Tuesday, February 25, 2025

Quips and Quotations (I Heard She Sang a Good Song Edition)

 

1937-2025

To be moved, to be moved constantly by your own songs. You need it to be in tune with them, and I don’t mean in tune musically, but I mean in tune with the lyrics of the songs, with the words of the songs, and with the meaning. You need to be in tune with all of that, and that takes a little bit of doing.

--Roberta Flack






Wednesday, February 19, 2025

The Past Recast

 

Stonewall Inn, 1969





 
 NEWS FLASH: The National Park Service eliminated references to transgender people from its Stonewall National Monument website on Thursday, which now only refers to those who are lesbian, gay and bisexual. According to a Park Service spokesperson, “The National Park Service is implementing Executive Order 14168 and Secretary’s Order 2416,” referring to orders entitled “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” and “Ending DEI Programs and Gender Ideology Extremism.”

With that in mind:




 Who controls the present controls the past.

--George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

Saturday, February 15, 2025

Quips and Quotations (Who Says Empowerment Can't Be Fun Edition)

 


Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel. It gives a woman a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. It makes her feel as if she were independent... the picture of free, untrammeled womanhood.

--Susan B. Anthony

Friday, February 7, 2025

Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore

  


 






 








"911. What is the address of the emergency?"
"1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. A little girl just bounced off the roof of a Tesla parked out front."

Saturday, February 1, 2025

Quips and Quotations (Renaissance Man Edition)

 


 

I play it cool

And dig all jive
That’s the reason
I stay alive.
 
My motto,
As I live and learn,
            is:
Dig And Be Dug
In Return.

--Langston Hughes

Monday, January 27, 2025

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.