newyorkette

(image: carolita johnson)

As Emdashes noted, this week’s TNY was a barrel of monkeys, what with Ian Parker’s fascinating swingin’ bonobo story, featuring a beautiful portrait of a “peace-loving” bonobo, and a bit of bonobo porn (that photo is not online, only in the paper version, where people can see it while you read on the subway).

Sasha Frere-Jones’ simeo-sino-coolbrit opera story comes complete with “Eeeeeeeeeee!”, and Ben McGrath’s “Muscle Memory” (not online, unfortunately), seriously and delightfully (to me, a Bionic Woman fan) conjures up visions of bionic women and bionic monkeys.

In the non-monkey section, the fiction, A.L. Kennedy’s “Wasps,” will hopefully inspire malcontent housewives to pack their TNY in a suitcase and leave, for chrissakes! Or at least call an exterminator.

And let’s hear it for that cover by Anita Kunz, “Girls will be girls.” The three images of women that scare me the most, united.

Now, for my favorite monkey song! (From Disney’s “Jungle Book”) Shoobedeeboo!

Above: “The Shortcut,” as it’s locally known. It is on the property of the Long Island Railroad, behind the fence (the one with the hole cut in it), on the shoulder of the train tracks, and technically in Nassau County.

I know. It’s a little snooty to insist on using the Latin, but the day I had to translate a piece called “Scala Coeli” in my Medieval Latin class, and realized it meant “Stairway to Heaven,” I decided I would use that phrase every chance I got, at the drop of a hat, if you will. (No, I can’t think of a Latin phrase that means “at the drop of a hat.” Happy?)

Anyway, I looked up this photo for a friend this morning. It was taken long ago, maybe in the year 2000. What you are looking at is the handiwork of my eccentrically resourceful father. The commuters of our neighborhood used to clamber up this little hill in their good shoes and business suits up to the train tracks, walk along them for about twenty feet, then climb up the emergency ladder to the platform. All this to avoid walking the long way around, which would have taken five extra minutes.

You may think that’s very lazy of them, but when your commute is 40 to 50 minutes, and more than an hour door to door, every minute is a minute that you’re not being paid to not be home. So five more minutes to sit at your breakfast table reading The Post — though I don’t condone reading The Post — was very important to these commuters, burdened with the bitterness of the gainfully employed as they were.

My father used to mow the grass that led to this slope, as a slight improvement on the status quo. But one day he must have got tired of slipping on wet leaves or loose gravel on that slope and improvised some stairs, using some discarded railroad ties he found near the tracks. Slapped on a coat of reflective paint, for higher visibility in the dark of overtime nights. The LIRR soon discovered the precursors to the stairs in the photo above and ripped them out. My father put them back. They ripped them out again. He put them back again, this time with deep piles embedding them into the side of the slope. They ripped them out again and caused a landslide. They also removed the emergency ladder from the platform, to further discourage sleepyheaded commuters from walking along the train tracks and causing the conductors of oncoming express trains to suffer panic attacks.

Most of the commuters continued to clamber up through the rubble, having evolved to wear black Reeboks instead of nice work shoes. Deprived of the emergency ladder, they crossed the tracks instead, not afraid of the third rail at all, and then used the overpass to get to their desired platform. My dad, not one to risk his life for an extra five minutes of anything, got a rope ladder. Eventually he found the rope ladder a little heavy to bring to work and back. So he put abrasive tape on the metal supports of a billboard behind the train platform, and got some well-treaded sneakers. He performed a strangely Spiderman-like stunt (strange for a 60 year old man) every morning, occasionally frighening a newspaper-reading, coffee-slurping woman when he called out, “excuse me!” so she wouldn’t think he was trying to look up her skirt, as he climbed up under the handrails and on to the platform.

For the walk home, he kept a stash of long, thin branches by the base of the billboard, and they served the purpose of waving away spider webs that had formed in his path during the day. Nothing worse than spider web in your face in the dark.

Rejected cartoon, Carolita Johnson. (Click on the image for a larger version).

I’ve always been fascinated by the bodies and poses of the baseball players, neglecting to learn the rules of the game. Still, it’s a lot more interesting to compare buttock size (what is it about baseball that gives players such meaty butts? It is all muscle, or all tucked-in shirt?) and pitching stances, so I celebrated my esoteric interest in baseball with this cartoon.

Rejected cartoon by Carolita Johnson. (Click on the image for a larger version.)

Rejected three weeks ago, by now it’s already old news, if it’s on NPR and in the Times! Still, don’t go buying your toothpaste at the 99 cents store again yet!

(image: carolita johnson)

I was in Junior High School, and the train station was part of the shortcut home. My panties were wedged deeply into my crotch after walking a mile homewards, and something had gone wrong with the configuration of my fleshy parts in that region: it was unbearable. In desperation, I’d thought, here comes the express train — it’s going by so fast, nobody will see…

This was years before I became a commuter on express trains passing people on platforms: needless to say I’ll never forget the first time I was on an express train and noticed that the people on the platform we passed might as well have been moving in slow motion. That was the day I blushed to remember that time long ago when I’d thought I’d cleverly taken advantage of a passing train to unwedge my panties from my crotch and rearrange my labia more comfortably, having reached under my skirt and tunneled past the elastic of my panties with no reserve whatsoever. It brings to mind the poster I saw in the Hallmark shop’s window the other day that went something like, “Sing like nobody’s listening.” Anyway, this was the day I imagined the conversation on the passing train must have been going something like “Hey, look,” by Simon Rich.

Oh, dear.

Well! Denby surely jests when he implies that he’d rather have seen Julie Andrews play Eliza Doolittle in “My Fair Lady” — this “idiocy” in casting is mentioned in the context of John Travolta’s cross-dressing role in “Hairspray.” But preferring Julie to Audrey in this review hasn’t made us forget his last review, of “Knocked up,” which is still raising questions and musings about irresponsible schlubs mating with boring beauties, on Emdashes.

And how about Christophe Mann’s clever illo accompanying James Surowiecki’s “Fuel for Thought”? Almost dispenses with the need to read.

PS - My advice: if you’re going to sing like nobody’s listening, do make sure nobody is listening!

Over the weekend, during the heat wave, I discovered something! Those energy efficient bulbs don’t generate nearly as much heat as incandascent bulbs!

I’d bought a bunch of the new bulbs, thinking to be very virtuous, but found I could only bear that light in one place: the hallway table by the door. Better than nothing, I thought, and I do use that light a lot. Well, I got used to it after a while. After a month or so, I decided to put a stronger one (a 75 watt equivalent that only puts out 35 watts, but is nice and bright) for my kitchen light. At first it was a little jarring, but I grew to like it within a few days.

I’ve finally put a third bulb at my work table — when I noticed how hot the incandascent light was! And you know what? It actually makes me feel cooler to see that cool, bluish, moonlight.

So, in honor of my discovery, I’ve put a poster of last week’s TNY cover by Staake in the hallway by the light, and am posting it today, to try to encourage everyone. It’s an acquired taste, but I feel so cool, and in more ways than one…

(NB: I got the poster at a TNY event, because it was a leftover promo item, but you can get your own copy at the cartoonbank, by clicking on the image.)