The L Magazine Wants YOU To Send Us Yr Comix

Hey there. Do you, or does anyone you know, make comix? Because we would really like to read, and perhaps even to publish said comix, in The L Magazine's Second Annual Comix Issue, which will be on streets and in your hearts on November 12.

Here be the official submissions guidelines:

‹The L Magazine› is now accepting submissions for our 2008 Comix Issue.
Submissions should exemplify a unique artistic style and variety of subject matter. All work should be submitted as completed, final artwork, black and white or color.

submissions should be one of the following three sizes (no bleed):
- 1/4 page, 4.635"w x 1.794"h
- 1/2 page, 4.635"w x 3.755"h
- 1 full page, 4.635"w x 7.875"h

300dpi, JPEG, TIFF or PDF documents.

Submission deadline is WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 29, 2008
Please send all submissions and questions to comics@thelmagazine.com

Crisis Time Romance

Remember when all those New Yorkers who dumped each other got back together after 9/11? I Can't. Stop. Thinking. About. Whether this Greatest Depression of ours is going to have a similar effect on this city's reckless, love-starved population.

So while others would like to hear your generalized tales of economic and job woe, I'd seriously be fascinated (trust me, I live for this stuff) by your wonky overshares about the rest of it. You know, relationships, hah! Maybe because you just need to rant and you can't afford to see your shrink anymore?
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To Do, Tonight and Tomorrow: The New Year, Lady Riot's Costume Ball

Stolen from The L's own carefully curated Daily Listings, here's a sampling of things I think you should do tonight and tomorrow as a way to escape our bitter reality. Good to go!

Tonight: The New Year
Okay, so you couldn't justify buying hella pricey tickets to that New York Magazine 40th Anniversary Party featuring the National and Grizzly Bear? Bummer. May I suggest hitting up the New Year show and letting the brothers Kadane soothe your ruffled spirits with their latest slow-core offerings? Your heart will thank you.

8pm; $15. Music Hall of Williamsburg, 66 N. 6th St, at Wythe Ave; musichallofwilliamsburg.com
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Your Weekend (Now and Later): BAM's Next Wave Festival

The Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival is happening right now, having opened last week with A Quarreling Pair, and through mid-December it will continue to feature short runs of new and touring performances, and continue to be the kind of thing that you always read descriptions of and think, wow, this theater/performance art/dance/music/"noveau cirque"/multimedia piece sounds really cool, and the stills look great, I should really be the kind of person who goes to hip-high culture events like this I bet the audiences are really good-looking and aren't there a lot of good restaurants around BAM for making a night of it.

And indeed there are, and they are, and you should at least look at the program to see what's there for you (there would, given the idiosyncrasy of the program, seemingly be something for everyone, plus period film screenings, artist talks and literary events). This weekend's event is the monologue-with-projections Sunken Red (pictured), about trauma and forgetting, among other things; next weekend is an Icelandic production of the obsessional German drama Woyzeck that takes place mostly underwater, and so on and so on.

Really, a Guy Named Keating?

All of my favorite political writers, from Orwell to Hunter S. to young Hitch, were able to distill their heartbroken rage into lucid, muscular prose (ok, the good doctor wasn’t always lucid, but you know what I mean). Well, in response to this latest McCain campaign official who’s trying to bring up Obama’s history of drug use as the world economy goes byebye, I say, FUCK YOU. Also, eat a bag of dicks (I think it was Mencken who came up with that one).
 
Some guy named Frank Keating (no, not that Keating) thinks Bar-Bar should be more candid about his past, because the American people deserve to know. I mean, it’s not like the guy wrote a book about it or anything. Oil up your flintlocks people, there’s trouble a-coming.

TGIF Round-Up: Some Stuff That's Happening While Global Markets Free-Fall

TGIF like whoa! Are you worried about the stuff you might be missing while you try to teach yourself all about why everybody is broke now? It's time to catch up! Herein, some handy newsy links for you to click on.

WORLD AFFAIRS!
Russia is maybe selling some bombz to Iran.

HEALTH!
The economy is in the shitter, ergo your health is improving.

MEDIA!
Haute Living is a publishing sweatshop.

RELATIONSHIPS!
A 105-year-old Scottish lady attributes her long life to not having sex.

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Is it Because We Have teh Gayz?

Global markets are, obvs, crashing left, right and center. But you know what really hurts? The Iranian markets are doing just fine, thank you. So yeah, if anybody knows what the Bushwick of Tehran is, gimme a shout.

Someone Else Made This So You Don't Have To: Mr. Business Bunny

Someone Else Made This So That You Don't Have To provides me with the excuse to troll the bowels of DIY marketplace Etsy.com for amazing thingz fashioned out of dust by by whimsical fairy queens! Credit crisis, say whaaat?

Exhuming Sokoloff

By Henry Stewart

Tonight, Anthology Film Archives will be screening two programs of the late trans-media artist Beryl Sokoloff’s experimental short films, split up by theme, each roughly an hour long (with a wine and cheese reception in the middle): at 7 p.m., it’s "Art/Politics & Society"; at 9 p.m., "NYC/Travels."

The longest film, at 17 minutes, is also possibly his best known: My Mirrored Hope (pictured). Part of the first program, it’s the highlight of both shows: Clarence Schmidt occasionally narrates footage of his dilapidated Xanadu (had Kane collected junkyard detritus instead of antique masterpieces), his “House of Mirrors” in Woodstock. It looks like ten houses smushed together into one unsteady behemoth (and makes the Broken Angel House from Dave Chappelle’s Block Party look as architecturally impressive as your apartment building), overflowing with wood, stone and glass — statues, windows, dolls, sculptures, paintings, door frames but, above all, mirrors.

Thus the title, though with Hope Sokoloff seems to suggest that he sees himself mirrored in the mad art-monk and his makeshift monastery, or at least finds inspiration in Schmidt and his palace; it’s a seemingly endless work of enormous creation that, taken wholly, becomes collective culture manifest, like that terrifying parade of pop culture in Paprika. 


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Not Everyone's An Author: Hugh Hewitt Still Searching for Publisher (Hopefully Forever)

Oh Lawd, the Dow is in free-fall, but hey, at least the world has a chance of escaping the publication of an enlightening tome tentatively titled How Sarah Palin Won the Election... and Saved America. According to the Observer, conservative talk show host Hugh Hewitt and his literary agent Curtis Yates pitched the book to New York publishers last week. Praise be, they didn't bite. Hewitt explained:

"The idea was to tell the story behind the effect that Sarah Palin has had on this election and how it is and why it is that she has basically turned the election around for McCain and why it is that she is resonating with so many people in the country," he said. "The intent was to finish the book by a week after the election, and to have it out before the inauguration."

Hey, It’s Barely Coded Racism Time!

Unfuckingbelievable. I am pissed. Quin Hillyer at the American Spectator, offering sound, xenophobic advice:

“McCain's campaign must pound home the message, in a coherent way, that Obama is not ‘one of us.’”

Trend Spotting: Sartorial Bookmarks

I interrupt your regularly scheduled Treasury Department hah-hahs with some potentially distracting superficial deliciousness: two new fashion and style interweb destinations have captured my attention of late!

What I Saw Today is for the menswear fanatics and quick-sketch afficiados. Bro-dudes, take note! The blog features colored pencil drawings of the sharply-dressed lads of Gotham. "My design eye is informed by working with some of the best in the business - Calvin Klein, Bill Blass, Perry Ellis and Sean Combs. They taught me how to look at fabric, shape, color," says webmaster "DesgnerMan" in his bio. "I'm taking that knowledge and combining it with my love of illustration to record what I see around me - the vital and always changing style of guys in New York."

Then there's the much-lauded LookBook.nu, my new favorite. Oh, sigh! Click here if you care more about how to dress for life than for a runway fantasy. You'll find endless aesthetic eye candy at LookBook, a co-ed street style community that mixes and matches self-portraits by users from all over the world in a seamless, slick scroll-through format. Plus, contributors and observers can rate individual looks with a Digg-esque feature called Hype. I mostly vote for Betty A., who hails from Paris (where else?), has impeccable style and may just be the coolest girl in the world. Um, after Louise, that is. She still reigns supreme. And I plan on being inspired by both of them until the end of time. Er, at least, until we lose electricity and morals along with our minds, homes, and savings accounts.

The New Yorker Reader: "Gold Boy, Emerald Girl," by Yiyun Li

It's a town full of losers and I'm pulling out of here to win.
 
This is... nice, by which I mostly mean sad. Good variations on themes of solitude, guardedness, and repressed need; pretty and stoic. But man, those last two sentences — would anybody make a case for their inclusion not being a mistake? Sorry, but I get a bit put out when short stories explain the significance of self-evident details and especially when, as happens here, the conclusion of the story seems to function similarly to the "restate thesis" part of the five paragraph essay.

Oh, but so far this Politics Issue of the NYer is really good; you should really read George Packer's What's the Matter with Rural Ohio piece in all its racial, cultural, educational, class-different maddening glory.

Father of Wonkette Explains McCain Health Plan

My love of Wonkette founder Ana Marie Cox is well known and, as it usually does, Wikipedia explains the origin of my strong feelings: “Wonkette became known for its sharp, sarcastic, intelligent voice, and for its mixture of heady political discourse with repeated references to gin and anal sex.” Sigh.
 
Cox is currently blogging at TIME’s Swampland, and today she’s posted an email from her father, a former medical actuary, explaining why McCain’s health care plan is very bad. It’s concise, it’s clear, and everyone should read it.

Thursday List: All Apologies

Today, like many of my people, I'm not eating as a way of atoning for my sins of the past year, the less fun part of our annual ethical binge-and-purge. (Sharon is not, she says, because she's an anxiety eater and the world is going to hell, thus lots of anxiety.)

Manchester, so much to answer for, this Thursday's List is like a mixtape that you make to send to your boyfriend, or your girlfriend, or god, to say that you've messed up and wish to make amends:


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The L's Nobel Prize Pool: This Guy Wins; We All Lose

Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, of France, "author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization."

Well, that sounds kinda sexy.

It has been a while since France won, and his bona-fides — experimental novels in the 60s and a over recent decades many works of fiction and non-fiction drawn from his vast experience as a world traveller and dealing, it would seem, in both theme and style, with one's relationship to all parts of the world.

He is, needless to say, rather unknown here, despite his considerable fame in France. Which, despite the carping of the Times report on the prize (which misinterprets the remarks anyway, despite jamming them into the lede before getting to the actual winner of the Nobel, assholes), kinda proves Horace Engdahl's point about us being "insular", and how we as a literary culture have no idea about writing produced beyond our borders.

And Now, A Word From Our Art Department...

October Is the Scariest Month

Or the corniest, or both. In something like an annual tradition, the Two Boots Pioneer theater devotes the month of October to classic creep-out cheapies and more recent D.I.Y. gorefests. Thus, "Schlocktober", this year's name for the monthlong Halloween parade. Things skew heavily towards stuff made this century, with a couple too-tawdry-to-be-cult favorites from years past, a few acts of toxic vengeance from Troma, and a midnight screening of Night of the Living Dead on Halloween itself. This is I guess a heads-up event post, though I have no idea whether any of this appeals to the (hypothetical) thelmagazine.com reader or not. But it's nice to know it's there, playing movies called Trailer Park of Terror and Bikini Bloodbath and Splatter Disco to diehard audiences, because really now.