newyorkette

(image: carolita johnson)

Okay, I know it’s a very silly cartoon. Of course, this is why it was rejected. But I love him. I named him Nick after The Thin Man’s Nick Charles, played by William Powell. I’m a big fan of The Thin Man movies.

But mostly I like it because it’s something I often say about myself. That is, I often say that if I started drinking to forget, I’d soon forget to drink. Because I’m that absent-minded. There’s no hope for me becoming an alcoholic, alas! Not until I have a personal assistant to remind me to tipple, anyway.

(image: carolita johnson)

Emily Gordon’s monthly feature, “Ask the Librarians,” is back on Emdashes now! This month’s questions to the librarians of The New Yorker feature answers about cartoonist Robert Day, and even the librarian’s favorite. Did The New Yorker always have a table of contents? You’d be surprised! What was the “pony edition” of The New Yorker? Also, are New Yorkers the major part of The New Yorker’s readership? Find out on this month’s ATL!

ATL’s debut here.
ATL’s latest: here.
The beautiful portrait of the librarians by Lara Tomlin.

(images: carolita johnson)

For the sophisticated sports fan, for the unknowledgeable but titillated-by-a-recent-event sports ogler, for the cartoonist who likes her sports news buffered by the spoonful of sugar which are Marshall Hopkins‘ illustrations, and for everyone in between, the venerable promoter of slacking off, Austin Kelly, has announced The Modern Spectator.

(image: carolita johnson)

Thanks to Gothamist today, I learned of a Blake Eskin update to Ian Parker’s 2003 article, “Mr. Next” about Bill Jones, the beloved “line director” of Chelsea’s Whole Foods. The update, “What’s next for Mr. Next.” is a “whatever happened to…” for those Chelsea customers who never venture to the Columbus Circle Whole Foods, where Bill has resurfaced.

I had to renounce Whole Foods in favor of the organic section of Fairway long ago, but I remember Bill Jones, who directed me to the next available cash register many a time, when I wasn’t being a “balker” or a “reneger.” His comfortingly fatherly baritone voice seems to calm the nerves of the hysterics amongst the clientele. You’d think vegetarians and health nuts would all be rather zen, but it’s astonishing how nasty they can become when they feel someone or something is trying to put minutes of wait time between them and their pure, life-restoring foods. It’s like they’re strung out! Or maybe they’re just grumpy because they failed to find love in the aisles.

Anyway, Bill Jones is no longer line directing at the Chelsea Whole Foods (he’s greeting customers at the Columbus Circle one now), but his voice is still there, somewhat, anyway. And life goes on!

Read about the cloning of Bill Jones, and how he feels about his new duties, here, in Online Only at The New Yorker.

Okay, here’s the story behind this experiment. I like the idea of Jonathan Schwartz. But I reach convulsively for the radio dial whenever I hear that spooky (to me) introductory music (you know, the “deda deDA-dee DAAAAAA”). I know that their voices are the voices of the Erynies that I’m going to hear as I die in my sleep. Even if it means hearing Car Talk twice, I immediately switch to NPR’s A.M. frequency in a a gesture that cries, “I’m not dead yet!” (And actually, I don’t mind hearing Car Talk twice at all! I’ve just sent Click and Clack this cartoon, as a thanks-for-the-memories. And I don’t even own a car. Or a driver’s license, for that matter.)

Sure, I like to hear certain oldies. It’s not an anti-oldies bias driving me. It’s just that I want to hear my oldies. Are my oldies your oldies? Have you been around but don’t feel that old yet? Do you have slightly edgier taste in oldies?

I figure if I do enough of these hour-long mixes, and then place them on shuffle, I’ll always have something besides a second helping of Car Talk to listen to whenever Jonathan Schwartz comes on. Also, I welcome suggestions.

Obviously I have no right to distribute this music, but iTunes allows me to do a remix that I can share with you in all legality. You are free to buy (from iTunes, not me) all or whatever songs on my iMix that you like, and rearrange them as you like, too. But there’s nothing in it for me!

Here’s the playlist:

(Click on the “album cover” at the top of the post for the downloadable iMix link).

(image: carolita johnson)

Ever wonder what happens to the DVDs you sent back to Netflix? Read about the Netflix fairies in Susan Sheehan’s Talk of the Town piece, “Tear, Slap, Clack.” If you ever wondered what happened to Gigi, aka Leslie Caron, Kate Taylor’s got the goods on her upcoming appearance in Law and Order: Gigi in Jersey. And Adam Gopnik thinks we should all read at least as much as the President of the United States does. Which may explain his “compulsory reading list for us all” at the end of “Read it and Weep.”

In one of those wonderful instances where a picture is worth 912 words, the illustration by Christoph Niemann that accompanies James Surowiecki’s “Private Lies“ pretty much says it all, but I read the piece anyway, just to confirm what I’d surmised about that two-headed dragon.

Read how Walter Reuther’s vision of broadly collectivized risk, rejected in the 1940’s, may finally be coming back home to roost: Gladwell’s “The Risk Pool.” (My cartoon appears amongst those pages, page 34 to be exact!).

I’m glad I didn’t read John Lahr’s “Petrified: the horrors of stagefright” (not online) before my appearance in The Rejection Show, Tuesday! Reading it on the subway yesterday, I had vague memories of sensations that correspond perfectly to the symptoms described. Luckily I was too busy trying to get through it all to stop and become a pillar of salt. I’m the kind of person to fall apart afterwards. Which didn’t happen because my friends were there to buy me a miniburger and a drink. (Thanks Em!)

If a model can read and then summarize Gödel’s Proof in 1990 on a sunny veranda in Mallorca in order to impress her Lacanian psychoanalyst/mathemetician boyfriend (me, I’m talking about me, who proved that love makes all things possible), there’s no reason for any non-mathemetician not to become engrossed in Sylvia Nasar’s and David Gruber’s “Manifold Destiny” (not online) about just who solved the Poincaré conjecture. It’s worth reading just to learn a little about topology, my favorite “area of mathematics.” It’s like playing with modelling clay, but in your head. I call it vitamin T, because topology’s good for your brain. No need to take it very far, the basics and a little Möbius-gazing will do you just fine.

“How was it to be dead?,” an excerpt from Richard Ford’s third Frank Bascombe novel, puzzled me for while. But when I finished it, I understood exactly why Sally did what she did. Frank, her second husband, and the narrator, was definitely due for a come-uppance. What was his crime? Thinking he had it all figured out, basically. Never do that! Amusingly enough, something about his whole discourse also seems to translate the opening strains of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana into, “O FATE! You’re like the moon! Ever waxing, ever waning! You asshole!” For more about Frank, read Deborah Treisman’s Q & A with Ford, Online Only.

Those horses work hard. (The carousel at Central Park.)

It’s Friday! My how time flies! The horses at the Central Park carousel are waiting for you. Why not take a ride after work? We need more adults on that carousel anyway. Way too many kids. You’d think carousels were just for kids. Don’t let them intimidate you with their temper tantrums brewing like storms in the backs of their big eyes! Take over the carousel, grown-ups! Let ‘em wait. They’ve got all the time in the world!

(image: carolita johnson)

I’ve always thought it was odd that there were women out there in the world (I read about them in the New York Post) complaining about sports usurping quality boyfriend/husband time from them. Why not watch the game together? I’m 50/50 about it: sometimes I enjoy the game, and sometimes I enjoy a nap during the game.

Any comments, baseball fans?

PS: ABC’s press on the special “Chicks & Giggles” edition of The Rejection Show, here. (I was having technical difficulties, so wasn’t available for interview along with the other brilliant girls, but you see a bit of me in passing.)

This self-portrait didn’t make it into the show. And my hair actually looked much better than this, thanks to Randall from Ultra, and a few well-placed snips of the scissors before the show. Thank you Randall!

The Chicks & Giggles edition of The Rejection Show was an experience I’ll never forget. Everyone was great, everyone put it all out on a limb, and I felt honored to be amongst:
Carolyn Castiglia (rejected from The White Rapper Show), Wendy Spero (of Microthrills), Desiree Burch (Comedian, Host of SMUT), and Negin Farsad (Comedian, MTV, Sirius Radio).
And of course, Jon Friedman, who is a man, and his “Why Michael Winslow is mad at me” story.

My audience was very kind to me! Thank you, kind audience! (I was very nervous!)
I created that act especially for the Chicks & Giggles merging with The Rejection Show, so it was all new. It was also only my second time speaking in front of an audience!

If you missed it, at least part of the show was recorded, and will be up on ABC’s website soon (I’ll link to it when it’s up). And I’ve put all my drawings from last night up on my flickr page, here: Ape-Face and Me.

If you know how to use flickr, you know what to do. If not, just click on the first thumbnail image to the right of the large image, and it will open up with the text that goes with it. To see the next image, click the right-hand image in the little box to the upper right of the opened image. The next one will appear with text, and so on and so on.

Comments welcome, as always!

Links:
Chicks & Giggles.
The Rejection Show
Ape-Face and Me, on my flickr page.

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

I was perusing my site meter this morning, as I am wont to do now and then while waiting for the caffeine (or is it theine?) in my tea to take effect, when I noticed something that made my eyeballs perk up (insofar as eyeballs can perk): a reader from Israel! Wow, I thought. I wonder what brought me an Israeli reader? Surely not my silly stories of Ape-Face. So I looked further, and found that it was the result of a google:

Meanwhile, my Saudi Arabian readers continue to find me through more serious googles like this:

I’m happy for whatever brings people from anywhere outside the walls of my apartment to newyorkette, so to all my Middle Eastern readers, a hearty:
As-Salaam-Alaikum!
Shalom aleichem!

My “Spring-Break Venus” seems to be a hit amongst my Saudi readers. To them I say, guess what? It’s for sale! I’m a starving artist, and you’re obviously a patron of… why don’t we just say: the arts! How about it? It will be worth even more in the fall, when the final version of it appears in a brand new book of rejected New Yorker cartoons, Matt Diffee’s “Rejection Collection”! Stay tuned.

(image: carolita johnson)

Today I’ll be organizing my bit for the “Chicks & Giggles” special edition of The Rejection Show tomorrow night. I’ll be telling the story of my failed attempt to validate my looks twenty years ago by becoming a model. Beforementioned “looks” having been under siege in both the public sector (I was “Ape-Face Johnson during junior high through high school) and the private sector (my mother offered to pay for lip reduction surgery).

(By the way, Johnny, Henry, Dad, if you’re reading this, don’t tell Mom.)

The drawings you see here are samples of what I’ll be using to illustrate my story of how Ape-Face became a successful, albeit ugly, model in Paris. Yes, I was once asked if I was with the “Ugly People Agency” by a photographer who spotted me on a tram in Milan.
Read the rest of this entry »

(Click on the image to see the full-sized version on Vanessa’s website.)

Vanessa Davis’s “Spaniel Rage,” is a cartoon format diary of the life of a human being of the fairer sex, a young woman with a job and the usual trials and tribulations we all go through. Not self-indulgent, but truly self-seeing, the lucidity of her point of view is what seduced me. For example, my old friend, let’s just call him “Jeff,” could probably relate to the image above. I’ve often complained about the “yeah, but,” conversation, which I’ve been subjected to by both sexes.

She’s recently been published in the New York Times, a whimsically low-key story about shopping for a pair of salt-water sandals.

Anyone who knows me will know why “The Blattarian,” is my favorite series on Spaniel Rage. In fact, this is the story that made me write to Vanessa, and we exchanged stories of aggressive cockroaches by email. Did you know that there’s a northeastern variety of cockroach known for its aggressive behavior? No? Well, that’s because there isn’t! Not officially, that is. I still believe it, Vanessa.

Here’s my favorite Blattarian image:

(Click on the image to see the full-sized version on Vanessa’s website.)

Do you want to know what it’s like to be a woman in the city? This is a classic: here.

Spaniel Rage has been compiled into a book by Buenaventura Press, which you can read about here.

Read her Gothamist interview, here.

Her work will appear in Kramer’s Ergot 6 this fall.

(image: carolita johnson)

If you’re too poor to go dally in Martha’s Vineyard, thank your blessings! Talk of the Town explores the “Vineyard Fracture“, the latest thing to plague the idle rich. (The last plague I remember before my 15-year hiatus from New York’s idle rich is the horrible, nose-addling Giorgio of Beverly Hills Plague). Apparently rich klutzes are fracturing their metatarsals left and right, and according to Lauren Collins:

Memorable methods include stepping back while taking photographs, engaging in jumping sports, walking on uneven streets, wearing clogs or sandals, playing soccer after a few beers, slipping on grass, riding a bike after several years’ hiatus, and trying to stop your boat from hitting the dock with the edge of your foot.

The punch line of this piece is when we find out that this injury actually resolves itself on its own most of the time, and doesn’t really require medical attention. Which means that all those Martha’s Vineyarders stumping around in their unwieldy, single orthopedic medical boots are just a bunch of whiners, driving health insurance premiums up for us all. You’ll be glad to know, though, that till it does heal, it hurts like the dickens.

To indulge in some more schadenfreude, turn to Shouts & Murmurs, where Christopher Buckley’s “Stations of the Mel,” with a little illustration by Michael Crawford will make you cackle with delight. It’s very very funny. But is it funny enough for me not to point out that there is a rather cavalier misuse of the nominative declension, “thou,” of the Middle English second person singular pronoun where the accusative “thee” is called for?

Mel Is Dropped by Disney. Disney cryeth out, “Why did we bankroll thou to make a movie about Guatemalans dipped in flour?”

Yes, it is funny enough! And yet I must point it out, as I spent years studying my declensions and must leap upon every opportunity to do so.

An article I never thought I’d even begin to read was William Finnegan’s “Blank Monday,” not online, about Gordon “Grubby” Clark’s surfboard innovations with foam. “Grubby” changed the surfing world, just in time for the Beach Boys to propel surfing into a culture of its own. I had heretofore been possessed of no interest in surfing other than the opening credits of “Hawaii Five-O,” and yet I couldn’t stop reading till I found out how the shock of Grubby’s brusque — somehow awe-inspiring — departure (taking with him many of his valuable secrets) would be absorbed by the world of surf.

Finally, and for something a little more lighthearted, if you’re too tired or lazy to read, Matt Dellinger interviews the charming TNY cartoonist Roz Chast, in his video-interview “Wish you were here,” online only.

The New York skyline as seen from Central park at the north end of the Great Lawn looking south, a few days ago.

For those of you in New York who, like me, didn’t get a vacation this year. What’s to complain? Look how beautiful! And it’s for free!

PS- Happy Birthday, to you-know-who (you know who you are!) And I’m not talking about Dorothy Parker, whose birthday it is this weekend, but if you’re interested, take the Algonquin Walking Tour in honor of her birthday, details in the “upcoming.org” in my sidebar, or here.

This is how I imagine God gives out the halos in doggy heaven. (Image: carolita johnson)

Well, it’s Rejection Thursday, and this is one that I’ve been told is a little “too Walt Disney-ish.” It’s not too newyorkette-ish, so here you go!

Comments welcome, as always!

Look! There was a boat named after me (before me, actually)! It’s currently sunk (having been used as a target), and provides recreation for divers! If you’re curious, just click on the image for more info. I think it’s a cute little ship. But I could be partial.

(Chez Gari, 370 Columbus Ave between 77th and 78th Streets)

Have you ever walked into a restaurant, sat down, looked at the menu, met the eyes of your waiter, and realized it was way too expensive for your budget, yet somehow found yourself glued to your seat by pride?

It won’t happen to you chez Gari, now that I’ve warned you. It happened to me there, though! I was sauntering down Columbus Avenue after a long walk through Central Park, feeling a bit peckish, remembered I’d seen Gari reviewed in TNY’s Tables for Two, and went in on an impulse. Once I realized I was paralyzed by indecision in my chair, I obeyed another impulse and decided to make the most of it, or the least of it, or maybe both. I pretended I only wanted a snack and ordered an appetizer, one roll, and a small hot saké (when in doubt, order hot saké, it’s always the cheapest saké in the house, since it’s a waste to heat up a fine saké).

The duck salad appetizer was actually rather bland, even though it purported to contain jalopeño. To be fair, I did get a hint of it later on, as an aftertaste. But bland as it was, it was still somehow rather pleasing, maybe because the duck was nice and tender, and because the salad portion was actually rather copious by Japanese restaurant standards. It led me to suspect it had been conceived for the rather conservative taste buds of non-sushi eaters who would inevitably be brought to Gari by their sushi-loving dates.

I ordered my one favorite personal sushi comfort-food: a salmon-skin handroll, which was light and crispy, the lightest I’d ever experienced. The chef’s special sushi selection passed through my line of vision on its way to a table (I was sitting at the sushi bar), and I noticed a very beautiful, jewel-like piece of sushi beckoning to me. I asked my waiter, who was handing me l’addition, what it’s name was, and was told something I absolutely cannot remember! But I do remember it was tuna, marinated Korean-style, and it was delicious. The chef was kind enough to make me a miniature version of it, compliments of the house.

To complete my dinner, I went home, a little lighter of wallet, slightly tipsy, and made my own cold Japanese buckwheat noodles, sprinkled with hand-roasted (my hands roasted them) sesame seeds, and shredded Nori on top. (Total value of this home-cooked side dish: probably about two dollars or less, once you divide the cost per ration of the noodles, the sesame seeds, and the Nori.)

All in all, not a bad experience for what might have turned into a night of financial chagrin. There was no discomfort in being alone at the sushi bar, though the leather seat, molded over time into two concave buttock-bowls by other people’s derrieres, was a little unnerving at first. I was there on the early side, before it got too crowded, and everyone was absolutely kindly and cordial, probably thinking I was just another Upper West Side chick on a diet. I recommend Gari for an Upper West Side, civilised experience anytime you’ve got the financial wherewithal to splurge, or if you have more self-restraint than cash and only want a little snack for around $50.

If you go there, tell me if I imagined the “Chez Gari” on the window. (Nobody calls it “Chez Gari,” but I could swear I saw the “chez” !)
Gari
370 Columbus Ave., New York, NY 10024
near 77th St.
212-362-4816

Jillian (right) and her cousin Mariko Tamaki, with whom she collaborated on SKIM. Double portrait by Jillian Tamaki.

I found Jillian Tamaki a long time ago when my friend Emily from Emdashes sent me a link to Illustration Friday. I put my name on her mailing list, contributed a drawing or two for the “rain” theme, then changed browswers, lost the bookmark, and forgot all about I.F. and Jillian till I got an email from her that I (yikes!) almost deleted as spam. But something told me to click it open, and I had a eureka moment. I checked out her website, and that is how I found SKIM.

I ordered a copy from Kiss Machine, but it has yet to arrive, or I’d review it for you right now! All is not lost, however, because Jillian’s website has two excerpts from it, both enticing enough to have compelled me to place my order, and one of which I’m excerpting here. Click on the image to see the full-sized image on her site.

SKIM was recently nominated for a Doug Wright Award, and, Jillian tells me, is being expanded into a graphic novel, due to come out in 2008.

Her comics and illustrations aren’t too disparate, both entirely recognizable as her own — see the lines in the tree, above, and the undulating, brushy lines typical in her renderings of hair, water, grass, skin creases. They’re something in her color illustration style that touches me the way William Wallace Denslow always did. (He’s my favorite children’s book illustrator of all time. Here’s one of my favorites of his, in which you might see what I mean, just a little?) But back to Jillian! Her illustrations have appeared in The New Yorker as well — illustrations, not comics: click here for a beautiful whirling dervish that appeared in TNY.

SKIM is definitely female-oriented, because of the fictionally autobiographical nature of the work (The Diary of Skim Dakota), written by Mariko, but not girly-girlish or twee (she’s not a fan of Emily The Strange), which may come as a relief and pique the curiosity of those among us who stand up to pee. Mariko’s humor is dry, freaky, and her observations are limpid. Check out the slightly unnerving interlude from SKIM below (click on the image to see the rest of this excerpt, which was too big for my 450 pixels of post space).

It’s well worth noting that SKIM has recently been nominated for a Doug Wright award, and is being expanded to a graphic novel, due for completion in 2008 (if, as Jillian says, she gets her “ass in gear.”)

For something darker, check out Jillian’s “City of Champions,” (excerpt here, more on her own website) and reviewed here.

Read Jillian’s interview on Illustration Friday, here. Mariko’s personal website: here.

Look out for Jillian’s “Gilded Lilies,” a book of “comics n’ stuff” due to come out at the end of 2006.

(image: carolita johnson)

This week’s weekend reader is a quickie, since it’s also last week’s weekend reader: the last issue of The New Yorker being a double issue. So if you just received your issue (I know a few subscribers who get their issues quite late!), or if you haven’t started it yet (maybe you’re saving all your TNY’s in a pile for your next vacation?), have a look at last week’s weekend reader. If not, there’s plenty waiting for you, both online and off:

I didn’t get to the piece on Beckett till this week. I’m pretty certain that someone I know told me a story of having actually met Beckett in Paris, but have not been able to remember who, and all the likely candidates deny any such luck. Ah, well. So much for the inside scoop. But “Sam I Am,” by Benjamin Kunkel, (who mentions that he picked up “Beckett and Zen” as a “nineteen-year-old trekker in Kathmandu” — I’d assume he picked it up at the Kathmandu Barnes & Noble and read it on the floor while slurping a Starbucks cappucino, if time travel were possible — gives you some of what a chance meeting would yield. Brief, curious, leaving you wanting more, wondering if you really understood — probably what it would be like to meet Beckett.

A few good selections are reprinted, starting with the first line of the piece, which one can imagine pronounced in many different ways (incredulous, fearful, doubtful):

“We’re not beginning to . . . to . . . mean something?

And my personal favorite ending with:

Perhaps she too was a man, yet another of them. But in that case surely our testicles would have collided, while we writhed. Perhaps she held hers tight in her hand, on purpose to avoid it.

Which seems to be a clue as to just how intimate you can be with someone, and still not know — or doubt that you know — them. Do you know Beckett? Even if you knew for a fact that he had testicles, and even saw them with your own eyes, could you really say you knew him?

There are a few others, which, if you haven’t read Beckett yet (and I’ve only seen the plays — alas, making me only typical, according to Kunkel), would lead you to wonder if he weren’t the forerunner of Monty Python. Such as when Kunkel refers to the “Unnamable”’s story “of a household laid wasted by a tin of ‘fatal corned-beef,’ contaminated with botulism,” or Beckett’s claim that he had “memories of being trapped inside the womb, ‘crying to be let out, but no one could hear.’” Such surreal tidbits make me wonder if Beckett weren’t actually even funnier than I thought. Not that I haven’t been laughing my ass off during his plays.

Idyllic Central Park, just a few days ago.

Well, the heat broke, and we had some beautiful weather, and some dramatic thunderstorms! The city feels a little cleaner. And speaking of cleaning, I called the IRS on a conference call with my accountant, and am on my way to clearing up some misunderstandings (checks sent and cashed, but never acknowledged by them), and paying the remainder of what I owe. It feels good to come clean! Come clean, cleaned out, whatever!

And I’m waiting with bated breath to hear about the FAA selling their own water, mouthwash and lip-balm brands on airplanes, at $5 a bottle, and $10 a stick.