Toy Pistols

On the 30th anniversary of the attempted assassination (and subsequent deification) of Ronald Reagan, it seemed fitting to put up some handgun art. It's also the anniversary of the terrible injuring of Reagan's press secretary James Brady. Brady never recovered, never got his job back, and then lost many of his friends when he and his wife began an organization opposing gun violence. He was demonized by some of the same people who deified his former boss. Irony is lost on some people. I did this drawing for a group that opposes handgun violence, but it was never used. And I see why. The guns I drew are simply too interesting, too fun, too iconic. They are like toys or playfully phallic little machines, perfectly sized to carry in one's pocket. I grew up playing with toy guns, so maybe some of this old fascination endures like a tattoo you forget you have, but I outgrew my boyhood gun fetish. It's fun to draw them and watch movies about them but I don't own one. They seem like relics of an interesting former age.

Q.E.II and Frida Kahlo

Queen Elizabeth married Prince Philip on this day in 1947. She was 21 and had been in love with him since she was 13. Theirs is an odd and oddly charming relationship. Look at it from his point of view: he's been walking two paces behind this woman for 62 years, waiting for her to talk, minding his manners as best he can. She pays him an allowance. He appears twice in A Book of Ages, she seven times, and several more times in other people's anecdotes. The royal wedding was celebrated in a film starring Fred Astaire, in which the 51 year-old Astaire danced with dumbbells, a hat rack, a framed photograph, a chandelier and Jane Powell (page 194).

The Mexican Revolution began on this day in 1910, not with gunfire but paperwork, a document called the Plan de San Luis Potosi which denounced the president. Painter Frida Kahlo's earliest childhood memory was of gunfire. Her mother served tea to revolutionaries hiding in their garden, details to be found on page 7 in A Book of Ages. (The book is full of revolutionaries, left, right and center.)