Health care reform: here we go again. For anyone who was old enough to be paying attention in the early nineties, there’s a depressing familiarity to the current debate.

I’m slowly emerging from what may have been one of the most intense, busiest periods of my working life — particularly the last month or so. It’s been very frustrating, to have so much going on, and to not be able to write about most of it. I’ve had some extraordinary experiences over the past few months, and come the fall, I hope to be able to lift the veil of secrecy somewhat.

I can say this: one of the joys of the past six months or so has been working with people who give a damn about what they’re doing. This has not always been my experience in recent years, with publishers and so on. But both with the album cover and with the children’s book, I had the great good luck to be collaborating with people who were genuinely focused on the quality of the end product.

And I’ve just received an advance copy of the actual, physical, published kid’s book, and I couldn’t be happier. When you’re in production on something like this, there are a million details you have to work out, and even when you’re working with good people it seems like you’re inevitably going to miss something — but the Mayor turned out exactly as I’d hoped. I really couldn’t be happier with it.

The book, which I wrote about in more detail in this post, will be available in stores in September (as will the PJ album — it’s going to be an exciting fall). And there are pre-order links on the very official Very Silly Mayor placeholder homepage.

All about US: the American right responds to the turmoil in Iran.

All best wishes to my friend Derf, who is currently recuperating from open heart surgery.

The entire week I spent in Seattle, it was sunny and warm. Since I’ve been back on the East Coast, it’s been grey and drizzly and cool.

These are not the weather patterns to which I have grown accustomed!

Tom-You’ve got to come up with some new material. The dim bulbs that actually get political information out of the Creative Loafing and Rolling Stone might actually not notice but your hard-on for Glen Beck is starting to get reduntent. I mean to a point that your otherwise ridiculous comic is actually outdoing itself in how retarded it really is. Come up with some new stuff would ya?

Great point! We don’t want to be “reduntent”! Why, in the last six months, I’ve mentioned the right wing’s most popular rising commentator at least twice!* I hope my editors at Rolling Stone don’t get wind of this, particularly in light of the fact that my work has never appeared in Rolling Stone!

Glenn Beck’s fans apparently have the same distant, somewhat strained relationship to reality as the man himself …

________

*In the cartoon, which this letter references. Mr. Beck admittedly comes up more often here in the informal setting of the blog.

Thinking that changing the color scheme on your blog will somehow help the protestors in Iran has to be the wankiest thing I’ve heard since … well, since about anything that came out of the rightwing wankosphere circa 2003.

Clear-eyed conservative realism translated into English.

On Mondays, the Times’ business section often focuses on the declining fortunes of the various journalistic and creative enterprises which we collectively describe as “media.” It’s invariably a depressing start to the week:

When Google representatives recently invited dozens of prominent artists to contribute work to be featured on its new Web browser, the company enthusiastically sold the idea as an opportunity to have artwork shown to millions.

But some, like Gary Taxali, were not impressed. Mr. Taxali, an illustrator based in Toronto whose work has appeared in publications like Time, Newsweek and Fortune, received a call in April from a member of Google’s marketing department. According to Mr. Taxali, the Google representative explained that the project will let users customize Google Chrome pages with artist-designed “skins” in their borders.

“The first question I asked,” Mr. Taxali said in a recent interview, “is ‘What’s the fee?’”

Mr. Taxali said that when he was told Google would pay nothing, he declined.

* * *

“So for you, I give you a special salute that I hope will keep you away because I don’t need your work,” Mr. Taxali wrote, followed by his own drawing of a hand gesture popular with impatient motorists.

Paying in “exposure” is how underfunded and/or miserly publications have wheedled free art out of illustrators for a very long time. The logic goes like this: we can’t afford to pay you, but your work will be exposed to someone who can. Exposure is the bottom rung on the ladder, one step toward a career in which people value the work you do enough to pay you for it. The problem is when you reach the very top of the ladder and the same argument is being used. Where exactly are you supposed to go from there?

And as artists are fond of pointing out, the local grocery store is unlikely to accept “exposure” in payment for a gallon of milk.

As another artist in the article notes: “I have done gift cards for Target that are in stores nationwide and animations for Nickelodeon that run 24 hours a day worldwide on cable TV … both of these jobs were high-profile and gave my work great exposure but both clients still paid me.”

1. Saw Eddie Vedder play solo in Philly over the weekend. I know there are still various dates upcoming on the tour — no idea if tickets are available anywhere, but if you can go, you should. It’s an awesome show. (This is, of course, a biased assessment, given my recent work with and for Pearl Jam. But it’s also true!)

2. Neil Young’s PR people were kind enough to send a set of the discs from his new Archives release. I haven’t had a moment to listen to any of it yet, but it goes without saying that it’s a must-have for fans of Neil. We’ve been waiting for this release for, what, about twenty years now? Anyway more info here. (The discs came without any of the packaging or extras, so I can’t tell you anything about any of that…)