Nancy Rommelmann

Michael Kimmelman on David Levine

A beautiful piece about David, in today's NYT, that gets it right. A clip:

His political illustrations in The Review were a biweekly fix for the fuming left back in the 1960s and ’70s. But plenty of angry cartoonists soothed the savage public, then slipped down the memory chute. What has made Mr. Levine endure — why, hands down, he’s the greatest modern-day caricaturist and one of the great artists of the last half-century — is his embrace of ambiguity. The power of his famous image of Lyndon B. Johnson with a map of Vietnam scarred onto his stomach, a classic of American satire, derives from the fact that while he clearly reviled the president, he also allowed him his complexity. That’s also why his art became the indelible face of a journal so fiercely devoted to the power of words.

There's also a nice slideshow of some of his work

David Levine, 1926 - 2009

My stepfather died this morning at 4:40. His son and I were with him in the room. It was, as these things go, an easy passage. The New York Times already has up an extraordinary obituary about an extraordinary artist and man, and personally, someone who was always supportive of me. He was well loved.

I thank everyone in advance for their condolences xx

Merry Christmas, Babies

Where have I been? Writing. Working. Not drinking, with the exception of the fantastic Ristretto Roasters Christmas party last week, at Joe's Cellar here in Portland, and at which there was much drinking and dancing and singing and, later, vomiting (but not by me!), broken glass and the apparently rather cinematic image of my taking my husband's hand, in order to pull him up from the booth for a dance, and him pulling back with a wee bit too much force, launching me across the table a la an old Western movie, glasses flying and candles crashing and our buddy on the other side of the booth going, "Whoa!"

Merry Christmas and happy new year to all, from me and mine xx