Looks like I wasn’t the only one thrown for a bit of a loop by the March 7 “Unaffordable Eden” cover. The Daily News has the full story, and I’m in it!

It’s fun to have rivalries, but there’s no need for a rumble between Brooklyn and Manhattan. Like Canadians, Brooklynites absorb two cultures automatically, without much choice in the matter. I think most people who live on this side of the river are fine with that; after all, many of us moved to Manhattan first. In my experience, Brooklynites tend to see New York City as a city, so they aren’t afraid to go to a movie in Queens or a bar in Staten Island. A number of diehard Manhattanites I know are afraid to leave the island, as though the F, V, N, R, W, 4, 5, A, C, E, 2, 3, 7, J, M, Z, L, and Q trains led to unmapped territory, marked Here Be Dragons.

I still think Marcellus Hall’s drawing is wonderful, but he should know better than to divide New York into Paradise and despair. Ben Greenman and Francoise Mouly, in the New Yorker cover-gallery supplement “The Big City,” wrote that “New Yorkers have always harbored the suspicion that people who live in other places are only joking.” Absolutely! But New Yorker readers and writers (and, I suspect, a good number of their cartoonists) live all over the city, which obviously includes Brooklyn. Cross the bridge sometime—you might like it! It’s an awfully nice walk.

Speaking of the Q train, I think it was the Daily News that published one of my favorite poems of all time, by the winner of a New York City high school poetry contest:

My hair all big
My jeans all tight
Perfumed all over
In the right mood.
Thinking of your kiss
Your sweet words to me
Q train, put on some speed.

Now that is a love poem. If anyone can tell me the name of the poet—I’ve been searching for it for years—I’d be thrilled. Even better would be the actual Poetry in Motion subway poster. I hope this girl has gone far.

Manhattan king? Fuhgeddaboudit! [Daily News]
The BMT El in 1924, a year before The New Yorker was founded [NYC Subway]
New York’s Poetry in Motion poems [Poetry Society of America; added 1/30/06. But where is “Hair All Big”?]

From the Capital Times, a lively Q&A (or as the NYker copy dept. would put it, Q. & A.) with Bob Mankoff and Roz Chast, who visited gracious Madison, WI, on the Cartoon Tour:

Are political cartoons serious art or part of popular culture?

Chast: Who decides what’s really serious art? Does that mean expensive? Does it mean an art academic is going to write about it? The question of what’s high art or low art has been up in the air for 30 or 40 years. I have gallery exhibits, and artists in the same gallery are making these crappy little sculptures, and people pay $12,000 for them.

Mankoff: Serious art demands that you come all the way to it. Those artists supposedly don’t care about you, and they’re not in communication with an audience on a constant basis, whereas we’re in an ideal state in that we do what we like to do and we’re always in communication with readers. We’re certainly serious about what we do. I would say that serious art on the money scale is idiotic art because you shouldn’t pay $60,000 for a canvas.

I’m itching to see Chast’s sketches of those crappy little sculptures, aren’t you? In the interview she’s surprisingly tart, and it’s fun to see her saying things like “[Adjusting to the political landscape after Sept. 11] is like when they dropped the atom bomb, and slowly but surely we began accepting that. You take some Valium, and everything is just fine.” Some of her frazzled ladies should follow suit.

Mankoff also says, “Cartoonists have no power so we’re as pure as the driven snow.” I’m not so sure. Poets are always saying that too (I say it often myself—I can’t sell out! I say), but I think we’re all mostly wrong. Poetry has a sneaky way of working its way into the collective unconscious, and cartoons do too—as Mankoff knows, New Yorker cartoons especially. Some are obviously more radical than others, but many are provocative without being obviously so; the Alex Gregory cartoon on p. 85 of this week’s magazine (which I finally got, thanks) kept flashing back to me all day. It’s funny/sad, which reminds me of a great Dave Barry anecdote from Slate:

One week, when [the Miami Herald‘s Sunday magazine] Tropic converted itself into a kind of Devil’s Dictionary, Weingarten instructed Barry to come up with a definition for “sense of humor.” Barry disappeared from the office for a few days. He came back with this: “A sense of humor is a measurement of the extent to which we realize that we are trapped in a world almost totally devoid of reason. Laughter is how we express the anxiety we feel at this knowledge.” Then he promptly went back to writing about exploding livestock.

Q & A With the New Yorker’s Cartoonists [Capital Times]
Elegy for the Humorist [Slate]

Categories: NYer, Chast, Mankoff, Cartoons

…To Affordable Eden, originally uploaded by emdashes.

In 1999, James Poniewozik in Salon lectured Remnick’s new New Yorker for being a little too safe, too obviously trying to “sell a certain mid-to-highbrow New York to honorary Upper West Siders throughout Saul Steinberg flyover country.” The ’99 Remnick, “who is young and good-looking and well-spoken and well-liked and who, hell, can probably catch bullets between his teeth,” was—writes Poniewozik—also in danger of being, like the covers, “militantly cautious”:

Remnick may not mean to promise Tilleyphiles a soothing snifter of brandy after Brown’s fizzy cocktail, but that’s the message he’s sending…. And this picture leaves out the New York that people who live here see. You’d think a New York issue might acknowledge, for example, that the four outer boroughs are where [Nancy] Franklin’s “people (who) come to New York because they’re looking for something” tend to land nowadays. But Manhattan’s satellites, in the “New York” issue, are simply where one finds exotics (Philip Gourevitch’s excellent profile of a young Indian-American woman resisting an arranged marriage) and Serious Urban Problems (Hilton Als’ affecting Brooklyn “Dope Show”), where Joseph Mitchell (profiled by Mark Singer) went prospecting for characters.

The magazine of 2005 isn’t nearly as provincial-Manhattan, I’m happy to say. So why is this week’s cover? Marcellus Hall’s “Unaffordable Eden” is well done and funny, but for a moment I thought the Pilates-buffed A&E were leaving Brooklyn, forced into Manhattan (or “the City” to those who haven’t figured out yet that the subways cross the river—the taxis, too!) for their daily wages. That’s how it often feels to me, at least. I can see the Chrysler Building from here, and the pizza down the street was voted best in New York City. That’s right, I said City. Drop in—we won’t bite! We also have lattes. Iced, skim, mocha, soy, chai, raw, done.

An earlier version of the famous 1976 Steinberg cover, “A View of the World From 9th Avenue,” was titled “New York vs. the World.” The finished drawing, with its emphasis on subjectivity, makes more sense. It’s folly, especially these days, to insist there’s anything second-rate about living outside those Disneyland animatronic suggestions that are Manhattan’s plum neighborhoods. Even Olmstead said his park here was better.

It was in that same Salon story, by the way, that (Park Slope resident) Poniewozik wrote the snappy line “Likewise, even if you don’t edit the New Yorker, if you read it, you fancy yourself its editor.” Well, sure.

Under the Covers: Steady Hand on the Tilley [Salon]
A New Yorker’s View of the World [Barry Popik]
A Funny Map Is Again the Best Defense [NYT, via Cartome]
Going Verical [Columbia]

Perfect take on the old “I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it” cartoon by Danny Shanahan this week (on p. 67 within Jonathan Lethem’s hypnotic musical history, about which more TK). The resourceful etymologist and New York historian Barry Popik may well have tracked down the source for the original Carl Rose cartoon, which ran on December 8, 1928 (the text is by E. B. White). From Mary MacFadden’s memoir, Dumbbells and Carrot Strips: The Story of Bernarr MacFadden (Holt, 1953):

Her name was Nanette Kutner. She had come to our carrot castle with her parents. She was never to forget the experience although she was not ten years old. She was thin but wiry, with inquisitive dark eyes that took in everything…. Her spinach and carrots always disappeared from her plate as if by magic. I knew she despised the stuff. While the boarders at the tables stowed it away in their stomachs she dumped it, by some sleight-of-hand, into a big reticule in which she carried reading matter. Later, sometimes in the middle of the night, in her bare feet, she got out of the house quietly and cast the food of health into the ocean. She is supposed to have been the originator of the phrase, “It’s spinach, and the hell with it!” A cartoonist for The New Yorker was to make it famous.

The new-style kid doesn’t have to worry about either evil green, as it turns out. According to no less an authority than Parents magazine:

Lots of kids shun vegetables and still do just fine…. Strawberries or oranges can stand in for spinach to help meet folic acid needs. Bananas are a good alternative to potatoes as a source of potassium, and citrus fruits can substitute for broccoli to cover vitamin C requirements. “But even if your child doesn’t routinely eat vegetables, it’s important to continue to offer them,” says [dietician Jo Ann Hattner]. “Veggies are packed with not only important vitamins and minerals but also health-promoting phytochemicals. Eventually, he’ll come to accept them.”

The Shanahan-drawing family might have something to say about that.

“It’s broccoli, dear…” [New Yorker, Cartoon Bank]
“I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it.” [Big Apple]
Mary Williamson McFadden [Riverflow]
Quite a Healthy Sum: Secret Caches of the Health Messiah [Lost Treasure]
10 Facts You Must Know About Feeding Your Kids [Parents]

How apropos that the Fauquier (Va.) Times-Democrat asked an electronics engineer to review the Complete Cartoons—after all, most of the cartoons aren’t in the book itself but on the two CDs tucked inside the front cover. The reviewer, Keith Selbo, kvetches:

The companion CDs don’t offer the comforting look and feel of a book, but they have the decided advantage of being searchable by author and date. Anyone looking for a favorite cartoonist or having a bent for research will welcome these computer-age features. Unfortunately, they come at a price.

Either as a cost-cutting measure, or possibly to protect Web reprint sales, the CD cartoon images were scanned at sub-par resolution. For the most part, this doesn’t overly diminish the viewing experience or the humor. Unfortunately, there are a few cases where meaning hinges on some minute visual nuance that doesn’t quite show up on the screen. The software zoom feature fails to reveal the lost detail, only a jumble of pixels. The joke is lost.

That’s troubling. I haven’t run into this yet myself—the resolution looked pretty good to me—but I can imagine that when the detail gets truly tiny it might be a problem. Still, as Selbo concedes, it’s hard to get more Booth for your buck than in this collection, for those who think about the world this way. He’s also right about the relatively cold comfort—for those unaccustomed to data CDs, it’s hard to conceive of more than sixty-six thousand drawings living in those two silver discs, like the flat pools to strange worlds in C.S. Lewis’ The Magician’s Nephew. And yet, once Acrobat is working properly (I had to install the latest version, helpfully included on the CD), one can relax; there they are, all the cartoons you wanted but were afraid to buy from the Cartoon Bank, or didn’t know exactly what you were looking for.

But I think Selbo’s dismissal of the “fawning reminisces by such notables as John Updike and Lillian Ross” is too harsh. They are light—but then, so are many of the cartoons.

A Bargain at Twice the Price [Fauquier Times-Democrat]
The New Yorker Book of Technology Cartoons [Powell’s]
Bob Mankoff: From New Yorker contributor to savvy businessman, the cartoonist banks on his entrepreneurial skills [Planet Cartoonist]
No, the computers are up. WE’RE down. [Warren Miller, Cartoon Bank]

From Gawker today, a ghoulish triptych of crucifixion covers, including Art Spiegelman’s April 1995 taxed-to-death Easter bunny and a wittily low-budget Hustler rabbit (guess we know how they feel about Playboy bunnies). Actually, though, it’s not sacrilege that gives me pause on the new Nation cover but the ever-frightening SpongeBob SquarePants, who I know the kids are into but who just…freaks me out. Even the edible oddballs of Aqua Teen Hunger Force out-normal him. Forgive me, Pop Culture Lord (and right-wing meanies who find him too metrosexual for their tastes), for I cannot stomach SpongeBob. If an angry mob were going to run any deity out of town, I’d choose him.

Update, almost a year later: Changed my mind. Love the squeezable little guy. Thanks to Sophie H., 3, for the critical appraisal that turned it all around.

The Passion of the Art Director [Gawker]
Which Aqua Teen Hunger Force Character Are You? [fan page]
SpongeBob, Evil Gay Heathen: How sad to be a right-wing Christian in a world full of homo cartoons and scary nipples [SF Gate]

Another take on the magazine’s social conscience during the Depression, by San Francisco State’s Eric Solomon. In his engaging study with plenty of terrific cartoon captions for evidence, Solomon writes,

My best estimate is that of nearly 8,000 cartoons printed from 1930 to 1940, over 300 were socially meaningful—a small percentage but a significant one. Many were too topical to be included in New Yorker anthologies—either yearly ones or retrospective books. And the magazine itself pretended to be above real political concerns, which it professed to leave to such other magazines as the New Masses, the old Life, or Ballyhoo. But I disagree with most comments on the New Yorker by cartoon historians like Thomas Craven. “The social upheaval,” Craven says, “did not interrupt [the magazine’s] established procedure, and its allusions to the questions of the day were faint and far between.” As what W. H. Auden called the “dishonest decade” grew grimmer, the New Yorker’s editorial policy shifted from insouciance to concern. White increasingly wrote on world affairs in the Notes & Comments section; there were more frequent appearances of reportage from writers like Edmund Wilson, Martha Gellhorn, Ruth McKenney, Leo Rosten, Hyman Goldberg, and A. J. Liebling; Auden published poems there, as did Stephen Benet and Kenneth Fearing. Stories by Arthur Kober, Albert Maltz, Leone Zugsmith, Jerome Weidman, Daniel Fuchs, and Kay Boyle treated lower class or political interests; and Clifton Fadiman’s book reviews were remarkably sympathetic to proletarian literature. And the quality, if not in each issue the quantity, of the cartoons reflected this 1930s editorial attention to the realities of unrest, poverty, depression, and fascism. For writing parallel to the visual effects of many of the political cartoons, we have Morris Bishop’s 1938 poem ostensibly about Roosevelt, “Him.”

“The undistributed corporate profit

Tax,” he said, “is suicide!

He never will make a penny off it!”

“I guess you’re right,” his wife replied,

“He’s got a collection of Red advisers

Who don’t care what the people need.”

He said, “His personal idolizers!”

“I guess you’re right,” his wife agreed.

“He thinks he can move us around like chessmen!

What kind of a fellow would take delight

In sounding off to a lot of yes-men?”

His wife remarked, “I guess you’re right.”

Interestingly, a few weeks after those lines appeared, the New Yorker, under its “Department of Correction, Amplification, and Abuse,” published a furious telegram from one Caldwell Patton, Chairman, Republican Committee for Public Safety, Yale Club: “I am interested in knowing whether you’re running a comic periodical or an organ for Communist propaganda.” He goes on to express outrage at cartoons ridiculing the DAR and Jersey City’s Mayor Hague and concludes, “It would be more honest to sell out your publication and draw cartoons for The Daily Worker. . . . I regret that you have changed a once humorous publication into an instrument for advancement of Bolshevism.”

Eustace Tilley Sees the Thirties Through a Glass Monocle, Lightly: New Yorker Cartoonists and the Depression Years [Compedit]

In the text to the great new Complete Cartoons, the editors write:

In 1929, the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange was just a few subway stops away from The New Yorker‘s midtown offices, but when, in October, the crash came the magazine did its very best to ignore it…. Cartoonists were, on the whole, less interested in the contrasts between rich and poor than in the way the rich reacted to the crisis…

All right, then: Mistakes were made. After all, “I never told her about the Depression. She would have worried” is much funnier than grim union graphics. But is there really any call to keep printing cartoons like this week’s P.C. bum? When you live in the actual city of New York or similar urban places, actual bums are a pitiful sight, and the number of schticksters with signs and quick comebacks is pretty tiny compared with the legions of people so inert they might be dead, under cardboard. It’s been a while since I found these cartoons funny, I’m afraid.

On the other hand, the anthology is just about the best treat I’ve had in years (thanks, Dad!). It’s so big you feel small, like Alice, reading a book that will never end. It almost can’t, what with the two enclosed CDs that bring the cartoon total up to 68,647. Yum.

The Complete Cartoons of The New Yorker, ed. Robert Mankoff [Powell’s]

p. 77: great.