Between yesterday afternoon and this morning, four of my flights from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina have been canceled due to weather. I’ve been stuck in Charlotte, North Carolina for a few hours now. They guarantee I’ll be back to New York by Sunday (or else my money back?)! Hopefully I’ll make it til then: I’ll have to ration these three Clif Bars. And who knows where and when my luggage will show up.
Fortunately the Charlotte airport has free wireless internet. But there are conditions: they block all websites that are flagged “Adult/Mature Content.” The ones I’ve discovered so far: Nerve and MySpace. VeganPorn’s okay though. Oh, Charlotte, a woman after my own heart. Now if only she could get her act together and get me on one of these damn planes before my computer battery dies (in 33 minutes…).

Update, 4:59 p.m. E.T.: Six canceled flights, down to one bar. But I found an outlet. I’m not sure what my total is then: negative twenty-three hours?

The third volume of the excellent reportage comics anthology Syncopated is debuting in a couple weeks. I wrote an article and illustrated an illustration for this volume — it is otherwise crammed full of excellent talents. And we all know that comics + excellent talents = free beer! I’m third down, third across. Hope you can make it! except if you don’t like comics, talents and/or beer, in which case you should just stay home. And maybe stop reading this blog.

Last week Radaronline.com broke the story that there’d been allegations of cheating on the open-book, take-home ethics final (there must be a j-schooler interning there). The story was later picked up by the Times and now everyone’s freaking out about the immoral Columbia j-student body. The strangest aspect of this story is that no one is attempting to address the central issue: how, in fact, do you cheat on an open-book, take-home ethics final? It’s also strange that people seem to find this surprising, though perhaps this surprise is just hiding their glee at watching the privileged falter. Or something.

A current j-school student has started a blog dedicated only to this topic, which I might express surprise at just to hide my glee at watching the privileged be idiots. S/he vehemently defends Mr. Sam Freedman, the unfortunate new professor lecturer of the ethics course. “He’s the captain and we’re just sailing on his ship right? As long as we get to our final destination, who the hell cares?”
No comments. Now that’s surprising.

This is the first in what will hopefully be a regular occurence of Quick Mondays, a short spot on something short and sweet.

This past weekend was the Tokion Creativity Now conference. If you aren’t familiar, Tokion is a beautifully designed, less beautifully written cultury magazine based in NY and Tokio. Each October they put on a two-day conference on “the arts.” This year, all the scheduled speakers were men. They claimed more women would show up, but I haven’t heard word on whether this actually occurred or not - if you went and could shed light on this point, I’d be very interested to hear what happened. In any event, here is an interesting e-mail exchange between the artsy Wooster Collective and Tokion’s editor in chief Ken Miller, regarding this gender disparity.

Coming soon, some less-quick and less-regular: cookie recipes, trials and tribulations, and other things of brief interest.

While attending the University of California at Santa Barbara, I met a young, goofy man named Graham Talley. Graham had an infectious laugh and a “FUN” club, and I loaned him some ketchup one time, and you know, things progressed from there. Graham said his ultimate goal was to have his own scavenger/treasure hunting company, designing hunts for clients and their friends/enemies, and he and some other FUN club members organized dry runs throughout our four UCSB years.

The most elaborate hunt (to my limited knowledge) took place during our sophomore year, when Graham tricked my friends Chris and the aforementioned Ari, among several others, into following a several week-long hunt around the UCSB campus and the nearby slum of Isla Vista. The best part was that much of the hunt was caught on video by surreptitious FUN club operatives. The second best part was for some reason, the participants thought they’d win money, and were annoyed when they simply won being blindfolded, led into a huge party and publicly humiliated. If they sound a little thick, remember, this was UCSB.

Now nearly three years later, Graham is using his talent for manipulation and tomfoolery to – surprise! – win himself some money. He’s started Whim Hunts, a company which crafts scavenger/treasure hunts individually for each client. Whim was even featured in the Santa Barbara News-Press last week, in part to promote the public scavenger hunt Graham and his cohorts will be organizing to begin tomorrow, Friday, July 28.

I’ll admit, I was rather skeptical about Graham’s goals back in the day, but that just makes me even happier to see him successful now. Yay, Graham.

Incidentally, the same day Whim was featured in the News-Press, my friend Jason sent me an invitation to participate in Midnight Madness, the ten-year-old scavenger/puzzle hunt game taking place in Manhattan on August 5th. “It is exhausting and difficult and ridiculous and fun,” says Jason. The game was created in 1996 by two Columbia University undergrads; the name is inspired by the 1980 Michael J.Fox film. There are only two rules: no motorized vehicles, and no tampering with clues. And not that there was really a question, but I read this on an old message board circa 2004 re: the typical player:

The average profile of the late night walkers is pretty homogenous, and not surprising if you consider that we’re talking about a scavenger hunt involving electronic gadgets, a central messaging program and analytical puzzles. if your guess was ‘20-something geeky types’, you would have been pretty right on.

And even though it’s not Mandatory, east or west coast, you have no excuses – get outside, run around, solve some clues and, like, have some Fun. Or whatever.

brooklyn, money, the pros and cons of pot-bellied pigs as household pets

So even though I went to the city yesterday for cake day at Atlas (cancelled! no new cake!) and some sweet action at Dick Blick (where I am now a “preferred customer” via my expired Columbia ID), today I really truly had to pick up a new brush at the Pratt store (where I also discovered aluminum clamp lights, “plum” twintip Sharpies and a Tria brushpen six pack on clearance… I swear, that place will be the ugly, premature death of my “independent wealth.”)

I continued my walk down Myrtle, then along Washington down to DeKalb. I was planning to get a late lunch at the excellent Pequena, but instead opted for a simple iced coffee at Tillie’s. I hadn’t yet been to Tillie’s, which I’d read about as “continuing the writerly tradition of Fort Greene” or something equally presumptuous and pretentious. Now here in the story it should be noted that I was wearing my massive sunglasses, the ones I wear when I care not to be fucked with, and the ones I usually do not wear when exploring new places, as they more or less make me blind. So I did not notice until I was halfway through the door that I had not, as I’d previously suspected, stepped over a very rotund dark gray dog on my way in. No, no - I had, in fact, stepped over a very rotund dark gray pot-bellied pig. On a leash. Just when I noticed, an older man walked by and remarked loudly, “Damn, that’s nasty.” I presume he was talking about the pig and not its petite blonde owner, who was quite a nice-looking woman.

So despite my surprise, this is apparently not entirely uncommon, though nothing compared to the “pot-bellied pig craze” of the late ’80s and early ’90s, when pigs were selling for $800 to $1,000. But I guess that was before my time.

comics: great and awful, overrated things, shifting cultural paradigms

This past weekend was the annual MoCCA Art Festival at the Puck Building in SoHo. This was the festival’s fifth year and my first, and I had great expectations, having only been to the San Diego and New York Mammoth Manga Comic-Cons before (but dreaming of SPX for the fall, despite Bethesda). I’m not qualified to compare it to past years (though 2006 was clearly lacking a Dan Clowes/Jonathon Lethem conversation, or anything feebly approaching that brilliance), so I should say that while I was not disappointed, and I did indeed procure a great deal of great comics, I was underwhelmed. I did notice that admission this year was the cheapest it’s been since 2002, which could hint at some administrative acknowledgement of a possible lack of particular greatness — or, like, maybe not.

My weekend was spent wandering around the three large Puck rooms filled with tables filled with comics, alternately good and awful, trying not to make awkward, guilt-inducing eye contact with anyone whose work fell in the latter category. The “event programming” was spotty. To celebrate the success of their quarterly anthology MOME (recently reviewed in the New York Times Book Review), Fantagraphics had an early run of the new issue for sale, and a panel featuring Andrice Arp, Gabrielle Bell, Jonathon Bennett, Gary Groth, David Heatley and Paul Hornschemeier. It was boring as all hell. I’m a big Gabrielle Bell fan, but she was not at her best, to say the least. No one seemed to want to be there, except the man who asked several questions of the panel, including “How do you feel about porn in comics?” which sealed the experience off really awkwardly, which is to say, it was perfect.

So I guess this is where I’m supposed to make some sweeping generalizations and conclusions about the fest en general. Of course it goes without saying that many good things were available, as they always are, at Drawn and Quarterly, Buenaventura and (yes, even) Fantagraphics. On the more indie front, I’ve never agreed more strongly with Sabrina Jones, who told me in January, “It’s like the early part of the 20th century, everyone was writing poetry – now everyone has a graphic novel or a comic.” I was skeptical, but MoCCA seems to have reinforced this concept for me, in sheer numbers of overpriced crap mini-comics. It was alternately unfortunate and inspiring, and I now feel entirely capable, qualified and excited to do comics again.

For posterity or something, this is the stuff I got, which I’d recommend to all four of you who might read this:
- Baby-sitter’s Club #1, Raina Telgemeier; sweet nostalgia
- Communism button and sticker from Diesel Sweeties/Dumbrella; for “being hilarious”
- Girl Stories, Lauren Weinstein
- Good News!, Mikhaela B. Reid
- Peck, James McShane
- Pencil Fight #1 and 2; a Portland zine
- Pink Popgun War T-shirt, Farel Dalrymple
- Salmon Doubts, Adam Sacks; thanks, John
- Syncopated #2, Brendan Burford and friends; a great compilation of reportage, comics and reportage comics
- Three Very Small Comics V.II, Tom Gauld

John Jones plugs in the light under the hand painted sign outside his store so passersby can read: “jigsaw. affordable art, shoestring media, zines and comics, obscure bands.” Then he starts to get ready for his last party. It’s cold this weekend, and the radiator is wheezing and rattling as he straightens the books on the shelves, re-stocks the bar, takes out the trash. He sighs when he starts and finishes each task, as he resigns himself to the idea, then is relieved when it’s finished. Jones, 31, is a little goofy and childlike, with a baby face and dimples, and a mess of wavy brown hair that he yanks straight up in a fist when he’s concentrating. Jones dresses up for work: thick-rimmed glasses, button-up shirts, nice slacks and wingtips – even though work is just upstairs. He sleeps in the shop’s basement: it’s the only way he could afford to have his dream store in New York City. “It was always kind of a weird thing that I wanted to do,” he says. “I had all of these different interests, and I thought, why don’t I just try to combine them all? Hence the name.”
Jigsaw is an expression of his personal vision, the piecing together of different parts of his life. It’s part small-press comics store, indie novel and magazine shop, art gallery, concert venue, open bar and sometimes living room. Or rather, it was. Now the metal gate below the hand painted sign at 526 East 11th Street is down and locked. The lukewarm response to the store and the high cost of living in New York have forced John Jones and Jigsaw to move to Durham, North Carolina at the beginning of April. “I thought, why not just go somewhere and get a cheaper, bigger place in a city that is perhaps in need of a little more blue in their red?” He pauses. “Where I could make it more purple at least.”
His last weekend in New York, February 24 and 25, is a relatively tame ending to Jigsaw’s geek chic history of late nights fueled by liquor, art and indie rock. The store’s closing coincides with the first New York Comic-Con, which means two back to back book releases and industry types filling Jigsaw on its last Friday and Saturday nights. A few fans are still convinced the move is some elaborate April Fool’s joke, that come the first, John Jones will roll up the metal gate on Jigsaw around noon as usual. Others are just sad, annoyed, both. There’s nothing like this in New York, they say: it’s not a pristine Soho gallery, or nerdy comics shop, or dingy indie rock venue, or East Village watering hole in the wall. It’s not really anything they’ve seen before. And he was just gaining momentum. “I don’t see this as ‘the end’ like they do,” he says. “One of the reasons I did the shop in the first place was to show people it could be done.” With only a little research into business structure, a short-term lease, and some start-up capital, Jones thinks, anyone could open their own shop. “It just takes being stupid enough to actually do it.”
But instead he seems to have proven that it can’t be done, that it’s virtually impossible for even the most driven and visionary impresario to pull off a project like this in New York City.

John Jones refers to the Durham move as “the move back south”: he grew up in nearby Charlottesville, Virginia, where his mother still lives. He’s more comfortable in the South than in New York City, where he moved on a whim in 2003, after a rough divorce. He didn’t quite know what his next step would be. He’d worked at Barnes and Noble, made his own mini comics and paintings, wrote three novels for National Novel Writing Month. There was too much he wanted to do. He finally decided to bring all of his passions together, and in the process, bridge the gap between creators and fans by hosting events where the two could mingle. In June ’04, Jigsaw was born.
The space is tiny – only about 50 people can cram in at a time without suffocating – but Jones somehow makes it aptly comfortable and homey. There’s a black leather couch by the shelves, and the register counter in the back doubles as a bar for parties. He chooses the stock for the store based on his own personal preferences. There’s nothing on the shelves that he hasn’t read at least once – most, several times. “It’s kind of a weird trust exercise to ask someone to spend 12, 15, 20 dollars on something they might not like just because it’s what I’ve handpicked,” he says. For that reason, he avoids the hard sell. At most, if he notices a customer is lingering a while and seems interested in the products, he’ll try to play matchmaker, asking what their favorite books and comics are and trying to find something he thinks they’ll like. “I’ve only had one person bring something back and say they really didn’t care for it.”
But the daytime sales are only one piece of Jigsaw. Jones has hosted pumpkin carvings and film debuts, along with the requisite book release parties and art openings – one complete with a go-go dancer. When the shop first opened, he hosted open mic ‘Jigsawlons.’ There were even small concerts, with the couch tipped on end to make room. Some of the parties drew up to 300 people, filling Jigsaw for five solid hours as the crowd rotated in and out of the shop. Throughout the past two years, he’s brought nearly every kind of art into the space at one point or another. And the events in turn brought in the bulk of the store’s customers: they were drunk and their inhibitions were down, and Jones didn’t need the hard sell to get them to buy some comics or artwork.
In its first month, Jigsaw turned a profit. But ever since then, sales have been steadily slipping. Businesses across the East Village have taken a hit, and many of the independent stores that sprung up optimistically after 9/11 are cutting back their hours or closing altogether. “The neighborhood got too big for its britches. It tried to become Greenwich Village,” he says. “Now it’s economically impossible to succeed unless you’re a bar.” It’s gotten even worse in the last six months: most days go by without any customers.
The last two walk-ins come Friday evening, the second to last day of Jigsaw New York. When Jones sees them, he calls out hello and nonchalantly makes his way to the back of the store behind the register/bar counter. The customers, two hipster guys in head to toe black, flip through the comics for nearly fifteen minutes. One of them reads an entire book. “This is great,” he comments to no one in particular. “I should get it for my sister.” But instead he checks his watch and reminds his friend that they have to meet someone at a nearby bar. As they leave, he calls out “Thank you.” Jones responds, “We’re having some events here later tonight if you’re interested.”
“Events?” The hipster looks confused.
“From 8 to 11, a book release, open bar.”
“Oh, okay,” the hipster says, still puzzled. “Thanks.” They don’t come back.

Jigsaw begins to fill up a few hours later with editors, publishers, creators, and others involved in the comics business. A little over 100 people show up over the course of the evening, even though it’s 7 degrees outside and the L train isn’t working, leaving Jigsaw a 15 minute walk from the closest subway station. People’s thick-rimmed glasses steam up when they come inside from the cold.
“Wait, what is this?” one 20-something in a long trench coat asks his friend.
“It’s just kind of … what it is,” the friend offers.
The store is buzzing with compliments for “Crazy Papers,” Jim Dougan and Danielle Corsetto’s debut graphic novel, but people seem to be more interested in Jigsaw and the news that tomorrow is its closing day. Even some of Jones’ good friends are hearing this for the first time. The long trench coat laments that he didn’t discover the shop sooner.
A little after midnight, Jones turns off all the lights. Someone asks him why. “I like disappearing into the shadows like a ninja,” he says. The last people leave around 1. John Jones gets three hours of sleep.
The next evening is a little rougher than expected. The New York Times runs an article on the Comic-Con and mentions John Jones and Jigsaw – and the public party with open bar, beginning at 7 p.m. Even with the L train out of commission and a wind-chill of 9 degrees, there’s a palpable dread about how many people will show up.
In the end, it’s only a few dozen more than the previous evening, but this crowd feels rash and desperate. Brendan Deneen and Szyman Kudranski, creators of the new comic “Scatterbrain,” decide to give their books away for free: it’s too much trouble to sell, and who wants to cart all the extras home? No one really talks about the end of Jigsaw – they accept the inevitability, the pointlessness of complaining. Everyone seems more interested in the liquor than the comics. By 2 a.m., patrons who started the evening drinking Stella have moved on to tall cans of Pabst bought at the deli next door. In the end, Jones has to kick everyone out around 4. He stays in bed for the next two days, dreaming of a real kitchen, a living room, “and a bedroom with a door.”

Art and Susan Zuckerman feel their way around the dark corners of the Gould Memorial Library. As the building’s historical directors, the Zuckermans know most of what there is to know about the library, but there’s always room for surprises. “It’s kind of like a treasure hunt coming up here,” Art says, walking past the once-grand stacks now filled with discarded newspapers and Gatorade bottles instead of books. He points out where the Tiffany glass windows have been broken, where the pigeons roosted, and where a glass tile is missing in the floor, leaving a square foot gap. “Watch out for that,” he says, indicating the hole. “That’s,” he pauses, “pretty unusual.” But not entirely.
From its cracked tiles to exposed wires, flaking paint to graffiti, the Gould Memorial Library has come a long way since the 1890s, when it was designed by renowned architect Stanford White to resemble the Pantheon in Rome. The Gould was the main library at New York University’s Bronx campus until the campus was sold to the city university in 1973. The library was made a historical landmark in 1981, but has been mostly out of use for several years.

But that could soon change. In 2004, Bronx Community College won a $228,000 Campus Heritage Grant from the Getty Foundation to develop a plan to rehabilitate the Gould and its surrounding complex of buildings, including the Hall of Fame, a collonade filled with bronze busts of “great Americans,” the first of its kind in the country.

But as the planning stage comes to a close, the college is faced with the blessing and burden of the grant and the library: where will it get the money necessary to rehabilitate the building? And if they rebuild it, will anyone come? Or care?
“We asked 80 local history teachers if they knew about it. One knew,” said Art Zuckerman, shaking his head. “If this place was in Manhattan, it would be a mob scene. I don’t think there’s anything else like it in New York.”

“I think it’s Stanford White’s best work,” said Mark Anderson, an architect and the director of historic preservation at Facade Maintenance Design, which fixed some problems at the Gould in the mid 1990s. “Just making it a landmark doesn’t save it. It needs to give back to the college and community too, so they will mutually benefit from its existence.”

But as for the issue of funding, Anderson was less than optimistic. “The price of the work goes up exponentially the longer maintenance items are deferred,” he said. “It’s such a great building. They’re constantly, constantly trying to get funding. But I really don’t know.”

Some officials at the college were reluctant to speculate about what the next step will be. “We’re still figuring that out, it’s inconclusive so far. But if you ask me, I think it will take a lot,” said one official who asked not to be named.

“It would take millions and millions,” said Susan. “Slowly and surely, we’ve gotten some funding. But it’ll take a long time. And, really, we’re not sure it’ll come from anywhere.”

“I can’t believe the potential in this place,” said Art Zuckerman. “I think it’s all a matter of budget.”

The first things to be fixed at the Gould would be the elevator, to make the building handicap-accessible, and to build another exit, as only 75 people can currently be in the building at one time according to safety codes.

“Those are the major things. If they could get that done, maybe they could have fundraising events. It could be self-sustaining,” Susan said.

For now the school is looking toward more unusual sources of income, starting with the film industry. Two months ago, Robert De Niro and Angelina Jolie shot parts of the upcoming film “The Good Shepard” at the library, and other films such as “Sophie’s Choice,” “Kinsey,” and “A Beautiful Mind” have also been shot at the Gould. The Zuckermans are now seeking out photographers who might use the library for photo shoots, and cable networks such as the History and Learning Channel to donate.

“We’re going to start up the Friends of the Library again, and ask NYU alumni,” said Susan.

“They cannot let this place go,” Art added. “Everyone can see the potential value of this building. Every person who comes in reacts the same way: ‘Oh my god,’ they say.”