what th’?
July 15th, 2008 | Uncategorized
I don’t know what’s going on with the blog…that last post has disappeared a couple times, and now it seems to have lost its comment box. Let’s see what happens with this one.
I don’t know what’s going on with the blog…that last post has disappeared a couple times, and now it seems to have lost its comment box. Let’s see what happens with this one.
41 Responses to “what th’?”
Can I make a comment? I guess so.
Can I make another one? Why not!
Mind if I comment on your comment? Works just fine on my end.
Still here. Glad it’s just tech weirdness – I went to comment on your decluttering efforts and painting the floor, and thought you’d deleted it.
Okay, well as long as we’re talkin’ atcha- Alison, while I was browsing in Mayday Books in Minneapolis, I discovered an old sort of chapbook published by Firebrand Press about women and AIDS prevention, and noticed that you did all the illustrations! It was an interesting find- what year did it come out? (I’m guessing late ’80s-early ’90s from the hairstyles.)
Sometimes I get an error that says something like ‘whoa cowboy’ and won’t let me post because it thinks I already posted five seconds early. Don’t know why!
Very sweet picture of the cat!
I think we all get the ‘whoa cowboy’ message occasionally. It’s just one of the quirks that makes this blog so enjoyable.
per the last post — i have no suggestions, but lots of sympathy! I hate throwing stuff out, especially paper. I have environmental issues about recycling Everything I Possibly Can, which takes forever to sort out. Plus on a more basic level, all my paper and stuff is associated with thoughts that I have had, am having or might like to have. So when I throw things out without due consideration, I feel like I’m indiscriminately wiping out my own thoughts. Since we writers pretty much think for a living, this is somewhat traumatic even when necessary. Good luck.
You have the cutest kitty cat. Give him or her (did we establish said kitty’s gender or is it a transgender, doesn’t like to be labelled kitty?) a schnoogle from me.
Alison, you look about 12 years old in that picture! Hee!
And I had wondered what became of the new floor pictures…
I can see the declutter post and comments. Short-term glitch?
Good luck with this endeavor. It was tough to see the picture of you looking so despondent but I am confident that you will persevere!
Hey Allison, not sure if you’ll see this, but what the heck: I was wondering if there’s any chance you’ll be at the SD Comic-Con this year? I’m guessing not, thanks to the book deadline and all, but I figured it was worth asking. 🙂
So, I am curious. Do you still aspire to contribute to The New Yorker?
Yep, comments are working on this thread, but the comment box on the reorg thread is still gone, and the comments stopped at July 12th. Weird! Glad you noticed it! Hope your reorg is going well!
All this time, I just thought no one had anything to say!
Aww, kitty!
(just contributing my witty commentary and scathing political criticism as usual here)
As long as brigid brought it up, what do people here make of The New Yorker cover of Senator and Mrs. Obama? Edgy satire? Raw commentary? Pure racism?
I don’t consider the New Yorker cover “edgy” satire, I think it’s dull. But maybe that’s what “edgy” means? (I never see the word “edgy” being used in that way without thinking of its use in Hedwig and the Angry Inch, which made such fun of Rent’s pretensions to edginess.) I have no idea what “raw commentary” would be, but I’m sure it’s not pure or even unrefined racism.
I noticed that the Obama cover was by the same guy who did the cover cartoon of Iranian President Ahmadinejad being foot-tapped under a john stall divider, which I thought was fag-baiting and not satire. But satire is a difficult matter. I’m sure many people were outraged by Swift’s “Modest Proposal,” and I remember that when Ellen Willis did what I thought was a hilarious satire of adults trying to prevent teen sex, some years ago for the Village Voice, she got a lot of angry letters attacking her for saying such awful things; but the scariest one, she said, was from a guy who thought she had some good ideas, except that he thought castration for second offenders was going a *bit* too far.
I think Americans in general have trouble with the whole concept of satire: it’s our puritan heritage. I must say, though, it’s been very entertaining to watch liberals’ heads exploding over the New Yorker cover, and just a few minutes ago I passed a TV showing Obama himself on Larry King, sounding a lot like George Bush: he didn’t like the cartoon, but thank goodness we have the First Amendment. (Thank goodness, because what — he’d have demanded the cartoonist and the publisher be guillotined otherwise?) He went on to say that he figured most Americans were more concerned with the financial system, Iraq, etc. (I agree, but as far as I can tell the issues he mentioned are issues he’s not interested in doing anything about.)
I haven’t gotten my New Yorker yet, but heard Cokie Roberts describing it on NPR yesterday morning. It sounds HILARIOUS to me…I was wondering who the artist was, and hoping it was Barry Blitt–which it seems to be, according to Duncan’s comment above.
I have to wait until I see it to weigh in properly, but it sounds like a really pitch perfect send-up of all the right wing lunacy about Obama.
hmmm. The only thing that i have to say about the illustration is that Michelle Obama looks super hot (minus the gun).
Yes, it’s Barry Blitt.
(Folks interested in seeing a couple other recent Blitt covers –together with a dripping-with-sarcasm take on all the outrage over the covers– can zip over to Tom Tomorrow’s ‘blog and scroll down a couple articles.)
To bring this back to D2WO4: Did this make anyone else think of the “heads-on-a-pike” incident?
As for the decluttering issue, I have to agree with the poster who pointed out that a professor had dumped all his/her materials on a young graduate student. The things that we no longer have use for, we may hate to get rid of because our younger selves would have needed those things (and our younger selves still reside in us).
If I lived nearby, I would volunteer to help pack the things up to donate or sell (even a charity auction). There are many people who would love to have a tattered copy of a book you no longer need–the provenance value-added makes these things worth a lot to many of us.
eBay allows charity auctions, you know. I would bid. One would have to make digital images for the sake of the sale, and this would allow you to archive things in a useful way also.
Yeesh, I’ve read so many angles on that New Yorker cover on political blogs over the last couple of days my head’s about to blow.
When I first saw it, I winced. I knew of course that it was satire, but I knew that it was like handing ready-made clipart to blathering right-wing idiots. Of course, they’re perfectly capable of creating their own false images, but still. I also have to wonder the percentage of this country that’s capable of recognizing it as satire. Does that sound elitist? Yes? I don’t care. Anyway, even though I winced, I think it’s a very well done satire.
And Alison? The Bechdel Test is being discussed at Alas:
http://www.amptoons.com/blog/
Go there, and there’s a link to a blog in which people are discussing which of Shakespeare’s plays pass the Bechdel Test.
Ginjoint, this one’s for you!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvgN5gCuLac
George Carlin we miss you! Give ’em hell in heaven.
Peace Out,
sunicarus
Thanks, sunicarus! I needed that. Yeah, I miss him already. Alison, that link that sunicarus provided is to George Carlin doing a riff on “stuff.” I bet you’ll strongly identify.
@NLC: “Head on a pike!” One of my favourites.
Yeah, head on a pike, as I recall that’s also the one in which Mo discovers where Osama Bin Laden has been hiding. That’s a great episode but the New Yorker cover controversy didn’t remind me of it. As far as I can tell, the New Yorker incident has been manufactured by the Obama campaign. Can anyone recall a spontaneous expression of outrage before the campaign got started? If so, I missed it.
On the chance that anybody is unfamiliar with Tom Tomorrow, his blog can be found at http://www.thismodernworld.com.
It’s hard to say, Andrew, because the outrage started so quickly. I don’t think the Obama campaign manufactured it; lots of Obamafreaks are perfectly capable of detonating their heads spontaneously without directives from above. I think I saw a brief interview online with the artist the day it all began, in which he was asked whether he regretted having done that drawing, and he said something like, “It hasn’t even been published yet, and it’s been online for about ten minutes! Ask me again later whether I regret it.”
One giveaway in the outrage, for me, is that so many people are saying that *they* aren’t bothered by the image, but lots of stupid wingnuts will take it literally, as The Truth about Obama. That’s a censor’s mentality: *I* can look at Dykes to Watch Out For without being corrupted, but Weaker Vessels might read it and become Lesbians, or become sluts like Lois, or smoke pot like Raffi, etc., etc. But then it’s hardly news, is it, that many liberals are just as repressive as many conservatives.
Just to make sure that there’s no misunderstanding, my mention of the “head on a pike incident” was not to compare the cartoons themselves; but, rather, the (similarly clueless) reactions to them.
I can understand that it might be possible that someone might not like Blitt’s cartoon. But those who were reading the ‘blog at the time will recall that AB apparently got a lot of mail from readers who seemed to have totally missed the irony and took her to task for expressing such a blood-thirsty point of view.
All other considerations aside, it struck me (and strikes me still) as utterly amazing that anyone could read more than a couple strips by AB and could even consider the possibility that this could be what she “really” meant.
[P.S. Andrew B: Thanks for posting the working link to TT’s ‘blog. For some reason it ate my HTML-tag when I tried to submit it in my earlier message.]
NLC, I understood that you were trying to compare the reactions. What I was trying to say is that I thought the reactions differed, because the reaction to Alison’s cartoon was spontaneous, but the reaction to the New Yorker cover looks to me like it has mostly been manufactured. The first criticism I saw of it came from the Obama campaign itself, as has virtually all the rest of the criticism I’ve seen.
Putting aside the question of whether the campaign was responding to an already existing controversy or creating one, I think I can see why they would take the position they’ve taken. A well-intentioned joke could provide cover for ill-intentioned sneers. Trying to express this in detail would take an essay, but think about bullies who defend themselves by claiming they were just joking, and think about how the Republican smear machine has already gotten started on Obama (“baby mama”, for instance). The campaign might reasonably think that this whole topic has to be put out of bounds, regardless of individual intentions.
I’m not talking about the corruption of weaker vessels, as Duncan observes some people are. I’m talking about vicious people using the concept of a joke as a cover for their malice.
re: the new yorker cover.
i thought it was brilliant and hilarious. i’m more disappointed than i can say that the obama camp is taking offense. i thought they were smart and edgy enough to get it.
Andrew B: OK, I see you’re distinction now.
Rather than the “heads on a pike”, perhaps a more apt comparison –in view of your point– might be when “All in the Family” first came out, and folks started realizing that there were people out there who were laughing along with (not at) Archie Bunker.
Hey – how did the “Bechdel test” get started???
Love it!
J.
Concerning the “Bechdel Test”:
Click Here
Ack! The reply-mechanism keeps eating my HTML!
Anyway, the URL I was trying to post:
http://alisonbechdel.blogspot.com/2005/08/rule.html
(Or check the “Dykes to Watch Out For” article on Wikipedia.)
NLC, yes, the Archie Bunker comparison is apt.
I hadn’t yet seen the New Yorker cover when I posted my comments yesterday. I have seen it now. If anybody cares, I can see why the Obamas would really take offense — as opposed to the type of calculated response I was suggesting yesterday. For a New Yorker cover, it’s disappointing at best.
I think we all get the ‘whoa cowboy’ message occasionally. It’s just one of the quirks that makes this blog so enjoyable.
That, and I Blame The Patriarchy bearable. For those who suspect I’m lacking a sense of humour. 😉
Speaking of which, I’d dearly love to see Alison and Twisty thrown down. Twisty maybe has the verbal edge, but AB can sketch like the wind. Do it! Do it!
Throw down. God. Typoriffic, or just Freudian? I need their benevolent dictatorships!
Seriously, they should team up and rule the world. Institute that cruel vengeful lesbo matriarchy all the antifeminists keep insisting that we want to happen.