TUMBLR
A scrapbook of stuff I'm reading / looking at / listening to / thinking about...
The Breeders have released a 20th anniversary reissue of their 1993 album, Last Splash. Lindsay Zoladz did a nice writeup on Pitchfork:
Before they could legally drink, the Deal twins, armed with one guitar and two mics, were fixtures in the scuzziest bars of Dayton, Ohio, where legend has it their salty-sweet harmonies could make even the motorcycle dudes cry. The year was 1978, maybe ‘79. Like the bikers, Kim and Kelley listened Hank Williams and the Everly Brothers; when Kelley was 16 she watched The Song Remains the Same on acid and the souvenir she kept from her trip was this dead-serious conviction that she wanted to be Jimmy Page. Other people’s songs were too hard to figure out, so they made up their own. Nobody else would play with them (Kim: “This is Dayton, Ohio. You know the NGA kids: No Girls Allowed. Motherfuckers.”), so they played with themselves. The angel-voiced twins kept booking scuzzy bar gigs and kept writing songs with no greater ambition than staving off boredom. “There was no scene,” Kelley recalled years later, “You made up your own fun.”
Filed under: The Breeders
ArtWork: Seeing Inside the Creative Process
Art Work reveals the artistic notetaking habits of an astonishing range of artists, filmmakers, writers, designers, and other creators by granting rare access to the journal pages and other visual materials they use to capture and foster their work.
From Sasha Frere-Jones’ forward:
As artists, we often prefer the note to the final product; it is an object that is ours alone, free of explanatory fuss and ornament. A mundane list next to three pages of earnestly revised text—shouldn’t we have published it just like that?
From Ivan Vartanian’s introduction, the distinction between journal and notebook:
Where the journal is meant to serve as a daily (or intermittent) record of observations and reflections on a life and its experiences, the notebook is meant as a place of work—for solving problems, jotting an idea, figuring a sequence, determining a position, shaping a phrase. Where the journal documents the life of its owner, the notebook documents the life of an artwork or artistic process.
Here’s Tony Kushner, talking about writing by hand:
Most of my best ideas have not been things that I knew I had in my head. I’ve been surprised by them…and it’s always the case that if you just start moving words around on a piece of paper…if you start limbering up your fingers and get going, you will find your way in.
And Richard Hell:
Notebooks, it seems to me sometimes, are the ultimate art form… Notebooks might be as good as art gets in our time.
(images via grain edit)
Woohoo! The moment you have all been waiting for.. the very first CreativeMornings/Austin talk is now live online!
The speaker is none other than Austin Kleon, the force behind Steal Like an Artist and Newspaper Blackout. Austin speaks on April’s theme of the future, by attempting to set the ground rules for future discussions between artists and designers—in terms of how we discuss our work and process.
“I think we’re living in this mass fetishization of creativity,” he says. “And you can tell that from the way we use ‘creative’ as a noun.” He goes on to breakdown some of his previous advice: Do Good Work and Share It With People, on what is good, what is work, and how we should share.
Excellent talk. Watch it here.
A transcription and the slides from the talk are here.
(Source: nprfreshair)
The book consists of a series of prose poems, or individuated chunks of poetic prose, interspersed with postage-stamp-sized collages made by Green, who is also a visual artist. Collectively the text bears witness to the 2008 suicide of her husband, the writer David Foster Wallace, and its harrowing aftermath for Green…
Upon first read, Bough Down feels disorienting and surreal — like entering a drugged wormhole of grief, pills, and barely tolerable engrams and emotions, which appear via allegory, hallucination, synecdoche, and blur. Upon rereading, however, the bones of the book’s structure become admirably clear.
I take your parents to the lighthouse, I do. There is nothing but September fog to cover our shame, and your father laughs just like you, at the opacity. I want to eat the laugh, I want to rub it on my chest like camphor, I want to make a sound tattoo. I also want to bash these two small people together and see if a collision of DNA will give me my life back.
In the morning, my wife pointed out our son didn’t have kneecaps yet, and later that night I read this line: “I worry I broke your kneecaps when I cut you down.”
Filed under: my reading year 2013
Black Sabbath - Live In Paris, December 20, 1970, Olympia Theater
Goodness gracious. @jndevereux sent me this set of Sabbath in their prime. It’s a bootleg, so unfortunately, it’s not available commercially, but just google “sabbath live in paris” and there are all kinds of rips.
Setlist:
- 00:00 Introduction
- 01:51 Paranoid
- 05:00 Hand Of Doom
- 11:52 Rat Salad
- 13:15 Iron Man
- 19:40 Black Sabbath
- 29:19 Intermission
- 31:13 N.I.B.
- 36:45 Behind The Wall Of Sleep
- 42:40 War Pigs
- 51:00 Fairies Wear Boots
Filed under: Sabbath
Clive Thompson got me totally hooked on these: they’re super soft and dark, which makes them awesome for marginalia and writing longhand. You can also buy a badass longpoint sharpener for them.
