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…)

As we know, Juan Cole is an “anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist, an apologist for radical Islam” who “peddles Hamas propaganda.” Obviously if he were Iranian, he would have just voted for Ahmadinejad while shouting “Allahu Akbar.”

And yet today he’s written extensively about the evidence the election in Iran was just stolen by the country’s Islamic theocracy.

I’m confused. It’s like the world’s turned upside down!

From Time’s embarassing “please buy our magazine” suckup article on Twitter:

Injecting Twitter into that conversation fundamentally changed the rules of engagement. It added a second layer of discussion and brought a wider audience into what would have been a private exchange. And it gave the event an afterlife on the Web. Yes, it was built entirely out of 140-character messages, but the sum total of those tweets added up to something truly substantive, like a suspension bridge made of pebbles.

And what could be more substantive … than a suspension bridge made of pebbles!

How they view abortion in the rightwingoverse.

Brooks, this morning:

Sonia Sotomayor had bad timing. If she’d entered college in the late-1950s or early-1960s, she would have been surrounded by an ethos that encouraged smart young ethnic kids to assimilate. If she’d entered Princeton and Yale in the 1980s, her ethnicity and gender would have been mildly interesting traits among the many she might possibly possess.

Leaving aside the likelihood that Sotomayor would have had the opportunity to enter college in the late fifties, note the weaselly phrasing Brooks employs. If she’d “entered college” in the late fifties, early sixties … if she’d “entered Princeton and Yale” in the eighties.

See the thing is, Yale didn’t admit women until 1969. Brooks knows this, but it undercuts his thesis, so he tries to distract the audience with a clumsy rhetorical sleight of hand. And as with a bad magician, the clumsiness becomes more compelling than the illusion he’s attempting to create.

Today the news is filled with remembrances of the heroism of the soldiers who stormed the beach at Normandy. But why have we as a society forgotten the heroism of those who, on that terrible day, took French classes and played baseball in the afternoon?

This question is particularly piquant for me because my grandfather was one of these heroes. Here’s the cover of his journal from World War II:

Journal
—
CA Det D3D1
—
First U.S. Army
—
Normandy
Northern France
Germany
Cour Z

And here’s his entry for June 6th, 1944:

6 June 1944

French class and road march made up morning schedule. Detachment played baseball in the afternoon, after which all members discussed implications of D-day.

Just imagining what it was like for those young men gives me chills.

(He did end up in France ten days later.)

The torture apologia chart.

So, one of the things I’ve been keeping busy with over the past few months, along with finishing up the children’s book, has been working on some artwork for Pearl Jam. Had to stay quiet about it until now, and I still can’t say too much about it, but I do want to note that the image that Conan held up tonight was only part of a greater whole — it wasn’t the finished album cover. And apart from saying that working with the band has been an utterly fantastic experience, that’s probably most of what I can share at this point.