into admitting rather cooperatively that the sparks of his inspiration began when his “auntie” admonished him “that I may break my toys if I play with them that way,” Read the rest of this entry »

^{My handmade cover of Moby Dick from days when I had a lot more time on my hands, and a penchant for pretending I was an engraver. (Image: carolita johnson)}

Inspired by La Penguina’s new subway reader series on ABL, here’s a book to read on the subway when you want to forget where you are, and who doesn’t?

I re-did the cover to this book in a Paris garret in 1988, when the ugly cover it came with got on my nerves one time too many. It was not only done at a magical moment in my personal evolution where I’d reached a maturity level sufficient to read a book on the high school reading list again and of my own free will. It was when I had dreams of doing book covers, imagining that there was a job out there called, “book cover artist.”

My best friend is now borrowing this book, and has promised not to put any coffee rings or hamburgur juice stains on it’s now precious cover.
Recommended reading, but skip the “loose fish and fast fish” chapter if it bogs you down. I never really got that one.

Maybe I’ll be reading it again on the ride down to the park: softball season is starting, and TNY is playing the United Nations in a couple of weeks. Somehow that doesn’t seem right! Shouldn’t we just play T-ball and drink beers to world peace instead? PS: I”ll let you know if Gawker decides to cover our softball season again this year.

^{The smell dogs like best.}

Matt Diffee, rising star cartoonist at TNY, has been working on a rejected cartoons project (as usual), and has been asking fellow TNY cartoonists for some “crazy,” “dirty,” outrageous” kinds of rejects. Only I guess I’m not as dirty, outrageous and crazy as most people seem to think I am! He gave me a last shot this weekend at coming up with something dirtier, grosser, and more outrageous than the three he’d already narrowed my batch down to.

This is a rough sketch, one of my favorites, which he didn’t understand (so it’s a rejected reject) because he never had or really knew a dog, it seems. He didn’t understand that this is the perfume for dogs that stinks like the stink that dogs like best: ass. Dog ass, human ass, raccoon ass, possum ass, the rare and elusive cat ass, you name it, dogs love ass of any kind. They smell it in the grass, then roll in it as if it were Chanel No. 5.

My dog used to wrinkle her nose and recoil in disgust when I dabbed on my super expensive Rose Cologne made by nuns at the convent of Santa Novella in Florence, exactly the same way I did when she’d come prancing back to me all frisky and feeling pretty after a roll in the grass. This perfume was conceived for her, and the dog you love. Top notes of feral cat pee, heart notes of raccoon ass, with a hint of trampled grass.

^{The sun was shy today, but all the people sitting for me at Saks Fifth Avenue this Saturday certainly weren’t! (Image: carolita johnson)}

I had to wake up early this Saturday morning and collect my wits and brush-tipped markers. A gig at Saks Fifth Avenue awaited me, Michael Crawford, Matt Diffee, and Victoria Roberts. We were the “guest cartoonists.” There were also face-painters, bathing suit models (of which one male’s pilosity was not abnormal, but nonetheless remarkable for a model), fashion models walking around with little placards identifying the designer of the clothes on their backs, free chinese food, and a guy in a tux playing a slick white piano.

I always worry about these gigs and spend the eve of the event making a list of ideas for cartoons to draw in case the audience is apathetic. But there’s never any need to worry. People see a man or a woman at an easel, holding a marker and next thing you know they’re all waiting on line waiting for their chance to ask, “Will you do me?”

Will I do you? I sure will, big fella!

It’s futility to resist or say, “I’m not a portrait artist, I’m a cartoonist.” But I do warn every incredibly earnest-looking sitter (I believe most have no idea that we are TNY cartoonists, and simply assume we’ve been picked up off the sidewalk in Times Square for the price of a lunch) that I will be drawing them as if they were a cartoon in The New Yorker. The secret to a happy experience on both sides of the easel is to draw them as themselves, but better-looking and thinner. Of course, I might have given myself a little less work if I’d started drawing people fatter and uglier, but I’m not that prescient.

Before I knew it, I was handing drawings to beaming, gratified people, feeling like Santa Claus in some cases, or like Glinda the Good Witch in others. I did one 60 year old Russian woman named Anna Maria as Greta Garbo’s younger sister. A half a beer and a bowl of soup at Sapporo later, I came home to rest my poor dogs. I’m now watching The Portrait of Dorian Gray on channel 13, with a young Angela Lansbury singing, “Goodbye little yellowbird! I’d rather brave the cold on a leafless tree than a prisoner be in a cage of gold!”

^{Who am I kidding? I’ll be doing my reading at the laundromat. (Image: carolita johnson)}

Martin Amis’ The Last Days of Muhammad Atta, The New Yorker’s Fiction in the Journey’s issue this week, will make sure you never think of Muhammed Atta’s pelvic saddle, scrotum, or “breath that smells like a blighted river” the same way.
Ever.
Again.

In case of overdose, go straight for the antidote: Jonathan Stern’s Shouts & Murmurs piece, “The Lonely Planet Guide To My Apartment.”
Here’s a small sample, taken from “Local Customs”:

The population of My Apartment has a daily ritual of bitching, which occurs at the end of the workday and prior to ordering in food. Usually, meals are taken during reruns of “Stargate Atlantis.” Don’t be put off by impulsive sobbing or unprovoked rages. These traits have been passed down through generations and are part of the colorful heritage of My Apartment’s people. The annual Birthday Meltdown (see “Festivals”) is a tour de force of recrimination and self-loathing, highlighted by fanciful stilt-walkers and dancers wearing hand-sewn headdresses.

And to balance yourself with a dose of reality after this fanciful traipse through a New Yorker’s life, read David Remnick’s review of Al Gore’s movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” in “Ozone Man.”

^{The interviewee, in the chair.}

Selling cartoons rarely pays the rent. Cartoonists sometimes have day jobs. Sometimes they also need night jobs. So today I began my night-job search. I started by responding to the call for telemarketers at the Roundabout Theatre, the 5pm to 9pm shift. How hard could that be? Couldn’t be harder than teaching software to coked-up, histrionic bookers at model agencies (or it’s equivalent, teaching monkeys to fly). I was good at that. What could be harder than that? Read the rest of this entry »

^{(Losing weight will be easy if you’re reading TNY this week. Image: carolita johnson)}

About Tables for Two, oops, I mean, “What Happened at Alder Creek?“, Dana Goodyear’s American Chronicles piece about the Donner Family Camp’s legendary cannibalism in The New Yorker this week. A word to the wise. Not to be read during your lunch hour unless you are striving to lose weight. In fact, I wouldn’t read it before lunch, or during lunch, nor even after lunch if you’re not hoping to lose said lunch. I happened to be reading it after lunch, and found myself suppressing the urge to gag. Personally, I’d have appreciated it if the end of the story were in the first paragraph.

Bleeeeeeaaaagh!

But of course, you’ll go have a look, won’t you? Because who can resist a campfire story that boasts a line like, “What do you think I cooked this morning? Shoemaker’s arm.”

^{(Image: carolita johnson)}

In honor of The New Yorker’s “Journeys” issue, I’m posting a Pamplona-themed reject. The first time I submitted it, it had the caption, “What do we call this again? Running with the nationally insured?”

^{My kwazy wabbit. (Image: carolita johnson)}

^{This week’s TNY fiction is available online, too! (image: carolita johnson)}

The Trojan Sofa, by Bernard Maclaverty: a cross between a James Joycean Dubliners episode and a chapter out of Huckeberry Finn. Who amongst us hasn’t as a child desired to mail ourselves to Timbuktu, sneak into the ventilation system to spy on other apartments, or be staple-gunned into a sofa with a ham sandwich and snuck into a stranger’s house on a Robin Hood mission?

Eleven year-old Nially, or “Skinny-ma-link” as his “da” calls him is the smartest boy in his class in Northern Ireland, and a willing accomplice in series of cat-burglaries worthy of the Pink Panther. His “da” simply packages him into the interior of an antique sofa delivered to owners who will own it only till they leave their home empty when they go to work the next morning. Nially must remain silent during the installation’s bumping and heaving, and then, once the movers leave, be still during “tea,” during the news and/or comedy shows, occasionally during sofa-sex, and pee into a plastic baggy during the night while everyone is asleep. And most importantly of all, he must remember not to snore if he falls asleep.

The Trojan Sofa will not fail to enchant. It’s one of those rare accounts of the making of a legend that leaves you incredulous but wanting to believe. And this week you can read it online.

^{In the interest of equal religious coverage (I covered Passover this morning), here’s a chocolate Easter Bunny, for you other religious fanatics!}

This week was low on New York-related news items (other than that trapped cat), but high in musical enrichments! Everyone needs a little free music, and you can procure some very nice, intimate, candle-lit chamber music if you inscribe yourself on the right mailing list: Movado Music Hour
If you’re a Jewish renegade, you can enjoy Kingsley’s “Popcorn” at your seder, or if you’re not, his “Fifth Cup” can accompany your Passover seder: Allegro Vigoroso
Meanwhile, every artist needs a little physical diversity, and the inappropriately Speedo and tanga-clad bodies will be singing to you like Ulyssian sirens on Brooklyn’s shores: Brighton Beach Babes
And no matter what the New York Times does to pretty itself up, I’m still on strike against TimesSelect: TimesSelect more subscriber-friendly.

Happy Holiday-Weekend to all! (especially anyone whose religion I neglected to mention.)

^{(image: carolita johnson)}

This oft-rejected cartoon is in honor of the musical week it’s been. Anyone interested in musical history should read Sasha Frere-Jones’ piece in The New Yorker’s Talk of the Town: Haggadah-Da-Vida

You’ll find a musically historic portrait of Gershon Kingsley, who wrote the famous electronic song, “Popcorn,” which I always wanted as my cell phone ringer, and which you may think you don’t know, but do, you’ll see. He also wrote an electronic piece called “The Fifth Cup,” which is meant to accompany a Passover seder.

If you’re having one, and would like to give “The Fifth Cup” a test run at your house, you can find it on Kingsley’s new 2 CD set called “God is a Moog.” This will prevent you from playing The Who’s Boris the Spider as my mother did at our last family gathering.

As for the cartoon, I admit it was done before I started applying the tips given by Owen Phillips (the man that will make we TNY cartoonists clean up our acts). So I may yet re-do it one day and try again.