The Fall 2001 IMF/World Bank mobilization was to be our blockbuster sequel to A16, rumored by many to be the biggest mass mobe in town since Vietnam — Lord willing and the creek don’t rise, barring any sudden freakish turn of events — such as, say, a large airliner or two or three diving into a few really large buildings.

Needless to say, the wheels pretty much came off The Movement’s™ wagon very soon after 9/11; the Mobilization for Global Justice and Ruckus Society practically tripped over each other while backing out, citing (as I recall) “respect for the victims” — even as the neocons and other right-wing freaks at the time were preparing for endless war overseas and endless abuse of the Constitution at home, also out of consideration for “the victims”. Luckily, there was ANSWER, which went on with its events, shifting to a pro-civil liberties, anti-war focus for what was previously an anti-globalization mobe, so at least the Left hadn’t been totally bullied off the streets by the Neocons and their brownshirt pals in Free Republic and Gathering Of Eagles.

Liberate Labor, high-res jpg image, 1.1mb
Demand Justice, high-res jpg image, 645k
Take Back Your Dignity, high-res jpg image, 1mb
Defend Democracy, high-res jpg image, 1mb
Restore Your Planet, high-res jpg image, 839k

Continue reading "Fall 2001 IMF/World Bank Series" »

What’s especially ironic about this piece was that it was a piece with a World War II patriotic retro-kitsch motif based on the loud, kitschy, big-time phony WWII-era posters on the bus shelters and subway billboards being used to advertise a recent Disney special-effex blockbuster, the infamous Ben Affleck masterwork Pearl Harbor that came out early that summer… a good three months before the real, live, non-ironic, mindless patriotic kitsch seizure following 9/11.

On the purely non-issue-oriented side, a design and technical epic Win. The layout, pose and color came out a perfect match — I was able to find a high-res scan of the original WWII piece to point-sample my colors from — and it was also the first time I made serious use of top-highlight and middletone shadow hatching effects, drawn on a sheet of tracing paper with a dark graphite stick, scanned as a separate layer and dropped over the main drawing in Illustrator. I’d been kicking the idea around for a while, playing with it just a bit, but decided to try it whole hog after seeing Van Gogh’s La Meridienne at the Musèe d’Orsay a few months before.

High-res jpg image, 1.8mb

Continue reading "Monkeywrench Grrl" »

Sam Smith, author of the Progressive Review, also wrote and edited its “City Desk” column about news and issues local to Washington, DC until his retirement to Maine in early 2009. One of my favorite City Desk columns appeared around 2000, where he details Anthony Williams’ numerous achievements during his first term as mayor of DC — the closing of city shelters for homeless families, the closing of schools for redevelopment as condos, the deterioration of city services, the closing of DC General Hospital — in a column entitled “Anthony Williams’ Greatest Hits”. As the run-up to the ’02 mayoral election campaign was just getting started, I thought this series would be an excellent and easy-to-remember reminder to potential voters about what, exactly, Anthony Williams had given this city in the past three and a half years.

One happy accident here was, during the initial sketching, finding out how easily my rat could be made to look like Williams with some extra whiskers, a little shock of hair here and there, and a bowtie. I wish now that I’d saved that issue of the Washington Post Sunday Magazine with the cover story on Williams — while he was running for re-election, I think — and the photo the Post used was one of him when he was about three years old, wearing an outfit almost identical to the suits we saw him in while he was Control Board honcho and, later, mayor: that dull-assed gray thing with a plain white or light-blue shirt and that friggin’ bowtie. So, apart from being a soulless Ivy League technocrat and servant of oligarchs, Anthony Williams really did look like his momma dressed him.

Improvisational Firefighting, medium-res jpg image 645k
Write-In Incumbent, medium-res jpg image 710k
Not Enough Health Inspectors, medium-res jpg image 645k
DC General Hospital Closed, medium-res jpg image 645k
Schools Closed, Land Sold, medium-res jpg image 710k
Family Shelters Closed, medium-res jpg image 645k
UDC Public Radio Sellout, medium-res jpg image 581k
University of DC Gutted, medium-res jpg image 710k
Understaffed Fire Trucks, medium-res jpg image 774k

Continue reading "Anthony Williams’ Greatest Hits" »

At the time I was doing posters for the Counterinaugural, the Florida freak show was still playing out in the courts and in the streets. Besides, our message didn’t really depend on the results; the message for the Counterinaugural protests was that people need to organize and take action on their own behalf and look among themselves for “leadership” instead of depending on “elected” politicians and the results of an “election” rotten to the core with hypocrisy and corruption, and so mobbed up with corporate cash that its results couldn’t possibly be legitimate no matter who “won”.

Ironically but happily, the scene depicted here came quite close to being what actually happened at one of the feeder-march rallies headed up by a group including the Rev. Al Sharpton. I’d gotten used to having huge historic events right here in the same city, so when several thousand folks gathered just half a block from my house, within sight of my front stoop, at Staunton Square on Capitol Hill, that was some treat. The climax of the whole rally, just before marching past the Supreme Court and on downtown, was a “mass swearing-in” of all the folks present, a mass affirmation that the People are supposed to be the real “leaders”.

Medium-res jpg image, 839k

Continue reading "Inaugurauction!" »