Brian's quite remarkable blog of wonder.

40 minutes of perusing Sam Javanrouh's fantastic blog, and now I'm completely decided: I'm going to save up for a camera.

Another outstanding source of photographic inspiration for me has been the Library of Congress' FSA/OWI collection, a series of photographs from the 1930s and 1940s documenting the quality of life during the Great Depression. There's a lot of great photos from New Mexico that I've been drooling over in particular.

Going after the big issues.

I wanted to catch that romantic nautical spirit of those cool paintings you see of ships in stormy waters. I don't think I really succeeded in doing this, unfortunately. But I guess it looks okay. I hope people will be able to tell that's a giant cannon and not, I don't know, a big elephant seal or something. I do a lot of worrying like this before my cartoons go out to press.

I visited Dan in the hospital. He's pretty messed up, but on his way to a full (but slow) recovery. Two broken ankles, a shattered tibia and a broken femur, and a messed up hand. Don't be a motorcycle moron, kids, you know what I mean? He's incredibly lucky he's alive, as he wasn't wearing a helmet.

Yesterday I had the chance to hear the Cedar Rapids Symphony and Susan Starr play Prokofiev's 3rd piano concerto (the piece that made me fall in love with Prokofiev when I was 15). The performance was almost immaculate. She missed a few notes here and there, but that's a lot better than missing entire cadenzas like my mortal enemy Christopher O'Riley last year with the 2nd concerto.

Today I practiced with Dirty Sixty (hey, here's a snapshot of us performing back in May, taken by Kevin P.). This was probably the first time the band actually "practiced" rather than just bumbling around. We're trying to get a set put together for this show we're going to do at some indeterminate future date with The Michael Tabors. Progress is going slower than I had hoped; and unfortunately I don't have all the time in the world to dedicate to writing/arranging/learning D60 songs, what with my school and two jobs. Being the creative impetus behind something like this is hellishly difficult.

Wow, my roommate just got in a pretty nasty car accident. I think he broke his leg. He doesn't want visitors, so I don't know when I'll find out how bad he is.

I figure I might as well start putting my new cartoons here in my blog, and eventually I'll make a page for them on the site. I don't know how the Daily Iowan feels about me publishing these cartoons here, but that's not something I'm going to worry about unless they decide to start paying for them.



Okay, so this is to accompany a point-counterpoint about the words "under God" in the pledge of allegiance; which is going to appear in the DI, I'm told, on Thursday.

The joke I'm making is a reference to the fact that the words "under God", which many people think are authentic to the original pledge, didn't really appear until 51 years ago, as a reaction to the "godless" menace posed by the Soviet Union (hence the picture of Joe McCarthy in the background). Thus, they are pretty much unnecessary now that the USSR is gone and, gee, aren't our biggest enemies religious zealots now and not atheists? I'm hoping, but not expecting, this to be common enough knowledge for at least some people to get this cartoon. With a little luck, this background will be covered in some of the articles that are going up with this cartoon on Thursday.

But the joke I'm really making is that the whole debate is stupid and ridiculous. Who cares what is in the pledge of allegiance? Kids certainly don't. I grew up saying "under God" with my hand over my heart every morning for my entire childhood. I also grew up in the Unitarian Church. Which one do you think has influenced me more? Our schools have enough trouble making kids remember who Magellan was for more than a year out of sixth grade; if there was some sort of strange federal agenda to make all kids grow up as God-fearers, you can bet they'd be doing more than making them say "under God" five times a week. Yes, to religious kids, "under God" applies nicely; but to the non-religious kids (like I was), "under God" was like all the other arcane stuff you take in while growing up, like all those weird nonsense symbols on dollar bills. Or like the word "indivisible," for that matter, to your average second grader.

On an unrelated note, I've been pretty good about not turning in piss-poor art lately. Even though I would get paid the same the crappier the art is (that being no money at all). The inking is looking pretty good, I daresay (but I hate lettering). Sometimes lines look parallel when you're drawing them, but then you look at it from afar and realize you should have used a ruler.

I'm starting to remember why I've never liked school in the past. Frankly, college is not so much about learning as it is about proving you've learned stuff. Once you've proven you've learned stuff, you forget it all like it was totally meaningless.

Right now I'm trying like hell to get used to my new life. Four weeks ago I was loafing around, watching TV and listening to music all day. Now I have no free time; tomorrow I have class and work from 8:30 AM pretty much until 1:00 AM the following day.

Also I've got this whole editorial cartooning thing. It's harder than I thought it would be. I'm notoriously bad with deadlines, even when I have nothing else going on in my life. I'm supposed to do two cartoons a week for them, and in the three weeks I've worked there I've done half that amount. The problem is mainly that I'm obsessive about quality; I throw away about 80% of the ideas I come up with. The other problem is that I often don't know where prudence lies when writing about controvertial political matters. As I discussed in a previous post, I'm opposed to the idea of looking to mainstream media as a precedent for my writing (both for the sake of originality and for the sake of not succumbing to the shitflinging tendencies to which mass media is prone); but recently I did just that. On assignment to make a cartoon about Hurricane Katrina and faced with a fast-approaching deadline, I simply didn't know what else to do but yet another It's-all-Bush's-fault cartoon. And don't get me wrong, the president's handling of Katrina was atrocious, but I don't feel good about A) oversimplifying a very complex issue and B) self-righteously jumping on one side of this oversimplied issue instead of focusing on the tremendous human suffering that should be vastly more important to us. I suspect I would have responded very differently to this challenge if I had known somebody in New Orleans or had lived there myself.

Well, I'll give myself a little credit and say that I am still learning this craft. My big goal is to try to handle stress and self-doubt better, and I'm doing well at that.

I've had an extremely good, extremely bad week.

I met with Dr. Fritts, the head of the Composition department. He listened to my clarinet piece, and said some very good things about it (and he only heard the first two minutes, which I thought was the weakest part).

Also, Michael Tabor and Jamal are interested in doing a show with Dirty Sixty and their band, The Michael Tabors. Holy cats! I've never thought about doing an actual performance before. This could be quite fun.

Conversely, I've been incredibly stressed out lately, and pretty insecure about a lot of stuff.