A Change in the Wind

Thinking about climate change: Tom Toles

For the beginning of the new year, Toles had this to offer:

Note the tense he employs -- the past.

The pen is mightier than the Mitt Romney

As the inevitability of dreary Mitt Romney's candidacy for President for the GOP becomes inescapable, one has to wonder -- will today's character artists be able to make fun of him?

Will he be a target-rich opportunity, as exemplified by the likes of Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton, or will he just be bland, like Dick Cheney? 

The truth is, he seems to be coming into focus slowly. The great Mike Lukovich highlights the blurriness around his eyes -- who is this man? 

Most of the attempts available from not well known artists do not impress, but there are surprises, such as this one from Adam Zyglis. 

Toles, as usual, tends to dominate, but today's sketch is particuarly rich. 

But to my eyes, the most evolved -- and dangerous -- characterization comes from Ted Rall. 

The Mitt-Bot. 

Why we shouldn't like writer's houses

From a marvelous piece by April Bernard in the NYRB (only partially available on-line, I should add):

Here’s what I hate about writers’ houses: the basic mistakes. The idea that art can be understood by examining the chewed pencils of the writer. That visiting such a house can substitute for reading the work. That real estate, including our own envious attachments to houses that are better, or cuter, or more inspiring than our own, is a worthy preoccupation. That writers can or should be sanctified. That private life, even of the dead, is ours to plunder.

Once long ago someone took me to visit Shakespeare’s house in Stratford. I couldn’t go inside; it felt like snooping, it felt like preening, as if we could own a piece of him for ourselves. As far as I know, the only way to claim our real inheritance from Shakespeare is by reading and studying and memorizing—and, if we are lucky, by acting—his words.

All true. but it's still hard to resist the word made flesh. 

Wordworth's house in Cambria, England. 

Tennessee Williams: I'm not a typical homosexual

(In case there was any doubt)...from an interview with Tennessee Williams:

"I'm not a typical homosexual. I can identify completely with Blanche -- we are both hysterics -- with Alma [Winehouse], and even with Stanley, though I did have trouble with some of the butch characters. If you understand schizophrenics, I'm not really a dual creature, but I can understand the tenderness of women and the lust and libido of the male, which are, unfortunately, too seldom combined in women." 

Playboy interview, 1973

[caricature from the late great David Levine]

Dumb headline of the year: Sugar bombs edition

Washington Post, you're better than this: 

Some Children's Cereals Packed with Sugar, Study Finds

Really?

Didn't Calvin tells us this, what, twenty-five years ago? 

I know, it's a study by the Environmental Working Group, but that's no excuse for the lack of imagination. 

Here's Grist's:

Cereal Offenders

Ah. That's better. 

Glee: Best TV show ever? A neuroscientific perspective

About ten years ago, while pursuing a story on the roots of depression, I tracked down the great scientist Jaak Panksepp, originator of the field of affective -- that is, emotional -- neuroscience, and he kindly let me interview him over the phone for half an hour. 

Panksepp has spent years studying the physiology of emotion in the brain, from autism to sleep, but his central breakthrough, in the early 1970's, was his focus on physiological similarity in the brain between opiates and brain-created (endogenous) chemicals linked to friendship and love.

In an interview, he explained: 

Our guiding central idea was that there was a remarkable family resemblance between social bonding and narcotic addiction--from the initial attachment-dependence phase to the eventual tolerance-withdrawal phases. 

I was interested in the connection between music, its apparent power to confront depression; and, possibly, to induce it. And, if possible, to further look at the curious fact that so many great musicians (Billie Holliday, Eric Clapton, Kurt Cobain, Charlie Parker, to name a few) were opiate addicts. 

Does listening to sad songs help us overcome depression, or help us wallow in it?

And what about a band like Nirvana, who uses the raw, roaring power of punk rock to drive depression back, with the likes of Stay Away? 

In his long and dazzling career, Panksepp has weighed in on my topics, but a sad twist in his own life led him to an interest in music, specifically, in music that has the power to bring on chills. 

Panksepp lost his beloved daughter, a teenager, who was killed in a crash with a drunk driver. He struggled to cope with her death, but discovered over time that certain songs would bring her back to his mind. Specifically, Whitney Houston's version of I Will Always Love You. 

[Panksepp] argues that chills may emerge from brain dynamics associated with the perception of social loss, specifically with separation calls. Separation calls are cries by young animals that inform parents of the whereabouts of offspring that have become lost. The “coldness” of chills may provide increased motivation for social reunion in the parents. So certain kinds of sad and bittersweet music may achieve its beauty and its chilling effect through a symbolic rendition of the separation call.

In our discussion, Panksepp forcefully argued that the power of this kind of music, the way we know it is working on us at an endogenous opiate level, are those chills. That "Dionysian response," he said, is the sign of art at its most powerful. Art that makes us want to go crazy. 

Watching Glee a week ago, I felt chills during this:

The fact that the joyful, unashamed, deliciously gay Darren Criss sings the song (It's Not Unusual) Tom Jones made famous only adds to the universality of the scene, and helps drive the crowd wild. 

Never before in my life has a taped television show sent chills up my spine, and I've been watching TV in America for fifty years, give or take.

That's why, personally, I think Glee may well be the best television show ever.

But wait, there's more! Variety critic David Benedict argues cogently that musicals have been disrespected by critics and the Academy because they focus on dramatizations of happiness.

Specifically, the happiness of love, which is what they do best -- better than any other medium. 

Complaining that musicals are not “realistic” (as if, for example, action pictures are) completely misses the point, although it is one that, of all people, tractor-driving farmer Judy Garland asks in Summer Stock. Bewildered by performers who are going to “put the show on right here” in her barn, she asks Gene Kelly to explain. In the wings of the makeshift stage he says, “If the boy tells the girl that he loves her, he doesn’t just say it: he sings it.” To which, reasonably enough, she responds, “Why doesn’t he just say it?” The number that follows makes his and the wider point. It is not that musicals cannot work through narrative, it is that they choose a richer, more expressively full-blooded route consciously abandoning realism for idealistic fantasy.

Add to this, the fact that the 21st century may well prove to be the century where we expect media experiences to be repeatable, and musicals -- which can be played again and again, like songs, without dimunition, indeed, with augmentation -- and it's no surprise that Glee, surely the most replayable show on TV, is a sensation. 

I wonder if they'll ever take on Smells Like Teen Spirit. 

Now with the forecast tonight, our new weatherman -- Tennessee Williams!

True story: In an attempt to stir up interest in Small Craft Warnings, one of his best late plays, in the l970's Tennessee Williams not only resorted to playing a character on stage, but made appearances around the New York, to attract attention and spread the word. 

This didn't always go well. 

[From Dotson Rader's deeply loving Tennessee: Cry of the Heart]:

[Williams] had taken the role of Doc in Small Craft Warnings. He had taken on the part because the box office had slumped and he thought people who wouldn’t come to see the play would come to see him. He was right. It was also during the run of Small Craft Warnings that he did a stint as a local television weatherman as a way to drum up publicity for the play. It was one of the most humiliating of his public appearances. On the news he was introduced as the station’s new weatherman. He stood, looking furious, beside a weather chart with its temperatures, storm fronts, and the rest. Holding a long pointed in his hand, he proceeded to read the weather forecast. However, he couldn’t see the cue cards, was blinded by the studio lights, and so spent a minute or two trying to fake the weather report, banging the pointer at the chart in a futile attempt to demonstrate professional authority. Finally, he said to hell with this, and declared that he was an artist and not a performing seal! He then tried to walk off the set with as much dignity as possible only to get his feet tanglied in the floor cables and nearly topple on his face, his humiliation bring peals of laughter from the television anchor people and crew.

It was not a happy time for him. 

A third-rate cartoonist we just can't forget: James Thurber

From Roger Ebert's spectacular Twitter feed, in memory of the incomparable James Thurber,  classic essay/set of drawings, via the Library of America, called Lady on the Bookcase.

Goes something like this...

One day twelve years ago an outraged cartoonist, four of whose drawings had been rejected in a clump by The New Yorker, stormed into the office of Harold Ross, editor of the magazine. “Why is it,” demanded the cartoonist, “that you reject my work and publish drawings by a fifth-rate artist like Thurber?” Ross came quickly to my defense like the true friend and devoted employer he is. “You mean third-rate,” he said quietly, but there was a warning glint in his steady gray eyes that caused the discomfited cartoonist to beat a hasty retreat.

With the exception of Ross, the interest of editors in what I draw has been rather more journalistic than critical. They want to know if it is true that I draw by moonlight, or under water, and when I say no, they lose interest until they hear the rumor that I found the drawings in an old trunk, or that I do the sketches while my nephew makes the sketches. 

If you like American humor, you really should read it, if you haven't already.  

The frustration of the long-term unemployed: The Onion

From the Pew Research Center [pdf link], the General Accounting Office [pdf link] and the Washington Post, the hard news about older unemployed people: 

Bad news...55 to 64-year-olds have fared worst in the recession than any other demographic. 

But from The Onion, the same kind of news -- Matt Millen on TV simply too much for nation's unemployed to handle:

BRISTOL, CT—The nation's 14 million unemployed persons experienced a combination of rage, disbelief, and near-suicidal depression after seeing former Lions CEO Matt Millen—long regarded as one of the most resoundingly incompetent failures in management history—working as a football analyst on Wednesday's SportsCenter.

"Matt Millen has a job?" said Brandon Martinelli of Potosi, WI, a three-time Grant County Teacher of the Year who was laid off in June after teaching high school art for 13 years. "Matt Millen, the laughingstock who screwed up the Lions for a decade, has a job—and it’s related to football? A job that is in fact to tell people how football should be played? While I helped dozens of underprivileged kids get scholarships to college and don't have a job at all? I just… There are no words. None."

 That's funny -- and that's art. Says this underemployed older person. 

Tennessee Williams tells a story about Truman Capote

From Dotson Rader's great, great Tennessee: Cry of the Heart, 1985

Rader writes: Tennessee went on to talk about the one time Truman came to Key West. 

"It was two years ago. he had flown to Key West from Mexico, where he was to stay with Mrs. [Lee] Radiwill but left in a hurry because the mosquitoes were terrible. So he came to Key West from the Yucatan. He had never been on the island before, and I suspect that he never will be there again. He was robbed the first night, losing all his credit cards, his address book, and about two thousand dollars. He said that he wasn't in his hotel room when the robbery occured, but the police found no evidence of forced entry. I think he was cleaned out by some street boy he invited home for a private session!"

"Truman came to Key West because he sold excerpts of his book [Answered Prayers] to Esquire, he made one of the conditions of the contract that the editor of the magazine [Don Erickson] had to fly to Key West to pick up the manuscript. He did that because Hemingway used to make Arnold [Gingrich, the editor/found of Esquire] came to Key West to edit his stories before they were published. Truman was not about to get one thing less thatn Hemingway." 

"One night Truman, Jimmy Kirkwood, and a friend of Truman's, I, and some other men went to dinner. His friend was very drunk. The restaurant was full of tourists in double-knit suits, and since it was quite late, most of them were as tipsy as Truman's boyfriend. Some distance away, at a round table, sat three couples. Truman noticed them staring at us, and he said, "Watch out! They'll be coming over for autographs!" And a few minutes later, one of the women at the table got up and came over, carrying a menu. She asked Truman to autograph the menu. He did. She left, and a few minutes later her husband came to our table and glared at Truman.

"Are you Truman Capote?" And Truman said, "I was this morning!" And the man unzipped his pants, and pulled out his cock. He said, holding it in the palm of his hand, "Can you put your signature on this? And Truman looked down at the cock, and up again, and he said. "I don't know about my signature. But I can initial it!"