I do not think that word means what you think it means.
Editorial cartoonist Scott Stantis apparently thinks his offering on the death of George Carlin is “irreverent.”
I did, indeed, mean George Carlin at the Pearly Gates as an irreverent commentary within the cartoon. I readily admit I have drawn my fair share of pearly gates and crying mascots in the past. But recently I have tried to take my inspiration from the obit cartoons of Pat Oliphant. When he does do them he places them in some kind of context of the persons life and impact. With George Carlin, (of whom I consider myself a fan), his contribution to comedy and social discourse was to tear down the walls of conformity and ridicule the overly serious. His anti-religion screeds grew longer and more serious near the end.
Hence, a cartoon I hoped would be viewed as irreverent. At least to those familiar with the subject.
Which, okay, I suppose it’s irreverent enough to speak some truth to power and all, you take Roy’s perspective into account:
—try to imagine being so utterly blind to your surroundings that you think George Carlin’s “most famous work,” which is decades old, “coarsened American culture,” rather than, “is American culture.”
Myself, I’d call the cartoon “obscene,” but I’ve always had a problem with perspective. The last few days I haven’t been able to get this couplet out of my head:
how do you like your blueeyed boy
You Cocksucker
Swan, swan, hummingbird hurrah.
Apparently it was not quite 22 years ago that I walked into a Sam Goody or whatever it was in the mall a longish bike ride from our house in Barrington Hills and saw to one side a towering stack of Lifes Rich Pageant (Bill Berry peering quizzically over those bison) and, to the other, a great record-store poster of The Queen is Dead, Alain Delon lying back over all those casette tapes. —I’d say something about how wistfully I wonder what might have happened had I franklied Mr. Shankly instead—but I already have, four years before. (That’s the thing about blogging, after a while; you don’t have to say anything more. You can just look back and point.)
Any sufficiently advanced art is indistinguishable from poetry.
From Norway via Mr. Snead, One Foot in the Wild—an RPG poem on nature and footwear. (Perhaps “indistinguishable” isn’t quite right—?)
They will come back—come back again,
As long as the red Earth rolls.
He never wasted a leaf or a tree.
Why should He squander souls?
And then Textism lit up once more in my feed reader. —This might just be a good year.
Not a dream! Not a hoax! Not an imaginary story!
Oh sweet Christ and all his little fishes that swam and swam right over that dam, boop-boop dittum-dattum wattum, choo—Fafblog is back!
Deep thought.
Cowboy Bebop is ten years old.
Spoiler.
So you’ve read the latest issue of Buffy Season Eight. Quel controverisielle, right? I mean, can you believe they’re bringing back that douchebag from the weakest season opener they ever had?
The shape where things have gone.
Does it make me a bad person that my first thought, my immediate reaction, was that it was some sort of viral marketing thing?
“Never lose the ability to be offended.”
We’ve had our issues, too, over the past five years. I’ll never forget one thing that really grabbed me and Sonja Sohn, especially, brought it to David’s attention. David mentioned—we’d asked him about someone’s murder, you know, why would you do that, and he says, well, there’s no hope.
And we all took great offense to that. If there was no hope, you wouldn’t even have a cast here. All the stuff that the people, that we’ve gone through. So how dare you say that. I remember Sonja brought it to my attention, and it was something she had every right to say, and she really got on David about that. We took issue with that.
That’s Wendell Pierce, who plays the Bunk, from a Sound of Young America interview with him and Andre Royo. [via]
“Maybe we are on the cusp of a change?”
Maybe. —David Byrne publishes a corrective adjustment to his much-linked Wired piece on the business of the music business. (By the way, you really can make webcomics for almost nothing. That’s why the Spouse never goes anywhere Sundays or Mondays or Tuesdays.)
