Don't get around much anymore

What began as this blog's first-ever movie review (!) has morphed into a total-experience review, wrapped around a movie and made complete with a trip (and several falls) down memory lane.

From the last time I entered a contest: A local humor publication inaugurated a
competition. Thinking I had a good shot, and riffing off Madonna's silly expensive
coffee-table book from the time, I entered this. The award went to the professional
cartoonist in town who entered, and I wrote the editor, pissed off about that.
The editor was one of the panelists last night. It's been 23 years but I'm over it.
Really I am.

Oh, and the merest possible excuse to run an old editorial cartoon, which has nothing to do with anything except it's a cartoon.

It takes a lot these days to get me into downtown Sacramento, especially at night. Too much meh going around these days.

The occasion drawing me out of the house last night was "Cartoonists: Foot Soldiers of Democracy," a French documentary showcasing the work, trials and passions of cartoon satirists from around the world.

Plus, Sacramento Bee editorial cartoonist Jack Ohman was going to be there for a panel discussion, and it was a chance to meet him. After I had complimented him on some work a while back, he unexpectedly invited me to lunch, but we could never get on track. After a while it felt like I was stalking him — "Look! You promised lunch!" — so I dropped it.

(Note to Bob: I tried, man. I really tried.)

The Sacramento French Film Festival hosted the screening in response to the Paris shootings early this month in which staff and veteran cartoonists of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo were killed. The shooters, who died later after taking hostages, said they had done so to avenge offense Charlie cartoonists had committed to Muslims and the Prophet Muhammad.

Though the documentary by Stéphanie Valloatto does not include Charlie Hebdo cartoonists and was finished before the shootings, it captures the palpable tension cartoonists face across the world, and the courage with which they persist.

"Cartoonists" yesterday received a nomination as top documentary for the César Award, the French Oscar.

Hopscotching around the world, the film features cartoonists in Russia, China, Venezuela, Burkina Faso, Algeria, Tunisia, Israel, Palestine, the Ivory Coast and Mexico. The United States is represented by Jeff Danziger, a syndicated cartoonist — one of the nation's most acerbic — who doesn't work for a newspaper. More on that later.

Jean Plantureux, a French cartoonist for Le Monde, serves as the thread running through the documentary. Plantu, as he's called, created Cartooning for Peace, a kind of Doctors Without Borders, except with ink-stained wretches. In the movie he travels to Israel, where the Israeli cartoonist, Michel Kichka, and Palestinian satirist, Baha Boukhari, are friends united in their fight against armed conflict and universal hypocrisy.

"Cartoonists" also introduces viewers briefly to Ali Farzat, a Syrian cartoonist, now in exile, whose hands were broken in 2011 by Syrian security forces for satirizing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad … Kurt Westergaard, the Danish cartoonist infamous for depicting Muhammad with a bomb in a turban and igniting violent protests and persistent debate about free speech … and Ai Weiwei, the Chinese artist and activist whose work critical of government corruption has banned him from being able to leave his country.

OK, one more cartoon. Strike while the rare opportunity arises, right?

How was the movie? As a survey of editorial cartooning and satire worldwide, it's instructive for bursting our bubble that cartooning is only a U.S. or Western medium. Some of the cartoonists featured face constant surveillance, ostracism and death threats. Damien Glez reports news by publishing a cartoon-heavy paper in Burkina Faso for a largely illiterate population.

Too many cartoonists, though, spoiled the broth. The movie should have focused on three or four cartoonists — I was most intrigued by Rayma Suprani of Venezuela, one of too few women cartoonists, who describes the daily oppression of life under presidents Hugo Chåvez and now Nicolås Maduro; and Pi San, an animator whose political cartoons use the Internet to spread word of corrupt practices.

But just as I thought the movie would focus on one cartoonist's approach to a controversial issue, another cartoonist was introduced. Then another, then another. OK, maybe now they'll show the fallout of a particular cartoon and — no, here's another cartoonist.

Watch it on your friendly neighborhood streaming service. And learn French: Though it's subtitled, the text is white and so, it turns out, is the paper the cartoonists use. Too often when a cartoonist made a salient point, it was lost in white letters on a white background as the director showed the cartoonist's work.

Lost to this arrogant imperialist monolingualist, anyway. Maybe the director was sticking it to me.

I'm glad I went, though. The Crest Theatre, a movie palace from another age, just a skinny city block over from the state capitol building, still looks as good as the day nearly 20 years ago when I was minister-for-a-day and presided over the wedding of graphic designers Paul and Julie. The theater is still cuckoo for rococo —great gold-painted plaster torches, uplit in fierce orange and yellow, along the walls, recessed ceiling spaces high overhead, lit in blue above vast gold friezes, like sapphire pools suspended upside down.

And great acoustics! I could easily hear a woodworking, bluegrass banjo playing, horse-hoof clipping, globetrotting man (he told quite the nonstop story!) translate "Je Suis Charlie," which blazed big on the movie screen before the show started, for his date. I couldn't tell if his date was being coy, overthinking it or had just come from under a rock. "I'd like to learn a language," she said.

And I got to meet Jack Ohman. He didn't recognize my name, not that I expected him too. It was late, everyone was tired, and I was following a man who had buttonholed Ohman to draw cartoons exposing the Kennedy assassination coverup ("It's all bullshit," said Ohman, apparently a student of the assassination. "There's no credible evidence."). He was gracious but the energy for a quick visit was gone. And so it went, as it has gone for just about any person of note whom I'd like to meet. It's what I get for being polite.

Ohman was not optimistic for the future of the pen. He is president of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists, which numbers 50 nationwide. When he started 37 years ago, the United States had more than 250 full-time cartoonists. Editorial cartoonists, he told the audience, are only as good as their editors are brave. Danziger no longer draws for a newspaper.

It was telling that Danziger, the lone American cartoonist in the documentary, said he was too afraid to put his name to one work that went unpublished. It was on par with the salacious work French cartoonists produce regularly. Titled, "Cheney, Dick," it showed a naked former vice president from the back, holding a used condom over a toilet bowl. The condom bears the likeness of George W. Bush.

Robert Salladay, editorial director of the Center for Investigative Reporting, told the crowd he was more optimistic about holding power accountable, though he cautioned that even though the Internet has spread the message, the message itself is getting atomized to smaller and smaller audiences. His center relies on massive donations to do its work.

People have every right to offend and be offended, Salladay said, but no right to violence and murder for their offense. When it happens, all debate must cease, and satirists should redouble their efforts to skewer.

Cartoonist Plantu said the satirists' greatest fear is the people's fear. A people afraid, he said, will not be brave enough to accept the truth and do something about it.

In a similar vein

Ethics, ever vigilant watchdog, expected a long and rewarding career …

Someday, or so the plan went, I'd hang around long enough as an editorial cartoonist to have my own tropes — recurring characters and icons of my own devising to serve as whimsical shorthand for whatever evergreen ox I was goring.

Readers would see the trope traipse into the cartoon and know immediately the issue and my opinion.

I'm surprised more editorial cartoonists don't employ these devices. Now that I think on it, only one comes to mind.

Punk and Edmund Muskie

Of course, Pat Oliphant, my cartooning man crush: He is a master.

This isn't about jack-booted menaces representing anything
vaguely evil or fascist, or the Star of David to represent Israel, or a girded Mars to stand in for war. Republican elephants, Democratic donkeys —those are staple icons many cartoonists use, Oliphant included.

Jack Ohman's Gov. Brown spokesdog

Nor is it about Punk, the miniscule penguinish character who appears somewhere in almost every Oliphant cartoon, cracking wise on the downbeat. Sacramento Bee cartoonist Jack Ohman has used the zeitgeist of his new job to conscript Gov. Jerry Brown's corgi, named Sutter, into the same role.

This is about what Oliphant does better than anybody, and that I had one shining chance to emulate.

Oliphant, for example, uses Uncle Sam (as others do) in all his Flagg-ian fury when the issue suits, as he did here following the 9/11 attacks:

But when the United States stumbles and bumbles and stinks up the world, as it's apt, Oliphant's Uncle Sam becomes W.C. Fields:

Pissing off multiple constituencies in one swift motion …

I wonder how long Oliphant can keep using this analogy, as Mr. Fields slips from our collective memory.

Similarly, Oliphant drags out a brutish, swarthy, money-counting thug to represent the national debt (I'm not sure whether he's a figure in literature or popular culture; something Dickensian, my narrow mind thinks; if you know, tell me).

When the Equal Rights Amendment was big and women's liberation was all the talk, Oliphant represented the issue as a breast-plated and helmeted Brunhilde, usually pummeling her milquetoast husband.

Oliphant isn't out to make friends.

So inspired, I created an ethics watchdog to safeguard the state Legislature, and made him way too small for his collar to show how well the Legislature designed it — present, but toothless.

Ethics made its debut following Shrimpscam, the FBI sting that ensnared several state officials and sent some lawmakers to jail. I 'tooned about it last post.

The Legislature wanted to clean house, or look like it was, after key lawmakers got caught taking bribes in exchange for favorable legislation.

The keeping up of upright appearances culminated, naturally, in voter initiatives. Because when your lawmaker doesn't know right from wrong, blame voters and punish them with a mumbly-jumbly proposition that may or may not do anything and gets tied up in court to boot.

Proposition 112 in 1990, which put strict limits on lawmakers' outside and under-the-table graft — and seems to have worked until the last couple of years — tied good behavior to a boost in lawmakers' pay. Presumably if our representatives were paid more, they wouldn't have to cadge strangers for their trips to Hawaii or college tuition for their kids. Honor comes at a cost.

California lawmakers this week just got a pay raise, shortly after the latest bribery scandal blew up. It's probably coincidence.

Little Ethics could still be on the job today, gumming miscreants into submission — if he could ever climb out of his spiked collar.

Michael Ramirez also go boom!

Every so often an editorial cartoon educates and enlightens me, which happened with Michael Ramirez' 'toon this week, above.

Though I had no idea the topic, the visual metaphor is lightning quick despite its devastating weight.

(By the way, it's so hard to keep track of what's going in the world, and it gets worse every day even as information builds to a torrent, isn't it? I blame myself almost entirely, succumbing to the beguiling filters and baffles of irrelevant TV and celebrity news, ignoring 10 world events for the sensationalism of one. What news I manage to pay attention dismays and disorients me.)

I had to find out what the hell Ramirez was talking about — to the Internet, Batman!

Gosnell is Kermit Gosnell, a Philadelphia doctor on trial facing charges of killing babies born alive, and of killing a woman by a drug overdose during an abortion. The jury is deliberating after six weeks of testimony.

Prosecutors say Gosnell delivered babies and then snipped their spinal cords because he didn't know how to perform late-term abortions, while Gosnell's attorney says the doctor performed abortions while the fetuses were in the womb. Gosnell's attorney said the woman died instead from unforeseen circumstances.

A two-time Pulitzer winner, Ramirez 'toons for Investors Business Daily; such is the state of our traditional newspapers that a top award winning cartoonist would now work in the narrow margins of specialty journalism, seen online more than in print.

Ramirez runs far to the right of my opinions, but he wins me by his mastery of art; I look at his stuff even though I know eight times out of 10 it's gonna be about anything-Obama-does-is-bad-because-he's-not-the-second-coming-of-George-W.-Bush.

Few are better than Ramirez at taking advantage of better printing and digital dissemination. The painting effects he applies to his black line art amplify rather than muddy the image, are inextricably woven into the picture. Note that he has even painted the shadow of the barbed wire on the children's faces.

This one surprised me; this one lured me in the way I'd find it impossible to avert my eyes from a car wreck, wondering frantically what happened, what is what.

Right away I saw the visual metaphor for the sign above the gates at Auschwitz, the one promising prisoners Arbeit Macht Frei — work will make you free.

Then I saw the doors to the ovens, the analogy that the babies Gosnell allegedly killed were disposed of dispassionately as so many Jews and other threats to the Nazi state. Then I saw the children; then the shapes (window hatches?) within the ovens, together with the openings forming haunted eyes; I'm guessing it's intentional, maybe even a spectral caricature of the bespectacled Dr. Gosnell.

This cartoon will receive letters of damnation and praise and threats and the usual calls for Ramirez' firing, as happened when last week The Sacramento Bee's Jack Ohman blamed Texas' lax regulation on the West, Texas fertilizer plant explosion. Or maybe not; maybe his readership is largely limited to the choir.

Here Ramirez unleashes all the power of his pen, skewering me in the gut. His 'toon is a too-sharp mirror, making me reflect and question myself.

I believe in a woman's right to choose. I also believe in the power of education to make the best of that choice. I hear some of you: How could I have lived this long so naive, eyes half-closed to realities?

If Ramirez' statement railed against this trial alone, it would be an outrageous stretch, equating the Nazi mass extermination with, if the jury convicts, a callous if not miscast and misguided doctor. Given Ramirez' long documentation, though, I'd say he is condemning all abortion, at least late-term abortions.

Still, it's outrageous and raw, and Ramirez did his job expertly. He got my attention. He taught me something. The image lodges uncomfortably in my conscience.

Jack Ohman go boom!*

Jack Ohman is good. Like the world needs my opinion.

Even after the Internet made viewing the world's editorial cartoons a mere matter of mouse clicks, I liked to pick up the Portland Oregonian anytime I was in the vicinity, mostly to see Ohman's latest cartoon.

(Cartoons are best read in your lap or at the breakfast table, your nose to the ink, examining the work.)

He has a distinct painterly style and a fierce voice. He knows precisely the power of the editorial cartoon; he knows not to waste his space and your time with the visual equivalent of a Jimmy Fallon topical toss-off.

Ohman joined my neighborhood newspaper, The Sacramento Bee, this year, after his best friend, cartoonist Rex Babin passed away. Ohman said he made the leap to help raise Babin's young son.

Babin had a spare, reductive style, as if he was carving away his cartoons from blocks of wood or linoleum. His voice as well was understated and circumspect, with occasional pointed jabs.

Ohman has brought a wealth of explosive devices to the job.

Last week he lit up the sky with the cartoon above.

In the wake of the explosion of the fertilizer plant in West, Texas, so horrible and vast and somehow swallowed up in the sensational Boston Marathon bombings, Ohman blamed the explosion on Texas' lax industrial regulations, touted as a benefit to California businesses looking for cheaper operating locales.

Oh, man!

The 'toon went viral, major newspapers reporting that Texas Gov. Rick Perry got mad. Perry told The Bee:

“It was with extreme disgust and disappointment I viewed your recent cartoon. While I will always welcome healthy policy debate, I won’t stand for someone mocking the tragic deaths of my fellow Texans and our fellow Americans.
 
“Additionally, publishing this on the very day our state and nation paused to honor and mourn those who died only compounds the pain and suffering of the many Texans who lost family and friends in this disaster. The Bee owes the community of West, Texas, an immediate apology for your detestable attempt at satire.”

Other letter writers said they failed to see the humor in Ohman's insensitivity.

Damn right it's insensitive — but not for its own sake. Ohman's job is not comic relief; it's sardonic dyspepsia. Ohman upholds editorial cartoons on the same serious level as editorials and columns, and uses the directness with which the written word can't compete.

The Bee stands by Ohman, who defended his work in a newspaper blog:

… what normal person doesn't mourn those poor people fighting the fire and living by the plant? I certainly do. What makes me angry, and, yes, I am driven by anger, is that it could have been prevented. I guess I could have done a toned-down version of the cartoon; I am not sure what that would have been, but I think many readers' objections just stemmed from the fact that I used the explosion as a metaphor, period. The wound is fresh, the hurt still stings.

Texas hadn't inspected that plant since 2006, Ohman pointed out.

To be fair, having to explain oneself in a blog defeats the purpose of a cartoon, but it's helpful in its expansion. Good cartoonists such as Ohman count on informed readers to know the issues, and then stomp around in the playgrounds of their minds, splashing ink.

A toned-down cartoon wouldn't have been worth publishing, much less drawing.

Ohman also gets a Sunday comic-sized space to satirize California politics, particularly the musings and meanderings of Gov. Jerry Brown and his corgi, Sutter, who comments on the lunacy a la Pat Oliphant's Punk. Ohman has an interloper's view of California, without any cows to hold sacred.

Here's a recent one, with entertaining riffs on art history:

His stuff is well worth visiting.

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/ohman/#storylink=cpy

*to borrow from the colorful patois of kids (or at least TV commercials) these days …