I also managed to somehow meet the daunting cluster of deadlines that had devilishly conspired to coincide with Open Studios: I completed my grant application for the funding needed to produce more issues of the North County Perp; I completed a Minneapolis-based illustration assigment that was due yesterday; I compiled this month’s issue of the Cruse Art Newsletter; and I somehow stayed on top of the cartooning course I’m teaching this semester at MCLA.

But back to our big citywide art extravaganza. More than 86 artists showed off their work in locations all over North Adams for two whole days, an organizational feat not to be sneezed at. (Here’s to you, Sharon Carson, for steering that unwieldy ship into port.) Not that I personally experienced much of the event’s scope, given that I spent all of Saturday and Sunday anchored to my own exhibit at 107 Main Street and could only spend time admiring the work of the six who shared that space with me (see below). Those six were plenty good company, though, and the room stayed awash in good vibes and mutual admiration the whole time.

Gratifyingly, the mounted blowup of "A Zoo of Our Own," my comic strip about gay animals (which I brought along on a last-minute impulse), turned out to be an unexpected hit when it was placed in the storefront window, attracting a steady stream of gawkers on the sidewalk, many of whom may well have never before contemplated the point of view of a homosexual hippopotamus. (You’ll find the whole strip, adapted for web viewing, by clicking here.) In the window to the left of my comic strip was one of "Skeets" Richards‘ gorgeous landscapes, a vision also difficult to pass by without stopping for a close look. Between our two showcased eye-catchers, we succeeded in slowing down the sidewalk strollers and tempting them to drop in and see the exhibits awaiting them indoors. John Sherman, whose creative skills are equalled only by his marketing instincts, concocted this ploy.

I’d be remiss if I quit without introducing you to my talented gallery spacemates from 107 Main Street, starting with…(clockwise from below left)

William LaBerge—cabinetmaker. His catalog wows everyone who thumbs through it, and you haven’t lived till you’ve sat in one of Bill’s exquisite chairs.

J. ("Skeets") Richards, Jr. —painter. This guy spent decades teaching high school physics, then morphed into a landscape master after retirement.

Wes Pecor II —wood hand-carvings. A master craftsman, Wes says he "draws with wood."

Dorothy ("Dot") Ransford —auctioneer, appraiser, and art framer. No web site for this gal, but you can email her if you want to talk business.

Gus Jamallo—Folk artist (and full-time barber). Drop by 475 Union Street in North Adams for a haircut and a look at his saw blade paintings. Gus will swap art tales with you from first clip to final talc.

It’s a good thing I enjoy playing with pixels as well as word balloons or I’d be fleeing for the hills in search of serenity right now. (And the nice thing about living in the Berkshires is that those hills are so very near and so very pretty that fleeing to them tends to shed any ambience of unpleasant psychic desperation.)

No hills for Howie, though. There have been fliers, posters, receptiuon invitations, and an incredibly complicated map to compose, the latter item showing where the event’s more than 85 participating artists are going to be showing off their brainchildren next Saturday and Sunday.

Yes, North Adams Open Studios, the annual citywide arts event that I warned you in an earlier blog entry was preparing to roll into north Berkshire county like morning fog into San Francisco Bay, is now but a week away.

Hopefully the word is getting out, because what’s the point of turning Greater North Adams into one long string of artists’ studios on October 13 and 14 unless lots of art-lovers, artist-lovers, and general partiers show up to help keep things lively. The town will be providing free rides thither and yon on its historic trolley, so you’ll only have to park your car once.

To quote the event’s press release, "artists at three historic mills, Eclipse, Beaver, and Windsor, will throw open their studios to welcome local visitors and tourists from throughout the Northeast. In addition, five storefronts on Main Street, Eagle, and Holden will be transformed into galleries, complementing the existing Gallery 51, a special Gallery 51 Annex, Papyri Books, Cup & Saucer, the Flatiron Art Space, North Adams Antiques, Widgets, Kronick Art Studio, and the Chapel for Humanity."

Things will be hopping at nearby Heritage Park, too, where artists will be showing at Northern Berkshire Creative Arts and the North Adams Historical Society. Wanna see costumed historical characters talking about history and the arts? Say no more; the historical society will be ready to oblige. To paraphrase the boast frequently offered by the young Ricky Nelson on the Ozzie and Harriet TV show of my childhood: We don’t fool around, man!

Some extra side events will be adding to the fun at the Beaver and Eclipse mills, like drumming, a children’s drawing wall, a printmaking demonstration, and an ongoing reading by local fiction writers.

And as an extra bonus, you can pick up a free pass to the town’s cultural crown jewel MASS MoCA at any of the Open Studios locations all weekend.

Meanwhile, though, I’m forced to content myself with a few quick notes about my life today just to prevent someone from declaring my blog dead and shipping it off to the mortuary.

But before I begin listing tasks, let me throw in a couple of Gratifying News Flashes.

Gratifying News Flash 1: Rich Thigpen has just published a very touching new review of Stuck Rubber Baby that’s now online at the PRISM web site. My sincere (if rushed) thanks for the warm words about my book, Rich, and my condolences for the loss of your dad.

Gratifying News Flash 2: The "Alabama" installment of the ambitious "Americana" series of art exhibits that I told you about two blog entries ago either opens today (according to the information I was originally given) or opened yesterday (according to the CCA Wattis Institute web site’s current home page). Either way, this show theoretically includes pages of original art from Stuck Rubber Baby. I thought I would remind my Bay Area readers about this in case some of you would like to check the show out.)

Now on to what’s been keeping me so busy….

Task 1: Tonight’s the first meeting of the Cartooning class I’m teaching this semester at MCLA. It’s structured differently this second time around (two evening classes of moderate length every week instead of one galumphing four-hour one). Hopefully the shorter, two-hour periods will leave me and my students less glassy-eyed with exhaustion when classtime ends.

Task 2: I’ve made great progress with my design work for North Adams Open Studios (three print ads and a poster completed so far), but I still have to put together a coherent map showing where the 75-plus participating artists will be showing their work.

Task 3: There’s also the matter of selecting my own artwork that I’ll be showing during the aforementioned Open Studios weekend. This entails rummaging through flat files, making choices, and arranging to have the chosen items mounted and shrink-wrapped for display. (Someday I’ll be able to afford frames.)

Task 4: Several Stuck Rubber Baby pages and a couple of other small drawings are going to be exhibited later this month in Pittsfield as part of an exhange between the Storefront Artists Project in that city and North Adams’s own MCLA Gallery 51.

Task 5: I’m applying for funding from the Northern Berkshire Cultural Council that I hope will allow me to publish a couple more issues at least of the North County Perp.

"The only thing I regret in my life is never having made comics."
—Pablo Picasso (according to an unsourced quote found online)

Assuming that the foregoing Picasso quote is legit, I feel reassured that the master cubist would not have minded the liberties I’ve taken in building the cartoony image above, which is my riff on one of his paintings and which was my reponse to an invitation to create promotional art for this year’s edition of North Adams Open Studios.

Anyway, I think you’ll see why the painting above struck me as the perfect springboard for a cartoon by yours truly that would be promoting a 21st Century celebration of North Adams artists. For one thing, it depicts an artist in the act of creation. How appropriate is that for advertising a citywide art show? Also, the sheer prescience manifested by the Spanish genius (who died 34 years ago) in showing an artist who’s watching a giant flat-screen TV while drawing even though such electronic wonders had not yet been invented when he created the painting fairly takes my breath away! (Admittedly, whatever show is airing must be less than riveting, since it seems to be making the artist’s companion doze off.)

But to leave speculations about Picasso’s technological clairvoyance aside, you can probably tell that I’ve incorporated into my own cubist-lite ‘toonery a patchwork of snippets from the works of several of the dozens of local artists who’ll be taking part in Open Studios this fall (October 13 and 14, to be specific). If you want to see work by the artists whose art I snipped in more dignified contexts, check out the links to their portfolios and web pages below.

North Adams artists included within my drawing, all of whom will be showing their stuff during the North Adams Open Studios weekend, are: Borkowski; Ed Carson; Sharon Carson; me; Martha Flood; FocoLoco; Karen Kane; Joan Kiley; Cynthia Lewis, Melissa McGorty; Danny O, Debi Pendell, J. Richards, Jr.; River Hill Pottery; Susan Rose; Robert Schechter; Norm Thomas; and Thor Wickstrom. Five galleries (MCLA Gallery 51; Brill Gallery; Eclipse Mill Gallery; Kolok Gallery; Northern Berkshire Creative Arts) will be hosting group shows in addition to the downtown spaces being converted into temporary venues for the weekend.

What could it be but the 2007 Downtown Celebration, which for one evening banished the customary quietude of North Adams evenings, filling Main and Eagle Streets with strolling families, exuberant teens, and other Bershirites in a mood to get mellow under moonlight.

(In the interest of full disclosure I should acknowledge that the crowd scene in the snapshot above is from last year’s Downtown Celebration, not last night’s. I was too busy shmoozing with passers-by last night to run around Main Street taking pictures.)

Meanwhile, on another topic…

Several Bay Area blog-readers noticed the passing reference in my most recent post to an "upcoming art exhibition in San Francisco" and wanted to know if a Cruse personal appearance in their city was imminent.

The answer to that question is: no. Unfortunately. While I’m pleased as punch to know that my artwork will be spending some time on a San Franciscan gallery wall, there’s no leeway in the show’s budget to fly me in for the ocasion.

I will, however, tell you what I was referring to in case some of you who live within reach of the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts at 1111 8th Street want to drop in to see my crosshatching in person.

From September 6-22 the Mary Augustine Gallery, a small vitrine within the Wattis facility, will be occupied by Alabama: A Portrait in Black and White, the opening installment of a projected fifty-show series of exhibits sharing the umbrella title Americana, in which each of our union’s fifty states will have a turn being artistically represented in one way or another.

Jessica Brier, curator of the Alabama show, feels that pages of original art from my graphic novel Stuck Rubber Baby will pair well thematically with some of the powerful linoleum cut prints that comprise a recently unearthed limited-edition book called Scottsboro Alabama.

At right: One of the Khan/Perez inages in Scottsboro Alabama

But things are calming down a little now, so I guess I’ll haul myself back into the ol’ bloggers’ saddle and see if I still know how to stay right-side-up.

Evelyn Update: Upon sober reflection and with a wary eye cast on New England’s reputation for winters that show no mercy to 94-year-olds, Eddie’s mom reversed course last week and decided to return to her familiar stomping grounds in Florida instead of staying permanently up here in the Berkshires as she had been tempted to do.

The interview was conducted by Transcript Arts Editor (and fellow blogger) John E. Mitchell, whose checkered career history includes not only journalistic endeavors but the creation (in collaboration with his wife, illustrator Jana Christy) of the Very Vicky comics series, which was first published in the early 1990s by Caliber Press and is still viewable online at the Very Vicky’s Most Pleasing Cartoon Collection web site.

It’s always fun when a newspaper writer decides to give your every word his undivided attention for a couple of hours in anticipation of writing about you. It’s triple the fun when that writer has spent time enduring the slings and arrows (and partaking in the pleasures) of comics-creation himself!

Still to come when I finish catching my breath: Riveting accounts of my latest promotional-graphics gigs, my contemplated foray into self-publishing, my upcoming art exhibition in San Francisco, and Eddie’s battles with fearsome bugs.

This being the laid-back Berkshires, no punches were thrown as the iced tea flowed, scones were scarfed, and our intrepid photographer Ed Sedarbaum snapped away. The scones were generously provided by Sarah McNair, the iced tea by Cup and Saucer.

Click the image above for party details.

The North County Perp is a small-scale, low-rent, shoestring ‘zine that I seem to have propelled into existence by sheer force of will and a willingness to spend my own money printing it even though I’m giving copies away for free.

This kind of thing is why no one ever makes the mistake of calling me a good businessman!

It all started several years ago, back when Eddie and I were North Adams newbies, when I noticed (a) that none of the locally published newspapers had any discernible interest in publishing locally drawn cartoons; and (b) that there weren’t even that many places around here that were looking to publish written humor, satire, or essays that risked stepping on toes.

It’s not that nobody in these parts is funny. Seth Brown, a friend of mine, writes cool humor columns regularly for the North Adams Transcript. Bill Shein, who doesn’t know me from Adam, spoons up nice helpings of wit in the op-ed columns he contributes twice a week to the Berkshire Eagle.

But even Seth, despite his own foothold in the local media, agreed with the bitching and moaning I threw at him during our conversation at a Williamstown party a couple of years ago when we had just met. Venues for folks like us are rare around here, he ruefully allowed. But on the whole, guys like Seth are exceptions in these parts. That seriousness has the upper hand among Berkshire commentators is undeniable. Seriousness plus a disorienting degree of courtesy.

Courtesy: bane of satirists everywhere! New Englanders don’t like to hurt each other’s feelings even if, in their hearts, they think they are surrounded by idiots. It ain’t like it was back in New York City; sharp elbows in the rib are not appreciated among small town folks who cross paths with each other regularly. I might as well be back in the rural South again!

Or maybe a shortage of humor isn’t the core problem. I’m not all that funny myself; in fact, I can be a major depressive if my supply of Zoloft runs out. There’s a shortage of quirkiness, whether couched in sobriety or glee. Weirdness is out. (I’m not talking about people in the real world, understand; there’s plenty of refreshing weirdness there. I’m talking about a shortage of weirdness in the words and pictures that get applied to paper.)

I’m not typical, I admit. If I ruled the world every city would have at least one old-fashioned underground newspaper that celebrated sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll. But then, I’m a traditionalist.

Anyway, you’d have to be totally off your beam to think that a genuinely underground newspaper of the San Francisco Oracle or East Village Other sort could possibly take root here in the Berkshire mountains this century. Hell, you can’t even find eyeball-candy rags like that in ‘Frisco or the Big Apple anymore. But it did feel like one segment of the creative people in the north county were being unfairly deprived of a place where they could be at least a little out of the ordinary in print.

So last year I decided to see if I could make something happen myself. My role model wasn’t the Oracle, actually, but rather the cheap little photocopied handout some friends and I put out while we were at Birmingham-Southern College in 1967. Nothing momentous; just something to jack up the energy level of a sleepy campus and allow us student smartasses to let off steam. We called our college "underground" paper Granny Takes a Trip.

(Sound familiar? Back in April of 2006 I wrote a blog entry about one of the pieces I wrote for it.)

But back to the present: I decided to name my new venture the North County Perp, subtitled: "Perpetrators of irreverent art and commentary for Berkshire County and the world." To get the ball rolling, I put a stack of fliers on the counter of a North Adams bookstore and asked a local writers’ group to distribute copies to its members. Hoping word would spread, I waited to see if interest would be generated.

Lo and behold, some submissions did materialize and the Perp was soon taking form—only to get temporarily derailed by Mark the Art Guy, the 14-episode commercial webcomic gig that was unexpectedly commissioned by Adobe Systems Inc. just as the Perp was beginning to take flight. As a non-income-producing indulgence in publishing hobbyism, the Perp of necessity conceded the field to Mark, which consumed most of my waking hours during much of the last year. Thanks to Mark the Art Guy and some other welcome freelance assignments that have showed up unexpectedly, it’s been life-on-the-back-burner time for my little gaggle of art perpetrators.

Fortunately, the Perp has been blessed by a set of preternaturally patient contributors who have waited out the long lull uncomplainingly. Along the way, some additional local writers and cartoonists have added their work to the mix. And now, with my Adobe work completed, the Perp’s early momentum has been restored. The printing is done and preparations for the aforementioned launch party are underway.

Come if you can.

Well, I’m happy to report that the heavy lifting has already been done by the industrious worker bees of the Library Patrons of Texas Inc., a non-profit agency dedicated to keeping their fellow citizens apprised of what’s on the library shelves of Montgomery County, Texas.

The results of the LPT’s research on my book can be found online here.

Alright, that might be going overboard. I myself opted for an understated fig leaf in my own rendition of the very same panel, seen below as it appears in a special revised edition of SRB that I’ve whipped up expressly for residents of Montgomery County.

Below: A second excerpt from Stuck Rubber Baby: The Montgomery County Edition, available soon at Christian bookstores everywhere.

I’m sure that local gay people, sexually comfortable heterosexuals, and fans of literature that questions the received wisdom of majority culture were among those polled by the LPT to determine exactly what the community standards and values being applied might be.

And the powerful Fig-Leaf Lobby must surely have been consulted as well.

Illustrating Steve’s post is his copy of Wendel on the Rebound, an early compilation of strips from the series that was published in 1989 by St. Martin’s Press. Unfortunately, any of Steve’s readers who are inspired enough by his generous comments about my work to try and track down that particular book will have to haunt dusty used book racks (like this online one), since it and its predecessor (Wendel, Gay Presses of New York) have been out of print for a dozen years now.

I’m happy to report, though, that everything that was first collected in Wendel, Wendel on the Rebound, and Kitchen Sink’s 1990 Wendel Comix has subsequently been reprinted in Olmstead Press’s 2001 omnibus collection Wendel All Together, which can still be purchased online and (very) occasionally even at bricks-and-mortar bookstores. Besides assembling the entire Wendel series from beginning to end, the latter collection comes (to adopt DVD-Speak for a moment) with "Special Features" and — as Wolf Blitzer enjoys saying on CNN — "much, much more!"