Pursuant to my coming crossing of the mighty U.S./Canada border, today at long last I was able to make my way to the front of the line successfully in order to obtain a U.S. Passport. This was my fifth or sixth attempt, plagued by the erratic hours the office is open, long lines, and inconvenient lunches. I thought I would share with you, O World Beyond This Flat-Screen Monitor, three things which I learned today:
ONE: If you want to fit in at the Post Office, and especially while waiting for an hour in the passport line, by all means hook up your phone to your ear, stare off into space disinterestedly, and just yammer away the whole time. Please. If you really want to fade into the background, liberally season your conversation with expletives and personal details from your life. Occasionally threaten whomever it is you are talking to.
Some people find this sort thing to be rude; other, even less enlightened people might become enraged to be subjected to this kind of audio onslaught. Clearly, these people who are so sensitive are throwbacks to a time before we all carried telephones around with us every where we went. If one of them complains bitterly to you, just nod and wait them out… soon they will be as inured to this sort of public nuisance as you are.
TWO: If you are fortunate like me, and get a sweet woman who loves it when you call her ma’am and say please and thank you, then you can make the most ridiculous faces for your passport photo and she will only say, “Ooh honey, we’re still getting a little more glare.” “What about now?” “Oh that’s better.” “Do you think I should smile even bigger?” “Sure, if you want to!”
The little drawing above is pretty much about half as crazy looking as the photo she and I later settled on. I was pretty excited, as I wasted a lot of time in front of the mirror trying to come up with faces I could slip by as my “regular” smile.
If you don’t know this already, this is a great lesson: being sweet to people who get pooped on all day will get you pretty much whatever it is that you want. Don’t YOU love it when people are sweet to you? Well there you go.
THREE: When I sat down in line and an official told me he estimated it would take me about an hour to get through the line, I was worried that I would easily finish the copy of Naoki Urasawa’s Pluto I’d brought, so I tried to read it slowly and really absorb it. When, about 35 minutes later my number got called, I was actually a little disappointed as I was so immersed in the story. I love it! If you’re looking for a good manga to read, Pluto has all the earmarks of being great. I’m only a fair-weather fan of Osamu Tezuka (Pluto is a retelling of the “Pluto” storyline from Tezuka’s Astro Boy), so a more serious version of a Tezuka story is right up my alley.
Okay, those are my three things! Back to your phone conversations, everyone!
Hot off the presses is this week’s strip, another in our series of “PORTRAITS OF GREATNESS,” the slow and shoddy portraiture of each of our nation’s (if America is your nation) presidents. This week’s subject: Jazzy Thomas Jefferson!
I will say, regardless of any ironic content that may accidentally find its way into these little profiles, most of these early “founding father” types are pretty impressive dudes. You have to remember that most people were autodidacts at this point, at least to some degree, and there was no such thing as the Internet, television, radio, even TELEGRAPH, as a means of spreading information. So you had to bust your hump to get smart–you couldn’t do it accidentally, as most of us have.
Thomas Jefferson was not quite a Renaissance Man, insofar as he wasn’t a super painter, mathematician, all that stuff, like Da Vinci. This is not to say that he wasn’t an impressive storehouse of knowledge. From the Wikipedia article I totally ripped for all the source material:
When President John F. Kennedy welcomed forty-nine Nobel Prize winners to the White House in 1962 he said, “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent and of human knowledge that has ever been gathered together at the White House–with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”
This is something that pretty much all of the Founding Fathers have in common–they were all incredibly smart people, who found themselves in a position to literally create an entire government out of whole cloth, and did it. They all had foibles, as I take pains to point out in my little cartoons, but they were the foibles of statesmen. This is one of the things I find so enervating about our current president–in Barack Obama are married a powerful intellect, comprehensive education, and the personal charisma of a statesman. Oops, I let my crush on Obama show a little bit–sorry!
In case my older brother Ken is reading this–hello, Ken!–I have to give him a shout-out, as we argued through most of the hamburger and hotdog I had at my father and niece Breanna’s combo birthday party today. The subject was whether or not it was right to revisit some of the less savory elements of these guys’ histories, using the mores and cultural attitudes of today. In this case, me pointing out that Jefferson owned slaves, which I find endlessly fascinating/repulsive, especially considering the fact that he supported abolition. But (again, according to Wikipedia), apparently he was too mired in debt and financial obligation to free his slaves? I find this puzzling and a little hard to believe, but I guess if it’s on Wikipedia it must be true.
This sort of argument, that something was part of the cultural landscape at the time and therefore, while unfortunate, must be viewed within its context… well, I don’t like it. I hear it a lot in the comic book world in regards to Tintin In The Congo, the second of the world-famous Tintin books, originally published in the 20’s. The Africans in the book are depicted as little more than bumbling ignorant savages out of some minstrel show. People call it “typical of colonial attitudes of the time,” but I just call it “straight racist.” I mean, right? Tintin’s creator Herge later expressed some guilt over the thing, and subsequent volumes of Tintin weren’t nearly so racially charged (unless you’re Japanese).
My point: brilliant people are often flawed. Sometimes moreso than their less brilliant counterparts. You can’t travel back in time and convince Thomas Jefferson to just say “Screw It, I’m The President” and free all his slaves, regardless of his debts or whatever. You can’t get that stain out of Monica Lewinsky’s pantsuit either. But you can most definitely be awake to history and watch out for the same malarkey from this generation’s brilliant men.
Yes sirree–I will be a guest at this year’s Toronto Comic Arts Festival, located at the Toronto Reference Library in downtown Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The show is free, which is well within your price range, and is only held once every two years, so you’ll have plenty of time to recharge your batteries before the next one. You and I are going to have such a good time together! I’ll be tabling with my buddies Joe Lambert, Chuck Forsman, and Alexis Frederick-Frost, plus a couple hundred other people nearby, including chums like Scott Campbell, Bryan Lee O’Malley and Hope Larson, and Paul Pope. The whole massive guest list can be easily accessed at this friendly fuschia hotlink. I wonder how come no one says “hotlink” anymore? Because, I mean, that’s awesome, right? “Hotlink”?
Anyway. I love Toronto. Toronto is the only non-American city I’ve traveled to, twice before. And a beautiful city it is, situated on its Great Lake. It’s like New York City with less people, much cleaner, and with a ton more Indian restaurants. DELICIOUS! I can’t wait to eat all of the food the city is even now preparing for me. I am thankful in advance for your bounty, Toronto!
The downside of going to Toronto is having to get a passport. The last two times I just sort of talked my way over the border, submitting to a real chewing out by customs agents who seemed appalled that an American citizen would so shame their country as to leave it without proud proof of citizenship. So this time I’m getting a passport. So far I’ve been to the passport office 5 times, and have yet to even get to the point where I’m talking to an agent, except for “Baby, that’s a copy. You got to have a certified birth certificate or they ain’t gonna take it.”
It costs around $125 to get an expedited passport–basically, you pay the government extra to do its job in less than six weeks, so that you may be allowed to leave the country if you want to. It cost me $42 to get a certified copy of my birth certificate overnighted from California, and involved a Goldbergian combination of Internet, fax machine, and notary public technology to obtain. On my first trip to the passport office, it was closed at 4.30. Second trip–closed on Fridays. Third trip: “Baby that’s a copy.” Fourth trip: learned that office closes Monday through Thursday at 3pm (discovered at 3.30). That one’s my fault–I should have noted the hours at trip 1. Fifth trip: discovered office takes its lunch between 1 and 2. Because the 6 hour shift is so grueling that an hour lunch is necessary to keep passport officials from dropping dead right there in front of us.
So now I’m circling the passport office like a hungry shark, waiting for the perfect chance to dart in and… stand in line with the disconsolate future travellers, present visa seekers, and the rest just people with 2 or 3 crying children who like to stand in lines I’m in.
But hey. I’m not complaining.
Also, and unrelated: as I was drawing the above picture in my sketchbook, I was listening to this old radio program I have on my computer, one of literally hundreds of old radio programs I picked up somewhere. The show is called “X Minus One,” which I’d never heard of, and it’s pretty fascinating. Usually I just fast forward through 80% of these radio shows–there’s a reason that radio is mostly dead–but check out the first few seconds of this one:
[theremin-produced science-whine ascends the scale, as an announcer's voice goes through a liftoff countdown; "X Minus Five, X Minus Four, et cetera. And then:]
“From the far horizons of the unknown come transcribed tales of new dimensions in time and space. These are stories of the future; adventures in which you’ll live in a million could-be years, on a thousand may-be worlds…
The National Broadcasting Company presents:
X! x x x x
MINUS! minus minus minus
ONE! one one one!”
How could you not go on listening. The title of the episode is “Mars Is HEAVEN!” Another notable point is that this Mars landing occurs on… April 20, 1987. I was 12! I actually found something on YouTube that seems to point to it being a Ray Bradbury story–but instead of this radio recording, it’s a kinda lame 3D adaptation. So no linkee.
Anyway! Come and see me at TCAF! I’ll certainly say more about it between now and then, but I wanted to let you know so you could get excited like I am. Also, in the minus column this week, it looks like I’ll be unable to attend FLUKE down south of me in Athens, Georgia. Which sucks, because I had a great time last year. But I’ve got like eight irons in the fire, AND things are heating up for the convention I work for, so my time is dwindling every week… But listen: YOU should still go to FLUKE!
Ah, spring! How I wait for you each year, watching the buds on the trees tumesce towards their new growth, hearing the birds begin to flirt with each other, watching the sunset creep later each day… and best of all are those first warm days in late winter. Though they’re followed with the last fitful death-throes of the cold season, for a few glorious days the temperature crossed the 70 degree mark, and out come…
…the short shorts. What better indicator of the dawn of a new season of hope? Click here to enjoy a strip dedicated to this ephemeral joy of these first warm days of the year.
Now up over in the STRIP section: the second installment in my series of oh, around 44 or so presidential portraits, this time memorializing His Rotundity, John Adams. I liberally swiped pretty much all the historical info from Wikipedia, just so you know: bring on your lawsuits, anonymous Internet authors! I defy you!
Okay, I’m super late for work again, so I have to go. But I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed making it!
Network was released in 1976. According to the well-informed staff at Wikipedia, it earned 4 Oscars, although I think the one most-deserved went to Faye Dunaway. She shares billing with a ridiculous wealth of talent that also includes a pretty amazing William Holden and Robert Duvall, not to mention dapper Ned Beatty near the end. AND it was directed by Sidney Lumet, who also did 12 Angry Men and Serpico, among a ton of others.
I won’t talk long about the movie: I don’t know much about movies, and generally like or dislike them based on my own ideas. My opinion about film as an artform should be taken with as much salt as you can find, if you take it at all. But this movie was, if nothing else, highly thought-provoking, one of the best purposes of any art. On that I think we can agree.
The rough plot is: a aging network anchorman goes barmy and starts swearing onscreen and threatening to kill himself. Rather than yank him off and have him treated for depression, some hawkish executives turn him into a national sensation and reaps buckets of money as a result. It ends about how you’d expect. At the time of its release, Network must have seemed pretty histrionic: imagine a world where the TV airwaves were consumed with crazy people spouting any old thing, which people would accept purely because it was on TV! But watching it now, it’s like writer Paddy Chayefsky was gazing (Sybil the Soothsayer-like, for those of you who have seen the movie) into the future, where he espied the likes of Survivor, the O.J. Simpson slow-motion car chase, Michael Jackson, etc.
Like a lot of movies from the 70’s, the ideas in this one are more sound than the story itself. There’s a love story in there between William Holden and Faye Dunaway that’s distracting at best, ridiculous at worst, although I get it that there needed to be a real-world analog for the whole dissolution-of-the-soul thing that all the TV worship had to lead to. But it’s not the most likely romance in the world. On the other hand, it produces some really great scenes between Holden and Dunaway, including at the first dinner of their affair, where Faye Dunaway perkily states, “I can’t tell you how many men have told me what a lousy lay I am.”
On the other hand, the writing is so overdone that you’re alternately impressed with the extraordinary vocabularies of the cast, or letdown when you realize that not even a roomful of Harvard professors talk like that. I’m reminded a lot of Being There, where a great idea was paired up with an incredible performance, but was ultimately saddled with the other 90 minutes of the movie. On the other other hand, what do I know about writing? The screenplay also won an Oscar that year, one of four (the other three went to Dunaway, Peter Finch (who plays the messianic anchorman), and Beatrice Straight, who plays Holden’s lady-cuckold wife.
I get a charge out of watching movies from the 70’s, although they’re always downers, so it’s hard to decide to watch one. I was born in 1974. I don’t remember the 70’s, of course–by the time I was old enough to start noticing, Reagan was president and the coolest thing in the world was the brand new Space Shuttle. So when I see things set in the 70’s, it’s almost like looking at a time capsule: this is how things were, this is what people looked like, these were the circumstances surrounding the beginnings of my life.
I especially like the attitude of the 70’s–everyone wearing these crazy jackets and wild hairstyles, and you can tell that the producers wanted everything to look super modern, super sleek. It’s easy to forget when looking at a Nehru jacket that at one time they were hip, right?
But best of all is the light in 70’s movies–I always notice that there’s all this actual light everywhere. I don’t mean bright light, but real light; or at least, real-appearing. Scenes will be totally dark, with just a disembodied face hanging in the frame, like the scene near the beginning where Holden and Finch are drunk in a bar. The light in a room might be obnoxiously bright, or dim and muddy; either way, it’s how it is in real life. Life is rarely lit correctly, and almost never properly composed. Of course, all those 70’s directors loved composition, so that clever sentence is only half clever.
But it’s the first thing I notice about the movies of this time period: 70’s movies are filled with the banal, unapologetically. The drama of the story is set half the time against the oppressive insipidness of life. Is this my imagination? It’s hard to say–I wasn’t really around back then. It may just be that the 1970’s look boring now; but in most of the films of the decade, the world around the action has all the life and spark and electricity of a lawyer’s bookshelf. The style of everything seems new and old at the same time–sleek, but covered in dust somehow.
The bad guy (other than just general concepts of greed and stupidity) in the movie is played by Robert Duvall, who if you put a gun to my head and forced me to name my three favorite actors, would probably be two of them. Think about Duvall in the 70’s: The Godfather I and II, MASH, The Conversation, Apocalypse Now… he was like the Phillip Seymour Hoffman of his time. Not the prettiest actor in the world, but with chops; able to imbue the most complex performances with the basic humanity they need to work.
It was strange watching Duvall play young buck to aging William Holden; as of this writing, Robert Duvall is pushing 80. But in the film he’s all fire and passion, while Holden seems tired, laconicly verbose. It’s hard to believe he has the energy for a high-powered strumpet like Faye Dunaway. But watching these three actors on the screen together seemed a little like watching the history of film up to that time. Remember that Holden was a hero of the Western and one of Hollywood’s studio stars from the 40’s on. Seeing the now-aging Duvall screaming profanity at this legend was a real mind-blower at times, further cementing the strange anachronism of the movie, post past and future.
The idea that Holden, who started acting in movies in the 30’s, played the lead in this grim 70’s polemic is a real headtwister for sure. He carries all that history around with him on the screen, making it easy to believe that he is a tired newsman who doesn’t buy all the hype and noise these days. There’s something to be said for the early years of an artform–in 1976, film as art was what? Fifty years old? Citizen Kane had come out 35 years earlier. The glory years of jazz had already wound down by the 70’s, and rock music is kind of sputtering and fizzling its way toward obscenity now. Could “Network” have been made today? I think yes, but with a lot more eye-rolling and winking, and a lot less class. I’m not sure that ANYone is making classy movies anymore.
Which Network surely is, for its strangeness and its several faults. Network is, if nothing else, a piece of art where someone had something to say and got some incredibly talented people together to help him say it. Here’s Ned Beatty saying some pretty interesting stuff, from near the end of the movie–don’t watch it if you haven’t seen it before.
OMG!! This new strip took me forever to color. So long, in fact, that I’m already late for work like crazy. Which means I can’t write anything clever about it here on my very own DHARBLOG?! Lo, the humanity! I promise to be even more clever next time.
From the book I’m reading right now (slowly), which is I suspect an excellent book: Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami.
The sentence at the end of this passage pretty much sums up most of my current ideas about art and its power as an analogue of we imperfect humans:
“He listens to the music, humming the melody, then continues.
‘That’s why I like to listen to Schubert while I’m driving. Like I said, it’s because all the performances are imperfect. A dense, artistic kind of imperfection stimulates your consciousness, keeps you alert. If I listen to some utterly perfect performance of an utterly perfect piece while I’m driving, I might want to close my eyes and die right there. But listening to the D major, I can feel the limits of what humans are capable of–that a certain type of perfection can only be realized through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect….’”
Do you know what Partyka is? I do: terrific, that’s what. This month I’ve been invited, in a display of flattery the world has not seen since The Supreme Court elected George W. Bush president, to be Guest Artist at Partyka, which is super awesome.
My little mini-residency is going to be a group of drawings I’m calling “WHAT HEAVEN LOOKS LIKE,” totalling 12 drawings and 12 different versions of the word “HEAVEN.” I think my man J. Chris Campbell is going to turn this into a sweet Wide Awake Press minicomic in time for FLUKE, which I’ll be attending as well. Oh, did I mention I was attending FLUKE this year?
But back to Partyka. The site is run mainly by Shawn Cheng and Matt Wiegle, both of whom have got a ton of sweet minicomics to their credit(s), all of which you should go and buy immediately. I used one of each of their minicomics in the class I just finished teaching on comics, mainly as examples of how singular and special a minicomic can be.
Here’s one of my favorite Matt Wiegle drawings:
I love it! And for even more color chicanery, Shawn Cheng:
Whoa Nellie! These guys were either very nice or very foolish or both to have invited me onto their site, but either way I’m excited to be there. I’m also looking forward to seeing them at TCAF (Toronto Comic Arts Festival) in May. Oh, did I not mention I was going to be a guest at TCAF? Oops! Okay, but let’s focus on Partyka for right now, alright? You can visit my (still nascent) guest page here!
Courtesy of the fine group of Canadians (O Canada!) that run the endlessly interesting DRAWN! blog, I just enjoyed this video while finishing up my lunch with some delicioius Baked Ruffles Cheddar & Sour Cream flavored chips. I suspect that the video is delightful no matter what chips you choose to enjoy it with:
Also recently profiled on DRAWN! is good ole Joe Lambert, one of my very favorite cartoonists. Joe may seem like the kind of guy you’d pair with salt & vinegar chips, but I’m thinking actually he’s 100% Ritz Crackers.
, by Haruki Murakami.
