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The Danish Cartoon Row

February 10th, 2006

I’m still in the UK, where it’s been a very exciting time for cartoons. I don’t know how much play this story has gotten in the US, but it’s been in the headlines here for over a week. Muslims all over the world have been protesting a series of cartoons about Mohammed published by a Danish newspaper. It’s all very complicated, and if you want the whole story, the Guardian has a comprehensive special report

The gist is that the cartoons were commissioned as part of a debate about freedom of speech in a climate where the press has felt a certain amount of fear and self-censorship around critiquing Islam. In 2004, a Dutch filmmaker who’d just made a film about violence against women in Islamic culture was murdered by a fanatic, and it’s had a predictably chilling effect on discourse.

The cartoons were actually published last September, but it took a while for the protests to build up steam. First the newspaper refused to apologize, then the government stepped in and apologized after Muslims called for boycotts of Danish products. It escalated last week with increasingly violent protests from Europe to Iraq to Indonesia. Danish embassies have been set on fire, and yesterday four demonstrators were killed in Afghanistan.

But there’s some question about whether the cartoons were deliberately provocative, or an earnest effort at opening a dialogue. No one was reprinting them, for obvious reasons, so it took me a while to see what the fuss was all about. Then the Guardian posted this link to them on Wikipedia. Some are tame, some are offensive, most are mediocre. but part of the problem is that in Islam, you’re not supposed to show ANY visual images of the prophet. So negative images are exponentially offensive.

Ted Rall has a good column about the ensuing diplomatic crisis on the Common Dreams site. He quotes a Kuwaiti oil executive who says, “America kills thousands of Muslims, and you lose your head and withdraw ambassadors over a bunch of cartoons printed in a second-rate paper in a Nordic country with a population of five million? That’s the true outrage.”

The Night Watch

February 3rd, 2006

Last night I went to the launch party for Sarah Waters’ new book, The Night Watch. Yes, strictly speaking, that has nothing to do with my comic strip. But it has something to do with lesbian culture, so I don’t think I’m going too far afield to mention it here. It was cool to see ads for the book in the Tube.

The novel takes place during and just after World War Two, so the launch was a costume party, “forties attire optional.” People wore amazing things. Old WAC and RAF uniforms, vintage dresses and suits and hats.

Sarah’s book is stunning, even more gripping, in my most humble opinion, than Tipping the Velvet, Affinity, or Fingersmith, which is saying quite a lot. You should read it as soon as possible.

This is my girlfriend Amy Rubin with Sarah Waters and our pal Helen Sandler.

These women were kids during the war, and advised Sarah as she was writing the book.

This is my girlfriend, me, and our friend Jane Hoy, looking very queenlike.

The book launch was held in the Cabinet War Rooms at the Churchill Museum in London, the nerve center from which Churchill directed the war. That’s why there are all those important looking gauges and levers and things in the background.

London in black and white

February 3rd, 2006

The south side of St. Paul’s is being repaired, so they’ve got this massive tarp up that’s printed with an antique drawing or etching of the building, for a sort of trompe l’oeil effect. It’s weirdly cartoony.

Here’s a self-portrait I took of me looking at a Franz Kline painting in the Tate Modern, before I was accosted by a guard and told to stop taking photographs. I’ve never been big on painting, but I love Franz Kline’s black-on-white stuff because it looks like ink on paper.

There’s an installation up in the Tate Modern’s vast turbine hall called “Embankment.” It’s stacks and stacks of these translucent plastic boxes. That’s me on the left looking up at the biggest pile.

My Morning at the BBC

February 1st, 2006

I’ve had quite a busy day in Londontown. It began with an interview on the Woman’s Hour on BBC Radio 4. I didn’t know what a fancy important show this was until after it was over. I was on for about five minutes, between the director of that film about the women iron range workers, North Country, and a lovely woman who’d just written a novel about chronic fatigue syndrome. They made me draw a cartoon about my BBC experience for their website (click ‘photo gallery’). You can also listen to the very brief interview there.

I did a lot of other exciting, blogworthy things today but I’m too tired to write about them now. It’s time for bed.

wands and nibs in London

January 30th, 2006

This morning I went to an art supply store on Great Russell Street, which looked like the wand shop in Harry Potter, lined from floor to ceiling with rows and rows of mysterious black drawers labeled in gold lettering. I spent £15 on a selection of Gillot pen nibs, which I can never find in the US. Edward Gorey used Gillot nibs, a kind that he referred to as “tit quills,” but the ones I got didn’t have exotic names, just numbers. I also got a very appealing mini eraser. I have an eraser fetish.

I also went to the British Museum, which was great fun. The other museum-goers were wildly international and hardly anyone was speaking English. So if people were saying trite, annoying things, I couldn’t tell. Indeed, I was suffused with an uncharacteristic wave of philanthropic feeling.

Here’s a mummified Egyptian hand, with my live hand in the foreground. An Italian couple in black cowboy hats was kissing obstreperously in front of this exhibit, but because they were doing it in Italian, I didn’t mind.

I saw the fragments of sculpture from the Parthenon that Lord Elgin ripped off from Greece in the early 19th century. The British Museum’s line is, at least he protected the stuff from further damage. And the pieces were so stunning that I’m inclined to agree. Here’s a close-up of a centaur’s elbow. Look at that vein over his bicep, and that crease of skin in the crook of his arm!

Going to England

January 26th, 2006

Sorry I haven’t been posting. My longtime and esteemed assistant Cathy Resmer recently left my employ because her partner is about to have a baby any second now. Cathy would always remind me to put something on the blog. She was my blog prod. Without her prods, I nod. Also, I’ve been recovering from my own recent delivery of a massive, 240 page graphic novel to my publisher, after seven years of labor.

No big loss, though, because there hasn’t been much to report. But now I’m going to the UK for two weeks, as part of something called an Associate Fellowship Scheme with the University of Kent’s Research Centre for Law, Gender, and Sexuality. See?

I’m also doing a roundtable with some other cartoonists in London, a joint event with the Kent Centre and the Cartoon Museum.

I’ll try to blog from the road. I like blogging while traveling, because all the fuss about finding internet access and downloading photos and keeping my devices charged fills up that annoying empty time that I would otherwise spend relaxing and observing the world around me.

Finishing Fun Home

November 26th, 2005

finishing Fun Home
Originally uploaded by Alison Bechdel.

This is Cathy writing, using Alison’s flickr account. I just snapped this photo of her putting the finishing touches on her graphic memoir.

“I’m shading the line art with ink wash,” she explains.

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic has its own entry on Medusa.com — er, Amazon — though it’s not coming out until next spring. Alison’s hoping to finish work on it in the next week. She’s been slaving over it in her basement for six years now, so this is a real milestone. Alison also wants me to add that she’s unnerved by the premature Amazon link, seeing as how she’s not actually done with the book yet.

She’ll be taking a short break on Wednesday night to do her slideshow presentation at the University of Vermont — 5 p.m. in Memorial Lounge, Waterman. Stop by if yer in town!

thai food in texas

November 6th, 2005

elisa durrette, annette lawrence, me, and sharon bridgforth
Originally uploaded by Alison Bechdel.

On Thursday and Friday I was back in Texas for a seminar at the University of North Texas called “Developing Multicultural Leaders: Women who are Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender and their Allies.” For some reason, the words “leadership” and “multicultural” make my mind go blank, but I had a good time and met lots of nice people.

Thursday evening I did a slide show about my cartoons, and the poet/performance artist Sharon Bridgforth read from her work. She was rather awe-inspiring. I had read some of her stuff before, but in performance it took on a whole other dimension. There was an interesting conversation with the audience afterward, about how Sharon and I both work with words, but in Sharon’s case there’s the additional medium of sound, and in my case, of visuals. This was facilitated by UNT art professor Annette Lawrence.

I’ve always had a chip on my shoulder about fine art, which is too complicated to go into here, but I think meeting Annette may have finally disabused me of this attitude. She talked about her art in an unpretentious, matter-of-fact, yet passionate way that was riveting. She does monumental installations–with string!

After the presentation, I went out for Thai food with Sharon, Annette, and their writer/business consultant/young-genius friend Elisa Durrette. God, that was fun. A person could get attached to this crazy outside-the-basement lifestyle.

A Mighty Fortress Indeed

October 30th, 2005

This morning I went to church! I was invited to do a book signing at a big LGBT church in Dallas, the Cathedral of Hope. Frankly, as a godless heathen recovering Catholic crypto-Buddhist, I was a little apprehensive.

But boy, did I get my blue state socks blown off. First of all, I haven’t seen such a huge, diverse crowd of gay people all in one place since…well, since the Halloween parade the night before. But here they were all sober and fully clothed. This place is amazing. It’s a buzzing hive of activity. There’s a bookstore, there are people tabling about the state anti-gay marriage amendment, there’s a Day of the Dead altar with candles and skeletons, there’s a whole kids’ wing, there’s a choir and musicians and big video screens and the joint is packed. Four hundred at the early service, six hundred at the later one. Plus they have a very politicized, progressive mission. As it says in their bulletin, “Jesus was the ultimate liberal.”

I hung out for a while as the first crowd left and the second one assembled. In between meeting lots of lovely people and signing books, I looked on slack-jawed at the stunning spectacle of community.

Then I stayed for the beginning of the second service. And when the processional began, with people in robes and the organ booming and the stained glass and everyone singing “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” I was ready to crawl to the altar.

The pastor was very moving. She talked about the church as a refuge from the busy activity of our daily lives, and from our inevitable suffering, and I almost wept. I think the guy next to me DID weep. At the end of the Lord’s Prayer, he definitely gave his boyfriend a loud kiss. Then I had to leave for the airport, and in the lobby I ran into Lucie Blue Tremblay, who was there to promote The Breast Exam Project.

Who knew that all this stuff was going on? I have to get out more.

Doing Dallas

October 29th, 2005

lovely librarians
Originally uploaded by Alison Bechdel.

This afternoon I did a slide show at the Dallas Public Library about my cartoons. And now I’m blogging about it. Because I can. I was part of an LGBT authors series that the library produces. Here’s Karyn and Leonardo, two of the lovely librarians who made the event happen. Here’s Nicole, who gave me this hand-painted Texas flag on recycled barnboard. After my presentation I went and signed books at the Crossroads Café, where I met this lovely gentleman in the poodle skirt and had a nice time hanging out and talking to people. It’s Halloween here, and I’m staying in the gay neighborhood. There’s some kind of giant parade/block party explosion about to happen. It’s not quite dark yet but the streets are barricaded off, thundering bass emanates from a sound system somewhere, and there are portable toilets everywhere. Looks like it should be a good time.