Monkeywrench Grrl

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.

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Show Us Where It Hurts

When you're a K Street big shot, you like your local politicians to stay bought and keep their campaign promises, and that's why around the turn of the century, Anthony Williams would've been your man. Among his top priorities as Mayor was closing down DC General Hospital, the city's only public hospital and, in spite of constant alarmist rumors in the Washington Times, not a hell hole.



Among the other jewels of the Williams Legacy was his keeping of campaign promises to close homeless family shelters, to close and sell a fistful of public schools for redevelopment as condominiums or health clubs, and to run poor and working-class people out of DC and replace them with people who can afford to shop downtown and who are most likely to vote for Anthony Williams (or someone like him... like, say, Adrian Fenty).

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Stop Dubya's "Star Wars"!

The Farce is strong in this one, O, Master!

Sure as hell was, there, Mr. George W. Skywalker. What other briefing materials could the Chimp have had when deciding that at a time when the Cold War was long over, one of our main military threats was reduced to a Mafia-ridden laughingstock and the other was our Most Favored Nation trading partner? Sure, why not restart the "Star Wars" program which, by Reagan's own admission, was a waste of time?



This also wound up illustrating the cover of Alternative Press Review in the summer of 2001.

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