That would be what we authors like to call the Great Orange Satan Bump. (Which is to say, the book was mentioned on Daily Kos yesterday.)
… also: new reviews on the Very Silly Mayor site — including a video review from a reader who looks to be about three years old. Anyone who says that children won’t enjoy this book has never actually met a child.
It would be a Very Silly Reader who expected Tom Tomorrow to write a children’s book that didn’t have a point to make. But it might surprise some readers to discover that point isn’t some heavy political lesson, but is actually the type of common-sense moral that has been the basis for children’s stories all the way back to Aesop.
The story and its messsage are, basically, an update on the timeless classic “The Emperor’s New Clothes”. In TVSM, Sparky the penguin, Tom Tomorrow’s longtime voice of reason in his “This Modern World” comics, discovers that the Mayor of his medium-sized town has begun acting on some ideas that are - surprise! - Very Silly, indeed. (As a resident of a medium-sized city that has had its share of Very Silly Mayors, I sympathize.) Everyone else in town seems very happy with these ideas, but Sparky discovers that they may not be as happy as they say they are.
The book is filled with highly entertaining and colorful artwork. Fans of TMW will recognize Tomorrow’s style, as well as some of his stock faces (Blinky the dog is also on hand). And if Sparky is his usual self in that he is unafraid to say what he thinks, he does so in a polite and respectful tone that is appropriate in a tale for all ages.
As a book that adults and children can all enjoy, “The Very Silly Mayor” will be quite comfortable next to my copies of such classics as “Go Dog Go” and “The Cat in the Hat”.
As I’ve said before: for the cost of a burger and fries, you can support independent cartooning and seriously independent publishing.
I haven’t written much about the album itself, because up to now I wasn’t really supposed to, but also because I’m not much good at writing about music. But I absolutely love this album. Of course, I’ve been living with this music for eight or nine months, since Eddie Vedder sent me an early demo disk with about 3/4 of the songs from the album (and one that didn’t make the final cut), and then the final mix with all the songs a few months later. All I can say is, I haven’t grown tired of it yet. And from what I’ve seen, the early reviews are overwhelmingly positive, like this one from Spin:
“Gonna See My Friend,” “Got Some,” and “The Fixer” nearly upend each other rushing out the gate, exploiting Pearl Jam’s leanest, punkest tendencies. And those traits carry through the album’s 36 minutes. No time to waste and Obama in the White House mean no political bellyaching, so when Eddie Vedder pulls out that indignant yet inclusive snarl and proclaims, “When something’s gone, I wanna fight to get it back again,” you can probably assume “it” is his band’s mojo.
Even the requisite restrained ballads feel renewed: “The End” finds Vedder channeling Cat Stevens, backed by a string and brass ensemble. Then there’s the towering anthem “Amongst the Waves,” which could bring “Alive” fans back to the fold. It even expands on that song’s theme, moving from grudging survival to jubilant exuberance (”I’ve put away my early grave”). For the first time in years, Pearl Jam are seizing the moment rather than wallowing in it.
Speaking of Spin, their current issue has three different Pearl Jam covers. The subscriber edition features art by yours truly. If you’re not a subscriber I have no idea how you can get ahold of that one, but the same art is also featured on a special poster insert in all three editions.
Also: with the album “dropping” (as we music industry insiders say), and the band about to go on tour, PJ’s management has more important things to do than worry about whether or not I’ve seen every single usage of the art. So if you see it in some weird place, let me know, and snap a picture if you can. As I said to one interviewer recently, my usual relationship to my art is that of a parent to a small child — you keep an eye on them, you know what they’re up to all the time. This is more like what I imagine a parent’s relationship to grown children must be like — they go out in the world and do all these amazing things on their own, and you kind of watch from a distance, trying to keep track of it all.
After a nine month absence, Tom Tomorrow’s House of Shopping Fun has returned. T-shirts, coffee mugs, thongs, and now even those inexplicably ubiquitous Sigg bottles. Remember — every dollar you spend keeps this site online for a few more precious minutes.
Von Drehle identified the boycott as “a boon” to Beck’s ratings; but he didn’t say that it now includes more than sixty corporations, including Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway and Procter & Gamble.
FCP asked Von Dehele if sixty wasn’t a rather large number–one perhaps worth mentioning in his piece. “Well,” he replied. “There are millions of companies.”
Von Drehle also seems to think that the progressive hosts on MSNBC are really just like the right-wing crazies on Fox. But when FCP pressed him about that, he admitted that had no basis whatsoever for making any comparison:
“I haven’t seen Keith Olbermann for at least a year and a half,” the Time writer said. “And I’ve never seen Rachel Maddow. I have four children and a wife. I don’t sit around watching cable TV. I don’t understand why anybody watches any of these shows. I know what these opinions are based on: they’re based on nothing.”
I don’t expect a lot from Time magazine, but even I am astonished at this.
I did some art for this scrappy little band out west earlier in the year; the cd’s finally going on sale this weekend.
Target’s apparently selling a t-shirt featuring some portion of the album art as well, though I haven’t seen it yet. Now if only they’d stock the Mayor, my infiltration would be complete.
David Brooks was out jogging on the mall and saw some teabaggers interacting with actual black people, and because no one was literally shouting the n-word or fashioning a noose, he concludes that racism plays absolutely no part in whatever it is that drives this — well, I almost wrote “political movement” but I’m not sure you can dignify it as such. It’s really more of a mass temper tantrum.
At any rate, Brooks is in fine Mister McBobo form this morning. And the really sad thing is, the people he is implicitly defending, the fringers, the Limbaughs of his party — they hate him. They would happily and eagerly throw him under that metaphorical bus we hear so much about, at the first opportunity. The irony is, acknowledging and denouncing the vile elements that increasingly hold sway over his party would not only be the right thing to do for the sake of that elusive civil society to which people like David Brooks frequently claim to aspire — it would be in the best personal interests of David Brooks himself.
But instead, he claims that there’s no reason to believe that race played a role when a Confederate flag-defending congressman interrupted a black president discussing health care for illegal immigrants. (Irony number two: the only disagreement between the President and Joe Wilson being the vehemence with which said health care is denied.)
For a more reality-based take on the teabaggers, I recommend the video by Max Blumenthal, below, though I’ll warn you in advance, I found it depressing as hell.
(Also, because several decades have passed in internet time since I last posted this link: readers interested in a refresher course in the Unbearable Wrongness of Being David Brooks are directed to this classic article by Sasha Issenberg.)
