C6
HIGHLIGHTS “In Performance at the White
House” (WETA at 8 p.m.) features “Paul McCartney: The Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song,” with President Obama awarding the prize to the legendary singer. The broadcast also has performances from the one and only . . . Jonas Brothers! Oh, and a few other people you might recognize, including Stevie Wonder, Herbie Hancock, Elvis Costello, Jack White, Emmylou Harris and Faith Hill. On new reality series “Plain
Jane” (CW at 9), fashion expert Louise Roe tries to take a shy tomboy who loves baggy clothes and scuffed shoes and turn her into a stunning, confident gal who rocks tight dresses and high heels. In the premiere, Roe travels to Los Angeles to help 24-year-old music business assistant Cristen, who’s had a secret crush on her buddy Ty for years but is planted firmly in “the friend zone.” Lots of familiar D.C. faces show up on Wednesday night’s “Top Chef” (Bravo at 9), as the contestants prepare lunch for politicians including Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Rep. Aaron Schock (R-Ill.), as well as TV anchors Savannah Guthrie, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, and chef Art Smith. Singer Mike Posner and dance
S TELEVISION
group Jabbawockeez perform on “America’s Got Talent” (NBC at 9) before four more acts get into the semifinals. “The Bachelor: Then and Now”
(E! at 10) checks in with former contestants to see if their lives have gotten better or worse in the wake of their reality-TV stints. Elka’s love live heats up on “Hot in Cleveland” (TV Land at 10), just as Melanie’s ex-husband arrives to make everything more complicated.
An old friend asks for Gus and
Shawn’s help to track down an alien on “Psych” (USA at 10), so the guys attempt to assist while keeping an open mind. “Countdown to Hard Knocks:
Training Camp With the New York Jets” (HBO at 11) offers a 12-minute preview of the fun to come on “Hard Knocks” (premiering Aug. 11), which looks behind the scenes of the New York Jets football team at training camp in Cortland, N.Y. Actor Michael Keaton is a guest on “Late Show With David Letterman” (CBS at 11:35), along with the band the Flaming Lips. “The Tonight Show With Jay
Leno” (NBC at 11:35) hosts actress Eva Mendes, Old Spice commercial star Isaiah Mustafa and singer Robert Cray.
— Emily Yahr
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Cartoonist Steve Breen takes gulf oil spill into his own hands by Michael Cavna It was a mission so potentially
sketchy, Steve Breen didn’t whis- per a word of it to his friends or bosses, either at his newspaper or his syndicate. Only his wife was entrusted with the secret of Breen’s covert op. She, in fact, en- couraged it. The two-time Pulitzer winner
was jetting and setting off for Op- eration Tarball. “My wife’s used to my hare-
brained schemes — she usually rolls her eyes,” Breen says. “Not this time. I tried to talk her out of it, but she said: ‘You’ve got to do it.’ ” The political cartoonist had gazed so long at images of the British Petroleum oil spill that his uncapped outrage eventually fueled — by an artist’s creative os- mosis — a sudden inspiration. The scheme: Breen would fly to the Gulf of Mexico so he could color his editorial cartoons about the spill out of true BP crude.
What better way to capture the visual truth of a situation, he rea- soned, than to capture the genu- ine viscous article to use as ame- dium?
Still, Operation Tarball had so
many unknowns — from acquisi- tion to the aesthetic — that Breen says he didn’t dare yet involve his bosses at his paper, the San Diego Union-Tribune. Hush-hush, he bought his plane ticket, packed his Tupperware and set out to score some British spillage. “There were so many vari-
ables,” Breen says. “I didn’t know if I could even find a beach with the alleged tarballs before clean- up workers got there. Then I didn’t know if I could transport the tarballs. Then, if I could get them back, I didn’t even know if I could mix them so I could paint with them, or if the oil would show up at all.” Undaunted, Breen called ahead
to Associated Press reporters working in the gulf, then contact- ed Ping Wang, a geologist at the University of South Florida. After
flying into New Orleans, Breen drove to Pensacola Beach. On July 3, he struck black gold. Just days earlier, Hurricane Alex had helped wash ashore more tarballs than entire schools of mixed-me- dia artists could ever hope to gather.
Breen collected his liquid loot.
Now, having been aided by AP and USF to score his BP booty, he needed to navigate UPS, a return AA flight and the TSA. He mailed one container home, then zip- locked two others — weighing several pounds total, counting the ambient shells and sand — into his carry-on. “I was nervous,” Breen recalls. “I didn’t know if I could fly with tarballs.” Once he got home, the next step was figuring out how to paint with the Deepwater Hori- zon product. “The sun had dried out the oil, so it was a concentrated goo,” he says. “So I decided to mix it — I had a nice palette once I mixed the tar with different measures of gasoline.” Breen says the ap-
the Statue of Liberty clutching “bleeding” oil drums; another de- picts an enormous oceanic fist about to capsize a vessel labeled “Gulf jobs”; and a third spells out “BP” in oil-drenched marine life. “I wanted to use minimal wording so the visuals would have maximum impact,” Breen says. “I needed to find powerful images.” The five cartoons ran in Sun-
day’s Union-Tribune. By Monday, Breen says, he had received an en- thusiastic reaction and a museum in Mobile, Ala., has expressed in- terest in exhibiting the artworks. Is this the most expensive set of
STEVE BREEN/ASSOCIATED PRESS SLICK IMAGE: Breen used oil from the gulf to paint this cartoon.
proach was akin to painting with watercolor. Mixing fresh tarball with varying degrees of Unlead- ed, the artist was able to create
tints of rust and sepia, of cocoa and ocher.
Breen painted four of his five BP cartoons. One cartoon shows
cartoons Breen has ever pro- duced? “Probably,” he says. “It’s certainly the most flammable.” So once he’s done working with oils, where might he next find such liquid inspiration? “For an encore, I might do health-care cartoons using my own blood,” says Breen, before waiting a beat. “That will be my last act.”
cavnam@washpost.com John Callahan: Fearless cartoonist was unbound by disability or decorum appreciation from C1
collaboration and friendship. Headless bodies are stumbling out of a restaurant, blood spurt- ing from the necks. The restau- rant’s name is “The Low Ceiling- Fan Cafe.” I think Callahan, who never
achieved any significant degree of commercial success, was the first and best to apply such darkness to the comics; this sort of edge is now almost mainstream. If you watch “Family Guy” or “South Park” or “American Dad,” you will see that they are Callahan’s chil- dren.
A difficult life Where does a sense of humor
like this come from? It’s a cliche to say “from pain,” and it’s not al- ways true, but in Callahan’s case the connection is self-evident. He grew up in Oregon as a teen-
age alcoholic. He was 21 and drunk — a passenger in a car driv- en by another drunk who fell asleep at the wheel — when the car hit a wall at 90 miles an hour, and Callahan’s spine was crushed. Even that didn’t stop his drinking. He stopped one day six years
later when he was in his wheel- chair, trying to gnaw the cork out of a bottle of wine with teeth
chipped from battle with so many corks. The bottle slipped out of his clawlike hands and rolled away on the floor to where he could not reach it. He burst out crying. In that moment, he saw the ruin of his life as a pathetic parable. He never took another drink. A man is at a bar. He has two
prosthetic hooks for hands. The bartender is denying him a drink: “Sorry, Mike, but you can’t hold your liquor.” Typically, Callahan’s humor was
judged against the backdrop of his disability — he was, in effect, given a pass for what would be considered tasteless if done by anyone else. He objected to that, and for good reason. Callahan’s genius — and it was genius — may have been informed by his disabil- ity, but it was not dependent on it or beholden to it; Callahan’s work needed no special accommoda- tion for the handicapped, and to suggest it did is a disservice to him and to humor itself. Calla- han’s crippled characters were stand-ins for all of us; he saw all of humanity as being lame — dis- abled by prejudice, by sancti- mony, by vainglory, by small- mindedness, by self-absorption. A gunslinger is standing on the
Great Wall of China, shouting into the wind: “I’m sayin’ you’re all
yella.” An adolescent slur, but in Calla-
han’s twisted hands and mind, a joke about how East meets West- ern.
Beyond boundaries
In person, Callahan was as gen- tle and unassuming as his car- toons were not. He was so soft- spoken that you sometimes had to strain to hear him. He found him- self to be a perfectly ridiculous character, and he seemed genu- inely surprised that anyone liked his work well enough to publish it. All he was doing, he felt, was holding up a mirror to a world that was spectacularly, hilariously nuts. A cowboy lies dead, his gun by his side, an apparent sui- cide. The title is: Shootout at the Schizophrenic Corral. Like me, Callahan felt that so long as humor was delivered in a good-natured effort to entertain, absolutely nothing was tasteless. Unlike me, Callahan didn’t seem to understand that not everyone felt that way. And so it often fell to us, his editors, to save him from himself. Tom and I would typical- ly reject a half-dozen Callahan cartoons a month. Once, some- thing went wrong, and it resulted in catastrophe.
If you search for Callahan art on the Web, the one that you find most often, unfortunately, is a cartoon that never should have been published. It came in one day, Tom looked at it, blanched and immediately faxed it to me — by then, I had left the Herald for The Washington Post. The cartoon was an almost un- imaginably crude gag at the ex- pense of a teenage Martin Luther King Jr. — so tasteless that The Post’s editors won’t let me repeat it here. Tom and I both laughed — not
at the joke, which was hideously offensive and not even particular- ly good, but at the wonderful tone-deafness of Callahan, who simply had no idea that there was a line — let alone where that line might be. The cartoon was, of course, in- stantly rejected. But somehow, through an error by a production worker, it got into the magazine, 500,000 copies of which had to be destroyed at a significant cost to the Herald. The result was pre- dictable: The newspaper’s brass went ballistic and banished Calla- han forever from the paper. In the ensuing media storm,
the cartoon was described as rac- ist, which was unfair to Callahan. It wasn’t about race at all; it was
just phenomenally crude and rude and outrageous. Callahan, of course, trafficked
in that realm all the time; outra- geous humor is funny because we are outrageous, as a species. We are bloodthirsty; we are hypocriti- cal; we are petty. We live in ridicu- lous denial of our flaws and even of our mortality. Callahan’s car- toons took these things and exag- gerated them, and threw them in our faces. I want to end here by telling a
story that I never thought I’d be able to tell in any public forum. The Post has permitted an edited version of it — on this day, in this context, for this piece. Many years ago, Shroder, Dave
Barry and I were discussing Calla- han’s dark brilliance, the fine lines between humor and pain, and how, in a sense, Callahan was right: Among friends who un- derstood that each other’s mo- tives were honest, nothing is tasteless. So we decided to pray an elaborate prank on our friend Mr. Callahan.
First, we each tried to come up with a concept for a cartoon so of- fensive that even Callahan wouldn’t draw it. We came with an unholy trinity of disgusting ideas involving Jesus, Auschwitz and breast cancer.
Tropic’s art director, Philip
Brooker, was an expert forger. He drew each of these cartoons in Callahan’s style and signed them “Callahan.” They were, to our eyes, indistinguishable from Cal- lahan’s work. We mailed them to Callahan, anonymously, without explanation, postmarked from another city. Several days passed. No word from Callahan. Then, one day, a letter in the mail, addressed to all of us. Callahan just knew there was only one place that first letter could have come from. What he sent us was his answer, a single drawing. It showed a man walk- ing down the street, popping can- dy into his mouth, from a bag. The candies were little, shapeless blobs. The bag was labeled “Choc- olate Thalidomide Babies.” I once told John that I intended to tell this story, one day, some- where. He laughed. That day will never come, he said. I wish it hadn’t, my friend. Not this soon.
weingarten@washpost.com
ON WASHINGTONPOST.COM To read more about John Callahan and see video clips, visit
washingtonpost.com/comicriffs.
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