Here's the movie I'm showing at Bridge tonight, at 8:30pm. Bridge is a restaurant/bar at 20 Broadway, between Wythe and Kent. I'm going to start making posters for the movies I show. This is just a sketch; I'm hoping to finish and print the lonely sole poster before the movie starts.



( Four more drawings... )

( the next page... )

I'm on Book four. Loving it. Love that Bobby Seale made an appearance.




( One more, not totally about 2666... )

A Pictorial Review of
Again, another quasi-/pseudo- book review. I was reading a ton of books until I got to this book. I read about 10 pages a day on this book; constantly re-reading, and re-reading again, looking up references and allusions, pondering exactly what it is they claim and how it relates to my world and the world I see around me. Anyway...


( Read the rest... )

A Pictorial Review of
Again, this isn't much of a book review. I'm getting back into the swing of things. I'm drawing a couple of projects until the book is going full steam. I'd like to get back to doing a full book review once a week.


( Read the rest... )

The daily journal gets off to a rocky start with this subpar outing.

So I want to draw a quick comic every day - no thoughts about style or anything; just a daily one page comic about whatever. Anyway, I also don't want to check facts on the internet, so I end up with what I have below, which says I was reading "Malcolm McDowell," who is an actor who was in A Clockwork Orange, If..., and a whole bunch of other movies, instead of "Malcolm Gladwell," who is the writer of books like Blink and The Tipping Point.

The article I read by Mr. Gladwell is from The New Yorker, and you can read it here. It's a great article, and what it has to say about genius and age goes against the popular conception, yet is fairly substantive.

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( Another drawing and a bunch of photos... )

I've watched all of the debates at my place, always with a group of friends.

( More of this drawing/comic, cut for the slower connections out there... )


Recently, my friend broke a bone in his wrist, so we drew on his cast.


( A few more photos and one of the most offensive drawings I've ever made... )

Just so you know, Mary Phelps Jacobs was a real person. She invented the first modern brassiere to receive a patent. Later in life, she started Black Sun Press with her husband, Harry Crosby. They published James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway and many others. She lived a wild life and became wildly politically active. A pretty amazing woman.




For more Polly Comics, click here.

I'm going to start posting a couple of times a day for the next week. I'm way behind on posts.

A Pictorial Review of
This isn't really a book review; more of a sketch for one, but the book is really weighing me down, so I thought I'd go back to doing at least one book review a week. I'm going to keep posting a sketch a day, and hopefully a couple of finished pages of comics a week, but I need some diversion other than the book, which I haven't even started yet.

I haven't been writing about economics because a) by now, everyone knows how bad the situation is, and b) anyone who bothers to read has by now tried to figure out what's going on.


One thing that concerns me is the amount of lies and public myths that are spreading around. Today I received, from two different people, "insider" information that "friends in banking" told them that "they" are going to close down banks today. I already deleted the texts, but they were exactly the same, which leads me to believe that you all have gotten the same thing, or WILL get the same thing today or tomorrow. But it is a lie. It's not true and there's no truth to it. I am a "friend in banking" and I can tell you it's bullshit.

Likewise, my LJ-friend Lin showed me another lie that I see popping up all over the place, including Wikipedia: the lie that the Community Reinvestment Act had anything to do with this crisis. It's a lie. Here's the facts. (A quick and rough overview: the lenders who followed CRA issued LESS subprime loans then everyone else.) It's a lie perpetuated by the far-right libertarian crowd who can't man-up and admit their direct responsibility for this crisis. They recklessly deregulated EVERYTHING for the last thirty years and THAT is what caused this shit storm.

Also, a lie on the left is that there is any sort of conscious will. That is, the lie that some evil cabal of bankers and rich dudes are deliberately doing this. Naomi Klein alludes to this, but is finally changing her tune. She's right to say that periods of crisis are exactly when people in power push the extremes of their ideology, but in this case, the very crisis is caused by the ideology that everyone has believed in for thirty years. More importantly, all of the bankers and regulators (including Congress, Paulson and Bernanke) know this, and although the bankers are still trying to prevents any laws passing that would hurt them in the future, they all know that this crisis could make them disappear and lose everything. They understand that their laissez-faire policies failed completely and are more interested in staying alive then acting as a global Svengali.

Anyway, I think the public is partially to blame for this mess, since they've been placidly cheering laissez-faire deregulation (for some reason that I will never understand). There were plenty of people warning everyone about this, but they were all Cassandras, all pilloried, laughed at, and ignored.


( The rest is mainly text, and isn't really worth reading... )