In attendance at last night's Yankees/A's game was practically a cavalcade of the architects of misery, as Michael Kay & co. introduced, in short order, Joe Lieberman, Henry Kissinger (no stand-seating for him, he was in a sky box), Bill O'Reilly and (sitting next to him) Donald Trump. Feel free to insert your own punchline in the comments. Meanwhile, there were quite a few repeats of that annoying New York Times Weekender ad, which I'm glad I can no longer watch without it bringing to mind this wonderful parody using the New York Post:
Via August Pollack. The sad reality is, of course, that the Post loves people like Trump and O'Reilly and Kissinger and even Lieberman.
Sometimes a gal just wants a little mindless escapist fantasy. On the surface I don't really have a problem with Disney princess movies, but then I love animation and I've loved fairy tales since I was a kid (I have the whole Lang Fairy Book collection). On the other hand, the grown-up no-fun-at-all* feminist in me recognizes the weird messages some of these cartoons send out. To women:
And to men:
That's all via Princess Xeni at BoingBoing. On the other hand, some gals from Second City just have fun with it:
Dang, now I want to go watch some Disney animated films again.
Back home, being pestered by a constantly-meowing kitty, hoping to start dinner soon. Roast chicken, I think, but not Paula Deen style. Even so, I can still draw inspiration from PaulaDeenisms (via Erin at Serious Eats). Watch out for flying hams!
Long day, didn't leave the hospital until mid-afternoon (even longer story, not for blog publication 'cause it's icky female stuff and, you know, personal). Will know results in a week or so. Upper body aches. Need to know what Totally Looks Like what today (via I Can Has Cheezeburger?). This will soothe me.
Not feeling too silly on the eve of a biopsy, but I suppose that means it'll be that much better when the procedure's over. I place myself somewhat resignedly into the hands of... Science!
Off to my brother's shortly, where I'm spending the night as my company's picnic is being held a few miles down the road and I'd rather get up at 8:30 tomorrow morning and drive for 10 minutes than rise at 5 AM to make sure I'm at the bus pickup spot in Manhattan by 7:30. Jay indicated the possibility of sushi, which put me in mind of Serious Eats' cavalcade of Gin No Sara ads from Japan's premier sushi delivery company.
I'm pretty sure that obstacle course is one of the events at tomorrow's picnic.
It's not much of a vacation when I keep doing stuff, is it? But Rob has his computer back from the Apple store at the mall, we paid my aunt a visit nearby at my Ancestral Homeland, and another longbox worth of comics has been filed. Oh, and now I've blogged as well. Here's some more RSAnimated food for thought:
Oy. It hasn't been my day. It started out well enough, I had the day off so I got lots of apartment-organizing done, but this afternoon my podiatrist informed me I'm forming a bunion, plus I got to experience (sort of voluntarily) low-level Taser-like shocks for a half hour care of some sort of pronged sensory machine (yeah, I'm pretty sure there's no nerve damage in my legs and feet, at least not before today!), then my auto place tried to replace the wrong inside door handle, on the driver's side when the duct-taped one is clearly on the passenger's side - and nobody noticed but me. Fortunately I was able to stop the technician in time, but that was an hour and a half I'll never have back. Plus, I'll doubtless be losing another few hours to sleep shortly when the Yankees game begins. Cute Japanese food, take me away!
Vegetable suicide and Ton Ton Tomato-Chan both via Serious Eats.
With the world seeming to be ever more unfriendly these days, any inroads we can make to inspire creativity, particularly in kids, is in my opinion A Good Thing. One of the masters of all Good Things, Alex Simmons, has embarked on a new project. Here he is talking about it on this site. A sample: "Recently we’ve been offered the opportunity to be part of a really fantastic experience. We’ve been asked to bring the Color of Comics exhibition and our KCC ROAD SHOW to the Senegalese American Bilingual School in Senegal Africa. When? December 3rd, 2010." They need to raise a little over $19,000 to accomplish this. I know times are tough - if Robin were working I could afford to pledge more than just my ability to publicize this via my blog - but if you have any disposable income to spare, Alex would greatly appreciate it. He's a terrific organizer, and this sounds like an amazing project.
Thanks to my old Rutgers classmate David Levin for digging up this blast from the past. I didn't know any Hello, Reality episodes still existed. If you go to about eight and a half minutes in, you'll see me as I looked 30 years ago (sorry about the ad preceding the tape):
My former coworker emailed me to wonder why I haven't been saying hi to him in my blog lately. I haven't been posting a lot in general, because my company's servers are now filtering any and all Blogger material so I can no longer post to my blog during work hours. And today, work hours were from 8:30 AM to 8:00 PM. So there you go, "Al"! Anyway, I believe you once told me you were of German origin, so I thought you'd appreciate Martin Luther's Twitter account (via Wonder Tonic).
So I've started organizing Robin's and my digital photos into one album, and just in time too, because his iMac's hard drive died a few days after he copied them over into my laptop. I must say, though, I've never thought of anything as clever as making an album out of Feeding Objects (via BoingBoing).
Recently Robin, whose color sense is of course superb, explained to me one of the reasons I tend not to want to see current blockbusters. Aside from the inability to control the noise level (both of the movie and of the often-socially stinted audience), the visuals often hurt my eyes, like the spinning camera and quick cuts, but also the color. Rob pointed out that was a lot of modern filmmakers like to do is tint faces orange (doesn't matter what color the face is, orange is mixed in) and backgrounds blue, as blue and orange are complementary colors and this is a common cheat on how to make everything "pop." If you don't believe me, check out David Lacher's The Michael Bayifier.
Happy Friday the 13th, you friggatriskaidekaphiles (or, if you prefer, paraskevidekatriaphiles) out there! And what would Friday the 13th be without a black cat?
Oh, okay, and his "sister" in the background. Must go now, the big tuxdeo boy is demanding attention. Again.
With unemployment continuing to rise, and the people in a position to do something about it clearly uninterested in alleviating our citizens' pain, it's no wonder that workers are being taken advantage of. A number of comics-centric sites report on the 16-year-old video game producer who advises his colleagues to purchase talent on the cheap, actually encouraging them to bilk creative folk. Nice young Republican in the making you have there, parents really seemed to raise him well. "I’m sorry for anyone that finds capitalism to be the devil." Well, the devil's in the details, and here are some places that have them: Heidi, Colleen, and Brigid, who also mentions the latest Bluewater ripoff. Entertainment producers, even young ones, realize these are desperate times and are hoping to gouge discouraged creators, but I like to think writers and artists are choosing not to devalue themselves and are retaining their dignity, despite perhaps dwindling savings accounts.
And speaking of dignity, Val passed along a site purporting to feature a woman who used a dry erase board to write a resignation letter in a series of 33 photos. Turns out it's a hoax (BoingBoing breaks it down), which I suppose many of us should have realized given the name of the hosting site is The Chive (aka Not The Onion, Honest), but you know, we really Wanted To Believe. And besides, the admins to whom I sent the link thought it was funny anyway, so I guess The Chive achieved their goal.
The actual working class hero of the hour seems to be ex-flight attendant Steven Slater, now with 120,000 Facebook fans and counting, who stood up for himself in a rather unorthodox manner when he'd taken enough verbal and physical abuse from an overly-entitled passenger. Both BoingBoing and The Awl have extensive coverage (BoingBoing here and here, The Awl in thesethreeposts), and the latter site also passes along a Taiwanese report using wooden animation (starting about 28 seconds in) that actually reminds me a bit of the drawings on the airline safety card, so that's kind of fitting:
I'm glad Gary Sassaman, for one, had the same idea as me about Steven Slater. I keep calling him Steven Stucker too. I miss Stucker. I wonder what he'd make of all this? "Well, I can make a hat, I can make a broach..."
• I found an RSS feed for Occasional Superheroine that actually works for me on Bloglines, so I can finally keep up with Val's comics-centric blog again. As Heidi and many others mentioned, at this time last month Val was pretty much the last person standing at Friends of Lulu. She told me a bit about the situation when I saw her at the NonCon, and had wondered aloud how to break the news to the general public. I composed a version of what I'd write if I were her, which I'm glad she didn't use because we have completely different styles and circumstances, but I wanted to excerpt some of it anyway 'cause, hey, why not?
FoL began in 1993 with seeds of hope – hope that an unapologetically feminist organization could help improve an industry that had created such joy for both its creative forces and its consumers, to bring it out of dingy and often dangerous specialty shops catering largely to male fetishists and into the mainstream of entertainment accessible to both genders. The way it used to be when comics were available on newsstands and read by boys and girls and men and women. The way we knew it was and is in Japan and Europe. The founders of Friends of Lulu wanted to celebrate all that American comics could and should be – diverse and expansive, rather than narrow and imploding from the burden of catering to an ever-dwindling readership, profitable once more for both the companies and the creators producing those comics. FoL desired to spread the love of comics through a change in mindset among those in charge of the industry, to help them see how allowing girls into the clubhouse (and even letting girls build clubhouses) would make the comics family stronger and more fun for everyone. It was an uphill struggle from the start. The direct market had little use for women in the age of Image over substance, when all many companies had to do to sell gazillions of books to unsuspecting speculeeches was slap sparkly lenticular images onto umpteen alternate covers. These babies practically sold themselves! As did the booth babes. When sex sells, and where women always equal sex-and-nothing-else, the only position for women in comics was, to paraphrase Stokely Carmichael, scantily-clad on a two-page spread-and-we-do-mean-spread. And woe betide any organization seeking to proclaim the basic humanity of its members against those who had a vested interest in seeing those members as anything but human. When you need to justify your existence in response to the tirades of the ex-husband of one of your founders, a man with a misogynistic paper trail worse than Mel Gibson whose credibility on the subject would be laughable in a more sensible world, you know you have a long road to hoe.
And yet Friends of Lulu succeeded for a time against all odds. We spread the word that women were interested in reading and writing and drawing and publishing and selling comics. We became visible at conventions, speaking with scores of “drag-alongs” who attended to please their male companions but were delighted, even relieved, to find oases in the deserts of Y chromosomes, many of whom were readers themselves but had never picked up a comic because nothing their men read really spoke to them. And we’d tell them about books that existed in the periphery, unnoticed by the superhero “mainstream” – about girl comics in Asia and independently-published efforts closer to home, about pockets of joy brought by female creators who were able to break into the Big Two, it seems, one at a time in those days, only to be marginalized by the opinion-makers at the comics lad mags and Usenet newsgroups. We praised female and female-friendly creators to the skies via our newsletters (kudos to primo “herstorian” Trina Robbins for a yeowoman’s job on that!) and Women Doing Comics list and Lulu Awards and other activities.
We saw things start to change for the better. Manga swept the country in numbers too big to ignore, and brought with them tons of entranced shoujo readers. Alternative comics gatherings blossomed throughout the country, where as many women as men participated both in front of and behind creator tables. At the bigger mainstream conventions, the drag-alongs became con-goers in their own right, and the ladies’ rooms at cons were no longer queueless. And the Web ushered in (literally) a new way of viewing and doing comics.
For the first time, women who didn’t have a lot of free time or money could produce comics online for next to no cost, on their own schedules at their own computers, not having to rely on old boys’ networks to distribute or publicize them. Women could and did band together in their own collectives to demonstrate the power of their voices and their wallets.
Everyone who’s ever been involved in Friends of Lulu ought to be proud of everything we’ve accomplished. Women are doing comics, and being recognized for it, in such numbers that our visibility and presence is (almost) taken for granted. One of the Big Two just published a three-issue series celebrating women in comics and showcasing the current generation. Everyone’s eager for the comics equivalent of a Harry Potter or a Twilight series, recognizing that both highly successful entertainment empires came from women. Things have undoubtedly changed for the better, and are continuing to evolve in a positive direction for women. I think the late Kim Yale and Leah Adezio would be proud to see so much of what they fought for with their activism in Lulu actually come to pass.
As it turns out, the news of the organization's demise was, thankfully, premature. Val now reports that not only has Lulu been resurrected with an interim board but, just as importantly, once-missing financial records have been located which will allow the organization to move forward with clearing up any outstanding tax matters. And there will be Lulu Awards! I hope they're held at the NY Comic Con, that's the only one I can afford to go to.
• It figures, as soon as I discover Amanda Hess' The Sexist she decides to call it quits at that blog. Dang, it hasn't been my month. Naturally it's all about me, whinge whinge!
• I swear, Robin had nothing to do with the anatomically graphic posters in his old hometown (via BoingBoing), honest. At least that's his story and he's sticking to it. (Hey Dad Riggs, I know you read this blog, any follow-ups to this story in the local press?)
• My old friend Jill has lots of terrific posts (as usual), of which I particularly liked the comparison of First Lady vacations, the history of the looting of FICA and how rich folks purposefully set out to eliminate the middle class starting around 30 years ago. It's always gratifying to hear someone else mention that the election of Reagan and his cohorts was one of the proximate causes of our current income inequality, as the rich only continue to grow richer at the expense of the middle class and poor. On a lighter note from Jill, an unexpected tribute to Snooki.
• Dave Johnson has noted a trendency (see, I can make up words just like Shakespeare and Sarah Palin!) for the aforementioned rich to treat the rest of us like the help, rather than as fellow citizens deserving of bothersome rights. I was once in a work situation where the boss treated employees like the help, and it was more than a little icky.
• If that weren't enough, Melissa McEwen reminds us that the current situation is a direct result of Bush's legacy: "Bush didn't part ways with conservatism; Bush realized its destiny." A policy legacy that has been proven to work, but that well-heeled conservatives can't wait to step up to make things even worse in this country for everyone except for them and their cronies.
• Our place is almost certainly not in Afghanistan, and the Rude Pundit apologizes to all the women there whom we haven't helped yet and whose situation may or may not worsen if we leave.
• Remember that "I Write Like" meme making the 'net rounds a couple weeks back? Making Light did a little research, Teresa sussed out the problem with the code, and Jim McDonald went a step further and discovered the people behind it are a bunch of apparent vanity press sleazoids. "This 'I Write Like' site isn't remotely legitimate. No, they aren't trying; or, anyway, they aren't trying to analyze writing samples: They're trying to lure newbie authors to the rocks and shoals of vanity publication." Caveat lector!
It's sad because it's true! And speaking of old-timey, I think I'll settle in now for an afternoon of Hope/Crosby road movies. Not terribly BlogHer-iffic, but a lot more accessible to me since I know about them.
Off to Mom's shortly. We'll not only be in the Land of Dial-Up but the House of Windows. As we're now an all-Mac family, Robin and I found this particularly amusing:
So I'm skimming through the past few months' worth of my local paper this evening, with the Yankees/Red Sox game in the background, and I finally find definitive proof that Robin and I weren't imagining that car on fire in our neighborhood on May 1 (the same day as a more dramatic incident involving a car took place in Manhattan). For the record, here's the article. Glad the driver made it to safety.
These days, lots of people have to give up a bit of dignity to earn a living, and I guess Neal Adams' Continuity Studios is no different. But being that it's Neal, the result is so self-mockingly cheesy that it's hard to look away. Ladies and gents, the strange viral ad campaign that is Taco Bell's Super Delicious Ingredient Force. For when value equals lame!
I admit I'm still not up on the Twitpics scene, but I absolutely adore the collection called #kanyenewyorkertweets, taking Kanye West's Tweets and interpreting them as New Yorker cartoons. Via Xeni at BoingBoing.
Moderately tough workday, physically painful evening what with the World's Longest Foot Cramp putting a bit of a damper on an evening when A-Rod once again couldn't hit the long ball, and I'm just tuckered out. I need some Tagpuss (via Cute Overload), not to be confused with Bagpuss.
Datsa has a number of favorite spots in the living room; Robin's recliner is one of them:
I love how you can just see the one eye peeking out. But I felt like being "cruel" to him this weekend with our coach pillows. Voila, a kitty sandwich!
What I do for "art." Speaking of which, Jamal was kind enough to invite Robin and me to a "non-con" last weekend for a number of pros and plus-ones who weren't in San Diego. Here's a photo Val D'Orazio snapped of Robin and his sketch, donated to our hosts at MoCCA:
Here's Val's post on the event. (In case you can't read the captions pointing off panel, which were my contribution, they're dialogue from Rocky Horror: "I don't like men with too many muscles..." "I didn't make him for you!") I highly recommend bookmarking Occasional Superheroine, by the way, as I can't get the RSS feed any more and I assume nobody else can. Val's been on fire lately, not only regarding Lulu (about which more if I can get up the energy) but about where she sees comics going.
White Rabbits! And speaking of white rabbits, this College Humor video has been everywhere but I saw it via Susie:
I have lots of links to discuss (including my two cents on what's going on with Friends of Lulu) but it probably won't be today, too many other things to take care of like finances and ironing. In other words, a typical Sunday.
