Madness of George II
This is one of the pieces I was happiest about, in terms of people getting the literary/dramatic reference in the context of the initial mass Tourette’s outburst of almost WWI-like zaniness from the US Government and society at large in the weeks after 9/11. I honestly didn’t think enough people in my audience would’ve seen The Madness Of George III to get it, but it turns out lots of folks had. I was rather embarrassed to have forgotten that the kind of people who collect my work aren’t going to be the kind of people who like films with hot babes, high-speed chases, robots turning into airplanes, and stuff blowing up.
It was another weirdly poignant piece: done originally for the October issue of The Progressive (without the headlines and captions) it dealt with the emerging imperialistic tendencies of the then-early Bush Regime and drawn a good month or so before 9/11.
Out With the Crew for an Evening’s Postering, Fall 2001
Gotta hurry on back to my hotel room,
where I got me a date with a pretty little girl from Greece;
she told me she would be there with me
when I paint my masterpiece!
–Dylan.
I try to think more about the guy we met at Dupont Circle who was overjoyed to have finally discovered where these posters came from, or the students from the George Washington Action Coalition out for a late-night bicycle ride on P Street who stopped off and jazzed us up with a quick blast of solidarity (”Yo, wheatpasters!”) to take my mind off the “neighbor” on Connecticut Avenue who stalked us — tearing down posters — for two blocks, and the DC cop who became frustrated with his own piss-poor knowledge of the law and inability to cite us for anything and proceeded to stalk us and tear down posters all the way down P Street from Dupont Circle almost to Georgetown, committing no less than half a dozen separate basic Constitutional violations in the process against our crew.
So, the next time you bump into some pacifist liberal who wants to “negotiate” with the police, direct them to this video.
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Fall 2001 IMF/World Bank Series
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
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
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