Happy Birthday Sam Gross!
The Spill wishes the great Sam Gross a Very Happy Day.
Here’s his Spill A-Z entry:
Sam Gross Born August 7, 1933, Bronx, NY. New Yorker work: August 23, 1969 -. Other than his work in The New Yorker Gross is probably best known for his work in National Lampoon. He’s edited a large number of collections, including Dogs Dogs Dogs, Cats Cats Cats, Food Food Food: A Feast of Great Cartoons (originally published as All You Can Eat: A Feast of Great Cartoons); Golf Golf Golf, Ho! Ho! Ho!, Movies Movies Movies. Key collections: I Am Blind and My Dog is Dead (Avon, 1978), An Elephant is Soft and Mushy (Avon, 1982)
–photo taken at The Society of illustrators not too many years ago.
His Conversation with Gil Roth on Mr. Roth’s Virtual Memories Podcast
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The Tilley Watch Online, August 1-5, 2022
An end of the week listing of New Yorker artists whose work has appeared on newyorker.com features
The Daily Cartoon: Kate Curtis, Teresa Burns Parkhurst, David Ostow, David Sipress.
Daily Shouts: David Ostow.
Barry Blitt’s Kvetchbook: “Alex Jones Seeks Help”
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Personal History…New York, New York: If You Can Draw There, You Can Draw Anywhere
In Manhattan this past Thursday, early for an appointment way downtown, I decided to drive around Greenwich Village and look for a parking space where I could decompress after the hundred mile drive from upstate. Amazingly, I immediately found a space on Bank Street, not far from where John Lennon and Yoko Ono lived before moving into the Dakota.
Parked, and looking at all the time I had before heading downtown, I realized I was going to have to mix it up: some people watching (and dog watching), and some reading (I keep a copy of Harpo Marx’s Harpo Speaks! in the car for just these kind of occasions). Possibly because I hadn’t worked yet that day — I had an urge to take a stab at drawing. I hadn’t planned on drawing — I don’t know that I’ve ever planned on drawing in a car. Luckily, there were supplies handy. I found a Pilot Precise V5 pen, and a small notebook filled with lined paper — not my normal pen and paper (scroungers can’t be choosey). I used Harpo’s book as a makeshift surface to support the notebook. Usually, if an idea comes to me while I’m driving (or parked) I’ll enter it into my phone, and then completely forget about it (not a great system). But on this day, for whatever reason, it felt right to draw.
What came down the cartoon pike and landed on the lined notebook paper had nothing to do with Manhattan, or Greenwich Village, or Bank Street. Among other things, written and drawn, was a turtle conversing with a guy at a counter, a medieval guy crouched down relating to a sheep, a Vermont covered bridge, a newspaper kiosk on a desert island (okay, so maybe that was slightly city inspired; I may have given a half-second of thought to when I lived in the Village and walked to the newspaper kiosk at 8th Street and 6th Avenue to get The New York Times).
It didn’t take long, with the blank lined paper in front of me, to disconnect from the distraction of people walking right by the car, or zipping by on e-bikes or bicycles, or the occasional NYC police car, or the vans double parked while workers unloaded building supplies. The disconnect has always been important — maybe the most important part — of working. If I can somehow not be anywhere when I’m somewhere, work gets done.
At home at the end of the day, back upstate, I ripped the drawn on pages out of the notebook (it wasn’t my notebook) and looked them over. I wasn’t sure, while still in the car, whether anything worthwhile went down on paper, but in fact, three of the drawings made it to my “send” pile for next week’s New Yorker batch (I can’t show them as The New Yorker always has first look). I’m going to file this entire episode under Ya Never Know.
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Catching Up With Two Favorite Blogs
From Attempted Bloggery, August 5, 2022: “Saul Steinberg: Fabric Patterns” — Stephen Nadler brings us up to speed on a recent sale of Steinbergian textiles. Read here.
And from A New Yorker State Of Mind, plenty of reading from and about the magazine in the summer of ’33.