EXTRA CRITICUM

Cartoon: Hope Springs Eternal

Artist = Helpless Child = Not Charming

There are people in this business (You know who you are) who love nothing more than to infantilize the artists they deal with. Sometimes these people are lawyers. Sometimes they're agents or producers or executives. Sometimes they're even D-girls, if you can imagine.

And there are artists who slip into the role of helpless child with such ease and frequency that slowly over time, imperceptibly at first, they get sort of glued in stuck into the costume. And they end up prisoners of a sort... ambling through life like helpless innocents looking for guidance to all the adults in the room. I don't have a lot to say about this syndrome, save this:

Letting Go: The Last Picture Show and Me

Here's my favorite scene from one of my favorite films, The Last Picture Show.

 

One Of the Best Things I've Ever Done

In September, 1991, I showed up at a realtor’s office in Brooklyn. The borough was to be my home for the next 18 years, but it was virgin ground to me then. I had graduated from college in June. After a summer at home and a trip to Europe with my girlfriend, I had come to start my new life, my New York City life. Some friends had found an apartment in the cute-sounding neighborhood of “Park Slope”. I was the first to arrive.

A week later I started a job as a paralegal at Wilkie Farr & Gallagher. The office was on the 51^st floor of the Citicorp Building. Why the powers-that-be there decided to give me a  job like that is a mystery on the level of Stonehenge, and they would quickly come to regret it. After six miserable weeks, I quit.