TWINGLEY

NEW BLUES REVISITED

2012-01-18T17:28:00.000-05:00

The View From My Dad's Studio (Bismarck, North Dakota - December 25th, 2011)

2012-01-03T23:47:00.000-05:00

A Controlled Burn...

2011-11-18T14:22:00.000-05:00

“WHAT IS IT, PIG MONTH?” (An Overheard Conversation On A Bus In Seattle – August, 2001)

2011-11-15T17:13:00.000-05:00

http://twingleystories.blogspot.com/2011/11/what-is-it-pig-month-overheard.html

University of the Arts Field Trip (Museum of Natural History, New York City)

2011-11-04T16:25:00.000-04:00

FORE! Exhibition (Pensacola State College, September 2011)

2011-10-19T10:07:00.001-04:00

Last month I attended the opening of an exhibition of my paintings and drawings and visited with students in the Illustration and Design Departments at Pensacola State College. Thanks to the faculty, staff and students for a wonderful trip.

(Read the "Artist's Statement" from the exhibition catalogue here: http://twingleystories.blogspot.com/2011/10/sort-of-timeline.html)

The Chronicle of Higher Education (September 2011)

2011-09-30T15:03:00.000-04:00

BARBERSHOP DUET

2011-09-16T13:54:00.001-04:00

Figure Communication 9.12.11 (University of the Arts)

2011-09-13T16:31:00.000-04:00

STATIC (Brooklyn Magazine – Summer 2011)

2011-09-06T15:38:00.000-04:00

http://twingleystories.blogspot.com/

THE WASHINGTON POST (8.24.11)

2011-08-24T15:14:00.000-04:00

PERSONAL WOOFERS

2011-08-18T18:11:00.000-04:00

NOT CLICKING

2011-08-15T16:54:00.000-04:00

WALL OF SOUND (Phil Spector)

2011-08-11T16:35:00.000-04:00

PARIS HILTON'S LAST STAND

2011-07-28T17:09:00.000-04:00

http://twingleystories.blogspot.com/2011/07/paris-hiltons-last-stand.html

THE ARAB SPRING

2011-07-22T09:57:00.001-04:00

CHE LATTE

2011-07-06T17:35:00.002-04:00

http://twingleystories.blogspot.com/2011/07/che-latte.html

NO SIGN OF KEITH RICHARDS OR UNCLE JESSE

2011-06-15T11:10:00.000-04:00

http://twingleystories.blogspot.com/

MAJ. GEN. BENJAMIN F. BUTLER WAS A VAIN MAN

2011-06-07T16:11:00.000-04:00

A TELEPHONE CONVERSATION WITH LORIN STEIN THAT MIGHT HAVE TAKEN PLACE (BUT OF COURSE NEVER DID)

2011-06-03T15:07:00.000-04:00

http://twingleystories.blogspot.com/

Putter (The Deal Magazine)

2011-05-25T12:42:00.001-04:00

NO-LOOK PASS

2011-05-17T16:38:00.000-04:00

http://twingleystories.blogspot.com

September 11th Revisited (The Los Angeles Times - May 8th, 2011)

2011-05-09T14:42:00.001-04:00

http://opinion.latimes.com/opinionla/2011/05/the-bin-laden-images-wed-rather-see.html

The news of Osama bin Laden’s “demise,” as it’s been referred to, inevitably brought many of us back to that tragic day in 2001 when the world at large was introduced to this vain, homicidal maniac. A friend called and woke me up that morning: “Better turn on your TV,” he told me. Later, standing on the roof of my apartment building some ten miles away, I could plainly see the two columns of smoke drifting languidly into the blue, early autumn sky. Also visible were the F-15 fighter jets circling Manhattan, as if there might have been an airshow somewhere in the area. But it wasn’t an airshow. It was the Real Deal.

The weeks that followed were nervous ones here in New York City. Will we be hit again? The common sight of passenger planes making their low approaches over Manhattan towards LaGuardia Airport were suddenly cause for concern. The myriad characters on a New York City subway car were no longer fodder for sketchbook doodlers, but things to be cautiously watched: What’s that guy got in his backpack? That man looks fidgety. Does that tattered package underneath the seat over there belong to anybody?

I began to make drawings, loosely titled the Terrorist Drawings, hoping to somehow exorcise those raw/nervous feelings, and in someway make tangible these spooks that were suddenly a very real part of our daily lives. A week ago, when news broke that Osama bin Laden had been killed, I again felt compelled to make a drawing – a simple attempt to make tangible those things we can’t see, and a bookend to the drawings I began nearly ten years ago.

Connie and Sherman Mendez (from The Ballad of Leonard Mendez Parts I & II)

2011-05-05T14:50:00.000-04:00

Leonard Mendez (from The Ballad of Leonard Mendez Parts I & II)

2011-04-27T10:51:00.001-04:00

Taxing Times

2011-04-18T13:40:00.000-04:00

The Chronicle of Higher Education

2011-04-15T14:17:00.001-04:00

The L Magazine (Brooklyn, NY)

2011-03-29T13:38:00.001-04:00

LA Times (3.20.11)

2011-03-21T11:13:00.003-04:00

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-dorfman-chile-obama-20110320,0,4363300.story

New York Times OP/ED (3.10.11)

2011-03-10T12:05:00.001-05:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/10/opinion/10matar.html?ref=opinion

Twingley Stories: SAND TRAP

2011-03-02T19:09:00.000-05:00

http://twingleystories.blogspot.com/2011/03/sand-trap.html

Every Day Is Valentine's Day

2011-02-14T12:37:00.000-05:00

New Site: TWINGLEY STORIES

2011-02-08T15:52:00.000-05:00

www.twingleystories.blogspot.com

In Real-Time: Hot Thoughts in Egypt

2011-02-02T15:08:00.000-05:00

JAZZIZ Cover & CD Sampler Case

2011-02-02T13:48:00.002-05:00

In Real-Time: Roll Over Gutenberg

2011-01-29T00:21:00.006-05:00

A Montenegrin man living in Staten Island, New York announced this week that he’s suing Facebook for half-a-million dollars because the social networking site disabled his account. The only thing the man wants (aside from the five-hundred-thousand dollars) is to be reconnected with his three-hundred-and-forty “friends” and his lost archive of uploaded photographs.

The Internet has laid everything in the palm of our collective hands: Our family and friends, our enemies and our admirers, histories, biographies, diaries of the famous and the infamous, answers to questions that we’ve had and answers to questions that we never dreamed of ever asking, digitized glossy centerfolds of Marilyn Monroe in the first issue of Playboy magazine and cell phone pictures of our ex-girlfriends last weekend, juggling monkeys and beer-guzzling pot-belly pigs and Super Bowls and Olympic competitions archived in one-minute video recaps on Yahoo’s sports page, Hotmail, Gmail, Hushmail, Zoho Mail, AIM Mail, FastMail – YOU’VE GOT MAIL!

Roll over Gutenberg.

It’s been speculated that before the Big Bang, all of the matter in the universe was compressed to less than the size of a golf ball. Will the compact expansiveness of the Internet experience its own Big Bang? Surely, at some point a nasty bug or virus of some kind will crash the whole works – slice the World Wide Web to shreds like a great white caught in some fisherman’s net – likely conceived and executed by a fourteen-year-old kid on a laptop computer in Malaysia or Des Moines. And a thousand years from now, historians and archeologists will puzzle over this gap in human history, this early apex in the history of modern man that left no record of its existence. Our Dark Age.

In Real-Time: Patti Smith on Charlie Rose (1.13.11)

2011-01-19T17:20:00.002-05:00

In Real-Time: Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat on YouTube

2011-01-14T13:18:00.003-05:00

New York Times OP/ED (1.12.11)

2011-01-12T11:04:00.003-05:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/12/opinion/12freeman.html?ref=opinion

In Real-Time: Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady on YouTube

2011-01-07T15:09:00.001-05:00

In Real-Time: William S. Burroughs on YouTube

2011-01-05T15:12:00.001-05:00

Soldiering On (1.1.11)

2011-01-01T10:31:00.001-05:00

Louise Bourgeois, DIA: Beacon (11.26.10)

2010-12-22T17:52:00.003-05:00

In Real-Time: Charles Manson on Charlie Rose

2010-12-20T17:43:00.003-05:00

In Real-Time: Jay Z on Charlie Rose

2010-12-14T12:55:00.002-05:00

In Real-Time: Victoria's Secret Fashion Show (11.30.10)

2010-12-07T17:45:00.001-05:00

PAPARAZZO

2010-12-03T16:50:00.001-05:00

In Real-Time: Fran Lebowitz on Charlie Rose (11.26.10)

2010-11-29T17:01:00.003-05:00

In Real-Time: V.S. Naipaul on Charlie Rose (11.23.10)

2010-11-24T13:18:00.001-05:00

Hall of Fame: Mark Twain

2010-11-17T16:13:00.005-05:00

The Sentimentalist (Rhode Island Monthly)

2010-11-08T16:37:00.001-05:00

Over-Sized Gambler (The Deal, LLC)

2010-11-03T17:20:00.003-04:00

In Real-Time: Allen Ginsberg on YouTube

2010-11-01T15:58:00.001-04:00

In Real-Time: An Abandoned Storefront Entryway

2010-10-29T13:11:00.001-04:00

In Real-Time: OH-NO, ROMO! (10.25.10)

2010-10-26T18:50:00.005-04:00

The Los Angeles Times (10.7.10)

2010-10-08T11:46:00.007-04:00

The American Museum of Natural History, New York City (9.30.10)

2010-10-04T18:37:00.004-04:00

New York Times OP/ED

2010-09-15T10:41:00.006-04:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/15/opinion/15krauze.html?ref=opinion

New York Times Op/Ed

2010-08-23T11:04:00.007-04:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/23/opinion/23homer-dixon.html?ref=opinion

ANIMATED ANTIQUITY

2010-08-10T17:21:00.002-04:00

iNTERNAL COMBUSTION

2010-08-05T17:59:00.002-04:00

DRAWING ON LOCATION

2010-07-15T14:01:00.003-04:00

FIREFLIES

2010-07-09T13:32:00.007-04:00

Insomnia has a sound. Usually it’s something like a hollow wooden tick-tick-tick – the sound of a clock – or sometimes it’s a faint metallic noise, mercury dripping into a rusty bucket of lukewarm pond water. It’s a frustrating sound because you can’t really put your finger on exactly what it is, but when the angels of sleep won’t come, that sound is there.

In New York City, where I am tonight, an alley cat outside my studio window is howling holy hell for a mate. It’s summertime in this northern city and it’s hot, like being locked up inside a sweaty sock without an air conditioner and the cat outside my window, five floors down, doesn’t have anybody to love. I guess we’re all lonely and frustrated tonight.

I’m a healthy young man, but tonight I’m thinking about other things, all the old irrationals: Do I have testicular cancer? Will I ever find a woman to love? Did I shave yesterday? Should I get up and shave now? Will my receding hairline ever stop receding? Why is there more hair growing in my ears than on the top of my head? Will I lose my mind if I get really old? Is this cancer on my cheek, or is it just a pimple? Am I fat or am I average? If I meet that Woman, what if our kids are losers? Are Gypsies real? What if my plane crashes? What’s my triglyceride count? Do I drink too much whiskey? Do I drink too much coffee? I think I broke my pinky toe yesterday on the bathroom doorframe. Are my teeth rotting? When my Dad told me, “Good luck in New York, son, you’re gonna need it” was he wishing me well or kicking me in the pants as I left home? Did I make a bad career choice? Will I be able to pay my rent next month?

It’s never rational sorts of thoughts at 4:13 on a Monday morning, awake and alone.

My big dream growing up in Pensacola, Florida was to a be a race car driver, and I’m not talking Formula One or that other sissy stuff – I wanted to be a NASCAR man with a hundred thousand people cheering me on at two-hundred miles an hour, blond girls in bikinis at all of the finish lines with bouquets of flowers and cans of ice cold beer. I had it very specifically planned out at a very young age: Get a job in some pit crew somewhere, and basically learn the ropes of the trade, work my way up to a pole position.

When we were growing up my friend Howard Trustless always laughed at me when we shared our ideas about what the future would look like because Howard wanted to be a baseball player, first base for some contender. He said NASCAR was a southern hick cliché. And that was another thing I never liked about Howard Trustless when we were kids: He had a handle on the English language at a very early age, always using words like cliché and articulate. I pretty much hated that about him.

But here I am, all grown up – almost thirty years old – living in New York City, driving a school bus for “under-privileged” kids in the Bronx. And it’s ironic, because until I had to give up my dreams of being a race car driver and take this crummy job, I actually felt privileged.

I’ve been lying here on my futon now for hours in this cheap little studio apartment. It’s not much but it’s all I can afford, driving the bus forty hours a week. And my thoughts are rambling away uncontrollably in that silent, after-hours way: Does eternity hurt? What’s the worse way to die, fire or drowning? Dear God: Please don’t let me die before my mother does, and let my mother live forever. And I’m realizing now these little flashes of light outside my window on the fire escape, and then the light slowly fading out, like lightning bugs, except it isn’t a little green light, it’s a little orange light. It flashes white each time at the beginning, glows faintly orange and then disappears for a minute or two. It’s a subtle thing, like fireflies, and has been going on outside on the fire escape for fifteen or twenty minutes. By the time I recognize it I realize that it’s been going on for a while. Maybe I’ve just been writing those little flashes off as part of the long, hot night.

I lift my head up and look over there, through the darkened little kitchen to the window leading out to the fire escape. Another firefly sparks, burns and fades. And there in the fading light is a figure, a scrawny skeleton out there on my fire escape wearing an overcoat in all this heat. Jesus, baby Jesus. What the hell is going on? I slip off the futon and fall down to the floor like water. This is my deepest nighttime paranoia manifest: Somebody – or worse, some thing – breaking into my apartment for blood or for money. Sweet Christ.

My biggest fear when I was a kid growing up on Pembroke Lane in Pensacola, Florida was burglars, uninvited guests casting their shadows on my bedroom door as they walked down the hall, poking their heads around the corner into my room. It was all imagination, but I used to lay awake for hours underneath the covers just sweating and shaking out of fear for that thing that wasn’t there. But in the end, that was the problem: If the burglars were there, what else was possible? Children need comfortable boundaries to keep them in, and to keep those other things out. Just the idea of that boundary being broken was terrifying. And it still is. There are fireflies on my fire escape and a dark figure. I live on the fifth floor of a pre-war building in New York City and there’s no reason for dark figures or fireflies to be up here. Not now. We should all be sleeping.

I’ve got to get closer, though, because I’m not a child anymore. I’m an adult. I drive a bus full of “under-privileged” kids forty hours a week. Paid holidays.

I slink along the wooden floor of the living room on my hands and knees, onto the cool linoleum of the little kitchenette of my studio apartment. Another little white light flashes, burns briefly and then fades away. In the brief light this time it’s obvious that the fireflies have some sort of dark keeper, some human thing out there on the fire escape. The kitchen window is open because it’s hot and I needed a cross draft tonight. I scoot along the floor there to the open window and pull my chin up to its ledge.

“Ruby?”

“Hey. It’s-my-birthday.”

Good God. It’s Ruby

Ruby is a homeless man in our neighborhood, a sweet middle-aged black man, dangerously thin but seemingly impervious to all the various elements of New York City. The heat, the cold, the crime, the crack, the hunger – none of it ever seems to really bother Ruby. He’s been living in the parking lot of the fried chicken shack across the street from my apartment building for as long as I’ve been here, and he’s always treated me like a neighbor, like we’ve both bought into some sort of card game where when he asks me if I can spare any money, it doesn’t matter if I can or if I can’t. No hard feelings, that sort of thing. No bitterness.

“Jesus, Ruby, what the hell are you doing out here?”

“A-A-Ahm just looking…At...It’s-crazy-what-people-throw-away.” Ruby has a lapful of discarded Lotto tickets, all scratched up and bent and wet. “Youknow…L-L-Last week…I-got-five-hundred-dollars-off-one-of-these. Because…peoplelookatthemtoofast!”

I’ve known all sorts of people who speak like Ruby does, or at least in the ballpark – not quite a stutter, just a pattern of words that the brain can’t quite get in line in time for the mouth. As far as anybody can tell, Ruby lives off of these things, spent Lotto tickets that are really winners. Any day of the week – summer, spring, winter or fall – you’ll see him out on Broadway with his head down to the ground, like he’s hunting arrowheads on a beach in Pensacola. Or you’ll see him in some dark doorway late at night with his hand-me-down bifocals, scanning used Lotto tickets like a man in a high-stakes poker game at the Golden Nugget. And I’ve always accepted this about him: We’re all fighting for it. Ruby’s just sort of made up his own rules, like we all do, I suppose, but his rules are a little less conventional or, at least, a little more rigorous.

“Ruby. What are you doing up here on my fire escape?”

“It’s-my-birthday,” he says.

Every time you see Ruby he tells you that it’s his birthday. It’s a panhandler’s refrain, but he always says it and I don’t even think he realizes that he’s saying it anymore. It’s just a line he came up with, however-many-years-ago, and it sort of stuck because maybe it worked for a while as a sympathy vote for loose change, and then at some point he just kept saying it anyway. Or maybe he did say it on his actual birthday once, standing outside the dollar burger joint down the street, and for that night it really worked – worked like wildfire – and he was rolling in paper money for a day or two, all because he was down on his luck on his birthday and everybody has birthdays and everybody can sympathize with that.

“But Ruby, it’s four o’clock in the morning. And you’re on a fifth-floor fire escape. My fire escape.”

“People-never-really-look-at-these-things,” he blurts out in a contorted whisper, holding half-a-dozen spent tickets. “Youknow…L-L-Last week…I-got-five-hundred-dollars-off-one-of-these.” In his lap among the spent tickets are matchbooks, too, the blank white kind you get with cigarettes for free at the bodega across the street. “I-used-to-work-in-advertising,” he says. “IhadthePerdueChickenaccount.”

It’s dark on the fire escape now.

“Y-You know,” Ruby says, “peacocks always sleep in the trees because wolves can’t climb trees.”

He sets his wrinkled cards down and grabs a book of matches from his pile, tears one out, strikes it and quickly moves it to the top card in his hand, squinting there in the faint light at what’s been scratched away and what might still be there. A white flash, then orange, then dark again.

“Did you win anything tonight, Ruby?” I ask him quietly. I’m exhausted, but there’s a comforting breeze coming from out there on the fire escape.

“N-N-No,” he says. “But-it’s-my-birthday.”

“I’ve got to get some sleep, Ruby.”

“Nobody-ever-checks-these-things,” he says.

I stand up and head back to the old futon, lay my head down on the damp pillow and look up at the same ceiling. Ruby strikes another match out there on my fire escape and squints – a white flash, then orange, then dark again. I close my eyes and sleep comes easily now, because I’m not alone and Ruby’s safe from the wolves on his birthday.

JAZZIZ Cover

2010-07-05T23:14:00.007-04:00

The current issue of JAZZIZ features a portrait of David Sanborn I made for the cover. The publisher, Michael Fagien, is an amazing guy – a physician by trade, he founded the magazine 25 years ago and fundamentally changed how the art form is covered. A real treat to work with.

...And The Companion CD Sampler Case

2010-07-05T23:12:00.000-04:00

The Los Angeles Times (June 27th, 2010)

2010-06-28T23:01:00.002-04:00

Hair Gets In Your Eyes

2010-06-06T19:00:00.003-04:00

Beach Buns #1

2010-06-02T20:02:00.003-04:00

Little Devils #5

2010-06-01T12:32:00.003-04:00

Little Devils #4

2010-05-21T22:27:00.004-04:00

Texter

2010-05-20T19:21:00.003-04:00

Little Devils #3

2010-05-17T19:04:00.002-04:00

Little Devils #2

2010-05-14T13:00:00.003-04:00

Little Devils #1

2010-05-10T13:26:00.000-04:00

Radio King

2010-04-30T17:13:00.015-04:00

RADIO KING

Red head, blue head

Radio King free

Camp fire, stove wire

Mongolian winter tree.

Stove pipe, lamp light

Dump truck Blues

Radio King, knee slapper

Animals in two’s.

Curb side, local tribe

Burger stand peddler

Monkey paper cup chump

Country music fiddler.

European radio

Telephone rings

Radio told him, whispered warm:

“You’re a European King.”

Food fight, late night

Panty raid affair

Radio King, side kick

Political scare.

Radio King, Radio King

Radio King stand

Turntable told him:

“You’re the King of Ireland.”

New Blues #4

2010-04-20T12:53:00.003-04:00

New Blues #3

2010-04-19T10:43:00.004-04:00

New Blues #2

2010-04-16T10:39:00.003-04:00

New Blues #1

2010-04-14T17:28:00.003-04:00

Hall of Fame: Horst Janssen

2010-04-07T00:42:00.010-04:00

Nobody I talk to ever knows who Horst Janssen was, but his hometown does – they built a museum for him in Oldenburg, Germany. He was sort of a Tom Waits of the Graphic Arts. He wasn't an easel painter. His sanity seems questionable, but maybe that's what I love so much in his work: Draftsmanship on a high level with a consistent impulse to mess the machinery up. Drawing and printmaking were matters of life and death to Horst Janssen. Heaven was the process.

Hall of Fame: Edgar Allan Poe

2010-03-30T23:36:00.003-04:00

Hall of Fame: R.B. Kitaj

2010-03-29T01:06:00.000-04:00

Edgar Allan Poe

2010-03-13T00:44:00.003-05:00

Random Abstract

2010-02-26T12:45:00.017-05:00

Funny Faces

HST RIP

2010-02-20T02:19:00.016-05:00

At 3:42 in the morning on February 20th, 2005, I was stepping out of the shower in a towel here in New York City after a long day-and-a-half of meeting deadlines. The Classic Rock station was on and the DJ said: "Hunter S. Thompson took his own life earlier today." Then the DJ played Jumpin' Jack Flash by the Rolling Stones.

I'd always liked the twinkle in Hunter's eye, and always thought that he could've been a Twain or a Mencken. The first picture is one I did for the Los Angeles Times Book Review, concerning his passing (including the sketch). The other two are from long ago times, because, as I've said, I always liked that twinkle in his eye.

President's Day

2010-02-15T14:35:00.022-05:00

A series of Lincoln pictures commemorating his 200th birthday (Rourke Art Museum)

The Society of Illustrators

2010-02-05T11:49:00.023-05:00

(New York & Los Angeles)

A few paintings from The Badlands Saloon were recently chosen to be included in the illustration annuals of the Society of Illustrators, New York and the Society of Illustrators, Los Angeles.

Maybe It's Me

2010-01-08T17:52:00.010-05:00

Ambrose Bierce's "Write It Right"

2010-01-06T15:54:00.007-05:00

(Walker Publishing Co. Inc.)

Los Angeles Times (December 13, 2009)

2010-01-05T15:39:00.004-05:00

Public Lecture, Bismarck State College

2009-12-02T11:46:00.005-05:00

Bismarck State College - October 27, 2009

2009-11-13T12:04:00.023-05:00

A visit from Jonathan Twingley

Jonathan Twingley graciously joined us today as guest lecturer for the freshmen and sophomore Graphic Design and Communications classes. Twingley, a Bismarck native, is a successful freelance artist and illustrator who currently resides in New York City. His work has been featured in several well-known publications including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic Monthly, The New RepublicRolling Stone, to name a few. Twingley has also published an illustrated novel, The Badlands Saloon, a fictional account based loosely on his own life’s journey, featuring several of his prolific paintings. He graduated from Minnesota State University Moorhead with a BFA and went on to gain his Master of Fine Arts in Illustration from the School of Visual Arts in New York. Twingley’s presentation helped students gain some insight into the creative process of design from an illustrative perspective. Jonathan’s entertaining presentation style made it encouraging and comfortable for students to ask questions. Being able to see a number of Twingley’s pieces from conceptual sketch to finished publication proved that every great idea has a solid foundation. A special thank you goes out to Jane Schreck for bringing him to BSC.

The Badlands Saloon Reviewed by Library Journal

2009-11-10T14:44:00.002-05:00

Twingley, Jonathan. The Badlands Saloon: An Illustrated Novel. 2009. Scribner. 224p. ISBN 978-1416-58706-4 $30.

Curl up with Twingley's debut novel, and you may feel a little like you're at the titular scene: the Badlands Saloon is the local hang-out bar in placid Marysville, ND, where Oliver Clay, an art student hired to work at the local bike shop, whiles away a three-month summer recess from New York City. In Marysville, Clay is reunited with Tank Wilson, an old friend and the manager of Chains & Whistles. He meets Kate, the Badlands barmaid; Willie Beck, a garrulous eccentric whose less than stellar hygiene habits don't detract from his appeal; and a stream of tourists just passing through. Complementing Clay's narration detailing Marysville's quirks and the cast of characters he meets are vibrant, color-saturated illustrations of both South Dakota and New York (though this is not a graphic novel).VERDICT While this is Twingley's first novel, hearing about the affable Oliver's summer feels like catching up with an old friend over beers. A wonderful read; highly recommended for lovers of the American landscape and fiction readers of all kinds.—Anne Garner, NYPL

New York Times Book Review

2009-09-06T22:53:00.028-04:00

The Badlands Saloon

(click photo to enlarge)

link to NY Times Sunday Book Review

Los Angeles Times – August 20th, 2009

2009-08-20T16:50:00.003-04:00

The Badlands Saloon: Reading & Signing

2009-08-10T20:44:00.012-04:00

The Badlands Saloon - Video

2009-08-03T23:45:00.005-04:00

video created by Adam Marvel

MinnPost.com Interview

2009-08-03T18:04:00.022-04:00

Book events feature illustrator/author Twingley, St. Paul writer J. C. Hallman
By Amy Goetzman | Published Thu, Jul 23, 2009 10:58am

Two really interesting reading events tonight, especially if you’re curious about the future of literature.

First: Jonathan Twingley, an illustrator whose distinctive portraits have appeared in the New York Times, Atlantic Monthly and other publications. His style is unflattering and strangely appealing all at once, something like the Very Hungry Caterpillar meets Picasso. His book, "The Badlands Saloon," is a beautiful object the likes of which the book world doesn’t often make: A full-color illustrated book for adults.

"The trickiest thing about selling the book was its strange format -- it's really not a graphic novel, it's not a kid's book, it's not an art book. It's just a story in pictures and words, sort of a children's book for big people," says Twingley, who was raised by an art teacher and a librarian; thus words and pictures go naturally together for him.

The story’s a classic artist-as-a-young man tale in which the young man strongly resembles the one wielding the brush: A North Dakotan educated in Minnesota, relocated to New York, then returned to the prairie for a summer in a tourist town to drink some beers, meet some characters, figure things out. For instance, how does an artist actually make a living? For Twingley himself, perhaps diversifying into books will be the answer to that one, especially as illustrators watch the landscape shift around them.

"Traditional publishers' heads are spinning at the moment, trying to figure out how to function in a world that no longer recognizes the traditional rules. As an illustrator who's worked regularly for newspapers and magazines for over 10 years, it's been not a little bit unsettling," says Twingley. "When you see 150-year-old papers like the Rocky Mountain News or the Seattle Post Intelligencer shutter their doors, well, it scares you a little bit. And not only because it's been my livelihood, but there are very real questions about 'hard journalism' versus what the Truth looks like in the virtual reality we find ourselves in today.

"As an artist, though, it's really nothing new. Artists have always been compelled to redefine how they fit into popular culture, and in the end that's all we're doing again. Again and again and again."

click here for original article

Prarie Public Radio Interview

2009-07-16T18:30:00.004-04:00

Jonathan was a guest today on the program "Hear It Now," Prarie Public Radio, Fargo, ND.

click here to listen to the interview

July Tour Schedule

2009-07-13T22:43:00.005-04:00

Thursday, July 16th, 7:30pm: Reading/Book Signing
The Rourke Art Museum, Moorhead, MN

Saturday, July 18th, 2:00pm: Reading/Book Signing, Slide Presentation
North Dakota Heritage Center, Bismarck, ND

Thursday, July 23rd, 7:30pm: Reading/Book Signing, Slide Presentation
Magers & Quinn Bookstore, Minneapolis, MN