newyorkette

They say when in New York you should look up. But sometimes you should look down: this is one segment of the south sidewalk on 26th street between 10th and 11th. (Or possibly 11th and 12th! I’m very bad with remembering numbers!)

(This cartoon was published in The New Yorker this week. Click on the image to go to the cartoonbank.)

So true. Don’t be sad! It’s gonna happen to the best of us!

(Rejected cartoon by Carolita Johnson.)

There is a mouse in my house, which is what reminded me of this old rejected cartoon. Not that there are any crumbs under my sofa cushions! Nein! My sofa is as crumb-free as any other obssessively mouse-avoiding person’s sofa should be.

I have placed humane traps - which I went to great trouble to procure - in places that I thought were guaranteed to score a live capture. I imagined myself freeing the little mousie in the alley downstairs, gently admonishing her not to come back to my house, watching her scamper gratefully away. After setting the traps, I filled every hole in my apartment with steel wool. For three weeks, I thought perhaps I’d locked the mouse out while she was out on an errand. I haven’t heard an odd scratchy noise, or any pitter-patters of little feet in my oven. But last night, I nearly gave the mouse (who had perhaps been away on vacation) a cardiac arrest.

I had been sitting in the armchair in my kitchen when suddenly to the left of me came trotting the little mousie, as if at the end of a long day, minding her own business. Involuntarily, I let out a very loud scream and jumped up on the armchair (how pathetic is that? — to be fair, seen out of the corner of my eye, I was afraid it was a giant cockroach). The mouse literally lost control, much the way a car would on an oil slick, sliding and sprawling sideways, doing a one and a half turn in the air before zipping this way and that way, not sure which way to flee. I felt almost sorry for it.

But why didn’t the peanut butter in my humane traps work? Because it’s “crunchy” and not “smooth”? The friend I shopped for the bait with figured mice would like “crunchy” better. So, I did some research today, wondering if there was something mice like better than peanut butter. Apparently they like peanut butter, oats, water, chocolate, and “nesting materials” equally well. I’ve come to the conclusion that my mouse is just finicky.

“Mouse in the house” reminds me of “bats in the belfry,” which reminds me of the “crazy astronaut lady,” who I think makes her first appearance in music video culture in the clip you’ll find on S/FJ’s blog, here. (I’m grateful she’s made her appearance in a spacesuit and not diapers.)

(Click on the album cover for the iMix)

I’ve been neglecting my music! I even bought my iPod a few months ago just for the photo and video components rather than to listen to music. Shame on me! I’m a sound engineer’s daughter and can spot a blip a mile away: I really should be using my ears. Well, that all changed when I bought new earphones! Dump your crappy little Mac earbuds, and get something decent for the same price (no need to go crazy and buy the Bose — I have it on good authority they are useless). I went to Tekserve (which I think of as my veterinarian, all my gadgets being my little pets), and got the Sony in-ear ones, which sound just as good, if not better.

NJS is back, because I’m back, and you’re back. We’re all back! Yay!

(The delicate creature known as “the model.” Illustration by Carolita Johnson.)

(This is what models do a lot. Sit around and wait. Get paranoid. Begin having (mostly justified) feelings of inadequacy. Begin thinking that listening to Aerosmith’s “Dream on” should be limited to the minimum. No need to learn all the words. Same goes for Twisted Sister’s “We’re not gonna take it,” particularly in the morning before work. Take it easy, girl. Stick with lighter fare, like Peggy Lee, Hank Williams, and Nat King Cole.

Maybe get a real job, throw away all those flesh-colored thongs, get some respect. Yeah.
(The flesh-colored thong would become a symbol of oppression.)

The above illustrations are from a chapter of “I’m Thursday” (working title, remember) to be called, “The delicate creature,” and it’s about being a model. That, up there, would be me, about twenty years ago. I’m afraid I may have made myself look better than I did, but I can’t really remember what I looked like anymore! Anyone who knew me is free to point out where I went wrong. One friend said I look rather “empty” in this illo, which means I probably got pretty close. Being empty was my job!

(image: carolita johnson)

In “The Human Bomb” Adam Gopnik observes what many French people take unashamed comfort in:

The French police are not known for their gentle touch with psychos.

And the comparison of Nicolas Sarkozy to Brigitte Bardot is particularly insightful and apt, love-handles (poignées d’amour?) notwithstanding. Gopnik’s little twist of transfering the “Human Bomb” epithet from the actual Human Bomb to Sarkozy is also very French, rhetorically speaking. Très bien!

Luckily I read Gopnik’s piece before reading Daniyal Mueenuddin’s “Nawabdin Electrician,” because that one piece of fiction was enough to sustain me for the whole week. If I’ve been waiting for another fiction piece to fall in love with, it was worth the wait. The suspense at the end, where we wonder if mercy will turn this piece into something else altogether, is acute. Is mercy a good thing of itself? Or is it a luxury? Does it really make one morally superior? Questions are raised.

I love my neighborhood. I’ll miss it someday.

(Un-sold cartoon, by Carolita Johnson)

Here’s a cartoon that was bought, then un-bought! Yes, it happened again. It should be noted that most of the time we cartoonists are unaware of such un-sales. Farley (the new assistant to the cartoon editor) does not call up and say, “Hey, you got an okay,” and then call back a little while later and say, “Scratch that.”

The sales go to the notoriously bully-like fact-checkers (ha ha), where they make sure they haven’t got another cartoon in their database that’s too much like the one they’re vetting. A cartoon must be original, or at least not resemble a cartoon published in recent history by a famous cartoonist. It might pass if the cartoon resembles a really old cartoon by a cartoonist who isn’t a household name.

Anyway, here is the cartoon (by Lee Lorenz, no less! It was hopeless!) mine resembled way too much. I only knew about its un-sale because I discovered the doppelganger myself, only after submitting the above. Sigh!

Speaking of “okays,” here is Mick Stevens’s compilation of “first okay” stories. Mine is among them, accompanied by a caricature that I have only myself to blame for, since I drew it myself in the morning before drinking enough tea. Do I look like that in the morning? Possibly.

Above is the sign I put in the elevator when I first moved in. I’d got tired of calling the cops, and thought: “Hmmm. Maybe all I have to do is ask.”

It’s worked many times for me before!

I’m not sure if the subsequent decreased population of crackheads in the hallways was due to the crackheads reading the note, or the super reading the note, but here is a rejected cartoon inspired by those days:

It’s a first version of a cartoon that was eventually bought. Here you can see what’s buyable, and what’s not, in basically the same cartoon.

(Green onions, by Carolita Johnson.)

Last June I was given an assignment by a nice lady who wants to be my literary agent. I was to come up with a couple sample chapters (with illos) by the end of the summer. What time is it? Oh! It’s the end of the summer!

I’ve been writing sample chapters for two projects. One is for what I suppose would be called an autobiographical account, a memoir, of sorts? With illustrations. I want it to look a bit like a Nancy Drew book, or basically the way books looked just before we all graduated to books with no pictures at all in them. I’ve always missed those books!

The other is a kids’ book. The story has already been written, and has been sent to my most accessible English-speaking father and small child (in Paris), for a test run and appraisal. (Most of my stateside friends got busy reproducing a good 20 years ago. Thank goodness for later bloomers like Juan.)

Why the green onions, you may well ask? Well, dredging up stories from my past without just turning them into flat “hilarious anecdotes” devoid of any actual human empathy, or only just hinting at their real significance in a life, well, it’s just a little unnerving. It means I have to feel something. I’m used to just mining for laughs. (What have I got in my pocket that I can use to make you laugh? Oh, look! Here’s a very sad story that I can turn on its head.) Making funny is a good distillation process. But if all you do is laugh, and forget to collect the distilled product, well? It collects. It overflows. Gets on people’s nerves.

So the idea is, you write a book (or do something) and put some meaning back into it all, but without turning it into a huge tearful blob of pathetic sadness or self-pity either. Yuck! You all have permission to put on a nice, big boot and insert it ungraciously in the appropriate place if I do.

But I digress! Green onions! Read the rest of this entry »

My telescope is in Canada, vacationing at a lake. Not me! I’m here, working.
I hope my telescope is having a good time.

8:05:01 a.m.:

8:05:05 a..m.:

8:05:06 a.m.:

(image: carolita johnson)

Paul Simms’s “My Near-Death Experience” is so so true. Live every moment like it’s your last. Or watch your life pass before your eyes someday and be bored to death.

I don’t understand “Mayberry Man.” Because as well-written as the piece was, halfway through it I realized that everything I was reading therein classified as TMI. I mean, the only reason I can possibly imagine needing all this information about Rudy Giuliani is if there actually is a good chance he’ll be our next president. Is this what Peter J. Boyer is trying to tell us? If this is so, then please excuse me while I prepare for my assisted suicide.

Fiction this week was the opposite of last week’s heavily estrogen-spritzed, lusty lady piece, with a surprisingly heavy intravenous dose of bitter, hairy-chested testosterone, in T. Cooper’s “Swimming.” There’s a cockroach in it, too, up a kid’s nose. Total boy stuff.

“Parallel Play” (not online), by Tim Page, about living with Asperger’s Syndrome awoke some old memories as well as some old bugaboos. My dad was diagnosed as an “Aspie” recently. Before that, he was often diagnosed as a jerk. Most people don’t get people with Asperger’s. The thing about “Aspies,” which I remembered as I read Page’s piece, is that even when they talk about how hard it is for them, they do seem to take pride in it. Maybe a bit too much pride for comfort. I’m not usually one to deny anyone a bit of self-satisfaction. Why? Because I’m often guilty of that sin myself, and sometimes wonder if it’s a tic I’ve inherited from my Aspie father. Which naturally leads to questions of free will, and all sorts of other worries.

While I worry, here’s the abstract of the piece, but you’ll have to get the paper version for the full article.

Is it my imagination, or was this issue very manly? (Note: I have no problem with manly. Me like manly. Manly good. Me just asking!)

The view downtown, more easily accessible with the livingroom windows removed. (For replacement, of course.)

(rejected cartoon by Carolita Johnson)

My dad, who was a sound engineer at Columbia Recording Studios (later absorbed into Sony), used to regale me with stories about Glenn Gould not allowing his off-key humming to be erased from the recordings, and refusing to play while sitting on any other piano bench than his own. Said piano bench apparently held together by bits of tape and string, Gould reportedly said he’d quit performing when that stool broke. We wondered who would go first, the stool or the pianist. One day my dad came home and announced that Glenn Gould had decided not to perform anymore. The fate of that stool and its influence upon Gould’s decision remained a mystery to me.

The Well-Tempered Clavier was in any case one of the pieces I loved to hear interpreted by my two favorite performers at the time (I was about 9): Glenn Gould, and Walter/Wendy Carlos. Walter/Wendy was also part of the mythology of my childhood. When my father told me that Walter was now Wendy, due to a scientific breakthrough (that’s how I understood the operation), I was amazed. How cool was that? Science could do anything, and Wendy’s “Well-Tempered Synthesizer” seemed to reiterate that amazement to me every time I thrilled to a newly noticed synthesized sound.

This cartoon, therefore, was a long time coming, conceived in early childhood. It needed to get out of my system, and so there you go. Out with the old! In with the new!

(image: carolita johnson)

Nancy Franklin’s “Women’s Work,” begins her review of Lifetime’s new season of female-oriented shows with an observation that confirms what I thought I might possibly have been imagining: Lifetime is all about reinforcing the fears that discourage women from being as free as they think they are. The killer always turns out to be the boyfriend or husband, and the boyfriend/husband turns out to be the killer or swindler. Women, barricade yourselves, put on your virtual burkas. Men are Bluebeard, or the big, bad wolf in every story. The message is: can’t live with them (because you might be killed or bamboozled big time), can’t live without them (as Maureen Dowd may well know). Now I know why I never liked Lifetime. Is the idea is to use fear to unite women, the easier to suppress them? That would be so old-fashioned that it would nearly be quaint. No, more likely the easier to sell to them. Beware of this kind of “television for women.” It doesn’t have women’s best interests at heart.

Herbert Spencer, a “Man with a plan,” would probably concur, if he were a TV-watcher, which he probably wouldn’t have been had he lived in our times. He observed that:

women manifested “a worship of power under all its forms; and hence a relative conservatism.” Enfranchised women would tend to vote for authoritarian figures, and so obstruct the natural law of progress toward an egalitarian society.

Sound relevant to our times?

Shapin’s exploration of Spencer yields so many contradictory yet sense-making details that you could easily use this piece to answer all the questions in a Keirsey Temperament Sorter. (Spencer would have been an INFJ, if I’m not mistaken). This is a purely gratuitous comment, though, and one and all are welcome to pshaw me. It’s perhaps just a passing thought. In any case, even if you don’t care how Spencer’s evolutionary theory differs from Darwin’s, you’ll realize how much more interesting Spencer was as a personality, and, moreover, be glad you never had to deal with him yourself. Especially if you’re a woman with a big nose, and in love with him.

Say what you will about my fortitude (or lack thereof), but An Error in the Code, by Richard Preston, was much too painful to read. My fingers hurt just thinking about it. I have nothing but compassion for anyone having to live with the compulsive self-destruction discussed in this article. But don’t ask me to read it. Here is an online abstract of the piece, which is not online itself.

In the Fiction, you have to love Hari Kunzru’s “Magda Mandela,” no matter how many times she tells you to “Go now. Go away. Fuck off. Go. I love you. Go.” She likes “a old man.” Oh yes, she does. The f-word makes seven appearances on one page, all very necessary to the plot.

Sasha Frere-Jones has no idea what I’d do without my inner Grinch, but if you want to lose yours, here’s how to do it: Great Danes.

And another great Christophe Niemann illo. Have a look and guess what James Surowiecki’s article is about before you read it.

(Brighton Beach, August 2007)

I like to call these girls my Brighton Graces.

Related: My first Brighton Beach Babe painting, “Coney Island Venus,” here.

(Rejected cartoon, Carolita Johnson)

Today is very silly rejected cartoon day.

(For background info on the gag, see J. Peterman’s catalogue of disembodied clothing.)

Who? Me? Gloat?

NYPost: TimesSelect Content Freed.
For sound effects, click here.

(I’ve argued at length about this with those folks! TimesSelect, I hate you!)

(Click on the image to go to Blackle)

Check it out! It’s the black version of Google, created heedful of the fact that “…If Google had a black screen, taking in account the huge number of page views, according to calculations, 750 mega watts/hour per year would be saved.”