I made the above painting in 2008, during Obama’s first run for president — the only time I’ve ever felt idealistic over a general election. It was exhibited at the Museum of Sex. After we had our champagne, we watched the Obama McCain debate, where Joe the Plumber made his pimple-like emergence onto the national stage.
The painting, with its tiny animals sucking, fucking, and removing their partisan masks, has hung in my studio ever since, surrounded by inky memorials I made to other moments, until, sixteen years after its creation, two squamous cretins shambled onto the stage and made it feel relevant again.
Cretin One, a painted, puckered fascist pumped full of horse steroids and liquid plastic, the eager handmaid of a Heritage Foundation penned proto-dictatorship. Cretin Two, a genocide-supporting skeleton in whose waning brain the factoids flutter like moths, but only arrive at his tongue in the form of trailing non-sequiturs, for which his wife congratulates him as if he were a kindergartener who successfully kept from wetting the bed. The two old fools compare their golf scores, the Supreme Court legalizes bribery, and the Israeli bombs we pay for shred Palestinian kids into bits of bone and meat. ‘Merika. What a system.
I’m back from Tbilisi. In New York, its so hot the pavements shimmer. The broken glass sparkles like makeup on a gogo girl’s cheekbone. Its wolf-whistle hot. Salsa blaring from the car stereo hot. Subway sweat box hot. So hot you give in to the heat. I’m back at the library, our People’s Palace of Knowledge. Our term at the Cullman Center is over, so they kicked me out to The Allen Room, which is still plenty nice. Light pours in from the big glass windows. I stack my books up like toy soldiers.
A few recent appearances
I wrote some Bundist, anti-Zionist history for my friends at Lux (as in Rosa Luxemburg) Magazine
* I did the cover of Centro’s journal. Inside, I illustrated a story by Monxo Lopez on Bernardo Vega, the socialist cigar roller and first Nuyorican memoirist
Here’s an old arrest photo, just cause
xoxo
Awesome post. You continue to inspire with your voice, your pictures, and your incredible spirit.
Molly, you have the remarkable distinction of looking good in an arrest photo.