I just sent this photo to my friend the Queer Theory Professor with the subject line, “which of these things is not like the others?”
She responded, “the second pumpkin from the right?” As a child watching Sesame Street, she would amuse herself during the little ditty (which apparently you can now download as a ringtone) by trying to come up with a reason why each of the things could be “not like the others.”
Thanks to the folks on here who have already linked to Dan Savage’s YouTube channel “It Gets Better.” Dan started this a week or two ago, in response to news of a gay teenager who hanged himself in Indiana earlier this month. Dan says in this recent Savage Love column, “I wish I could’ve talked to this kid for five minutes.” Then he realized that there is a way for LGBT adults to talk to the kids whose lives are being made miserable by the people at their schools. YouTube. He’s inviting people to send in videos telling LGBT kids who are being harrassed that life gets better, so they should stick around for it.
I know this stuff goes on all the time, but it seems unusually bad lately, with today’s news about the Rutgers student who killed himself. There’s also this story about bullies breaking a boy’s arm, and this story about a man telling a 14 year old girl with a rainbow flag to move to a country where they will hang people like her.
Anyhow, the videos people are sending in are very moving. I hope kids are watching. It seems to me like an unusually brilliant use of the web.
Have you heard about this event? Where people produce a comic book in 24 straight hours? It sounds really fun, but not quite so fun that I plan on doing it myself, although it would probably be good for me.
Anyhow, it starts this Saturday, October 2. I know there are a couple places near me in Vermont where it’ll be happening. The Trees and Hills Comics Group is organizing an event at the public library in Montpelier, and Artists Mediums is hosting it in Williston.
I suppose you can also do it at home alone.
Just heard that Jill Johnston died two days ago. There’s a very respectful piece on the HuffPo.
I recently organized my whole library. Fiction was easy, just putting stuff in alphabetical order. But when I got to my huge stash of books on gay and lesbian topics, I was confused about how to arrange them. Finally it became clear that the only meaningful order was chronological. So I put them all on the shelf by publication date. And quite accidentally the first one was Lesbian Nation, and eight feet further down the shelf was my latest acquisition, When Gay People Get Married. A fitting summation, I felt, of the past 40 years.
RIP, Jill Johnston.
Yale University Press published this really beautiful book last year called Unpacking My Library: Architects and Their Books. It begins with Walter Benjamin’s famous essay about collecting books, Unpacking My Library. Then it shows you the actual bookshelves of 12 architects. Close-up, all the books on all the the shelves. As someone who always ends up in the corner at parties poring over the host’s bookshelves, this was a voyeuristic treat.
Now they’re doing a follow-up book about writers and their books, and I’ve been asked to be part of it. The photographers were here the other week, which prompted me to rein my books back into some sort of order after years of entropy. The editors asked each architect, and now each writer, to name their top ten books. That was quite a job. But I’ve finally narrowed them down. Since I’m a cartoonist, they want me to illustrate mine. So I’ve been working on drawing all these books. It’s a strange task…I feel like I’m not so much drawing the book covers as recreating the book covers. They just look like the books, especially in the case of books that have drawings on the cover, like these two.
It’s a laborious activity. Like, am I really going to finish coloring that Tintin cover? And to what end? Plus I should have dug out my Gillott tit quill pen nibs for the Gorey drawing. I have some somewhere. But I just I used my regular nib, which is way too coarse and sprawling.
Unfortunately, the mic on my camera failed to pick up the buzz of the hummingbird.
Prop 8 has been overturned. And there are beads of water like mercury on the nasturtium leaves.
Update: 7pm. I pixilated my cat. This isn’t a movie, it’s a series of photos. Well, of course that’s what a movie is. But you know what I mean.
Remember Mädchen in Uniform? The very steamy 1931 German film about girls at boarding school? My pal Jenni Olson has been working very hard to make a DVD release happen of the 1958 Romy Schneider/Lilli Palmer remake. I haven’t seen this but now we all can! Help Jenni succeed by adding the film to your Netflix queue or ordering it online.
And, Jenni adds, if you’ve already seen it, please give it a nice star rating at one of the above sites or write a short complimentary review if you can.
I have five more weeks left to be 49, deo volente, but the mailman just delivered my little reminder card from the grim reaper.
I just found out that Harvey Pekar died. There’s this very short “just in” piece in the Huffington Post. (It’s been fleshed out a lot, I just noticed, since I started writing this an hour ago.)
I’m kind of stunned. He was such a sweet person, and I just saw him recently. In April we traveled together to do some presentations in Los Angeles and Las Vegas. He didn’t seem to be in the greatest shape, and I felt bad for dragging him out on a walk into the crazy casino area at the hotel where we were staying. Now I feel even worse. Here, I made a little movie of him in the garish indoor mall because he just seemed so incongruous there.
Anyhow, I loved Harvey. and I loved his work. I first discovered him when I was in college. American Splendor #2.
It’s the only comic book I bother keeping in one of those archival sleeve things. There was an epic story in it about Harvey and two friends just hanging out one night. It goes on for pages and pages, and the only thing that really happens is that they move a rug from one guy’s house to another guy’s house. The guys are all at loose ends–one’s a Vietnam vet who just got fired from his job, one has been unemployed for years. And then there’s Harvey with his “flunky government job” as a file clerk. They haul the rug—which is waterlogged and smelly from being left in the rain—all the way across town and up to the guy’s apartment. But then he decides it was a mistake, and they have to haul it out again, to his back porch. It’s a perfect story about nothing, and everything, and it started to give me ideas about autobiography. You don’t need to engineer some grand sprawling thematically dense narrative. If you write honestly about everyday life, all that stuff will automatically be there.
That issue of American Splendor also has the brilliant “Harvey Pekar Name Story” in it, illustrated by R. Crumb. It’s about Harvey finding all these other Harvey Pekars in the phone book. It was dramatized quite hauntingly in the movie American Splendor. Here’s an excerpt:
