Graphic Grandeur (Sketch as Sketch Can Edition)

 

1929-2025

 Shortly after A Bonfire of the Vanities came out, Tom Wolfe wrote an essay that took novelists of the day to task for wasting all their prose on navel-gazing and not directing their attention on society at large (as he had just done with Vanities.) Another way of putting it is these novelists were putting the personal over the political, and it needed to stop. While I understood Wolfe's point, I wondered why does it have to be one or the other. After all, society is composed of people with, well, navels. And while they may prefer we think of them as giants that walk the Earth, politicians are people, too, and can like anybody, can take things personally (which we may be seeing played out at the moment.) Isn't there a novelist out there capable of a balancing act between our innermost thoughts and the world's outermost outbursts? 

Not a novelist, as it turned out, but a cartoonist. Jules Feiffer was his name. Starting in 1956 in the alternative newspaper The Village Voice, the comic strip Sick, Sick, Sick, (later syndicated to mainstream newspapers as Feiffer), there is no need to divide your attention between the personal and the political, as you can now look at them as two sides (one with a belly-button, the other with a commander-in-chief) of the same coin:

 

 

 

 

 

Just as navel-gazing and socioeconomics both coexist in the same world, so too does comic strips and other forms of media that Feiffer also dabbled in from time to time such as plays, screenplays, novels, children's books, and this Oscar-winning animated short from 1960:  

 I know it's dated, but they could always bring the draft back. After all, Greenland awaits.

White Lodge Pride

 

It's so amazing. It's like listening to Hendrix in a way, because it sounds so current. Like if you watch Twin Peaks, I mean, think back. That's 1989 or 1990. That's network TV. That's insane. And it feels like it could be on any streamer today. I guess that's [David Lynch's] true voice. You know, that's what happens when you have an authentic voice [...] I think he's out of time [instead of 'ahead of his time']. If you're not chasing a trend, but you're not trying to speak in today's voice all the time, then you're always gonna be current.

--David Duchovny, on playing transgender DEA, and later FBI, agent Denise Bryson in the David Lynch-produced TV series Twin Peaks, both the original series (1990-91) and its 2017 revival.

 

 

David Lynch 1946-2025

Vital Viewing (Cat Scratch Fever Edition)

 

Girl-next-door type Eartha Kitt was born on this day in 1927 (she died in 2008.) Homespun innocence and decorous behavior both are on full display in the following clip:

See what I mean by homespun innocence? But enough about the interviewer. In the second video, Eartha pretty much repeats what she said in the first video, but this time to musical accompaniment:

HOO-HAH! I'll take her brand of evil over that of a tycoon's, or tycoons', any day of the week (and, in particular, this coming Monday.)

Quips and Quotations (The Brain That Wouldn't Die Edition)

 

 

No, just immortality. I'll settle for that.

--Ray Bolger, when asked if he received residuals for his role as the Scarecrow from the many TV showings of The Wizard of Oz.