Sleeping Your Way to the White House
Dear Ted:
Looks like it's time to clear the dishes from this old breakfast table. I'll
endure the scurrying roaches long enough to say It's been a lot of fun
(although I don't usually have elephant dung with my oatmeal).
I should have known I'd get myself in trouble by calling names of my
favorite editorial illustrators. I left out Burt Silverman, Joe Ciardiello,
Alan Cober, and Julian Allen (the last two, alas, having passed last year). And
Ralph Steadman, the King of Swing.
About drawing ability, don't sweat it, Ted. Your work is so much better
drawn than Lurie's that the subject shouldn't even be on the table. You
have what all great artists of all disciplines need: self-knowledge. It is the
understanding of our own artistic personalities, temperaments, and, yes,
limitations that enables us to shape an effective statement on the page. While
a burnt-out hack like Lurie sweats bullets trying to be Levine (and failing
every single solitary day of his long and lucrative life), excellent
cartoonists figure out how to draw in a way that perfectly supports the
statement they're making. You mention Thurber. How sublime he is! Those
drawings bring you right in. Somehow (and I don't know how) they cause you to
stop flipping and really look , and then, of course, you're reading the
story. The Tom Tomorrow thing is interesting. He'd be out on his keister
without a Xerox machine. But who cares? The image matches the voice
wonderfully. And the voice is saying important things. Your work understands
how fast we're flipping through the newspaper. It brings us immediately to the
idea. Your understanding of blacks is very keen; those lines hold the image and
grab our attention. So your cranky left-of-irony point of view comes in loud
and clear. For God's sake, don't learn to draw.
For years I resisted The
Simpsons . I hated the drawings. It
seemed a cheap approach to animation. Plus it was on the Fox Network, so, I
thought, how could this be worth the trouble to sit and watch it (TV is a big
effort for me). Turns out, of course, it's, perhaps TV's greatest moment. All
the crappy drawing and "family situation comedy" is a ruse. It gets the masses
in the tent and then Groening lets them have it. It's powerful, experimental,
strangely committed. On top of that, there's very real and touching character
development. It is a work of unalloyed genius. More than the work of my
favorite graphic artists, this program will be the thing our cultural era will
be remembered for because he wrapped his message in such strategic cleverness
as to make it a Saturn rocket that blasts into every home in the USA. And the
guy can't draw to save himself.
I'll finish with Phil Harris (I know you've been waiting). Phil Harris was
Jack Benny's orchestra leader on radio. He was also married to Alice Faye, the
gorgeous star of many 20 th Century Fox musicals. Benny, in an
interview, said that the writers always wrote Harris' radio character as if
he'd just got out of bed having had great sex. Harris, on radio, is laid-back,
flippant, casual, with a little buzz on. You could just see the cigarette.
Everyone knows a guy like this; someone so comfortable with himself that he
just doesn't give a f**k. And this, it occurs to me, is why Al Gore is a loser.
George W. Bush, you just know has great sex. He said to me last year, "Maybe
I'll see you in national politics; maybe I won't I have a cool life." Bill
Bradley? C'mon, great sex. He's a jock, could get all the girls he wanted. He's
traveled everywhere, knows about life. Every movement is easy. He's comfortable
with himself. Al Gore looks like a guy who broke his toe because the vibrator
fell out of the medicine cabinet when he opened it looking for a band-aid
because he cut his finger trying to undo his wife's bra. People don't think
these things, of course. But I think they perceive them subconsciously. If a
man is comfortable with himself, he'll be comfortable in the job. It's too bad,
though. Stevenson might have made an inspired president. Or Mondale. Or
Dukakis. Or Gore.
But I don't think we'll get to find out.
Au revoir,
Steve
