Mistah Zevon, he sleepin’ tight.
The rains came yesterday, and I’m in a chipper mood. They started coming Saturday night: we stood on the balcony, rudely startled out of character, as a callithumpian band went rattling away down the street a block away from the one that had the fair, and I was startled to note that the air was chilly. The heavy heat was gone and the leaves began tossing restlessly in a rising wind, and I wanted to wrap up in something. Yesterday, it actually fell: the gutters overflowed and there was lightning and thunder, too, which almost never happens around here. I couldn’t stop grinning and I kept leaking squiggly little dance steps. (You ever try not moving to the boogie-woogie Ben Folds gets going in “One Angry Dwarf and 200 Solemn Faces” when you’re in a mood like that?) Tonight I’m wearing a sweater and I’m drinking a cup of hot tea. Fuck you, summer; the new year’s begun.
I’ll be moderately upfront, since I haven’t been yet: I don’t know if I’ll make the (charitably loose) September deadline for getting City of Roses off the ground. Rather, I know I can make it: what I don’t know is if we’ll be in October and already muttering about how reruns have started. It somehow fits the generally feckless air of the whole enterprise thus far—cobbled together, catch-as-catch-can, and yet. It’s still more than it isn’t. I’ll take it as a good sign, I guess. Better than the alternative.
I have a new article up at Comixpedia: interviewing the spouses of webcartoonists and asking them about that Cyril Connolly quote about the pram in the hall, and what it was like being married to an artiste. It’s all terribly tongue-in-cheek, on everyone’s part, even if Ivy doesn’t think she said “What a load of crap!” —I was wryly amused to discover when I’d jotted down a shortlist of interviewees, I’d come up with a wife, a husband, a fiancé (as opposed to fiancée), and a long-term girlfriend (long-time companion?); this I took as a sign that something or other is better now than it ever has been before, so I ran with it.
Bruno’s back, and I owe Chris and Bethanne email. They’re in Olympia now, former home of Sleater-Kinney; wave hello as you zoom up I-5 past Evergreen State, the Oberlin away from Ohio, as some of us old Obies knew it. —While Bruno was gone, Chris was running several weeks of his new project, his latest attempt to pan for gold in the mines of syndicated commercial dailies: Little Dee, which I hope I do not diminish in your eyes by pointing out that, of all his attempts up and out, it’s the most likely to succeed—fiendishly cute, with enough of the wicked cynicism of necrophagic humor and the judicious schmaltz of an adorable moppet to deftly walk the fine line of entertaining the jaded while remaining perfectly apropos for refrigerators everywhere. Hie thee hence, and then bounce back out to the main page: after all, Bruno’s back.
While we’re discussing that fine line and those who walk it, might I also encourage you to check out Sheldon, the pig who can’t stay put? (An egg-shaped pig, a robin pulling a Casey Stengel, and rabbits. How can you lose?) —Also, I would be so thoroughly remiss if I didn’t point out that the Pants Press crew has gotten Wary Tales up on the web: the latest product available under the BitPass beta test. Which is going swimmingly, so far as I can tell; so much for the barrier of mental effort. (The soft bigotry of low expectations?) (And do note I’m knocking wood as I so smirkingly take someone who’s so much less of a dilettante to task.)
And it’s been long days at work lately, which is maybe why I stood over the latest copy of The New Yorker today after I got home for what felt like ten minutes: on the left-hand page, a full-color, full-page ad for Ruth’s Chris Steak House. “Life’s too short to eat anywhere else,” says Ruth. On the right, a sixth-page vertical black-and-white for Warren Zevon’s last album; “Includes performances by Billy Bob Thornton, Bruce Springsteen, David Lindley,” and so on (in alphabetical order by first name, you see). Both of them in the middle of an advertising circular for The New Yorker Festival (September 19, 20, and 21, 2003). The whole thing had a nagging oracular quality to it, that presque vu that I usually cherish, that I spend a great deal of time not so much chasing as hanging out in places where we’re likely to run into each other: but today it was just annoying. It was trying to tell me something, but what? —That I’d been at work too long. Next question!
(I never did get a new pair of seersucker pants.)
The rains are back. Grey skies and wind from the west, extra blankets on the bed, sweaters and tweed and whiskey in the tea, and the cats are that much friendlier. —Virgos everywhere, with their innate love of order (and here you have to imagine me looking around the jumbled wreck of my office to get the joke), look back fondly on the incipient order of the new school year (or, granted, ahead, with no small amount of fondness amidst the teeth-gnashing): the new velcro and zip-up binders, the untrammelled packs of paper, the complete sets of colored pens, the waveform of all those perfect schedules and plans that has yet to collapse into all those discretely messy particles. (Usually by two weeks into it it’s all a lost and hopeless cause: contingency is king.) But between that and their birthdays, and the change in the weather, it’s not hard to see why Virgos might consider September to be the start of something new: the high hot timeless haze of summer’s gone, and with it the beastly heat; the air is crisp again, and something wicked will be along in about a month or so. Time to finally get some work done.
So: happy new year, and presque vu. Raise one to whomever; kick up a callithumpian moment. And then let’s roll up our sleeves and get down to cases.
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Married to Cartoonists
Kip writes an amusing take on a problem familiar to creative types, balancing making art with real life responsibilities—especially if one's partner is a creative type, too. (She offers her mild rebuttal.) As an expectant father, I particularly liked t...
been meaning to comment on this -- really like the bits about fall. i feel the same way.