Category Archive
The following is a list of all entries from the art category.
Morning Has Broken
Is old Episcopalian hymn #8, the woman poet Eleanor Farjeon wrote it, and another woman poet, my late, beloved aunt played it beautifully on piano.
Props to Silver Age Lana Lang in Superboy
I fear the graceful arachnid…I’m trying to either think of them as tiny oddly shaped scorpions or sort of remember the old Superboy comics where Lana Lang became the Insect Queen (thanks, I believe, to a ray gun built by an old-familial-wizard figure, either her uncle or her dad?). She could become a human-size version of whatever insect a given danger required for its neutralization! I feel affectionate kinship with scorpions, bats, rats, snakes, and can’t fathom how people are afraid of them. Lana learned that since she could also become crustaceans and spiders, at some point she realized she was The Arthropod Queen or something…it was all pretty goofy! Comics are great for helping overcome fear. As a tiny leetle Southern girl in second and third grades in P.S. 59 in Manhattan, afraid to talk because if I did I had teachers and students alike thinking I was kinda special cause my accent was pure, I was sooo often absolutely bewildered…until my mom started taking me to Bill and Rose’s newsstand on 2nd Avenue and I started hiding Thor and Batman and Daredevil and Spidey and the Legion of Superheroes in my nasty horrible math books! I can still remember how wildly delightedly I would smile thinking of my comic books when I was that age. 😊
vegan cookies
Oreos, at least in the US, are vegan. But Newman-O’s are even more delicious, and give much $ to charity.
This Filthy World! and something really disgusting…
Watching the last bits of John Waters’ wonderful monologue entitled John Waters: This Filthy World made me soooo happy…I hope he gets to make the film MangerMania! He seems like a happy person…said he loves the description the Japan Times gave Pecker, his delightful flick about the art world, pubic hair, shoplifting, young love, and a talking Virgin Mary: “a Disney film for perverts.” Seriously…i didn’t think it was like that at all, but loved the film, and its efforts to encourage young people to vote, LOL… was hoping he’d mention the enthralling Harry Dodge / Harriet Dodge, who played a lovely filmic revolutionary in Cecil B. Demented as well as one of my favoritest characters in ALL OF CINEMA: Valentine in By Hook or By Crook–but perhaps he’d done so earlier. Still, was glad I learned he has a TV show on HERE!, John Waters Presents Movies that Will Corrupt You. One thing that he mentioned, however, caused me to look up something reeeeeally disgusting online. When Mr. Waters mentioned “reborn babies” I went right to Google, having seen one of the hideous products of these sick “artists” at my day job. I even gave my colleagues’ little monster, Baby Josh, a tattoo, and used some of my nicest white shimmery eye shadow to make it look like he’d been snorting something white and a little sparklescent. Sure enough, these things are truly scary. Imagine how scary the people who make them must be. And, at least at a site called Destiny Dolls or something equally putrescing, they can’t spell. On a website selling their frightening spawn, they can’t even bother to spell correctly.
A friend of sorts at work told me today of someone who, he felt, “wouldn’t like [my] comics at all.” Now, I have a lot of problems with much of the work I put out there in the past and would someday like to put out more and better and truer and realer comics. But just hatin’ on ’em?! That would be the type of person, I suggested, who would like to drown kittens. My friend irritated me by disagreeing bluntly that someone “with a different worldview from my own” would hate my work. Let’s see, even if my art were brutally reduced in the most insulting and trivializing manner possible to simply propaganda for some “worldview,” that worldview would propose that women are people…that a generation of gay men decimated by AIDS was a bad thing…that knowledge and investigation and education and joy go better with sex than shame and rejection and closed minds…that children are to be loved, encouraged, taught, and listened to with respect… My friend wouldn’t tell me what a different worldview from that could look like, other than a misogynistic, homophobic, sexually puritanical, pro-child-abuse kitten-drowner. This hurt my feelings surprisingly and so I went to look at some dinosaur statues nearby at the Academy of Natural History at lunch. They looked so birdlike, I found it heartening: a reminder that theories come and theories go.
But a sense of humor, including the ability to at least peek over the walls of one’s ego, can help in any era a time traveler might visit.
Very, very late on posting this….
Because I think it happened in January. But it was this magical night in Philadelphia, warm and ever so slightly misty, and very dark, and I worked a bit latish in center city to then walk over to the Borders bookstore to Charles Burns’ book signing. Whee, there I was, [trying to pretend not to be terrified at being out in public where I could be observed and despised by my fellow humans who would recoil in disgust and possibly crush me like a worm were they to notice me, for how could they not then instinctively intuit my loathsomeness and the need to rid this plane of existence of an evil of my ilk?!] getting to meet this great artist at last whose work just inspires me to my core. And besides being this amazing artist whose crisp black and white inkinesses and negative space somehow by sheer vibration create color, being this prolific imaginer whose dark baroque eruptions dance elegantly with language clean as a Morandi painting in words, he’s a real sweetheart, super nice and gracious. I’ve never been able to really understand the whole color-out-of-black-&-white thang, I just stare at his pages at length. If you’ve never read his stuff, please don’t deny yourself this experience of beauty. You might go to his entry at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Burns_(cartoonist) as a start, because for some reason I’m not finding his actual website tonight–I’m lucky if I can walk and think at the same time actually, we’re dealing with humongous sinus infections in an epic microbial badminton match around here–or look at the hardcover collection of Black Hole which is what he was signing and discussing that evening. When I spoke to him I of course told him how fantabulous he was, but mostly we talked about our BREEEEEELLLIONNTT seventeen year old daughters and how they’re juuuuust starting not to be too embarrassed by us 😀 and how one of our former publishers who’ll remain unmentioned is a total asshole. And bless his heart, Burns is a Philly boy now, too, after doing the childhood-as-trek-around-the-U.S.-cauza-Dad’s-job that I and many other artists did as well. Go buy his books, y’all….
Not so good
Things that “seemed like a good idea at the time” but weren’t
1. putting your fist through a door’s glass panel to impress a cute girl at a party (ex gf’s)
2. skipping any interviews with big “corporate” law firms despite being top-10-and-Law-Review cause you just wanted to help the downtrodden (mine)
Angela Bocage 