April 2008

I received a surprising number of responses to my rather whiny artist’s statement about not making any money off my website, too many to reproduce in whole. I have compiled edited highlights. Many of your suggestions were intelligent and practical and you will see them implemented in the weeks and months to come, just as soon as I have completed the Herculean labor of getting off my ass.

Andre Cunha,

It does look pretty Mexican, I know. But I do research my visuals and I swear that figure turned up in a google image search for Sao Paulo or Rio. Now, looking again, of course I can't find it, plus I get distracted by all the asses. You guys are the ass capitol of the planet, man. How can you stand it?

Tim Kreider

Andre,

Check out this week's cartoon [30 April 2008].

Eu sou um brasileiro!,
Tim

Mitch,

I think you misunderstood my remark; I have no objection to becoming rich as Bill Gates, rolling around naked in my vault of gold coins like Scrooge McDuck and fucking as many groupies as Gene Simmons. My disdainful comment that "that is not the sort of thing we do around here" referred specifically and only to placing ads on the site. I have to admit I'm kind of intrigued by your suggestion because frankly the idea of a couple of hundred extra bucks a month sounds pretty enticing at this point. I'm not sure I can explain my reservations in any way that will make rational sense--it's very visceral and squishy, just a vague ethical/aesthetic squeamishness.

Did you know that MAD magazine has started running ads? Well, they have. I don't know how old you are but if you're anywhere around my age (40ish) you know what a crucial and formative influence MAD was on my generation of kids, and perhaps you can share in some of my sense of betrayal and disappointment that they would run real ads side by side with their hilarious fake ads that expose the empty hype and lies of advertising. Kids get duped and betrayed by ads very early on in life. Maybe you still remember the first thing you ever bought that proved to bear no resemblance to the thing advertised (X-ray Specs? Sea Monkeys?) and how ripped-off and stupid and sad you felt. It was partly because MAD ran no ads that you felt you could trust MAD. MAD had no agenda other than its vigilant and relentless mockery of all forms of bigotry, hypocrisy, and bullshit.

As an adult, advertisements still depress me. It depresses me when people advertising apartments on the "owners" section of craigslist turn out to be real estate brokers, or when bored and horny girls turn out to be software programs. I don't remember the figures for how many thousands of advertisements the average American is subjected to per day, but they're ubiquitous, unrelenting, an unavoidable part of the fabric of our daily existence, worse even than Ray Bradbury imagined in Fahrenheit 451. There are ads on the highway, on the subway, in supermarket muzak, over urinals. There are ads for other TV shows in the corners of TV shows you're trying to watch. There are TVs in elevators, in the backs of cabs, in freaking gas pumps. I think it's demeaning to be treated always only as a consumer, an audience, a target market, rather than as a citizen and a human being. David Foster Wallace writes about the soul-withering effect of the "professional smile" of service personnel. Lie detectors work because they measure stress levels, and lying is (kind of hearteningly) inherently stressful for human beings; I think it must also have some unhealthy effect on the human psyche to be lied to thousands of times a day.

Well my rhetoric is getting all het up here, as it does after too much coffee and not enough breakfast. I really don't mean to imply any judgment of your own decision to run thematically relevant ads on your site, which after all may well offer stuff your readers can use. (I use gmail for my personal email account, which does the same thing, and I find it amusing when it recommends Spam recipes, but slimy and invasive when it suggests self-help books on relationships.) For my own part, I feel like not running ads sets my site apart from the false and clamorous world of commerce, where the agenda is always the same: to get you to Buy More Shit You Do Not Need. The Pain is a sort of haven where the only agenda is my own crackpot opinions. Selling books that collect my cartoons, or signed prints or T-shirts, seems honest and straightforward enough to me, and I think I will be doing that.

Here's hoping we can toast our material success with Krug on board one or the other of our Learjets in the near future.

Regards,
Tim Kreider

Evan

I am somewhat torn over this whole issue. On the one hand I believe in art as a gift, as communal cultural property, and I like the idea of what seems like an unprecedented marketing tool that thwarts every effort to make so much as a cent off of it. Like everyone else, I have watched with glee the destruction of the record industry in the face of the internet. On the other hand: hey man, what about me? I deserve some payment for the work I do and whatever amusement and insight I offer the world. (It's sort of the reverse of the smoking ban, to which I, as an advocate and defender of all vice, am opposed in principle, but whose selfish benefits I have enjoyed shamelessly.) As an Agentinian colleague of mine recently put it, "the important thing is to avoid honest work."

Thanks,

Tim

P.S. Sorry about the Lovecraft thing. It should blow harmlessly over after a few months, but it will leave you subtly and unnaturally... altered.

M. Turyn:

Nah--I did read it, and it got on my nerves mildly, but it's just not enough of a story. I mean, who cares what David Mamet thinks? I think a letter-writer to the Voice pegged it by synopsizing it as an Onion headline: "Rich White Guy Realizes Everything is Great!"

Tim

Dan Howard,

Sorry it's taken me so long to respond to your letter of last month, but the link you provided sent me to a dauntingly long list of other links which I got too exhausted by in advance to even bother reading. (But this, of course, is one of the ways people in power sneak through legislation to fuck you over--by making it so confusing and overwhelming and dull that no one wants to pay any attention to it or try to figure out what it means or think about it at all.)

I did read the column in your second link, which gave a (relatively) succinct synopsis. It sounds about like everything else the government's done in the last seven years--indefensible and bad for just about everyone except corporations who donate money to Republicans. As to whether it represents a real danger or is just a lot of hooey, it's hard for me to know. We certainly know that any new legal deregulation or loophole gets abused as shamelessly as possible until it's revoked or amended. Anything I can do?

Tim

Eli Friedman,

Don't let’s take my opinions too seriously. I am only a cartoonist, after all. Who knows? Maybe everything will be fine. Ha, ha! Just kidding.

A friend of mine recently suggested I do a cartoon about "What Happens When the Chinese Get to the Moon." Eventually I am sure to do another cartoon about the wily Chinese and will take your idea into consideration at that time. I am far from done with them, don't you worry. You can't take your eye off them for a minute.

Tim Kreider

Scott Hamm,

I was in a slump? I kind of thought I was rocking--artistically, anyway.

I remember in an episode of Barney Miller a crackpot who claimed to be from the future advised Det. Harris (Ron Glass) to invest heavily in zinc. Harris did not for one minute admit to believing that this guy was actually from the future but he did call his broker to make discreet inquiries about the price of zinc. He was dismayed to learn it was currently selling for three cents a pound.

Tim

Ben Carlsen,

Yes, there are a number of such stories, decent and competent emperors who were nonetheless unequal to the corruption and decadence of their age, or else unable to pass whatever peace and stability they'd secured on to a worthy successor. So far the main lessons I've learned are 1.) don't concentrate too much power in one office and 2.) arrange for some sort of orderly succession and, perhaps most importantly, 3.) keep the goddamn military out of civilian affairs. The fact that we've managed to do all this so far impresses and mystifies me. I mean, the Constitution is just words on an old piece of paper; the fact that, with so much wealth and power up at stake, everyone is at least ostensibly playing by the rules is as amazing and heartwarming to me as the fact that we all, for the most part, stay on the right side of the dotted line and obey traffic signals when we drive. I mean, why doesn't Hillary just have Obama killed and his body dragged down Pennsylvania Avenue? Why doesn't the army just say 'fuck this,' frag Bush, and nuke Fallujah? I guess the real lesson I've learned is, We don't know how good we've got it.

Tim

David Paleo,

Your work is truly impressive; your compliments mean a great deal to me.

[…] Don't wait 'til you're drunk to write again. Or else don't wait too long to
get drunk again.

Tim

Mike Wood,

It means a lot to me to know that my cartoon and writing have eased, or at least provided accompaniment to, your heartbreak. Barring actual problems, like illness or death, it is the worst. I don't except this will actually help right now, but I want you to know that less than a year ago I was in nearly as wretched a state as you are now, and I am now fine. A year may sound like a very long time to writhe in searing misery, and in fact it is, and who knows?, it may take longer for you, since your relationship was longer-lasting and sounds as if it was much more serious. All I can truthfully tell you is, you won't feel the way you do now forever, and when you do feel sane and normal again you'll be relived you didn't kill yourself or go to jail over something so transitory and stupid. In the meantime, just hang on. Feel free to drink to excess for the duration of the emergency. Watch whole seasons of TV series on DVD. (Firefly is my favorite, although tragically short-lived.) Sleep around, if at all possible.

As for your question: so far I have only ever given my originals away, either to good friends or to women who slept with me, which latter originals I have more often than not wished I could break into those women's houses and get back and smash or tear into tiny unreconstructable bits. I have never seriously considered selling them, and I'm not sure what I would charge. I do think most cartoonists seriously undervalue their work and I'm thinking I'd ask several hundred dollars for an original. This is not to gleefully screw over those who admire my work but out of a self-respect that's sadly lacking among many of my colleagues. However, these are special circumstances, and I am a sucker for the wretched. Let me know what your price range is and I'll think it over. Not promising anything. But I don't know, maybe this would be a rash purchase you'd regret once you return to your senses anyway.

Tim

Kim Ylvinger,

Thanks very sincerely for your discerning compliments on my work (if it isn't immodest of me to call compliments "discerning"). It means a lot to me to know that I am ameliorating our nation's trashed image abroad in some small way. Indeed we are not all jingoistic yahoos, although an appalling number of us are. All of my friends have, over the last long seven years, been outraged to the point of exhaustion and despair. It breaks our hearts, the way our country has betrayed and disdained its best and most basic ideals out of fear. At this point we've given up hope of any accountability or consequences for the criminal Bush administration and are just glumly waiting for the next election. (If our fellow Americans contrive to elect yet another Republican in 2008, then, yes, you may justly write us off as a nation of unrepentant swine who deserve death.)

But if I may say something in faint defense of my country, I think that the same proportion of assholes to decent people holds across all times and places. Most people in all countries are content to go uncritically along with whatever foolish and brutal policies their government enacts as long as they personally are making money and there's something good on TV. Possibly it's true that Americans are more oblivious to the repercussions of their policies than most people because of our geographic isolation and a cushy century of peace and prosperity. But frankly no empire has ever behaved well, and all I can say about ours is, it could be worse. (I'm currently reading The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which talk about swinish.)

Thanks again for your kind words about my work. Feel free to bore me with politics in the future.

Tim Kreider

Ronin,

I think you misread my tone. I have no idea what will happen--even Arthur C. Clarke admitted that anyone who purports to predict the future always ends up looking stupid. I'm not sure what gives you the idea that I'm bitterly rooting for decline and catastrophe. I am kind of a fan of our current civilization's decencies, comforts, and entertainments and have no illusions about any utopian society arising out of its collapse. (Let' us not forget what replaced Rome--a thousand years of wars, pestilence, and boring art.) I myself am inclined to hope that we will, indeed, figure something out. My favorite science-fiction author, Kim Stanley Robinson, is a scientific positivist, an optimist, and a utopian. I have no doubt that my friend Rob could argue even you to the point of catatonic acquiescence insisting that there is too little time left to develop alternative technologies that can possibly take up the slack of fossil fuel depletion at our current levels of consumption, golf carts notwithstanding. Whatever happens, we are certainly going to have to change our current lifestyles, with which I for one have no problem. I never liked cars or malls anyway.

But I have to say, these complacent dismissals that it's all a lotta hooey and we'll figure something out like we always do sound a little worrisomely smug. I don't think the truth has an expiration date, and one thing I'm learning from Gibbon is that, caught up in great inexorable cultural disasters, even the wisest and best-intentioned people, who see the causes clearly and try to implement sensible remedies, are often helpless. I am haunted by a quote from an interview with writer/Santa Fe Institute fellow Cormac McCarthy; he said that if you could've told a group of intelligent people in 1900 what the coming century would hold, their response would've been: ''You've gotta be shitting me."

I realize human civilization got along fine without oil for five thousand years--but that wasn't this civilization, which is totally dependent on oil. The earth's population has sextupled since 1900 and our society is now structured around being able to produce a huge amount of energy and transport resources over long distances. I have great faith in the human species' adaptability and I don't imagine that anything short of an all-out nuclear war or large meteor strike could possibly kill off every last one of us--but just imagining the population returning to pre-industrial revolution numbers would mean five billion people dying--a ghastly, unthinkable calamity far beyond even the plagues of the middle ages or the global wars of the industrial age.

Also, don't let's underestimate the human capacity for denial and self-destruction. People don't go to AA when they realize they're blacking out every night and their friends are all telling them they have a problem--they do it only after their wives take the kids and leave them or a judge orders them to because they've wrapped their car around a tree. This tendency seems to be even more prevalent and intractable among institutions than it is among individuals. All I'm saying is, I don't think it's a foregone conclusion either way, and we can't afford to be complacent about either our inescapable doom or our inevitable survival.

Frankly both you and Rob sound like you know more about it than I do. My job is not actually to prognosticate or to propagandize for anyone's theory or position. My job is to expose my nerve endings to whatever's in the cultural air, trust my gut feelings, and draw funny cartoons. Pessimism is inherently funnier than optimism, but this is the nature of comedy, and not some ultimate truth or personal idiosyncrasy of mine. And you seem not to notice that the punchline of this particular cartoon is, in effect, that everything's fine and not to be such a bunch of worry-warts.

In other words, no need to get so pissy.

Tim Kreider

Philip Roberts,

I have no doubt that, should the actual shit hit the actual fan, the actual Boyd would turn on me in a heartbeat and not only try to take my coat but turn my cat into a comfy hat. No telling who will come out on top in such a terrible struggle but suffice it to say that fucker will have to peel that coat from my cold, dead torso.

Tim Kreider

Lawrence Petersen,

I have read that life itself is the ultimate Ponzi scheme, a sort of tricky shell game to keep entropy looking the wrong way for a few billion years.

I join you in hoping my cartoons last longer than you.

Tim Kreider

Robert Himberger,

I certainly hope you are wrong about Hell existing, and if you are right about that then I at least hope you're wrong about its being a game, since games have always bored me. But I suppose this means that if Hell does exist then my personal Hell will probably be a game, and not a spelling bee or crossword puzzle or Rock-'Em-Sock-'Em Robots, either, but a really crushingly dull one involving a lot of math and strategy, one I will lose and lose and never even bother trying to understand. Which comes to think of it sounds a lot like life here on Earth.

Go Team,
Tim Kreider

David,

I share your suspicions about the subconscious motives behind the peak-oil movement's grim certitude; Thomas Pynchon describes this best when, in appraising some of his earlier efforts, he admits to "a pose I found congenial in those days--fairly common, I hope, among pre-adults--[...] of somber glee at any idea of mass destruction or decline." I’m aware of the history of apocalyptic cults in the West. As I said in my artist's statement, most utopian visions are contingent on some preceding apocalypse to slash the insoluble Gordian knot of the present and clear the ground for the bold, clean foundations of the New Order--a tendency I specifically cite as a failure of imagination. History never goes according to anybody's plan--not the Project for the New American Century's, not the Peak Oilers', and definitely not the batshit evangelicals'. It's always stranger, sloppier, more unpredictable, and seldom satisfies anyone's notions of even poetic justice. We'll probably have to slog our way through this mess rather than starting neatly over from square 1. To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, you go into the future with the world you've got.

My favorite science-fiction author, Kim Stanley Robinson, describes that tendency to lay a reductive network of ideas over the observed world as "an imaginary relationship to a real situation," and he warns of its dangers in relation to things like climate change. I myself am inclined to hope that we will, indeed, figure something out--more because this is agreeable to believe and demands I do nothing than because I have reason to think it is true. I do worry about the extent to which the whole infrastructure of our society has been restructured around petroleum-powered transportation. The pre-highway world doesn't exist anymore--we bulldozed it, let it fall apart, and replaced it with strip malls. I have less faith than you seem to in the invisible hand of the market, which is what got us into this hole in the first place.
Whatever happens, we are certainly going to have to change our current lifestyle, with which I for one have no problem either. I never liked cars or shopping malls anyway. One thing we do know for a fact about the future is: we're going to hate it.

Tim

Ivar Dravnieks,

Your mention of the name of the Rev. Dr. Swift in connection with my own is high praise indeed, which I cannot flatter myself is deserved but can only aspire to earn.

It'll be nice to know I am raising my glass in toast to any number of equally doomed kindred spirits around the world on that long-dreaded day.

Cheers,
Tim Kreider

Paul,

I'm not actually running an advice column here, but I do haave a soft spot for petty vengeance. It seems like of sneaky and tattle-tale-ish, but maybe a preëmptive strike—tell on him first?

Tim

Nikolai Kingsley:

Let me know what happens with your ex. The Pain's lawyers are preparing their defense.

Not to sound like the kind of Type A parent who scolds their child for bringing home a single B on his report card, but it seems to me that, as only the fifth weirdest, you could be applying yourself a little harder.

Tim Kreider

Scott,

Nice to see a little belated good news for Pluto. If roundness is the key, seems like Pluto should be in good shape.

“ Not ‘less you think round is funny.” –Raising Arizona

Tim

Tim’s response is klassified under the Kartoonist’s Kode of Kollegial Courtesy.

Yes. They are killing me. They are killing me.

Phil Pierson:

Under the Seal, my friend. Omerta.

T.K.

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