Archive for July, 2007:
Fat Chance
No matter if you’re struggling to get into the magazine for the first time or trying to stay there after you’ve become a regular contributor, your chances of getting an OK each week are slim. There are only so many slots to fill each week in the magazine and the competition is intense. As a result, some of us resort to superstition and strange rituals in addition to the weekly rite of producing the all-important Batch.
As OK Day approaches, it may be neccessary to wear a certain article of clothing (Jack Ziegler one time told me he always wore his “Lucky Jeans” on that special day). I had a special New Yorker hat which I wore for awhile on Thursdays, but it seemed to have an effect opposite of the one intended, so after awhile I reversed the procedure and now am careful to wear the hat only on days other than Thursday. Some of us offer up weekly prayers to our deities (The Editors). So far, I’m not aware of any actual animal or human sacrifices, but we’ve probably all thought about slipping a fifty into the envelope with our weekly batch of drawings. Among our personal superstitions, there was one involving a FedEx truck, which a while ago was the means used by the magazine to inform us of our OKs. On Wednesday, the day of the NYer art meeting and the day before OK Day, if you saw a FedEx truck cross your path from right to left, it meant you weren’t getting an OK the next day. The opposite was true if you saw one crossing from left to right. There were variations on this theme.
There’s also the idea of “stacking” the roughs, arranging them in a certain order for effect, this based on the foolish assumption that our Ed has the time and energy to carefully weigh the merits of each drawing in our submissions one by one.
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Upon settling back in his comfortable leather chair, feet propped up on his desk, the Editor casually opens each envelope and leisurely examines the contents in the order carefully arranged by the artist. On the top of the stack, he might first encounter a mildly amusing cartoon idea, a kind of appetizer before the entree of which he is about to partake. The second drawing would likely be slightly funnier than the first. The third drawing in the stack might then be the killer cartoon, the big ka-ching, the cartoon the artist is certain will be bought if any will be. The rest of the batch might then be seen in descending order of comic value, according to the cartoonist’s biased opinion. The last cartoon might be a little throwaway doodle, for dessert.
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I made a study once of my stacking system and it’s results over a period of several weeks. It came out something like this:
The truth is, of course, that none of us can crack the code. How and why cartoons are bought or not is as much a mystery as why they’re funny to some and not to others. All we can do is draw what we think is funny and hope for the best.
Uh-oh. Here comes Thursday…
Life With and Without Mozart
Artists have always attributed inspiration to their muse (Though some of the more self-centered artists insist that they are their own). Usually, muses are dipicted in cartoons as apparitional women dressed in flowing, white gowns, holding golden harps, and floating around in the air somewhere in the vicinity of the artist. (I’m sure there’s one behind me right now, hard at work).
In San Francisco, before I got started at the NYer, I would sit for hours, waiting for inspiration in front of that “Blazing white island”, as Bill Woodman once called those blank pieces of paper we eventually draw on. (He was quoting a writer who’s name escapes me). I hadn’t yet learned that you don’t just wait around for the muse. You have to start doodling a little before she shows herself if she’s going to. I was living with a woman, then, a sometime muse and a classical violinist. Before meeting her, I’d been listening to a lot of country music. She had introduced me to the likes of Beethoven, Haydn, Vivaldi, and especially Mozart, who I loved. I still wore cowboy boots and occasionally a western-style hat, and carried a harmonica in my jeans-jacket pocket, but now I was whistling “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” around the house. I had a tape of that piece and another, I think his 5th Piano Concerto, which was on the flip side. The tape was always playing on my old cassette-player behind me as I worked on my cartoons.
One day while I was listening and doodling as usual, I found myself drawing an empty frame, then a horizon line within it. I added a few forlorn-looking clouds above the horizon, then some random objects in the foreground: An old tire, a tin can, an empty bottle, a pencil, and assorted debris. I stared at this melancholy scene for awhile then added a box at the top for a title. I was stuck there for awhile, then eventually lettered the words “Life Without …” in the box. The drawing could represent life without something, but what?
A few seconds later, I heard “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” suddenly stop playing behind me and then heard the sad, crunching sound tapes make when they self-destruct in a cassette-player’s mechanism as they die.
My muse at work.
This event provided me with the last word in the title. As it turned out “Life Without Mozart” became my first OK at the New Yorker.