I was working at the computer this evening, past the cat’s feeding time. She was sitting right in front of my screen and following my cursor around, occasionally reaching up to bat at it. It occurred to me that she might enjoy watching something more exciting, so I went to YouTube and searched for “videos for cats.” I didn’t know there was such a thing, but of course there is. This example popped up, and I started playing it. She knows the squirrels aren’t real, but she’s not quite sure what to do with them. She does a little investigating toward the end.
My colleague Matt Madden teaches an experimental comics class at the School of Visual Arts called The Obstacle Course. He just gave the class an assignment to do an “appropriation” comic, where they took one or more existing works and transformed them into something new. (Like Garfield Minus Garfield.) One of his students, Maggie Siegel-Berele, turned in this hilarious appropriation of an old Dykes To Watch Out For episode combined with art from an old Flash comic.
Here’s Mo in the 1987 strip, Angst in Right Field:
Maggie had been hoping to use a Flash scene with two women talking to each other in it, so she could do a take on the Bechdel rule…but no surprise, she couldn’t find any images of two women in conversation. So she went with this soliloquy of Mo’s. Maggie says, “It was a lot of fun swiping ‘Barry is late – I’m never calling him again!’ with Mo’s political rant.”
Matt’s teaching a special Obstacle Course workshop at the Museum of Cartoon and Comic Art in NYC this week. He’s a smart and awesome teacher, with a special interest in constrained writing/drawing techniques. You should go take it!
My esteemed colleague James Kochalka has been named Vermont’s first Cartoonist Laureate!
He draws the wonderful diary comic American Elf, among innumerable other things—go to his site for links to his music, kids’ books, t-shirts, and god knows what else. Here’s a short article about him on the Center for Cartoon Studies’ website—CCS thought the whole laureate thing up, I guess, and got the governor behind it. Apparently Alaska also has a cartoonist laureate, but Vermont is the second state to appoint one. God, I love Vermont. And I love James’s work. His diary comics are little perfect visual/verbal haikus carved from the dross of everyday life. He will be a most stellar ambassador of comics.
On another note…
Here’s my office floor in front of my desk in November 0f 2006. The wheels of my desk chair had worn and splintered the plywood so badly that I put duct tape down to minimize the ongoing damage.
Then in July of 2008 I repainted my office before I settled down to work on my new book in earnest.
I took up the duct tape and patched the deeply scarred plywood with a can or two of Plastic Wood before painting it green. It didn’t look too terrible.
See how pretty the freshly painted floor was?
Anyhow, after I got the joint repainted, I rearranged my desk so that my chair was in a different spot, where the plywood was intact and glossy with pea green paint.
Here is that spot today, two and a half years later:
I was supposed to turn my “new book” in to the publisher over a year ago, but I’m still working on it. My progress has been elusive and for the most part invisible. So I find this clear visual evidence of my effort somewhat comforting.
I just heard that Jack LaLanne died. He was my fitness idol as a young child. If I was home sick from school, this wild muscle man was on tv, showing housewives how to tone & trim. He had the most amazing arms, the most amazing polyester jumpsuit, and the most amazing white dog. I was spellbound.
This very handsome volume just came out from Abrams, the fancy art book publisher. Erin McHugh wrote short profiles/interviews with various lesbians and Jennifer May took amazing photos. Kate Clinton, Urvashi Vaid, Susan Love, Phyllis Lyon, Christine Vachon, Linda Villarosa, Sharon Kleinbaum, some yahoo named Alison Bechdel, and many more. All kinds of women doing all kinds of things. Here’s the trailer. If your coffee table is feeling naked and neglected, this could be just the thing for it.
I’ve been doing a lot of research on the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott for the book I’m working on. At one point I searched online for any possible video footage there might be of him, and didn’t find anything. Recently I checked again, and saw that a short video I posted about my cat came up in the search.
Then I noticed the first link, to an audio clip of Winnicott. I followed it, but had a great deal of trouble trying to get the .wmv file to play on my mac. (Thank you to our kind blog monitor Mentor for finding the hidden links that enabled me to finally hear it.)
I don’t know where or when the recording was made, but it was probably some time in the mid-sixties. It’s weird that there’s not more audio available of Winnicott because he did many BBC broadcasts about child psychology in the 40s and 50s but of course it was much more difficult to record stuff then. And possibly because they were talks about mothers and babies and not war or the economy, no one considered them worth preserving.
Anyhow, after years of reading about him and reading his work, it was very exciting to hear his voice.
A student from Rutgers came to my house with a film crew last September to interview me for a documentary filmmaking project. I couldn’t quite wrap my mind around what exactly it was for…the student is part of something called the Institute for Women’s Leadership and for some reason the word “leadership” always makes my mind go blank. But she made a very nice interview. Great job, Mimi and crew!
I’m trying to embed it but if that doesn’t work you can see it here.
