One hundred years later…

Via Body and Soul
I discovered that they’re still trying to censor Emma Goldman.

The University of California Berkeley has seen fit to block a fundraiser mailer
for the Emma
Goldman Project over the use of a couple of quotes that the University deemed
were too political. (What? Emma Goldman? Too political? Say it isn’t so!)
More to the point, they didn’t want the U.S. government to think that
the University was criticizing certain policies. Makes the objectionable
quote from 1902 seem poignant: Emma warns that free-speech advocates “shall
soon be obliged to meet in cellars, or in darkened rooms with closed doors,
and speak in whispers lest our next-door neighbors should hear that free-born
citizens dare not speak in the open.”

I can’t help but think one should be quoting more Emma Goldman these
days. Even if you don’t believe in anarchism, her wisdom and humanity
are very compelling. And so what if she didn’t exactly say “If I
can’t dance I don’t want to be part of your revolution.” I think
the account found in her autobiography, Living My Life, to be equally
inspirational, if a bit cumbersome for a bumper sticker:

At the dances I was one of the most untiring and gayest. One evening a cousin
of Sasha, a young boy, took me aside. With a grave face, as if he were about
to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not
behoove an agitator to dance. Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway.
It was undignified for one who was on the way to become a force in the anarchist
movement. My frivolity would only hurt the Cause.

I grew furious at the impudent interference of the boy. I told him to mind
his own business, I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown into my
face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for
anarchism, for release and freedom from conventions and prejudice, should demand
the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to
become a nun and that the movement should not be turned into a cloister. If
it meant that, I did not want it. “I want freedom, the right to self-expression,
everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things.” Anarchism meant that
to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world—prisons, persecution,
everything. Yes, even in spite of the condemnation of my own comrades I would
live my beautiful ideal.

Do read Jeanne
d’Arc’s comment on the situation.

Aw shucks

Jeanne d’Arc has not only done me the honor of adding me to her blog roll, but paid me some nice compliments as well. I’m extremely flattered that she considers some of my writing good because, well, she’s a rockstar.

I feel a little bad I don’t do entries more often, but I do have a day job and a comic to maintain. Plus, I don’t like the idea of making entries for the hell of it. I average about two to three entries a week, which actually pleases Becca as she has trouble keeping up with all the journals she reads and will occasionally surrender in the face of Barry’s and Kip’s output.

(pssst, Becca, Barry is with out power, now’s your chance! And you really ought to check out Kip’s post about female telegraphers.)

Kittenhawking

While puttering around as I wait to go over to John
and Becca’s
for dinner and Farscape,
I came across this photograph:

It was out from when I was rummaging around for pictures of Chelsea.

My husband has a way with cats, or, I should say, has his way with cats. Now,
now, nothing nasty, he just can’t believe that there exists a cat that
couldn’t benefit from a petting and a cuddle from him personally. Even
cats he hasn’t been properly introduced to. In fact many is time that
he will make me nervous as we walk about our neighborhood, picking up strange
cats for a cuddle right in front of their house. He always puts them back where
he finds them, but, still. Those cats’ peoples might get the wrong idea.

Kip also has a certain expectation of cats, and is horribly disappointed that
our felines
don’t grok shoulder surfing. Unlike Radclyffe (kitten on the left) who
will still partake of his shoulder when we visit Barry and all. Mosley (kitten
on the right) never really took to it.

Well, I must be off. John and Becca’s cats, DJ and Buddy, will momentarily
be getting the special Kip treatment.

The Haberdasher’s loose ends

So, back on December 28th, Kip made this blog entry about creative groups, then and now. Which inspired Barry and me to make our own entries as Kip had mentioned a group we were all involved in, the Haberdashery. Barry’s post was a somewhat maudlin one; the type one is likely to write at 3:00 am. Mine was more a trip down memory lane with pictures (which Barry and Kip commented on and annotated on their respective blogs).

But there were two more members of the Haberdashery, Amy and Paul, at this time blog-less. They both posted an extensive comments to Kip’s original post, but, due to Kip’s prodigious prose output, that post and its comments are now buried in the archives. So I decided to unearth Amy’s and Paul’s responses.

First, Amy:

Well, I DID give up (comics), damnit !! Not very noble, but there you are. I consider myself a passable cartoonist and all, but not much more than that. Frankly I didn’t have the will to keep struggling with the elements of it that sucked (anatomy and perspective) even if the stuff that didn’t suck (dialogue and composition) or was merely mediocre (everything else) was thankfully what people paid attention to when they complemented me.

Hence collage: Which allows me to concentrate on at least one of the good things (composition). Its main drawback being that without that other good thing (dialogue)it can’t really convey much other than a certain rancid mix of disgust and irony contrasting nicely with an “Oh-Wow-Look-At-The-Colors” sort of feeling. But it’s better than ending up like a certain John Riley, I suppose. Abandoning any artistic impulse whatsoever, chain-smoking, closeted forever in the nowhere land that is Hudson County, and hallucinating the existence of guitar-playing seabirds.

In case you are wondering, John Riley was the name one of her main protagonists in the comic she used to do, Fool’s Paradise Funnies, who can be seen in this drawing here. (He‘s the one with the glasses. Noddy, the guitar-playing seabird and the other protagonist is the one in the foreground sipping a malt and holding a sign.)

As I remember it, Amy always took offence at her comics being described as poetry—taking that to mean “it must be art; I can’t understand it!”

It was a compliment Amy, really it was. C’mon, you’d actually illustrate, oh, poetry, along with blues songs and lines from Shakespeare:

But we all had problem with accepting compliments—and still do. Barry just won the Koufax Award for best designed blog, news that he shared when Kip and I visited his house last week. He immediately followed this by announcing he was going to do an entry listing all the blogs he could find that he thought were better looking than his. Typical.

And I’m no better—whenever anybody pays me a compliment on some Dicebox page, I am appreciative but then instantly think of all that is wrong with it, and would happily reveal all the various flaws to them blow by blow. This used to lead to me to have a negative page count, as Charles recalled for me during the same visit mentioned above. I would start a year with a certain number of pages, decided I couldn’t bear a certain number of them and toss them out, only to begin again (Amy was guilty of this as well).

So I did make a certain number of people nervous that evening when I talked about redoing certain aspects of Chapter 1. I reassured them that I only intended to standardize texture and adjust color areas, not redraw the damn thing.

Then there was the odd way we used to pay each other the highest of compliments, through insults, like: “That’s beautiful—you bastard!” And, the highest of compliments: “This is brilliant. I hate you!”

Nowadays, apparently, leg humping is all the rage. I’ve been treated a couple of times and Kip has had the affections of Bill
Mudron.

Let’s move on to Paul’s response to Kip’s original post:

I still think I’ll draw another comic or two someday… but yeah, I did basically sidestep into music. Which I have also nearly abandoned. I’m getting hooked on this weird thing called paying off my debts and it doesn’t leave much room for anything else. Somebody shake some anti-sense into me!

I still wonder sometimes about why I dropped comics and spent so much of my life so far making music. Several reasons come to mind:

1) Instant gratification. You can make up a piece of music in the time it takes to listen to it. (Improvising.) If you have a tape recorder handy, and can play an instrument tolerably well, you can call it finished if you like. I don’t know anybody who can draw a legible comic in the time it takes to read it.

2) Playing with other musicians can be one of the most intense social activities I know of. It can get really intimate. Or it can just be light and fun. By contrast, drawing comics is almost always solitary. Sure, we would hang out later and talk about the comics, but that’s not the same thing.

3) You don’t get to watch people dance while they read your comics.
Maybe they should!

There’s something very appealing about the idea of people dancing to comic books.

Paul’s post actually brings doing 24-hour comics to mind, specifically, the two sessions that he, Kip, Barry and I all did one together. Why? His comment about instant gratification, which is part of appeal of 24-hour comics. And also the random elements he imposed on the basic structure of the two I saw him do, basically preparing to improvise

We did the first group effort in Boston where Kip and Barry were living. This was a second go at it for all four of us, but only Kip had succeeded in doing a 24 page comic within 24 hours.

Paul started out by covering 24 sheets of paper with a grey wash of watercolor. He made it all uneven on purpose, adding splatters and what not. He then proceeded to execute his comic, basing his art around the random blobs. He even managed to work in the object we all agreed to incorporate into our respective comics—a paddle ball. He also managed to do it all within the 24 hour period, as did Kip with the Star, whereas Barry and I failed yet again.

The second time we dubbed “the Bagel Sessions” in honor of the object we were to work into our stories that time out. Paul prepared for this one in advance. Not with sketches or writing which is taboo, but a system by which he could randomly generate the layout for each page as he went. By rolling the dice he could determine how many panels a page got, which ones had normal borders, thick borders or no borders, plus a basic layout. But he paid a prce in time and went over 24 hour, as did Kip, whereas Barry and I succeeded for the first time..

Epilogue: Kip and I never did another 24-hour comic. Both Barry and Paul went for number four. Barry’s Filling the Hole exists online here. Paul’s was… abstract. Amy never did a 24-hour comic.

And I should also mention how pleased I am that Paul’s considering doing another comic or two.

A Wake for Chelsea

Chelsea, an elderly and ailing Irish Setter that I once shared ownership with passed on yesterday. Barry writes more thoroughly on the event in a post on his blog along with his memories of her. He invites others who have known her to post their reminisces in the comments sections, which Kip and I did.

She is pictured above pretty much in the position she was in when I first met her. As Barry relates, the owner right before us was forced to keep her in his pick-up truck as he looked for a new home for her as his new place was strict about no pets (He had placed his other two dogs and four cats all in new home. Me, I would’ve found a different place to live) And as Kip shared, she seemed perfectly content as she had spent much of puppyhood in a plane similar to the one pictured below:

I think all that flying is part of what made her tetched in the head.

But she was a very sweet, if dumb, dog, and though I hadn’t seen her much in the past year, knowledge of her existence comforted me and so her passing grieves me.