newyorkette

I don’t have the game on, but something tells me it’s not going well. I can’t watch. No, seriously. I have too much work to do. I’ll be rooting for them, though.

Pictures for sad children, about “Paul, who is a ghost.” At first I was like, huh? Wha? And then I was like, okay, why not? And now I like it.

John Campbell also has a blog, with other comics on it, some with accompanying memes.

And I’m not sure what this blog is about (seems to be a temporary blog created during some server down time?), but I’ll definitly use this line someday:

“The insufferable gaucho,” by Roberto Bolaño has a little of everything: it’s a western (of the Pampas variety), it’s got a rather Monty Pythonesque rabbit moment, it’s got Borges wandering around in the shadows, it’s got a Marquezian dilapidation of society, a sort of devolution of humanity. Go ahead — don’t be afraid of what Stephen King says about short stories.

That was enough for me this week. Besides, someone stole my magazine before I could finish reading it.

The C-Town on Broadway, somewhere around 155th street.

The person who tried to persuade me that mice are known to have a predeliction for getting into cupboard drawers in order to lick one’s clean cutlery, and who even claims to have witnessed said perversions being committed upon his own clean cutlery, knows who he is.

(Though I know what feminism has done for me, my boobs wouldn’t be where they are today without the proper use of brassieres.)

I realize that Rebecca Traister is trying to help, but her article in Salon, The Feminist Who Made Me Blush, made me blush.

I never knew Katha Pollitt was a feminist because I have a blissful ignorance about certain personalities, not having lived in the United States for most of my adult life. That means I’m able to read and hear things without knowing who the author or reader is to, for example, a lot of curmudgeonly, more-militant-than-thou feminists. Who did I think Katha Pollitt was? I thought she was a very interesting human being. Read the rest of this entry »

Next time you get busy with all your wildly ambitious projects, remember one little thing: water all your plants or they will die!

This drawing was executed for a change from watercolors, and in the spirit of “note to self.”
More later.

The Rosa bakery on Broadway between 137th and 138th.

There have been a lot of birthdays coming up lately, so this one goes out to everyone!

(Rejected cartoon by Carolita Johnson.)

This cartoon is somewhat embarrassingly perverse, and yet I’ve always loved it. It’s been rejected for the last time today. (Sorry for the scan of a photocopy, but the original is still in the reject pile at the magazine — which, hearteningly enough, means that it actually was considered.)

(The signs say: “Employees must wash hands,” and “Non-employees really ought to wash their hands, too.”

This article in Reuters is what made me think of this old cartoon. And all I can say is, yuck!

(Funny how I got tired of kissing people on both cheeks in France and decided I’d only shake hands! Now I think I’ll simply salute people.)

That’s my subway/style cartoon in this TNY “Style Issue.” Today is night before deadline for all TNY cartoonists, so that’s all I have to say for now! Back to work!

(image: carolita johnson)

There are things, ugly desires, dark, simmering rages, festering hatreds, repulsive beliefs, and just plain embarrasing mediocrities jostling alongside all the good and boring things one values within even the most docile of parents. Sometimes they come out in a humiliating (for you, but perhaps beautiful for the involved parties) affair with someone younger than your sister/brother or daughter/son, sometimes they come out in a public toilet (Hertzberg on Craig), and sometimes they come out in the form of “Mr. Bones”, which I read mostly on my cell phone going downtown and then back uptown to finally find my copy of TNY in my letterbox. Paul Theroux’s Mr. Bones is part Minotaur, part Mr. Magoo.

Aptly, Crawford’s cartoon is my pick of the week: Is this your first time…?

Larry Doyle’s “Portrait in Evil,” makes evil, and Karl Rove, funny again.

But “Crybabies,” by Jerome Groopman made me shake my own hand in congratulations for not having any babies, thereby neatly preventing the evil which is the colicky baby. There is nothing you can do about a screaming, colicky baby. NOTHING. Read my lips: NOTHING. It is nothing more than a test of your own capacity for evil. So, good luck. And the article isn’t online, either. But if you want to know what you’re missing, click here.

How’s that for a “come up and see me sometime” ?

(Rejected cartoon by Carolita Johnson.)

This one goes out to all those sweet, naive souls who think God’s job is to help them get a raise, or a car, or help them pass an exam. Snap out of it! Let him get on with his work — it’s not as if the world is taking care of itself!

And here’s a cartoon not by me that I like very much, for all you temp workers out there, from Pictures for sad children.

(Opera glasses, by Carolita Johnson)

When I was a kid, my dad often had season tickets to whatever was going on at Lincoln Center. He usually managed to get on the bad side of my mom on the night of a performance, and I’d be enlisted in the cause of not wasting a ticket. Thus I saw a lot of opera, ballet, and symphonic art that I found diverting, but mainly because it meant getting away from my disgruntled mother and immersed in more gracefully conducted or choreographed drama. My knowledge of opera was passively acquired, and it still takes great props and special effects like huge, stomping statues of Commendatores with sepulcherous bass voices to get me truly excited.

This weekend the New York City Opera invited me to see a Commendatore once again, in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, arguably one of Mozart’s best operas, and part of this season’s offering, which also includes La Boheme, and the tragic Margaret Garner. And here’s the sweet spot: as part of their Opera For All promotion, every performance will be offering at least fifty $25 dollar orchestra seats all season.

This Don Giovanni doesn’t disappoint those (dorks like me) that spend the entire opera giddily awaiting the statue’s portentious response to Don Giovanni’s invitation to dinner. Since I’ve made it my mission to see as many different versions of Don Juan as possible, I can tell you that Mozart’s Don Giovanni character is not quite as constantly witty as Moliere’s Dom Juan, but he’s just as tragically seduced by his own fear of abandonment. Which is to say, he’s actually pretty desperate. And I mean in the date-rape way. It’s only natural that he invites the Commendatore in; Mozart seems to have been way ahead of Freud in identifying the Death Drive.

Besides the singing statue, Julianna Di Giacomo is definitely the star of this show, and deserved every “bravo!” Everyone else seems to need a little more coaching, and there seemed to be a problem with one of the speakers behind me (it was vibrating to certain notes in the overture). But this was the first performance of the season, and I don’t doubt things will improve. Why not check their progress yourself, for only $25? That’s what they’re there for — there’s nothing like a live performance, because good or bad (or good and bad) they’re there for you. There’s no rarer treat.

If you’re stubbornly anti-opera, here’s a cartoon for you, instead:

“Black & Decker meets Jimmy Choo: multi-bit/patent leather” (Original shoe idea by Carolita Johnson)

Zach Kanin, Matt Diffee, and I got booked to do a cartoonist appearance at Saks today. We were all on separate floors, and I don’t know what Matt and Zach did, but I always end up doing people’s portraits, which I really don’t mind — much easier than coming up with original cartoons for four hours!

Nevertheless, during a ten minute lull, I invented this shoe — since the store was celebrating it’s new shoe department, which apparently has its own bona fide zip code (quite impressive, I must say, more pics of the event here). It was drawn for a lady who asked me to come up with something original for her daughter, who “knows about everything.” What would a girl who knows about everything need? I figured maybe she needed to know the further possibilities of hybrids. Like my stiletto/cordless drill.

(Eat up!)

In France, one tends to “savor,” “breakfast,” “lunch,” “dine,” “snack,” or “nibble” (a favorite word, “grignoter“). What’s more, it’s all about doing so with someone, which could even mean you, yourself, in a self-centering moment. When I returned to New York, I was often struck by the simple “eating” that got done here. Asked if I needed to “go get some food,” I took it to mean: stuff something into my “pie-hole” to make the stomach stop its grumbling. The “Food Issue” reveals that while it really is all about “food” here, depending where we’re from, the meaning behind all this ingesting and digesting shines out of different places in our psyches.

Which reminds me: never mind that awful “shimmering” thing in Judith Thurman’s “Fast Lane” (not online, but here’s the abstract). If you ever want to experience a subtle joy, pay for your boyfriend’s colonic irrigation. Especially if he is a Lacanian psychoanalyst and you are convinced he’s full of “it.”

For me, the stars of this “Food Issue” were “Luda and Milena,” the heroines of Lara Vapnyar’s fiction piece. Wherein it is confirmed that all is fair in love and war, even when the arms race inventory includes cheese puffs and cabbage pies.

Was it the homonym that made this the perfect issue in which to feature an article about Manu Chao (pronounced, at least by anglophones, as “chow”) ? Don’t tell me you didn’t notice! Travelling Man: Manu Chao’s polyglot pop, by Sasha Frere-Jones.

“Real Food,” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie features this compliment that I will be actively seeking to use at every opportunity:

“Auntie, this is soup that you washed your hands well before cooking.”

I worry about Adam Gopnik putting hits on chickens in “New York Local: Eating the fruits of the five boroughs.” I was hoping he’d render an account of how, before the awed eyes of his children, he actually wrings the neck of a chicken he raised himself. (No, not really! But putting a price on the head of a New York chicken does raise questions of just how far one can go in one’s mission to eat local…)

Gary Shteyngart nearly made me cry at the end of Sixty-nine cents, but personally, I’d have taken the beet salad: I used to wish I were dead every time my parents announced we were going to MacDonald’s.

David Remnick sobers us up with a digestive expresso in the form of “The Lobby,” on the bitter subject of the “Isreal Lobby.”

And for dessert? Make your own Orange and Almond cake! Only seven simple ingredients (two of which are almonds and oranges), and online only: Claudia Roden’s recipes.

Favorite food-related cartoon (besides mine): Crawford’s “You can stop the pain, Marcel…,” based, he tells me, on a true story.

Since this is what we started the week with, this is how I’m wrapping it up. In blue. I snapped this pic with my phone as I arrived at my favorite place to get my hair cut three times a year, Ultra.

These articles about “Big Blue” (I’ve decided that’s what I’m calling it, rather than the more distinguished, “The Blue Building”) are the first things I saw on Monday morning:
Gothamist on “Blue.”
NYTimes on “Blue.”

And hey! I just realized! Today is the anniversary of the day I finally left home in September 1987, with a one-way ticket outta here!

(Dancing flowerpot, by carolita johnson)

Today is “Carolita sold a cartoon day!” So, to celebrate, here is a dancing vase of flowers — this scan is all I have left of it now, as I gave the original as a wedding present. It’s one of my very first ink and brush drawings, and the little guy got me through many rough days, always made me smile. I hope it’s not slacking off just because it’s in a happy new home! It must keep on its toes. Goodbye, little dancing vase!

And below is a rejected cartoon, for good measure! It is truly hideous, sorry! But we all have a hideous cartoon or two (or ten) in us, at any given moment. The best place to get rid of them is slipped furtively amongst better efforts. It’s our editor’s job to take this crap from us, to know our best and our worst.

The best back to school song ever, by Gorky’s Zygotic Minci. Click on the image for the (animated! and therefore a propos) music video on YouTube. Enjoy!

UPDATE:
Best back to school story I have:
Monsieur Charpin was my antiquities teacher in Paris. Often a student from our class had to be expedited to the main tower of the university where he was to be found getting on with his life, completely liberated from the reality that he had a class waiting for him. He arrived one day, escorted by one of us, and simply said: What are you doing here, anyway? When I was in university, I showed up for the first class, found out when the finals were, and didn’t show up again till the last class. Why aren’t you in the library or in a café, instead of sitting here waiting for an old man to come feed you knowledge? I don’t understand!”

I’d have quit that very year if it weren’t for that little speech.