On the Ongoing Cartoon Shellshock

comics and cartooning, current affairs, journal

manden-bag-stregen_t.jpgI was just reminded today of how depressingly treacherous it has become to navigate the Mohammed cartoon affair and its religious-cultural discontents. The day before yesterday it was reported worldwide that the upcoming memoirs of ‘Bomb in Turban’ cartoonist Kurt Westergaard, Manden bag stregen (‘The Man Behind the Line’), would be published with the cartoon for which he has become world-(in)famous on the cover. Pretty daring and rather provocative thing to do, I figured, but perfectly plausible, I felt. We published the news both at our Danish comics site Nummer9.dk and at the Danish Comics Council webpage, as media all over the internet had done.

Then today, I received an email from the book’s publisher, John Lykkegaard, informing me that the news as reported everywhere was in error and that it was not the intention to publish said cartoon on the cover. He also mentioned that the announcement that the book has 35 illustrations in Somalian media had been interpreted as it carrying 35 images of Mohammed. For fuck’s sake.

Lykkegaard included the actual cover design for the book, which features the cartoon Westergaard drew for his newspaper Jyllands-Posten (publisher of the original Mohammed cartoons) to mark his retirement earlier this year. It refers to the debacle, casting the cartoonist as Don Quijote accompanied by an ass carrying a box labeled ‘freedom of speech’, on top of which rests a bomb with a lit fuse. Above them, the crescent of Islam glows. The caption reads: “The Don Quijote of idealism says goodbye, with thanks — the real Sancho Panza will be sticking around for the moment”

So, a reflection of the issue, and fairly acerbic (understandably!), not to mention a little self-aggrandising, but not exactly something to reignite the fuse of idiocy, I hope. Real sad, though — and symptomatic — that we nevertheless reported it that way.

Here’s the publisher’s official announcement.

Picks of the Week

current affairs, hype & linkage

“I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me. Rage would be beside the point for the same reason. Instead, I am badly oppressed by a gnawing sense of waste. I had real plans for my next decade and felt I’d worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read—if not indeed write—the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger?”

— Christopher Hitchens

The picks of the week from around the web. (A little late, sorry.)

  • Christopher Hitchens on his cancer. The contrarian author and political commentator has been diagnosed with cancer and writes about it with candour. Our best wishes — get well Hitch!
  • Washington Post: Top Secret America. I’ve only started digging into this major investigative project, on the proliferation of secret service and intelligence agencies in the US, but from what I’ve read, it seems great.
  • Google’s villainous turn. Another step towards the crippling of net neutrality perpetrated by the “Don’t Be Evil” people. Ryan Singel has a fine write-up at Wired, while Robert X. Cringley offered a counter-intuitive caution at the New York Times.

    • Bobby Ray, Drake, and the Prescience of Hip Hop

    commentary and criticism, music

    bob.jpg
    The synthesis of rapping and singing surely has its prehistory in church, and found precursors in such acts as the Last Poets, while on record it goes back to the early days of hip hop, when The Fatback Band invited Tim Washington onto their 1979 record for “King Tim III (Personality Jock)”, which was shortly followed by the game changing “Rapper’s Delight”, on which an ad hoc assembly of non-rappers killed it over Chic’s “Good Times.” Since then, the genres have continuously converged, while the rapper-singer has been a staple since at least The Sequence, and boasts a long history written by such diverse acts as UTFO, Queen Latifah, Teddy Riley, Bell Biv Devoe, Boyz II Men, Domino, Warren G, Fugees, Mikah Nine, The Roots, OutKast, Mos Def, Cee-Lo Green, N.E.R.D., and Kanye West.

    drake-thank-me-later-album-cover_t.jpgToday, multi-talented vocalists who shift effortlessly between rapping and singing fetch top dollar at record companies looking for the next hit. Right now, this is evidenced by two young (early 20s) rapper-singers topping the charts: the 23-year old Canadian Drake just dropped his debut album Thank Me Later on Wayne and Birdman’s Young Money Records, while the North Carolinian Bobby Ray aka. B.o.B. has recently released his first longplayer B.o.B Presents: The Adventures of Bobby Ray on Grand Hustle/Atlantic. Their superficial similarities elicit a comparison, which reveals real differences in concept, skill sets and, ultimately, quality.

    Thank Me Later is a polished, autotuned catalogue of timely pop formulae. On the first single, “Over”, Drake asks himself, “what am I doing?”, answering his own question, “Oh yeah, that’s right, I’m doing me”. He doesn’t seem sure though, and one can see why: he comes across more like a product than an artist.

    Picks of the Week

    architecture, comics and cartooning, culture, current affairs, hype & linkage, music

    The picks of the week from around the web.

  • RSA Animate: David Harvey breaks down in simple terms the financial crisis from his perspective, accompanied by some great instructional white-board cartooning (above).
  • Amoeblog: Billyjam interviews hip hop legend Krs-One in depth, on the occasion of the release of his new book The Gospel of Hip Hop. As usual the Teacha’s all over the place and highly idiosyncratic, but it remains lovely to hear him speak about hip hop.
  • London Review of Books. Rebecca Solnit writes on the repercussions of the Gulf oil spill. A little wobbly, but with some interesting reporting from the ground.
  • Vanity Fair: Survey among 52 world-renowned architects and specialists on the most significant works of architecture since 1980. Of course this is just a best-of list, but it’s compiled from the responses of people who know what they’re talking about and serves to highlight many of the remarkable buildings of the last 30 years, with a great overview provided in a slideshow. I’m suprised Santiago Calatrava didn’t make the final 21, but that’s the nature of these things…

    • Mail from David Mazzucchelli

    comics and cartooning, debate

    toth_pie_4_t.jpg
    I recently received the following correspondence from cartoonist David Mazzucchelli, re: my old article on his “Big Man” and its similarities with Bill DuBay and Alex Toth’s “Daddy and the Pie” (above):

    “Dear Matthias,

    I came across your essay, “The Child and the Giant,” several years ago, and would like to thank you for your flattering words (about me). Since I’ve noticed that it is still posted at your site (and rather prominently), I would also like to suggest one correction. Hard as it may be to believe, I had never seen “Daddy and the Pie” until about ten years AFTER I made “Big Man.” (Although Toth did have an influence on my work — especially at certain periods — it was based on a very limited acquaintance with his work.) Imagine my own surprise at seeing the similarities you discuss — down to certain panel compositions! Chalk it up to lack of originality on my part, I guess.

    Sorry if this pulls one of the legs out from under your argument.

    Best wishes,

    David Mazzucchelli”

    As I answered, to the contrary: I’m very happy to receive such a corrective. When I first saw “Daddy and the Pie”, it immediately struck me that it must have served as inspiration for “Big Man”, not the least because Mazzucchelli had channeled the older master so beautifully in Batman: Year One. I figured it couldn’t be a coincidence, but of course it could.

    Thanks, David!

    Roskilde 2010: A Look Back

    commentary and criticism, music

    purplerain.jpg
    Wow, it’s been three weeks. They just disappeared. But yeah, I did want to make a few points related to this year’s Roskilde Festival, before the subject gets way too old. It was a great time as usual, but rather poignantly for the year in which it celebrated its 40th anniversary, the festival seemed to be straining at the seams, trying to reconfigure itself to cope with globalisation and the digital age.

    There’s been a lot of criticism of the new restrictions imposed by the festival, most notably disallowing the carrying of even a single drink (even water) onto the festival grounds, as well as the profusion of new fees they levied on press and other people working there. This was irritating, sure, with the drinks issue seeming especially ungenerous (one wonders whether the money earned through increased drinks sales outweighs the problematic signal thus sent by what remains a non-profit festival, not to mention the antipathy it engendered in the festivalgoers). As for the media restrictions, many of the people who have populated the vanity fair that is the so-called media village over the years have been freeloading on the festival’s dime for long enough that these dispositions were understandable, even if they frustratingly affected people who’ve actually been putting in a lot of work in support of the festival for a long time. Ideally, the festival will be able to fine-tune these restrictions more fairly in the future, but I’m not holding my breath.

    More problematic was the elimination of the Astoria and (to a lesser extent) Lounge stages and the resultant cut from the programme of around fifty acts. Besides naturally affecting the festival’s musical diversity, this contributed to unusual and persistent congestion around the stages. Clearly a decision made to compensate for cash flow problems at a time when musical acts charge more for live performances than they used to because of falling revenue from record sales, it is a problem that won’t go away and needs serious thinking on the part of the festival organisers if they want to maintain Roskilde’s image as arguably the highest quality, most diverse and forward-thinking festival on the summer circuit.

    Distant Relatives — Nas & Damian Marley Interviewed

    interviews, music

    kn_damian_nas3.jpg
    One of the most positive musical surprises this year for yours truly has been the recently released Distant Relatives, which sees reggae scion Damian “Jr. Gong” Marley and hip hop veteran Nas teaming up for an Afrocentric album on the theme of our common heritage.

    Far from an assured success, the collaboration and the thematic focus the two have selected make for a remarkable consistent album, containing moments of vocal fire as well of spiritual oomph. The maturation Marley exhibited with last year’s remarkable Welcome to Jamrock continues on this record—his vocals are more varied and self-assured than ever—while Nas has not been this consistent on a whole album for many years.

    Musically, the album could have been a little more adventurous, sounding perhaps a little too polished, but it is skillfully and melodically composed by Damian and his brother Stephen and carries the amazing vocal performances perfectly, with nary a weak track and only one or two instances of ill-advised sentimentalism.

    I caught up with the two of them on their tour stop in Copenhagen the week before last, a few hours before a fantastic, sold-out show at Store Vega and got the chance to ask them some questions for Rapspot.dk. I was joined by my buddy, DubCNN’s PTA. Since we were in his hotel room, we started talking to Marley, but Nas showed up about half-way through.

    kn_damian_nas1.jpg
    Matthias Wivel: How did the album come to be? What made you decide to work together?

    Damian Marley: The album came to be because we were respecting and being fans of each other’s music. I invited Nas to be on the Welcome to Jamrock album, on a track called “Road to Zion”, and he had invited me to do some work with him on the Hip Hop Is Dead album—unfortunately, the song that we did together didn’t make it onto that album—so we always had an interest to do more work together. And then our management teams came up with the idea to do an EP of four songs based upon Africa. And when we started working on that EP, it became an album, so that’s how it happened.

    Traces of Soul, Mind, and Body

    commentary and criticism, pictorial arts

    verrocchio.jpg
    In the second edition of his great collection of artists’ biographies, Le vite dei piu eccelenti pitturi, scultori ed architettori (1568), the Tuscan painter and architect Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) wrote the following about the significance of drawing:

    “Seeing that Design, the parent of our three arts, Architecture, Sculpture, and Painting, having its origin in the intellect, draws out from many single things a general judgement, it is like a form or idea of all the objects in nature, most marvellous in what it compasses, for not only in the bodies of men and of animals but also in plants, in buildings, in sculpture and in painting, design is cognizant of the proportion of the whole to the parts and of the parts to each other and to the whole. Seeing too that from this knowledge there arises a certain conception and judgement, so that there is formed in the mind that something, which afterwards, when expressed by the hands, is called design, we may conclude that design is not other than a visible expression and declaration of our inner conception and of that which others have imagined and given form to in their idea.”

    The Italian word for drawing is disegno, a broader and more complex term than the more straightforward English ‘drawing’ and ‘design’. Disegno transcends these to encompass the very idea that emerges as drawing. As is apparent from Vasari, it is an epistemological term that unites spirit and matter.