newyorkette

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.)

(click on the image for more information about this cartoon)

Well, I knew this was coming! I’ve already been planning a week-long romp in a wedding dress, in which I will go to work, ride the bus, hang out in bars (professing that I don’t want to get married, but might as well be prepared for the unforeseen), and even play softball in a wedding dress. My mother, bless her hopeful heart, has expressed the desire to see me “in a wedding dress before I die.” (The only way she’ll see me in a wedding dress is if I just wear one for no specific reason.) All I need is someone to film and direct this mini-documentary.

Salon explores the new rage of trashing your wedding dress, a bit the way rock stars trash their guitars onstage: The Wedding Trashers

(If you’re not subscribed to Salon.com, all you have to do to read the article is click “next,” then look at the ad that pops up, then go on to “enter salon.” For some reason it was really complicated for me, in my uncaffeinated state, so I thought I’d be helpful and nudge you along.)

And yes, some of you have seen this cartoon before, when it first came out: as promised…

(Books by carolita johnson.)

Harold Ross, of course. Check out Emily Gordon’s latest Ask the Librarians, where she interviews the honorable Erin and Jon, librarians extraordinaires at The New Yorker. Find out when the first board meeting cartoon appeared in the magazine. Also, read all about Garrison Keillor—no mention of where he took singing lessons, I notice—but everything else is there! Pseudonyms are also addressed.

I get my TNY by subscription as a reward for my contribution to WNYC, which I support in spite of my occasional objections to Leonard Lopate (his gospel hours, his embarrassing adoration of Patricia T. O’Conner), a heck of a lot of religious content, and Jonathan Schwartz’s strange insistance on sharing his love affair with the insane-sounding “Carousel Waltz”. My contribution is ten dollars a week, forever, or until my credit card dies. All I asked for in return: my reward and a mailbox free of WNYC requests for contributions.

Anyway, never mind my grumpy nature: the thing is, even though my contribution is ongoing, my reward apparently isn’t! They have not coordinated their gift-giving to synch with their gift-receiving. That means that I will spend the next month not getting my TNY in the mail. The E.T.A. of my next issue is apparently May 7th. Get it together WNYC!

Being too cheap and stubborn to go out and buy my own (alas, here we go with my grumpy nature again!), I have been reading The New Yorker on my cell phone instead. Thus, the illustration above in honor of my stalwart efforts to read TNY come hell or highwater, or not.

But it’s not just in my honor, because how am I able I do this? I found that Opera, a web browser recommended to me by my high-tech medievalist friend Maria in Berlin, does a “mini” version, aptly called “Opera Mini.” It’s free, just like the computer-based version. I downloaded it onto my cell phone, and found that the magazine was quite readable, even on my inch and a quarter by inch and six-eighths screen. I was even able to view my own cartoon this week on the site. Very satisfying.

Yesterday, I spent my lunch break reading Atul Gawande’s “The way we age now” on my cell phone in the “Go Sushi” downstairs from my next fitting client, and was quite pleased about it, however horrified I was by the prospect of my future and inevitable calcification.

Calcification may be in the future for us all, but so is reading magazines on our cell phones! Try it! Don’t be an old fart!

PS - in case anyone has tried to post a comment lately and not succeeded, it seems my anti-spamming measures have been nuking perfectly acceptable comments before I even see them… Sorry about that! Please keep trying, and let me know if you’re still not getting through.

That’s what a friend says I should call my as yet unwritten modelling autobiography.

This cartoon appears in this week’s TNY. Apparently it has the honor of being the first cartoon in the issue, which I’m extremely pleased about. I’m not sure why, though—this is due to the fact that I haven’t received my TNY for the last two weeks. Ahem! Is it in keeping with the theme of the magazine this week? I can’t say yet. I’ll know tomorrow!

I started this cartoon with the majestic image of the multi-antlered buck in the background. I felt compelled to come up with a cartoon for him, and this is what came of that compulsion. As you can see, I’ve resisted the urge to put in a lot more shading, which often gets me accused of getting “muddy.” No more mud.

I kind of miss the mud. Perhaps someday I will figure out a way to bring it back without incurring any wrath or distaste. In the meantime, as I come up with my new, and improved not-so-muddy-but-not-TOO-darn-unmuddy style, I am happy to demonstrate an unsuspected ability to “adapt” and “work with others.”

Now, back to work on other cartoons! Till later!

Sean Walsh, one of my TNY friends and organizers just sent me this pic from the Humor on the Slopes trip: me, Drew Dernovich, and Chad Darbyshire pretending to have a hard time judging the caption contest. It wasn’t that hard, it was actually every educative.

The winner of my cartoon was something along the lines of “UVA, UVB, what does some university in Virginia have to do with anything?” I thought it was clever. (Other entries showed too much obvious foreknowledge of the original caption.)

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(Cartoon: carolita johnson. Click on the image for newyorker.com cartoon coverage. To see the image on Cartoonbank.com, a link will be posted as soon as it exists!)

I’ve always wanted to do an Easter Rabbit cartoon as well as a Thanksgiving one, and here is the fruit of my labours! (I may yet post a photo of my crucified Easter Bunny on Sunday. TK.) And yes, this cartoon was rejected in another version once before, where the turkey was smoking crack in front of a brownstone stoop littered with beer cans and hypodermic needles.

PS - for my non-american readers who may not be aware of the custom, the tradition is that just before Thanksgiving, the President of the United States (the Leader of the Free World, as they say), pardons a turkey. That is, this pardoned turkey will be spared from becoming someone’s dinner, and basically “retire” from the food chain.) Other pardoned turkeys include President Nixon.

(This is a custom cartoon drawn for the event’s invitation and the poster you’ll see in the pictures below.) Click on the image to see a larger version.

Well, the hiatus was interrupted by a day and a quarter in San Francisco this past week, on a cartoonist booking for Bloomingdales’ launch of the Nike/Cole Haan shoe line! I’d prepared a bunch of shoe-themed cartoons to draw in case I wasn’t actually asked to draw portraits, but was delivered of that plan within five minutes (phew! Doing twenty cartoon portraits is far easier and more fun than drawing twenty custom cartoons! ). So, two and a half hours of portraits were punctuated by some rather nice cocktails and some delicious little hors d’oeuvres, all to the beat of a DJ who played Prince enough to make it cool. (Note that the difference between caricatures and what I do is that I draw people as they would look in one of my cartoons. Usually more attractive than a caricature!)

Here are some pictures! (Click on the images to see larger versions on flickr.com)

This lady wanted me to draw her with a thought bubble in which she’s dreaming about a new handbag.

These three are actually San Francisco branch versions of Conde Nast employees—like the Bizarro version of their New York homologues: younger, or perhaps less New Yorked out, more innocent? I think they all requested that I make their noses look smaller!

(Seems to be an obsession in SF —I noticed a lot of people I drew had the same nose!)
(And eyes, for that matter! Californians in general are more laid back socially than their New York counterparts, and, oddly enough, they seem to need the features of their face to be as unassuming as their personalities… I guess this is a rather benign, and even generous impulse, but still a little disconcerting to a mutt like me! I kept remembering that episode of the Twilight Zone, where everyone was beautiful by law.)

And here is Ben Milligan from The New Yorker (who arranged the whole trip and made sure I got there on time and in one piece). Thanks, Ben!

And thanks to Cole Haan for the free Nike Air/Cole Haan shoes! Very cute! See their link for more info about their state of the art heels (and flats, like I wore).

(This is where Carolita was from 22 feb to 26 feb 2006, Beaver Creek, for the Humor on the Slopes event!)

Humor on the Slopes (or “HOTS”) was a lot of fun in spite of my altitude sickness! Not to be discouraged, I discovered other activities that I could enjoy to the fullest while undergoing the acclimatizing process: the jacuzzi, snow shoes, and the chair lifts. I took many, many rides on the chair lifts just for the fun of it. Went snowshoe-ing once, but found I was still breathless and had to cut it short. Was glad to see the Aspen Pines, even so.

I certainly enjoyed Colorado hospitality along with the likes of fellow TNY cartoonists Harry Bliss, Drew Dernavich, Matt Diffee, Mort Gerberg, and C. Covert Darbyshire. Enjoyed cartooning, theological debate, the Oscars, and the snow with them! The New Yorker team (sent to make sure we actually did our jobs, no doubt!) were top flight, and without them I’d never have known where to go next! Thanks Tracy, Lisa, Ed, Janine, Sean, Melissa, and that other guy (whose name I forgot to ask! but he’s swell!). Also, thanks to Sharon Fialke for suggesting me for the gig! Have I forgotten anyone? If so, it’s only because they’re no longer around me to remind me of everything!

And of course, a huge thank you to all the folks at Beaver Creek!

Please note:
Newyorkette is on a temporary hiatus, which started on Feb 21st, when her beautiful but ailing computer had to go to the shop (namely, the wonderful world of Tekserve) for repairs. Reunited with her computer since last night, Newyorkette must nevertheless now take care of both her corporate taxes (yes, newyorkette was silly enough to incorporate, for no apparent reason) and personal income taxes, with no distractions. Poor Newyorkette!
Newyorkette has no head for numbers, not even the ones she doesn’t have to add up. Numbers give her a stomachache, no doubt due to the abuse she took for being bad at math when she was a child. (Newyorkette’s parents are not to blame, however, since they didn’t know any better and, sadly, are nearly as bad at handling their money as their offspring are. Their come-uppance will come when their children have no resources to take care of them in their old age! Poor newyorkette’s parents!)

Newyorkette will be back as soon as business is taken care of! (Or at least till she files for a corporate tax extension). Or unless she begins using this blog as a procrastinatory device…

More photos from Beaver Creek here.

(Click on the image for the cartoonbank’s page.)

I was pretty surprised to see this week’s “new arrivals” already up on a Monday! Snappy work, Trevor!

About the inspiration: it seems whenever I do a cowboy cartoon, I start out with an image (usually based on a movie, since that’s where I get my cowboys—this one was came from a John Wayne movie), that looks good till I do something to ruin it, like give the curtains a ridiculous polka-dot pattern, and then one of the cowboys gets sassy with me thus providing the caption. I like it when that happens.

The printed version is a lot less contrasty in the shading, by the way, and looks a lot smoother.

(In this week’s The New Yorker magazine, click on the image to reach the cartoonbank.)

I don’t even know when I came up with this one, it just sort of came out under my pen without me thinking about it. I’m one of those people who will say to you, if you are sitting in my window seat, even if you are pretending to be asleep, “Excuse me, you are in my seat!” And when you say, “Oh, what does it matter?”, I will say in a no-nonsense, take no prisoners tone of voice, “I went to a lot of trouble to get that seat, and it matters to me, thank you.” There will be no blushing on my part, either. I will not be shamed out of my seat, no matter how long you take to grudgefully gather your belongings and move to your assigned seat.

So, watch it.

(Cartoon by Caroline H. Dworin, The New York Times)

I missed the photo op last Tuesday, but I’m mentioned (and thank goodness there’s no photo of me to belie Caroline Dworin’s unbelievably flattering description!) in “Doodles à la Carte,” about the Tuesday cartoonist lunch gatherings, in today’s Sunday Times.

Pergola des Artistes is a wonderful little place, cheap and cheerful, which is why we cartoonists like it. I’ve been a fan since way before I joined the TNY cartoonists—found it with my friend Vania Leveille when we were seniors in High School (I believe we played hooky to go). It’s a great place to go with a dinner date if you don’t want to spend too much, and yet don’t want to look like a tightwad who’ll eat at any old dive either. The atmosphere is cozy, and the food is always good: the lobster special can’t be beat. It’s one of those places you don’t want too many people to know about, lest it spoil the pleasure of having a great secret.

I’ll never forget the $4.95 lunch special (in 1983), and how Marie-Rose, the owner, responded to my question, “What’s the vegetable that comes with the meal?”, with, “Do not worry, ze chef will geev you a very nice vegetable.”

(Mind you, stalkers will be fricasséed!)

(image: carolita johnson)

I made myself dizzy trying to figure out the vantage point of this week’s cover. Maybe the modelling numbed my mind, or maybe this vantage point doesn’t really exist? Anyway, this is the best I could do: if that’s the Empire State Building in the background, then in order to see the Chrysler Building in the midground from the bird’s position in the foreground, we must be northeast, possibly somewhere in the mid to upper 40’s, maybe around Third Avenue? Anyone else have an clue? As far as details go, I love the pigeon droppings, which are, of course, pigeons’ sole reason for existing.

Shalom Auslander’s “Playoffs,” not online, started out slyly amusingly, and then overwhelmed me with contagious paranoia. Paranoia and feelings of persecution can be very amusing to those who didn’t grow up with it, or to those who embrace it as their heritage. For my part, it was just too close to home and by “home” I mean the home I fled from without leaving a forwarding address. (And yet they always find me!) Enjoy!

What can I say about “The Chappaqua Three”? When I did live at said home, I often commuted home with such imbibers, and did not appreciate the alcoholic stench and vaguely degenerate postures. Remembering them dredges up other bad memories, like that of the “smoking car,” where one often suffered during peak hours when the non-smoking cars were too full. These memories don’t even seem plausible now! They’re like memories of whalebone corsets, children working as chimney-sweeps, or people smoking in restaurants!

(copyright: carolita johnson]

It’s just so easy! When New Jersey was looking for a new slogan, I called in with, “New Jersey: what’s that smell?”
(This cartoon ended up published in The Rejection Collection, and is also part of the Cartoonbank’s repertoire now. I’m pretty sure they can make t-shirts and other prints of images from the RJ, even though they’re not in the catalogue yet. Will check on that today.)

Anyone not from New York will know that I’m referring to that infernal gas smell that overtook the city yesterday. I was working at Gloria Vanderbilt Jeans, and at around 9am was to be seen sniffing around the kitchen, wondering where the gas leak was. Of course, there was no stove so I was mystified! Spent the morning looking at Gothamist on my cell phone.

We still don’t know for sure where it came from, but urban legend leads us to blame New Jersey.

(image: carolita johnson)

Am I the only one who noticed that this week’s TNY contains a cartoon with the word “bullshit,” another with a Hindu deity giving someone the finger, and my own rather insolent horse-whipping fantasy cartoon, making it a rather naughty issue, cartoon-wise? It warmed the cockles of my heart, naturally.

On the other hand, the reading is very urbane. We have Milan Kundera, in “Die Weltliteratur” (not online) waxing rather emotional—and justly so—about the state of literature in the world, or the world of literature in the State. I never knew Kafka was considered a Czech writer in France, but if he says so… In any case, the Germans seem to have wholeheartedly adopted him as their own.

The only thing I disagree strongly with Kundera about (that sounds very presumptuous somehow, so let me add, “humbly”) is that “to judge a novel one can do without a knowledge of its original language.” While I enjoyed Dostoyevski’s “Crime and Punishment” (in the now discredited Constance Barnett translation) as a suspense novel, I am quite sure I did not appreciate the author’s purportedly beautiful writing. I read Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary” in English first (and second, and third) and despised it each time as a soap opera. Only when I finally read it in French did I appreciate Flaubert as an author. Don’t even get me started on Proust. If you’re not in love with the French language, you’re just a frimeur if you’re reading Proust in translation.

Kundera does say one thing that could be a response to David Denby (who laments the new age of digital transfers, or “betrayals” of certain movies in “Big Pictures“): “(...) only a person who delights in being modern is genuinely modern.” I’ll watch a movie on an iPod if that’s all I have—and maybe even like it, the way I’ve always loved polaroids for what they don’t capture. But maybe I’m just an old-fashioned whippersnapper.

NB: anyone notice my em dashes up there? To make an em dash on Mac, do this: option+shift+hyphen. Voila! No need for spaces between the em dashes and the enclosed word(s), according to Em, of Emdashes.

(“Champagne love” image: carolita johnson)

UPDATE: so, remember this ad got stuck in the wringer because I had no idea how to make it an inch tall and still clean? It turns out that this is all taken care of by a “pre-press operator,” in my case, a company called “Adfixer” (recommended by the folks at TNY) did it for $44. That’s a fair price, and my client was happy to pay it, since they got my ad for a friendly price already. Apparently Adfixer uses a very expensive software that I don’t need to buy unless I want to be my own pre-press operator.

My ad is now in this week’s The New Yorker, on page 125. It looks good! Nice n’ clean, slightly doodly-looking, which I like. It’ll appear three more times (but I won’t post about it anymore, don’t worry!)

Thanks for the suggestions!

BTW - I’ve been K.O. in bed for the last few days due to a case of food poisoning (no, not from Taco Bell!). It seems I got it from some plum tomatos. Oddly, miles away in a totally unrelated incident, a friend of mine upstate also got food poisoning, and had unfortunately shared his tainted meal with his labrador retriever…

(image: carolita johnson)

I forgot it was Friday yesterday! All these holiday parties are throwing me out of kilter.

Inserting myself back into the calender with a “TNY weekend reader,” I personally cannot condone Walt Disney for anything but his amusing Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse films. His cleaned-up takes on fairy tales have rendered modern childhood devoid of the warnings or wisdom that every child needs. Maybe reading the Grimm’s originals (I found a battered old mouldy book in my elementary school library), was what kept me from running away from home many a time—I learned the lesson that the world was dangerous for a child. But if you want to see what Walt wrought, here you go: Wonderful World, by Anthony Lane.

Patricia Marx’s “Santa Secrets,” deftly illustrated, but overwhelming, isn’t online. Which may be good, because if you read it, like I did, it may push you over the edge and make you close all those open “check-out” windows on your computer: I promptly decided I will not be buying any presents for anyone with a roof over their head this year. This, however, is inspiring: buy a goat for someone who needs one, here. For other useful presents for those who really couldn’t give a rat’s ass how many songs will fit on the latest iPod, click here. Heifer International is endorsed by Walter Cronkite, Jimmy Carter, Ed Harris, and of course, Susan Sarandon, among others. And me.

It’s probably a good idea to inform yourself on what our government is doing (or not) to prevent global warming: Elizabeth Kolbert’s “Hot and Cold.” My first suggestion would be to change the name of this phenomenon to something more frightening, since “global warming” actually sounds rather pleasant to me. “Earth: the warm planet” would probably attract intergalactic tourists! How about “global inferno,” “global frying,” “global slow-roasting”....?

Back to our little world, to forget the misfortunes around us for a few minutes, read Frank Gannon’s “Beyond the Bird Flu.” Perhaps you’d like to purchase an anti-bird flu t-shirt or sweatshirt? Check out the different options here: The Bird Parka Project. Part of the profit will go towards outfitting the pigeons on my fire escape with little parkas and earmuffs.

(Click on the image for the cartoonbank’s website.)

I don’t always remember to post about my published cartoons, maybe because the unpublished ones are more on my mind. But here’s one that has a story behind it.

Last summer I got a job selling subscriptions to the Washington Symphony Orchestra for a month or two, which made me very little money but forced me to overcome my shyness. It was worth it just for the new ease with which I can now make a cold call (not that I have to make any lately, but I always feel one can never have too many skills). It also gave me an insight on how it must feel to be a man trying to pick up women on the street (I forget, why do they do that?), and how they keep going even through the scorn and disregard.

This is progress: when I worked in a software company a few years ago, they made me do cold calling and you know what I’d do? I’d hang up before anyone answered, and then write “no answer,” or “not interested,” or “will call back later” in my log book. I did not make a cent, either for myself or my company. (I suppose the idea of selling this software was made all the more daunting by the fact that I knew without a doubt that it came with a serious defect that would eventually cause the loss of entire databases of images. The thing was, I was also the technical support person they’d be calling with their “where’s my database?” queries. It felt like I was pulling my pants down for a spanking, really.)

Anyway, at this call center, one of the supervisors had a sweater that was full of pulls and snags on the back and shoulders. I asked him, “Do you have a cat?” He looked at me like I had telepathy—“Wow! How did you know?” I kept a little pad by my Purell-soaked telephone in which I wrote unusual names and addresses (like Jade Lightbody, or 2434 Dogue Run Lane), and wrote that idea down. I sold the cartoon that week!

(image: carolita johnson)

This week is “The Cartoon Issue!” You know what that means, don’t you? It means you can go back to just looking at the cartoons! (Most of it’s not online, so you’ll have to read the paper version.) I’m not part of the cartoonist roster this time but a commissioned pair of cartoons of mine is featured in one of the magazine’s ads this week. The product? Ahem. Look for the header that begins, “Bathroom confidential…” Need a drawing for a prostate medication ad? I’m your girl!

(image: carolita johnson)

I’ll never forget the first time I read Descartes’ “Discours de la Méthode.” He claimed to have had an epiphany after climbing into an oven (and not the “Hey, I’m in an oven!” kind of epiphany). Having grown up in Queens, where the only oven I’d ever seen was about two square feet big, I took him for a liar. An oven? Was he, as an Italian woman once said to a friend of mine, “pushing my leg?” I was obliged to suspend my disbelief to continue reading and prepare my homework. (It turned out ovens used to be quite roomy in Descartes’ day!) Anthony Gottlieb, in “Think again,” clears away any cobwebs that may have accumulated since the first time you read (or read about) Descartes, and goes even further to explain how you arrived at the popular misconceptions his Discours is prey to: Descartes did not do for the individual what Galileo did for the sun. Not on purpose, anyway.

Also unforgettable is Bill Buford’s “Talking Turkey,” wherein you will fall in love with the man who learned to talk with the animals (not just turkeys, but field mice too, to the chagrin of his turkeys), but your heart will be broken by the fate of Turkey Boy, which remains unspoken at the end and which I take to mean that he tasted very good with cranberry sauce and yams. It’s not online, but Matt Dellinger interviews Bill in “Calls of the Wild,” on the Hard Drive.

Anyone who was ever enamored of the fact that the “Epic of Gilgamesh,” and Homer’s “Iliad” were once purely oral tradition will quickly become engrossed in William Dalrymple’s “Homer in India,” and wish they had half the memory capacity of the illiterate farmers capable of reciting for eight hours a day for a month till the epic encased in their memory is finally unrolled completely. And then rolled back up again, perhaps never more to be recited, since the tradition is dying along with the humans that live them. Not online.