Political cartoons

Well, it's taken me a couple weeks to digest the events of the party conventions, which is like a couple years in this tiresome 24-7 news cycle wherein we all become screeching little mini-commentators obsessing about political strategy instead of politics, and ask myself if I have anything to add to it. The answer is not really. Unlike the weird popular caricature of a Clinton supporter that prevailed for about three minutes, I've dealt with my disappointment and support Obama/Biden wholeheartedly. Unable at first to figure out who Palin was, then feeling sorry I ever asked three minutes later, I just find it sad that the GOP's both 25 years late to the concept of putting a woman on the ticket and unable to pick anything but a total lightweight. Yes, she has that square-jawed-femme-top thing going on that I'm susceptible to, but being only slightly better pulled together than Dan Quayle isn't enough (and his much-touted sex appeal, I definitely never understood).

Still, being old enough to remember how tough it was for Jesse Jackson, Pat Schroeder, Geraldine Ferraro and Elizabeth Dole, how marginalized all their candidacies were even so embarrassingly late into the 20th century, I feel weirdly happy to be alive at this moment. A black man and a white woman are now my party leaders, and the opposition is demanding their female VP choice be treated on the same terms as a man, more or less. Even ten years ago, I wouldn't have expected things to come this far.

It does really make me miss political cartooning. That's something I truly regret letting lie fallow for so long. I'll hit that in another post. You know, six months from now or so.

posted by Joan at 9:57 PM · 0 Comments

What I did on my summer vacation

OK--it was just a long weekend at Netroots Nation, but I don't have any other good excuse for not posting for so long. I was a spousal tagalong at the conference, which is just in its third year and still could use a little more direction and a little less homogeneity, but there's a distinct electric swell of hopefulness, a sense of plugged-in progressives really coming together after eight years in the wilderness. Best panel hands down: a lively, supersmart discussion about Gitmo and the legal horizons going forward, with special props to investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill and Slate's Dahlia Lithwick, both fantastic speakers.

Austin was hot, mellow and pleasant; even with a car I spent most of my time downtown, a baking grid of low-rise Alamo-style brick buildings lately giving way to 10-20 story high-rise condo and office buildings, giant cranes swinging this way and that. Even a gritty old one-story diner called Las Meninas, a triumph of Mexican home-cooking (the least savory breakfast thing on the menu being granola, clearly a grudging nod to the hippies) owned by sisters who'd stayed afloat on the lunchtime money of the construction workers yet now have to move down the block to make way for a developer; one or both of them had been savvy enough to buy a nearby, probably landmarked corner building. But everyone else, well, they're screwed.

Ate way too much barbecue, including a 40-mile drive out to a Wall-Drug sized joint called Salt Lick, and went tubing, which sounds athletic, but really just means driving another 40 miles to pick up a few six-packs of Lone Star and float down a river in individual black rubber tires, one reserved for the beer cooler. You just drift amiably around clots of college students hooked to each other's tubes with their feet, amoebalike, and spill your cans on the mild rapids downstream; it's mighty fine. Swam at Barton Springs, the legendary limestone-cavern-natural-spring-turned-public-pool in Zilker Park. It looks unremarkable at first, a huge no-food-allowed Olympic-esque pool with a few low limestone ridges at the south end, a cyclone fence blocking off the dam outlet and adorably dog-accessible river at the north end, and a single low diving board framed with two duck decoys, but it's nifty and democratic: sloping grass to lay out towels, a refreshing 70 degrees year-round, ranging from quarried pebbles to weedy, algae-slickened-raw-stone to poured-concrete bottom allowing all ages to float and chat, laid-back yet watchful lifeguards.

Beautiful bungalow neighborhoods nestled in greenbelts around small tributaries dumping into the Colorado -- which cuts right across downtown and hosts a nightly summer spectacle of thousands of Mexican fruit bats pouring from under the Congress Avenue bridge. Crowds literally line up along the river and the railing at sunset to see this -- from the bridge they look like spawning fish, spilling out in a squeaking mass and then ducking back under the arch before soaring up into black insect-gobbling clots above the river. Nice time all around. Haven't had that much fun at a conference I wasn't officially working since...I guess that'd be the National Lesbian/Gay Journalists' Conference in Minneapolis in the 90s, the one where my now-ex and I bought a raffle ticket at a bar and won a crazy vacation to Puerto Vallarta, just 200 gay men and us....but that's a story for another time, kids...

posted by Joan at 9:15 PM · 1 Comments

Read Dateland

Because Jennifer Parello is a funny woman. A can of Heineken is apparently like Proust's madeleine to her: something with a taste or scent that will torment you with the godforsaken memory of some ex for the rest of your life. I believe every girl has one of these. Mine's a certain brand of Aveda conditioner--thank god it got too expensive for me to keep compulsively buying. What's yours?

posted by Joan at 12:37 AM · 1 Comments

Post Toasted

I really am sorry I don't post more often. This website and blog ground to a balky, cranky start when I belatedly realized there's just no other way to self-publicize and stay in touch with readers in the 21st century. Unfortunately, none of that cold hard truth makes me a faster adapter. I instinctively dislike conducting my professional and social life on the Web, but I'm just gonna have to learn to loosen up. While that unfolds (unloosens?), your patience is most appreciated. Anyone else out there have as much trouble with this as me?

posted by Joan at 2:36 AM · 5 Comments

Graphic Diction

As mentioned a while back in News & Notes, a few words about queer creators in mainstream graphic fiction.

Nothing published today would be possible without the seminal autobiographical works of Mary Wings, Howard Cruse, Roberta Gregory, et al. They made (and continue to make) it possible to define modern queer identity by breaking all kinds of literary taboos to write and illustrate out gay life, though out of necessity they mainly did it within the context of gay communities. Nothing wrong with, or limiting about, that. It was new territory with endless possibilities.

There was then a second wave that broadened the narrative of the gay comics landscape with respect to race, nationality & class, including but not limited to Rupert Kinnard, Jen Camper and Rob Kirby. (I'd also have to give grudging, no-names mention to some straight creators who took their work into queer zones, though much of it has been about bi-curiosity rather than queer sexuality.)

Now we've got the likes of Alison Bechdel, Ellen Forney and a whole bunch of young creators --young enough to have grown up with queer youth groups, out parents raising planned families, etc., as viable norms-- all achieving mainstream success & recognition by making queer perspective into universal perspective in their work. This is very cool. And it's cool because it's an expansion on what's come before. Not an evolution -- that would suggest the seminal works are inferior or limited in some way. They're not. They're timeless and permanently influential. And now they've got lots of company.

posted by Joan at 10:45 PM · 2 Comments

Catch up in Seattle

The Bitter Girl archive on Gmax is still stalled at the October 30 "Weightlifting" strip due to dreary publishing drama I'm too much of a lady to discuss (that's got to be a first), but now you can catch up on strips from November 2007-onward, thanks to the Seattle Gay News' new back issue archive. Go here for details.

posted by Joan at 9:53 PM · 3 Comments

Super Tuesday

Vote Clinton.

Yes, Obama's great. So's Clinton. And she'll get the job done.

posted by Joan at 10:00 PM · 2 Comments