Wednesday, August 17, 2016

Bait and Switch on Photo of British Cartoonist Michael Heath!

You just can't trust anyone these days! The right-leaning British magazine The Spectator seemed to  promise a lefthanded look at cartoonist Michael Heath, who grew up in a communist home and whose cartoon below appeared to have some vaguely Cyrillic heading:

Left Bait

But no, uh-uh, not at all. The article we reached by clicking shows a righthanded Heath with a decidedly Western alphabet in the cartoon below!

Right Switch

Who's responsible for editing these things these days? Nobody? Well, Nobody ought to be editing like nobody's business! Okay, so we don't know if Heath is left or right, but birds of a feather do flock together:
In his drinking days in Soho with his friends at the Colony Club, Jeffrey Bernard, Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, he was terrified of Bacon, 'the most frightening man he ever met'. But what he loved was the talk. They drank continuously, whisky and/or vodka, but always 'had something I wanted to hear. No one was allowed to boast.' But when were you drawing? 'When I was drinking,' Michael says, creating a rather shocked silence. 'I could drink and draw . . . It gives you a sort of whizz.' ('Funny is now dangerous', The Spectator, Kate Chisholm August 13, 2016)
Yeah, yeah, one does have to take an occasional whizz during a long drinking bout. But who is Chisholm quoting here:
'the most frightening man he ever met'.
Herself? Or does Heath talk about himself in the third person? He does have some interesting things to say:
What's it like working as a cartoonist after the attacks on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo? asked Kirsty Young. 'It adds a certain frisson to your drawing,' Michael replies. 'But I never wanted to be a political cartoonist . . . I wanted to be funny . . . People take offence [anyway],' he says. 'Funny is now dangerous. But I'm not scared. Because they don’t get it.'
Right, they don't get the joke, but they do know they're being laughed at. That modicum of insight into insult makes them dangerous

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