newyorkette

^{The view from the 20th floor of 4 Times Square, soon to be obscured.}

Well, my week has had it’s ups and downs just like this spot next to 4 Times Square, the home of Conde Nast, and The New Yorker. There used to be a few peep shows and a strange sort of burlesque museum here, even a small merry-go-round, if I recall well. Then there was a huge space like a childish gap between someone’s teeth through which one could see the buildings on north 43rd street. Now, as the days pass, this construction site rises closer and closer to the 20th floor, from whence I took this photo. Soon its metal and concrete frame will develop an exocarp. (Yes, I’ve been playing with the thesaurus! I’d originally thought “exoskeleton,” but got curious and ended up with “exocarp.”)

You can see Bryant Park and the back of the New York Public Library (the one with the lions) over to the right. Sometimes, from the fact checker’s side, you can see a long sliver of setting sun being lightly brushed along the tops of the trees on the left, across from the Grace Building.

I’d have liked to get a postcard snapshot of a cartoonist crying in the rain on 86th street (sadness over my best huckleberry friend preparing to move out of town). Because even as the waterworks began it occured to me that the raindrops were having the retch-effect on me. You know, when someone within earshot starts retching and gagging in the preamble to vomiting, something in you involuntarily begins to retch too? Similarly, perfectly content babies catch the cry-bug from some other bawler in the playroom. It seemed the torrential outburst of rain had that treacherous retch-effect on my tear ducts, and that made me want to laugh as much as cry. I’d have welcomed meeting anyone, no matter how silly I looked — in fact hoping to look very silly, memorably silly — just for the laugh of it. But they blended into the rain like my wet dress, and I made it home to dry off and nibble at chinese food while I reminisced and dabbed my eyes a couple more times.

The cynics all love to say good things never last, damn them! (I never believed them till now!)

NB: The next person to say those words to me will incur the petty revenge that is the volatile flip side of acceptance. Queries about my style of revenge may be directed to my old Paris garret neighbor, Anna Popovic, who will never lock all six security locks on her door while going to the hall toilet again.

^{Men, too, like you to look them in the eyes and not just ogle their breasts. (Image: carolita johnson)}

In the interest of equal exposure, here’s my male breast cartoon, freshly rejected. It’s actually a scan of a photocopy, so there’s a little less subtle shading going on here than in the original, but it loses nothing in the translation. I’m going to submit it again, possibly with a slightly modified caption, but thought I’d share it with you for now.

Personally, I have nothing against man-boobs, and find a nice rack to be esthetically pleasing on the right male body. It suits some men very well, and others not as well. So I drew these to look as sensual and intriguing as possible.

It’s going to be a nice, hot, beach weekend! So, girls, do unto others…

^{Click on the image to get to the cartoonbank.com’s page.}

This is a first for me (a cartoon in the magazine three weeks in a row!), so I celebrated by doing some bartender training tonight. I finished my batch early, so I even stayed an extra half hour to have an aperetif afterwards, at The Bubble Lounge. Tonight I learned how to pour Grand Marnier for two counts with my right hand, while pouring brandy with my left hand for six. I also learned how to make a Mojito, an Expresso Martini, a Sidecar, and practiced my champagne uncorking. I’m pretty good at that, can do it with practically no noise at all.

Anyway, back to the cartoon. It was originally handed in once with a different caption, something snarky about one of these broads needing counseling for having no problems. It was rejected, naturally. I’d drawn it inspired by a sixties bikini ad I’d seen on the “inspiration” wall during a fitting at Peter Som’s about two years ago! Then, the next week on my way to drop off a new batch, I had a flash of inspiration while looking at an unnaturally fit much older woman on the subway downtown to the magazine. When I arrived, I dug the reject out of the reject pile (miles high), changed the caption, and sent it straight back in. It sold! I was afraid it had been killed (since I sold it so long ago and never saw it printed), so I’m all the happier today.

I might add that this is one of a series of breast-appreciation cartoons I was working on at the time. I guess doing bra fittings will make you really think about breasts in all their shapes and sizes, and I was always on the look-out for a great pair to draw at that time! Also, since I had to put on some weight for this client, I needed a well-padded but not too chunky image to aspire to. I was quite enchanted with their very slightly rounded tummies, and healthily curvy thighs and hips, which women used to wear proudly before deathly skinny became such the rage.

I dedicated it (mentally) to a lady we used to call “Robocop” for years when I used to do showroom at Jean-Paul Gaultier’s in Paris. It was obvious she worked out to terrible extremes, and would come in every new season with some new work done on her face or body, new boobs, new jaw, new cheekbones… We could swear she even had implants in her calves. She tended to wear skin-tight black leather that showed her bulging arm muscles. She was a sweet, sweet lady, with a slightly Kewpie Doll face, making her the more unnerving to look at. One season she didn’t come back, having died on the operating table during yet another procedure. We called her Robocop, but with tenderness, really. I never knew her real name, but I hope she’s perfect now wherever she is!

Meanwhile: Retirement age will someday need to be 85.
Related newyorkette posts: “Reject du jour: The untucked dress shirt and the original bikini girls”

You must think I have noodles for brains by now, with all these ramen posts in my T41’s! But you can never have enough ramen joints in a city! Ramen (when it’s not the kind you simply add water to in your office kitchen), real ramen, is healthy, fast, hot, and not as easy to find when you need it as it should be.

So when I was cutting across town to meet a friend at Penn Station (late, as ever), and spotted the Ramen King on 38th Street near 8th Avenue, my stomach growled a little. It growled, “Let him wait.” So I ran in, and ordered the basic: miso ramen. It was perfect, in a classic way. Not innovative (so annoying, those innovative miso ramens!), and perfectly up to par with it’s relatives in Tokyo, with its pinch of slivered red ginger on top. I had to run, so I poured a little into a styrofoam cup and grabbed some chopsticks so I could finish it on my way to Penn Station.

On my next visit, I tried the “Miso Veggie,” the nickname of Miso Ramen with Vegetables uptown at Sapporo (only the waiters call it “miso veggie” as they yell it to the chef). It was, again, perfectly classic. The only difference between the Ramen King and Sapporo’s “miso veggie” is that there’s no cabbage (a little more spinach and wakame instead), and the subtle bite of the red ginger. Otherwise, in quality and deliciousness, they are equals.

Pricewise, a little cheaper, about $6.50 for a typical bowl of ramen or udon. They also have little tubs of kimchi, and japanese desserts in a fridge for you to take out or eat on site. For the kid in you, there’s Calpico (an indescribable, but well-loved drink savored by little Japanese kids everywhere. And me.)
Perfect before or after getting on a train at Penn Station or Port Authority.

As usual, I started eating before it occured to me to snap a pic. This “miso veggie” contains miso soup, noodles, spinach, wakame seaweed, soy sprouts, corn, shredded carrots, scallions, and red ginger.

Ramen King
237 West 38th Street (near 8th Ave).
(212) 764-3118
Hours: 11:30am - 8pm M-F
(closing 7pm Saturdays, and closed all day Sunday)

^{(All images by Pancho, borrowed from El Museo della Satira et della caricatura)}

Pancho draws political cartoons for Le Monde, the daily semi-conservative French newspaper, as well as Le Canard Enchainé, the French independent (no advertising!) newspaper (it’s name literally means “The Enchained Duck.”).
He’s been described as French, Ecuadorian, Mexican, you name it. He was actually born in Caracas, Venezuela, and raised in Montevideo, Uruguay.

Drawing since he was un niño, he describes himself as a little bit of everything: caricaturist, illustrator, editorialist. He’s provided drawings for the Herald Tribune, The Guardian, Lire, Le Matin, Le Nouvel Observateur, and continues providing one drawing a week to Le Monde, as well as to the Duck in Chains.

I discovered him while living in Paris. I’d always noticed him superficially on the covers of Le Monde because of his well-placed pencil lines, but the day I really discovered him was when I saw a cartoon (which I wish I could find online for you) of his, showing the two French heads of state (President and Prime Minister) sitting at a tiny dinner table with the German leader, who is tying on his napkin, preparing to tuck into dinner.

“I am SO hungry tonight!”, says the German leader.

The two French leaders turn to each other and snidely comment:
“Tonight?”

It was all I needed to understand the tension between France and Germany with regard to Europe at the time.

It was hard to find his cartoons online, and I wondered if he exercises strict control over their copyright. Or perhaps only those who get his nationality right are allowed to reproduce his work for nonprofit? I’ll soon know if I’ve offended. For now, let me point you to the only website I found that had several of his cartoons available for viewing, which I will translate for you below.

I found an interestingly rough “rush” transcript of an interview conducted by CNN in 2003 about the war and asking if the pen is mightier than the sword is available here: CNN.

And if you can read Spanish, check out this piece on “Uruguayans in the World” which profiles Pancho (his whole name is Pancho Graells): Uruguayos para el mundo: Humor uruguayo en la información de Le Monde. A fellow Uruguayan, singer Pajaro Canzani, who lives in Paris, once offered to introduce me to Pancho, but alas, I had to move back to New York before I had the chance.

Below are some of his cartoons, with translations.

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If you have seen any Pancho cartoons you’d like a translation for, feel free to ask!

^{Spotted on the downtown A train this morning, a mermaid (on her way to Coney Island to march in the parade? or just on her way to work?), reading The New Yorker.}

Or is that a broad generalization about mermaids? Okay, let’s justs say that at least one mermaid reads The New Yorker!

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

This weeks fiction, “Innocence,” by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, presents a rather conventional contrast to many of the other pieces in the magazine which seem to be vying to top Larry Doyle’s Shouts & Murmur’s piece, “I’m afraid I have some bad news,” in surrealness and whimsy. Louis Menand’s Talk of the Town piece, “Name that tone,” actually kind of freaked me out at the end, with its strange middle-aged nihilism with regard to young people who can still hear certain frequencies better than the over-twenties:

For all intents and purposes, if you’re under twenty, this page might as well be blank.

(NB to Louis: I’m 41 and I can still hear that damned squirrel’s heartbeat. The little bugger puts a megaphone to his chest and leans against my window, that’s why.)

After this, and David Sedaris’ piece, “What I learned” (something like the “And now for something completely different” moment in Monty Python’s Flying Circus), I latched onto the age-old story of inappropriate love, jealousy, and domestic intrigue that “Innocence” offered. One of my favorite moments is when Kay, the “emancipated” westerner is on the radio, reading the personal messages for listeners, amongst which are her fellow tenants at Bibiji’s house:

She read these messages in a seductive voice—“This is for Bunny, and a million billion thanks, darling, for the fabulous times”—which made Sahib nod and smile in some sort of recognition, while Bibiji looked down shyly, as if she were the one being addressed.

But my big discovery this week was the Ian Frazier piece on Co-op City: “Utopia, the Bronx, Co-op City and its people.” I never thought I’d become so absorbed by the history of this chunk of real estate that I’d always assumed had never been more interesting than any other crime and mold-infested tenement.

A roller coaster ride that spans hundreds of years, and ranges from scalpings and genocide to the suspense of a good old rent strike involving thousands of Davids against the Goliaths, you’ll never think of Co-op City the same way again. You’ll discover the Indian artifacts underneath it, the dreams of Young Americans (in Young America of New Netherland days), in contrast with the dreams of the builders of that giant monument to both greed and idealism gone terribly awry.

I’m sorry it’s not online, but it’s certainly worth the price of the magazine. In keeping with the whimsical (whimsical, yet grave, somehow) tone of this week’s issue, Frazier gets a little loopy himself when using punctuation (or the lack thereof) to represent one long stream of reminiscences spewed forth by a tenant.

^{And Rejected Cartoon of the Week as well! (image: carolita johnson)}

Anyone who passes through the bowels of Times Square 42nd Street Station knows who these people are. I suspect they hang out in malls as well, and not just in New York. They’re those weird, culty Dianetics people. They offer you a free stress test, where they hook up your finger to a clunky sort of playstation with a gauge on it, and ask you questions that make you laugh, and then say, “Did that question make you nervous?”

I know because I tried it once, to investigate. Every time I see them, I wonder if it’s going to be me or someone else to do what is being done to them in my little cartoon. Rejected twice, I think this one will be someone’s birthday present, because I have a fondness for it, probably because I live it every day in my imagination…

^{“Submit your questions,” image by carolita johnson)}

My buddy over at Emdashes needs to know: what do you need to know about The New Yorker?

She’ll be posting monthly Q & A’s on her blog Emdashes, where you may actually find your questions about the magazine answered by two TNY staffers she’ll interview on your behalf. So, check out her preview, and send your questions to her as soon as possible, and as regularly as you want:

Like me, you read The New Yorker. With interest. Loyally, actively, critically. Ardently. You love to wrangle with it. Perhaps you’ve just picked it up for the first time. Don’t you wish you could ask it a few questions? To confirm a subtle change that no one else seems to have noticed? To go behind the scenes of the DVD archive with some juicy institutional knowledge? To debunk a hoary myth once and for all? Or a other dozen things? Did you ever have a New Yorker question that could only be answered by someone who’s actually there?

Well, now you can.

To read more of Em’s sneak preview, and to submit your questions, see here: Sneak Preview.

NB: Gawker already has all the snarky question-asking covered. TNY staffers are a tender sort, not snarky at all, so all earnest, nerdy, or otherwise interesting questions will be most appreciated.

^{(This one’s for all you cat lovers out there. I like cats. They’re smart!)}

This one’s a three-time loser! I don’t know, is it too insulting? My personal criticism of the drawing is the proportions. I’d have the cat a little bigger and show a little less of the guy, basically tighten up the focus. But for some reason I’ve been too obstinate to re-draw it as a rough submission. Maybe some day! In any case, here you go. Throw tomatoes, or kitty litter!

^{(click on the image to link to the cartoonbank)}

Got this cartoon in this week’s The New Yorker. Sold last winter, the caption has been slightly modified by suggestion from my editor (originally had been: “Look honey! I got a brand new huge red bow for our car!”).

I still have the list of alternate captions, ten in all! (He thought it was too wordy. I thought, then why waste more words talking about it? But I’m absolutely amenable to criticism, and was very happy to get it sold and off my hands, since I’d been thinking of doing this gag for at least two years! The more concise caption works very well, I think.)

The car had originally been a dented heap, but we didn’t think readers needed to be hit over the head with the gag. So I re-did it. And there you have the life story of a published cartoon.

I’ll post a rejected cartoon tomorrow, for you to throw rotten tomatoes at, at your pleasure.

^{This photo is borrowed from their own website, whose link is below.}

This one was easy, and thank goodness, because I have three jobs at the moment, and barely enough time to write about what I eat. Aceluck Thai! Recommended to me by fellow artist-slash-telemarketers (albeit high-class ones, after all, the National Symphony Orchestra isn’t exactly the Fuller Brush Company), I spent an hour’s pay on my dinner there on my first day of work with them, and kept going back for the Tom Yum because it was the only thing that helped my allergies last month.

It’s in Hell’s Kitchen, it’s got that railroad car, cozy, narrow feel that I love in a little treasure of a restaurant, and it’s green inside, which reminds me of all of my favorite things. My perfect meal: the Thai Spring Rolls, with a Tom Yum soup (I take it with tofu), and some Thai rice, a la carte, which add up to about $9.50. You don’t need more than that. But you can always have more, or maybe just some beer, wine, or saké with it. They’re also on the menu.

530 Ninth Avenue (Bet. 39th - 40th Street)
New York, New York 10018
Tel: 212 594.7083 / 212 594.7084

^{(I hope it’s okay with Quino, but I translated it myself. A scan of the original can be seen at my Flikr site, here.)}

Mafalda is a Spanish language comic strip that was fatally compared to Charlie Brown early enough on to keep it from ever being imported to us. I found Mafalda in Spain, in my friend Sybilla’s bathroom. Mafalda book after Mafalda book were piled in front of the toilet. Since I was so stressed living in Madrid and not being paid for my handbag and toy designing, I spent a lot of time in that toilet. The strip above is a scan of the original, which I suspect I tore out of one of Sybilla’s books. (Which I can’t believe I did, it’s not very typical of me, but perhaps I found it so inspirational that I thought she’d forgive me.) It’s been taped to every fridge I’ve had for the last fifteen years.

Mafalda had originally been created by Quino (whose full name is Joaquín Salvador Lavado, Quino being a nickname for Joaquín), as part of an ad campaign for household appliances that got killed. He decided to keep the character of Mafalda, which began appearing in Argentina’s weekly newspaper, “Primero Plano,” before becoming popular in Europe, particularly Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Germany. Mafalda has always been outspoken and questioned the world rather lucidly, making observations about politics and world events without being precocious or cynical. She’s simply curious and impressionable.

For example, see Wikipedia for more on Mafalda, including a panel where Mafalda says, in true Mafalda style: “We’re screwed! It turns out that if we don’t start changing the world, it’s the world that ends up changing us!” (I’ve re-translated the translation to suit my ear.)

If you speak English, German, Portuguese, or Catalan, you’re in luck with Mafalda Online. If not, just keep the above cartoon in mind when the world seems scary and with any luck you’ll come down with a slight case of Mafalda.

(Willam Blake’s “William Blake’s Urizen as Creator of the Material World, 1794”

For Father’s Day, I’d like to bring up the one phrase I associate with my father: “Life isn’t fair!”

That was a phrase that I bucked against for a lifetime. Generally uttered (seemingly to me with a little too much glee, and possibly even a little schadenfreude) after the thwarting of one or another of my childish desires, such as the wish, when I was about 5, to stay up and watch “The Beverly Hillbillies.” (”Why can’t I stay awake later?” Because you’re too young. “But it’s not fair!” Life isn’t fair, little girl!).

Too young to understand that each of my desires were not equally valid or reasonable, I nevertheless understood this as some idiot phrase he’d picked up somewhere in the world of “grown-ups” and felt inclined to use as an alternative to the equally meaningless “because I say so.” Because it was obvious that life is a concept and can have no determination, fair or unfair. (In kid’s language: “Oh, yeah?“)

Life, when we’re really talking about misfortune, is impartial, sometimes leaning this way or that way by pure luck of the draw. It’s people who aren’t fair. People make other people suffer from drought because of border wars. People get greedy and steal other people’s pensions with impunity, because other people have no compunctions about being paid to get such abusers off the hook. People poison eachother if the FDA or other authority says it’s okay. People love some people, and detest others, sometimes for no particular reason.

If it weren’t for this typically human and irksome agent of chaos in society, manners and diplomacy (and swing dancing) wouldn’t have been invented to smooth it all over. Total honesty is for animals.

So, fathers and fathers-to-be out there, to use the “life isn’t fair” argument when you’re explaining to your brat — er, child — why he or she cannot have his or her every wish completely fulfilled, is another unfairness. Children who believe this become the annoying whiners who use that phrase to explain their own lack of determination. They often become examples of another self-fulfilling belief: “Misery loves company.” But they’ll get the kick in the pants that’s coming to them, because life is fair.

And in case you think I’m playing a “blame game,” let me just add this: if you were mentally lazy enough to believe your father when he said this to you, you have only yourself to blame, dumbass!

Happy Father’s Day!

(And when they say, “But that’s not fair,” just tell them that “Human development is a form of chronological unfairness, since late-comers are able to profit by the labors of their predecessors without paying the same price.” (Alexander Herzen (1812 - 1870) Russian author, Quoted by Isaiah Berlin in: Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution, Introduction (1952; tr. 1960).

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

This week’s TNY fiction piece, Accident Brief, by Karen Russel, is something like Jack London’s The Call of the Wild, crossed with Golding’s Lord of the Flies. I know that’s a rather rough-hewn comparison, but you’ll see what I mean when you read it.

I didn’t mean to do so much research and de-coding (I didn’t realize there was anything to de-code!), but the culture described in the story mystified me (Polynesian sounding names, snow and glaciers all around?), so I indulged in what I’d meant to be a perfunctory little google. I could not find any information about the “Moa” civilisation, finding only this website through a Google search. A quick browse of it reveals that MOA’s goal is to save the world, through what reads to me like something similar to “permaculture,” or sustainable ways of maintaining our civilisation. A search for “Weitiki Valley” prompted Google to patronize me by asking, “Did you mean: Waitaki Valley?” So I’m assuming the place and civilisation evoke purely fictional and exaggerated versions of the typical histories of the overunning of one “primitive” civilisation by another more destructive and technologically advanced one.

Rangi (an anagram of “grain”?), the mute Moa boy, is the savage child whose desire to return to the womb of nature will be the undoing of the interestingly named teenaged “Tek,” (as in Tekserve? Or for non-Apple readers, as in “Tekkie”?), who is hoping his transponder will save him from the Lord of the Flies situation he’s been thrown into when their plane crashes into the glaciers. It seems (duh!) that technology only serves us as long as it’s used properly: the pilot forgot to put in his contact lenses, the plane crashes, and then the plane slides into a crevasse as the injured survivors watch. Rangi throws his transponder away, and runs from the rescue helicopter. See what I mean? Transponders are meant to be worn, in the “on” mode, and rescue helipcopters only work if one does not flee them.

So, what exactly is this story about? Nature versus civilisation? The occasion the story is centered around is the traditional “Avalanche” ceremony, which culminates with the boys’ choir causing an avalanche with their voices (in a song about conquering the Moa), commemorating the “original Avalanche” as well as the original rape of the Moa Civilisation. But the avalanche is always guaranteed by a little pre-concert ice hatcheting in the right places, creating a false impression of domination over Nature (and perhaps a false impression of the conquering of the “savages”). Rangi’s revenge is perhaps also Nature’s revenge for being set up to play someone’s fool.

^{I’m happy to announce that this cartoon was in the “marriage issue” this week!}

Although published this week, this cartoon was done a while ago, during the year I spent fitting and modelling underwire bras for midwestern buyers. All the women I drew when I got home during this period were always, lets just say: nice and comfy. (It makes me feel free just to look at her!) And she’s not wearing a thong, either: she’s wearing full brief, 100% cotton undies that go up to her belly button, in a bright floral print. My forbidden fantasy.

^{“Tempest in a tumbler,” image by carolita johnson.}

Well, it was bound to happen some time. I got food poisoning. Or perhaps the stomach flu. Whichever it was, it laid me up the entire weekend with fever, chills, and a couple of tears of anguish at the precipatory moment when it hit me. Of course the entire weekend was spent trying to pinpoint the agent of the malaise. So let’s see…

It was either Lombardi’s Pizza (Nolita) Friday night, or MacDonald’s “Asian Salad,” Saturday night (don’t feel sorry for me, I was experimenting!) The thing that points to Lombardi’s is that at least one of the friends I dined with there also got sick, miles away in upstate NY. To be fair to Lombardi’s it could also have been beer glasses possibly not cleaned well enough at The Magician on Rivington and Essex, where we fellow New Yorkers had previously celebrated Owen Phillips as he moves on to Men’s Vogue and starts wearing ties. Come to think of it, perhaps Owen himself was the carrier of the bug (he does have kids, and kids are well known for pestiferously carrying and breeding annoying diseases) (not to say they’re walking germ-bags), and he naturally distributed and received many potentially germ-propagating hugs that evening. Hmmmm.

But why play the blame game? I woke up with no more fever today, weighing about the same, and have just been called to urgently sub for a size 6 model who became a size 4 from grief over the weekend after being dumped by her fiancée. I’ll be making good money while she eats her way back to good fortune. So all is forgiven, whoever it was.

I maintained my fighting weight by eating my friend Juan Pittaluga’s Uruguayan version of “chicken soup for the miserably sick”: uncooked rice sauteed with plenty of onions and several dashes of oregano, then boiled in lots of water till it becomes a liquidy porridge. A light squeeze of lemon adds a Greek “avgolemono” touch and augments the oregano aroma, if you’re stomach isn’t too jumpy.

Till next Monday!

^{Click on the image to proceed to The Perry Bible Fellowship main page.}

I’m sick today, ate something that decided to try and kill me from the inside (I hate it when that happens!). And while I also hate to point an accusing finger, the last thing I ate was McDonald’s “Asian Salad,” thinking I’d be good and save myself some money by eating on the cheap. Never again! (Plus, $4.99 for a small piece of chicken on top of iceberg lettuce isn’t really that cheap!)

Thus the late start today. Because I’m sick, I’m going to point to the sickest cartoon I’ve seen in a while. I’m particularly touched by this cartoon because I have had rodent troubles myself. (In my case it was — and still is — squirrels). This cartoon proposes the way to end such troubles in the easiest, most expeditious way: An End to Gopher Trouble.

Here’s another one that seems to be trying to tell me something, but I’m not quite sure what: God Tree.

And this last one about the monster under the bed, warms my heart: Monster and Dad.

Nicholas Gurewitch’s Perry Bible Fellowship is an alternative to the feel-good comic strip. (Don’t you hate those?) It’s a feel-stubbornly-perverted-and-delightfully-evil comic strip.

And now, I must crawl back to bed.

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

Well, someone pinched my Fiction Issue. And then someone bought me David Remnick’s “Reporting: writings from The New Yorker,” at the Spring Books Party at the Housing Works Used Books Café the other night. I haven’t had a spare subway moment to read anything else since. So this weekend reader is going to introduce you, if you haven’t already met, to David Remnick.

But first, let me introduce you to Paul, the bra salesman I ran into today, who I knew from my days fitting at Warnaco. He asked me how the cartoon business was treating me, and I asked him if he hadn’t seen my last cartoon a couple of weeks ago. He said, “Nah, I don’t read The New Yorker, it’s too high-brow for a guy like me.” I’ve double-checked my copy of Reporting, and found that the only high-brow aspect of it is it’s connection to The New Yorker (which, well, people do think is high-brow).

And maybe TNY is a bit high-brow. But Remnick’s essays are a smooth read, with only the occasional need for a dictionary (always worth it), and written in a style that I can only compare to a long drink of water. Hardly a hitch, you just keep reading, because it’s easier to keep reading than to stop. If you doubt me, just give it a try. The only reason I’m insisting is because on the subway today, I found myself wishing the history books I barely read in High School had been as easy and pleasurable to read as the articles in this book. I might have learned something about History! Or at least wanted to learn something! Click on the link at the end of this post for a sample.

Reporting is a compilation of essays Remnick has written for The New Yorker over the years, starting, in the first section, with the recent past, with the second section appearing to be a “best of” of previous years, and the third section being devoted to his boxing articles, which seems appropriately situated at the end, mirroring the way the sports appears at the end of the nightly news on TV.

The first section, for anyone who reads The New Yorker regularly, is an experience akin to watching your favorite old movies on video. If you ever wanted to read those articles again and couldn’t remember which issue they were in, or were so buried in unread issues that they were impossible to find, Reporting is where you’ll be able to savour “The Wilderness Campaign: Al Gore” again. It came out not long after Al appeared on Saturday Night Live, in which his self-effacing sense of humor and lack of self-consciousness (or shame, for that matter) frankly blew my mind. Once content to vote for him on the basis of competence (rather than personality), Al’s appearance on SNL is possibly the one thing he did to endear himself to me as a human being and make me wonder, “who is this man?” Remnick’s piece on him is a sparkling portrait of a man who none of us particularly wanted to know before.

A good chaser to the Al Gore piece is, of course, “The Masochism Campaign: Tony Blair.” I wondered why it didn’t appear immediately after the Al Gore piece, but perhaps that would’ve been too obvious, a little too neat, like wearing matching shoes and handbag (which I’d never do). Also, the Mrs. Graham article, an education for people of my generation who took the Pentagon Papers and Watergate for granted (or as a bit of pop culture), as well as an education for anyone who ever thought being a woman before the seventies was an excuse for anything, also works well to clean your palate and prepare you for Tony. You’ll need it. Tony’s portrait is excruciating, not because it’s particularly unmerciful, but because just observing the truth seems to be cruel enough. “The punishment is daily and takes many forms.” And that’s all there is to it. There’s no exaggeration, no need for it. Is there any need to embellish the sound of fingernails being dragged across a blackboard? Read it and realize how lucky you are not to be Tony Blair.

It made me want to return to “Mrs. Graham,” and I did. For some reason I’d missed “Mrs. Graham,” (possibly having snubbed the magazine for one week for not containing one of my cartoons?) After the deaths of Wendy Wasserstein and Betty Friedan this year, Katherine Graham’s personal history (so well put in her autobiography, “Personal History,” is the story of a woman’s coming of age in middle age, after breaking out of the “little woman” mold she hadn’t realized had shaped her till the Washington Post was deposited into her inexperienced hands. Her autobiography, cited often in the piece, is the expression of a woman who understood her limits and her challenges, and apparently blames no one but herself for being duped by the preconceptions and expectations imposed on her by society. She seems to have prefered to admit her error rather than bitch about the unfairness of it all, and I don’t believe I saw the word “feminist” in the piece (correct me if I’m wrong). And if I’m not wrong I’m glad of it. Mrs. Graham was a human being that anyone, man or woman, would not do badly to emulate.

I’m still in the middle of the Post-Imperial Blues: Vladimir Putin, in which I’m learning all about the news that I didn’t pay attention to during the last part of the last century. And I’ll tell you my secret to this ignorant bliss. When I was about eleven, I saw a hostage get shot on TV. I’d thought I was watching a movie, but then the anchorman came on and apologized to the family of the shot hostage, followed by the “You heard it here first” and station identification. I was so disgusted that I swore not to watch the news ever again. And I didn’t. I only started watching the news again when I came back to the USA. To see what everyone was believing. When everyone says the same things, and talks about the same news, you have to see for yourself where they’re getting their information.

For years I only got my news from watching muppet, or French cartoonist’s versions of it. “Les Guignols de l’Info,“ “Spitting Image,” SNL’s “Weekend Update” were all I watched. I eventually dipped into the newspapers, and got hooked on the AP website for a while, but nothing beats a Remnick article to bring history, the history that’s going on around you right now, into limpid focus.

For a sample, click here: All Things Considered (NPR)

^{Received as an emolument after a non-sexual, sexual favor. (image: carolita johnson)}

In 1990, I moved from Paris to Madrid with my dog, nearly no money, and a skin condition that flared up whenever anyone stared at me. I had become allergic to modelling. If I walked into a restaurant and people turned to stare at the model (I assumed they were staring because they were wondering how the likes of me had ever become a model), the side of my face that faced the stare would break out in hives. If my agency called with a “gosee,” no sooner had I written the address down, than I’d broken out in a rash and had to cancel. One afternoon it dawned on me that since nobody knew me as anything but a neurotic and eccentric-looking model, nobody in Paris, or Europe for that matter, would give me a job outside the modelling world, and that I’d have to go back to school to break the mold. I burst into tears while washing the dishes. I was still wearing my yellow rubber gloves as I called my mother, and bawled, “I have to go back to schoo-hoo-hool!”

Then I had to decide where to do it. The States were out of the question. Too expensive. It would have to be either Madrid or Paris. One way or another I’d finesse my way into a free education. (I did, by the way, but this is the story of how I went to Spain and ended up with the Ruby Slippers). I was broke, unemployed, had a dog to feed, and no prospects in Paris, so I stuck my landlady for the phone bill (only because she’d warned me again and again not to, even though I’d always paid the rent on time), and got on a charter flight to Madrid to see how I liked Madrid’s university system.

I got a job there sewing handbags for the handbag designer of a famous Spanish designer. The only reason I got that job was because I bore an uncanny resemblance to this designer, Sybilla, and she had a cult following that worshipped anything and everything about her, including my resemblance to her. Her groupies would observe, intrigued: “It’s funny, you’re so like her, and yet you can be so unlike her.” I was lucky. Without this, I probably wouldn’t have eaten so many free cans of sardines offered to me by the jolly middle-aged modistas in the studio who realized that I (and my dog) were going hungry. In return, I played my Nat King Cole Canta en español tape for them, and relished, with them, their memories of first crushes and first kisses.

Beatriz, a former ornithology major, worked in the boutique under the atelier, and showed me the ropes. She was manic, like most of the people who worked for Sybilla. Possibly depressive, too. She was married to a vampire, they said. A man who lived in what another girl at the atelier described in hushed tones as a “pornographic monastery,” and who was said to be in the habit of making Bea bring women home for him. One day, she asked me to spend the weekend there. I declined. She asked again, the next week. And again, with more urgency, and then repeatedly over the next weeks. Finally I told her that I knew what she was up to, and she confessed that her husband was making her life miserable.

Don’t go, everyone had enjoined me. Read the rest of this entry »