newyorkette

(Disclaimer: Yes, I’m of Ecuadorian descent and quite proud of them for this.)

Every little squeak helps!
Ecuador expels World Bank rep. Heheheheheheheheheh!

I get my TNY by subscription as a reward for my contribution to WNYC, which I support in spite of my occasional objections to Leonard Lopate (his gospel hours, his embarrassing adoration of Patricia T. O’Conner), a heck of a lot of religious content, and Jonathan Schwartz’s strange insistance on sharing his love affair with the insane-sounding “Carousel Waltz”. My contribution is ten dollars a week, forever, or until my credit card dies. All I asked for in return: my reward and a mailbox free of WNYC requests for contributions.

Anyway, never mind my grumpy nature: the thing is, even though my contribution is ongoing, my reward apparently isn’t! They have not coordinated their gift-giving to synch with their gift-receiving. That means that I will spend the next month not getting my TNY in the mail. The E.T.A. of my next issue is apparently May 7th. Get it together WNYC!

Being too cheap and stubborn to go out and buy my own (alas, here we go with my grumpy nature again!), I have been reading The New Yorker on my cell phone instead. Thus, the illustration above in honor of my stalwart efforts to read TNY come hell or highwater, or not.

But it’s not just in my honor, because how am I able I do this? I found that Opera, a web browser recommended to me by my high-tech medievalist friend Maria in Berlin, does a “mini” version, aptly called “Opera Mini.” It’s free, just like the computer-based version. I downloaded it onto my cell phone, and found that the magazine was quite readable, even on my inch and a quarter by inch and six-eighths screen. I was even able to view my own cartoon this week on the site. Very satisfying.

Yesterday, I spent my lunch break reading Atul Gawande’s “The way we age now” on my cell phone in the “Go Sushi” downstairs from my next fitting client, and was quite pleased about it, however horrified I was by the prospect of my future and inevitable calcification.

Calcification may be in the future for us all, but so is reading magazines on our cell phones! Try it! Don’t be an old fart!

PS - in case anyone has tried to post a comment lately and not succeeded, it seems my anti-spamming measures have been nuking perfectly acceptable comments before I even see them… Sorry about that! Please keep trying, and let me know if you’re still not getting through.

That’s what a friend says I should call my as yet unwritten modelling autobiography.

This cartoon appears in this week’s TNY. Apparently it has the honor of being the first cartoon in the issue, which I’m extremely pleased about. I’m not sure why, though — this is due to the fact that I haven’t received my TNY for the last two weeks. Ahem! Is it in keeping with the theme of the magazine this week? I can’t say yet. I’ll know tomorrow!

I started this cartoon with the majestic image of the multi-antlered buck in the background. I felt compelled to come up with a cartoon for him, and this is what came of that compulsion. As you can see, I’ve resisted the urge to put in a lot more shading, which often gets me accused of getting “muddy.” No more mud.

I kind of miss the mud. Perhaps someday I will figure out a way to bring it back without incurring any wrath or distaste. In the meantime, as I come up with my new, and improved not-so-muddy-but-not-TOO-darn-unmuddy style, I am happy to demonstrate an unsuspected ability to “adapt” and “work with others.”

Now, back to work on other cartoons! Till later!

(Click on the image to get to the newyorker website.)

At 4 a.m. one of the things you can do is come up with one sellable cartoon, and one unsellable one. This week’s TNY has a cartoon I sold in one version, that was rejected in another. Above is the sold version. Below is the unsellable version. Both were perfect expressions of my ironic feelings about what you have to face on TV at 4 a.m., however.

The unsold version, which, besides being a little more depressing, is also a little “muddier” than the above, since it’s the “rough”:

(”Papers please,” sticker from my illegal immigrant days in France. I “distributed” this one at Immigrations, where an odious one-armed man used to violently reach over his counter and wave my “carte de séjour” application papers in my face while yelling at me till I cried and went home to find more papers. At the student center, even though I had the equivalent of an A average, they used to demand “proof of attending classes.” At both places, young and old alike were often escorted out, crying or screaming obscenities. I stood for this kind of treatment for 11 years. But I digress.)

I just finished reading this article in the Times: U.S. Raid on an Immigrant Household Deepens Anger and Mistrust

Besides the normal feelings of empathy and indignance such a piece would evoke in a normal person, there was one particular bit that struck me as needing extra attention:

Ms. Murphy, who has three children, voiced larger misgivings about illegal immigrants with children in the local school. She called them “freeloaders.”

“I’m paying taxes, they’re not,” she said. “Yet their kids still get to go to school with the privileges of my kids. I resent it.”

As a former illegal immigrant myself (before you get excited, it was not in the USA — I was an illegal American immigrant in France for roughly 6 years overall, with 7 years of legal residence spead out on either side of that time segment), I’d like to point out that most illegal immigrants I’ve known both here and in France are very careful to pay their taxes. Paying taxes does not bring you unwelcome attention from the INS, since the two organizations are not connected, most likely because every country wants every penny it can get, whether it’s from their own citizens or non-citizens desperate enough to pay taxes in order to prove good faith.

Paying taxes provides necessary proof of one’s upright presence in the host country and is very handy when it come to applications for naturalization. The only thing it doesn’t provide is benefits. All those years when I was paying taxes and “charges socials” (social security, etc) while working illegally in France will never ever pay off. Not when I retire, not ever. So, it was my host country that was the freeloader. Not me, the illegal, tax-paying immigrant. And it is the same in every country. We all know what we’re getting into, and we work anyway. When and if we leave the country after spending all our money on food, clothing, rent and other things in that host country (we might send some money “home” or leave with some, but the cost of living and breathing is incurred and paid off in the host country), we also leave behind those benefits. That money stays in the system. Consider it a present.

Those that don’t pay taxes probably don’t make enough to even dream of it: life can be expensive when you have no bank account, no credit record, and you’re paying your rent in cash to landlords who would have you believe they’re doing you a favor (but these landlords aren’t declaring or paying taxes on your rent — the same goes for employers who pay you in cash: they aren’t paying social charges for you either). Those that pay cash to illegal immigrants would have them believe that they could get into trouble for declaring — but in fact, it’s the employers who could get into trouble, too. Where you have an illegal immigrant not paying taxes, you have a Ms. or Mr. Murphey not paying taxes of social charges either. This is also freeloading.

That was for all the Ms. Murphy’s out there. (Hmm, Murphy? — is that a native American name?)

Sean Walsh, one of my TNY friends and organizers just sent me this pic from the Humor on the Slopes trip: me, Drew Dernovich, and Chad Darbyshire pretending to have a hard time judging the caption contest. It wasn’t that hard, it was actually every educative.

The winner of my cartoon was something along the lines of “UVA, UVB, what does some university in Virginia have to do with anything?” I thought it was clever. (Other entries showed too much obvious foreknowledge of the original caption.)

(Found this image here.)

When I made my first attempt to move back to New York from Paris in 1998, I lived on St-Mark’s street near Avenue A. This was in the old days, when drug dealers acted as my security guard on the stoop. I lived with two and a half roommates (Jason would turn on the christmas lights in his window when he was available to spank girls during the sex act), in an apartment where I could see through the gaps in the living room floor to the apartment below. It was nothing personal, but I didn’t really like having roommates, so I used to go to another living room: Alt Coffee. There, I could sit on a seedy, cozy couch with my soy chai and read my “Futurological Congress.” Or sit at a dinky old computer and trade love emails with a kind of silly, unrealistic man (who forgot to tell me about his live-in girlfriend) in Germany. It was escapism, Alt Coffee was.

I was one of the contributors to the graffiti and sticker art in the bathroom. I’m one of those people so broke that I spent hours taking tiny little sips of my one hot beverage. I didn’t love the place: it was simply comfortable the way being at a friend of a friend’s house on a holiday can be. You sat there feeling like the one people might ask about later: “Whose friend was she?” When I moved back to the neighborhood in 2002, even though the rest of the neighborhood was already taking on the aspect of a hipster mall, it was still there for me when my two Italian roommates made life intolerable by watching “Sex and the City” on a loop all day long.

Alt is reopening as “Hopscotch,” which painfully (to me) and eloquently speaks of the patronage it will be catering to. No more strange vaguely homeless looking, but oddly confident and self-contained personalities. No more mystery, no more spiders from Mars. It’s true, I’d often go home rather than use the really disgusting bathroom, but maybe that should’ve been anyone’s measure of how long is too long to stay: if your bladder is bursting, you’ve been there roughly four hours. No, the new clientele will be stroller jockeys, and aunties of stroller jockeys. The last bastion of the gritty survivor who wouldn’t dream of living on Park Slope is gone. In fact, I think it wouldn’t be too facetious to call this a bit of Park Slope Spread.

Even the person bemoaning the “draining” away of the East Village’s “grit” in this New York Times article about Alt Coffee, seems to think that the place where Alt got its first furniture is a place called “Dumpsters.” How clueless is this city becoming?

Ah, well! I have no more time to complain! Life moves on. The gritty keep moving. I moved up to West Harlem where Starbucks died on 138th street and Broadway. The only gourmet coffee you can get here is at Vinegar Hill downstairs, where espresso is only a dollar and is served to you by my neighbors. It gives me hope for our neighborhood. For a little while, anyway.

(image: carolita johnson)

This is my first TNY weekend reader since the new online version of TNY. Have you seen it? It’s elegant, inviting, and spacious. And it’s got pictures, lots of pictures. Reading on the old version was a bit like stepping into an old fashioned phone booth, which was why it didn’t really matter whether I was reading it online on my 17-inch computer screen, or on my 2 x 1.5-inch cell phone screen. Now it does matter. (Now, it doesn’t look so good on my cell phone! Too many interruptions in the middle of articles, with things like “see more cartoons”, weirdly.) I’m sure the glitches will be figured out. So, welcome, new online TNY! (newyorker.com/magazine)

Speaking of pictures, I’ve realized that I’ve been silently admiring the work of James Surowiecki’s usual illustrator, Christoph Niemann, who also did this week’s cover, “T-Day.” Niemann is especially adroit with images that I call “charade” images — I look at them before I read the article (and if possible, before reading the title of the article), and try to figure out what the article’s going to be about. This week’s image is particularly eloquent: the snake of temptation, the indigestible house stuck in its gut. It’s about sub-prime mortgages and the devastation they’ve wrought, of course.

I’ll remember to mention Niemann’s illos more often, since they’re always just right.
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(Cartoon: carolita johnson. Click on the image for newyorker.com cartoon coverage. To see the image on Cartoonbank.com, a link will be posted as soon as it exists!)

I’ve always wanted to do an Easter Rabbit cartoon as well as a Thanksgiving one, and here is the fruit of my labours! (I may yet post a photo of my crucified Easter Bunny on Sunday. TK.) And yes, this cartoon was rejected in another version once before, where the turkey was smoking crack in front of a brownstone stoop littered with beer cans and hypodermic needles.

PS - for my non-american readers who may not be aware of the custom, the tradition is that just before Thanksgiving, the President of the United States (the Leader of the Free World, as they say), pardons a turkey. That is, this pardoned turkey will be spared from becoming someone’s dinner, and basically “retire” from the food chain.) Other pardoned turkeys include President Nixon.