newyorkette

Can you read Spanish? The “Peruvian New Yorker,” Etiqueta Negra has a new edition: “morir de risa” (die laughing). The entire issue is devoted to laughter, the how, the why, the when, the Nobel Prize for Humor, the Marxist theory (we’re talking Harpo, not Karl). To read, haga click aquí.

“Drinky Crow” (above) is a suicidal alcoholic, but that’s what I like about him.

Here’s a cartoonist whose patron of the arts I’d love to be by buying this cartoon from him: “Scratching the Back of my Neck & The Editor “. Clicking on my link is a crap shoot. Sometimes you get the cartoon, sometimes it’s more like: Ha, sucka! Personally I love the machine gun-shooting maniac screaming “inhuman monsters!”, but you don’t get him every time. Try the link: you’ll get whatever you get, and you’ll like it!

I wrote him asking him for permission to link to a non-booby trapped image, but got no answer. Temperamental cartoonist? or just enjoying the holiday weekend? Knowing cartoonists (since I’m one myself), it could be all of the above, or none of the above. Maybe he’s counting trees in Corona. Maybe he’s trying on jeans at a factory in Cancun. Maybe he’s playing golf, or maybe he’s just having a life. Or getting killed… Anything’s possible with a cartoonist. It’s also possible he feels his “terms of use” are clear enough. *(UPDATE: Tony wrote me Monday morning and very kindly provided the image above.)

Anyway, perhaps if you’re more prosperous than I am at the moment you’ll find something you’d like to buy for yourself! His prices are actually quite reasonable, and worth every penny. (I just don’t have any spare pennies these days! But when I do, maybe my favorite cartoon will still be available.) Check out his original art. He’s famous for his “Drinky Crow,” as well as Billy Hazelnuts, and the ravishingly beautiful Sock Monkey books. He made a splash on Gawker, during Burklegate, and done this delightfully lighthearted SNL short!

He’s Tony Millionaire. If you like Little Nemo in Slumberland, or Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend, but are a way sicker puppy than these call for, you’ll love Tony Millionaire.

^{If Little Nemo (above image borrowed from salon.com) isn’t hard-core enough for you, try Tony Millionaire.}

^{Happy Mother’s Day from Janet Leigh!}

What would film be without the bad mother? Hitchcock’s bad mothers and bad mother figures are at the root of some of his best films. The mother of all Hitchcock mothers being, of course, Anthony Perkins’ mom in Psycho. Read the rest of this entry »

^{A detail from the cover of Frederic Tuten’s “Tintin in the New World.”}

When I lived on East 10th street, I had a downstairs neighbor who I was drawn to because he had white hair and black horn-rimmed glasses just like my friend Michael Crawford. And me, I’m just like my dog, who only liked white fluffy dogs, because her best friend was a white fluffy dog. Very simple souls we are.

One day I bought too much ivy and started trying to give away my surplus. I went downstairs, knocked on my neighbor’s door, offered some ivy, and he accepted. He told me his name, Frederic Tuten, invited me in for a coffee, and within a few minutes it transpired that we had both lived in the same building in Paris: 79 boulevard St-Michel, in a beautiful house that has been reputed to have been Madame de Maintenon’s love-den when she was dating the Sun-King (there’s a sun insignia over the threshold of the front door). Read the rest of this entry »

In France, lily of the valley is the traditional flower of May 1st, and is sold in small sprigs in the streets everywhere.

For an alternative flower, this is one of my friend Xiao Fan’s “Cent fleurs.” To see the other 99 psychadelic and whimsical flowers of varying degrees of volupté and perturbingness, see this link.

This is the flower to make you get out your Carmina Burana and listen to Eugene Jochum’s joyous interpretation of Carl Orff’s “Ecce gratum!”

Read the rest of this entry »

^{The Bibliotheque Nationale, where I sat at the same desks and read the same books (marked with candle droppings sometimes), and perhaps dreamed the same dreamy dreams as Rousseau.}

Ever look through your old computer and find stuff you can’t remember writing? I found this in my medievel anthropology notes in the middle of some research about Hildegard of Bingen. I must have typed it into my computer at the national library (La Bibliotheque Nationale). Doctoral students spend most of their time wondering how and when they’re going to get into someone’s pants, never doubt that. The only difference between them and regular people is that they lace their daydreams with a bit of Latin. (And, well, regular people just don’t get nicknames like “Onan the Librarian.”)

(click the “read more” link to see the long lost doctoral-student-in-love poem)

Read the rest of this entry »

^{They did it their way. (Like the rest of us!)}

Some inconsequential uproar and controversy has been brewing about the new spanish-language version of the United States’ national anthem. See Michelle Malkin’s lowdown on “Nuestro Himno”. Or WaPo’s: here.
I don’t know what the fuss is about. Everybody knows that the real national anthem is “My Way!” (Is there anything more american than appropriating and translating everything into one’s own idiom? Not to mention the complete assimilation of the capitalist ideal: 9 of the ten dollars they sell the CD for go into their own pockets, with the remaining measly one going to the effort they’re supposedly supporting.)

(image: carolita johnson)
Stop by The Bubble Lounge between or after films and have some fine champagne under flattering candlelight. (There’s also a full bar). The atmosphere is Parisian cozy chic, with armchairs and sofas everywhere, good music, and here and there my champagne-themed posters. They’re still up (originally put up for the 10th birthday party), though one of them appears to have been splashed a bit, perhaps a drink melodramatically flung in someone’s lying two-timing (and now wet) face? And it’s where A.M. Holmes had her book party, as covered by Gawker’s party crashers. While you’re there, you can pick up a postcard with my “happy cork” image on it and send a drunken “wish you were here” to someone you really shouldn’t be writing to anymore.

Au champagne!
(The Bubble Lounge is at 228 West Broadway, a block north of Franklin Street Station on the 1 Train)
There are snacks, but if you’re really hungry, go up the street to Takahashi Tribeca.

^{Books change the world, whether you like them or not.(image: carolita johnson)}

Whenever I’m not working enough, I volunteer for things. PEN World Voices this week got the benefit of my free time last night. It was a little weird since I knew no one, and the other volunteers seemed to know eachother already. I just popped up out of the blue. After all, I’m not a writer, nor am I in the publishing business. I just thought the event was a worthy cause.

Salman Rushdie opened the festival, speaking in his inimitable way, sounding and looking bit like a cross between John McGiver and Alistair Cooke. I long held a grudge against him after reading his first book, whose metaphors and similes annoyed me to no end. The one that constantly comes back to mind is the one worthy of Tex Avery, describing someone (the narrator’s sister?) getting crushed “as flat as a chapati pancake.” I remember feeling insulted, thinking, fuck you, and throwing the book out. The outrage he inspired in me was not against injustice or human suffering, but at himself. It didn’t seem to me that being supremely annoying was worthy of the international support rallied for him after the Fatwah. I’d always thought of him as the Forrest Gump of literature. But now I understand. He’s like the war in Iraq, which I didn’t believe in or want either, but which is now a reality that’s changed all our lives forever, whatever that means. That’s how I feel about Rushdie, a constant he’s there and has changed the face of literary culture, whatever he means.

Orhan Pamuk, on the other hand, was meaningfulness in a bottle. You could almost imagine Rushdie as a little red devil, and Pamuk as a little silver-haloed angel, each perched coquettishly on one of Literature’s shoulders. Even with Margaret Atwood asking him the occasional obviously silly question designed to prompt an easy, painless chuckle from all present, he always answered in all earnestness. Coaxed gently by Atwood into admitting rather cooperatively that the sparks of his inspiration began when his “auntie” admonished him “that I may break my toys if I play with them that way,” Read the rest of this entry »

^{My handmade cover of Moby Dick from days when I had a lot more time on my hands, and a penchant for pretending I was an engraver. (Image: carolita johnson)}

Inspired by La Penguina’s new subway reader series on ABL, here’s a book to read on the subway when you want to forget where you are, and who doesn’t?

I re-did the cover to this book in a Paris garret in 1988, when the ugly cover it came with got on my nerves one time too many. It was not only done at a magical moment in my personal evolution where I’d reached a maturity level sufficient to read a book on the high school reading list again and of my own free will. It was when I had dreams of doing book covers, imagining that there was a job out there called, “book cover artist.”

My best friend is now borrowing this book, and has promised not to put any coffee rings or hamburgur juice stains on it’s now precious cover.
Recommended reading, but skip the “loose fish and fast fish” chapter if it bogs you down. I never really got that one.

Maybe I’ll be reading it again on the ride down to the park: softball season is starting, and TNY is playing the United Nations in a couple of weeks. Somehow that doesn’t seem right! Shouldn’t we just play T-ball and drink beers to world peace instead? PS: I”ll let you know if Gawker decides to cover our softball season again this year.

^{(Losing weight will be easy if you’re reading TNY this week. Image: carolita johnson)}

About Tables for Two, oops, I mean, “What Happened at Alder Creek?“, Dana Goodyear’s American Chronicles piece about the Donner Family Camp’s legendary cannibalism in The New Yorker this week. A word to the wise. Not to be read during your lunch hour unless you are striving to lose weight. In fact, I wouldn’t read it before lunch, or during lunch, nor even after lunch if you’re not hoping to lose said lunch. I happened to be reading it after lunch, and found myself suppressing the urge to gag. Personally, I’d have appreciated it if the end of the story were in the first paragraph.

Bleeeeeeaaaagh!

But of course, you’ll go have a look, won’t you? Because who can resist a campfire story that boasts a line like, “What do you think I cooked this morning? Shoemaker’s arm.”

^{(Image: carolita johnson)}

In honor of The New Yorker’s “Journeys” issue, I’m posting a Pamplona-themed reject. The first time I submitted it, it had the caption, “What do we call this again? Running with the nationally insured?”

^{(image: carolita johnson)}

This oft-rejected cartoon is in honor of the musical week it’s been. Anyone interested in musical history should read Sasha Frere-Jones’ piece in The New Yorker’s Talk of the Town: Haggadah-Da-Vida

You’ll find a musically historic portrait of Gershon Kingsley, who wrote the famous electronic song, “Popcorn,” which I always wanted as my cell phone ringer, and which you may think you don’t know, but do, you’ll see. He also wrote an electronic piece called “The Fifth Cup,” which is meant to accompany a Passover seder.

If you’re having one, and would like to give “The Fifth Cup” a test run at your house, you can find it on Kingsley’s new 2 CD set called “God is a Moog.” This will prevent you from playing The Who’s Boris the Spider as my mother did at our last family gathering.

As for the cartoon, I admit it was done before I started applying the tips given by Owen Phillips (the man that will make we TNY cartoonists clean up our acts). So I may yet re-do it one day and try again.

^{The Movado Hour is considerably more highbrow than this Plattsdeutsch “Oompa Festival” concert I attended because my Dad was in the band. Moreoever, the Movado hour offers canapés and white wine before and afterwards (so you’ll have to bring your own Jägermeister and herring sandwiches!)}

You can’t beat live music for free. Even my Dad’s Oompa Festivals are a pleasure for knowing that the fat old men playing their lurching polkas are playing just for us.

But my Tuesday evening was spent in a considerably more highbrow manner at the Baryshnikov Arts Center (BAC), listening to a little Schubert octet, played live in a candle-lit, intimate setting, with city lights pleasantly perceptible in the background through tall black mesh windowshades. I spotted TNY’s Russell Platt two seats away. I’m not sure what my dad would think (he’s very picky, even finding fault with Lincoln Center’s acoustics), but I thought the sound in that room was perfect, the music enclosing the audience like a small egg in a velvet glove.

I’m no stranger to classical music, having grown up with a father who was a recording engineer for CBS and Sony and who told me stories about working with Glenn Gould and Wynton Marsalis, among others. So my take on the music was this: it’s funny how some music can sound exactly like a bunch of socialites at a high-class tea party engaging in animated gossip, suddenly transformed into musical instruments. The first allegro was for classical music what “Summer Dreaming” was for Grease. Well, maybe a cross between that and Cole Porter’s “What a swell party this is!” (I hope Russell Platt isn’t reading this nonsense!)

I saw other people with their eyes closed, absorbing the chords and harmonies and trills and crisp little curlicues, all very dignified and worthy of the music. But me, I was smiling. I was feeling tickled. I think we all should reach the point where a one-liner by a bassoon at the end of a musical jaunt can make us laugh a little inside. Here’s a shortcut to that point (or a life-saver if you’re just plain bored): just imagine it’s all the soundtrack to a classic pre-1957 Tom & Jerry cartoon.

Have a look at the schedule, maybe there’s something you’d like to hear played live for free. And even if not, try it, you might like it. Everything’s nicer when you hear it live, and it’s only an hour! Plus, Baryshnikov will be there, and he’s still very nice to look at: The Movado Hour at the Baryshnikov Arts Center (BAC)

^{Who am I kidding? I’ll be doing my reading at the laundromat. (Image: carolita johnson)}

This week’s fiction in TNY, A Better Angel, by Chris Adrian, reverses last week’s trend in my tear ducts and serotonin uptake. The further I wandered fascinated and transfixed into it, the more I suspected this story was the metaphor of every attempt at domestic intimacy I’d ever recoiled disgusted from. The fetid stink emanating from the angel’s wings reminded me of under-the-sheet farts of deeply-loved, burrito-nourished boyfriends.

And the dead-cat slippers:

“The angel paced in the confines of the room, the cats going squish and squash as she stepped (...)”

are of course my own yucky, twenty year-old slippers whose unsanitary qualities boyfriends have hinted at with eloquent stares. The angel’s puzzlingly inconstant beauty shifts during the narrator’s ordinary or un-drugged moments into the kind of ugliness that recalls the esthetic of swollen red blotches left behind after squeezing forehead pimples before bedtime, bad breath in the morning, or the baggy underwear of one’s now long-unceremonious lover at breakfast, the sound of crunching cereal amplified through his skull.

Adrian seems hell-bent to evoke the horror of love you’re addicted to, stuck with forever, whether it’s your unloving father or your really burdensome guardian angel. The unbearable love you desire so very much but wish were more beautiful sometimes. Or at least not so ugly. It’s no wonder the narrator is constantly taking hits of his father’s death-bed morphine, even giving him water instead so that he can have more for himself as he waits for him to die, not so much refusing as not deciding to “reach out” with the curing touch the angel believes he can somehow muster.

And yet, like your boyfriend or your wife, or your mucous-encrusted child or little brother with the skidmarks in his underpants, it all seems nonetheless magical, and all that sordid ordinariness worth living through again and again, and even worth—I can’t believe I’m saying it, me, ever the Atalanta—cherishing.

^{“Happy Cork” for The Bubble Lounge’s 10th birthday (image by carolita johnson)}

I’ve been pretty overwhelmed with work lately, but it will all be rewarded tonight. Because the thing that’s been keeping my hands occupied this last week is champagne! The Bubble Lounge, which you will have heard of either because of some disgruntled TriBeCans, or because you love a good champagne bar, is celebrating its 10th birthday tonight. I did the invitations as well as 6 drawings for posters, one of which you see above. I don’t know how many will be up during the private party tonight, but I’m hoping all of them will. All depends on the printer today.

The Bubble Lounge is at 228 West Broadway, two steps away from not only the now infamous well-hidden Sufi mosque, but from the Franklin Street subway station. I personally enjoy the low light, the great live music, the comfy armchairs, and of course the champagne. ( The good stuff doesn’t give you a headache.) I’ve participated in a pilot champagne “class,” during which a few friends tasted different types of champagne, learned about the region, and best of all, participated in the “sabering” of a bottle of champagne. That it, using a sabre to knock the top off a bottle of champagne, as, I imagine, victorious French warriors used to do in days of old when they’d forgotten or couldn’t find their corkscrews.

You can even arrange to have the class done all in French like my French-learning friends did (with translations of tricky words provided upon demand or upon eloquent expressions of perplexity on your face).

^{Momus among us at the Whitney Biennial.}

I wonder how many people visiting the Whitney’s Biennial exhibition thought the guy sliding around the galleries with the eye-patch, trendy clothing and mini-megaphone (through which he insinuated his “disinformational” quips into their perception of the art they were viewing) was just some NY weirdo cleverly managing not to get thrown out.

When I first heard him speaking softly into his mini-megaphone I was too far away to make out what he was saying, only noticing that as soon as he’d uttered his piece, he’d immediately proceed into the next room like some nerdy, slightly giddy art sprite empowered by his freedom of speech. I followed the brim of his hat threading between the heads of other people like a dolphin’s dorsal fin along the surface of the ocean (emboldened to pursue it once I’d realized it didn’t belong to a shark). Waiting for him to come flying out of the water and let out another little kibbitzy remark before diving back in to swim underwater to the next room.

Since nobody around me dared react, or even ask (when did New Yorkers become so polite and restrained?), I ventured to ask the guard: “Who is this guy? Is he part of the exhibition?” The guard burst out laughing, as if that were a good one. “Yeah, heh heh! He, oh, heh, heh! He’s part of the exhibition, heh heh!” Apparently he wasn’t quite sure himself, but was relieved to have his awkward doubt punctured with a bit of humorous small talk.

“After you left, Sinead O’Connor came into the museum. I did my line about the Steve Parrino room transforming at 6pm into “a nihilist discotheque” and she said “Uh-huh…” in a sarcastic tone of voice and swished out,”

Read the rest of this entry »

^{Who am I kidding? I’ll be doing my reading at the laundromat. (Image: carolita johnson)}

If you haven’t got around to a thorough reading of this week’s The New Yorker yet, it’s time to go straight to the fiction (because most of the GOAT is already past due). Gary Shteyngart’s “A Love Letter,” which I can’t post a link to here since it’s not available on TNY’s website, should be begun on the subway or train ride home (not at the driver’s seat of your car or truck), and finished at home, at the laundromat (like me), or at one of your favorite Tables for One.

I hope it’s intellectual-propertiedly okay for me to type out a few morcels to whet your appetite:

The narrator (300-pound Russian-Jew Misha “Snack-Daddy” Vainberg) making plans to become a Belgian by subterfuge, pictures himself:

“[...] sitting at a zippy Belgian café watching a multicultural woman in a thong eating a frankfurter. Did such things happen in Brussels? In New York they happened all the time.”

A dream sequence you’ll taste in your own mouth, as the narrator literally drools with anticipation about his future:

“I stuck my hand inside my heart and took out precisely eight U.S. dollars, which I gave to her. Our hands barely touched. “What’s going to make you love me again?” I asked.

“Take a bite,” she said. The apple flooded my mouth with freshness, as if I were biting the color green. I tasted pear, as promised, but also rosewater and white wine and my beautiful dead mother’s sweet cheek. The roof of my mouth froze in wonder, as if stroked by an invisible ice cube. I tried to speak, but only gurgling came out. I wanted to hug Rouenna, but she lifted up her hand to stop me.
“Be a man,” she said.
I gurgled some more, flapping my arms in front of me.
“Make me proud.”

Then, when civil war breaks out in Absurdistan (yes, Absurdistan), the descriptions of perplexity, perception and action come giddily together with cinematic clarity:

I was looking at a convoy of stubby Caterpillars outfitted with battering rams, which I realized were Soviet T-62 tanks [...].
The sound of heavy machine-gun fire reverberated throughout the city. It was time to do something important, and manly and American. “Go, go, go motherfucker!” I yelled to Sakha. The jeep’s alarm was blaring and a rear window had been partly smashed, but the imperious Hyatt logo had apparently scared off the thieving locals.
A passing T-62 had begun to rotate its barrel our way, like a slow child trying to make friends. “Drive!” I shouted to Sakha.

At first, I thought I wasn’t going to like this story. I had a suspicion Shteyngart was trying to gratuitously palm off the kind of flippant metaphors and outlandish expressions that I’d found annoying in my first Salman Rushdie experience. But the more I read, the more I liked. By the time “Snack Daddy” arrives in Absurdistan, you’ll be hooked, if not before. I realized I’d been seduced me the moment “Snack Daddy” notices that the T-62 “had begun to rotate its barrel our way, like a slow child trying to make friends.”

I won’t tell you the ending, but I’ll tell you it’s the typical trade-off of one’s desire for one’s humanity, complete with the “and then just as he had everything in his grasp it all slipped away” ending we’re used to these days. And yet you’re left wanting a “to be continued…”

Which may be exactly what is hoped for, since presumably this has all been a mere exerpt of his book, “Absurdistan,” which will be published in May.

^{(Image: Carolita Johnson)}

Hispanic owned businesses are opening in record numbers in New York, says the NYPost: N.Y. HITS NUMERO UNO SPOT

When I read that article this morning, I thought it was a pity that the siesta wasn’t among the cultural influences brought to us by Hispanic New Yorkers. Sipping my tea, and thinking how lucky I am to be a freelancer with a right to a siesta after being up all night working (a right I pay for by being called “The American Who Sleeps All Day” by the hardworking Hispanics in my building), I supposeed Hispanics in New York will be too busy working their nalgas off to maintain the custom of “the Sunday of every day,” or “LA SIESTA: El domingo de cada día.”

If you read this article, you’ll learn that the word “siesta” comes from the latin word “sexta,” which refers to noon, the sixth hour of the waking day, or Roman half-time. You’ll also learn this incredible industrial secret (shh!): apparently companies in the United States, China, and Germany are beginning to recognize the siesta as a basic workers right (mostly because they noticed that the siesta improves productivity)! I hope this right will be institutionalized by the time I’m forced to get a regular job.

Emdashes notes the Peruvian literary magazine, Etiqueta Negra, which has been dubbed “The Peruvian New Yorker” by its fans. If you read Spanish at all (and we are in New York, so I’m assuming there are plenty of us who do), practice reading good Spanish by reading Etiqueta Negra. And while it’s a huge compliment to be compared to The New Yorker, I have to say that I find the content of Etiqueta Negra, at least in this issue (The Sleep Issue) is much lighter reading, in a good way.

If you can’t read Spanish, read Em’s post (in English) about the two brothers from the Andes Mountains who started it up. [Emdashes]

Buenas noches!

^{I know. This isn’t a pitbull. It’s a german shephard thinking, “But I could bite you just as bad.”}

If you haven’t already seen it or received it by email (it’s the top emailed-article in The Onion), this is a must-read: Poverty-Stricken Africans Receive Desperately Needed Bibles. A cynical, but ringing-all-too-true must-read. If you don’t believe me, go to the Born-Again Christian camp up in Canandaigua Lake I attended from ages 12 to 16 (of my own volition, as field work and cheap vacation— the first summer propelled me into the autumn thinking I was possessed by the devil, till a little rational thinking took over and served to intensify my curiosity.)

If you need to refresh your palate after that one, try this one:
Rumsfeld: Iraqis Now Capable Of Conducting War Without U.S. Assistance
Still too close to home? Try this bit of fluff (and feathers):
Chicken Feeling Better

Meanwhile, over at gladwell.com the pitbull paradox continues to draw nothing but pitbull love/hate replies, and nothing about the pharmaceutical half of the comparison TNY writer Malcom Gladwell makes to illustrate the perception of statistics in various instances, if I recall the original article at all anymore.

I think his next post oughtta contain a single word: “Pitbull.” He could stand by with a stopwatch and wait to see how many pitbull love/hate replies arrive within seconds of clicking “publish.”