After the wires are off…

Can someone (Hello Lisa Lyons!) tell me how to get this hair FOREVER?

Wired for brain

All wired up for my ambulatory EEG. For 24 hours a little box will record my brain waves, looking for those crazy epilepsy “spikes.” Melissa Shaw’s got a picture of me, complete with box, head gauze and Belgian beer that is much more telling. More soon.

The problem with a common name

I’ve been thinking, somewhat seriously, about changing my professional name for some time. It’s too damn common. ASIDE FROM ANOTHER CARTOONIST IN MY CITY with the same name, my Google Alerts is constantly throwing my way links for sportscasters, small-town politicians, and lately, a cowboy. Here’s a curious thing to wake up to:

I got an eyeful of Tom Hart, the cowboy on AMC’s Broken Trail, and I knew I wanted to do another western. The guy isn’t at all good looking. He’s not hero material in the sense of charm, but he had more grit than any hero I’d seen in …

Click here for more at petticoatsandpistols.com

And send ideas for what to change my name to my email address, which notably has no Tom or Hart in it, because they were all taken by the time I got there: hutchowen ( at ) gmail . com .

Longé, Sahmi visit New York City

The fabulous family of Christopher Longé visited NYC and Leela and me for 10 days ( staying in our tiny apartment!) and it couldn’t have been more fabulous. The family is Christopher, his brilliant wife Nadia, and his two brilliant (yes- they are all brilliant, trust us!) kids, Lilia and Tydian. They HEART NY!
Here they are enjoying a jacuzzi in New Jersey…

Grover Norquist, 2008, with cartoons

Well, my nemesis, Grover Norquist has published a book, “Leave Us Alone”.

To quote Bugs Bunny, “what a maroon”.

In fact, he is interviewed this week in The New York Times Magazine.

Read through this interview. Grover Norquist is the classic example of the walking baby-man, of which there is a surfeit in power in this society. A man, aged 40+ in body, 10+ in mind and emotion. My feelings about him are justified: he came up with his “no tax pledge” when he was 14. Grover’s problem, as I see it, is he never grew up.

Grover Norquist claims in his interview that private entities take care of their properties better than public ones. He claims parks as his example, but consider, let’s say, Okeefenokee Park. By all parameters, Okeefenokee should be a national park. It’s gigantic, a glorious national treasure, a unique ecosystem and living, wild environment. The park itself, for reasons you can read about elsewhere, is privately owned, pathetic- full of cardboard cut outs of Pogo and other swamp creatures. The goat stall, the train, the gift shop are all slight and embarrassing, and not one person knew anything about the “Walt Kelly Museum” on their grounds. Though everyone had a vague idea in which direction to point me. (Though let me say that everyone working their was very pleasant and charming.)

Your average National Park is run by dedicated rangers, and is full of scientists and other professionals dedicated to either the conservation of the park or the accurate education of the park goers. The parks are reasonably well taken care of, and are in equal service of the park and its patrons. Grover can keep his crappy little private parks.

Another example. The French trains (the SNCF), publicly owned, are clean, well-maintained, affordable, on time, efficient and fabulous. Compare to the London trains, mostly private and mostly shitty. Or any other number of competitive, penny pinching, profit-driven enterprises.

What GROVER NORQUIST, the jackass, doesn’t realize is that the same thing is true, private or public. Things are run best when they are run by responsible, intelligent, caring, well-trained people. Period. Whether they are private or public matters not.

Norquist, take a powder!

What a maroon! What an ignoranimous!

In honor of GROVER NORQUIST’S RIDICULOUS new book, I am running classic Norquist strips on Hutch Owen. Click here for the dailies. Click the image below for more Sunday Grover.

My bookstack, Feb 29

The new trend seems to be posting ones “BookStack.”

That’s Nabakov short stories, hidden by the glare. Leela is fond of being surprised that I’m not finished with it yet, as I’ve been reading it off and on for 8 or 9 years. Of course, that’s the way to read some short stories. On the bottom is a stack of short stories pulled from the New Yorker; that stack is the unread pile. I finished 100 Years of Solitude recently but it’s still reverberating around in my head so I include it here. And that’s Tsuge, above Marquez. Luckily, some of those are in the scanlations I’m reading, see below.

I realized posting this “BookStack” that A) it should also involve a shot of the folder of scanlations I’m trying to make it through (image below) and that B) what I really would need is a “CultureStack.” Said CultureStack would incorporate the Messiaen concert I went to with Jon Lewis, “Shortbus” by John Cameron Mitchell, the Lucien Freud exhibit at MOMA, my printmaking class with Bruce Waldman, the amazing Monica Hunken and Judith Malina at the Living Theater, and maybe even the obsessive games of Just A Minute I’ve been playing with Brendan Burford and other friends. Would it involve the conversation I had with Josh Bayer about Jack Kirby, dovetailing into our investigations into the neurosis of some processes of cartooning, dovetailing again into the Bayer’s description of “dangerous and farcical masculinity” in some films he’s been seeing?

All these wonderful things are keeping me from and feeding my work of cartooning and teaching. But who has time to blog about it?

Gainesville Round-Up

Leela and I decided to skip out on NYC and spent the holidays in lush, green, froggy, moist Gainesville, Florida. I’ve been meaning to post these for a while.

1. The moss.

2. The gators. Went to one sinkhole where we saw a good dozen or so. We (Leela, her brother and I) we sure they were LOGS until a crazed drunk naturalist came and pointed to them all, conjuring or animating them through his bony fingers, suddenly they were ALL ALLIGATORS. Tons of them!

3. The GREAT PUBLIX design! Publix, the grocery store chain down there must have hired some hot shot designers, cause the packaging on their generic products (beans, aspirin, garbage bags, juice, you get it…) are minimal and lovely. A simple color band- from a jeweled pallet with a touch of gray in it- on top, bisected by a simple black circle publix logo. Then, usually, a nicely styled and photographed shot of the product. The beans, whatever.

Sometimes, the images are playful- the trash bags have dogs on them, peering into the bins. And sometimes they are illustrated, as on the tampons. These products are so lovely. I walked around publix giddy about the stuff I might see around the next corner.
4.
Walt Kelly “museum” at Okefenokee Swamp.

Some December press and accolades

Erotica genius Polly Frost interviews me here:
http://pollyfrost.wordpress.com/2007/12/03/tom-hart-interview/

Cartooning Genius Dave Lasky draws me
HERE

While I’m at it, here’s an old interview by Tom Spurgeon with me

Nosferatu strips

I got so into putting Blumer into this costume. So another week exploring his determination to be in some other skin.

The thing about Blumer is that life sucks for him. Clinging to the belief that if he can just start over from scratch , things will be ok for him.

Damo Suzuki’s Network

Just saw Damo Suzuki in Brooklyn, in a room the size of my living room. Rhythmic, melodic, hypnotic, meditative, loud, constant, varying, alive, awesome.