this is what concerns me:

This looks like fun, but it costs $42,997. The plans alone are $995. Wonder how much it costs to build… (Permits not required, composting toilet not included.)

I don’t read Jezebel, but I do subscribe to their Joan Didion tag. This is what Sadie Stein had to report back from Didion’s “cold, detached” presence at last week’s New York Review of Books panel.

She started by describing the “unexpressable uneasiness” she and some others had felt early on in the campaign. Why? “We were getting what we wanted,” she continued, meaning, a smart, qualified, decent candidate the Eastern elite could get behind. And yet the frenzy surrounding Obama made her uneasy — both the sense that he was a young person’s candidate, “a generational thing we couldn’t understand” and the unthinking embrace of “naivete transformed to hope, partisanism as consumerism.” Didion bridled at the wanton use of “transformational” and said she couldn’t count the number of times she heard the 60’s evoked “by people who apparently had no memory that the 60s” didn’t involve decking babies out in political onesies.

Didion was at pains to say that she did not think any of this was Obama’s doing, nor to his tastes. He would, she speculated “welcome healthy realism” and achievable expectations. In our frenzy, we are doing him a disservice, expecting miracles “at a time when the nation can least afford easy answers.” She recalled, the day after the election, an overexcited newscaster declaring that we now possess “the congratulations of all the nations.” She likened this to the naivete of thinking we’d be regarded as beloved saviors in Iraq. But, she ended, “in the irony-free zone that our country has become, this is not what people wanted to hear.”

Sorry, you can go back to worshiping your Hope posters now, kids.

Honestly, I had no idea the economy was so bad as to drive the Mountain Goats and the Weakerthans into the cruise industry. Et tu, Kids in the Hall? Et tu?

“The Federal Reserve is refusing to identify the recipients of almost $2 trillion of emergency loans from American taxpayers or the troubled assets the central bank is accepting as collateral.” –Bloomberg

Things have been relatively bustling in my living room at TIWCM HQ lately. For APE last weekend, I made a lil’ quarter-sized, 24 page self-obsessed mini-comic about my favorite shoes (pictured: page one) and, in typical TIWCM fashion, table-squatted with the thing rather successfully. I swear that one of these days I will pay to play. Stumptown, perchance? Good news: that leaves nearly six months for a couple other stories, including the long FNB situation. Oh, plus my return to regular civilization.

Bad news: the entire miniscule “lit” comics industry may very well have collapsed in upon itself in a small, self-contained haze of inflated egos and semi-toxic inks by that point. Tom Spurgeon shares his cynical old-man wisdom on the subject.

For every new exhibitor at SPX putting their creativity on paper in order to share it with a couple of hundred fellow travelers, two young Hollywood functionaries descend on San Diego for the first time looking for idiosyncratic projects with a hook by which they get to justify their place on payroll.

Me, I’m just happy to get some really sweet deals on my print runs from my friend Henry down the street. Because print shops, those are definitely depression recession-proof…

Horrifying commercial #4,296.

SPX was sweet. The minicomic I made for it will be going up in part on Flickr over the coming days, plus I’ll even leave my apartment for a time to drop some off at the usual spots. They’re a paltry $2 each — even you can afford that in this economy. And because I like self-torture, I’m going to make a new lil’ something for APE, too, so stay tuned for some preview panels maybe.

In other news, I wrote another one of these political cartoon book dealies, this one campaign specific. The yearly book will be out in a few more weeks, and I’m writing a depressing forward on the state of political cartooning for it, so there’s lots to look forward to.

AND ALSO: I’m the new editor of Curbed SF. What-what? Yeah, about that whole leaving the apartment thing… Only to get more coffee.

I’ll be at SPX this year! It’s my first time and I’m pretty excited to see the Bethesda sights. And I’ll have a new mini-comic (um, if I finish inking…). This is a previewy page (click through to get the bigger version). But unfortunately, this means the longer book is getting postponed. Well, unfortunately for you (maybe), but fortunately for my metacarpals (definitely). Speaking of which, I’m going to stop typing now.

After all that, I registered too late to get a table at APE. Unfortunately, the state approved my application for a temporary seller’s permit, so I still have to file a tax return after the event — which means I might as well sell something!

So I’m working on a mini about my more noteworthy Food Not Bombs experiences. This was one of them. But there will be more. (Incidentally, a brief Googling after I drew this seagull turned up some really disturbing YouTube videos of the act in progress that I refuse to link to here; I stand disgusted and corrected.)