Spy vs. Spy (vs. Spy) vs. Trump?

 

Review: Spy vs. Spy: The Big Blast (Special Collector’s Edition) and The New Yorker, April 21, 2025

 

I rarely take “selfies” but I couldn’t resist this time, given that I have these two current issues of classic magazine fare (hurry, the Spy Vs. Spy collection is only on newsstands until May 23rd!) – and an apt-enough “Spy” get-up.

The one-two punch of these two great publications pretty much  knocked me on the floor (literally, in the above photo).

Allow me to get up, dust myself off, and explain.

I’ve always been a fan of John le Carre, the British master of literary espionage novels, having read most of his books about George Smiley (or George :-), as my goddam voice dictation understands his name), and recently watched the brilliant and harrowing mini-series adaptation of Le Carre’s novel, The Night Clerk, about a callow, mid-30s hotel night clerk who pretty much allows his libido to get him caught up in deadly international intrigue.

Of course, as a youth, my brow drooped quite a bit lower, to the delicious depths of Mad Magazine which featured in every issue, “Spy vs Spy” on the back page, as I recall. 1

Some of the best of these one-page cartoons also involved a third spy (“Spy vs. Spy vs. Spy”), a voluptuous female who would always foil the excessively testosterone-driven male spies.

Here’s the very first appearance of the so-called “Grey Spy” in the series, according to a online fanzine:

Spy vs Spy vs Spy MAD #73

Such triangulation of deceit has actually been a trope of espionage fiction for a long time: Think of James Bond’s famous opening line to any femme fatale he invariably beds (“My name is Bond. James Bond”). He’s sure that line, along with his square-jawed movie-star looks, are all you need (is not love). Of course, she knows that’s about all she needs to get him hooked into her deviousness.

So, yes, I guess they were trafficking in female stereotyping. But triangulation of deceit also brings to mind another male deceiver’s infamous line: “I did not have, sexual relations, with that woman.”

Young readers Google that quote and you will be duly instructed, in some of what power (real and perceived) breeds.

And though Le Carre’s shy and retiring George Smiley was too old and dumpy to fall for a female double agent, that’s a little bit of what happens in that author’s The Night Clerk — even if Le Carre’s dazzling, almost Byzantine, plot easily transcends that cliché.

So, I was struck by the synchronicity of the latest New Yorker magazine, which arrived a couple days after I bought the Spy collection. On that cover, the two hapless spies are tied to a globe-sized bomb which, the mag’s backside reveals, is being lit by, you guessed it, the snickering “grey” woman spy. On The New Yorker cover, in a five-scene sequence, Donald Trump (a satire by Frank Viva, titled “Hot Air”) blows up the whole world like a big balloon, which he proceeds to dance with (we know how well he can dance!), twirl and bounce with his big butt, before the whole thing explodes in his face.

And to think he castigated Ukraine President Zelenskyy for flirting with World War III ! The whole hot-air overheated world is lucky some of Trump’s staffers tugged on his leash enough to temporarily choke-back his globular tar-riffing. As MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow reported, and The New Yorker’s Benjamin Wallace-Wells seconded: “The tariffs had been so hastily designed that they imposed duties of 10% on Antarctic islands inhabited only by penguins and seals, and placed a duty of nearly 50% on Cambodia, a producer of cheap textiles that is too poor to plausibly buy much of what we produce.”

We kid you not. Trump’s kidding only one person. Or maybe two others: Harvard grad Vee-Pee J.D. Vance and “genius” Elon Musk.

Wallace-Wells continues, “The markets predictably plunged, wiping out more than $6 trillion in value.”…J.P. Morgan Chase’s CEO predicts the ‘likely outcome’ would be a recession. The labor economist Aridrajit Dube wrote, ‘never in human history has a whimsical decision by a single person destroyed so much wealth.’ ”

So what is the world thinking and feeling right now? How much is Vladmir Putin flexing his greasy, crooked grin?

Now, also imagine what disarray America’s current CIA spycraft may be now, with the chainsaw-weilding Elon Musk gleefully ripping into every government agency he can heedlessly reach.

The third brief article brief in this New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town” feature was about cartoonist Robert Crumb, who visits the Whitney Museum with the interviewer while chatting a bit about a brand-new biography by Dan Nadel, Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life.

Lo and behold, a copy of the Crumb biography appeared on my front doorstep, Monday.

So I can blame my old high school pal — a publicity-shy guy preferring to be known as “my Crumby friend” — for this painful and delightful distraction. We are both cartoonists, of sorts, ourselves, and friends since plying such dubious artistic skills in The Poster Club at Marquette High School, back in the day.

Speaking of cartooning, here’s my graphite-and-pastel Trump caricature, now a protest poster I hoped I’d never need to use again. But I did at the “Hands Off!” protest of Trump/Musk in downtown Milwaukee on April 5, with 9,000 other people (more on that event in a coming post).

Ah, but the truth is, I had been toying with the idea of the spy get-up selfie since The New Yorker arrived.

To deter me from my seemingly interminable book projects, this meaty tome of “Crumbs” is a very “early birthday gift” from “Crumby,” who was probably afraid I would buy it before he could gift it, a reasonable fear. My birthday is not until July 1.

Plus (really full disclosure), my housemate is not here today to try to shame me out of such semi-foolishness (I did work fairly hard yesterday on my jazz book’s permission requests. The book’s excess of quotes has become a bit of an albatross for a project with, sadly, no publisher’s deadline.)

I feel a bit better about this “confession,” akin to Crumb cooperating with his biographer only  if he didn’t gloss the artist’s flaws and obsessions. We were both raised in Catholic families though his was a considerably harder slog than mine, as the biographer quickly reveals.

The new Spy vs. Spy collection features the strip originator’s Antonio Prohias’s close friend, Sergio Aragone (a fellow MAD cartoonist) drawing a delightful five-page story of Antonio’s life. Many of his original (b&w) cartoons have since been colorized by Carrie Strachan, and this is a 96-page, slick-paper, high-gloss production. Yet what goes around comes around (in such a manner), as MAD, and this collection, now includes the black and white stylings of the current heir to the Spy ‘toon job, Peter Kuper.

Current MAD editor John Ficarra posits that part of the original MAD’s appeal was the cheap paper it was printed on, to make it seem ” ‘underground’ and tacitly forbidden, and therefore more desirable” to young readers.” I’d sort of concur, though my folks were enlightened enough to not forbid me MAD. It ran “proudly” black and white from 1955 to 2000. Toward the end of that “proud” era, another MAD editor quipped “MAD looks like it was printed in Mexico in 1959.”

Such inky grubbiness was likely part of Crumb’s thinking when he self-produced his first “underground” ZAP Comix in the mid-late 1960s. One my favorites of his early surreal drawings, is from another boho rag, The East Village Other, titled “Burned Out,” for which they one-tone colored for its cover, illustrated in the Crumb biography.   The East Village Other Counterculture Newspaper February 1970 Robert Crumb Burned Out Cover - Mark Lawson Antiques

Courtesy Mark Lawson Antiques. 

So, one more synchronicity in the smallish world — it suddenly seems — of cartoon satire: I had finally re-subscribed to The New Yorker again, after decades of refraining, because the cartoons are as good as ever. Of course, the typically excellent, sometimes Pulitzer-winning, thumb-sucker lead articles are still awfully long.

So I need to pick and choose among them, or my authorial name will always be, pre-emptively, Mud.

And here’s my new Crumb book which I’ll surely finish the 400 pages (plus notes) of long before I finish the two doorstops underneath it. 2

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  1. You can still subscribe to MAD, for one year of six issues for $19.99 “CHEAP!”

2. I was almost startled at the mounting synchronicity of this column’s subjects as soon as I turned a few more pages of Crumb. Turns out, MAD magazine would soon hit the adolescent Crumb like a lightnight bolt. Author Dan Nadel describes this even more provactively: “Seeing and then handling the magazine altered Robert’s brain chemistry as surely as LSD would a decade later. He would never normalize…

“MAD” was first a comic book and then a magazine cranked out by artists without pretensions to literature or acceptance; it could tell its audience that the world was a lie and that the only answer was all out cultural anarchy.
“MAD was effective because it was noisy, teeming, coming-out-of-its-skin, yet incredibly sophisticated, sustained by beautifully-crafted cartooning straight from working class Yiddishkeit Brooklyn.”
Crumb himself continues such raving: “I began to use my own free judgment about things. Being cast out, though painful, was a liberating process open bracket [MAD‘s] critique was coming out of a kind of craziness, and they didn’t have a real strong analysis of what they were criticizing, they were just laughing at it all. It was this irreverent nose-thumbing at the straight-backed hypocrisy of these old American values, which were hypocritical and try to brush all the bad stuff under the rug.”

(Crumb,” Scribner, 2025, 32-33)

 

 

 

A Tale of Two Tails (Or Almost That Long)

Eddie “Little Count Dracula.” Photo by Kevin Lynch

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Chapter 1: Taking “the leap” with a little black cat who thinks he can Fly.

It was the best of times, with our two aging cats, slowly and uncertainly getting to know each other. Then, it was the worst of times, though Ann and I had the best of intentions, when we brought “Eddie” into the house.

It’s debatable whether, for me and my gal pal Ann Peterson, it was “the age of wisdom,” as Dickens once proclaimed, to begin a famous tale. When I moved in with Ann last year, we instantly became a three-cat household, deeply exacerbating the absurdity of me being a cat owner my whole adult life, while being allergic to cats. Before too long, my asthmatic wheezing started getting worse, despite Ann’s assiduous dusting and vacuuming.

But Taj, her big, crazy black cat, got sick about five months after we moved together and, as cats will do, he died quite soon afterwards. It was a great loss I’m sure for Ravi, her creamy-white semi-Siamese scaredy-cat, who had been housemates with Taj since Ravi’s kittenhood. 1

Ann Peterson with our first set of three cats (L-R) Chloe, Ravi (in background) and Taj (facing Ann), before the black cat passed away. Photo by Kevin Lynch

But it seemed an even greater loss for Ann, I think. First of all, Taj was unbelievably attached to her. A “pet psychic” she had once hired, did a phone “reading” long distance and declared of Taj: “That is the neediest cat I have ever encountered.” He was persistently jealous of any book she was reading and tried to horn in past the book, to stick his face into hers, especially when she was reading prone, in bed. Ann loved and hated Taj’s clinginess in seemingly equal measure, and his often hyper-goofiness entertained her no end, well, until the end.

However, she is also the most squishy-hearted, animal-centric person I’ve ever met (She claims her two sisters are “worse” and, indeed Cary and Jennifer both own more pets than we do). She actually had two cats and two dogs when I first met her although, by the time she moved to the east side from Wauwatosa, the two dogs had died.

So, she began to make up for those losses by volunteering to walk dogs at the Humane Society on Saturday mornings. Now, she daily checks on the current dogs on her cell phone, to see which ones might’ve been adopted overnight and, to her great chagrin, which end up being returned to the Humane Society for not quite fitting into the household.

“Oh, Capone is back!” she cried out yesterday. Of course, you wonder why the dog ended up with that name. “But he’s the sweetest guy, so polite,” she always says of most any returning dog who apparently violates parole. Yeah, sweet like crafty Capone was, just before he pulled his gun to waste an old crony who’d betrayed him.

Ann promised me she would never again try to bring a dog into her house, despite all her angst and strong affection for these mangy, sometimes handsome, and eager dogs. So, I was hardly surprised the day she suggested we look for a kitten who might begin to replace the playmate/pal role that Taj made in Ravi’s life. By then it had become clear that Ravi and my cat, Chloe, though now beginning to peaceably coexist, would unlikely ever be close buddies, as Chloe had been in a one-cat household for so long.

So, I agreed to the idea, somewhat warily, and sure enough, Ann quickly found a three or four-month- old black kitten in a foster home, waiting for just the right real home.

We went to visit the cat — a lean, wiry shorthaired little critter, unlike the fat and long-haired black Taj. He was just as charming and crazy as you would expect a kitten to be, so we were hooked.

Chapter Two: Life (and Fear and Loathing?) with Eddie “Little Count Dracula” the cat.

When we brought him home, almost instantly all hell broke loose. I only slightly use the term figuratively, as it wasn’t long before the cat, whom we named Eddie, took on the role of a satanic intruder. I thought Eddie was a fine name, not because it’s my middle name, but because he right away reminded me of Eddie Haskell, the smart-ass neighborhood troublemaker on Leave it to Beaver. He even talked a bit like Eddie, with sort of a whiny, scratchy voice, not at all like my Chloe’s almost lyrical meow.

And when it’s time for chow he schmoozes me with intense body rubbings against my legs, just like Eddie Haskell would schmooze Beaver’s mom — “Good-afternoon, Mrs. Cleaver, you’re looking especially lovely today” — and might get rewarded with a piece of cake, despite having just dunked her son’s face in a mud puddle in the backyard. Otherwise, Eddie the cat often runs away from me because I’ve begun to become sort of the “bad cop” in our disciplinary efforts. Of course, that mad dash is at least as much his manic energy at work, as cat toys of all sorts bounce and skitter around the floor.

Ann and I quickly got dizzy watching Eddie zoom back-and-forth through our Riverwest flat, but that was laced with anxiety because Eddie was often chasing either my Chloe, or Ann’s Ravi, and usually tackling and roughing up the victim a bit. If it were football he would be repeatedly charged with a personal foul for unsportsmanlike conduct.

Eddie soon was creating chaos for all of us while, of course, charming us with his kittenish playfulness and goofiness. It’s as if he had memorized the book a cat is reading in a New Yorker cartoon: How to Be Very Annoying and Cute. Part of the problem and the charm is that Eddie seems to be an extremely smart cat, which is saying something giving the superior intelligence of the species in general. So, he’s crafty, stealthy, cunning, and seemingly, at times, cold-blooded. In other words, he’s an unrepentant scoundrel.

Okay, here’s a cute example of his smarts. He invented a game with one of the little sparkly squishy balls he and the other cats play with. When an empty laundry basket is on the kitchen floor, Eddie will toss the ball into the basket, and then tip the basket over sideways. So now the ball is caught in the side webbing of the basket. But rather than simply pull the ball out again, Eddie delights in the fact that it is “in jail,” perhaps like he should be. So, he starts pushing the tipped basket around and it rotates across the floor on a circular axis, with the squishy ball dancing around along its sides. Neither I nor Ann, another lifelong cat-owner, have ever seen a cat do such a thing.

Watch Eddie in action: Eddie and the rolling basket

On the downside, at the most, shall I say, existential level for me, my asthma was once again getting worse, with three cats and Eddie often infiltrating our bed at night. Oh joy.

So, for my health and Ann’s relative nightly peace, we’re trying to keep Eddie out of the bedroom at night, another challenging “game” the elusive rascal’s too good at. Even when we successfully get him out of the room, our early morning slumber is often roused by the unnerving sound of Eddie jiggling the doorknob, trying to open it. If he had opposable thumbs, I would readily imagine him, already up on his hind legs, marching in upright, putting his paws on his hips and staring at us indignantly.

Ann wasn’t blind to the ever-complicating situation and a couple of times even broke down in tears, declaring her notion of finding a new playmate for fraidy-cat Ravi “was all a bad idea.”

Let’s step back just slightly. This story’s title comes from perhaps Eddie’s most distinguishing physical trait, which may also have symbolic value. As you’ll see in the top photograph, he has what Ann admits to being “a ridiculously long tail,” nearly two tails long. It does make you wonder, and I’ve begun to think of Pinocchio and his mythical nose, which would grow longer every time he told a lie. Perhaps Eddie’s tail grows just a tad longer every time he commits a household transgression, which is quite often. After apparently learning his lesson, Pinocchio, the wooden marionette, one day turned into a real boy, his fondest wish. If Eddie the real cat one day turned into a wooden marionette, someone’s fondest wish might come true, and things would be quieter and, um, “safer” around here, with no strings attached.

If one of these days his tail tip begins to grow a satanical spear-blade tip, we’ll know something is, um, following him and maybe us. Should I have honored Poe, not Dickens, in this tail of two black cats? Or perhaps Dr. Seuss, given the scene illustrated below? Taj’s bushy black tail actually had a crooked kink in it. By contrast, my calico cat’s black -and-brown-speckled tail has a lily-white tip, a signifier or not (Of course, Ravi can attest, Chloe has proven no angel in this house).

Understand, poor Ravi was an almost neurotically meek and fearful cat since the first time I met him, although Ann claims he improbably would initiate wrestling matches with Taj. Since his “black bro” has passed, and since Eddie arrived, Ravi has taken on the “clinging cat” role, and to a whole new level – from Taj’s in-Ann’s-face to on-her-head, that is, starting each nap or evening bedtime by laying literally on her head, and often kneading her hair into a rat’s nest, though I suspect Ravi might run away if he saw a small furry marsupial scampering around the house.

Ann prefers not to have her picture taken but, one day, realizing the situation’s ludicrousness, she wryly took a selfie, of her and Ravi (see below). Now she has finally begun to protest to minimize the hair kneading.

“The Cat as a Hat”: Ann (holding back a giggle) and Ravi, in bed. Photo by Ann Peterson

I think these photographs speak for themselves, worth the proverbial thousand words. So, as this little story has exceeded a thousand words already, I need to close. Things are getting a bit better around here, though I know any number of new owners would have by now deemed Eddie as severely violating his parole, and shipped him back to the Humane Society. I’ve never wanted to do that, while biting my lip when “Little Count Dracula” bites Ann’s neck or elsewhere, yet again. She has tearfully admitted she could never return him, despite the household strife. His high zaniness quotient does keep all four of us entertained, each in our ways.

We can only hope, somewhere over the horizon and a lucky rainbow, the worst of times around here come closer to the best of times.

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  1. Culture Note: Despite Ann’s doubts of how much I liked her first two cats, I had been predisposed to do so partly because of their names. Her daughter Teresa had named Ravi after the great Indian sitar player Ravi Shankar who of, course, turned George Harrison and the Beatles onto Indian classical music and its spiritual implications. Shankar also influenced guitarist-composer Mike Bloomfield, who witnessed the sitarist’s Western star-making performance at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1966, and then wrote the title tune of the Butterfield Blues Band’s profoundly influential second album East-West. Though Ann doesn’t recall the genesis of Taj’s name, I prefer to think that a name-giver in her family really liked the music of Taj Mahal, the marvelously eclectic blues musician.

 

Grace Slick and Jefferson Airplane fly into a storm of American discord

The situation begins to deteriorate quickly during a Jefferson Airplane performance which preluded the death of five people later at the infamous Altamont Motor Speedway concert. Photos courtesy The New Yorker
I just came across this video of Jefferson Airplane, which is illuminating and demonstrative in two contrary ways. The first is how it shows that Jack Casady is, in my book, the greatest bass player in rock history (as an ensemble player he exceeds Jack Bruce, perhaps a better improviser). It still amazes me how the propulsive power and rhythmic acumen of Casady’s playing drives this group. I think you can also feel how his bass intoxicates festivalgoers, along with some illicit drugs. His decades-long synchronicity with lead guitarist Jorma Kaukonen is also evident (The two went on to form the longer-lasing blues-roots duo Hot Tuna.) 1
The photos above of Altamont suggest how extraordinary these
live outdoor events had become for my generation, especially in that critical year of 1969. I make that claim with deeply bittersweet sentiment. That’s because the second demonstration of the video is the sad and ugly one. 
This was at the Altamont Motor Speedway Free Festival, which later in the evening turned deadly when Hells Angels killed at least one audience member during the Rolling Stones performance. 2
Here we see things not quite that bad. But the photo at top reveals a perhaps under-discussed aspect of the problem. The San Francisco-based Airplane, which had gained enormous popularity in the previous couple years, is on a small bandstand barely above ground level, and easily accessible by members of a crowd of stimulated young people that probably numbered several hundred thousand.
What we have here is a failure to plan properly. I mean this was a  “free” festival, for crying out loud. Other concert planners had been overwhelmed by the gargantuan crowd in rural Woodstock ,a short time earlier, so something should have been anticipated, even if Woodstock was a truly peaceful event.
In the video we see particularly the efforts of the band’s lead singer Grace Slick (and singer-guitarist Paul Kantner) in trying to get things under control, in her own inimitable way. Slick cajoles for calm, then points out that, even though Hells Angels are the heavies here, people in the audience are also getting out of hand by scrambling on stage.
It was the prelude to what many declared the death of the ideals of the Woodstock generation. Those ideals hardly died that night, but they began to face up to the harsh realities of life in America, as it teetered like a troubled neurotic between the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit complacencies of the 1950s and the Revolutionary 1960s. The Airplane, of course, embraced the later ethos with almost desperate heroism in their album Volunteers, released only months after Altamont. There’s very telling irony in the song the band was playing in this video: “The Other Side of this Life.”
Because of the visible violence, the video is age-restricted:

Here’s the YouTube clip:

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  1. For those further interested in this era from the viewpoint of a key Jefferson Airplane musician, Kaukonen’s engaging recent autobiography Been So Long is worthwhile.

2 For a far more in-depth piece on this event here’s an essay from The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-chaos-of-altamont-and-the-murder-of-meredith-hunter