newyorkette

^{Batter up! (No KFC jokes, please) [Image: carolita johnson]}

Well, I had allergies, so I was useless. I spent most of the night on the bench striving not to scratch my itchy eyes. I was good for one thing, though. I had an eight-pack of baby-Buds in my bag, which I added to the bag of Corona’s bought from the ubiquitous Mojito Joe. (I think I’ve even seen him on Brighton Beach!)

Practice was at DeWitt Clinton Park on 11th avenue and 54th street till late last night, and there were lights! (Quite a change from the illumination we’re used to at Central Park: fireflies). We were joined by a few street kids, one of whom, Kyle, was an urchin straight out of a Norman Rockwell. He patiently waited for his chance at bat, hanging on even as his buddies headed home, calling, “Kyle! Go home!” So I gave the kid a break (in addition to my glove), and got Josh Hersh, ever the silver knight, to let him cut the line. After his last hit Kyle composed himself and raised the bat over his head with both hands to yell the words:”Never underestimate the little guy!” (Actually he did the same thing after his penultimate hit, mistakenly thinking it was his last hit, but had no qualms about repeating his finale.) Then he sauntered casually beyond center field adjusting his sweatjacket, and I watched him squeeze through a gap in the fence and disappear into the night.

The team is gonna be great this year! Josh was slugging away, Crawford inspired a shifty man standing behind the dugout fence to exclaim, “the old guy can hit!” (he later exclaimed, “the old guy can catch!”), Gus Powell brought to mind Sidd Finch, and there were a couple of new female fact checkers with incredibly powerful arms. (Leading me to suspect that Canby has realized that good fact checkers are desirable assets to the magazine, but good fact checkers with softball skills are even better.) Read the rest of this entry »

^{Either that or those pigeons are getting way out of hand!}

I had an early fitting this morning for Chocolate Kisses (cool junior clothes you can buy cheap at Kohl’s and the like), and an hour to kill before my next one for Araks (cool, very expensive clothes you can get at Barney’s Coop), so I bought my Bi Bim Bap at Pergola’s on 39th street, and brought it to Bryant Park. I was just about finished with my miso soup when I looked up and saw I was surrounded by angels. Idiot students, was my first grumpy thought, but as my digestion contributed to a feeling of well-being, my curiosity and benevolence kicked in, and I got up and asked one of them what their story was.

“We’re promoting the Cirque de Soleil,” one very pretty angel told me, “and we also go around the city blessing nice people like you,” she added, while stroking my arm rather brazenly for an angel. Anyone sitting in Bryant Park between the hours of 11:30 and 12:30 will have seen their playful antics, done during their lunch break, all of them obviously aspiring, exhibitionist actors. There were cartwheels, waltzes, and raids on single seated park patrons that ended in a whirling hand-held ring-of-angels-around the rosie around the delighted, camera-wielding victim.

All in all they provided scenes that would’ve blown your mind if you’d fallen asleep on park bench and woken up to see, like the above (angels congregating, with the Grace Building for a backdrop), or this one:

^{The sun was shy today, but all the people sitting for me at Saks Fifth Avenue this Saturday certainly weren’t! (Image: carolita johnson)}

I had to wake up early this Saturday morning and collect my wits and brush-tipped markers. A gig at Saks Fifth Avenue awaited me, Michael Crawford, Matt Diffee, and Victoria Roberts. We were the “guest cartoonists.” There were also face-painters, bathing suit models (of which one male’s pilosity was not abnormal, but nonetheless remarkable for a model), fashion models walking around with little placards identifying the designer of the clothes on their backs, free chinese food, and a guy in a tux playing a slick white piano.

I always worry about these gigs and spend the eve of the event making a list of ideas for cartoons to draw in case the audience is apathetic. But there’s never any need to worry. People see a man or a woman at an easel, holding a marker and next thing you know they’re all waiting on line waiting for their chance to ask, “Will you do me?”

Will I do you? I sure will, big fella!

It’s futility to resist or say, “I’m not a portrait artist, I’m a cartoonist.” But I do warn every incredibly earnest-looking sitter (I believe most have no idea that we are TNY cartoonists, and simply assume we’ve been picked up off the sidewalk in Times Square for the price of a lunch) that I will be drawing them as if they were a cartoon in The New Yorker. The secret to a happy experience on both sides of the easel is to draw them as themselves, but better-looking and thinner. Of course, I might have given myself a little less work if I’d started drawing people fatter and uglier, but I’m not that prescient.

Before I knew it, I was handing drawings to beaming, gratified people, feeling like Santa Claus in some cases, or like Glinda the Good Witch in others. I did one 60 year old Russian woman named Anna Maria as Greta Garbo’s younger sister. A half a beer and a bowl of soup at Sapporo later, I came home to rest my poor dogs. I’m now watching The Portrait of Dorian Gray on channel 13, with a young Angela Lansbury singing, “Goodbye little yellowbird! I’d rather brave the cold on a leafless tree than a prisoner be in a cage of gold!”

^{The interviewee, in the chair.}

Selling cartoons rarely pays the rent. Cartoonists sometimes have day jobs. Sometimes they also need night jobs. So today I began my night-job search. I started by responding to the call for telemarketers at the Roundabout Theatre, the 5pm to 9pm shift. How hard could that be? Couldn’t be harder than teaching software to coked-up, histrionic bookers at model agencies (or it’s equivalent, teaching monkeys to fly). I was good at that. What could be harder than that? Read the rest of this entry »

^{(My first attempt at oil painting last summer, inspired by my Coney Island Venus, came out rather unsurprisingly cartoony!) Image: carolita johnson}

Well, this is my favorite Brighton Beach babe, who I call my “Coney Island Venus.” But if she’s not to your taste, there are other “babes” to be seen on Brighton Beach against the Coney Island backdrop. Less bashful than your american babes, you’ll find speedo-clad male slavs, and the occasional tanga-clad female slavs.

Not everyone in a Speedo or a tanga really ought to be in one (summer’s variant on “not all that glitters is gold”), but diversity in body types is what makes the world go ‘round for an artist. That makes Brighton Beach a feast for the eyes. The hard-core Russians are already out. They seem impervious to cold weather and incapable of goosebumps, inclining me to indulge in romantic daydreams in which they’re all Dostoievskian escapees from the snows of Siberia.

Check out Gothamist’’s celebration of the the re-opening of Coney Island. True love means you’ll still come to Coney Island in the winter, but there’s no need to suffer now. Just stash a sweater and a good book in your bag and hop on the N,Q, D or F to Stillwell Avenue. Go straight across the street to Nathan’s and get your hot dog and fries, then take a shoreline or boardwalk stroll beyond Astroland to Brighton Beach. Cross over the boardwalk back onto the street there to pick up your favorite pickles and Russian specialities at the grocery stores, or stop for a quick vodka before getting back on Q or B train home again.

As part of its recent makeover, the online edition of The New York Times has added a new button which allows readers thwarted by the allocation of certain choice articles to TimesSelect to express themselves. In a related bid to improve customer relations, they have also removed the snarky “psych!” message from the top of the “sign-up now or go read the boring news” page.

^{(Helpful hint of the day: The air-kiss involves no bodily contact and is even more sanitary than the handshake. Image: carolita johnson)}

This article in the NYTimes, “Better not miss the buss,” is about the Latin/European trend (and its perils) of kissing people we barely know penetrating our borders and continues the theme of good manners and bad manners of my week.

At about my thirteenth year of living in Paris, France, I was pretty sick of kissing everyone I met. It wasn’t just one kiss. It was two. And at the point when I was getting not just weary of all this kissing, but even grumpy and recalcitrant about it, a new and even more disturbing trend in la bise came in from the suburbs: the quadruple kiss. That was when I snapped. Four kisses? Four kisses to each person in a group of five meeting for a drink is twenty kisses! C’est trop!

I started sticking my hand out for a handshake.

This raised objections. “What, you don’t want to kiss me?” No, I didn’t. At first I’d say I had a cold. But that ruse eventually got tired. Then I simply decided there were people—close friends—who I would kiss, and everyone else would get a handshake. When an acquaintance or newly introduced person whose name I’d already forgotten asked what my antisocial behavior was about, I’d simply explain that I was sick of kissing every stranger I was introduced to, and that perhaps someday, if we became friends, I’d kiss them too.

This behavior was seen as symptomatic of an incipient nervous breakdown by my French friends. Only my friend Juan (descended from a family of Uruguayan diplomats) understood. He suggested the “air-kiss.” And that solved the problem. All it takes is an inclination of the head in the direction of the cheek, and the utterance of these two syllables: “mwa! mwa!” People would think I was a bit of a bubble-head, but at least I wouldn’t have to feel the lips of strangers or end up red-faced and itchy from the aggressions of razor-stubble.

I personally don’t see why we have to make everyone think we love them equally. I think it’s a social aid to distinguish between those you are close with and those you barely know by limiting your kisses to the former. It gives the unkissed something to aspire to. What’s wrong with that? People needn’t have such fragile egos. But if you’re not inclined to change the world one withheld kiss at a time, and feel obliged but reluctant to kiss strangers, try the air-kiss.

But please, no quadruple air-kisses. It’s dizzying.

It was the 3 to 4pm crush of people going home from school on the 1 train, a mess. I was standing in front of a girl seated by the door whose aspect annoyed me. She had dyed blue-black hair, frazzled-looking, with pixie bangs, thinning at the crown (probably from a scalp overwrought by hair dye and other aggressive products ), blue eyeshadow, deep red lipstick, pale, pale white skin, a bright cobalt blue scarf, and a rather bulky blue-green military parka on. I didn’t like her style. It was mostly her hair that bothered me. Why abuse your tender scalp like that just to look extreme? And so on. I was busy critically eyeing her whole get-up to pass the time, trying to avoid getting stepped on by the tall dork in the yarmulke who kept jerking his huge feet around every time he started to nod off. And then I looked up and met the eyes of the pervert. (cartoons coming up) Read the rest of this entry »

^{This is what awaits you in Central Park today}

Up here in Washington Heights, the neighbors are engaged in the battle of the sound systems of mass destruction, with one side blasting “Killing me softly,” in response to heavy artillery from the reggaeton neighbor dropping “Gasolina” bombs on us. The pacifist upstairs is playing disco, wondering why we can’t all love eachother, and I can’t hear my Freebird anymore, so I’m going a’fishin’! (There really are fish in the lakes at Central Park, but I’ve never actually seen any get caught, though occasionally they’re good enough to give a little tug to your lure as they pass by and give you a little frisson…)

For you birdwatchers, there’s plenty of different sparrows out there (song sparrows, black throats, and the regular ones), I’m sure I saw a nuthatch or two (possibly a warbler), definitely plenty of cardinals, bluejays, grackles, the ubiquitous robins, redwings, and though no one believes me, a red headed woodpecker (in a tree on the Great Lawn near Turtle Pond). And, of course, the red-tailed hawk that keeps the deadbeat pigeon population under control.

^{Hal, the Central Park fox. (image: carolita johnson)}

Like many of us who ended up in New York, Hal appeared out of nowhere and survived for a while.

They don’t know what killed Hal, who died as he was being tagged before release.
RIP, Hal. We were rooting for you, you wild thing.

Story and pix/videos of Hal’s Central Park adventure, and his untimely demise here.

^{The Central Park “Sheep Meadow tote.” (image: carolita johnson)}

Not me! Martha’s Vineyard? Sag Harbor? Get on outside to Central Park. The robins are scouring the hills for worms like keystone cops searching for clues in the countryside. The loons are on the lake, and the pervs are lurking. As my dirty little friend likes to say, “It’s tit season!” (Is he a birdwatcher? or not? I leave it up to you.)

^{Naomi was always very nice to me. (image: carolita johnson)}

I was a lousy model. But at least, since I wasn’t on drugs, I remember things. At my last Dolce & Gabbana show, I remember two things. To wit, Linda Evangelista waiting in line backstage in front of me, looking curiously at Amira (the other short model, me being the next shortest. They called me “La Petite”).

“Who’s she?“, she asked me.

“That’s Amira.”
“Is she, like, big?”
“Yeah, well, you know, big in France.”
“But is she big like… Like me big? Oh my god, I can’t believe I just said that!”

But before that, while waiting for make-up and hair, I’d gone to the racks to see what I’d be put through this show (not anticipating the last minute change to the black transparant dress that led to the thong incident—correction: making that THREE things I remember). I’d prised apart two crowded racks to view my line-up only to discover Naomi Campbell sitting on the floor between them with her handbag in her lap, reading a book and looking as lonely as can be.

Naomi Campbell arrested at her Park Ave. Apartment: [HuffPo]
Naomi Campbell and the blackberry of destruction: [Gawker]

^{Taxi-scented air freshener. (Image: carolita johnson)}

My taxi drivers of the year:
1- Paul Robeson’s nephew (or so he purported himself) who sang in Paul Robeson’s voice, honest to goodness, really, but slightly off-key, from east 10th street to the Roundabout Theatre one Christmas Eve. (I think it really was his nephew, in a quirky Christmas half-miracle.)
2- The guy from Spain who introduced me to the Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star.”
3 – The various Hindu men who have asked me if I’d like to marry them, too many to name individually here. (Let them thank their lucky stars for my compassionate declinings! )
5- The Buddhist who gave me the booklet on spirituality for my mother (unfortunately she was way too rude to me that day so I never gave it to her. She’ll have to be reborn as a bug instead).
6- The mysterious, saturnine Korean lady at the wheel of a cab with a man’s ID in the window, driving me up the FDR while I wondered what she’d done with the body.

Cabby hailed as city’s best: [NYP]
Inspired by the Post’s story, Gothamist invited cabby horror stories and got surprisingly few. [Best Cabbie Ever?]

I hope you’re reading this in the park via WiFi! If not, get your ass outside! I’ll be back later with something besides a photo. This is no time to be sitting in front of your computer!

^{“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).

^{(Montage inspired by this.)}

The Huffington Post featured a post today about a Maureen Dowd article that was thrown in Rumsfeld’s face, entitled: Read The Maureen Dowd Column Rumsfeld Was Reacting To…, with what appeared to be a portion of her column followed by a “Read entire story here” which directs you (if you’re like me and won’t pay for Times Select) to the “To read the rest of this article you must subscribe to TimesSelect” page.

A few replies to that post were indignant objections to being duped into getting that annoying page, by people who thought they were gonna read Maureen Dowd for free! Dream on, boys and girls! So I replied asking if anyone would care to cut and past the entire article for the benefit of those who are on strike against TimesSelect.

I say we all go on strike against TimesSelect until they come to see reason and do things the iTunes way. Surely they realize they’d make more money selling one article at 99 cents at a time, rather than by trying to extort a subscription out of people like me who buy the paper intermittently? Or maybe they just don’t have enough confidence in their writers to let them show us their wares day to day and let the reader decide who comes home with them?

For example, I’m not paying for a subscription for MoDo, who is just too pop journalism-y for me to pay for unfettered access to. And I”m certainly not paying for dingbat Joyce Purnick, who delusionally thought she’d spread the word about under-reported crimes against Asian women by publishing her story on a limited availability venue.

NB: for anyone who noticed the mispelling of MoDo’s name in my reference earlier (thus resulting in the impression of a “MoDown”, here’s both the original and the corrected post headline:

^{(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!

(image: carolita johnson)

I can’t work. The neighbor upstairs is either rearranging all his furniture for the fourteenth time or getting nailed (or both), or has fought with his ex-boyfriend again and is dancing the anguish out of his system (or all of the above) and he’s got this music playing that is splitting all the atoms in my head and making the windows rattle. It’s killing me, but he does this so rarely that I don’t want to get on his nerves by complaining when he really needs some musical purging. Does he complain when I need to pump up the ABBA now and then? It’ll be over in an hour. So I’ve been reading the news.

I found an article in the Post that reminded me of the day I was going up the subway escalator at 125th street, and an old lady ahead of me says to her middle-aged son as she peers through the dirty plastic windows, “My how times change! You see that Subway? It used to be a Taco Bell!” I wondered to myself what the difference was, as it was just one fast-food chain franchise replacing another. Her nostalgia struck me as ironic enough to write it down and try to do a cartoon about it.

But when I’d finished drawing, and was penning the caption in, I realized it wasn’t gonna work. How would anyone know I was talking about Subway, the sandwhich chain, and not Subway, the subway station? So I changed it to Blimpie’s and Burger King. I was never happy with it that way, so I just kept it to myself. Till I found this article about how Subways (the sandwich shop kind) have outnumbered Subways (the subway station kind) in Manhattan.

Apparently the Subway (sandwich Subway) people hadn’t been aware of it till the Post let them know.
[NYP]

^{(I don’t mean it. I really, really love bagpipes.) [image: carolita johnson]}

St-Pat’s is tomorrow, and The Daily news offers up this list of bars in New York where you can go if you want to carouse with soused Irishmen (or wannabee Irishmen), which I’ll be using as a list of hotspots to avoid. I will, however, be attending the parade in order to get my earful of bagpipe music. Yes, that’s my dark secret. I love the bagpipes. I love their obscene cry. When I hear them in the distance I am spellbound, hypnotically compelled to seek them out as intently as Frankenstein’s monster sought out the violin in Young Frankenstein. I have resolved never to marry, but if I were to meet a man who had everything my boyfriend has, plus a talent for playing the bagpipes, I’d have to change my tune. So to speak.

Happy St-Pat’s all you crazy greenies!

Now this is what I call sadly ironic. Joyce Purnick supposedly wants to bring our attention to two other murders that we negligently haven’t been paying attention to while we’ve been busy soaking up all the media available on Imette St-Guillen’s case. So she writes an article that only TimesSelect subscribers can have access to?

Let’s say I didn’t buy the paper today. I buy it often enough not to be bothered with the NYTimes’ petty imposition of TimesSelect’s subscription fee. Has it occured to them that the least they can do is let me open a Paypal account that lets me pay, say, a fifty cents to a dollar for access to all or some of their TimeSelect articles all day on a given day? Is what works for iTunes not good enough for the gray lady?

Well, if you have TimesSelect, read all about the “Two Killings That Didn’t Make News.” I’m not subscribing. I did the trial period and concluded that I won’t pay for Maureen Dowd, for one. She’s getting way too sloppy for me, liberal as I am (which is probably more liberal than she’s supposed to be). And paying for a subscription plus buying the paper in person so that I can read something on the subway or park or cafe (without toting my computer around) isn’t gonna happen. For another thing, I can’t sit on my computer on the wet lawn in Central Park.