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In the current copy  of the now Open Edition INTERFACES, I write about the brilliant, popular originator of what Der Spiegel magazine dubbed “art-journalism,” Molly Crabapple, and using multiple examples, demonstrate how combining image and text enables her to convey truths with an immediacy and accessibility that neither can do alone.

You will learn how the synergy of Crabapple’s duple talents enables her to give a voice to the victimized, stigmatized, and oppressed–how she has sympathetically portrayed the Occupy Wall Street protesters, sex workers, taxi drivers whose lives were destroyed by predatory lenders, the tortured inmates of Guantanamo, the Syrian peoples warred upon by their own government, and the Ukrainians attacked by Russia.

Enjoy, and don’t miss my embedded 2024 video interview with her.

Click here to read the article.

https://journals.openedition.org/interfaces/9762

 

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Brilliant and creative to the last of his 95 years (January 26, 1929-January 17, 2025), author of 35-plus books, plays, and screenplays, winner of a Pulitzer Prize and an Academy Award, all of Feiffer’s work was infused with social and political satire of the highest order.

In this interview he acknowledges that his goal was no less than the overthrow of the government and that the technique he employed was to make complex ideas readily accessible and, like Fred Astaire’s dancing, make the difficult seem easy.

A staunch opponent of authoritarianism, he has been taken from us just as we need him the most.

 

 

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In this July 2024 interview, the brilliant, popular originator of what Der Spiegel magazine dubbed “art-journalism,” Molly Crabapple explained that if she carried a chip on her shoulder it was not anger at some past injustice she suffered, but for other people.

Seeking to give a voice to victimized, stigmatized, and oppressed, Crabapple, has sympathetically portrayed the Occupy Wall Street protesters, sex workers, taxi drivers whose lives were destroyed by predatory lenders, the tortured inmates of Guantanamo, the Syrian peoples warred upon by their own government, and the Ukrainians attacked by Russia. Combining image and text enables her to convey truths with an immediacy and accessibility that neither can do alone.

Here, in this art-filled video, she narrates her first-hand experiences in war zones, with refugee children and struggling adults, as well as her observations on capturing beauty, the advantages of a pad and pen over a camera, and using art to earn a living as well as to circumvent censors.

 

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Voilá, the latest issue of INTERFACES, internationally renowned journal of text and image and my contribution to it–an extended essay on Frederic Tuten along with an on-camera interview with him.  Note this is not the brief commentary previously posted but an expanded discussion of the prolific author Tuten, and his art, including a first-of-its-kind art in which separate but complementary words and images combine to create a new form.  Enjoy it and the many fascinating takes on adaptations as they cross a variety of media.

51 | 2024I found Paris inside me – Frederic Tuten creates a new art form 

And check out The Writer’s Brush: Paintings, Drawings, and Sculpture by Writers for more than 400 plates of artwork by great writers and the stories behind them.

Connect with me on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Medium, YouTube,  Goodreads , and please  sign up for my blog ! You can purchase The Writer’s Brush and other books on Amazon here.

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I am happy to report that Book Life selected Still Phyllis as an Editor’s Pick, saying:

“Incisive, moving, and stripped of sentimentality…scrupulous prose… Scenes of brother and sister still managing to understand each other despite the fraying of Phyllis’s capacity for language have rich power… That commitment to rigorous thinking and writing about life as it’s actually lived powers this first-rate memoir, an act of memory, empathy, and love. … Finely wrought, deeply human memoir of a sister’s neurodegenerative disorder.”―Book Life

 

 

All royalties from sales of Still Phyllis have been assigned to the Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease Foundation

My sister Phyllis was a vital, single woman, a photographer and writer, who was enjoying life in the city when she was suddenly stricken by Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD), a disease rarer than a lightning strike that spreads, incredibly, via a non-living molecule called a prion. Terrified to realize she couldn’t perform her duties at work, Phyllis very soon couldn’t even find her way to her desk or to her apartment from the corner store. Informed of her diagnosis with this dementing and always fatal illness, I, her estranged brother, her only living relative, brought her home (against the advice of her doctors) to care for her with my wife.

This memoir tells the profoundly affecting family drama that ensued. It is a story of reconciliation and of how, paradoxically, closeness can deepen when words are lost—a truth that I hope will inspire others with a friend or family member with dementia.

 

Buy the Book: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, Books-A-Million

All royalties from sales of Still Phyllis have been assigned to the Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease Foundation

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“Donald Friedman brings his considerable literary gift to this memoir of despair, and with that gift fills the pages with the flickering light of the spirit.”

―William Kotzwinkle author of ET the Extraterrestrial and Felonious Monk

All royalties from sales of Still Phyllis have been assigned to the Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease Foundation

 

 

 

My sister Phyllis was a vital, single woman, a photographer and writer, who was enjoying life in the city when she was suddenly stricken by Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD), a disease rarer than a lightning strike that spreads, incredibly, via a non-living molecule called a prion. Terrified to realize she couldn’t perform her duties at work, Phyllis very soon couldn’t even find her way to her desk or to her apartment from the corner store. Informed of her diagnosis with this dementing and always fatal illness, I, her estranged brother, her only living relative, brought her home (against the advice of her doctors) to care for her with my wife.

This memoir tells the profoundly affecting family drama that ensued. It is a story of reconciliation and of how, paradoxically, closeness can deepen when words are lost—a truth that I hope will inspire others with a friend or family member with dementia.

 

Buy the Book: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, Books-A-Million

All royalties from sales of Still Phyllis have been assigned to the Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease Foundation

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“At this time of my life–someone would say, the winter of my life, although I don’t feel cold,” Frederic Tuten, novelist, essayist, short story writer, and art critic, tells of finding a new joy in painting.  “Practically no day passes where I’m not either writing and painting or painting and writing, whichever comes first in the morning.” And Tuten’s art is not merely avocational, but has been critically praised, reproduced in a 2022 book, On a Terrace in Tangiers, and is shown and sold through quality art galleries. Moreover, in Tangiers Tuten creates an entirely new kind of art in which the images are accompanied by stories. Uniquely, the images do not illustrate the stories, nor do the stories explain the art; rather, they synergistically produce a third reality–a set of emotions and perceptions in the reader/viewer that are different and deeper than either text or image could alone.

With his natural story-telling skills, in this 2023 interview Tuten tells how he went from adolescent fantasizing about being an artist in Paris to this late in life success. “At 15 I just thought I would go to Paris and somehow I’d meet some artists, and they would all sort of like take me in as a fellow artist and I would get a little place maybe like in the film ‘American in Paris,’ a little atelier up above a cafe, and I’ll meet a great-looking beautiful woman like Leslie Caron in the film, and then she’ll become my girlfriend and my model.” After a failed attempt at figure drawing at the Art Students’ League he turned his focus to fiction  writing–but also to reviewing contemporary art shows in the U.S. and abroad for the New York Times and leading art magazines.

Today, it is Tuten’s art that is being shown and reviewed: “Not thinking about anything except the sheer pleasure of making the work, Tuten forges wondrous paths…(that) inspire us to be just as spirited and creative and capricious as the artist,” wrote Ida Panicelli in ARTFORUM. An example:

 

Enjoy many more in this video interview, and especially the story of how Tuten, having worked up the courage to show some early efforts to his friend, famed artist Roy Lichtenstein, got the encouragement he needed to persist, to transform himself from amateur to professional, to achieve his goal of making pictures that would give others pleasure.

Please check out The Writer’s Brush: Paintings, Drawings, and Sculpture by Writers for more than 400 plates of artwork by great writers and the stories behind them.

Connect with me on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Medium, YouTube,  Goodreads , and please  sign up for my blog ! You can purchase The Writer’s Brush and other books on Amazon here.

 

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Why is this night of Passover,2023, different from all other nights?

Because this celebration of the Exodus, a symbol to peoples everywhere—Jews and Christians alike–who’ve won the hard fight for freedom, is being overshadowed in Israel itself by a group of democracy-suppressing, racist, and violent Jews.

Because, after centuries of Seders, of praying for return to a Jewish homeland, Israel and all that it was meant to symbolize is being destroyed—not by the increasingly antisemitic world, but by the Jewish citizens of Israel themselves.

Because the dream of Israel as a light unto the nations, a democratic state embodying the Jewish principle that each of us has an obligation to, and must have compassion for, others—Hillel’s lesson that Jesus took to heart and made a foundation of Christianity—is in danger of being extinguished.  It is the principle that evoked the murderous hatred of Hitler whose opposing belief was that the world belongs to those with the power to seize it.

The betrayal of this principle is found in the attempted disempowerment of Israel’s Supreme Court by Netanyahu and Itamar Ben-Gvir, momentarily halted by massive opposition. But there is also a terrible threat in the effort to create a policing force to address internal disorder, to be run by Ben-Gvir, the same Ben-Gvir who was convicted in 2006 of supporting a terrorist organization and inciting racism, the Ben-Gvir who openly advocates shooting demonstrators, expelling Arab citizens, and who has supported settler pogroms.

In this he seems to have taken a page from Hitler’s tactic in the 1930s. after his conviction and imprisonment for a failed coup in Bavaria. To initiate his agenda, Hitler created a paramilitary wing within his Nazi party, to protect its rallies, to disrupt the meetings of the opposition, and intimidate trade unionists and most especially Jews. It was called the Sturmabteilung, also known as the SA, but more informally as the Brownshirts for the color of their uniforms. It was this huge group of thugs that gets the credit for Kristallnacht, when virtually all of Germany’s 200 synagogues were destroyed, along with more than 7,000 Jewish stores, a number of Jews were beaten to death, and 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and removed to concentration camps.

If Itamar Ben-Gvir were given command of a National Guard, he could and likely would employ it as his own private militia—his own Kahanist/Proud Boys/Oath Keepers/Boogaloo Boys band—fully armed and militarized, but with the sanction of the state—giving him the unbridled ability to attack the Arab minority, and progressive secular Jews as well.

Yesterday, the New York Times reports, the government agreed to move forward with Ben-Gvir’s National Guard, as it was his demand for supporting Netanyahu’s plan to destroy the independent judiciary and abort his trial for corruption.

This night, this Passover, is different from all others, because when it concludes with the ancient cry, “Next year in Jerusalem,” we will need to consider deeply what we might get were that wish granted. .

 

 

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The genius of Ralph Steadman can be found in the more than 50 books he’s written or illustrated (or both written and illustrated), in his famous partnership with Hunter Thompson and the creation of Gonzo journalism—the two not just covering a story but becoming it. “Bats over Barstow,” reproduced here, is one of his drawings from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Steadman’s creative brilliance shines in the lyrics he wrote for Richard Harvey’s oratorio Plague and the Moonflower, in the songs he’s written and recorded, and in a wide range of artistic expressions–from beer bottle labels, to British postage stamps, to diverse theater sets, including one for the Royal Opera House production of a ballet of The Crucible. But most of all, Steadman’s genius is manifested in his scathing, scurrilous, occasionally scatological, always over the top, visual assaults on corrupt, authoritarian, and stupid politicians, and in his protest of social unfairness.

You may be as surprised as I was to discover when I had the privilege of interviewing this savage satirist, that Ralph Steadman is a gentle, soft-spoken, utterly decent man.  Less surprising were his observations and insights into the horrors of America and what he calls its “screaming lifestyle.”  Consider this prescient 1975 drawing of a mob of police beating some poor soul–a scene that is sadly ubiquitous across the country nearly half century later:

Or how, with subtle alteration, he exposes  a  hidden malevolence–specifically the corporate greed and manipulation behind the oversized, ostensibly benign and child-beloved cartoon figures at Disneyland. From their unhappy faces, the kids, unlike their dollar-drained parents, are not taken in.

Enjoy many more examples of Steadman’s art in this video interview, and especially the story of how the boy Steadman, inspired by a fifty cent used copy of Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebooks, was able through hard work and “taking pains,” to turn early failure into great success.

Please check out The Writer’s Brush: Paintings, Drawings, and Sculpture by Writers for more than 400 plates of artwork by great writers and the stories behind them.

Connect with me on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Medium, YouTube,  Goodreads , and please  sign up for my blog ! You can purchase The Writer’s Brush and other books on Amazon here.

The post RALPH STEADMAN: “GENIUSES ARE REALLY LOSERS WHO TRY HARDER.” appeared first on Donald Friedman.

On March 10, 1948, at 48, Zelda Fitzgerald, widow of F. Scott, died in a fire in a locked hospital room during the last of her many confinements for chronic mental illness. Variously diagnosed as schizophrenia and bi-polar disorder, at least one biographer asserts that a major objective of her treatment was to restore her to the appropriately domestic life she had rejected. Zelda was then merely one of innumerable women in history whose creative potential went unrealized or which had been subsumed by a prominent husband’s.

A ballet student in girlhood, at the too-late age of 27, Zelda made an obsessive try at a career as a dancer. She was a writer who published one poorly received novel, Save Me the Waltz (1932), and only after major revisions demanded by an infuriated F. Scott who had planned to use some of the same material in Tender is the Night, then a work in process. Zelda was also a capable artist who, besides her painting, like Hans Christian Anderson, found a métier in decoupage, creating cutout paper dolls which she believed had educational value and which she tried unsuccessfully to get Scott’s editor, the legendary Maxwell Perkins, to publish. The dolls, inspired by notable French painters, were exhibited in small venues and touted as a way to introduce children to contemporary art. Here’s Zelda’s portrayal of the sorceress “Morgan Le Fay” (c. 1941). In Zelda’s imagining, the supernatural, sexually voracious Morgan is rendered so as to manifest her power in an unambiguously masculine body. A collection of her dolls was published in 2022 as The Paper Dolls of Zelda Fitzgerald, by her granddaughter, Eleanor Lanahan.

A tomboy as a child, and a jazz age flapper as a young woman, it is not difficult to imagine her behaviors as female emancipatory expressions. Zelda extolled the carefree, sexually open, rebellious life, declared she wished it for her daughter ahead of “a career that calls for hard work.” But Zelda’s industry and the intensity of her creative pursuits belie her praise of the lighthearted and superficial ethos of the day. At some level she recognized the truth observed by her biographer, Nancy Mitford:  the life of a flapper was “potentially destructive and that it would demand its own continual and wearying performance.” Of course, in the end she opted, however conflictedly, for a domestic role alongside F. Scott.

Zelda’s resentment of her husband—if not his creativity then his dismissiveness of hers–was not well concealed. Save Me the Waltz is viewed today as a protest of female oppression, and Zelda, herself, as a feminist martyr. When given an opportunity by the New York Tribune to pen a light-hearted review of Scott’s The Beautiful and Damned, Zelda urged readers to buy the book for its aesthetics, which she attributed to “a portion of an old diary of mine which mysteriously disappeared shortly after my marriage, and, also, scraps of letters which, though considerably edited, sound to me vaguely familiar.” She concluded: “Mr. Fitzgerald—I believe that is how he spells his name—seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home.”

Not only did F. Scott not acknowledge the degree to which he purloined Zelda’s writings to enhance his own, but he shamelessly modeled his female protagonists after her, and in the least flattering way; they are all, like Zelda, beautiful seductive women from wealthy backgrounds who ultimately destroy the men they ensnare. Zelda seems to have taken her retribution in a way to inflict maximum wounding–by attacking his masculinity–likely his greatest vulnerability..

If his buddy, Ernest Hemingway, is to be believed, Scott confessed to him one night in a Paris brasserie that, “Zelda said that the way I was built I could never make any woman happy and that was what upset her originally. She said it was a matter of measurements.  I have never felt the same since she said that and I have to know truly.”  Hemingway, also not spared Zelda’s emasculating comments, was accused by her, according to Nancy Mitford, of being “just a pansy with hair on his chest.” (And one cannot ignore the homoeroticism in Hemingway’s taking Scott into the toilet for some dropped pants reassurance.)

Zelda’s legacy, apart from the pathos and passion of her life, and the era in which it was lived—all conjured up by the mere mention of her name–is her visual art. According to Laura Maria Somenzi, a Woodrow Wilson Undergraduate Fellow who curated a 2011 exhibition at the Johns Hopkins Evergreen Museum and Library, more than 100 of her works have survived, In an accompanying catalogue, Somenzi reports on Zelda’s studying Van Gogh and his influence on her own painting.  In addition to spending time with the likes of Picasso and Leger, she took painting lessons, and was profoundly affected by Georgia O’Keefe, both as an artist and female.

One can perhaps detect some O’Keefe influence in this painting of a female figure with flowers, although the subject’s manly shoulders, and hypertrophied muscles are a distinctively Zelda touch.

Female figure with flowers (c.1932-34) Gouache and pencil on paper. Department of English, The Johns Hopkins University.

Contemporaneous with her final confinement at the Ashville, North Carolina, hospital she produced this disturbing surreal depiction of a picnic which can be read as a summary of her life:

 

Titled, “A Mad Tea Party,” (Gouache on paper, F. Scott & Zelda Fitzgerald Museum), it possesses none of the fun of  Lewis Carroll’s absurdist vision, but projects a joylessness one cannot help but read into her psyche. The strewn teacups, like the basket, are empty, the figures on the blanket—a collapsed, white-faced, emotionless, frail, doll-like woman in ballet shoes, and an upright, gray, faceless, muscled, masculine form, also in ballet shoes—and overseeing it all, a top-hatted man in black formal wear with a red cape suggest the sense of failure, the emptiness and lack of control she must have felt at that low point in her life.

 

 

 

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