In this new campaign video, Senator Bernie Sanders discusses his values, his political convictions, and his fucked up noise band, Frog Piss. It is real shitty garbage.
Written by Benjamin Korman and Max Blecker Director, DP, Editor - Max Blecker Bernie Sanders - Benjamin Korman
The identical twins of the Identical Twins Moving Company are identical twins
Writer, Director - Benjamin Korman Director of Photography - Michael McDermott Editor - Max Blecker Sound - Christina Nickas Starring: Jackson Wingate Emily Lynne Benjamin Korman
Below are some words from Art Spiegelman about several recent cartoonist related events.
A very good MSNBC interview on with Speigelman and Francoise Mouly speaking on the same subject can be seenhere.
Though Spring Semester has ended and I’m no longer Professor Hebdo, I will always be interested in talking openly about these issues.
Love to you,
Professor Squirrel Head
On Tuesday
night, Art Spiegelman hosted a table at the PEN gala, after other
authors dropped out in protest of an award being given to French
satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Here, he speaks to TIME about the
award and why cartoons are so misunderstood by many Americans.
TIME: After six writers withdrew from hosting last night’s
PEN gala honoring Charlie Hebdo, why did you decide to step up and
co-host the event?
Spiegelman:
It seemed necessary as a corrective to what I saw as boneheaded reasons
for the pullout. I decided to accept an invitation to host a table that
I’d passed on before, because black tie galas aren’t my thing, and I
had something else I was supposed to do that night. But after those six
authors, who I’ve come to think of as a kind of super hero team called
the Sanctimonious Six, pulled out, I just felt that it was necessary to
be a corrective and invite other sympathetic people to be there to
shout, “Cartoonist lives matter.”
Why was it important to honor Charlie Hebdo with the James C. Goodale Freedom of Expression Courage Award?
One point that was made over and over again was that this is an award
for courage. And it’s hard to be more courageous than going back to
work after your office has been bombed and your comrades have been
slaughtered. On those grounds alone, one would think, “It’s a no
brainer. They get the award.”
Beyond that, the magazine was getting a really bum rap. It’s actually
anything but a racist magazine. One of the most touching things for me
during the award ceremony last night was having the head of SOS Racisme,
a French organization that combats racist activity, very movingly talk
about Charlie Hebdo being a great force against racism in France.
They received the award for using their particular vocabulary and
medium to stir debate on issues, not to create mischief, and they did it
estimably, even when people didn’t agree with them. As one of the
editors pointed out yesterday, the Charlie Hebdo editors don’t
even agree with each other. The point of these cartoons is to start
conversations about these issues. And these issues are not trivial.
This week, we also saw a shooting in Texas outside of a “Draw
Muhammad” contest sponsored by the American Freedom Defense Initiative.
What’s the difference between Charlie Hebdo and Pamela Geller’s
organization?
I think that’s when my brain short-circuited. Because superficially,
it seems like, well, the same thing is happening in Texas. But it’s not.
It’s the anti-matter, Bizarro World, flipside, mirror-logic version of
what Charlie Hebdo is about.
The American Freedom Defense Initiative is racist organization. It’s
exactly the nightmare version that the writers who were protesting the
PEN award thought Charlie was. But Charlie is an anti-racist, political
magazine that does not have an agenda that consists of wanting to bait
or trouble Muslims.
Pam Geller’s organization is intentionally trying to start war of
culture with Islam by saying that all Muslims are terrorists under the
surface, and we’re going to prove it. Do the group members deserve free
speech protection? Of course. But they’re hiding behind that banner with
things that have very little to do with free speech and a lot to do
with race hate.
What is the role of images and cartoons in this debate?
It’s interesting to me that cartoons have been so central to it.
Cartoons are so much more immediate than prose. They have a visceral
power that doesn’t require you to slow down, but it does require you to
slow down if you want to understand them.
They have a deceptive directness that writers can only envy. They
deploy the same tools that writers often use: symbolism, irony,
metaphor. Cartoons enter your eye in a blink, and can’t be unseen after
they’re seen. But to understand some of these cartoons requires a lot of
culture immersion and symbol reading and a lot of analysis.
There was a New Yorker cover back in the beginning of my
time at the magazine that helped change the magazine’s DNA enough to
embrace controversial images. It was in the wake of the Crown Heights
race riots in which the West Indian black community and the Hasidic Jew
community came to bloody blows. As I was doodling I wondered, “What
would the guy with the monocle look like if he were Hasidic?” And then I
had a black woman kiss him.
When the cover came out, it created a riot of its own—as much
indignation on both sides as possible in the world before the Internet.
Among the letters that came in to the magazine was a letter from a young
woman saying that she thought it was really sweet that on Abe Lincoln’s
birthday there was a picture of Lincoln kissing a slave. What’s so
amazing about that is that it gets right to the heart of the problem
that some of the protesting PEN writers have: learning to read images.
They’re very easy to misread without enough information, and some of my
writing brethren are great mis-readers.
What would you like to see moving forward?
We should be teaching visual literacy in all schools. We’re bombarded
with images more and more, and we have less and less time to understand
them. What’s amazing about these simple drawings is that they stand
still long enough for you to circle them and get around them in ways you
often can’t with videos.
It’s not easy for Americans, because for one thing there are hardly
any political cartoonists in America at this point. Political
cartoonists are a dying breed. Here there are fewer newspapers, fewer
newspapers with a cartoonist on staff, and political cartoons have been
reduced to being a variant of a gag cartoon because the last thing a
newspaper would want to do is lose a single reader.
I’m stuck having to agree with my bête noir friend Pam Geller that it
would be better going forward for newspapers and magazines to take on
the responsibility for showing these images. When the Danish Muhammad
cartoons appeared in 2006, and when the Mohammad cartoons from Charlie Hebdo
appeared, newspapers should have shown these images and talked about
them. Many dismissed them as banal and treated them as, “Nothing to see
here, move along.”
If it were taken as a matter of course for newspapers and magazines
to show these images, they could be normalized, so the many Muslims not
offended to the point of grabbing a machine gun could understand that
this is how our culture functions with images and issues. It would
create a better-informed population dealing with whatever comes next. It
would also be useful to have other voices on newspaper and magazine
staffs.
What’s the mistake in not publishing images that could be deemed offensive?
There’s no stopping it. What would it be based on? Would it be based
on when someone takes up arms against the image? Would it be based on
when someone thinks it’s offensive? God knows where the line would be
drawn. It can’t be drawn that way. There is an incredible efficiency
cartoons have, once you learn to read them, in clarifying the issues at
hand, making them memorable.
There’s something basic about cartoons. They work they way the brain
works. We think in small, iconic images. An infant can recognize a
smiley face before it can recognize its mother’s smile. We think in
little bursts of language. This is how cartoons are structured. They’re
structured to talk to something deep inside our brains. A cartoon
becomes a new kind of word that didn’t exist before.
It’s interesting how little respect they get. “Oh, anyone could draw that crude, vulgar scrawl,” said a number of critics of Charlie Hedbo. That’s not quite true. They’re not totally dismissible. If a writer had made some of the points that Charlie Hebdo had made, I don’t think the writers protesting PEN would have been so condescending and dismissive.
(Below, more of Art Speigelman’s New Yorker Covers)
