from Sex, Cigars & Booze Lifestyle Magazine:

Most people might know Harvey Pekar from the 2003 film, American Splendor, which was a pseudo-documentary based largely on the stories he published in comics and graphic novels over the past thirty years. He died today at the age of 70.

Here are a few sites that mention his passing:

Anthony Bourdain

Cleveland.com

CNN

Marvel Comics

NPR

NPR’s “Fresh Air”

The Washington Post

So long, Harvey. I’ll miss your stories.

Jimmy Mirikitani is an artist.

As a young boy in Japan, he argued with his father over his unwillingness to join the military. “I am an artist,” Jimmy explains.

Scammed out of his U.S. citizenship and forced to live in a Japanese internment camp during World War II, Jimmy explains: “I am an artist.”

Fast-forward sixty years to find Jimmy, eighty-years-old now and living on the streets of NYC, painting and drawing in Washington Square Park. “I am an artist,” he explains.

This is where filmmaker Linda Hattendorf finds Jimmy, busily painting and drawing, seemingly unmindful of the goings-on around him. Indeed, during the World Trade Center attacks on September 11th, Hattendorf discovers Jimmy alone in the park, coughing and hacking from the toxic black cloud that had begun to engulf the city, still working on one of his paintings. She takes him into her apartment, and this is where the film’s journey begins.

What impressed me the most was not so much that he was a prisoner of war; or that he lost friends and family when Hiroshima was bombed; or that he was stripped of his U.S. citizenship or was homeless for more than a decade (from what I could gather) — but that throughout it all: Jimmy Mirikitani remained an artist.

read more: Netflix: The Cats of Mirikitani.

“Filmmaker Linda Hattendorf becomes an integral part of the action in this heartfelt documentary about her efforts to help aging Japanese-American artist Jimmy Mirikitani get off the streets of New York City and make peace with his complicated past. As she and Jimmy sift for long-lost relatives and even revisit the internment camp where he was forced to spend several years during World War II, Hattendorf hauls her camera along to capture every moment.”

“Al Jazeera found that stoplights that lead to Jewish settlements and neighbourhoods stay green for an average of a minute and a half. In Palestinian areas, it’s 20 seconds. One light in predominantly Arab East Jerusalem is green for less than 10 seconds.”

read more: Israel’s ‘street apartheid’ – Focus – Al Jazeera English.

who had spent too many summers selling home-made jewelry beneath an Arizona sun.

Half Price Books (Northwest Highway)

Half Price Books (Campbell Rd.)

in this tangled pile of yesterday’s technology.

The detritus of a wasteful civilization. All that is lost and found again. In your friendly neighborhood thrift store.

Portable Stanzas.